The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (11 page)

He examined their misfortune from every angle before reaching a conclusion. He had to leave. His only path to redemption demanded that he travel unencumbered.

He intuitively understood that times of economic calamity eventually terminated in war. And the bigger the calamity, the bigger the war, and this current depression was a truly colossal calamity. It would take him far away, beyond the reach of his creditors, to murky places where
the coming conflict would generate business opportunities truly global in scale.

And it was better to go now, while he could still provide his family with a buffer to heal. He had a modest reserve of cash that his creditors hadn’t uncovered, and it would allow them to survive in modest comfort until he returned. He had no idea how long that might be, but it would most certainly come to pass. In the meantime, he would periodically let them know that he was out there, diligently working his way home.

He walked out of the living room and down the hall to the bedroom, where his wife lay sleeping. She faced away from him, and he could see through her nightgown, so soft and silken, the slight rise of her shoulder with each breath. He got as far as the bed, then turned away.

He didn’t even consider visiting the next room, where his son slumbered in the white bassinet. The pain of it would take him to the brink, to a point where his resolve might falter.

Before he left, he carefully packed bundles of cash into a box that he left in plain sight on the kitchen counter. He wrote a note saying that he loved them both, and would be in touch, but nothing more. What else was there to say?

Zed grasps the rails on his wheelchair and idly rocks back and forth on the polished cement floor of Bay 3. One of the medical devices issues an anonymous beep, a call to no one in particular. He ignores it. The past beckons again and he quietly follows.

The Second World War raged on and on, startling in its scope and intensity, magnificent in its profitability. Zed traveled ceaselessly, in cargo holds of freighters, in cabins of DC-3s, in smoke-filled railcars, in armored vehicles. He crafted networks of common interest, webs of mutual advantage, and grand assemblages of monetary leverage. His operations grew in size, in wealth, in political power. Their scale and potential consumed him utterly. His notes back to his family became less frequent and more abbreviated. Eventually, he automated the process so that a monthly sum was sent to them without his intervention. They became an artifact, a relic from an era he would just as soon forget, a time of personal defeat and failure.

But while the past can be buried, the truth cannot be forgotten, and it nipped away at him. He had forsaken his wife and son. The possibility of redemption had come and gone. Markets could be manipulated, governments swayed, and banks brought to heel, but a breached family yields to no one.

He had defaulted on the only contract that really mattered.

In Bay 3, Zed looks over to a cabinet beside the empty bed, a utilitarian work of metal and plastic. A glass vase sits on top, cut from crystal of the finest quality. It once held flowers: prize
roses, exotic orchids, Casablanca lilies, peonies. Symbols of life. Celebrators of death.

Nobody invited the ravens to his wife’s funeral, just as no one had invited him. They came of their own volition. Natural history blew them in, an inexorable surge of events propelled them forward. Just like him. He stood back from the graveside gathering and listened to their cawing. They were the only attendees he recognized, with one exception.

He saw just enough of himself in his son to be sure. The pale eyes, the prominent jaw, the slight widow’s peak, even at twenty-five. A young woman stood at his side and grasped his arm. The warm air of spring settled snugly about them as they stared at the casket draped with flowers. Prize roses, exotic orchids, Casablanca lilies, peonies.

His son suddenly looked up, looked right at him. His heart gave a solitary thump. Did the boy know? Zed quickly broke off eye contact, and when he looked up, his son was once again staring at the casket.

The ravens chose that moment to depart. Big black wings beating through a sky of cloudless blue.

Zed scans the darkened screens of the monitoring equipment. They once danced with the imagery and numeric symbols of life in progress. Pulses, beats, pressures, electrical waves. Now they stand like silent scriveners, waiting to once again take note and bear witness. Just as they had in that hospital room over fifty years ago, when his only child lay dying.

He had entered the room only after hesitating out in the hall to gather his composure. The bleak light of late winter imposed itself from outside, and the instruments around the bed displayed all the signs of imminent decline brought on by lymphoma. Weak pulse, vacillating blood pressure, falling oxygenation. Seventy years of life circling for a final stand. His son lay motionless with his head propped on the pillow, his cheeks sunken and his color gone.

Zed pulled up a chair and sat down. His son did nothing to acknowledge his presence. His only offspring stared out into a space known only to those on the final precipice. Zed took a deep breath and moved into his son’s field of vision.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t there for you. It was a terrible mistake, the biggest of my life.”

His son stared back at him blankly. Not a hint of motion in the pale blue eyes, their common legacy. No response anywhere on the dying face.

Zed looked away and out into the grim winter. No resolution, no forgiveness, no reconciliation. His son’s final silence would fester within him always, an open sore prone to
spontaneous eruption.

“Is it cold?” Zed asks Arjun as he wheels himself out of Bay 3 and back into the corridor. “It seems cold to me.”

“Yes, it might be a little chilly,” Arjun agrees. “I’ll check on it.” They kept the temperature down here at almost 80 degrees to accommodate the old man. Any higher and you would break a sweat just by walking. But Zed’s comfort comes first. Always.

Arjun grasps the handles of the wheelchair and they start down the corridor at a brisk pace. “I think you may be humoring me,” Zed comments. “But we’ll deal with that later. Now let’s review the facts.”

Arjun reviews the possible repercussions of Anslow’s escape. The scientist’s handheld turned out to be a cheap bootleg from Borneo. All the data from phone calls and video resided exclusively on the memory card, which was missing and presumably with Anslow. Zed’s generosity with the current administration had bought them deep access with the National Security Agency and others of its ilk, so it might be possible to trace any calls, but it would definitely take time. And that still left the possibility that video shot inside the van was on the card.

“Just remember Yogi Berra,” Zed says.

Arjun stares down at the old man’s bald skull as he wheels him along. A brown spray of age spots cover the pallid dome. “Who’s Yogi Berra?”

“It’s not over until it’s over,” Zed responds, with no further explanation.

They reach an unmarked door at the far end, beyond all the numbered bays. They knew from the outset that this additional space would be necessary. It holds a fully equipped examining room that doubles as a morgue, with the most advanced autopsy tools and diagnostic instruments. Arjun does a lobe scan to let them in, and they face three portable tables, with the body lying face up on the center one.

The operatory fixtures pour a merciless light down upon the subject. No detail hides in shadow. The subject is young. The subject is old. Take your pick. The jaw strong and firm. The neck wrinkled and withered. The forehead clean and smooth. The earlobes swollen and hairy. The arms thick and muscled. The hands knotted with arthritis. The calves strong. The thighs withered. The haunches firm. The belly a puddle of white flab.

The subject holds no shock for Zed and Arjun. The 101-year-old male was one of the first. They’re intimately acquainted with his bizarre farrago of biological triumph and tragedy. They know that CT and MRI imaging shows even more chaos inside him. The robust heart, the wheezing lungs. The vigorous liver, the shriveled colon.

“Have we determined when he died?” Zed asks.

“It was in the early morning, somewhere out on the road in the van with Anslow.”

“Are you going to cremate him?”

“Not yet. First, we want to fully understand the nature of his death.”

“Yes, of course. Well, no matter what, he gave himself for a good cause.”

“Yes, he did,” Arjun says. A good cause! What did that come from? Madness? Genius? It was hard to tell. And getting harder all the time.

“Nice piece,” the security guard says as he examines Lane’s pistol, one of the new 10 mm weapons with an auto-correcting laser system.

“Goes with the job,” Lane mumbles. They stand at the screening gate for Store Land, a commercial zone on the old highway just east of Hillsboro, the county seat. The lobe scan informed the security people that he was cleared to carry it, but routine procedure demands a check of any weapon that comes through the gate.

The guard hands the pistol back to Lane, who tucks it in his shoulder holster and walks toward the big building directly ahead. A large, electrified sign on the roof explains the enterprise below:
NATIONAL PANCAKE WAREHOUSE
. Even though it is mid-afternoon, people are streaming toward the big entrance, seeking a nutritional bargain that lets them fuel up on fats, sugar, and carbohydrates at a minimum cost. Most have the soft yet inflated look of the chronically overweight. A few carry the extraordinary bulk of the hopelessly obese.

Lane enters through the sliding glass doors and waits patiently in the ticket line. The interior is a big, industrial cavern lit by a grid of fluorescent lights installed in the metal framework overhead. They pour their cold illumination onto a cement floor covered with a multitude of folding tables and chairs. Off to the right are the big gas-fired griddles and the prep tables where batter is mixed, bacon arranged, butter whipped, and syrup bottles refilled. In front of the griddles is a long counter built from folding tables, where the patrons file by with plastic trays and paper plates to pick up their fare.

Lane avoids this orgy of cholesterol and goes to the end of the line, where he pours himself a cup of coffee from a ten-gallon container. He surveys the sea of tables and spots Bellows at the far end, right where he said he would be, underneath the giant screen for the Feed. As Lane weaves through the tables, people look up at him suspiciously before diving back into their heaping plates. He shouldn’t be here. He’s too hard, too lean. He can only mean trouble.

Bellows doesn’t bother to rise as Lane approaches the table. He merely nods and takes a sip of his coffee. Not a good start. Bellows is the number two guy in the Washington County coroner’s department. The plane disaster has him on edge. The department has gone from maybe a half dozen bodies a month to more than one hundred all at once. All burned beyond recognition by a hellish blaze of jet fuel.

“Sorry,” Bellows says, without any formalities. “I can’t tell you anything about your brother.”

“I didn’t think you could,” Lane says.

“So what do you want to know, Mr. Anslow? As you might suspect, I’m a busy man.”

“I want to know if you’ll
ever
know anything about my brother.”

Bellows sighs. “You got me there. You got me good. It’s a real mess, I’ll tell you that. Our lab can’t handle it, that’s for sure. Sooner or later, we’ll send everything off to the state. Maybe we’ll get something back, maybe we won’t. It’s not like it used to be.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Lane says. “Anyway, thanks for your time. Keep in touch, all right?”

Bellows stands and lightens a little. “Sure. And I’m sorry about your brother, okay?”

“Okay.” Lane watches Bellows walk off through the crowded tables. He and Bellows are informally connected as members of the law enforcement fraternity. He’d asked for a favor and got one. Sort of.

Bellows was bought and paid for. Lane is sure of it. The DNA would never come back from the state. The fate of his brother’s body would remain permanently unresolved.
Sorry, Mr. Anslow; it’s the best we can do
.

Lane gets up and heads out through the seductive smell of grilled bacon. The meeting was a success. He’d sent a signal that he thought his brother was dead. Just in case someone was watching.

The interior of Johnny’s lab is stereotypical, at least from Lane’s point of view. Counters full of chemistry, cubicles full of computers, hulking machines dedicated to purposes unknown.

The place is empty and quiet. Just the drone of the cooling fans in their endless thermodynamic battle against the march of the electrons. Lane finds Johnny’s cubicle at the end of the row, a double-wide befitting the leader of the pack. Arcane papers and notes litter his desk, full of graphs, math expressions, and chemical equations of the sort that have mystified Lane ever since high school. The spot obviously reserved for Johnny’s laptop sits empty. End of story. Peoples’ lives reside on their laptops, and without it, Lane has little to go on.

He sits in Johnny’s chair and looks up to the burlap-like surface of the cubicle wall. A blue pushpin secures a photo to its surface, a snapshot of him and Johnny with the water, the firs, and the wooden pilings encrusted with barnacles that mark the annual extent of the tide.

Fuller Bay.

They were in their late teens then, and their swimming trunks hung loosely from their spare frames. An idle summer afternoon stretched out before them.

“Let’s check out Old Man Simmons’s boat.” Johnny sprang up off the porch steps as he said it, powered by an effortless muscularity.

“We’ve still got work to do,” Lane protested. A rotary power mower sat idle down on the wild grass. Little waves of heat still rose off its finned cylinder head. “We’ve got to finish the lawn.”

“We can do that later.” Johnny started to pace between Lane and the end of the porch. His head kept thrusting forward in an avian fashion, as if to an invisible rhythm. He’d been doing more of this kind of thing lately, and it bothered Lane. The more he paced, the more he thrust, the more determined he became. “Let’s have some fun, man. This is it. You know that, don’t you? We’re not coming back. It’s gonna be gone.”