The Nowhere Man

22 Divine Right

Propped on a brace of pillows on a regally upholstered gurney, René drew in a deep lungful of air as the needle sank beneath his flesh. This was his favorite moment, when the fix first flowed into his body and set the world quivering with potency. Everything turned vibrant, the colors saturated even down here in the bowels of the chalet. Every sensation felt enhanced — the oxygen in his lungs, the hum of adrenaline hurtling through his veins, the creamy sheets caressing his bare skin.

The rush hit his arteries, a surge that rocketed him to his feet. The catheter in his arm couldn’t slow him. He seized the IV pole and dragged it beside him, one stubborn wheel giving off a squeak.

His finest bequeathment, an AB blood type, served him exquisitely. Having both key antigens and neither constraining antibody made him a universal recipient. Anyone could give to him. Few could receive from him. He was a taker. He hadn’t merely resigned himself to this fact; he embraced it as divine right.

Sure of foot, his back ramrod-straight and unaching, he threaded through the youthful bodies lying prone and unconscious on their gurneys. Through the dim light, he moved erect and proud, an ageless sovereign lording over his minions.

All was right in the Great Chain of Being.

He swore he could already feel the pyrotechnics exploding through him. His aging tissue rejuvenating. Tired muscles mending. New neural connections sprouting in his hippocampus. His heart, his brain, even his cartilage reviving. His memory fortifying. Liver cells generating. He felt swollen with vitality, with youth, with timelessness.

Even his sense of smell grew more keen. This was no trick of the mind. From across the basement lab, he picked up a trace of dewy perfume on the slender neck of David’s girl.

Kendall was an AB type, too, unlucky dove. She would receive from him tonight, and that would cost her. Each of the guests had to be replenished, and there was no use wasting valuable O neg from the freezer when she could take what had to be drawn out of René to make room for the new.

From time immemorial man had searched for the fountain of youth. From Herodotus’s recitations to Ponce de León’s hapless wanderings, it had cast a mythological shadow across the ages. Silver chalices and bubbling springs.

Who would have thought it had been right in front of everyone all along?

Someone just required the audacity to take it.

If you considered it, really considered it, this was a move befitting a Cassaroy. Rather than forging through enemy fire to claim some godforsaken battle-torn hill, René had fought his way through social mores and human limitations to stake his flag in the virgin terrain of an age-old fantasy.

Passing among his unsuspecting acolytes now, he brushed against dangling bags of blood, as bright and cheerful as Christmas decorations.

That was when he heard a groan behind him. He halted. Turned. There was movement in the bed where there was supposed to be none.

And then Joshua sat up.

The kid was not supposed to come to for another few hours. Dr. Franklin rarely got the dosing wrong, but the bigger the fellow, the more unpredictable the anesthesia. All that mass, it seemed, gave the boy the tolerance of a water buffalo.

It was awful when they woke up in the middle.

They got so confused.

It wasn’t just the whir of the processing machines, the hum of the medical refrigerators, the white-noise rush of the benchtop centrifuges, all of it amplified off the basement walls. Nor the smells, the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol, the nail-polish reek of iodine, the hospital-room whiff of PVC tubing and dried sweat. The sights weren’t what did it either — not the needles plunged into their flesh, the blood piping from their veins, their acquaintances laid out in neighboring beds, dead to the world. Not the scrape of the sanitized pillowcase at their nape. Not the taste, old pennies at the back of the tongue.

It was the vertiginous sense of dislocation.

They were no longer in the world as they knew it. No, this gave them a glimpse of The World As It Really Was.

Might is right. Eat or be eaten. Accrue resources or starve. Repeated again and again and again, because all ten thousand years of civilization had been built upon mankind’s desire to deny this fundamental truth.

René tried to protect them from reality. They were supposed to pass out full-bellied, drunk, and happy. Never know the difference. He was greedy, sure, but not inhumane.

No sense spooking the livestock on their way to the abattoir.

And yet now Joshua was certainly spooked.

He reared up from his gurney, tubes snaking around his bulging arms, IV poles crashing over.

René unhooked his own IV bag and dashed away, using Kendall’s gurney as a shield. He was too charged to feel fear, but a dark excitement gripped him. Tingling electrified his body — his gums, his arms, the skin of his lower back.

Joshua’s head pivoted, fixing on René. Even across the gurney, René registered the wounded rage and stripped-bare terror lurking behind the dilated pupils. It gave him a heady, almost sexual rush. He wondered if this is what his ancestors had felt charging through the fray, shrapnel grazing their cheeks.

Joshua lunged at René, sending the gurney skidding. Dead to the world, Kendall rolled to one side, smashed beneath Joshua’s weight. Scrambling toward them, Dr. Franklin tried to hit the kid with a syringe full of Versed, but with all the flailing he couldn’t get to the port. Joshua clawed across the unconscious girl, his churning legs propelling the gurney until René was backed to the wall, Joshua’s straining fingers inches from his face.

That was when Dex stepped in.

However big the boy was, he looked like a puppet in Dex’s hands. Dex lifted him in a choke hold. There was a crackling sound, and then Joshua poured limply from Dex’s arms onto the floor.

Silence reasserted itself in the basement.

Joshua lay still, one dead palm pressed to the concrete.

This was not a substantial problem. Come morning René would generate some excuse to cover for the boy’s absence. He’d peddled such excuses before. If the others showed bruising from the needles, he would instruct David to tell them that in their drunken state they’d played around with heroin one of the kitchen workers had brought. Not to worry — what happened at Chalet Savoir Faire stayed at Chalet Savoir Faire. And that’s what would happen. The best way to ensure silence was to bury the truth beneath shame.

From over by the door, David coughed out a note of disbelief, hugging himself around the waist, his arms trembling. Dr. Franklin leaned against a cabinet, flushed from the scare.

René, too, was breathing hard, though not from fear. He’d never felt more alive. He looked down at the IV bag compressed in his fist, now depleted. In all the excitement, he had rapid-bolused the final unit into his arm. All that fresh young blood bathing his stem cells, turning back the clock.

With a furrow of his shiny forehead, Dex looked past Joshua’s slumped body at René. He seemed unclear which mouth the present circumstances called for.

René pointed to Dex’s right hand.

Dex raised the smile, folded it across his mouth.

Yes, that looked appropriate.

It was, after all, a happy occasion.