The Wave (9 page)

22

The sun was shining on my face. I thought of GT lying out naked on his back, cold and alone and remembering more years than any other living being in the cosmos. Older than dirt. Older than God. Immortal despite my mortality. No wonder he had been so afraid those first days in the graveyard.

“Good morning,” a woman said.

I opened my eyes and realized that the sun was not part of the dream. The woman who had been working in the garden the day before was standing at the foot of a large four-poster bed.

I was under a thick down comforter.

“You were crying in your sleep,” she said.

“Where am I?”

“Back at the house you left yesterday.”

She was lovely and sad, wearing a button-down tan blouse and a tight black skirt. The hem came to her knees but flared, seeming like it wanted to ride up.

“David asked me to look in on you,” she said.

“Dr. Wheeler?”

She smiled. “My husband.”

“You’re keeping me prisoner,” I told her.

“What else is new?” She looked at me from behind those adorable freckles. “Breakfast is in half an hour.”

“How did I get here?” I asked.

“They brought you in last night. You were unconscious. Nobody said so, but I think they might have drugged you.”

She shrugged and began to turn away.

“What’s your name?” I asked her back.

“Krista,” she said. “Krista Arnet-Wheeler.”

I found my clothes in the closet. They had been washed and pressed and hung from a wire hanger.

The breakfast room was like a finger jutting out into what was left of the orange grove. Instead of walls, it had light gray netting pulled tight from ceiling to floor. The long dining table was made from dark wood. At the farthest end, Krista Arnet-Wheeler and David Wheeler sat before a set of plates. A black woman was hovering around them, putting down dishes filled with various breakfast foods.

David stood up when he saw me. He gestured for me to come over. “Come have breakfast with us, Errol.”

“Thanks.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Nor could I remember the last time I’d eaten.

I was ravenous.

Wheeler pulled out a chair for me.

It was a family-style breakfast. Scrambled eggs, French toast, fat pork sausage seasoned with thyme, fresh-squeezed orange juice.

The coal-black servant was tall and severe, ageless beyond sixty, and wearing a powder-blue dress that seemed somehow powerless on her.

“Thalia, this is Errol Porter,” David Wheeler said. “He’ll be staying with us for a while.”

Thalia’s eyes took me in. I don’t think she meant to show contempt, it’s just that she had an imperious mien.

“Your sister is out of the ICU,” Krista said as I swallowed the first bite of egg.

It embarrassed me that I hadn’t thought about my sister yet this morning.

“And her baby?”

“Fine,” Krista said with a kindly smile. “She’s still in an incubator, but the reports said that they expect her to survive.”

“Coffee?” Thalia said. It was only a word, but there was Texas all through it.

“Thank you,” I replied.

When she had left the finger-room, I asked David, “So am I a prisoner here?”

“Yes,” he said without shame. “This house has a twenty-four-hour guard around it. If you are found trying to escape, you will be caught or killed.”

Krista was looking down at her juice.

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t have a sense of humor. Do I, dear?” He reached out for Krista’s hand and pressed it.

“No, he doesn’t,” she said, giving me a wan, humorless smile.

“The whole world is at stake, Errol. You and I, Krista and Thalia don’t matter in that. We are all prisoners of war.”

“What war?” I asked the slender scientist. “I didn’t see anybody fighting you. Those prisoners were just sitting there—being tortured.”

“You mistook those husks for human beings because that’s how they present themselves,” he said. “They might just as well become a bear or a bird. We apprehended an infected man and dog in downtown L.A. just a couple of weeks ago.”

The radio news item came back to me.

“The man who pushed the policemen off the roof downtown?”

“Yes,” Wheeler said, “a man who died thirteen years ago. His dog died the next day, and there was such a bond between them that the family got special permission to allow them to be buried together.”

“GT never sounded like he wanted to hurt anyone,” I said. “He talked about togetherness.”

“They’re parasites, Errol. We are the hosts. That’s the kind of togetherness he was talking about.”

Krista stood up then.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to go shopping.”

As she left, Thalia returned with a chrome pitcher. She poured me a cup of coffee and asked, “Cream?”

“Just a touch,” I said.

Wheeler waited for her to depart again before he went on. “The men and women who have risen from those graves are puppets. They’re an infestation that will drive us into extinction. You and I cannot allow that to happen.”

I got stuck on the word
extinction.
I thought that all death was a form of extinction; that all of a man’s memories and beliefs, his loves and tactile sensations, were in some way like a singular species of life. The man dies, and all that he was is gone forever.

“GT remembered me,” I said. “He felt for me; expressed love for me. He was aware of who he was.”

“Like a corpse farting in the morgue,” Wheeler said. “It gives you a start at first, but then you get used to it.”

“Like that child screaming when you ordered her arm cut off?”

“Like that monster,” he corrected. “Who, even now, is reconstituting in the basement of XT-1.”

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Because of what we’re doing right now,” he said. “Your personal demon, this GT as you call him, is the first XT to contact a family member. He’s different. And we want to know why.”

“How do you know that no others have called their families?” I asked. “For all you know, there could be dozens of men and women at home with their loved ones right now.”

There was a flash of green from light reflecting in Wheeler’s right eye. He smiled.

“This infestation has come in waves,” he said. “The first ghouls were fairly mindless when they came out. Uncooked, as Dr. Gregory says. That’s why they were discovered so easily. They were picked up wandering senselessly from the graveyard. They had no ability to speak for many weeks. And even when they did manage to communicate, they uttered only single-syllable words.”

Naked . . . cold . . .
The words came back to me as if I were listening to them on the phone the first time GT called me.

“They were experiments,” Wheeler continued. “The first attempts at invasion. Later, the ghouls could speak almost upon their first appearance.”

“How did you know about them?” I asked.

“They were picked up by the police, one by one,” he said, “wandering naked in the neighborhood around Evermore. The first three appeared in a week’s time. Their fingerprints were taken and a bright young detective thought it wise to inform the FBI. Our unit was formed soon after that.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Eighteen months.”

“At Fox Hills?”

“Your father was the first host to rise from that cemetery. All of the other resurrections came from Evermore Cemetery. We were sure that the infection was located solely under that property. That’s why we had no surveillance of Fox. Our resources haven’t been deep enough to keep active watch on all the graveyards around Los Angeles, and up until your case, we hadn’t thought it necessary. But we know that the ghouls have been getting more sophisticated. We also know that they were all headed north. We thought we’d caught all of them until your father showed up.”

“Nobody else called their families?” I asked.

“Not until you.”

“How do you know?” I said. “A hundred XTs could have arisen there before my father.”

Wheeler smiled and nodded. A sparrow flew up and grabbed onto the gray netting and then flew off again.

“The XTs leave certain evidence of their passage,” the doctor said.

I remembered the cool soil in the grass covering my father’s grave.

“Your father,” Wheeler continued, “was in the only affected area at Fox.”

I felt like an ant in a beetle’s sand trap. Every step I took brought me closer to the chattering jaws of the predator. Even if I stayed still, holding my breath, the ground beneath me slowly gave way.

Wheeler sounded reasonable. But then I remembered how he’d ordered the severing of MaryBeth Coulder’s arm. GT had all of the memories and at least believed he was my father. My father had killed a man in our living room and buried him in the garage. I had been kidnapped. My government was in a secret war. My rights as an American citizen were of no consequence. Every step, every detail of my life, seemed to be dragging me down.

The story my grandmother told about my cousin the arsonist came to mind. Albert Trellmore committed crimes against his enemies based on his own judgment. And when he judged himself guilty, he went to his bed and died.

“Tell me something, David,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“What kind of doctor are you?”

It seemed to me the most important question in the world. How Wheeler answered would determine my response to him. No president or senator or judge had called on me to protect humanity. This man, this doctor, had done so.

“I’m a general in the United States Army,” he said.

“I didn’t ask you about your rank,” I said. “You’re a doctor, and I want to know what kind.”

For the first time since we’d met, David Wheeler faltered. He laced his fingers, and a furrow came into his brow.

“I’m a plastic surgeon.”

23

“Plastic surgeons are important physicians in the armed services,” David Wheeler was telling me. “There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers in active service, and then there are the insured veterans. Reconstructive surgery due to disfigurement or physical dysfunction would be astronomical if we farmed out that work to the private sector.”

I heard him, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to work in the service of a beauty doctor. I would make up my own mind, like my dead cousin the arsonist had done.

“And how did you become a general?” I asked, not really caring about the answer.

“Leadership comes in all professions,” he said. “I became the youngest commander of a military hospital fifteen years ago. I haven’t practiced in over a decade, but I don’t have to be a surgeon to cut out this contagion.”

We talked awhile longer. When breakfast was done, I told the general I was tired, that the experiences of the past few days had exhausted me. He said we’d meet for lunch and resume our talks then.

I asked him could I call my sister, but he said there was an order of silence imposed on the whole XT project and that no one who had been to the facility could have unsupervised contact with the outside world.

When I got back to the room, the pages I had written were there on my freshly made bed. There were also four long yellow legal pads, three yellow pencils, and a child’s red plastic sharpener. I wondered who had left these items for me. Dr. Wheeler had probably brought them home, but he hadn’t made the bed. And I doubted that he would have provided those particular writing utensils.

But right then I didn’t care where the writing tools had come from. I threw myself into a diatribe against the government and the general in particular. I must have written thirty pages railing against my captors, but those words didn’t make it into this history.

I realized that my anger meant nothing to the world. I was well fed and free to roam the house, at least. My movements were limited, but I wasn’t in a jail cell. My sister and her child had survived, and no one would miss me except Angelique and my mom, and maybe Nella.

It was near to one o’clock when I realized the pettiness of my harangue. For a while I contemplated escape. I thought maybe I’d use my paper for plotting strategy. But then I worried there might be cameras located throughout the house, as there had been in the bunker. Even if Wheeler hadn’t given me the paper, he might still be aware of it. And if I wrote down my plans, he could foil any effort.

So I went back to detailing the events as they had unfolded. The objective relating of facts would make Wheeler and his crew believe that I was controllable.

Not long after I had reached this determination, there came a soft knock at my door. It was the servant Thalia summoning me for lunch.

I met with Dr. Wheeler for the next four hours. I never lied to him once. I told him about the phone calls, about my mother’s infidelities, and about the love GT seemed to have for my sister and me. I told him about GT’s hunger and need to eat sand. That was the only time the good doctor took notes.

“Do you know what eating sand is all about?” I asked Wheeler.

“They eat quartz-based soil or pebbles, sand, as food. The insides of their stomach linings allow for the invading cells to come feast on the material.”

“But if they need to eat, couldn’t you starve them?” I asked.

“They don’t die, they just go into hibernation,” he said. “And if any quartz material is brought within their reach, they awaken and gorge.”

He asked me many more questions, and I answered every one with complete candor. But I never mentioned GT’s lyric mouthings about the Wave or his
mission
.

“Did any of them show violent tendencies against humans or other forms of life?” I asked at one point.

“The man who fought the police threw them from the roof,” he said.

“But they attacked him first. What I want to know is if any of these people—”

“Creatures,” he corrected.

“—if any of them actually attacked anyone without provocation.”

“Not directly,” he said. “But the beavers of North America didn’t have to be aggressive to force out any species that couldn’t live in harmony with their watery world. These XTs could very easily create environments that would be extremely unfriendly to human and mammal alike.”

I told him that GT didn’t have a scar that my father was marked with as a child.

“Of course not,” he said. “GT, as you call him, is not your father. He’s a simulacrum of the genetic code that once made up your father—not the man himself, not the physical experiences that made up your father.”

“Then why does he have my father’s memories?”

“Because the cells got to your father’s brain before it had decomposed. Somehow the XT cell can reconstitute what it finds. Memories, mental functions, language, even the ability to learn.”

I thought about how GT had said the cells counted the components of whatever structure they encountered. I thought about
count
in the word
encounter
. But I didn’t share any of that with Wheeler. I had no reason to help him kill GT, and no reason had been proffered. Maybe these so-called XTs were my enemy. But I’d have to see that for myself before I’d help kill the man who thought I was his son.

I went back to my room and wrote down every word of our conversation as far as I could remember. I did this because I believed that our lunchtime talk had actually been an interrogation, that Wheeler would come back to the same questions some time later to see if my story was consistent. If I wrote down everything we said after each meeting, then I could keep on top of any inconsistencies that might arise.

I finished my notes at about nine that evening, took off my clothes, and got under the covers. I wasn’t tired. My mind was racing back and forth over all the experiences I’d had since the first night GT had called.

While I was thinking, the door opened. Wheeler’s wife walked in and sat next to me on the bed. She reached over me to turn on the lamp that sat on the side table next to my head. She was wearing a robe that hung open a bit. She was a well-endowed woman, and quite lovely.

“Are you awake?” she asked.

“You see my eyes open, don’t you?”

She smiled and put her hand on my thigh through the blanket.

“We’re all prisoners here,” she said.

“Even David?”

“In his own way. David is obsessed with these resurrections. He’s become like some crazy saint from the Middle Ages, out on a quest to destroy Satan in the world. They wouldn’t let him quit even if he wanted to. But he doesn’t want to.”

“Are you the one who brought me my journal?” I asked.

“Yes. David had it in a briefcase. I thought you’d want to have it and to keep on writing. You have to have something to keep you sane in this prison.”

“He won’t let you leave?” I asked.

“No. Thalia and I are both prisoners. If we go shopping, we have a guard ride with us. Otherwise we are never allowed away from the house.”

“Doesn’t that sound odd?” I asked. “I mean, why keep everything such a secret? And even if you did talk to somebody, who’s going to believe that there are zombies crawling up out of the grave?”

That’s when she kissed me.

She lunged at my lips and shoved her luscious tongue almost down my throat. It was a muscular tongue. I was thinking about that when her hand went under the cover and grabbed the erection that had formed almost immediately.

“I need this,” she said. “I need it.”

I did, too. While she kissed me, I pulled off her robe. We were together in under a minute. We reached climax in half that time. But that didn’t even slow down our lovemaking. She was on top of me, and then I was on top of her. With all of that rolling around, we were bound to fall off the bed. When we finally did, the impact of our bodies made a large booming sound.

“Maybe you should go,” I said.

“With you this excited? I want to see your face when you come again. You look like a woman when you surrender to me.”

“But somebody might hear us.”

“Only Thalia, and she won’t tell. David is at the facility. He won’t be back until breakfast.”

She slapped me then, hard across the face, and said, “Now shut up and fuck me.”