Unkillable Page 3

  Finally, she passed one of those wands over herself, the ones the CSI guys used to expose blood, semen, any signs of trace evidence. Only when she passed muster under the light did she feel ready to move on.

  Celine grabbed a fresh pair of sanitary gloves out of the box mounted on the wall, donned them, and took the ear from him as she sauntered to another section of her lab as hygienic and blood-free as the former section was a crime scene. The two areas were separated by a see-through wall and on the other side of that wall was pressurized filtered air being pumped in from above to make sure none of those creepy crawlies made it across the barrier from where the blood-letting went on. Even so, she couldn’t resist rolling out some paper towel to line her stool before sitting on it.

  Just to fuck with her, he sneezed into his hand. She nearly jumped out of her skin, and toppled her stool in the process. She turned to make sure he had his hand over his mouth, which he did. She still aimed a spray can at him and zapped those germs right out of the air before the cloud of noxious gas could penetrate further. He smiled wickedly at her. She gestured towards the hand sanitizer as if his permission to remain where he was standing had been revoked until he administered the proper self-hygiene. Which he did. His now more petulant smile lingered on his face. “This Jekyll and Hyde thing you have going on,” he said, watching how differently she acted now that this other persona had taken hold, moving the way a neat-freak would move, or better yet, a germophobe, “really gives me pause. I thought, of the two of us, I was the far more serious candidate for a serial killer, but now I see that was little more than hubris.”

  “Huh?”

  She had long since fixed her stool and placed a fresh paper towel over it, and was bent over her microscope, talking while really not paying attention to him all that much. He frowned. “Good to see some things never change,” he mumbled.

  A moment to double and triple check, then: “This is incredible!” She picked up the ear with a pair of tweezers and sent it through what looked like an MRI machine for rodents. Adrian had never seen one scaled down in size so. The entire unit wasn’t much bigger than a bread box.

  “What are you looking for?” he said.

  “Everything.”

  “How can you look for everything at once?”

  She broke her rapture over the digital display already spitting out gobs of data at her as the unit scanned the ear to glance at him and point her finger at the different parts of the screen. “It’s not like it was a few years ago, Adrian, where a coroner had to have more equipment on hand than Tony Stark of Iron Man to run her tests. And even then she had to send it out to a dozen different labs or more to handle the studies no coroner was equipped to do, I don’t care how big the city budget.”

  “Remind me what year it is again?”

  She turned to him and snuck a kiss. “This is DARPA, sweetheart. We’re at least fifty years ahead of everybody else. And if that’s not far enough into the future, then I walk down the hall to another agency that doesn’t exist at all in case anyone asks, and voilà, I’m seventy-five years into the future.”

  “I knew I fucked you dispassionately and left in the morning for a good reason.”

  The machine was hemorrhaging its results, beeping at her and forcing her to return her attention to the scans underway and away from his cheap aftershave. Stetson on most people smelled, well, like a guy you should find an excuse to dump before heading uptown to a bar where the clientele could at least afford Obsession For Men. It wasn’t just the brand name that said it all; it was the price. But on him it was like an aphrodisiac someone whipped up in a supernatural thriller.

  “Since when does DARPA work out of New York City and not Arlington?” Adrian asked.

  “They’re metastasizing, just as with the FBI. By all rights, you shouldn’t be out here either; you should be in Washington, DC. Intelligence Agencies these days are de-centralizing, just like terrorist cells. To fight a thing, you sometimes have to become it. Not that the new reality is going to make the headline news anytime soon.” She was talking at him detachedly, still too engrossed in the results from her scanners.

  She snorted, perhaps to interrupt the spell of the computer screen, traced her well-manicured fingernail along her chin. “Techa, Adrian, what the hell have you gotten me into here?”

  “Techa?”

  “Oh, we don’t say ‘Holy Christ!’ or ‘Dear God!’ anymore, we say ‘Techa be praised,’ or ‘Techa damn it!’”

  Adrian took another glance at the high-tech side of the lab, and despite its “minimalism,” according to her, with each machine able to do hundreds of duties that took hundreds of machines to do before, was forced to concede her point. Why worship God when you could worship the spirit driving technology?

  “You want to spell it out for me,” he said.

  Again she pointed at the touch-screen, this time to bring up the big monitor that she could enlarge the image on. The picture-in-picture view with a checkerboard pattern of computer images, expanded on the 50 inch display, remained until she tapped one of the pictures that pushed the others out of the way. “This is John Doe’s DNA. It has been altered.”

  She interrupted the sermon to take the ear out of the “MRI” machine and stick it in another machine. That one sounded and looked more like a medieval torture device, also scaled down. The instant she pressed the button on it, he realized just how right he was. The way it was poking and prodding that ear, there soon wouldn’t be any of it left.

  She returned to the display she’d been showing him earlier. “If I’m right—and that’s what I’m testing for now—you have your explanation as to why this ear is so pristine more than a day post mortem.”

  “And that’s because…”

  She turned, arms folded and body tense, perhaps just to bolster her defenses against his anticipated rejections of everything she was about to say. “This guy can’t die. Even with his body parts severed like this, you could glue him back together, I don’t care from how many pieces, like Humpty Dumpty, and he ought to reanimate.”

  “One piece of DNA tells you that! You haven’t even looked at the rest of the scans. Though I’m not sure I’d believe you no matter how many of them you showed me.”

  She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Look, I know it’s a lot to take in…”

  “Lady, don’t stand there and patronize me. I was just at a crime scene, psyched it out and stripped it down to what was relevant and what wasn’t, past a lot of scent markers meant to throw me off the trail. A NASA supercomputer couldn’t have done what I did in less time running one of those AI thingies.”

  She smiled condescendingly and bit her lip. “AGIs,” she corrected him. “No one’s saying you aren’t brilliant in your own way, Adrian. Maybe if you could just allow me to be brilliant in mine.”

  He huffed and puffed some more and paced before he finally settled down. “Fine, go ahead and patronize me, but just for a bit.”

  She resumed her lecture. “It isn’t just one DNA alteration, if that makes you feel better. More like hundreds. Enough that it makes me wonder if someone didn’t first design one of those ‘AI thingies’” she tried to say without sounding particularly mocking, “to handle the CRISPR edits.”

  He had a rudimentary idea of what CRISPR was, a DNA-editing tool that supposedly made it so easy to edit human DNA that a child could do it working in his bedroom. But to ask more about it would just make him feel stupid again, so he let the point go.

  “Here’s the real magic going on here,” she said pointing at the results from the “miniature medieval torture device” still doing everything in its power to destroy that ear. “The cells being electrocuted, burned, frozen, boiled, sliced, diced… They die, but not before giving birth to stem cells, which then quickly become specialized cells to replace the cells that were lost.” She took her hand away from the screen. “However he or she did it,” Celine said, “well, they leap-frogged the rest of us by quite a bit. Everybody but everybody is wo
rking on anti-aging methods right now with the global population aging most everywhere but Africa and the Mideast. Whoever finds the fountain of youth first will likely make Bill Gates look like a pauper by the time he’s done cashing in.”

  Adrian took another deep breath. He found when processing things he didn’t really want to face at all that power breaths were critical in pushing past his own resistance. “Trust me, Celine, this guy isn’t looking to get rich riding the next anti-aging craze. But that’s my problem, to figure out what he’s really about. Yours is to tell me how worried I should be. I got at least a dozen people a day in Manhattan alone looking to take down the world, each one with a better hi-tech solution for how to do it than the last one. Had one guy with a positively ingenious way for creating runaway atmospheric reactions, triggered by cloud seeding, to strip all the oxygen out of the atmosphere. You might think that was rather novel. It might be, were it not for the fact that there was this guy who wanted to perfect Tesla’s invention to send electricity wirelessly through the air. For free to everyone. Quite noble. Until you realized that when he fired up the device it would burn off our entire atmosphere.”

  A chuckle erupted out of her like a volcanic blast. She had to cap the volcano by shoving her fist into her mouth. “I’m sorry. But you’re my favorite fire and brimstones preacher. Nobody does it better than you, Adrian, nobody.”

  He took another calming breath. He did that a lot around her, often during sex, just to muscle through the power sex without passing out. It seemed their intellectual exchanges were no less taxing on his entire body. “So, I guess what you’re saying is I should be very worried?”

  “Oh, yes, without a doubt. You need to find the rest of that body, Adrian. If even one piece falls into the wrong hands, we could be looking at a mass extinction event. Namely everyone who doesn’t have this guy’s genetic alterations is done for, the same way Cro-Magnon man was done for the instant he came up against the Neanderthals. Do you need me to paint you a picture?”

  “No, I guess not. Imagine fending off a Chinese or a Russian army of unkillable people. Forget their eternal youth and good looks; that’s beside the point.”

  “You see, you’re a lot smarter at science than you let on. In fact I’m guessing you have more PhD equivalents in more fields of science stuffed in that head than you have specialists to run too for help.”

  He snorted. “Pays to be a generalist in an age of specialists. In a world where everyone’s wearing the blinders of their particular specialty, the man with no blinders at all is king.”

  A long sad silence befell them.

  “This is usually when we have sex, after we’re all talked out. You want to fuck on one of the lab tables, one with blood still on it? That seemed to do it for you last time.”

  “I’ll have you know I was getting into character.” To catch a killer with a serious blood lust.

  “I’ll say. If I remember right, you were the cowboy and I was the bucking bronco.”

  He smiled like a guilty man who wasn’t particularly sorry. “You drive us to your place. It’ll give me time to pick through whatever’s still stuck in my craw.”

  He no sooner said the word “craw” than he heard a bird squawking. He turned to see one of the ravens had landed on the window sill. It drew a circle in the window with its beak, then poked the center of the circle to pop the glass out, then stepped inside the coroner’s room.

  Celine stared at the bird flabbergasted. “What the…? Get out of here! Shoo! Shoo!”

  “You don’t want to do that.” He let his tone convey the “trust me” part. “He’s just here for the evidence.”

  “You mean the ear?”

  “Yes, I mean the ear.”

  “That ear is worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox. I’ll get the bazooka I keep in my locker.”

  “You keep a bazooka in your locker?”

  “My therapist says it’s helping me through the trauma of being pickpocketed.”

  “It’s helping me through the trauma of End Times I’m so clearly living in,” he said staring at the Raven, a walking, squawking totem of ominousness. “Can’t wait to see your solution to that if a bazooka is your solution to being pickpocketed.”

  He grabbed her by the arm when he realized she was serious about going for the bazooka. “Don’t bother. Unless I miss my guess, it’s doing what you wanted me to do. Collecting up the body parts. Five’ll get you ten my golem is being assembled for me out of all of Humpty Dumpty’s broken pieces.”

  “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “Why take him apart in bird-size bits if not to put him back together again someplace else? Besides, how better to blow my mind?”

  “Even if you’ve managed to get inside this guy’s head as far as he’s gotten inside yours…”

  “How do you know he’s all up inside my head?”

  She glanced down at her arm which apparently he was clutching harder than ever. “It’s in your eyes.”

  He frowned, not taking the proverbial blow to the chin all that well. He relaxed his hold on her. “You were saying?”

  “Forget your mad theory. Right or not, I still can’t let the bird take that ear. I have to get it to my DARPA team so they can start reverse-engineering The Indestructible Man before someone else does. We may not need the rest of him, so long as we have that ear.”

  “You have your scans.”

  “Not nearly complete enough.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll never get the ear away from that bird.” Adrian wasn’t prepared to go any farther than staring it down.

  The bird flew towards the ear in the device still trying to torture it to death, the one it had been left in.

  Celine wasted no time getting to the fire extinguisher on the wall. She blasted the bird with it as it was flying back with the ear towards the window. Only it was a flame thrower, not a fire extinguisher. The bird flew through the ribbon of flame as if it were immune to it. They already knew the ear was.

  Celine let out a scream as the bird flew out the window. “Looks like you have some crows to round up as well. They have the same genetic alterations.”

  “They’re not crows. They’re ravens. I don’t know how you could have missed that.”

  Celine let out another burst of rage and flung the canister at the wall. It exploded. Half the room was going up in flames. Robots were coming out of the walls, and all kinds of hidden compartments, dousing the fires. They were nothing more than utility bots that looked like vacuum cleaners that might be able to talk to you.

  “Don’t worry about the flames,” Celine said. “The lab is fireproof.”

  “What the hell were you doing with a fire extinguisher?”

  “When you need to shut down a runaway biological reaction, nothing spells ‘stop right there’ better than thirty-five-hundred-degree flames.”

  Adrian took another deep abdominal breath. “Come on. You owe me sex. And if I do any more power breaths I’ll start hallucinating us having sex, which is the only other time I’m breathing so heavily. So by the time we actually get around to it, the whole thing will be anticlimactic in the extreme.”

  She beamed a “You aren’t half as amusing as you think you are, but amusing enough” smile at him. Then she pressed a button on her key ring, of all things, and set the lab robots to respectfully tuck away the body of the man lying on a slab in the morgue for her. Let’s hope she wasn’t half as respectful when it came to tearing off his clothes.

  FOUR

  Celine drove like an Indi 500 race car driver, with all the same confidence and dexterity and not a second slower. The amount of weaving around cars and accelerating and braking would have caused a seasoned roller coaster rider to barf his guts three times over. It just so happened she was the only one that could take him on a makeshift Coney Island ride wild enough to settle his mind. It was another one of those paradoxical sensations he was given to. His mind was only at rest when he was skirting life and death. The fact that she was an e
ntirely capable driver meant he never had to worry once, moreover, about her actually putting his life in danger.

  He took the thermos out of his trench coat pocket and handed it to her. “Test this for me when you get a chance.”

  “Why?”

  “I think someone left poison in my morning coffee.”

  “Hold the wheel,” she said, not actually waiting on him to grab the wheel before she was unscrewing the cap with one hand and holding the thermos in the other. She took a whiff of what was inside at the same time his hand grabbed the wheel. “You’re not wrong. This is cyanide. A lot of it, considering the smell of the coffee still isn’t strong enough to mask it. Who’s trying to kill you, Adrian?”

  “I don’t think he was actually trying to kill me. I think the cyanide is just in the coffee to get my attention. I’m guessing once you analyze it you’ll find some solution that is ripe for putting in the water supply to end all human life as we know it. Or maybe once it’s injected into someone it spreads like a highly contagious flu. You get the idea.”

  “Another groupie?”

  “I swear they won’t leave me alone. Not since I got an international reputation. Everybody who wants to bring the world to an end is trying to get on my radar just so they can boast that the greatest future-killer of them all collared them.”

  “But why…?”

  “That way they have proof that their end-of-world hi-tech solution is the real deal, not like these other posers.”

  “Is this guy the real deal?”

  “I doubt it. Most are just posers. Wannabes. The kinds that can forge an indestructible man in their basement are few and far between. No one knows that better than you guys. DARPA’s got most of them on the payroll.”

  “Most that we know of. The truly smart ones know how to stay hidden.”

  “Yeah, that’s what bothers me.”