Ted Kosmatka: Prophet of Bones

“What is this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.

“Are you going to answer me? What is this!” The words more shriek than question, spit flying from his mouth.

“I, I thought—”

A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul’s chest, balling his T-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

“What the fuck is this? Didn’t I tell you no pets?” The bright light of the family, the famous man.

“They’re not pets, they’re—”

“God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house?”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I—”

“You brought this vermin into the house? Into my house!”

“It’s a projec—”

The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the big cages, toppling one of the tables—a flash of pain, wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

His father kicked at the wood, splintering the frame, crushing the cage in on itself, stomping it to twisted wreckage. “You brought these things into my house !”

Paul scrambled away, just out of reach.

His father followed, arm raised, and the big hand came down on Paul’s shoulder, knocking him to the floor, where his chin split against the rough wood. And still his father came, stomping toward him, while Paul rolled away. His big leg lashed out and missed. And he came again, arm raised high—but then stopped, attention snagged. His head turned toward the glass box. He strode to the middle of the room. He grabbed Bertha’s aquarium in his big hands.

“Dad, no!”

He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, a final generation that would never be born.

Then his father’s arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm.

Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was This is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

There is a place where the sky touches the ground. Martial Joseph Johansson knew that place. He stared out through the glass bubble of the helicopter as it tunneled through the downpour. Rain sheeted off the glass, transformed by the curvature of the windshield into writhing little rivers that streamed away, found edges, fell. Became rain again.

“Five minutes, sir!”

The horizon, Martial Johansson knew, was an illusion of perspective. Below a certain altitude, each point in the sky occupies the horizon when viewed from some specific corresponding vantage. A formula could be deduced involving the curvature of the earth, the altitude of the helicopter, and the distance from the observer. So from some theoretical miles-off viewpoint, the helicopter sat like a microscopic insect on the dark line of the horizon. A lightning bug in a storm.

Martial closed his eyes.

The helicopter bucked beneath him, a deep vibration felt in every cell of his body.

Beside him sat his assistant Guthrie, looking at his watch. His knuckles were white on the handle of his briefcase. Although he’d worked for Martial for six years, Guthrie still hadn’t gotten used to the frequent flights. Running a corporation the size of Axiom required Martial to be on three coasts, often in the same day. Mostly, that meant jets, but every now and then the helicopter was required. Guthrie still seemed a bit nervous in the helicopter, even in the best of weather. This was not the best of weather.

Martial coughed phlegm into a dark handkerchief. It took a moment for the coughing to subside.

“You okay?” Guthrie shouted over the roar of the helicopter.

Martial nodded.

The noise discouraged conversation. But this was okay. Martial was a man with little use for small talk.

The helicopter banked against the wind, and the world swiveled. Martial’s stomach went light and feathery as he looked out through the glass. They were almost there. He could see it. From this height, the facility looked like any nice hotel retreat. Or maybe a high school campus that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed—all hard angles and elegant symmetry. A structure built so perfectly into the landscape that you secretly suspected it had always been there. Huge and beautiful, a sprawling compound of laboratories and research buildings, interconnected by a series of covered walkways. This was Axiom’s epicenter, his third home.

The helicopter swiveled again, changing the world’s orientation. Lights and a red cross, a helipad—and standing there, against the rain, waiting for the helicopter to land, three men in suits.

Always three men. Martial liked it that way. His security detail. Though he’d learned a long time ago not to trust anyone completely—even those closest to him.

All three had guns, but only two of the guns were loaded with live rounds. Nobody knew which two.

Not even the men.

The helicopter touched down with a gentle thump. The door swung open and cold, wet air blasted Martial’s face.

He followed Guthrie out into the storm.

“Two transplants, and this fucking rain will be the death of me!” Martial shouted into the roar of the machine. The tropical storm had been born in the Gulf, two hundred miles to the south, and now it lashed the Gulf States, shedding its moisture as it moved inland.

Guthrie made some response, but the sound was yanked away. Guthrie ducked as he ran beneath the spinning blades. A common, involuntary reflex. Though Martial was a few inches taller, he stood upright and walked slowly, reaching up to hold his hat onto his head.

He’d done the math when he’d first bought the helicopter. He was six foot one. The blades, at their center, were eight feet off the ground. Therefore, he didn’t need to duck. Later he read of a man who’d died in a windstorm, his head taken off by the overhead prop. For though the blades were eight feet high at the center, they drooped while the helicopter idled down; and during gusty weather an idling helicopter could be rocked ever so slightly by the force of the wind, producing a slight pitch. Blades that were eight feet off the ground in the center might be suddenly, on one side of the helicopter, only five or six feet at their spinning tips. Martial took the news as a lesson: When God wants you, he will take you.

The three men in suits walked forward to greet them.

“Sir,” the first man said. This was Scholler. As big as he was dedicated, and one of Martial’s longest-serving personal guards.

They shook hands. “I trust you had a good flight, sir.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“And glad to see it, sir.”

Behind Scholler was Ekman. Blond, serious, unsmiling. He looked younger than his actual age, as much boy as man, but he was the one Martial trusted to handle the more difficult operations. A diagonal scar split his upper lip. To Ekman’s left was Phillips, who really was as young as he looked. A newer asset. Ex-military and kept the crew cut.

They crossed the helipad to the waiting doorway. Once inside, they took the stairs down. “How were the latest trials?” Martial asked.

“Negative,” Scholler said.

Martial nodded, accepting the news. “And how is he?”

“The same, sir.”

“The others?”

“Another numbers reduction, sir.”

“Cause of?”

“We haven’t finished the autopsy yet but we’ll—”

Martial cut him off with a raised hand. “What do you think ?”

“Probably the same as the others. Methylation imprint. Unbalanced base-pair alignment.”

“Which is another way of saying you have no idea.”

“Yes, sir. You could say that.”