Supernatural: Carved in Flesh (6 page)

She ran her hand through her short blonde hair, suddenly aware of how greasy it was. She was in dire need of a shower. She hated to think what she smelled like, and she probably had the world’s worst case of dragon breath from all the coffee she’d been drinking. Working alongside Conrad down in the lab, she never thought about such things. If she did stink, he never gave any sign that he noticed, let alone was bothered by, her body odor. But up here, in what she thought of as the Real World, she was painfully aware of her lack of hygiene.

“Tell that to the families of the four people who died,” she responded. “I took an oath, Conrad.”

“Primum non nocere:
First, do no harm,” Conrad said. “I am familiar with the Hippocratic Oath.” He gave her a slight, almost amused smile, but otherwise stood completely still, his hands at his sides. From the neck down, he might as well have been a mannequin.

“It’s my fault it escaped,” she said.

“Our
fault,” he corrected. “We both thought the cage you had me purchase would be of sufficient strength to contain the beast. I am only grateful that you were at your practice when it made its bid for freedom. Otherwise, it surely would have attempted to feed on you.”

What a mess the damned thing had made in its escape, too. The damage to the lab hadn’t been so bad, since the creature headed straight for the stairs after tearing free from its cage, but it knocked down the basement door and raced around the house as it searched for a way out—shredding her furniture with tooth and claw in frustrated rage—before finally crashing through the back door. Luckily, it had happened in the early evening and had been dark enough by then that none of her neighbors had seen the beast as it fled. It also helped that she lived on several acres of land outside town. If she’d lived in a suburb, somebody surely would have spotted the monstrous dog running from her house and called the police. In that case, she’d probably be in jail right now, her medical license suspended. If she’d lived in an earlier age, she’d likely have been burned at the stake. She still could be, she supposed. The people of Brennan weren’t exactly the most educated or progressive in the state.

Even though she found being in Conrad’s presence difficult, Catherine was thankful for his assistance. He’d taken care of everything, buying and installing two new doors, as well as removing the worst of the damaged furniture and hauling it away. He’d even offered to replace her lost furniture, but she’d declined. She spent most of her time down in the lab, and it wasn’t as if anyone else lived in the house. Not anymore.

She held her mug in both hands and looked down at the coffee within. “Maybe it would’ve been better if I had been here,” she said softly.

Conrad stepped forward. For a moment she feared he meant to reach out and touch her, perhaps give her upper arm a reassuring squeeze or lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. She tensed, hoping that if he did she would be able to keep from screaming. As if sensing her discomfort, Conrad took a step back and kept his hands at his sides.

“You shouldn’t speak like that,” he admonished mildly. “The beast’s escape and the lives subsequently lost are regrettable, yes, but I must remind you of the larger concern here. If you achieve your goal, not only shall you reap personal reward, you will change the world forever. Untold billions of lives will be saved, and the human lifespan itself will be extended. It is impossible to say just how long people will live in the new world your work will bring about, but virtual immortality is not out of the question. Isn’t the attainment of such a goal—”

“Worth four people’s lives?” she interrupted. She looked up at him, jaw tight with anger.

Conrad’s eyes narrowed, but his voice remained even as he replied. “Something for which those people would willingly sacrifice themselves.”

“Considering we can’t ask them, we’re never going to know for sure, are we?”

They were both silent for a time after that. Catherine sipped her coffee and tried to ignore how Conrad just stood there, quiet and statue-still.

After a while, he said, “You will not abandon your work.” It was part question, part command.

She finished the last of her coffee and sighed. “No, I won’t.”

Conrad gave her a slow smile.

That’s the way a lizard would smile,
she thought.

“Good. Now, is there any service I may perform for you?”

Sometimes she found his formal manner charming. Other times, like now, she found it cold and distant.

“We could use some...” She looked down, unable to meet his gaze. “Fresh supplies.”

His lizard smile returned. “It will be my pleasure.”

After Conrad left, Catherine was able to relax a little. While she was grateful for both the tutelage and assistance he’d provided over the past few months, she was always on edge when he was around. There was something indefinably wrong about him that set off alarm bells in the back of her mind. Beyond his appearance and manner—and aside from what she suspected he did in order to procure more “supplies” for her work—he drew in the energy of his surroundings, as if he were some kind of living black hole. Light, heat, even her own vitality seemed to drain into him, and she felt weary after spending any length of time in his presence. His departure always came as a relief. She was never able to fully relax when Conrad was in the house, and now that he was gone, she knew she should try to lie down and get some sleep. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten any decent rest, let alone a full eight hours.

As a doctor, she well understood the effects of sleep deprivation, both physical and mental. Logically, she knew that she couldn’t do her best work if she didn’t take care of herself.
You have to take care of the machine,
as she always told her patients. Used to tell. The way she’d neglected her practice the last few months, it was all but dead. But that was a small price to pay to achieve her ultimate goal. She would give anything,
do
anything, to make it happen.

Conrad’s question—which she’d both interrupted and completed—came back to her.

Isn’t the attainment of such a goal worth four people’s lives?

She didn’t want to think like that. She was supposed to be a healer, for Christ’s sake! But despite her protestations to Conrad, she couldn’t deny that deep down she
did think
that way. She wasn’t proud of the fact, but there it was. However, even though she knew how important it was to get her rest, emotionally she found it almost impossible to tear herself away from her work. About the only time she slowed down was to make a fresh pot of coffee, and she justified that to herself only because she needed the caffeine to keep her alert. She couldn’t afford to slow down. She had to keep pushing herself. They were depending on her.

She was no psychologist, but she had done a psych rotation in med school, and she knew that while it was vital to keep pushing herself if she hoped to succeed, there was another, deeper reason she refused to slow down. If she kept her mind busy, she didn’t have time to think about anything but work. It was when she allowed herself to rest that she remembered—or worse, dreamed.

She finished her coffee, got up from the table, and poured herself a refill. She headed back to the table, but instead of taking her seat again, she set the mug down, then walked past the kitchen, down a short hallway off to the left, and entered the family room. The lights were off, as they always were these days. She never went in there anymore, so there was no point in wasting electricity. She reached for the wall switch, but couldn’t find it. She couldn’t have forgotten where it was... could she? This was her
home.
She should be able to remember something as basic as the location of a light switch. She fumbled in the dark for several moments before her fingers finally encountered it and she flipped it with a sharp gesture of irritation, although inside she felt more than a little relief.

The illumination from the track lighting over the couch dazzled her eyes for a second, and she raised a hand to shield them. When her vision adjusted, she lowered her hand and saw that the room looked the same as always, with the exception of a light coating of dust on the cherrywood coffee table and the black leather couch. It almost looked like the room was covered with a thin layer of snow. No, she decided, it was more like she was looking at a faded photograph. A large flatscreen TV hung on the wall above the fireplace. The latter was empty and cold, but there used to be flames in there almost every night, even in summer. On the mantel above the fireplace beneath the television were a number of framed pictures. As Catherine stood there, she experienced the strange feeling that she was somehow trespassing in her own home.

She crossed the crème-colored carpet and stopped in front of the mantel. The first photo she picked up was one of her and Marshall on their wedding day. Both of them were laughing at something the photographer had said—she couldn’t remember what. It was her favorite picture of the two of them. The joy they exuded in that frozen moment perfectly captured the essence of their relationship. Love was only part of it, although of course, the largest part. They had genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, too. Some couples said they were also best friends, but in their case, it had been true. Marshall looked so handsome in the photo, and so young. They’d been in their early twenties when they married, but even so, the man he would become was visible. Thinner, a bit more hair, but the playful intelligence was present in his brown eyes, and it would only sharpen as the years progressed. And his smile... God, how she missed it.

She placed the picture back on the mantel and picked up another, this one of a pretty teenage girl with long brown hair, dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and shorts, sitting on the ground surrounding by flowers. Catherine had taken this picture of Bekah herself in the spring, out in the garden. She and Bekah had spent so many wonderful hours planning, planting, and tending the garden. It had been so long since she’d gone out back, she didn’t want to think about the kind of condition it was in. She supposed it was nothing but a tangle of high grass and weeds.

She remembered exactly when she’d taken this picture of Bekah. Eight days before her fifteenth birthday. Nine days before she’d gotten her learner’s permit. Twenty-three days before her father took her out for her first night-time driving lesson. That had been four months ago. It was the last time Catherine had seen either of them alive.

She didn’t recall much about the night itself after seeing them off. She assumed the police called her at one point, and she must have called someone after that, because she had a vague memory of sobbing in someone’s arms. She thought it might have been Ronetta, her office manager, but she wasn’t certain.

The details of what had happened to her husband and daughter, though, those she remembered, or at least could imagine, perfectly.

At approximately 8:40, Marshall and Bekah—in Marshall’s BMW, Bekah behind the wheel, excited and nervous—approached a railroad crossing outside of town. They got there just as the warning lights came on and the wooden crossing gate lowered. Bekah braked and together she and her father waited while the train passed. Over the months since, Catherine had wondered what, if anything, they’d talked about. She was certain no music had been playing. As much as Bekah would have loved to cruise to some tunes, her dad would never have permitted such a distraction while she was in the early stages of her driver’s education. She thought they might’ve rolled down the windows so they could better listen to the sound of the train’s passage and feel the wind it kicked up. She imagined them looking at each other, grinning and sharing a special moment, just the two of them, father and daughter.

The train passed, the crossing gate lifted, and Bekah took her foot off the brake, gently pressed the gas, and eased over the tracks, looking both ways as the BMW juddered across. Once safely on the other side, Bekah accelerated. An instant later a pickup with its lights off came flying out of the darkness, weaving back and forth, its driver one Earl Fulmer, a local plumber who’d just left a poker game at a buddy’s house, running with more alcohol than blood in his veins. Earl hit Bekah and Marshall head-on at what the police estimated was in excess of seventy miles per hour. There were no survivors.

As a doctor, Catherine knew her husband and daughter had died quickly, and despite the horrific injuries they’d sustained, they hadn’t suffered. At least, not for long. But even though she knew this intellectually, emotionally she imagined their experience of the accident as very different. She knew that human perceptions became heightened during times of extreme stress, giving rise to the common belief that a person’s life flashes before their eyes at such times. She imagined the accident seeming to occur in torturous slow motion while Marshall and Bekah’s consciousnesses operated at normal speed. If that were true, every wound they suffered would have seemed to take an eternity to inflict. The agony would have been inconceivable. She knew it was a foolish scenario to imagine, one that had no firm basis in scientific facts, but in her heart she believed it to be true, so she grieved not only for the loss of her loved ones, but for the unimaginable suffering they had endured before finally dying.