The Brain Eaters

Chapter 29

The pain came and went in waves for Eddie Gault as he trundled the old van along the road toward Biotron. He had to keep slowing down as the fierce headache hammered at him and dimmed his vision. He kept up a constant muttered monologue in an attempt to focus his mind away from the pain.

No matter what image he tried to conjure up, Eddie’s thoughts kept returning to Roanne Tesla. From the beginning he had questioned why anyone so beautiful and so much smarter than he would love him. It was a doubt he had kept tucked back out of sight while he enjoyed her attentions, but it never quite died. Now, in the moments when he was lucid, Eddie grew convinced he had been used. The thought made him angry, and the anger helped him stand the pain.

All of Roanne’s talk about the purity of the natural environment and the greed of the big companies had been easy enough for him to accept. Eddie had not possessed any strong opinions of his own, and he was happy to adopt Roanne’s in exchange for the sensual pleasures she delivered. Now he wished he had spent more time asking her about her motives and less time with his cock in her mouth.

As he neared the Biotron gate, Eddie ground his teeth in an effort to maintain control against the devils that wanted to come screaming out of him. He had things to tell Dr. Kitzmiller, and he had to hold on that long.

He saw the black limousine parked on the other side of the road, but he could not be bothered thinking about it. Faces were visible behind the smoked glass, but they were no more than white blobs to Eddie. He passed the limousine and turned in at the gate.

Two men in civilian clothes came out from the guard shack to meet him. Others in uniform watched warily.

“Eddie Gault?” one of the men said. He was taller than his companion and wore a neat moustache. Both men were about thirty and looked to be in good physical shape.

Eddie nodded, relieved that he would not have to make the effort of identifying himself. Dimly, he wondered how they came to be expecting him, but the thought did not take hold.

“Come with us, please,” the man said in a voice of quiet authority.

He got out of the van, grunting with pain from the small jolt when his feet hit the asphalt.

“Over here, please.” The second man, the clean-shaven one, took Eddie’s arm and led him to a beige Plymouth that was parked next to the guard shack.

“Dr. Kitzmiller,” Eddie got out with an effort. “I got to see Dr. Kitzmiller.”

“We’re going to take you to him,” said the first man. “Get in the car, please.”

Eddie got into the back seat of the Plymouth with the clean-shaven man. The one with the moustache got behind the wheel. They drove away, keeping the windows rolled up despite the fact that the car had no air conditioning. Eddie was sweating heavily before they had gone a quarter of a mile.

“Where … where we going?” Eddie said with difficulty. Each word he got out felt as if it pulled a little bit of his brain with it.

“We’re taking you to see Dr. Kitzmiller,” the driver said, not looking at him.

“He’s … back at the plant,” Eddie managed. “I saw him on TV.”

The driver glanced back at the man sitting next to Eddie, who said, “He had to leave the plant for a little while. We’re taking you to him.”

The Plymouth turned off onto a dirt road that twisted off into one of the dense patches of forest. The sway of the car made Eddie’s head hurt like an open nerve.

“Stop,” he said. “I don’t want to go in here.”

“It’s just a little farther,” said the man sitting next to him.

“No. You’re lying.”

The man in the seat next to Eddie tensed. He leaned forward and whispered something to the driver.

“Lemme out,” Eddie said. “No Kitzmiller here. My head hurts.”

The Plymouth pulled to a stop where there was a small clearing on one side of the road.

“This is it,” the driver said.

“Here we are, Eddie,” said the man with him in the back seat. “You want to get out?”

Eddie wiped his eyes, trying to clear his pain-streaked vision. Outside was nothing but the dirt road, the small clearing, and the thick growth of trees — white ash, birch, and bigtooth aspen. No buildings, no trail, no people.

“There’s nothing here,” Eddie protested.

The man with the moustache had already got out of the car. He pulled open the door on Eddie’s side.

“Get out, please.”

Even in his pain and his doubt the lifetime habit of following orders made Eddie lever himself out of the car. His head was about to burst. Something was crawling under the skin of his face.

“Walk over there, please.” The man with the moustache pointed toward the far edge of the clearing, where the encroaching trees formed a thick barrier.

“Why?”

The two men stood side by side, facing him grimly.

“Walk,” said one of them. Eddie could not be sure which one spoke.

Eddie turned, shuffling his feet on the leaf-covered ground. He took a lumbering step toward the trees. Another. Then he stopped.

“Keep walking.”

Eddie’s body stiffened. The inside of his head churned and bubbled like molten lead. His face felt like one of those balloons with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it. He turned back toward the men.

“Oh, shit, look at his face!” one of them said.

Then they had guns in their hands.

Eddie heard a voice howling in his ear and only dimly recognized it as his own. He charged at the two men. His movements were no longer clumsy and slow. The pain had become so terrible that he had somehow transcended it. His sensory system had taken all it could stand; then it blew out like an overloaded circuit.

The boom of the guns blended with a distant roll of thunder. The impact of the bullets was no more than a small tug at his flesh. Eddie’s hands reached out and seized the nearest of the two men — the one who had sat beside him in the car. He found the man’s throat and closed his fingers like metal claws around the bobbing Adam’s apple and the windpipe. The man’s scream was lost in a sudden rustle of wind through the leaves as Eddie ripped out his trachea.

The man with the moustache fired his pistol wildly. His mouth gaped; his eyes bulged in terror.

Eddie stepped over the body of the man with no throat. He could feel the freshly risen boils on his face begin to burst. He reached for the man with the gun and caught his arm. He yanked on it, and the gun thumped to the ground. Eddie heard the man’s shoulder separate with a crackling sound.

The injured man cried out and pulled free. The pistol lay forgotten among the dead leaves. With one arm flopping uselessly, he dragged himself into the car. Eddie started after him. The engine ground to life, and the driver frantically wheeled around and headed back toward the highway, scraping the side of the Plymouth on a tree as he fought for control with his one working arm.

Eddie took a couple of steps after the fleeing car and stopped. The pain came in short terrible bursts. He felt the warm fluids oozing down his face where the pustules had broken. His mind veered along the edges of insanity. He was dying, and he knew it.

But before he surrendered to death, there was something he had to do. Someone he had to see. There was a debt to be paid, and Eddie Gault willed himself to stay alive long enough to pay it.

Thunder rumbled again, and Eddie started back along the dirt road.

The gloom of the lowering skies outside his window suited the mood of Lou Zachry. He sat slouched in the chair behind his desk in the Biotron plant, wondering if somewhere along the line he could have made a different decision and everything would have turned out right.

Fantasizing, he told himself. Wishful thinking. Not Lou Zachry’s style. He had just slipped away from the afternoon media briefing being handled by Corey Macklin. It had been a string of tired clichés that Corey hadn’t even tried to disguise as real news. The reporters were grumbling, and with justification. They had kept their bargain not to harass Dr. Kitzmiller and the task force. In return, they were supposed to be kept informed at the twice-daily briefings.

Zachry knew Corey had excuses for his spiritless delivery that day. Anybody with eyes could see what was happening between him and Dena Falkner. If Dena was now infested with the brain eaters, it was not so strange that Corey’s enthusiasm for his job would flag.

But damn it, almost everybody had lost somebody. You had to do your job even when you were hurting. That had been Lou Zachry’s code as long as he could remember, and he expected the people around him to live up to it.

Then there were the damn Russians sitting across the road in their air-conditioned limo, eyeballing the gate. Couldn’t those people read English? Didn’t they watch television? If they knew what was happening, how could it matter a damn if one of their people defected or got married or turned queer or whatever they were afraid he was doing?

And there was Kitzmiller. He was no help with his rigid old-time anti-Russian stance when a couple of words from him might send Raslov and his goons on their way. Sure, he had his reasons, but they dated back to another war in another time. Everybody had reasons.

Underneath these major worries, like a fragment of half-remembered music that won’t go away, was the phone call from the woman. She had gotten his number from the newspaper and was calling to warn that Eddie Gault was a victim of the brain eaters and was on his way to Biotron for some crazy purpose. She had refused to give her name, but some vaguely familiar note in the young voice troubled him.

Zachry was well aware of the potential danger if Eddie Gault talked. It was possible, of course, that the brain eaters would make the whole question academic, but Zachry could not wait for Armageddon. Eddie Gault had to die.

He was, in fact, a dead man the moment the brain eaters had entered his bloodstream. Zachry had talked to the task-force doctors enough to know what the little parasites could do to the human brain. He figured he’d been doing the man a favor by sending Quick and Vollney to help Eddie Gault out of this world.

The thought made Zachry wonder where the hell Quick and Vollney were. How long did it take to shoot a man?

Zachry reached for the telephone. He snatched his hand back reflexively as the thing rang just as he was about to touch it. Then he picked it up and cleared his throat.

“Zachry.”

“Lieutenant Purdue at the gate, sir. Agent Vollney is out here.”

“Vollney? What about Quick?”

“He’s alone, sir, and he’s … hurt.”

“For Christ’ sake, send him in.”

Zachry slammed down the receiver and ran out the door, heading for the front entrance to the plant. As he burst out the door, he saw Agent Donald Vollney making his way across the asphalt of the parking area. His left arm hung limp at his side. He clutched the shoulder with his right hand.

Zachry met him at the edge of the walkway before the building and helped him up the low curb.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Vollney said in a strained voice.

“What happened?”

“He went crazy. Killed Seth.”

“Eddie Gault killed a trained agent?”

“Yes, sir. He was like nothing human.”

Vollney’s legs sagged, and his eyes started to roll up. Zachry grasped him around the waist and supported him into the building and into his office. Inside, the agent recovered and refused a chair.

“Tell me about it,” Zachry said.

Vollney made an effort to get control of himself and in a voice purged of emotion related the events of the afternoon to Zachry. “Everything was going according to schedule. We intercepted the subject at the gate, transferred him to our car, and transported him to the location selected in advance for termination.”

“What condition was Gault in when you took him?” Zachry asked.

“He was obviously suffering some distress, but he was coherent and ambulatory.”

“All right, go on.”

“When we reached the designated location, we exited the car, and I instructed the subject to walk toward a growth of trees. He started to comply, then turned back. He began to … howl.”

“Howl?” Zachry repeated.

“Yes, sir. More like an animal than a man.”

Here Agent Vollney’s emotions welled up, and he dropped the awkward locutions of report language. “His face … the guy’s face … I’ve never seen anything like it. It looked like he’d walked into a hornet’s nest. There were bumps all over the skin, and right while we were watching, they broke open.” Vollney had to pause and swallow something that had come up in his throat. “They made little popping sounds and squirted gunk out of them. Jesus, it was ugly.”

Zachry gave the agent a minute to collect himself, then said, “What happened to Seth Quick?”

Vollney retreated back into the formalized, emotion-free jargon. “The subject became violent and charged Agent Quick and me. We both discharged our weapons. I observed several bullets strike the subject, but they seemed to have no effect. The subject seized Agent Quick by the throat and he — he killed him. When I tried to render assistance, the subject grasped my arm, knocking my weapon to the ground. I sustained an injury to my shoulder. I managed to reach the vehicle and returned here.”

“Gault escaped,” Zachry said, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Yes, sir. We — we just messed it up.”

“Nothing to do about it now,” Zachry said. “Go on back to the lab and get somebody to look at that arm.”

“Yes, sir.” Vollney lingered for a moment as though there were more he wanted to say but changed his mind and went out.

“Damn, damn, damn!” Zachry said to the empty office. Now he had a vengeful brain-eater victim thrashing through the woods out there. Fortunately, there was little chance he would get past the gate guards even if he did make it this far.

Where would he go? To the woman, of course! Circuits closed in the brain of Lou Zachry with an almost audible click. The woman, Roanne Tesla, had to be the anonymous caller. In the old days he would have punched up her name on the computer for a full report of the investigation they had done on her when Eddie had first come under suspicion. Now he had to pull out bits from his memory. Roanne Tesla: No Nukes; Greenpeace; Save the Whales. Your basic eco freak with leanings toward free-this and stop-that trendy radical causes.

Zachry thumped himself on the forehead. She was the one! Whether out of madness or twisted idealism or plain old villainy, this woman was behind the brain eaters. He was suddenly as thoroughly sure of her guilt as he was of his own name.

Zachry fairly leaped for the file cabinet and snatched out the folder labeled Edward Gault. He flapped it open on his desk, memorized the location of the house where Eddie lived with his girlfriend, and sprinted through the door.

As he dashed out of the building, a wisp of cool breeze ruffled his crew cut. Lightning forked to earth on the horizon, followed by the grumble of thunder. Lou Zachry shivered and ran toward his car.