The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (24 page)

Eventually, the woman returns with a single piece of paper produced by a vintage copy
machine of some kind. “Anything else?” she asks. Her tone indicates that it would be a definite imposition.

“Don’t think so. Thanks,” Lane says as she leaves the counter without comment and returns to her desk.

Lane joins Rachel out on the front steps and reads the gist of the document to her: Autumn West allegedly expired at six in the morning at Perrin County Community Hospital, Elkton, Nebraska. Dr. Wesley Fenner signed the death certificate, listing the cause as respiratory failure from pneumonia. “It happened right when the shift changed,” Lane observes. “Very convenient.”

They return to Mr. Larson’s truck. “You still got a hospital around here?” Lane asks.

“Just barely,” he tells him. “It’s three blocks. As a matter of fact, everything around here is just three blocks.” He manages a hybrid exhalation somewhere between a wheeze and a laugh.

“What about the cemetery?” Rachel asks.

“Oh, that’s a little farther out. You gotta go three blocks down to the tracks and then take a right for a half mile or so. It’s just past the Farber place.”

“Let’s try the hospital first.”

Perrin County Community Hospital sprawls in brick over a flat expanse fronted by a withered lawn. Its single story hugs the prairie horizon. This time, a receptionist greets them warmly. Much of the corn originating in the fields beyond has found various avenues into her body in the form of fat cells, a condition quite common in these parts.

“Hello, can I help you?” she asks.

“Hi, we’re looking for a Dr. Wesley Fenner. Does he practice here?”

“Oh.” The receptionist appears slightly stricken. “Dr. Fenner did practice here, but he passed away last year.”

“I’m sorry,” Lane contributes. “I didn’t know. What happened?”

“It was so sad. He was still in his fifties. He died just down the street. A train hit his car.”

“Wow,” Lane says sympathetically. “Did they ever figure out how it happened?”

“Not really. The train’s engineer saw him stopped right in the middle of the tracks. All the warning lights were on and the barriers were down. It was too late to stop the locomotive. He was killed instantly. At least, that’s what I heard.”

“Well, thanks for your help,” Rachel offers. “We’ll remember him in our prayers.”

“That’s very nice of you,” the receptionist says as they leave.

“So what are we going to do with that little piece of information?” Rachel asks Lane as they step outside and head for the truck.

“Nothing. We’re not here to resurrect a homicide investigation. We’re here to get to the
truth about Autumn West.”

Where Skyview Cemetery ends, great fields begin that stretch all the way to the horizon, interrupted only by little islands of trees or barns. The cemetery’s layout divides the ground into sixteen squares with intervening pathways. Twelve are full. Four await additional souls not yet departed.

“We’ll call you in a couple of hours,” Lane says to Larson through the rolled-down window on the truck.

“You got it,” he replies, and heads his pickup back toward the grain elevators and town.

The chirp of birds and the distant hum of his tires are all that remain under the enormous sky. Lane peers from the shoulder of the road down into the cemetery’s interior, where the intersecting paths are just wide enough to accommodate service vehicles. A utility shed sits under the shelter of a few trees at the far end. When they reach it, they find the door ajar and Lane peeks inside. Gardening tools line the walls and a tractor mower squats in the center of the gravel floor. He sees no sign of a map describing the plots. “Okay, let’s hit it.”

Lane treads slowly through the short, dry grass. A few headstones poke up, but flat markers of bronze or granite identify most of the grave sites. He scans the names and the dates. At first, the spent lives waft up at him, but he tamps them down to stay focused. One section over, Rachel also scans the gravestones.

Insects fizz and snap. Birds chatter. Great vessels of cumulus drift by and cast shadows that stir the air slightly. Now and then, the hum of car tires invades the vast expanse of solitude. Once, a train thunders by.

Ninety minutes into the search, Rachel makes the discovery. “I’ve got it,” she yells.

Lane comes over and looks down at the two adjacent bronze markers. Sure enough, the names and dates of the West twins agree with what they know. He squats down and carefully examines the carpet of surrounding grass. It spreads uniformly over the ground and gives no hint of the time of burial or excavation.

He stands up and notes the location of the section where they stand. Three back from the road and two to the left. The graves are on the section’s right side, two rows back in. “Okay, let’s call Mr. Larson, and get out of here.”

“But how are we going to know about the twin?” Rachel protests.

“I don’t think it’s advisable for us to stand out here in broad daylight in view of the road and dig up a baby’s grave. That comes later.”

“Sorry. I’m not much of a criminal or a fugitive.”

Lane smiles. “You’re worse. You’re in politics.”

The Greer-Parsons Funeral Home occupies a modest lot three blocks off the main street. A large, solitary elm casts shade on the front lawn and the porch. Lane and Rachel stand under its shelter and ring the bell while Larson waits curbside in the truck.

A man in his forties answers the door with the practiced smile common to the trade. “Hello. Come in.”

They stand in a small reception area that leads to a chapel with the usual trimmings. “My name’s James Burton,” he says. “How can I help you?”

“We’re just following up on an old friend of the family,” Rachel explains. “You handled her funeral.”

“What’s her name?”

“Autumn West.”

“I’ll have to check the records. You see, we just took over here last year, so I’m not familiar with all the names.”

“We’d appreciate it,” Lane says.

“Come and have a seat in my office. It should just take a minute.”

Burton leads them down a short hall and into a neat office with a laptop on the desk. He sits and types. “Ah, yes,” he says, gazing at the screen. “Autumn West. My goodness! She was over a hundred. You don’t see that very often.” He looks up at Lane and Rachel. “What would you like to know?”

“We’d like to know how she was interred and where the cemetery is,” Lane says.

“She was cremated and the cremains were buried at the local cemetery. It’s called Skyview. You can’t miss it. Just go to the end of town and take a right by the tracks. It’s about a half mile down the road.”

“Thanks for your help,” Lane says as he gets up. “So you just took over here. Would it be impolite to ask how business is?”

“Not at all. It’s quite good. The average age around here is now over fifty, which bodes very well for this kind of business.”

“What’s the previous owner up to these days?”

“Mr. Greer no longer lives here. He came into some family money, so he wanted out. Can’t say as I blame him. He’s living in Italy now, somewhere on the coast.”

“Ah yes, it must be nice,” Lane comments. Also quite perilous, he imagines.

Lane’s thumb runs idly over the switch on the flashlight, which sits in his lap. He purchased it from the hardware store just down the street from the Imperial Café, where he now occupies a booth with Rachel. He’s just finished his tuna melt sandwich. Outside, the shadows advance against the setting sun.

“So how did they do it?” Rachel asks.

Lane does a precautionary scan to make sure their waitress isn’t around. The place is empty. If she’d gone home and left them to lock up, he wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve seen no one else since they arrived.

“My best guess is that it started with Dr. Fenner giving the elderly and ailing Autumn something to make her damn near dead. Very shallow breathing, no detectable pulse. Then he waited until it was time for the nurses to change shift. This guaranteed him enough time to disconnect the monitoring stuff. By the time the next nurse shows up, Fenner’s declared her dead. The funeral guy knows the timing and is there in just a few minutes to pick up the body. They take Autumn to the funeral parlor and he revives her, but keeps her sedated. Next, the people from Mount Tabor show up, and off she goes, along with a sample from her buried twin. The funeral guy puts some wood ashes in an urn and the burial goes on as scheduled, which earns him enough loot to move to Italy—or so he hopes. That’s it.”

“Can you imagine what it must have been like for Autumn when she woke up with maybe seventy years peeled off?”

“No, I cannot.” Lane looks out into the dimness. One streetlight flickers, the rest are dead. “You ready to take a little moonlight hike?”

Lane plays the flashlight beam over the interior of the utility shed at Skyview Cemetery. The place smells of baked motor oil and spilled solvents. He spots a shovel on the back wall and removes it. A moth flutters through the beam as he goes back out to Rachel.

He extinguishes the light. A thick tree line separates the burial ground from the one adjoining farm, but they can’t take any chances. “Okay, let’s get it done,” he says softly. Out here, there’s no ambient noise to mask the sound of conversation.

At the grave site, he briefly shines the light on the bronze marker. April Clarisse West. God rest her soul. He turns off the light, picks up the shovel, and begins to dig. He suddenly becomes aware of just how protracted a process it might be. His soft hands run the risk of bad blistering. He stops and gives the light to Rachel. “Would you go back and see if you can find a pair of gloves?”

She nods and takes the light and leaves. He stabs the point of the shovel into the thick mat of hard, dry grass. It yields only slightly. Not good. He repeats the action, with the same result. Finally, after several attempts, he pierces the mat and reaches the underlying soil just as Rachel returns.

He stops and puts on the gloves. “Let’s hope we get lucky,” he says, and brings his foot down hard on the shoulder of the shovel blade. It slides easily into the soil below, which seems to be loosely consolidated. He leverages the handle to pry the dirt free. It comes up easily.

“It’s not filled in solidly,” he tells Rachel, “which means somebody’s been here before us.”

Overhead, the stars spin slowly and mindlessly about the celestial pole as Lane resumes his shoveling. A train roars by across the highway. The ground shudders slightly. Bats swoop and dart over the fields beyond. The air cools to a mild chill.

He hits the casket just three feet down. A little more exploratory digging outlines its shape. He clears just enough space to expose the lid, which is loosely attached. More evidence of tampering.

“Okay, bring the light over,” he instructs Rachel. With the beam centered, he removes the lid.

The mummified remains of a two-year-old child stare up at them and into the firmament high above. All except for the bones of the right arm below the elbow.

“I guess they got what they wanted,” Lane says softly. “God bless you, April Clarisse West. May you rest in peace.”

***

Lane picks up the model of a Boeing 707 off Larson’s cluttered desk in the hangar’s corner office. Outside, the turbines on their plane churn the night air. The time of reckoning has come.

“What kind of plane did you say we have out there?” he asks Larson.

“Piaggio 180. Only one I’ve ever seen,” Larson replies from where he sits under the pale fluorescent light.

“But you’ve seen other big planes land here, haven’t you?”

“Nope. Can’t say that I have.” Fear floods Larson’s face. He’s a rotten liar.

Lane puts down the model and leans across the desk close in to the old man. “I don’t think your memory’s serving you correctly. I think that some time back, a plane about the size of ours came in here. And I bet they took off in the night, just like us, after they loaded a big box. And they most likely told you to shut up about it. Permanently.”

“Don’t know nothing about that,” Larson mutters while staring at the floor.

Lane reaches out and pats Larson’s cheek, causing him to wince. “Good man. That’s the right answer. You stick with that.”

“Okay.”

Lane picks up the model again. “And if anybody asks about us, you do exactly the same thing for us that you’re doing for them. Say nothing.” He snaps the wings off. The fuselage falls onto the desk. “Does that make sense to you? I hope it does.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

Outside, Lane reviews the other possible sources of leakage as he heads to the plane on the taxiway. The court clerk, the hospital receptionist, the funeral guy. None knew as much as Larson, who just took a highly paranoid vow of silence. With luck, he and Rachel are okay.

He hops aboard and the engines rise in pitch as he shuts and seals the door behind him. The plane surges forward, and Rachel points them into the upper reaches of the firmament.

Harlan Green puts on a display of casual indifference, a façade within a pose within a pretense. In fact, he’s stunned by what he sees inside Bay 1, where Thomas Zed lies. My God! The man already looks at least several decades younger than when they met.

At the end of that meeting, Green had demanded proof, and here it is. And it changes everything. He plows through the intricate structure of relationships that he’s constructed, but it’s simply too complex to deal with at this moment of overwhelming truth.

“The clock’s a nice touch,” Harlan Green comments casually as he nods at an antique grandfather clock near Zed’s bedside, with its exquisitely engraved face and dangling chimes. “Does it run backward?”

“No, but it should,” Arjun tells him.

“So how does it work?” Green asks. “What’s actually making him younger?”

Arjun looks up at the multiple levels of equipment and tubing overhead. If their facility had human operators, the procedure would be less technically complex by an order of magnitude, but then their security would be hopelessly compromised. They had no choice but to achieve total automation.

“Basically, he’s being genetically reset,” Arjun explains. “The system will launch successive waves of artificial viruses that migrate to various groups of cells, where they methodically manipulate the existing DNA in the nuclei and make the required changes. Each virus carries only enough genetic material to trigger the process and initiate a cascade of activity that carries out the actual replacement work.”