The Jigsaw Man (37 page)

This was exciting stuff. I could hardly wait to see the

first fireball and I didn't want to miss any of the show so

I kept my eyes riveted on Andrew's tower. W h e n he

sparked the lighter, that room would be the first to go.

Ten minutes passed and n o t h i n g happened.

Even the guards were staying silent on the radio and

that was starting to worry me. W h a t if they'd discov¬

ered my plan and were quickly and quietly going around

shutting the gas valves and opening windows to air out

the rooms? Or what if t h e guards had rushed the tower

room and grabbed the lighter before Andrew could ig¬

nite the gas? Or Andrew had accidentally dropped the

lighter onto the floor, and being paralyzed, couldn't

move to pick it back up?

All of those scenarios were valid reasons for worry,

and with every passing minute, the tension in me was

cranked up a notch. Leaving Andrew alone might have

been a big mistake.

Dammit! Should I go hack?

Maybe.

Probably.

Yes.

Leaving my bed of leaves behind, I started back

across the grassy field, not having a clue what I in¬

tended to do once I made it back to the castle. I could

head for one of the basement windows and—

BOOM!

The tower room detonated, the sudden explosion

catching me unprepared, a mighty crack of thunder

smashing into my eardrums from what seemed like two

feet away. It was a good thing I still had most of the

field between the building and m e , or I'd be a goner.

Andrew's room was there one second, gone the next,

and then the sky darkened and started to rain chunks of

brick. Chunks of Andrew and a guard or two, as well,

I'd imagine, but I tried not to think about that. I hit the

deck, curling into a ball on the grass, protecting my

head with my arms.

Seconds later, there was a huge explosion on the

fourth floor, followed immediately by an overlapping

series of minidetonations throughout the building. W h e n

the basement blew, it appeared that the entire fourstory structure—foundation and all—lifted fifteen feet

into the air, the superheated gases expanding and push¬

ing upward in the same way volcanic eruptions occur.

There was no lava flow from the basement, but fires

raged and the thickest, blackest smoke I'd ever seen

came p o u r i n g out to obscure the final explosions that

tore N a t h a n Marshall's research facility apart at the

seams.

I never saw the castle come back down to earth, but I

sure heard it. There was a tremendous
growl
within the

swirling smoke, then a volley of j a r r i n g
thuds
that shook

the ground under me like an earthquake. I had my head

buried and my eyes tightly shut, praying none of the

thousands of pounds of concrete, brick, steel, plaster,

and glass being torn apart and thrown skyward would

land on m e , crushing me in my moment of triumph.

I kept my eyes closed for a long t i m e , feeling very

much like Chicken Little as the sky fell all around m e .

N o t h i n g touched me. N o t a thing. W h e n I opened my

eyes, the billowing smoke was so thick over where the

building had been, I couldn't tell how much damage I'd

actually done. Had I demolished the entire structure,

or did some of it still stand, untouched? As black and

acrid-smelling as the smoke was, it had to be the oil

furnace reservoirs that were burning. If that were the

case, the fire might rage for a while yet. I sat up with

my legs crossed at my ankles, and waited.

It gets awfully quiet after a large explosion. Too quiet.

Once the fires and smoke died down a little, I could see

that my hopes had been granted—there was n o t h i n g

left of the castle except a large hole in the ground. I

should have felt ecstatic, but in all honesty, what I felt

most was empty. Everyone that I'd channeled my ha¬

tred, fear, and anger into for so long, as now gone. Dr.

Marshall, Drake, the security team, whichever of the

cruel doctors, nurses, and orderlies unlucky enough to

have been on duty today—all gone in the destruction

that had just ended. I felt like the sole survivor of a ter—

rible plane crash, sitting here amid the debris scattered

over a three-hundred-foot blast radius. It was a creepy

feeling, alone among the charred pieces of the dead, so

I tried thinking about me and what I should do next to

get my mind focused on something different.

Bad idea.

My thoughts about the people who'd j u s t been blown

apart started me t h i n k i n g about my own new body and

how it was also made from pieces of the dead. From

there, my thoughts swirled darker and darker, wonder¬

ing where I was supposed to go from here. W h e r e could

a freak like me possibly fit in? And would I even be

given a choice? W h e n the authorities finally showed

u p , it wouldn't take long for them to realize I wasn't

exactly an innocent bystander. One look at my body by

a policeman or an ambulance attendant and the gig

was up. I'd soon find myself hurried off—for my own

protection, of course—to some hospital room, where

they'd poke and prod me until someone with more

power got wind of me and sent his own people to poke

and prod me more thoroughly.

I had a bleak vision of my life b e c o m i n g a never-ending

series of tests and medical examinations, every doctor,

scientist, and government official in the country vying

for the right to keep me as their own personal oversized

lab rat. It would happen, too, I wasn't just being para¬

noid this time. N a t h a n Marshall had been a brilliant

man and his success with me was a huge leap forward in

nerve regeneration and transplantation research. For

science, finding me would be the equivalent of the

Wright brothers getting their hands on a space shuttle.

They wouldn't stop testing, scanning, questioning, ex¬

amining, pushing, pulling and molesting every square

inch of me—body and mind—until they uncovered all

of Dr. Marshall's secrets. The same secrets, I'd vowed to

destroy along with the rest of this place.

Son of a bitch/

W h a t had I done? Here I thought I'd had the last

laugh on everyone, the bum who had defied the odds

to defeat the mad scientist and destroy his research

forever. Only now was I realizing I should have stayed

in the building and went up in smoke along with ev¬

eryone else.

Briefly, I considered taking off, disappearing before

anyone showed up to investigate the explosions. No one

knew I was here so all I had to do was slip away and

never say a word to anyone. People who saw me would

cringe at my scars but with the crowd I h u n g out with it

wouldn't really matter much. Blue j would still be my

friend, regardless of how hideous I looked.

It was a nice dream but I knew it couldn't happen. For

one, someone would rat me out eventually and someone

would come to check out the mysterious reports of the

homeless Frankenstein monster. Even if that didn't

happen, and people j u s t left me alone, I was on several

antirejection medications to keep my body from attack¬

ing all the foreign parts. They were expensive drugs

that I'd have no way of getting my hands on. Without

them, my body's immune system would start waging

war in a hurry. If I went back to live with Blue J and

Puckman, within a few weeks I'd start getting sick and

I'd be dead before Christmas.

Stay here or take off? Either way I was screwed.

I had no idea what to do. No idea what I
could
do.

Then
I
heard a noise coming from a long way off in the

woods. It was a familiar sound that put a smile on my

face and erased the nagging questions in my mind. I rose

to my feet, instantly knowing what I had to do. Turning

away for the smoking chaos I'd created, I started hob¬

bling back toward the woods, hearing the sound again,

only closer this time.

The lonely sound of an approaching train whistle.

PART FIVE

T H E E N D

C H A P T E R F O R T Y - T W O

Full circle.

For obvious reasons, those words were stuck in my

head and I couldn't shake them. The idea of things al¬

ways returning to where they'd begun was a total crock,

but there was no denying the notion appealed to me.

After all, if
I
was going to kill myself I had a perfectly

good gun that would do the trick with one pull of the

trigger. There was no reason for me to lug my battered,

aching body through the woods on a freezing cold day

j u s t to achieve the same goal on a railroad track I might

never find, much less find beibre the train passed me by.

But something inside of me wanted to try.

Swallowing Drake's gun would be quicker, easier,

and far less messy, but that was part of the reason
I

didn't want to end my sad excuse of a life that way. The

bullet would ruin my head and send my soul packing—if

I still had a soul left—but it would leave the scientists

my body intact to slice, dice and dissect at will and I

wasn't going to let that happen. The train, although

harder to get to and a potentially agonizing death if it

didn't kill me on first impact, would at least leave noth¬

ing behind bigger than a bread box. I'd seen pictures of

train wreck victims and, man oh man, most had to be

scraped up off the tracks and put into little plastic freezer

baggies. Let the government scientists try do their r e

search on me that way. Good luck.

More importantly, when they identified my remains

on the railway track, my daughter Arlene would still get

her college fund from my life insurance policy. Good

old dental records. At least my teeth were still my own.

Arlene and Gloria would have no idea why
I
was out

wandering in the woods so far from Buffalo, but nei¬

ther would anyone else. No one knew
I
had ever been

here, which was good. The insurance people could

squawk but in the end they'd have to pay. That thought

put a smile on my face.

I couldn't remember crossing any train tracks when

Jackson had been marching me to my death along the

wooded trail, and I'd walked a fair distance along it. My

guess was Dr. Marshall and Drake had known where

the tracks were and made the trail out to their macabre

graveyard in the opposite direction. It wouldn't do to

have the railroad crews passing by j u s t as Drake was

dumping a fresh body into a shallow grave. People tend

to remember things like that. N o , the tracks would be

nowhere near the trail, so when the path veered to the

right, I cut into the trees and headed left.

I was fairly confident I'd find the tracks, but not at all

sure if I'd make it on time. Judging from its whistle, the

tram had seemed to be fairly close, but the way sound

travels in the open woods, there was a better chance it

might still be miles away.

I hurried as fast as I could manage, my knee throbbing

in time with each step across the uneven, leaf-shrouded

terrain. The trail far behind me now, my sense of direc¬

tion was getting all screwed up. There was n o t h i n g to

see but trees and bushes. No wonder people always got

l o s t in the woods. Every bloody thing looked the same.

For ten minutes I charged forward, one foot in front of

the other, hoping I was headed in a reasonably straight

line. Ahead of me, the land started to slope upward, and

when I crested the hill the trees fell away and I suddenly

found myself standing on large chunks of rock and

gravel instead of frozen dirt.

The tracks were twelve feet in front of me.

Bingo!

Had the train passed already? That was the question.

I walked out into the center of the tracks and looked

both ways. Nothing. The track was straight as an arrow

and clear for miles on my right. I was on a bit of a curve

heading to my left, but I could still see for a long dis¬

tance down the line. I considered going down on my

knees and putting my ear to the track like I'd seen train

robbers and Indians do countless times in the old West¬

ern movies, but my knee hurt too much to bend and I

didn't know what to do once I got down there. Were you

supposed to put your ear to the track and listen for the

chug-a-chug-a
sound of the approaching train wheels,

or was the purpose to feel the silent vibrations along

the steel rail?

Either way, it wasn't necessary. One look at the top

of the rails told me everything I needed to know—the

train hadn't passed yet. There was rust on them, which

would have been scratched and buffed shiny had a cou¬

ple of hundred steel wheels jostled and rolled over them

recently.