Zero, p.8
Zero, page 8
I didn’t initially mind, as more and more nights lately, I’d heard her footsteps pad down the stairs and onto the linoleum in the kitchen. I’d hear the scrape of the chair and then her weight settle atop it. Her soft whimpers. Time would pass, and when she returned I could positively smell the salt of her tears, the rose wine on her lips.
That night, however, when the garage door rumbled open beneath the bedroom floor, I knew.
I knew.
The top of her skull clatters to the steel table like a ceramic bowl, the inner crevices of the cranium lined with blue blood vessels and dripping with cerebral fluid like warmed honey. Her brain has the consistency of festering mackerel, the dark convolutions like snails crawling in search of their nautilus-shaped shells.
I roll it into my waiting palm, feeling the gentle swell of the twin hemispheres like a newborn’s derrière. The bulbous lobes are bloated with the metabolic byproducts of deterioration: sea sponges at their absorptive threshold. Gently, I coax her brain far enough out that I can see the brain stem stretch beneath it like the stalk of a mushroom. I dare not stretch too far, for if I were to damage the medulla, pons or midbrain, the entire procedure will have been for naught. Without the instincts to inhale and exhale, stir the heart to beat, or stimulate digestion, she would be no better off now than she was right now.
Transferring the mass of tissue to my right hand, I excise a length of wire from the alcohol with my left and twist it securely into the pulpy center of the medulla oblongata. I follow suit with the pons, twisting that corkscrew tip into the meat of that knot. From there, locating the cranial nerves isn’t as difficult as I had thought it would be. They looked like dead worms protruding from their roots in the cortex. I skewer them all: optic and olfactory through the vasovagal and vagus, cranking that tungsten filament until it can be turned no more for fear of popping those tiny sacs like corpuscles. When all twelve pairs are satisfactorily connected, I arrange the wires so that they form a ring pointing outward from the center like rays from the gray sun of the brain, which I set precisely back into place, shifting it slightly to ensure that the pituitary gland sits comfortably within the trough of the sella tursica.
I close the cap of the skull; the wires ring it like a crown of thorns.
I chuckle at the irony.
The wounds in her palms had needed to be stitched as well.
She must have heard my footsteps thundering above her head, for I heard the Beamer’s engine roar and then the squeal of tires lighting up the smooth garage floor. By the time I exploded through the door from the house, my bare feet slapping the frigid cement, all I could see was a pair of frightened halogen eyes racing away from me in reverse. I sprinted out into the snow, rising up over my ankles, the swirling flakes stabbing my bare chest and arms like icy nails.
Snow-capped evergreen hedges passed to either side as though I was sprinting down the center of a trench, but those lights were getting further and further away. A flash of red stained the night and the back end kicked out to the right as she hit the street, slamming the brakes. The crimson glare died with the groan of gears being forced into first. The tires screamed and burned streaks into the ice, frantically spinning to try to grip the asphalt.
I raised my right fist and pounded it through the driver’s side window, showering her with balls of glass that skittered across the leather seats beneath her terrified screams. My fingers snaked through her hair and twisted around the roots, jerking her toward me. She threw her hands up on the lip of the door, impaling them on ragged shards of fractured glass. Her scream trilled and I knew I had to silence her. Yanking again on her hair, I tugged her toward me so I could clasp my left hand over her mouth. Before I could do so, however, that mess of jagged shards opened up her abdomen and dropped a loop of her ileum down the face of the door, washing the ground with a steaming rush of blood that slapped back up and coated my shins.
Whether the neighbors had heard the ruckus or not, there wasn’t a single light in any of the windows. No front doors opened for slipper-wearing brokers in their pajamas. No shouts cascaded from above.
Silence.
Interrupted only by my slowing heartbeat and the patter of snowflakes settling atop their brethren, melting into her rapidly expanding stain.
Hiding the blood beneath a veil of engine oil had been as simple as stuffing those lengths of intestine back where they belonged and stitching her gut together.
Holding the top of her head in place, I remove the steel plates from the alcohol basin where they had been soaking beneath the wires, lining them up before me on the slab like playing cards. After fishing the matching screws from the fluid, I align them across the seam I sawed through her head, and begin screwing them into place. Bone fragments skitter down the sides of her head, each twist of the screwdriver bringing a cracking sound akin to snapping plywood. I secure four brackets in place, then begin the arduous task of pulling the crimped edges of flesh back together so I can suture them in place around those wire tines.
“It isn’t the sum of our flesh and blood that makes us human,” Gayle had said.
She had been reading the Bible again, waiting until four in the morning before I finally came home. I could see it in the creases around her wide eyes, the way she sat just that much taller at the kitchen table, erect with righteousness, there in the wan candlelight.
“What makes us human then?” I had asked, already stripping out of my tie.
“Our souls.”
“What is a soul if not the metaphorical conglomeration of our mind’s chemistry?”
“A soul is more than thought processes. A soul is the light at the core of our being. It’s the heart that loves and the tears that mourn. It’s the driving force behind our hunger for faith, our thirst for knowledge and our lust for intimacy.”
“That could describe any animal.”
“No. Without a soul, all you would have is hunger. Thirst. Lust. That is what separates us from the beasts.”
Souls. I might as well have used my surgical skills to stitch Peter Pan’s shadow back to his booties.
I cast the bloody needle aside and tie off the final stitch.
The time has come.
I roll her over onto her back, lovingly tracing the angles of her clavicles, following them around the swell of her breasts and to the recently sealed belly that looks like a hideous smile full of sharpened teeth.
I plant a single kiss on her stiff lips, then roll her over again.
From beneath the table I produce the circuitry I crafted myself. It looks like an inverted soup ladle, though the cup at the end is large enough to fit over her head like a crown. The arm follows the curvature of her neck, running a stripe down the middle of her back to where it terminates at her buttocks. The entirety of the creation is molded from silver, riddled with varicose veins of tungsten. A ring of metallic knobs circle her head, running down her back in twin lines to where two large bolts have been affixed .
With great care, I attach each of the wires coming from beneath her skin to the corresponding protrusions on the machination. Lovingly, painstakingly winding the tungsten filaments together until the heat from the soldering iron will seal them in place.
It only takes a handful of three-inch screws to secure the device to her spine.
Finally, I attach the clamps from the jumper cables to the bolts at the base of the unit, and roll her onto her back.
Her body bucks from the table as though I’ve just shocked her with compression paddles, forming an awkward human rainbow. Sparks scatter from beneath her like roaches scurrying from the light. She slams back down, sending all of my implements careening in every direction. Her scalp begins to smolder, smoke rising from her charring hair like I would imagine the smell of a dog roasted on a spit.
The fine hairs covering her body prickle electrically.
Her eyes snap open.
“Rise and shine, my dove.”
Lightning bolts of red streak the whites of her eyes, the irises coated with a milky skein like cataracts.
Her blue lips part, and what comes out sounds like a belch of captive gasses, like nothing I’ve ever smelled before; hard-boiled eggs lanced from a necrotic length of duodenum after a week of impaction.
Brow furrowed, throat swelling almost avian-like, her eyes dart from side to side.
With a scream of incoming air, she draws her first breath into her crackling lungs.
I smile.
“I’ve missed you,” I say, leaning over her to again press my lips to hers, to feel the movement of the air from within her.
Her hands creep across my back until they cross, sealing me within her embrace.
She pulls me atop her and squeezes my hips between her thighs, crossing her ankles behind my knees.
“Gayle,” I whisper, bringing my mouth from her cold, rancid lips.
My eyes find hers.
Filmy and white, clouds forming between her lids.
There’s no light within.
No life.
It isn’t the sum of our flesh and blood that makes us human.
“What makes us human then?” I ask her memory aloud.
Her teeth snap closed on my lower lip.
Our souls.
She jerks her head to the right, tearing free a strap of flesh with a spray of blood from the pulpy ruin.
I scream and slap my hand to my chin, pressing against the wound to try to stall the flow of blood that streams between my fingers.
A soul is more than thought processes. A soul is the light at the core of our being. It’s the heart that loves and the tears that mourn. It’s the driving force behind our hunger for faith, our thirst for knowledge and our lust for intimacy.
Her fingernails tear through my lab coat and pierce the skin, wedging themselves deep in the tissue like fishhooks. Her legs constrict and my knees grind together.
Without a soul, all you would have is hunger. Thirst. Lust. That is what separates us from the beasts.
I rock my head back to cry for help, giving her the opportunity she’s been waiting for.
Hunger.
Her lips seal against my throat like a leech, pulling the skin taut before sinking her teeth deep into the flesh beside my trachea. She clamps down and tears from side to side until she gleans a sloppy wad of flesh.
Thirst.
Blood gushes from the wound, filling her mouth to the point I can hear her gagging on it. She has to pull her head away and let it flood across her face.
Lust.
My consciousness spilling in warm waves across her bare skin, she pulls me tighter to her breast, yet I manage to struggle free and fall to the floor. Crawling forward, I hear the thump of her flesh slapping to the cold tile behind. I only make it as far as the door, turning to face her as I press my back against the wooden surface, holding my trembling hand over the seething gash across my throat.
She crawls as far as her electrical tether will allow, slaps one bloody hand down, then another, pulling against her reins until finally, with a clack, the cables disengage and she drops flat on her face.
I stare at her still form, then bring my shaking palms in front of me.
Gayle was right. She’d known all along.
The proof was all over my hands.
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One
Pueblo Bonito
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
June 17th
7:36 p.m. MDT
Twelve Years Ago
Dr. Graham Bradley waited for the rooster tail of dust that had followed them for the last twenty miles to pass over the forest-green Cherokee before he finally opened the door and stepped down onto the sun-baked earth. His chief of security, Roland Pike, remained rigid behind the wheel, staring fixedly through the dirty windshield. The setting sun bled the sandstone escarpments crimson and cast long shadows from the sparse pockets of sage and creosote that spotted the sandy valley. A faint breeze ruffled Bradley’s ebon hair and returned the dust, forcing him to shield his azure eyes. His custom-tailored Caraceni slacks and calfskin shoes were already gray with accumulation. At least he’d had enough foresight to shed his jacket in the car, just not enough to have packed a change of clothes in his hurry to reach the site. When the call came from Dr. Brendan Reaves eight hours ago, Bradley had been in the middle of a board meeting. The anthropologist had refused to divulge the nature of his discovery over the phone and had insisted that Bradley needed to see what he had found in person. Considering the scope of Reaves’s research, Bradley couldn’t imagine why he would be summoned in such a fashion, which only served to heighten his curiosity. The corporate jet had been fueled and waiting at Sea-Tac when he arrived. Four hours in the air and three more wending through the New Mexico desert in the rental Jeep, and here he was, parched and irritated, and tingling with anticipation.
“This had better be good,” he said, and struck off toward the cluster of khaki tents at the edge of the Pueblo Bonito ruins.
The rubble formed a D-shape, straight in front and rounded where it abutted the sheer cliff. Walls composed of stacked layers of flat rocks climbed three stories up the sandstone face to where petroglyphs had been carved by long-dead hands nearly a thousand years prior. Where once more than six hundred rooms and thirty-nine ceremonial kivas had surrounded a broad central courtyard, now only the framework remained. Some walls still stood thirty feet high, while others had crumbled to the ground. A large portion was buried under tons of sandstone where “Threatening Rock” had broken away from the embankment.
For nearly two hundred years, this had been the capital of the thriving Anasazi culture and could have housed as many as five thousand people. Until, abruptly, they abandoned the entire canyon and embarked upon a northwestward migration that would prove to be the end of this once flourishing society.
And no one knew why.
A ring of halogen lights blossomed to life just beyond the tents, turning half a dozen men and women to silhouettes. One of them raised an arm to hail him and broke away from the group. Dr. Brendan Reaves, Regent’s Professor of Cultural and Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University, strode directly toward him. He wore a dusty ball cap over his unkempt, sun-bleached hair. The bill hid his face in shadows. He extended a dirty hand, then thought better of it and swiped it on his filthy shorts. Instead, he tipped up his chin and offered a beaming smile, which made his sharp hazel eyes positively sparkle. He barely looked out of his teens.
“Thank you for getting down here so quickly,” Reaves said. “I honestly didn’t think you’d be willing to make the trip in person.”
Bradley gave his best boardroom smile to hide his annoyance. GeNext Biosystems was his baby and he was intimately involved on every level from research and development through marketing and distribution. He wasn’t the kind of COO who pandered to shareholders or spent his days swilling martinis on tropical shores. His vision was of a forward-thinking, revolutionary company that remained on the cutting edge of biotechnology through a non-traditional approach to research all over the globe, which meant that even he needed to roll up his sleeves from time to time.
“So, Dr. Reaves. Right to business. What could possibly be important enough to drag me across the country on a moment’s notice?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Reaves turned and guided Bradley toward an old pickup painted tan by the desert. “Like I said, you have to see it with your own eyes.”
Pike eased out of the Cherokee and stood at attention, but Bradley dismissed him with a subtle wave. He climbed up into the passenger seat of the professor’s truck and kicked aside a pile of garbage to make room for his feet. The truck reeked of body odor and dust, and shook when Reaves started the engine.
“Where are we going?” Bradley asked.
He watched the ill-defined dirt road in the bouncing headlights.
“Not far. Just across the wash to Casa Rinconada. It’s the largest, and only freestanding kiva in the Pueblo Bonito complex.”
“You found more remains?”
“You could say that.”
Reaves glanced over and gave a cryptic smile.
Bradley was in no mood for games. He was tired and famished, and had reached the end of his patience. Reaves must have recognized as much from his expression and started talking to fill the tense silence.
“Okay. Let me set the stage. In case you don’t remember, I’m an evolutionary anthropologist. I study the changes—both cultural and physiological—in a society over time. My primary focus is the tribes of the American Southwest, specifically the Anasazi, who inhabited this amazing primitive mecca here in Chaco Canyon from about 800 to 1150 C.E.. We’re talking about more than four hundred separate villages clustered around a dozen or so major pueblos like Bonito back there, all within a twenty-five thousand square-mile territory, the majority between these very canyon walls. They mastered agriculture, even in this hostile terrain, and set up a system of commerce that was beyond advanced for the time. And then, one day, they just up and abandon this community that took hundreds of years to build, by hand, stone by stone.”
The tires grumbled over a bridge that shuddered under the truck’s weight. The creek bed below them didn’t appear as though it had ever held water. Ahead, a low mesa crowned by a tall stone ring resolved from the cliffs behind it.
“Next thing we know,” Reaves said, “the Anasazi reappear in the Four Corners area, only their entire architectural style has changed. Instead of building at the bottom of valleys like this one, they’re erecting fortresses hundreds of feet up on the cliffs. We’re talking about the kinds of places that someone can only enter if a ladder is lowered down from the village or if they can scale the sandstone like Spider-Man. Places like Mesa Verde in Colorado and the White House in Arizona. We speculated that the mass exodus was caused by a prolonged period of drought in the middle of the twelfth century, which killed all of their crops and drove the wild game from the area, but that didn’t explain the necessity for the fortified villages carved into niches that only birds could reach. It was almost as though they feared something, as though they were preparing to defend themselves against some kind of invading force.”
