Prototype. Part 30

Adrienne scrabbled to her knees beside Sarah, cradled her as the mad clawing desperation in Sarah's fingers resigned to a tender stroking. They could say nothing to each other now. Words took time, and were imprecise at best, never enough to hold everything that must be said when they are needed most.

A falling shadow: Adrienne looked up in reflex - to defend Sarah's last ragged breath? - but it was Clay falling along her other side. Coming not to steal this terminal moment but to share it. He reached, an arm sliding beneath Sarah as he helped bear the weight that had grown so slack. With his other hand he touched her face. Through the chill of shock she was aware of it, aggrieved eyes crinkling for a moment, and with a blood-slicked hand she reached for Clay's cheekbone. He did not flinch.

He's touching, Adrienne thought, the only lucid flicker in awareness that otherwise wailed. Then: Why does it take a catastrophe before it happens...?

Adrienne embraced Sarah, clutched her, felt the blood wash down her front and tried to impart her will even though it never work: Live, you, just another moment, just another lifetime, just long enough to hear me say I loved you. Live.

Adrienne raised her head, sacrificing a precious second to look about the room - could anything be done, could anyone help? - but there was nothing for her beyond the sight of three others, immobile, doppelgangers all, watching someone die.

A moment that came too soon. By decades.

The silence was total, its own world as she clung to Sarah's last bubbling breath, the final tremulous beat of her heart, the last pulse of blood. If anyone took these from her, she would show no mercy.

Ellie was first to break the silence, with a sickened cry that ripped free as if it had been trapped for minutes. She shook her head in denial, then lurched back to the bedroom, bathroom. It sounded as if she picked up speed as she went, and whether she retched or sobbed once there, it was not clear.

Like a broken appendage, her companion followed, backing out of the room while pulling off a pair of dark round lenses. Gone, then, and nothing else moved but Adrienne's lowering head.

So it had come to this.

Clay fell aside, sitting heavily on his rump with elbows on knees, head in hands. His breath came swift and shallow, about to hyperventilate.

Is this what it's like to be you? she wondered. With nothing left inside or out to go on?

How did he do it? How ever had he done it all these years?

Valentine had sat again, on the edge of his chair, so wholly absorbed in the moment that he appeared transported. His face bore the look of artists who have achieved the breakthrough to aesthetic perfection, who have transcended themselves and ride a moment that felt eternal. Adrienne knew that he would never again feel this alive.

Hate him? He was too alien to truly hate.

She fell inward again, the first real sob working its way up, scarcely aware that Clay had risen and walked from the room. He barely touched the floor, gliding, may have been gone a moment, maybe an hour, and when she glimpsed him again he had returned from the kitchen, flowing with smooth even purpose, a mongoose to the cobra.

She opened her mouth, mute, and what a mistake to think that she had no heart left to break.

His first slas.h.i.+ng blow with the butcher knife caught Patrick Valentine across the forehead, opening a deep split that rained a sheet of blood across his eyes, blinding him. Two-handed, Clay plunged it down into the meat of one shoulder, then the other. The gun went thumping to the floor, and a moment later Valentine fell atop it, as Clay bore after him with a brutality primordial and relentless. His face was gone, replaced by the visage of carnivores that rolled in the spoor of their prey.

"No, no, stop, don't do that," she murmured, crawling over Sarah and slipping along on all fours until, midway there, her strength giving way to shock, she sprawled upon the floor while Clay swung the knife, and plunged it, and gouged it, and twisted it, never once looking up from the task at hand - *

- until it was finished, forever and ever.

So here the journey ended. He could see it now, unspooled behind him. From Denver through the deserts to Tempe, then back again. To the brink of mountains and down once more, through the mounting losses, then across frozen wastes. To the savannahs within and, finally, north. All the while, sliding down the coil of the double helix, until here he was, a new being. No, not new - complete, the killer he had always been destined to be.

The inevitable quit trying so hard to impose itself, once it was accepted.

And if there were regrets, they were only for the innocent. For Sarah, and for Adrienne too, because she had dared believe he was redeemable. She had deserved better.

She had never had a chance.

Dripping, he rose from the corpse of Patrick Valentine, got as far as his knees before he saw Adrienne's eyes. In shock, she was, trembling and chilled. He knew the look, but had not realized just how horrible a creature he must truly be until he saw the judgment on her face.

He fetched a silken comforter from the sofa and draped it over her, so she might stay warmer. Stripped away his s.h.i.+rt, his pants and the rest, for he, conversely, was burning alive.

Knife in hand, he trod down the hall.

Their existence was intolerable, of course. He had known this all along, had tried to fight it, had tried to see it as another of nature's simple ways that were indifferent to the outcome. Much less deserving life forms than they had met with extinction; he would do his part.

Daniel Ironwood he found in the bathroom, trying with nervous hands to light more to smoke. He dropped his paraphernalia when he saw Clay, naked and bloodied, and the knife was swift to fall. They grappled down along a peach-hued wall, a towel bar coming free, with which Daniel managed to strike a bruising blow along Clay's collarbone. He sank the knife through Daniel's lower abdomen and hung on despite the sudden burst of fetid odor. Knife grated bone, and together they twitched, and Daniel wept as his struggles grew feeble. Then nonexistent.

Oh, how he had wanted to live.

Ellie he found in the bedroom, sitting on her bed and drawn into a tight ball. He'd thought she might be the fiercest of the three, yet here she had all but surrendered, and he supposed no one was really as tough as they let on.

And Ellie knew him, knew his heart as well as he did.

"I can't help what I am," she whispered, and would neither tremble nor cry. Nor beg.

"None of us can," he said, and proved to himself just how wrong Valentine had been last night on the balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.

The third one is by far the hardest.

He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food - he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.

He fell into Valentine's chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.

Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn't coming next - or so her gaze struck him - and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.

Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.

But it was no good. Despite everything, the old sour repugnance had returned already, his skin crawling beneath her hands. What is it, he wondered, they've got to be dead first?

Adrienne seemed to sense it, perhaps a stiffening across his shoulders, and she pulled away with a single downcast nod. Content to brush two fingertips against his chest, as much as he was able to tolerate.

"So many scars," she said. "It's too late. Isn't it?"

"We tried. So the scars won anyway. We tried." As if that were supposed to be some consolation.

He crawled away from her, rubbing the scar on his forehead, from early November. Twelve st.i.tches, it had taken? What an amateur. He could do better than that, and crawled toward the marble table.

I want to live in a different world, he had told Adrienne weeks ago, and if he had seen only the worst of worlds, it did not mean he had abandoned hope entirely.

There would be a better world, somewhere, there must be. He would find it, that world where he could touch Erin's face and whisper her name as many times as she wished to hear it, and know that he could love her without reservation. That world where she could touch him lavishly and his skin would not reject any hand that was not brutal enough to bruise. This place, it had to exist - this could not be all there was.

Anything but that.

He knelt before marble, its smooth rock edge become the ledge upon the precipice. Eyes gone blurry, he stared down until he was one with the stone, its mottled gray and black a universe. It beckoned.

He answered.

He whipped his head down, let his brow crack across marble, and the inside of his skull went white and vast. Skin split; he was as blind as Valentine at the end. Clay reeled, rising up onto both knees, face tipped to an unseen sky, Icarus flying too high. He whipped his head down again, harder than before, all his strength this time, and forever he fell ... from the eye of the sun, from the pain of a frozen moon...

Falling from grace.

And she was alone.

Clay's head had twice hit with a sound like a bursting melon, and the second time he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from a forehead gone sickly concave. In his boneless heap he twitched with convulsive spasms until they shorted themselves out, then fell still but for shallow breaths.

Adrienne found a phone and punched out 911, let the receiver tumble to the floor when it became obvious she had no voice for the task. They would trace it; they would come.

But she couldn't wait until then, could no longer breathe the air of this slaughterhouse, so with the last of her ebbing strength she dragged Sarah across to the gla.s.s door. Dragged her onto the balcony, to huddle with her beneath the comforter in the farthest corner, under the chilly kiss of falling snow.

Sightless eyes, she closed them. Silent lips, she kissed them. Braided hair, she stroked it. She raised Sarah's sweater and caressed her navel, still healing from the ring that pierced it, and she kissed that as well.

And then? Just held her, until rougher hands would inevitably pry them apart.

Her face running with melting snowflakes, she thought of the rainstick left far behind. If she had it here, she would slam it upon the railing, break it open and let its pebbles and bone chips cascade to the street below.

Sarah would approve, at least, and understand.

Nineteen floors up, while down in the street they all walked past at the end of their workday, and none of them had a clue what went on above. So Adrienne settled back and began to s.h.i.+ver, waiting for the sirens but never quite sure when they arrived.

That was the trouble. There were always sirens.

PART FOUR/DUST OF A FADED DECADE.

"But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of G.o.d and man had friends and a.s.sociates in his desolation; I am alone."

- Mary Sh.e.l.ley.

Frankenstein.

Thirty-Seven.

He had lost sight of the past, wondering if for every year he spent distancing himself from civilization, those memories had not become more and more like some vestigial organ that had withered to a nub, to someday drop away entirely. The primitives, he had heard it said, possessed no true sense of time, past and future only the broadest of conceits, sacrificed to a raw and overwhelming now.

Was he, in part, proving the theorists right, bridging that gap by becoming a living atavism? Would that no one ever got the opportunity to find out. He had tried their route; he'd been there before.

As for the route he had chosen, its first steps he scarcely remembered; they seemed as unimportant as his name, his lineage. Once even dirt roads have been forsaken in favor of desert vistas and high crags, one can wander for years without need of the past. It made no one any less human.

He could no longer recall how he had found himself here, but some nights, when on the verge of sleep with rocks at his back and the fire at his front, he stirred with the idea that something must have been terribly painful long ago, when he was young, with fewer scars, and that it was better left in a world given up for dead. Memories were sly things, not to be trusted, for their faces could change so over time. Treacherous change he did not need. Better he immerse himself in something stable and endless, a place that time could never defile, because what was time but a sense of order imposed by human hands?

A desert was such a place.

To the Gobi he had come, drawn by its call, its immensity, by everything it promised not to be. It offered neither truth nor lies, it simply was, and that was all he asked for. That, and the fulfillment of some tale he knew he had heard, with reason to believe, but far enough ago that its teller had been lost to him.

Once upon a time he had heard of the almas, and their story lay lodged within him so deeply it might have been a memory planted for the sole purpose of sending him to an elder world in which hours had no meaning. A world in which lives progressed by days and nights, by the pa.s.sing of the seasons and the cycles of the moon. He needed no more clock than these.

Deserts he crossed and mountains he climbed, nourished by the land and that with which it teemed. Old clothes tore and rotted and fell away to be replaced by hardier skins, while his head and face sprouted with hair thicker than any he had known before. It must have been years that he wandered, that he climbed, and his feet grew tough and his hands callused, and his voice grew vast with the song of primeval solitude. He was earth and wind and sky and water. He was beast and dream.

And the almas waited.

He loved them long before he saw them, knowing that whatever they were, when he found them it would not matter. Be they hermits of folklore, or the descendants of feral children, or some dead-end evolutionary branch, prototypes of humanity with all their potential intact, who lived now as forgotten anachronisms. They were as wrong for the world he had abandoned as he was himself - he remembered that much, too, not quite recalling the problem, only sure of one thing: I am not like others, not like others.

He roamed the slopes and plateaus, and sometimes he would find the remains of their fires - more than once still warm, he was but hours behind them - and the bones of their kills, picked clean. In the shelter of caves he would find evidence of their lingering, earthen pigments used to pay homage to a mighty bisonlike creature that would surely die a very hard death. In all his years up here he had seen no such animal, and it was a long time before he realized: They pa.s.sed it down. They remember what used to be, as a people, if not as individuals. This is how they keep it alive because if they let it die, a part of them dies too.

He wished that where he'd come from they had known things like that.

So he followed, but the almas were as elusive as they were nomadic, as shy as their legends said. There were times when he began to wonder if he were becoming somehow incorporated into their folklore. And why not, they must have found him a creature of sufficient mystery: a solitary being with a strangely shaped head but clothing not unlike their own, who walked in fog and left lonely tracks in the snow. Perhaps they thought him a spirit, or a G.o.d. Or a demon.

He knew only that they seemed to grow to trust him, allowing him to get closer and closer over the years before turning and melting into the hillsides. Half a mile became a quarter, became an eighth, until as little as fifty yards might separate them, and the almas would stand immobile, stocky and powerful atop a hill, silhouetted against a sky of blue, or gray, or sunset red. They would stare at one another through mists and rains and burning suns, but the almas would always vanish before he could walk in on their camp.

Still, he took their small tokens as encouragement to keep trying, objects they could not have left behind by accident in their haste to flee. A soft-furred pelt, a flint knife, a clutch of wild flowers lashed by rawhide to a bone. Such gifts he came to cherish, whether they were left in simple trade, or in appeas.e.m.e.nt driven by awe.

So he followed, and dreamt of the day when they would no longer run from him, and he began to imagine fathering a child, the idea no longer repellent, as it had seemed long ago. What might such a child be like? Perhaps, backward as the almas were, that which was best in them might cancel out what was worst in him, and so the child - or children - could grow to be something new, better than either of them, a more worthy survivor.

If only they would let him get closer, close enough to touch.

They had to; this could not be all there was.

And, too, if only that d.a.m.ned blazing star would quit searing from the sky to blind him at the most inopportune moments - *

"Pupillary response ... none."

The results were always the same, year after year - s.h.i.+ne a penlight into his eyes and it might as well have been shone down a mineshaft. Pupils fixed, pursuant to damage to the frontal lobe, she'd been told more than once; patient catatonic. He had, for the greater part of a decade, not uttered a single word, nor focused his eyes on anything in his field of vision, nor reacted to one sound around him. It was as if Clay Palmer had simply gone away.

Each summer Adrienne flew northeast to visit her parents in their retirement on Prince Edward Island. From there it was a simple matter to drop down to Logan Airport in Boston, then rent a car and drive out to Worcester to visit with Clay in the state hospital that had been the longest-lived home of his adult life.

Never had he given any indication of being aware of her, but she visited anyway, hoping against experience that in the year since her last visit he might have shown some meager improvement. Always a disappointment, though, and Adrienne supposed by the time she was forty she had given up hope, had accepted, and, all things considered, was grateful that Clay had grown no worse.

He had, ironically, managed to keep his youth over the years, his skin still smooth as a twenty-five-year-old's because he never used it and it never saw the sun. His impa.s.sive countenance became a living museum exhibit of Helverson's syndrome, worst-case scenario, the streamlined bones no longer going anywhere. And as fine lines circ.u.mscribed her mouth, crossed her forehead, circled her eyes, she began to resent his stasis. Age, d.a.m.n you! - a fool's command, and she thought of spending hours folding his face with wrinkles in hope that at least a few might take root. It wasn't fair; he was thwarting her in body as well as mind.

Although it wasn't as if he looked perfect, now, was it? She thought it terrible the way they kept his hair trimmed so short in this place, for easy maintenance, when they should have let it fall unruly over his brow. It would at least conceal that broadly scarred concavity across his forehead.

In a dayroom alive with the shufflings and mutterings of his ward mates - a chamber that took her back to her duties on Ward Five - she would spend a full afternoon with Clay, sitting with him at a table and for a time trying to penetrate his never-ending stare. Where did you go? she would think, sometimes even feeling a tweak of jealousy because his surrender to it was so complete. It denied her everything.

She would then take to conversation that was entirely one-sided, wondering if anything was getting through. Giving him updates on her life because she didn't know what else to talk about - she should reminisce about all the fun times they'd had? - and she would reveal herself in a peculiar role-reversal she had never antic.i.p.ated. Clay sat like the perfect therapist, never a word, a pale iconic presence whose silence only prompted her to go on, find something else, there must be more.