The Methuselah Gene (18 page)

I used the loop of my camera case shoulder strap to pull down the old metal ladder.
 
I expected a screeching from the rusted hoist mechanism, but it seemed to move smoothly, and was well oiled.
 
Slipping the revolver into my belt, I pulled myself up onto the rungs, and began to climb.

The slate gray surface felt cool to the touch, but I was still in the shade on the north side.
 
As I neared the upper slope that was more exposed to direct sunlight, the skin seemed to radiate like an oven.
 
I lay my hand on it like one lays a hand on the body of a freshly found corpse, or on the hood of a parked car to see how long the crime suspect has been home.
 
I continued up the ladder until it turned into an arching frame of convex rungs, which were bolted against the sloping surface.
 
At this point I took out my gun, and tapped the belly of the reservoir with the handle.
 
The emitted thrumming sounded hollow, and it was impossible to tell the amount of water inside.
 
I was out of luck unless I found a gauge, or until I could plum a weighted line down a hatch.
 
Hoping for evidence of forced entry, I continued up until it was level enough to stand.

This was my first mistake.

There were two gunshots.
 
They were muffled, from a silenced automatic that nonetheless made a distinctive
whumpf
sound.
 
The shots came from the south, and from the same gun.
 
The first brought me to my knees as the bullet ripped through the flesh of my inner thigh.
 
I fell flat and hugged the warm surface while fire and blood spread out from my wound as though I'd wet myself with acid.
 
The faint whizzing of the second bullet registered close to my ear as it passed near my head.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my—

I crawled up the very top, to the forced hatch I'd suspected would be there, in case my sniper was circling for a closer shot.
 
I was almost certain he didn't have a rifle, or the first bullet would have ended me, burrowing right through my left ventricle and leaving a pulpy hole in my back big enough for a final geyser of pumping blood.
 
It had to be a pistol, I told myself, because the shots had missed my vital organs.
 
And a pistol with a suppressor on it possessed even less accuracy on long range.

Out of sight from below, at the apex of the water tower, I lifted the revolver above my head and fired once toward the south.
 
Not trying to hit anything, I just wanted to make certain whoever it was knew I was armed.
 
Maybe the sound would attract someone from town to investigate, too.
 
At least I hoped it would.

I slipped the gun in my waist belt, and rolled painfully over onto my back.
 
Breathing rapidly, I put the back of one hand over my eyes to shield out the sun.
 
With my other hand I kept pressure on the flesh wound inside my upper thigh.
 
Listening intently for any sound coming up to me from below, all I could hear was the faint, distant barking of the same dog I'd heard earlier, only more persistent and frequent, now.
 
That, and the birds, and . . .

Something else.

I strained, listening.

Far off, carried on the hot, still air, came the sound of voices.
 
Singing voices.
 
A choir of voices, in synch, in harmony.

As I lay there, sweating and already beginning to feel thirsty atop a tainted water tower in the middle of nowhere—and with a killer somewhere in the trees below perhaps now aiming at the ladder I must eventually descend—I could now hear the faint chorus of a church choir carried to me as if from heaven to hell.

I began to laugh.

It was ludicrous, my predicament.
 
Ironic.
 
The gunman below had trapped me, I realized, and would simply wait me out.

Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, it didn't matter.
 
The water tower seemed to turn beneath me like a carrousel all the same.
 
An hour passed in this limbo as I listened for footsteps on the rungs leading up to where I lay.
 
I wasn't certain of time anymore.
 
My watch was somehow broken, its crystal smashed.
 
But at least my bleeding had stopped.
 
The fabric of my pants felt matted beneath my hand.
 
If the bullet had ripped its way through me several inches in either direction, there would be no arresting the bright red leak.
 
Something my sniper was no doubt hoping had happened.

While the world spun beneath me, I soon felt like I'd been skewered on its axis.
 
And I knew the pain from my flesh wound would only become worse.
 
Thirst already filled my mouth with cotton, and considering the irony of where I lay, only tortured my mind further.
 
I thought about what had trapped me, and how much more ironic it would be if it ended like this, in ignorance and stupidity.
 
All I really had were unanswered questions about who, why, when, and where.
 
Was it industrial espionage that had led to this?
 
Aftermath of some lost merger deal, perhaps, after other successful mergers like the multibillion dollar Pfizer/Warner-Lambert merger?
 
It seemed unlikely, and bizarre.
 
But the pharmaceutical companies were growing and acquiring more power all the time, and it was at least remotely possible that a clandestine official at some conglomerate had decided it was easier to steal what they wanted rather than to merge and acquire the deadwood too.
 
It would certainly look better on their quarterly report that way, with new R&D potential interesting the stockholders again after so many profitable patents had expired, and with the government targeting them as greedy regarding senior citizens.
 
But why risk discovery over unproven research?
 
Why bet the farm on an unknown entity, however promising, with the possibility of lawsuit and real jail time if you got caught?
 
It was absurd.
 
Ergo, it wasn't happening.
 
I was missing something.
 
It wasn't
Tactar
, or any other pharmaceutical company, doing this.
 
But who, then?

Terrorists?

I considered that, and not for the first time.
 
Would terrorists go through the trouble and risk of testing out what they'd stolen here?
 
Why Zion?
 
The giddy laugh trembling on my lips felt like gallows humor.
 
Go ahead, I wanted to shout, shoot me now, before I find out.

I closed my eyes as if already dead, imagining my sniper climbing a tree for a gander at me.
 
I listened for the crackling sound of branches bearing weight, or breaking.
 
Even for the sound of snickering as the demon
boxholder
known to me only as Sixteen reckoned he might blow off my balls with a nine millimeter at better than a hundred yards.
 
But the only sound I could actually hear was a mockingbird that taunted me in descriptive soliloquy.
 
No heavenly choir.
 
No junkyard dog.
 
Just that one bird—annoying, raw—to accompany the throbbing in my head, telegraphed by the throbbing near my groin.

Against my better judgment, I risked rising up on my elbow to use the binoculars.
 
Still, the only objects to look at
were
maple leaves and the tops of evergreen trees.
 
Several sparse openings in the branches afforded a peek through to the scrub field below—one of them off toward the rooming house to the south.
 
But that was all.
 
Julie had probably already taken the path I saw down there.
 
She was probably already home, having concluded that Rebecca
Crim
really had found religion, and that my theory was equivalent to claims of sighting
Nessie's
cousin in Lake Icaria, west of Creston.

I lay back again onto the warm, gun-metal gray surface of the tower, and considered the odds that the man who'd shot me had fled when I blindly fired back.
 
There had been no sound from below since.
 
Was he really sitting underneath the tower and waiting me out as I imagined . . . or
were
he and the one named Sean already enjoying chicken fried steak and home fries at the Slow Poke?
 
I tried to imagine them there, exchanging banter with the likes of Edie, Earl, and Sheriff Cody.
 
But I couldn't.
 
What I could imagine was Sean being deputized, maybe even being given a key to the gun rack, from where he withdrew a Remington 12 gauge pump shotgun.
 
As for my man Sixteen, alias Walter Mills, alias Who-In-God's-Name-Am-I, he was nowhere to be seen.
 
But just let him climb up here and try to pop one in my brain pan with the bullet that had my name on it, though, and I'd favor him with smooth hollow point for his.

Welcome to the Great Beyond, buddy, where the devil may care who you are . . . or may not.

“Hey!” I called out, surprised at the twisted timbre of my own voice, in a spontaneous burst of frustration and thirst.
 
“How about we make a deal?”

I sat slowly up and looked around at the trees again, listening intently for some response.
 
For a rustling movement.
 
For anything.
 
The rush of blood from my brain prematurely dimmed the late afternoon sky for a moment, but when the roar in my head subsided, even the mockingbird fall silent.
 
The air was dead calm now.
 
Funereal calm, as though my mourners had just left the cemetery, and the only thing left was for my lost and lonely soul to finally quit my body and drift high up past the circle of evergreens and away.

Having heard no answer, I worked my way toward the access hatch, a square metal protrusion eight feet away.
 
The hatch had been forced, I could see, but I was reluctant to touch it and disturb any evidence.
 
I took a photo of it instead.
 
It felt mostly futile, doing it, but at least it beat waiting for answers from St. Peter.

That accomplished, I lay back again, careful not to dislodge the clot at my thigh.
 
I closed my eyes once more and tried to visualize Julie's face, but what came to me first were other faces, as if in montage for a final memory sequence—a flashback jigsaw that might finally let me see the whole picture, just in time to make some sense of my life.
 
I saw Rachel's face, her soft olive skin, her inquisitive brown eyes trying to hold mine, to understand why I'd been so evasive, so alone.
 
Not seeing me, really, but warm with the affection of familiarity.
 
Dad's face was there too, with the only sad smile I could remember him possessing, as though the fates had conjoined to bequeath us bad luck from the foundation of the earth, amen.
 
That weather-beaten face, resigned to Mother's decrees, once bore the half smile I now sometimes found on my own face, after its original owner escaped to God's waiting room—as George had put it—to live the bawdy, bohemian life of an eccentric.
 
Then there was the subtle worry of Mother's face, suspecting she'd been right about Dad.
 
Animated by the realization of her failure to convert him, she'd constantly used his name in lieu of a curse word thereafter, as though Rachel might somehow hear the mantra and make it her own.
 
Even from the grave, her lips seemed to move in memory.
 
And now, against my closed eyelids, her mouth appeared to form the words of guilt and betrayal soundlessly, incessantly.

Other faces came and went more quickly.
 
Emily Danville's, the moment before she turned away from me in tears on the beach that night.
 
David Thorne's above a white lab coat, as he stopped me in the hallway at
Tactar
.
 
Darryl's above a lime green silk tie,
Winsdon's
above a narrow gray one.
 
Jeffers, as he studied one of his cruise brochures.
 
Kevin Connolly, as he stared over folded hands across a mahogany conference desk.
 
Even Jim Baxter's face from my nightmares.
 
And then Wally's, Tom's, Edie's, Earl's, and even George's placidly transformed smile.
 
Sheriff Cody's sweaty face was next, and then Sean's enigmatic one.
 
And finally, Julie's . . .
 
Her simple smile rose into my mind like an exclamation point, erasing all the others.
 
But then her face metamorphosed into terror.
 
Her moving lips seemed explicit in warning.

I opened my eyes wide, shocked alert again.
 
Then I could hear something approaching, I was certain of it.
 
Something getting bigger, with a beating sound.
 
A whirling.
 
A windy yet distinctive
rotoring
.
 
When I caught sight of it between two tall trees, I began to roll myself toward the ladder in a panic, and in the process lost my pistol.
 
It slid to the very edge of the parabola as pain shot up and down my leg with an electric charge.
 
I gripped a hand hold and started to descend the rungs to reach the gun when the thing finally came into view overhead, hovering above me.