Eternal Life Inc. (30 page)

“Right now I’m making a big effort just to stay conscious. Look, in order to stay alive, I have to put myself back into suspended animation and when I do,” he raised his arm with the medivac strapped it, “this will think I’m dying and begin doing all the wrong things.”

Harry felt S-s-s-arge’s grip on his arm loosen, but still the merman hesitated.

“Ask your medic what kind of chance there is of getting me out of here alive,” Harry suggested.

S-s-s-age turned and looked at the medic who just rolled his eyes and shook his head doubtfully. The merman turned back. “How long?” he asked and released Harry’s arm.

“Harry unstrapped the medivac. “I don’t know, a day or two, maybe more.”

“What!”

“I know what I’m doing.” He held up the medivac. “Look, you can put this back on after I’ve gone into suspended animation. Put it on diagnostic only and at its finest setting. It should be able to pick up a vital sign now and again.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’m probably dead and it wouldn’t have helped me anyway.”

“Wonderful,” S-s-s-arge grunted resignedly. “When do you do it?”

“Now, on the count of three.”

“The count of three,” The merman nodded. “Good luck.”

“One…Two…Three…”

46

Dodger Stadium

Harry woke up to the sound of children’s laughter and the feel of warm sunlight. He heard the gentle lapping of water nearby and smelled the scent of flowers and rich plant life. Somewhere in the distance, a goat brayed. He opened his eyes to flickering sunlight. He squinted up at the palm trees, swaying gently overhead. Their feathered leaves cast sun-dappled shadows over him.

He dimly remembered a long trance-like period in his ka and a violent return to his body and then…nothing. He wondered where he was. He turned his head toward the sound of children’s laughter and saw Doc dozing nearby in an antique, pre-Crash, aluminum lawn chair.

He had exchanged his usual undertaker blacks for a military-style, chameleon jumpsuit. Its camouflage graphics were turned off and it had a dull gray, metallic sheen. The sight of the old man touched Harry deeply. He knew he could depend on Jericho. Right from the beginning, through five years of craziness, the old man had always been there for him. Harry thought it was probably Jericho who had dressed him in the loose fitting shirt of unbleached linen and matching pajama-like trousers he now wore.

He looked past Jericho’s sleeping form to an ancient, rusted guardrail set in a low, moss-covered concrete wall. A profusion of weeds, flowers, and bushes grew along the wall and he had to push himself up on his elbow to see over it. When he did, he discovered that he had been sleeping on an ancient nylon weave, aluminum-framed recliner from the same period (late twentieth century) and in the same style as Jericho’s chair. There were collectors who would pay a fortune for such a matched set. Where the hell was he?

He looked over the guardrail to where the waters of a broad lagoon lapped against the concrete wall. Nearby, he could see a group of children playing in the water. Just then, one of them dove under, and Harry glimpsed a brightly colored tailfin flick the surface. Merman, he thought, or maybe, merkid. S-s-s-arge said he was taking him someplace safe. What safer place than the home of the mermen.

Harry looked across the lagoon to the opposite shore. He could see how it curved around and back towards him. He was on some kind of atoll, he thought. An artificial atoll, he amended as his eye followed the steep overgrown sides of the opposite shore up to where they ended in a jagged panorama of rusted girders sticking out of collapsed, sagging roofs. He turned around and looked up the slope behind him. Through the bushes and trees he caught glimpses of other broken-down, overgrown structures. He noticed how the steep sides seemed to go up in even steps. When he looked closely, he could just make out mottled, cracked concrete sticking out of a thick overlay of soil and vegetation.

“It was called Dodger Stadium,” Doc’s voice was full of quiet reverence.

Harry turned in surprise. “Hi, Doc, good to see you awake.”

“It’s good to see you alive, my boy,” Jericho said with affectionate relief.

“What did you call this place?”

“Dodger Stadium,” the old man repeated waving his arm in a slow, all-encompassing gesture. “Built just for the game of baseball back in the twentieth century. Over fifty thousand people gathered here to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Mets in nineteen eighty-eight. Can you imagine how they must have cheered?” he said reminiscently. “What it must have sounded like, fifty thousand baseball fans?” he shook his head sadly. “Gone, all gone and forgotten now.” The old man turned and looked out over the lagoon but before he did, Harry
thought he caught a glimpse of tears glistening in his eyes.

“The mermen found it nearly intact and fortified it,” Jericho continued, his voice thick with emotion. “It was the perfect base for them. They tore down and blocked up the outfield pavilions over there.” He pointed to an irregular, ragged stretch of the atoll wall at the far end of the lagoon. “They hauled old wrecks, cars, trucks, buses, whatever they could find, and piled them up.” Doc shook his head. “It took them years. They brought in soil and plants and animals and turned the whole place into a garden. Probably the best fortified garden in the world. The only way in from ground level is through underwater passages. They’ve got missile launchers, laser canons, and rail-guns up there in the bleachers to handle aerial in-coming. Most of the mermen are gone now. Chueh’s got his own soldiers guarding this place.”

“What happened to the mermen?” Harry asked

“They’re too valuable to keep penned up here. Chueh has them out on reconnaissance patrols.”

“That’s too bad,” Harry said. “I kind of wanted to thank S-s-s-arge for trusting me and getting me back alive.”

“Who was S-s-s-arge?” Doc asked too quietly.

Harry looked at him sharply. “He was the leader of that patrol that saved me. Why?”

“He didn’t make it.” Doc shook his head sadly. “The patrol was ambushed…twice.”

“Oh shit!” Harry moaned. He thought of that pointy-toothed, jack-o-lantern grin and the laughing voice in his head, gone, all gone, just like Doc said.

“They were tracking you,” Jericho said.

“Probably used the monitor on my ka,” Harry said. “That means they’ve got someone working for them at Eternal Life, someone with a lot of authority to get the monitor access codes. Roger…”

Jericho shook his head. “The monitor on your ka went dead that night down in the Sinks. They couldn’t track you with it.” He
leaned forward and regarded Harry gravely. “Son, it’s about time you admit you got Roger all wrong,” he said.

For once, Harry didn’t argue. He thought of what Susan had become and all the lies she’d told him.

“You’ve got to understand,” Jericho said gently. “Roger loves Susan very much. Maybe even as much as you…” Jericho hesitated, watching Harry closely, “…once did,” he finished.

Harry felt as if he had been walking around with a bomb strapped to his heart and Doc had just cut the wires and disarmed it. “How did you know?” he asked.

“Know what?”

“Maybe even as much as you…once did,” Harry repeated the words with a sense of wonder, as if they were some kind of magic formula.

“What? Oh that!” Doc growled impatiently. “You’d have to be blind, deaf, and brain-dead not to notice what was going on between you two back there at Chueh’s.”

“Diana…” Harry started.

“Later!” Doc cut in curtly. “First, it’s important that you understand about Roger. He’s a lot like you, a man capable of great love. Right now, he’s wracked with pain and guilt because he blames himself for what happened to Susan. Does that sound familiar?”

“What did happen to her?” Harry asked.

“The world’s a strange place sometimes,” Jericho said. “When I was young, they used to say, “What goes around comes around”. Roger took Susan to the wrong party, just like you once did.”

“Son of a bitch!” Harry muttered.

Jericho nodded. “Roger always did like to run with a fast crowd, movers and shakers, the beautiful people, powerful, jaded, dangerous people. Even after he became king of the castle and had nothing more to prove and no one to else impress…” Jericho unhooked his wire-rimmed spectacles and knuckled his
eyes like a tired child. “Anyway, to make a long story short,” he said, replacing the spectacles, “they were at this party, and someone spiked Susan’s drink with black ice.”

“Oh no,” Harry groaned. He closed his eyes and had an instant vision of Isis, with her painted face and little girl costume, fighting for possession of her soul.

“When she came out of it, she wasn’t Susan anymore,” Jericho said. “Something came back with her, possessed her, riding her like a horse, making her do and say things she would never do or say, terrible, perverse, evil things.”

Harry thought of the recent rumors of wild orgies and unspeakable depravities coming out of Roger’s island estate. “How long ago?” he asked numbly.

“Almost six months,” Doc said.

“When did you find out?” Harry asked.

“Not until Roger came to me the night your resurrection went wrong. He was at the end of his rope. He’d tried everything to get Susan back. He even put her through medieval shock treatment and a secret resurrection to try to force the demon to release its hold.” Doc shook his head. “They were acts of foolish desperation. He must have known that they’d already been tried and failed countless times. The trauma units in the sub-basements beneath Eternal life were filled to overflowing, many worse off than Susan, with their kas crippled and nothing left of their original personalities. They were the wolves’ early failures, but with each failure they got better at possessing and controlling. With black ice their success rate went up exponentially.

“Maybe it would have been better for Roger if she’d been one of the failures, just a mindless, homicidal maniac,” Jericho stopped and looked around the ruins of the once mighty Dodger Stadium. “Maybes and might-have-beens,” he said quietly. “This place is full of maybes and might-have-beens.”

For a while he sat staring out over the lagoon at nothing in particular. Finally, he turned to Harry. “Don’t mind me,” he said.
“I’m just getting too old, carrying around too many memories, too many maybes and might-have-beens.” He ran his fingers through his always unruly shock of silver grey hair and said. “Now where was I?”

“Roger trying to get Susan back,” Harry said, his voice as neutral as an actuary table.

“Yes, poor Roger,” Jericho said. “He knows all about maybes and might-have-beens. After he tried everything he could to bring Susan back, one of the wolf-possessed came to him and promised that they would give her back if he just did them a few favors.”

“A promise they never intended to keep, of course,” Harry said scornfully.

“I think even Roger knew that,” Jericho said, “but every once in a while, they brought his wife back just to show him that the real Susan, his Susan, was still there inside, alive and conscious and begging for help.”

Harry remembered the brief, cruel glimpse the dying wolf showed him of Susan trapped, tortured, and begging to be set free. A low groan of despair escaped his lips.

Doc looked at him sharply. “What is it, Harry?”

“Nothing!” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Just tell me what happened.”

Jericho nodded reluctantly and said, “Each time they brought Susan back, Roger was reminded that his wife was still alive, trapped inside her demon-possessed body, and that only he could save her. What else could he do? What would you do? He gave them what they wanted.”

“And what did they want?” Harry asked, his voice deceptively calm.

“Oh, they had quite a shopping list,” Jericho said. “First, they wanted complete access to Eternal Life with wolf-possessed in key positions. Then they wanted Roger to use the full weight of his position as CEO to keep stone-walling, denying, lying,
whatever it took, to keep the lid on the fact that the trauma wards beneath Eternal Life were filling up with wolf-possessed who had gone flat-out crazy, homicidal, and catatonic. Finally, when they were ready, they wanted him to empty the trauma wards, spilling these people out on the streets like an insane fifth column, creating fear and chaos and pulling in more souls either through murder or black ice.

“And if anyone made trouble before they were ready…you know, family members, friends, the media, talking too much, asking too many questions…then the black wolves took over. When that happened, these people either ended up dead or got slipped black ice. Either way, the result was the same. The black wolves moved into their bodies…but not always.” Jericho hesitated.

“Not always?” Harry asked and felt something stir in his memory.

“Roger said there were times when a victim’s ka never came back, and the body didn’t resurrect. He assumed they just went into the white light of real death. Later, the wolf that possessed Susan told him the terrible truth, that, sometimes they didn’t take possession of a ka but captured and ate it instead. Can you imagine a greater obscenity,” Jericho’s voice was raw with emotion. “To eat a ka and condemn that person to unbeing, to nothingness forever?”

Harry suddenly remembered the Susan-thing’s tongue thrusting towards the soft palate at the back of his mouth and the insane hunger that drove it.

“Harry, are you alright?” Jericho asked. “You’re looking kind of pale.”

“It’s nothing, Doc,” Harry waved it away. “I assume Roger is no longer working for them,” he said instead.

Jericho shook his head. “On the night you resurrected, when we all thought the wolves had taken possession of you too…Well, that was the last straw for Roger. He felt as if he’d betrayed
everything and everyone who ever meant anything to him, and he came and told me everything.”

“Just a minute, Doc,” Harry said. “As far as I can see, I don’t mean squat to Roger. Why would my getting possessed bring about such a sudden transformation?”

“Not so sudden,” Jericho said and leaned back and stretched out his legs as the ancient lawn chair creaked dangerously. “Did you know he stayed by your bedside that first night and most of the next day after your resurrection went wrong?”

Harry stared at him with dumb incomprehension, and Jericho shook his head irritably. “You know, Harry,” he said. “For a very smart guy, you can be incredibly stupid sometimes, especially about Roger. There’s a common bond of guilt, love, and respect between you two that Roger always recognized even if you didn’t.”

“Susan,” Harry said.

Jericho nodded. “Susan’s a big part of it, of course, but it goes deeper than that. You two are very much alike not only in the choice of whom you love but how deeply you love and how far you’ll go to protect what you love. And when you fail at that…” Jericho threw up his hands in a gesture of complete defeat. “Well, you know all about that.”

Harry knew what Jericho was saying was true. In a sense he’d known it all along but pigheadedly refused to recognize it. Instead, he self-servingly blamed Roger for everything; for the resurrection torture that destroyed his marriage, for the unforgivable betrayal of falling in love with Susan, and for stealing her from him. Now, he could finally admit that there was nothing to betray and nothing to steal because he had destroyed Susan’s love long before Roger claimed it. As for the torture of those serial resurrections that destroyed his marriage and that he blamed Roger for…even here he had to admit, as he had admitted to Diana, that it was his own fault, a self-inflicted torture, a fruitless attempt to appease a guilty conscience.