The Frankenstein Factory (15 page)

When he saw that Tony hadn’t followed Vera outside, Earl went after her down the path to the beach. It was a warm morning, the warmest they’d had, and he breathed in the fresh sea air as he trotted to catch up with her.

“Hi.”

She glanced around at him. “I didn’t know which one of you it might be.”

“Are you glad it’s me instead of him?”

“I suppose so. But I haven’t forgotten some of the things you said last night. About my arranging to be discovered in your bed.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No, I
didn’t
!” There was lightning in her pale blue eyes. “My idea of sex games doesn’t extend to men fighting a duel over me, thank you!”

“Calm down. It seemed likely at the time. After all, how else did he know where to find you?”

“I imagine he looked in my bed first. When I wasn’t there, he must have guessed that you were the most likely one. After all, what was the choice—you or Armstrong or Hobbes!”

“All right,” Earl agreed. “I suppose you’re right.”

She was staring off toward the distant mainland. “Are we going to build that fire you suggested?”

“Of course. Want to help me start gathering wood?”

There were a few fallen limbs among the trees but not nearly as many as he’d hoped for. It was obvious that some of the smaller trees would have to be cut down. “I wonder if he has an ax,” Vera said, staring up at a slim, twelve-foot manzanita not yet old enough to have taken on the typical gnarled appearance of its species.

“We don’t need an ax. The laser pistol will do the job. Might as well use it for something.” He trotted back to the house and went up to his room. Both pistols had been locked away in the dresser drawer. He took one, leaving the other one there. The house seemed silent as he passed through it, but on the way back to the beach he spotted Armstrong. “We’re gathering firewood. Want to help?”

“Might as well,” the bland-faced doctor answered.

“How’s Frank?”

“How should I answer that? ‘Fine, resting’? I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing since Sunday night.”

“But there was a change during the night. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“You mean about the electric shock? Yes. Tony explained what he did.”

“Frank’s eyes were open.”

“A good sign. Frankly, though, it seems unlikely that he’ll recover normally after-this long a period. Everything points to some brain damage.”

Vera was waiting by the manzanita tree. She’d already broken off a few of the smaller branches, close to the ground. “All right,” Earl warned them: “Stand back, both of you.”

Armstrong seemed apprehensive. “Have you ever used a laser to fell a tree before?”

“No. Have you ever ministered to a man brought back from the dead before?”

The laser cut quickly through the trunk near the ground, and the tree toppled over. After another few minutes’ work with the gun Earl had stripped it of its branches and cut the slender trunk into three lengths.

“That should burn well. Let’s carry it out to the pile.”

It was still a skimpy supply of fuel for a bonfire, and it was Vera who had the idea of adding green leaves. “They’ll make black smoke,” she explained. “I read it somewhere.”

“Anything’s worth a try.”

Armstrong went to gather the necessary leaves while Vera helped him stack the wood they’d cut. “What do you think about Hobbes and Miss Watson?” Vera asked, hefting a limb onto the pile. “Isn’t that something?”

“It’s something, all right, but I don’t know what.”

“You’re being mysterious.”

“There are a great many little things—the fancy, feminine decor in your room, for one thing. Whose room was it before you came? If Hobbes had a woman here, living as mistress of the house, what happened to her when old Emily Watson arrived on the scene? Would she have been so free with her money if another female was on the scene?”

“Don’t you believe Hobbes?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted. “But there’s something he’s still not telling us.”

Armstrong returned with an armload of leaves, many still attached to branches. “This enough?”

“It’ll do for a start. We can always throw more on.”

“Shall we light it?” Vera asked.

But before either of them could answer Hobbes came running down the walk from the house. Earl had never seen him move so fast, and the limp that had slowed him before seemed all but vanished.

“Come quickly!” he shouted, “Frank is gone! The operating room is empty!”

His words were true. Now only the rumpled operating sheet lay across the table, dangling down among the straps that had proven so useless earlier. They stood for a moment in simple awe of the fact, then Earl broke the spell.

“He can’t be far away. We’ll have to search the island again.”

“It could be dangerous if we split up,” Armstrong cautioned.

Earl still carried the laser pistol in one hand, and now he glanced down at it. “No!” Hobbes protested immediately. “You can’t kill him!”

“He’s not your son any longer.”

“He’s a human being.”

“Some courts of law might question even that.” Earl glanced around, seeing Hobbes and Armstrong and Vera, and suddenly realized that Tony Cooper wasn’t with them and hadn’t been for some time. “Where’s Tony?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him since we were having breakfast.”

Armstrong drew a sharp breath. “We’d better start searching.”

“Downstairs first,” Earl said. “We’ll split into two groups, but stay within shouting distance of one another.”

They moved out of the operating room, Earl and Armstrong going first to the lockers where the green surgical jumpsuits hung. There was one empty hanger. Then they decided on staying together and checking the laboratory while Hobbes and Vera looked into the various storage and supply rooms. Ten minutes later they met again in the amphitheater.

“No sign of either of them,” Hobbes reported.

“Same here,” Earl said. “What about the vaults? There must be some way to reach them besides that elevator for the capsules.”

“There’s a spiral staircase leading down from the supply room. But the entire system is automated. I haven’t needed to go down there in years.”

“I think we’d better check it out. Armstrong, you remain up here with Vera. Come on, Dr. Hobbes—lead the way.”

Hobbes unlocked a metal door in the equipment storeroom. “See? It hasn’t been tampered with. No chance he’s down here.”

“Let’s look anyway.”

They descended the metal staircase to the subbasement vaults. Though the air was decidedly cooler it was not the freezing sort of cold Earl might have expected. He remembered then that the freezing was done by liquid nitrogen within each container. There were rows of them here, far more than he’d expected, all bathed in an eerie half light from glowing pillars.

“There must be hundreds of them here!” Earl said in amazement. “I never realized you had this big an operation!”

“I’ve kept its size confidential,” Hobbes admitted. “A great many people don’t like it made public when they’re frozen after death. They feel they might be held up to ridicule or have their wishes sidetracked by the intervention of relatives. But I can tell you in confidence that this vault contains the body of a former president of the United States.”

“What?”

“Oh yes! And at least a dozen men who were powerful world leaders during their lifetimes. Millionaires, statesmen, all are here!”

Was he to believe this, Earl wondered, any more than he was to believe the story of Hobbes’s son? What was the reality? “Why don’t you bring them back to life?” he asked.

“All in good time. Can you see now why this project is so important to me? Can you see why Larry’s reanimation will be just the beginning?”

“I can’t think of any former presidents I’d like reanimated,” Earl admitted. “Let them all sleep on!”

They checked each of the aisles in turn and found nothing. “Satisfied now?” Hobbes asked.

“He could be hidden in any one of these capsules. For that matter, Emily Watson’s body could be in any one of them too.”

“You can see they’re unopened! The screw tops are all in place.”

“Apparently,” Earl agreed. “Now, just how are these transported to the elevator?”

“This automated cart runs up and down the aisles on that overhead rail. It’s much the same principle as automated parking garages for cars. That’s really the simplest part of it.”

“All right,” Earl said finally. “I guess you’re right. He’s not down here.”

Vera and Armstrong were waiting for them up above. They proceeded next to the ground floor, searching as they had before, always staying within shouting distance. But there was no sign of Frank or of Tony Cooper.

“The bedrooms next,” Earl said. “Come on.” He was beginning to feel that he knew the house as well as his own apartment back in New York.

By the time they’d finished it seemed obvious that there was no one else in the place. Frank had vanished and Tony was gone along with him. But Earl wasn’t yet ready to give up. The day was still young. “What about hidden rooms or secret passages?” he asked Hobbes.

“Nothing like that here. I can show you the plans, if you’d like.”

“I would like.”

But a carefully detailed checking off of the rooms on the plans revealed that there was nowhere they hadn’t looked. “If he’s not inside, he must be outside,” Armstrong concluded reasonably. “Let’s go look.”

Once again Earl teamed up with Armstrong while Hobbes and Vera went off together. They called to each other every few minutes to make certain that they were still in contact.

“He could be managing to stay ahead of us,” Earl suggested. “He might have doubled back into the house.”

“Which one—Tony or Frank?”

“Either. Both.”

“Why would Tony be hiding from us?” Armstrong asked.

“I don’t know. But at this point there are a lot of things I don’t know.”

As they moved toward the point where the pile of wood had been gathered for the bonfire Armstrong suddenly gripped Earl’s arm. “Look there!”

Earl looked, and saw. Tony Cooper’s bloody body was sprawled across the top of the woodpile. He was dead.

“Stabbed several times in the back,” Armstrong said as he finished examining the body. Vera and Hobbes had come running in answer to their shouts, but now Vera turned away, burying her face against old Hobbes’s convenient chest. He tried his best to comfort her while Armstrong and Earl lifted the body off the wood and placed it on the sand.

Earl noted scuffed footprints over the ones they’d left earlier, together with damp patches alongside that could have been blood. “Looks like the killer caught him in the woods and chased him out here. He probably fell on the woodpile and died.”

“But we were all together, weren’t we?” Vera pointed out, starting to recover herself. “We were together since the moment Dr. Hobbes ran down to tell us about Frank’s disappearance from the operation room.”

“That’s right,” Armstrong agreed. “It had to be Frank that killed him. There’s no one else on the island.”

“No!”
Hobbes insisted, the word torn from him as an anguished scream. “He’s my
son.
”

“Not anymore,” Earl said. “A new brain, a new personality … He’s nobody’s son any longer. We have to find him and kill him before he kills us.”

“Just four of us left now,” Armstrong muttered. “My God—just four out of ten!”

“It’s just like—” Earl began, but was interrupted by Vera.

“What about the fire?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we start it?”

“Of course.”

Earl borrowed her matches to light a twist of paper, and this in turn was applied to the smaller pieces of wood. The fire did not catch immediately, but soon a few twigs were burning. “You should have gasoline for that,” Hobbes volunteered a bit grudgingly.

“Do you have any?”

“There’s some in the boathouse.”

Earl trotted down the beach to get it and returned in a few minutes with the five-gallon can he’d found there. Carefully avoiding the few flames that were already burning, he poured the gasoline generously over the rest of the wood, then picked up one of the burning embers.

“Get back, everyone!” he warned. “You’d better move Tony’s body back too.”

Armstrong and Hobbes pulled the body across the sand and Earl tossed the torch into the gasoline-soaked wood. There was a whoosh of flame as the entire pile became engulfed at once.

“We need more leaves,” Armstrong said at once. “There’s not enough smoke!”

Vera stepped back from the heat and eyed the small, intense blaze. “They’ll think we’re cooking hotdogs. It isn’t big enough!”

Earl could see that she was right. From fifteen miles away the flames wouldn’t even be visible. Armstrong was throwing on more leaves and branches, but it did little good.

“There just isn’t enough here to burn,” Hobbes said. “For all our trees, they’re mainly fast-burning evergreens and manzanitas.”

“Let’s not panic,” Earl said. “There has to be a way out of this, and if we put our minds to it we’re sure to come up with something.”

“I know one thing for sure,” Vera said. “I won’t sleep another wink in that house!”

“Not until Frank is found, at least,” Armstrong agreed.

“It’s Larry, not Frank,” Hobbes said. But even his correction was half-hearted.

They stood, watching the flames consume their wood pile until nothing was left but glowing embers. Then the four of them walked back to the house in silence.

While Hobbes poured drinks Vera came over to where Earl stood by the window. “What’s to become of us now?” she asked.

“There’s still the boat—the one Whalen tried to escape in. If that patch job has held, one of us could try to get across.”

Hobbes heard them and came over, holding out two cocktails. “I checked the boat this morning. The gas tank is dry. The motor must have been still running when he was killed. It kept running until the gas was used up.”

“Don’t you have any more?”

Lawrence Hobbes shrugged. “You just threw it on the fire.”

Earl came very close to striking him then. “Why in hell didn’t you tell us?”

“There’s no escape from here,” the older man said. “Our fate is tied to Larry’s. For myself. I have to stay and see it through.”