Zero, p.6
Zero, page 6
“Who is he?” Brian screamed into Connell’s face, but he already knew.
The color drained from his face and he released his grip on the professor. He stumbled slowly backward.
He’s coming!
Brian thought of the zero fading in the dead girl’s breath on the mirror.
Zero. Dr. Leod had called him Zero.
The girl had been trying to warn him about Dr. Leod.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Brian gasped.
Connell looked up with tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Her leg,” Brian whispered. “He gave you her leg.”
“We needed it!” Connell sobbed. “We couldn’t even get approval to use a monkey’s limb. We told them... told them it came from a cadaver.”
“How many more died here?” Brian shrieked, whirling in a circle amidst the shivering bodies. “You could have prevented all of this!”
Connell dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands.
“No!” Brian shouted, grabbing Connell by the collar and jerking his head up. “You don’t get to hide from this! Look! Look at them all! Look at all the people who died in this house because of you!”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Connell wailed, a strand of saliva slapping from his chin to his shirt.
“Each and every one of these people is buried inside of these walls! Wrapped in cellophane and wired together like some sort of living schematic!”
“Wired together?” Connell asked, his brow furrowing. He straightened at the thought. “Inside the walls?”
Brian released the doctor’s coat.
“My God. He actually pulled it off,” Connell said, looking from the mirror to the walls and back again.
“Pulled what off?” Brian demanded, but Connell was already to his feet and headed toward the mirror. He stared at his own smoke-clouded reflection for a moment before finally reaching out and touching one of the electric veins in the glass. He ran his fingers up and down the wiring, tracing it, absorbing some form of information like a blind man would read Braille.
Connell spoke, his voice little more than a whisper.
“We wanted to advance medicine: to create artificial limbs and organs that the body wouldn’t reject. We wanted to overcome heart attacks and strokes. We wanted to change the world.” He reached up and swiped a clear patch in the soot. “Doug. I think he originally felt the same way, but he... he changed. He saw the potential for the human body as a conductor, capable of amplifying the biological energy we could modify from the electrical input current.
“They form a complete circuit,” Brian said, walking to the mirror beside Connell. In the reflection, he could see all of the eyes in the room staring from shivering, blood-swathed faces, focused on them. “The lightning provides the source of power. The metal poles must have some sort of positive charge to trap the electrically negative lightning. The cords then carry the electron flow from the spires to the house, where it’s translated from electricity to biological energy in the bodies in the walls. They in turn amplify the energy in succession, boosting the power...” He paused and looked to Connell. “But to supply what?”
The mirror shivered, straining against the plastic clips that held it to the wall.
Brian watched his reflection vibrate.
He took a step forward and placed his palm on the glass.“Something’s on the other side,” he gasped, jerking his hand back.
He stumbled slowly away, watching the objects in the mirror shimmer like the reflections on a still pond violated by a thrown rock.
Buck whimpered and pressed himself into the corner by the front door.
The lightning snapped and strained against the poles, draining the energy from the sky, lighting the house with brilliant blue and white strobes of blinding light.
Bang!
A small hole appeared in the mirror like a rock hammering a windshield, the glass cracking and spider-webbing away.
Bang!
Then another.
Shards of mirrored glass tinkled to the floor, leaving black gaps like missing puzzle pieces.
Brian looked to Connell in time to see that precious moment of understanding erase the furrows in the professor’s face and a sense of comprehension wash over him.
He began to nod.
Then closed his eyes.
The mirror exploded outward behind him, firing wicked shards of glass into the room.
Ø Ø Ø
A human form lunged through the mirror, collapsing in a heap at the base of the wall in the midst of the scattered shards, blazing with the reflection from the lightning snapping like a whip outside of every door and window. The body jerked and twitched as though wrought in the throngs of a final convulsive seizure. Head whipping back and forth on the neck, back buckling into contorted angles that the spine should never have been able to allow, the body collapsed forward. All of the vessels beneath the decayed, parchment-colored flesh were visible, protruding through like worms crawling on the skin. The body itself was little more than decrepit skin draped over bone. There was no muscle left whatsoever. Burnt hair smoked atop the head, small blue flames licking to life.
Wires ran from within the wall to the arms, branching into smaller vessels and disappearing into the wrists like the pair of hands he had seen within the wall. More cords ran to the feet, matched with the visible veins on the tops of the feet. The common carotid arteries to either side of the neck were swollen like twin goiters where matching cords had been sewn into the skin.
The body bucked and shivered.
Then fell absolutely still.
“Doug? Oh God. He wired himself to absorb all the energy,” Connell whispered, easing toward the body.
Brian looked from one deceased face to the next, lifeless, fearful. Lightning flared from their eyes with a hiss of static, leaping to the ceiling where it burned in electrical flames, spreading unimpeded.
The bodies of the dead rose from the ground in unison, toes dangling inches from the ground. Heads snapped back against their shoulders, arms flung out straight to either side, the lightning flowed from their eyes in smoking bolts.
The decomposed heap in the middle of the floor rose from the ground, folding backward at the waist as though suspended by invisible wires from his bare pelvis. Leod spun in circles, a cyclone of lightning swirling around him from the ceiling like a tornado. There was some sort of circuitry sewn into the chest, as though replacing the very skin itself. It looked remarkably like the electrical plates and wiring inside of Brian’s broken television.
The swirling stream of electrical power poured into the circuitry like water being sucked down a drain, until all of the crackling electrical flames shot from the charcoaled ceiling and into the man’s chest.
As one, every body in the room dropped to the floor with a hiss like so many flickering flames, fading, dwindling.
Dr. Connell reached down toward the smoking form of his former colleague, immense heat emanating from the body.
He turned to Brian, unblinking.
“He thought that the biological energy could be converted to electrical energy in such a way as to exist as a separate entity devoid of flesh. A living human being composed solely of electricity.” Behind him, the corpse smoldered, positively reeking of cooked flesh. “I guess he was wrong.”
Thunder tore a seam in the sky, shaking the very walls of the house.
Buck whimpered and scurried to Brian’s side, shivering violently against his leg.
“I suppose we’d better call the police,” Connell said. He ran a trembling hand through his hair and let out a nervous laugh. “I don’t know how we’ll even begin to explain—”
Tangible energy shot from the circuitry on Leod’s blistered chest. It formed a straight beam like a laser, drawing diagonal lines in a raster pattern so fast Connell could barely track their course. The diagonal lines formed a human shape, though larger than any man he had ever seen. After finishing the first field of diagonal lines, the lightning laser rose to the top again, drawing diagonal line after line, filling in the gaps left between the initial lines until there was no space left between. An electrical image that he recognized immediately as Professor Doughall Leod flickered before them like a hologram.
The laser died and the circuitry on the corpse’s chest popped and snapped, catching fire and melting through the circuit board, igniting the thoracic cavity.
The electrical being shimmered before them, crackling with small blue bolts moving up and down his body. He raised both palms and inspected them with eyes glowing with energy so blinding it was like looking directly into twin suns. Appraising his hands, he turned them over and over, flexing the fingers into fists then straightening them again. He raised his knees from the floor, leaving a gap of air beneath his feet, hovering there for a moment before straightening his legs once again.
Finally, his stare returned to the room around him, settling on Dr. Connell.
He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a scream of feedback like a live microphone pressed up against an amplifier. Lightning snapped between his teeth, expanding sideways from his eyes like an electrical sunset.
“What have you done?” Connell gasped, taking a step back.
Leod looked to him and smiled with a crackle of power. Both arms shot out from his sides, hands clasping Connell by either side of the head. Energy flowed from one hand to the other through Connell’s head, lighting it like a flashlight through flesh. Fire shot from Connell’s eyes and mouth, flaring from his nostrils. His skin changed from pink to black before his entire head was consumed by flames.
He never even had time to scream before spouting a spray of boiling blood.
Leod tossed him aside like a slab of meat. Connell crumpled against the wall with the flames rising from his cooked skin to lap at the wall.
His gaze turned on Brian, who felt like an insect drawn to the electric blue glare of a bug zapper.
“Oh God,” Brian whispered, stumbling backward, tripping over Buck.
He flopped over onto all fours, his shadow framed in the electrical glow against the wall. He scurried forward, passing harmlessly through the holographic bodies littering the floor around him like autumn leaves. Finally securing some sort of traction, he got his feet beneath him and leapt from the ground, catching himself on the wall.
What remained of the jaggedly fragmented mirror was covered with blood from the other side, through which countless hands had smeared finger-painted circles, each with a diagonal line drawn through the center.
Zero.
Covering the mirror in bloodied smears.
Zero.
Brian’s breath caught in his chest.
They weren’t trying to warn him about Leod.
He understood now.
Dear God.
He understood.
Ø Ø Ø
Brian propelled himself from the wall a heartbeat before an electrical fist slammed behind him, sending veins of electricity shooting through the wall, cracking the plaster.
He lunged over Dr. Connell’s cooking remains. The side of his head slammed against the floor with a resounding crack that summoned a copper taste from his sinuses. He felt the left half of his face go wet with blood, sapping his hair to his skull. Flailing, he pushed himself up, his vision throbbing with the pain in his head, and scurried forward. All he could do was force himself to crawl and slither, all-too-conscious of the intensity of light coming up from behind him, the heat from the conduction so warm he could feel it through the wet clothes.
Reaching the corner of the wall leading to the hallway, Brian grabbed the edge with both hands, smearing bloodied handprints up and down the warm plaster, tugging himself out of the living room and into the hallway. He crawled over the rapidly dissipating corpses, their electrical forms reverting to dwindling clouds of photons barely holding their physical shape.
A clap of thunder boomed behind him, but he didn’t dare look back.
All he could think of was the look on Connell’s face when the current was transferred through his head. The sheer amount of pain that twisted his features in that fateful second before his flesh split like a burnt hotdog and burst into flame—
“Where is it?” he screamed, swiping his hands across the floor in front of him.
The impossible glow of light filled the hallway behind him, generating such a blinding glare that everything around him appeared as different shades of white. It generated so much heat that he felt like he was being baked alive.
Jamming his fingers on the shaft, he screamed and wrapped his fist around the handle of the hammer, leaping to his feet.
Zero.
Biting a tatter of flesh from the inside of his lower lip, Brian raised the hammer over his shoulder, haphazardly aligning it with the hole he’d already torn in the wall, and swung it with all of his might.
It wasn’t a zero.
He’d been wrong.
The hammer head slammed right into the wrist of one of the arms in the wall, pulping with a splatter of silver fluid. He raised it again and again, pounding on the wrist, shattering bones, destroying flesh, flinging reflective sprays of artificial blood into the air around him.
He screamed with the exertion, his shoulder throbbing, closing his eyes against the bitter sting of the electrolytic paste. It lingered on his tongue, dripping down his throat, but there was no time to spit.
A hand closed on his left shoulder with a searing pain like a hot iron sizzling through his flesh, summoning a swell of heat that boiled the marrow in his bones.
Still, he brought the hammer down over and over, pounding straight through the mashed skin of the wrist.
Jessica Marus’s wrist.
Even now he recognized her.
Another hand grabbed the back of his shirt and tugged, the cloth immediately catching fire, sending tendrils of flames up the back of his neck into his hair.
Still, he brought the hammer down, raging against the pain and the fear.
The ulna snapped in two, the wrist nearly completely cut in half, held together by a strap of flesh and fragments of the exposed radius. The entire wall was drenched with silver blood.
Break the circuit.
That’s what she had meant.
It wasn’t a zero at all.
Brian’s entire shoulder ignited with the spontaneous generation of flames, bringing with it a pain the likes of which he had never even imagined possible. It felt as though his shoulder had been lowered into a cauldron of boiling oil, while the bones within burned like logs.
Screaming.
The zero was an engineering symbol.
The circuit-breaker.
The hammer pounded the wrist, culminating with a crack of the exterior wood. The hand dropped away from the wrist, dangling by the cords that connected it to the other body’s hand. Glowing with the reflected glare from what Leod had become, artificial blood spurted from the severed wrist.
Brian whirled, stealing his shoulder from the ferocious grasp, throwing himself onto his back on the floor. The flames on his shoulder hissed in protest as they fought against his own weeping blood from the wound.
The corpses littering the floor disappeared in the blink of an eye as though they had never been there at all.
The energized form of Dr. Leod collapsed in on itself like a dying star, sucking everything into a pinpoint-sized hole with a scream of high voltage forced to run through wires far too thin.
Brian could still feel the current crawling across his body, electrifying every hair to stand erect, his fillings vibrating.
Lightning snapped from one wall to the next, running up and down the plaster through the electron void created between.
Wiring sizzled inside the walls, igniting with a whoosh of flames that sent churning clouds of smoke from the holes in the walls. Heat blossomed from the house with such intensity that it curled the ends of the fine hairs on his body.
“Buck!” Brian screamed, charging through the electrical displays snapping between the walls of the hallway, toward the front door.
The dog cringed in the corner, his fur standing erect like a trimmed porcupine, olive eyes reflecting the flashes of lightning bursting through the air all around the house.
Brian tried to wrap both arms around the dog’s chest, but his left arm was completely unresponsive; the slight attempt at movement sending a ferocious stab of pain from his shoulder, down his arm and into his fingers where it sparked with explosive torture.
Squeezing with his right arm, hugging Buck to his chest, he charged through the front door and into the storm, thankful for the blessed rain that chilled the excruciating heat on his skin.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Drenched shadows gathered outside the gate surrounding the front yard.
Brian collapsed onto the walk halfway to the street, rolling just in time to keep from slamming down on top of Buck.
He flopped onto his back, wallowing from side to side, trying to catch his breath. The faces of the onlookers flashed past: wide-eyes, hands clasped over mouths, frozen by terror.
His eyes rolled up beneath his lids.
Raindrops battered his face, slapped his tongue in his open mouth.
Buck nuzzled his cheek with a cold nose.
Darkness.
Ø Ø Ø
Brian bolted upright, sheet clinging to his damp pajama top, blanket bunched around his waist.
The fading realm of dreams swirled at odds against the waking world in a cacophonous miasma of shadows. At first, he was unable to rationalize his surroundings, as though waking someplace different than where he remembered falling asleep. Slowly, the wan moonlight parting the blinds drew contrast in shades of gray.
A darkened television was bolted to the plain white wall directly ahead. There was a dry erase board with the stenciled word “Nurse:” and the name Andrea hurriedly scrawled in green marker to the right. Beside “Aide:” was the name Anna.
