Immortal

32

The laboratory was a windowless cell but the clock on the wall told Lillian it was night and she had been working for almost six hours straight under the silent gaze of a SkinGen security guard. She hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing and the guard had even escorted her to the latrine. Tyler Willis lay nearby on the mortuary slab, groaning and shivering occasionally. To her relief, Jeb Oppenheimer had refrained from slicing the poor guy’s kidneys straight out of his body, deciding instead to leave the threat unfinished in order to force Lillian into working further on Hiram Conley’s remains.

Lillian had been happy to see him leave; she would obey his parting command to find out once and for all what had infected Hiram Conley’s body before he finally died. But she was also certain that Oppenheimer had absolutely no intention of letting either her or Willis leave the building alive. They had witnessed too much. Lillian had to escape.

She turned, putting down the scalpel with which she had been dissecting Conley’s crumbling corpse, and looked at the guard.

‘That’s it,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t go on without something to eat and drink.’

The guard glared at her but remained silent.

‘What?’ Lillian asked. ‘Too many words at once for you to understand? Food. Drink. How’s that?’

The guard took two paces across the room and grabbed her throat with one chunky hand, shoving her backwards into the worktops and straining her arm against the handcuff still pinning her to Conley’s mortuary slab.

‘You stay until you’re finished.’

‘I can’t work properly,’ Lillian shot back, refusing to be intimidated, ‘if I’m exhausted, hungry and thirsty. I’ll make mistakes, miss evidence. You want your boss to find out that you half-starved me and then I screwed up?’

The guard held her for a moment longer, the handful of cells in his brain churning laboriously as he considered her point of view, and then he dropped his grip on her and turned for the door without another word. Lillian watched as he unlocked the doors and left the laboratory, locking the doors behind him.

Lillian waited until he was out of earshot and then looked at Willis.

‘Tyler? Wake up!’

Willis groaned, his head lolling to one side as he tried to focus on her. Lillian waved a hand in front of his face.

‘Tyler, I need your help.’

Willis licked his parched lips, struggling to remain conscious.

‘Water,’ he said. ‘I need water. And my stomach hurts.’

‘The guard’s on his way back here with something to drink,’ she said. ‘I can give you more morphine, but you’ve lost too much blood to give it intravenously — it might kill you.’

She turned to face his body, his chest and stomach now sealed by a neat row of stitches that she’d administered as soon as Oppenheimer had left. The old man’s cuts had not been deep, and none of Willis’s internal organs had been damaged as far as she could tell. But he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood, and the old bastard hadn’t even given Lillian a saline drip to replace Tyler’s lost fluids.

God only knew what Oppenheimer would do to him when he returned. Lillian closed her eyes, and made a swift decision.

Using a syringe, she extracted morphine from the small vial she’d been supplied with, and glanced up briefly at the camera staring unblinkingly down at her from one corner of the laboratory. She turned to shield Willis’s body from view, tapped the needle, and then slipped it gently into Willis’s femoral artery.

Slowly she saw him relax, his breathing calm and the sweat dry from his forehead. Using her scalpel, she began easing off some of the dressings now brittle with blackened, congealed blood, replacing them as she went. She dabbed at the skin under the dressings with a soft, cool cloth.

‘That’s good,’ he whispered.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Lillian said. ‘Tell me why he’s doing this to you. To us.’

Willis swallowed thickly and shook his head.

‘I can’t, it’s too dangerous.’

‘Dangerous?’ Lillian retaliated in a harsh whisper. ‘Do you honestly think we’re getting out of here alive? We’re already screwed, so the least you can damned well do is explain to me why the hell I’m stuck in here with you!’

Willis sighed.

‘Hiram Conley came to me a few weeks ago,’ he said, lifting one hand to massage his temples, ‘with a sample of halobacteria that he said came from a hidden cave somewhere in New Mexico. He refused to tell me where, only that I should check the bacteria out and then he’d visit me again, said that I’d understand. I did what he said and put the bacteria in solution. Damn me, if they didn’t revive. When we checked the age of the samples they came in at two hundred fifty million years old.’

‘Bacillus permians.’ Lillian nodded, glancing at the close-circuit camera and keeping her voice down. ‘I read about it in the papers, the oldest revived species ever discovered.’

‘Conley met me again a week or two later, and told me he was infected with the bacteria,’ Willis went on. ‘He told me he was a hundred ninety years old.’

‘He was, give or take a few years,’ Lillian confirmed. ‘I’ve run every test on him since Oppenheimer brought me here.’

Willis smiled despite his discomfort.

‘I didn’t believe him at first,’ he said, ‘but pretty soon I realized he was telling the truth, not least because he was dying and was searching for a cure.’

‘The decay?’ Lillian asked. ‘On his arms?’

‘Yeah, it was like he was coming apart at the seams. Some kind of cellular breakdown.’

‘So, you were working with him to try and reverse that?’

Willis sighed again, his eyes closing as Lillian continued replacing the bandages on his stomach.

‘Partly,’ he said. ‘I’d been approached recently by Jeb Oppenheimer, not long after I’d published the papers on Bacillus permians. He wanted to hire me as a specialist, offered to treble my salary. I said no; I knew I was onto something big and wanted to keep it to myself. But when Hiram Conley came on the scene, I decided that if I could figure out what was keeping him from aging, I could sell it to SkinGen for far more than just a fat salary.’

Lillian stopped working, looking down at Willis.

‘You sold out,’ she said finally.

Willis nodded.

‘I’m not proud of it, but I was looking at retiring at thirty-five years of age. Who wouldn’t have taken the chance? Sure, I could have stuck with it and figured it out myself, but I thought: what the hell? Let Oppenheimer sort it out, and I’ll buy myself a condo in the Bahamas and spend the rest of my life sipping cocktails on a yacht somewhere.’

‘What happened?’ she asked him.

‘I offered to take Hiram Conley’s blood to Oppenheimer, who could then use it for tests, but Jeb wanted Hiram Conley to come in himself. I met Conley out in Glorietta Pass, and was trying to convince him it was a good idea when he suddenly pulled his gun and shot me.’

Lillian frowned.

‘So how come Oppenheimer’s got you here now? Surely he could have just left you alone once he’d grabbed Conley’s corpse from my morgue.’

‘Because I didn’t tell him about the cellular degradation,’ Willis said. ‘He only figured that out once he’d taken a look at the corpse and realized that his people at SkinGen didn’t have the skills necessary to manufacture or engineer a genetic copy of the infection. Even the blood samples I’d taken from Conley had degraded. I’d pitched the whole thing to him as good as I could to get the most money, and he was stuck with a corpse that he couldn’t use. I guess Oppenheimer wanted revenge, and for me to figure it out along with you.’

Lillian nodded.

‘And then he kills us both,’ she said. ‘Are there other people chasing this?’

‘Some,’ Willis admitted. ‘Very wealthy people, who had also read my published papers and were interested in investing in my work. I don’t have any names, but I did some research and know that they were part of something called the Bilderberg Group. You ever heard of them?’

Lillian shook her head.

‘Wealthy individuals like Oppenheimer?’ she asked. ‘Pharmaceutical companies?’

‘No,’ Willis shook his head, ‘way bigger than that.’ He looked up at her. ‘And two detectives, government people or so they said. Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. They seemed solid, but I got jumped by Oppenheimer’s goons before I could tell them much.’

‘I think they were the ones looking for us here,’ Lillian confirmed, recalling the earlier altercation outside the laboratory.

‘You figured anything out yet?’ Willis asked her.

Lillian glanced across at Hiram Conley’s remains.

‘Nothing adds up,’ she admitted. ‘What little blood I managed to extract shows signs of anemia, but there was nothing to explain the mummification of the remains, especially not overnight.’

Willis nodded, his voice sounding dreamlike, as though he were struggling to connect his thought processes.

‘The anemia could be due to a mineral deficiency,’ he said. ‘I noticed it in Hiram’s blood pathology before he died. The mummification is almost certainly calcification.’

Lillian blinked in surprise. Calcification was a conservative-transformative phenomenon by which a corpse could appear petrified when the skeleton rapidly absorbed calcium salts in the presence of bacterial decomposition of internal organs.

‘You think that the bacteria inside him affected his calcium levels in some way?’

Willis shrugged lazily, his eyelids half closed.

‘Seems likely to me,’ he murmured. ‘If he was hosting a bacterial infection as I assume he was, then the bacteria must have themselves consumed resources. That’s how they live inside us symbiotically, consuming and replenishing. Maybe Hiram’s death starved them of whatever they needed, and his apparent mummification was the result?’

Lillian nodded, glancing again at the corpse.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she whispered, and then looked down at Willis.

His eyes were closed, and as she watched his breathing slowed gently until his chest stopped moving. Lillian stared at his serene features for a long moment, and then moved away from his body.

The door to the laboratory opened and the guard walked back in carrying a tray of food. Lillian looked across at him and wiped a tear from her eye.

‘You’re too late,’ she said softly. ‘Oppenheimer must have cut him deeper than he realized.’

The guard took one look at Willis’s inert body, dropped the tray and dashed away.