Into The Inferno Part 41

I'd been living with this syndrome for six days, but it felt like six months. Or six years. Time had sped up and slowed down, compressed and expanded. I was prepared to leave this world, conditioned to give up the ghost through either the death of my body or the loss of function in my central nervous system.

No matter what happened, my view of life on this planet would never be the same. I would take nothing for granted. Not after burying Harold Newcastle and Stan Beebe. Not after seeing Joel McCain, Jackie Feldbaum, and Holly Riggs turn into nerveless lumps. Not after escaping Caputo's trailer explosion, watching my house burn down around my ears, not after thinking my children were dead. After hammering a writing utensil into a man's brain. Nothing would be the same.

Life was a matter of time. If I'd learned anything this week, I'd learned time was what you made of it.

When I looked away from my image in the window, I caught DiMaggio staring at my hands. "That's right. They're waxy. I hear it's big this season."

"When did that start?" She joined the others behind the desk.

"My hands? I told you about it. Six days ago. Which makes tomorrow my last day, doesn't it? I may drop at any second."

The room grew silent. I knew if I did drop, one of them would pick up the gun and shoot me. No need for the world to try to figure out why I was brain-dead. Better to shoot a maniacal ecdysiast in the middle of the night than to have people listening to my theories about Canyon View Systems. I waved the gun in the air. The man seemed most frightened, possibly because he thought I was going to shoot him first.

He was wrong.

DiMaggio would be first.

"I was in your shoes," I said, "I'd stand around and wait me out. That's what you've been doing all week, isn't it?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," DiMaggio said.

63. A HISTORY RIFE WITH UNUSABLE BRAINS.

It occurred to me that the man and woman with DiMaggio thought Donovan was on the floor with a pen hammered into his eye socket because I'd run amok, not because I'd been defending myself. That they thought I was naked and holding a gun because I was stark raving mad, not because my clothes had been shredded off during our struggle.

That I had arrived this way.

That I'd been running around Redmond bare-a.s.sed all night. For all they knew, the last stage of the syndrome was insanity. Or nudity. Or both. h.e.l.l, for all I I knew, the last stage of the syndrome knew, the last stage of the syndrome was was insanity. Or nudity. Or both. insanity. Or nudity. Or both.

In fact, for all I knew, I was as crazy as a s.h.i.thouse rat. I wondered if anything I'd been saying made sense. I wondered if Stephanie had actually found an antidote and stuck me with a hypodermic or I'd imagined it.

DiMaggio wasn't afraid of me, perhaps because she had a built-in arrogance that staved off self-doubt, just as it staved off second thoughts. We didn't have a woman here who second-guessed decisions. No. This was the sort of person who could leave a litter of kittens in the woods, justify it in her own mind, and never think twice about it.

"I don't know how much money you guys are going to get when you sell the company, but I'll be rooting for you from the nursing home. New cars. Fine houses. Hire your own architect. Do it up right. Get yourself a Ferrari. What's it like to know you're responsible for so many broken lives? You murdered Chief Newcastle in North Bend and two others in Tennessee. Probably six more, actually. My friend Stan committed suicide when he found out what was happening to him."

"That's not how it is," said the woman to DiMaggio's right. "That is not how it is at all. We were not responsible."

"That's right. You're not responsible. But you are are to blame." to blame."

"Shut your trap, Clarice," DiMaggio said.

But Clarice wouldn't keep quiet. "We never meant for any of this to happen. None of us even knew it was happening until a day ago."

"Who told you that? Marge knew last February. Her niece called her and told her."

Clarice turned to DiMaggio. "You told us-"

"Shut up!" Smoothing the front of her blouse with her palms, DiMaggio maintained perfect posture, unflappable. "Hush now, Clarice. I'll handle this."

But Clarice hadn't resolved herself for any moral ambiguity, didn't want to be in the wrong ethically, even if she might be legally. Her thin eyebrows bobbing to her words like broken windshield wipers, she appealed to me. "This is no different than when an airline carrier has a plane go down. People in business do their best, but despite their best, they have accidents. People die. It's not because somebody wants them to die. It's just the way the world is."

"Shut up, Clarice," DiMaggio said, not unkindly.

"No. Go ahead," I said. "Talk to me. I'm on day seven. It's Sunday by now. I get arrested, the earliest I'd get bail would be Monday morning when the courts open. By that time I'll be in a big white diaper. In fact, I think I can feel my mind slipping even as we speak." I rather liked the effect this last sentiment had on them, particularly on Clarice, who hunched her shoulders and tried to make herself smaller.

Even though I'd warned them to keep away from it, the man turned his back on me and looked out the window. Maybe he was too embarra.s.sed to face me. Or maybe he was trying to signal the cops outside. Then, like a strutting bird of prey, DiMaggio stepped forward, defiant and, even at her age, still striking.

"You don't understand what's going on. This is groundbreaking. For some time now we've been working on a way to encode DNA into liquid metal. I don't expect a layman to understand why we're doing this or what it will accomplish, but I'll tell you anyway. We've been working with positively charged metal complexes that are known to liquefy substances. Because DNA has an innate capacity for recognizing complementary sequences of itself, it's the perfect tool for making electronic circuits. I won't bore you with the details. I will tell you we're not the only ones working on it, although we were the first. As you might suppose, one of the problems in a new field is that you end up handling chemical compounds n.o.body's used before. You take precautions, you do everything you can to ensure the safety of your workers and of the general public, but accidents happen. To say that we meant for them to happen, that we provoked them, is just plain myopic. If there was anything we could do, we would have done it."

I wanted to tell her I knew about the antidote, that I had a dose of it in my a.s.s. But I needed to give Stephanie time to get away. "My brain turns to mush, and all you do is turn up the volume on your doublespeak."

"Mr. Swope, we've been running on a shoestring since the day my husband died."

"I can see that," I said, glancing around the redecorated office.

"Philip was the one we counted on to bring in funding, and after he was gone it began to dry up. Any lawsuit against Canyon View would have bankrupted the company-probably before we even got to court-stopped the project cold, forever ended any hope of those people recovering. You see, we're not only working on practical DNA applications for microelectronic circuitry and genetic engineering, but even though there was no profit in it, we've been working on an antidote for D number fifty-six."

"You admit it was your company caused those brain deaths?"

"I'm a.s.suming Achara told you about D number fifty-six."

"I found it in your vault over there."

"You do persist, don't you?"

"A character flaw."

DiMaggio said, "Tananger Bryers is all set to buy our company. They will be in a position to make sure this never occurs again. They have the funding to-"

"Bribe and corrupt all over the world. They were the ones responsible for that chemical spill in Pakistan where twenty-eight hundred people died. Tanager Bryers won't make sure this never happens again. You You should have done that." should have done that."

"Freak accidents," DiMaggio said. "One in a billion."

"Go tell that to your niece in Tacoma General."

I stared hard at DiMaggio.

DiMaggio stared back, basking in the confidence that science and law were on her side. I kicked the Bible that had gone unnoticed. It cartwheeled across the floor until it hit Donovan's leg. He groaned. "You were shipping this stuff across the country in Bibles," I said. "You had accidents in Chattanooga and North Bend and G.o.d knows where else. You lost people right here in this plant. Right under your nose."

"Books make good insulators," Donovan said, from the floor. We all looked down at him in astonishment. "Phil found a warehouse full of 'em. Got 'em for a song."

"Why don't you tell us how your husband really died?" I asked.

The room grew silent. Clarice froze. The bald man's pate was beginning to shine with perspiration. I had the feeling they'd all bought into the heart attack story, that Marge's hesitation in the face of my accusation was giving them pause.

DiMaggio sat down in her padded swivel chair and began tidying her desktop, as if keeping busy would fend off my interrogation. "My husband worked himself to death trying to make Canyon View a success. William Armitage was a thief and a liar."

"Who you had killed."

"This has all been for Phil."

"He got some of that c.r.a.p on his skin, didn't he? Phil did. Back before you knew how it affected people. Back when it was in a more potent form. When it didn't take five months to make someone sick."

"Took about five days," Donovan said, gasping for breath.

DiMaggio leaned forward, licked a finger, and turned a page on her desk calendar. "Our hands were tied. If we'd talked about it publicly, the sale would never have gone through."

"There's a letter on your desk says your husband died from D number fifty-six. Others in the company got contaminated, too, didn't they?"

DiMaggio scanned the papers strewn across the top of her desk until she found what I was referring to. "Armitage was a criminal."

I looked at Clarice and the man at the window. "I'm guessing you guys don't know about the antidote?"

"You want the truth?" DiMaggio seemed to be speaking more to her coworkers than to me, but it was obvious from Clarice's reaction that this was the first she'd heard of an antidote. "We had a deadline. We didn't have time to file affidavits and watch federal inspectors crawling all over the office. Mr. Swope, I don't expect you to understand, but whenever science makes breakthroughs, there are casualties. I warned Holly. I warned her, in the event of an accident, she was to call before she let anybody inside that truck. But by the time she called, you'd all been inside. There wasn't enough antidote for that."

"There really is an antidote?" The man at the window was sweating even more heavily now, his shirt stained with it.

"We'll talk about this later." DiMaggio took a deep breath and picked up the phone on her desk.

I said, "Did you know what they had planned for Achara?"

"Scott handles the cleanup operations."

"That's what you call murder? Cleanup?"

"Achara's dead?" Clarice was dumbstruck.

"In a fire," DiMaggio said. "The police think this man set it."

"Donovan set it. He told me as much. He thought I was inside with my kids. He killed Achara."

When all eyes in the room froze on something behind me, I turned slowly and saw two SWAT team members in black jumpsuits and Kevlar vests. They had rifles pointed at my chest.

"Drop it, buddy!" one of them shouted.

"Shoot him!" DiMaggio screamed. "He's got a gun. He's going to kill us. Shoot him."

"Drop the gun, a.s.shole! Drop it now!"

There was only one way I could think of to stall them and at the same time to avoid getting killed on the spot.

I pointed the pistol at my temple and pulled my swollen and bloodied mouth into the most addlepated grin I could muster. "Make a move, I'll pull the trigger. Swear to G.o.d."

64. DON'T BURY ME UNTIL I GIVE THE SIGNAL It took a few minutes for the standoff to move outside, the two SWAT team members, joined by six more men and one woman, all pointing rifles or shotguns at me, another eight or ten uniformed police officers dispersed behind trees, and in the darkness additional gun-happy officials arriving each minute.

As for myself, I held a c.o.c.ked pistol in one hand, Stephanie's cell phone in the other. It wasn't easy to scramble up onto the roof of a police cruiser with both hands full, but I managed. Bare-a.s.sed.

Wingdoodle flapping in the breeze.

I almost felt as though I were playing a role in a film, a part in which a flubbed line could precipitate my death. Forget the nursing home. If everybody here fired at once, I could easily catch thirty bullets before I hit the ground.

When a couple of the SWAT team boys tried to move in closer, I said, "Back off, kids. I'll do it! Swear to G.o.d!"

"Come on, buddy. We've got you for illegal entry and a.s.sault. That's nothing. You might get three months. Let's not make it worse."

"Stand back, ladies and gents! Stand back and pray for me!"

I'd come to terms with the fact that tonight was my last night. Now I was coming to terms with these as my last minutes.

Strange as it seems, I was all right with it.

I really was.

Sounds dumber than a fence post in the rain, but I was always always going to die. going to die.

Everybody dies. It was simply an event most of us never really gave much thought to. Now that I knew when, or pretty much thought I did, the terror had been stripped away. There was a genuine serenity in knowing. In fact, the knowledge was almost comforting as I stood on the roof of the police car, a dozen rifles trained on my chest, Donovan's pistol pressed to my brain.

I hadn't seen Stephanie during our tense procession out of the building. No telling whether she had fled or was still hiding upstairs. It worried me. I needed her to be safe and free, so she could take care of my girls, so she could administer the antidote to Karrie, but most of all, so that someone would be around to tell the truth after this was over. If DiMaggio had her way, this would go down as a mental patient caught in a burglary.

The nearby police cars were empty, but had they arrested Stephanie, they would hardly have placed her where I could see her.

The police had yet to ask about an accomplice.

And why would they?

I had all the characteristics of a cla.s.sic maniac, and cla.s.sic maniacs operated alone.

I was armed. Bloodied. Naked. Toothless. Berserk.

And now word had gotten around that I'd stabbed a man. I could hear them talking about it, rumors buzzing about in the darkness like mosquitoes. The cops were like big-game hunters wondering who was going to get the privilege of turning me into a rug, discussing my dementia in the same breath they discussed the best way to make the shot. They all thought I belonged in Western State Hospital. A woman cop cracked a joke, something about not having a camera.

DiMaggio and a.s.sociates had remained upstairs, observing the festivities through the window. Sooner or later, tired of cupping their hands to the gla.s.s, one of them would turn out the overhead lights.

That's when the real entertainment would begin.

The thought made me laugh aloud, and of course, laughing made me look loonier than all the rest of this put together.

"Shoot him," said the bald man through the now-open upstairs window. "For G.o.d's sake, shoot him, so we can all go home. Can't you people please just shoot him?"

The officer with the megaphone told him to shut up, then told me he had doughnuts and coffee on the way-as if they could appease me with twelve dollars' worth of lard, sugar, and coffee beans. And why didn't I make things easier for myself, he said. If I gave myself up, I would be treated with dignity. They would provide clothes. I would be fed. Didn't that sound like a fair trade-off?

The phone in my left hand rang.

"h.e.l.lo?"