James Gunn - The Immortals

“I was hoping you’d give up administration,” he said.

“Not yet,” she said. “Maybe in a couple of years.”

“I want you to see this,” he said, opening the lid of his experiment. All the cell cultures were dead except for two.

“Success already?” she said.

“It’s a beginning,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. But it was more than a beginning. It was the beginning of the end. The long search was almost over, and he knew he would discover what the alchemists had searched for all their lives: the secret of immortality. But he would not give it to the world until Locke was dead; no doubt he would be replaced by someone just as determined and just as ruthless, but he would not have Locke’s combination of qualities or experience.

Julia put her arm around his waist, and they stood looking down at the immortal cells. He felt like the hero of an interplanetary romance.

And yet he knew that it would take a long time before he was confident that Julia herself was not one of Locke’s agents, as Barnett had turned out to be. He could love her, and he would have to trust her, but he might never be sure.

Maybe that was the human condition.

He woke to pain. It was a sharp, stabbing sensation in the pit of his stomach. It pulled his knees up toward his chest and contorted his gaunt, yellowed face with an involuntary grimace that creased the skin along familiar lines, like parchment folded and refolded.

The pain stabbed again. He grunted; his body jerked. Slowly it ebbed, flood waters retreating, leaving its detritus of tormented nerve endings like a reminder of return. “Coke!” shouted the man on the twenty-ninth floor.

The word echoed around the big room, bounced off the tall ceiling and the wood-paneled walls. There was no answer. “Coke!” he screamed. “COKE!”

Footsteps pattered distantly, clapped against marble floors, muffled themselves in carpeting. They stopped beside the broad, silken bed. “Yes, Boss?” Even the voice cringed. Cringing made the man even shorter. The little eyes wavering on the monkey face refused to focus.

The sick man writhed on the bed. “The medicine!”

Coke snatched up the brown bottle from the gray metal nightstand and shook out three pills into a trembling hand. One of them dropped on the floor and he retrieved it. He held them out, and the sick man grabbed them greedily, popped them into his mouth. Into his hand Coke put a glass of water he had poured from a silver pitcher. The sick man drank, his Adam’s apple jerking convulsively.

In a few minutes the sick man was sitting up. He hugged his knees to his chest and breathed in exhausted pantings. “I’m sick, Coke,” he moaned. “I’ve got to have a doctor. I’m going to die, Coke.” Terror was in his voice. “Call the doctor!”

“I can’t,” Coke squeaked. “Don’t you remember?”

The sick man frowned as if he were trying to understand, and then his face writhed and his left hand swung out viciously. It caught Coke across the mouth and hurled him into the corner. He crouched there, one hand pressed to his bleeding lips, watching the sick man with a rodent’s wary eyes.

“Be here!” the sick man snarled. “Don’t make me call you!” He forgot Coke. His head dropped. He hammered futilely against the bed with a knotted fist. “Damn!” he moaned.

In that position he sat, as if graven, for minutes. Coke huddled in the corner, unmoving, watchful. At last the sick man straightened, threw back the heavy comforter, and stood up. He walked painfully to the curtained windows. As he walked he whimpered. “I’m sick. I’m going to die.”

He tugged on a thick, velvet cord; the curtains whispered apart. Sunlight flooded into the room, spilled over the sick man; it turned his scarlet pajamas into flame, his face into dough. “It’s a terrible thing,” said the sick man, “when a dying man can’t get a doctor. I need the elixir, Coke. I need treatment for this pain. I can’t stand it any longer.”

Coke watched; his eyes never left the tall, thin man who stood in the sunlight and stared blindly out over the city. Coke took his hand away from his mouth; the back was smeared and red, and blood welled through three cuts in the lips.

“Get me a doctor, Coke,” the sick man said. “I don’t care how you do it. Just get him.”

Coke pulled his feet under him and scuttled out of the room. The sick man stared out of the window, not hearing.

From here the ruins were not so apparent. The city looked almost as it had fifty years ago. But if a man looked closely, he could see the holes in the roofs, the places where the porcelain false fronts had fallen and the brick behind them had crumbled and toppled into the streets.

Twelfth Street was blocked completely. Mounds of rubble made many other streets impassable. The hand of Time is not as swift as that of man, but it is inexorable.

The distant, arrowing sweep of I-35 drew the eye like movement, bright through the drabness of decay. The Kansas Medical Center was out of sight behind the rising ground to the south, but the complex, walled entity on Missouri’s Hospital Hill was brilliant in the sunlight. It was an island rising out of a stinking sea, an enclave of life within the dying city.

The sick man stared out the window at the first tendrils of smog thrusting up the streets from the river, climbing toward the twenty-block-square fortress on Hospital Hill. But they would never get that far.

“Damn them!” the sick man whimpered. “Damn them!”

Flowers peered out the slit-windows of the one-man ambulance into the sooty night. The misting rain now was mixed with smog. The weather was a live thing against which the fog lamp struggled helplessly. It shifted constantly, there was no place to grab it, and the amber beam retreated in defeat, let itself be rolled back.

Ever since Flowers had left the trafficway with its lights and its occasional patrols, he had been lost and uneasy. Even the trafficway wasn’t safe anymore. A twenty-millimeter shell caroming from the ambulance’s armored roof made a fearful din.

Where had the police been then?

The maps that listed Truman Road as “passable” were out of date. This had to be Truman Road; it was too wide to be anything else. But he had only a vague notion how far east he had come. On either side of the street was darkness; possibly it was a shade denser on the right.

Unless that was a strip razed by wind, fire, or dynamite, it was a park. He visualized the city map. It was either the Parade or the Grove.

Something exploded under the front wheel. The ambulance leaped, shuddering, into the air. It came down hard. Before the shocks absorbed it, the chauffeur lost control and the ambulance slewed toward the left.

Flowers grabbed the emergency wheel and took over from the chauffeur, turning the ambulance in the direction of the skid. Like the muffled wail of a parturient woman came the sound of screaming tires.

Lights loomed up unexpectedly, dim-red lanterns in the night, almost invisible in the swirling smog. They would have been waist high to a man standing in the street. That meant there was something supporting them.

Flowers twisted the wheel sharply to the right this time, clutched his seat with taut legs as the ambulance took the curb, fought the crazy tilt as it lit in mud and skidded again. It was a park, all right. He raced through it, fighting desperately for control, dodging trees and bent telephone poles with their tangles of old webs, until he jogged the ambulance back into the street. He was blocks past the beginning of madness. He pulled up.

In the ambulance, balanced at the side of the road, Flowers sat and sweated. He rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and fought the twitching nerves across his shoulders. Damn the city! he thought savagely. Damn the street department! Damn the resident who would send out a medic on a night like this.