Devoted(30)
In the fading light, the sliding water doesn’t make a good mirror. His reflection is faint and distorted, and his eye sockets appear to be empty.
With one hand, he smooths the water, as though he can still its rippled surface and see himself more clearly, but this doesn’t work.
He washes the blood out of his hair, from his face. He cups his hands and scoops from the stream and drinks. At first, the water has the flavor of blood, but then it acquires a lesser taste.
He strips off his black leather sport coat. After shrugging out of the shoulder rig, he puts it aside with the pistol. He discards his spattered shirt.
He’s gotten blood on his T-shirt and jeans, though not much. Anyway, the T-shirt and jeans are black, so the stains don’t show.
Besides, the scent appeals to him. Semi-metallic. Not like any other smell. It’s the exciting odor of power, dominance, triumph.
In his great triumph, he wants to leave the meadow for the woods and find a safe place and curl up there and sleep.
He stands now on the bank of the stream, staring across it and into the trees, into the shadows coiling around the trunks and up into the branches, a serpentorium of shadows.
Darkness is gathering within and without him. He senses that it’s different from all other darknesses that have come before it. This will be a generous and welcoming darkness, one in which he will at last feel at home and never again be a victim.
In time there will be Costa Rica and all the money to have anything he wants—anything, anybody—but right now he feels the need to give himself to the arms of darkness and sleep.
Then he sees the pistol in the holster, lying at his feet, and he is reminded of Megan Bookman, remembers how she treated him back in the day and earlier this afternoon on the phone.
He can’t tolerate being disrespected like that. If you allow yourself to be disrespected, you’re weak. The weak inevitably become prey. Prey dies. Prey dies by tooth and claw.
Leaving the holster behind, pistol in hand, he retrieves his black sport coat and sets out across the meadow.
He thinks he’s going to his car, the Dodge, but somehow he finds himself standing over the dead woman, Justine.
A sort of manic glee overcomes him at the sight of her ravaged corpse, a sense of immeasurable superiority. A wet, snickering laugh escapes him.
Who was she, after all?
Just another hot girl.
So easy to take, to break.
All his life, he had allowed such girls to say no to him. He should never have let them say no to him. No isn’t a choice for them any longer.
A sudden exhilaration burns away his lethargy. His heavy-lidded eyes open wide to the wonder of what he is becoming.
He spits on her remains and spits again.
Without quite realizing what he is about to do, Shacket finds himself urinating on the corpse. His stream is strong and fragrant.
This kill belongs to him. Nothing else can want it, claim it.
He makes his way through the tall grass to the corpse of the man whose muscles availed him nothing. Shacket urinates again.
He is renewed. He zippers himself away. Like something that might live under bridges in expectation of passing children, he scampers up the long slope to the roadway, where the two vehicles wait.
In his Dodge Demon, powering forward, he leaves one state highway for another, heading north toward the great attractant, toward the woman who should always have been his.
Not much farther. He knows her address. He has seen her home from the air on Google Earth, also on Google Street View.
Ever since Jason died, Shacket has been keeping track of Megan, the ice-queen bitch. He knows what she needs better than she does, and he will wake her to the need to please him.
In half an hour, he reaches Pinehaven, passes through town, and continues on the state route until her house appears on the left. He almost swings into the driveway, but realizes that too bold an entry will be a mistake.
He continues past the house. In less than a quarter of a mile, he arrives at a lay-by. He pulls off the pavement and parks in the deep shade of ancient pines.
When he gets out of the car, he stands by it, inhaling the pleasantly cool air, the fragrance of pines, the forest mast. He can also detect the scents of small animals cowering in the underbrush; he can’t differentiate one from the other by species, although maybe one day he will.
With the highway to one side of him and the wilderness to the other side, he is a creature of two worlds. Perhaps some men, during a profound becoming such as this, would worry that they might soon belong in neither world. Shacket doesn’t doubt that he will belong in both, will dominate both.
The billions of programmed archaea that he inhaled in the Utah facility have swarmed through his blood, through his flesh and bone and brain, where they remain at work, inserting new genetic material into every cell in his body. What that material might be, he cannot say. But the particular group of researchers at Refine’s Springville laboratories had been identifying those useful genes in everything from fungi to insects to lower animals that they believed would enhance the human immune system and increase longevity.
They had the best of intentions, and intentions mattered.
They’re all dead now, gone to ashes because some damn fool panicked and pressed the doomsday button, convinced that a release of programmed archaea into the environment would precipitate some genetic plague. But archaea are not bacteria; they can’t replicate the particular genetic material they brought with them into Shacket. Whatever it might be, that material was a onetime cargo with which the scientists loaded them. If Shacket is infected with biological catastrophe, he can’t pass it on to others, nor can these redesigned archaea, which have been engineered to be short-lived and incapable of reproduction.