The Death of Wendell Mackey (21 page)

He’s warning me.

“Wendell. Mr. Mackey.”

From behind him this time. Wendell turned.

It was Dr. Scotia, wearing a red cassock and alb, a black stole over his shoulders with unknown symbols at the ends, thick black cincture around his waist, and black miter on his head adorned with more bizarre symbols and letters. He swung an incense burner by his side, issuing blue clouds of smoke that encircled him and Dr. Thane behind him, who was dressed in a black cassock and black skull cap, hunched over and shuffling his feet like a giant beetle. Bastardized bishops, they trailed a line of doctors in white coats, heads bowed like defrocked priests. The blue smoke settled and swirled at their feet like early morning fog as they moved towards Wendell. Wendell’s eyelids hung heavily, and he knew that this was his father’s warning. If only he could have heard him.

Eyes closed, then opened, and they were closer. Again, and they were almost on him. Smiling, excited. And behind them all was another man, standing at the street corner, watching.

Wendell
was
being followed.

He smelled the incense. Saw their hands moving. But they were too late. He closed his eyes one last time, and felt his cheek smack into the ground.

It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt real bad. She’s gonna—

But his mother disappeared from view, and images flickered by as he opened and closed his eyes, like a TV remote control changing channels. The yellow house; Sister Agatha; the oxygen tanks in his room; his hands; spiders; Agatha again, now lifeless on the floor in the apartment; a man, standing over him, backlit by the sun; his father; bloodstains; a duck pond. It went on for a few minutes, and Wendell felt himself getting to his knees. The images faded, and the muddy sky returned to cast a copper pallor on the city. Wendell was alone. The passenger car was empty.

Surveying his surroundings, his tongue felt a gap in his mouth. Looking down, Wendell saw a pool of blood, clearly his own, in the middle of which sat two teeth. He picked his gloves up off the street and slipped them back on his hands, afraid to look at them and see how mangled they were. Hands now gloved, he rubbed his aching chin, likely the source of the blood, he thought. Looking to his left, he saw more blood, and a brown boot, sitting up as if its owner had dashed off so quickly he had stepped out of it without a thought. Wendell stepped towards it, but stopped.

You look in it,
he thought,
and you’ll see a foot.

“No, I didn’t…”

His chest cratered and his back heaved and Wendell vomited into the street. There was little in his stomach, but still enough to produce a puddle, with a few bright red rivulets in it. He retched until there was nothing but dry heaves, his back screaming and his skull ready to explode. The blue spots reappeared in his vision, but Wendell still stood up and began to walk, fearful and directionless. One street blended into another; at times the sky would darken, as if the sun itself had extinguished behind the clouds, but it would only be another fainting spell, dropping Wendell to the ground again. He would come to, sprawled out on the pavement and thankful for the lack of traffic, get up and continue on.

But soon the sky yellowed, the clouds bluing and narrowing like gun barrels and running across the sky. Now the homeless men skulking in the corners of burnt-out buildings weren’t men but monsters, with glowing eyes and furry necks. Wendell looked to the yellow sky and saw flying beasts, once people, but now horrifying creatures, with leather skin and pointed jaws. The skyscrapers in the distance—yet somehow closer than they were before—melted like candle wax, and low-hanging tree limbs became arms scraping against the pavement.

Now they were all following him, all watching him, waiting for him to change into one of them, to join, to swallow rats whole and lick the dog blood from the culverts. He would wait in dark corners for the children returning home from school. He would escape the sewers at night to prey on winos and hookers, and scrape his claws against window panes to frighten housewives. He would exit humanity, and then terrify it. Rule it.

Lights out. Sun gone. Again he collapsed to the ground.

Don’t do it,
he thought,
don’t think about it, the yellow house, the old life, because you don’t go back. Probably got demolished a long time ago anyway,
or burned to the ground, with something new built on top of it, some strip mall or nightclub, so when I die, then everything in my past is gonna die with me, and it’s all gonna be snuffed out like a match, and it’ll be like none of it ever existed in the first place.

Wendell tried to get to his feet, but found that crawling on his knees and elbows was the best that he could muster. It didn’t last long. He crawled to a stop sign, huge and seeming to hover in the sky over him like a bleeding moon. He grabbed at its pole for support, stared up, and watched the stop sign bend, lean down to address him, somehow alive. Its white letters S-T-O-P dripped away, replaced with U-N-I-T 2-0-0.

Wendell let go of the pole and felt himself slip down into a ditch.

Voices. It was the flying beasts, coming to peel the rest of his skin off his body, to hurry along his transition.

No, not the beasts. These were human voices, one of them female.

“Over here.”

“What?”

“Over here. He’s over here, in the ditch.”

“It’s him? Oh thank God. Be gentle with him Santos.”

“Yes ma’am.”

A shadow overtook Wendell, who was now staring up at the yellow and blue paisley sky. And then he was floating, or being carried.

“We got you, Wendell. You’ll be okay.” He recognized the voice.

The shadow set him down in the back seat of a car. The engine started, and he heard the two voices whispering in the front seats. Everything went dark.

Then came a low, metallic hum, and another recognizable voice, this one Scotia’s. The darkness receded, and Wendell’s vision settled on the doctor. Wendell was back in the institution, and the white neon lights above Scotia buzzed.

I’m dreaming
, Wendell thought, though it all felt too real.

“You know,” said Scotia, “you’re the first of your kind, Mr. Mackey.”

If that were the case, Wendell wondered what it was that lived on the lower levels, that thing that he would hear moaning and screaming through the vents.

“A new…Adam, perhaps,” Scotia said, “if you’re of that
persuasion
. But not from the earth, nothing so mundane. No, from the best minds
on
the earth. The first of your kind.” Scotia looked proud of himself, his head turned to one side slightly, like the carved bust of a triumphant general. “A new creation.”

“Head hurts.”

“Just the medication. It’ll pass.” Scotia leaned over Wendell, pulled a pen light out of the breast pocket on his lab coat and shone it in Wendell’s eye, pulling the lid up with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re recovering well.”

“From what?”

Scotia smiled. “Just a slight procedure. Quite minor. One of our therapies caused a small amount of swelling, so there was a need to correct it. All like new. Better than new, in fact.”

“What are you doing to me?” Wendell smacked his lips, letting his head roll to one side.

“It’s all about improvement.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

Wendell expected nothing. No response, as had been the case in the past. Certainly no clear, direct answer. But this time was different.

“We’re testing the limits,” Scotia responded. Such vagaries were usually the best that he could expect. But then, Scotia added, “We’re transcending humanness. We’re accelerating evolution, but ameliorating it as well, adding a human touch to human evolution.”

“So…I am…”

“Fortunate, Mr. Mackey. Because you’re a pioneer. Well, we all are, but not like
you
. You’re the first to see the Pacific, or to walk on the moon, or Mars and beyond. You’re the first to feel, to
live
, in a hyper-human state.”

Now the pain was becoming real. There was no need to fake it. It was liquid, pouring down from his head and neck, pooling and burning in the center of his back, and rushing with a mad tenacity down his limbs into his hands and feet. His body shook.

“Just another side effect, Mr. Mackey. A necessary side effect. Your body has been rejecting the…well, let’s just say, our initiatives. So we’ve had to suppress your body’s natural reactions. Thus, the pain. But all good things come to those who wait.”

“Please, help me,” Wendell hissed, “just help me—” and then his lungs forced a moan out, sudden and shocking, forcing even Scotia to step back.

Liquid heat, ferocious heat, like molten glass injected into his bones. And for the first time since regaining consciousness, Wendell realized that around each of his wrists was a leather band. Dr. Scotia deftly threaded the leather straps attached to the bed rails through the bands on each wrist, pulling them tight. Wendell watched, and didn’t fight. The pain accelerated as muscles in his back and neck began to spasm. He lost bladder control, and the newly wet gown clung to his legs.

“Am I…gonna die?”

Scotia laughed, almost incredulous. “Of course not, Mr. Mackey. This is a new beginning. The old is leaving, the new is coming.” He leaned back in towards Wendell, staring into his eyes. “You must trust us.”

“
New-w-ww
…” The pain was pushing out on the inside of his skull.

“Entirely new. And magnificent.”

“W-why me?

And then there spread across Scotia’s face a new smile, sympathetic, fatherly. Somewhere, there were children who received that same smile from that same man, but wholly out of love.

“Why not, Mr. Mackey?” said Scotia. “It’s all quite amazing. You, a pioneer, a new species.”

“We’ll see.”

“We should drop him at the hospital, Sister.”

“I said we’ll see.”

“Or call the cops.”

“No. Not now.”

“So what then, you think you’re gonna—”

“If need be, Santos, but not right now. I’m going to see where things go.”

“You ask me, it ain’t smart.”

“I know.”

“So I’ll be coming back, just to check up.”

“I know you will.”

Wendell felt himself lying on a couch, and he opened his eyes to see a ceiling. Agatha’s ceiling, he thought. He turned his head as his vision continued to clear and he saw a man at the door, a giant frame in a short-sleeved flannel shirt with a head of short-cropped black hair. The thick, rough voice suited him. Santos stared at Wendell, his arms slightly out from his body and his fists pumping open and closed. He held his weight like a linebacker ready for the snap, rocking up on the balls of his feet, ready to throw himself at any threat and smother it into the ground. He looked down at Agatha standing next to him.

“It ain’t smart,” Santos repeated. “This’ll turn bad fast, you ask me.” He opened the door, looked at Wendell one last time, and left. Agatha closed the door behind him.

“You’re a hard man to find,” Agatha said to Wendell.

“Was he the one following me?”

“Well, I asked him to help me—”

“There was someone following me.” Wendell didn’t think he saw Santos; from what he remembered, the man was smaller, wearing a denim jacket, or a sweatshirt, and perhaps a hat. “When I was out there, I saw somebody…saw lots of things.” He shook his head, thankful that, at least for the moment, the headache was gone. “All those empty streets…and then I saw them in the train, and—”

“Drink,” Agatha said, walking over to a chair sitting parallel to the couch and taking a seat. She was holding a bottle of water, which she handed to Wendell after twisting its top off.

“Thanks.” Wendell took big gulps, but slowed when he saw Agatha wince.
She thinks I’ll barf it up all over her area rug
, he thought.
Probably will
.

“You’ve been in and out of consciousness for the past hour,” Agatha said. “Heat stroke, dehydration, something like that. It’ll make your head play tricks on you. Santos wanted to take you to the hospital. For some reason, I disagreed.”