Surviving Immortality Read online

  Chapter Six

  THEY RODE side by side with their packhorse, T-Bone, trailing. Groucho roamed within calling distance. They cantered through open country among scrub mesquite, piñon trees, and nopal. The day warmed beautifully, and lupine, growing in rocky crevasses, bloomed fragile lavender stalks. By midafternoon, they came upon Cash Creek in the hills below the White Mountains. The water had green trailing moss threaded over granite boulders. They followed the creek south as it cut its way through the broken hills.

  They scarcely spoke all day.

  Matt Reece rode leaning forward in the saddle, his right hand resting on the rope tied to his saddle horn that drew T-Bone. They rode beyond the boundaries of the Promesa Rota into hilly country he roamed often. This land, however, seemed altered, made suspect by the miracle that happened at the ranch. Everything held a hidden possibility; nothing could be taken at face value. The world felt different, and so did his body. His flesh tingled, as if the tissue clinging to his bones was buzzing like a swarm of bees; only instead of hearing it, he felt it rolling through his core in waves. It set him trembling at odd moments, his heart pounding, sweat pouring. He wondered if he was experiencing the hot flashes that women in menopause speak of. At times he thought about the possibility of possession. It felt like that—a demon invading his flesh.

  The bottom line was, the tricorder set something in motion within him, like the slow beginning of an avalanche. He was frightened by it, but it happened while trying to save Grandpa Blake, so whatever price he must pay was okay by him.

  Kenji, so silent and self-assured, now seemed a god who had supremacy over life or death. Matt Reece didn’t know if he should be scared or comforted. The thing he knew with certainty was that Groucho was now running through the brush with the pep of a dog half his age. He prayed the tricorder did something similar to Grandpa Blake. He saw little improvement before their hasty departure, but hope was burning a hole in his gut.

  They came upon an abandoned cabin on the slope of a stony mesa. Timbers of a collapsed windmill were heaped nearby. The place held a forlorn air, so isolated in this hard country. Matt Reece imagined the Promesa Rota looking like this someday, and the thought saddened him. They climbed a rise and dismounted, staring to the east, at the trail they traveled so far. They stood silent, like men who came to the end of something.

  Melancholy descended upon Matt Reece. He looked at the mountain peaks where the sun flashed on jagged teeth. He listened to the wind croon. When he mounted Comet again, he knew he could never lose his feeling for this land. The creak of his saddle, the jingle of his spur chains, the rasping of the horse’s tongue over the bit-roller all merged with the land’s melody. He felt suddenly sensitized, as if awakening from a deep slumber. And in a corner of his heart, he knew he was turning his back on his family, his home, his childhood. He’d wanted to leave the ranch even before the miracle, but now he felt he was abandoning everything he owed a duty to.

  To combat losing those beautiful memories of ranch life, he thought of the calm and peaceful strength, and eternal rightness of his father, for Jessup and this land were one. Matt Reece glanced at the shambled windmill again and shuddered.

  He dug Blake’s silver pocket watch from his pocket and checked the time. The hands had stopped at 8:15, which was about the time he had held the tricorder over Blake. He twisted the nob to rewind it, but it did no good. Busted. He clicked the lid closed and repocketed it. Some “Keeper of Time” I am, he thought.

  They rode on.

  Riding through a ravine, Matt Reece heard the shrill yelp of a coyote in distress. They halted the horses when they saw three coyotes near an outcrop of manzanita. Two reddish-brown beasts held a third coyote down. One had his jaws locked on the victim’s neck while the other sat on its haunches, tearing and eating the victim’s belly.

  The largest attacker pulled up and stared when he caught the horses’ scent. It growled and returned to ripping the victim’s flesh. “Damn you,” Matt Reece shouted. He slipped his carbine from its scabbard under his leg and aimed at the largest coyote. The prey was near dead, he knew, because its cries went silent. Above, a dozen buzzards swept across a circular sky, waiting their turn.

  Matt Reece lowered the barrel and thumbed the hammer down. “I just hate cannibals,” he told Kenji. But he knew that when these animals saw a helpless creature, even one of their own, they ripped it to bits. They were predators, after all, unfamiliar with mercy.

  They skirted around the beasts.

  Once they reached the tree line, they slowed to a leisurely pace, staying under the cover of evergreens as much as possible, and whenever they heard the drone of a plane or helicopter, they halted under cover until the sound died away.

  Kenji finally spoke. “There should be more game, considering the time of year.”

  Matt Reece nodded. All day he saw birds, and now and then he caught sight of a jackrabbit, but no sign of deer. He felt grateful that Kenji broke the silence. Now maybe he could ask a few of the million questions bombarding his skull.

  “You have the power to save Grandpa, just like Groucho, and you were letting him die.” He didn’t mean it to be an indictment, but there was no softer way to state it.

  “Maybe you should wait until you know the facts before you start accusing?”

  “Where’re we headed?”

  “A spread thirty miles south of Bishop. We’ll be plenty safe there for the time being.”

  “Who we running from?”

  “Everybody and his dog will kill to get their hands on what’s in here.” He patted his saddlebag. “From now on it’s just you and me, kiddo. We trust nobody.”

  Matt Reece didn’t have to be told who to trust. That became evident when they lit out without so much as a wave goodbye to Jessup. If they couldn’t trust him, then the entire world was against them.

  They rode under a stand of pines beside the creek and dismounted. “Water the stock while I round up some protein for dinner.”

  Kenji pulled the .30-30 carbine from Comet’s saddle scabbard. The rifle belonged to Patrick, but Kenji brought it along, almost as an afterthought. Matt Reece never saw Kenji eat meat, so the idea of him hunting seemed as bizarre as everything else that had happened that day. Matt Reece led the horses to the creek and let them drink while Groucho splashed around in the shallows. A shot rang out, and the horses reared and kicked out. He held the reins and spoke to them in a mollifying voice, telling them it was nothing more than a distant lightning strike. He walked the horses back up the slope.

  By the time he’d tied the horses to a pine limb, Kenji came through the trees carrying a jackrabbit with a bloody head and one ear shot off. Matt Reece’s stomach lurched when he saw the mutilated skull, but he looked away and quelled his nerves. Kenji reholstered the rifle and removed a hunting knife from his saddlebag.

  Kenji nodded at the stream. “Why don’t you cool off?”

  He knew the water was icy, but that seemed a better option than watching Kenji gut that poor creature. He shucked off his clothes. It felt delightful to be naked with the sun on his skin, and yet, his feet stung as he stepped into the stream. Every nerve ending howled as cold bit his ankles. He waded out up to his knees and sat with his back to the current, spreading his arms out and leaning into the flow until only his face was above the surface. The cold grew excruciating, to the point he couldn’t draw air. His reflexes demanded that he leap up and away from the torment. Yet, in a surprising display of will over instincts, he forced himself to endure that soul-consuming sting until he felt nothing.

  The need to fill his lungs finally forced him to stand. He pushed his hair back and wiped his eyes. His body trembled violently. On shore, Kenji squatted several feet from the horses, gutting the rabbit. He called Groucho over and fed him the organs. He rose, wiped the blade on the rabbit pelt, and placed the knife back in his saddlebag before tying the rabbit by its hind legs to his saddle horn. He pulled a notebook and a pen from the saddlebag and walked to the boulder wh
ere Matt Reece had piled his clothes.

  Kenji washed his hands in the stream and said, “I need to assess any changes in your body.” He motioned for Matt Reece to come ashore. “I don’t have lab equipment, so I can’t do a proper examination, but I can take measurements to see if there are any outward changes over the next several days.”

  Matt Reece splashed to the bank and stood warming in the sun while Kenji scrutinized every inch of him. Blackbirds in the trees sat squawking, as if he were one of them newly emerged from his baptism. He felt a twinge of satisfaction that he had endured nature’s stinging assault.

  Kenji asked how he felt and took pages of notes. By the time he was done, Matt Reece was dry enough to climb back into his clothes.

  Kenji opened the canvas camp bag strapped to T-Bone and pulled out a loaf of bread, a block of cheddar, and a bag of oats. While Matt Reece prepared cheese sandwiches, Kenji poured oats into his upturned Stetson and fed the horses one by one.

  They ate the sandwiches quickly, swung into their saddles, left the creek, and climbed a ridge. They followed a valley southwest, still keeping to the trees. A cool wind rushed down the slopes, and Matt Reece wondered if they would find shelter for the night.

  Late afternoon brought arrowheads of geese speeding north, no doubt searching for the shine of water where they could rest the night.

  By the time the sun coppered the landscape, they’d covered over fifty miles. They now rode in unfamiliar country, rolling hills with grassy meadows and streams rushing off the mountain. Fading light fanned upon the plains below and withdrew along the edges of the world, leaving a blue shadow that crept toward them. They dismounted in a clearing beside a pool surrounded by pines as abundant as blades of grass. Matt Reece unsaddled and brushed Comet and Pepper. Kenji unloaded T-Bone. Matt Reece hobbled the horses and turned them out to graze while he gathered firewood. It seemed dangerous to build a fire, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to eat that rabbit raw.

  He built up a flame. The wind made the fire squirm and scuffle as if ill at ease, even though it was sheltered by heavy stones. But the resiny branches of the dwarf pines couldn’t be blown out, and a blaze soon rushed up in long yellow spirals.

  Kenji skinned the rabbit, skewered it on a green limb, and propped it over the flames to broil. Matt Reece pulled the coffeepot from the camp bag and filled it with water from the pool, measured out grounds, and set it on the coals. He also set up a flatiron over the fire, and while the coffee brewed, he mixed masa with water in a bowl and patted out tortillas, dropping them on the flatiron.

  Kenji laid out the bedrolls and placed the saddles at the ends for pillows. He leaned back into his saddle and watched the fire. His face grew mysterious with the gentle play of firelight and shadows. “How’s that food coming?”

  Matt Reece used his fingers to flip tortillas. “The caviar and pheasant under glass are ready. The white peaches in champagne will take a few more minutes.”

  “I guess it’s time we talked,” Kenji said.

  “Yessir.”

  Kenji propped the heel of his right boot on top of the toe of his left, as if he were about to pace off the distance between the ground and the stars. “I guess you figured I’ve discovered a way to make people younger. Oddly enough, it all started before I was born. You see, my family lived in Hiroshima during the Pacific War. My mother was eight months pregnant with me when the Enola Gay dropped the A-bomb. It killed a hundred and forty thousand people, including my mother. Radiation poisoning killed or disfigured tens of thousands more. But it had an opposite effect on me and a few other fetuses who were exposed to the emissions in utero.”

  “In what?”

  “Unborn babies. Radiation caused nightmarish birth defects, but there were exceptions.”

  “Jesus, sir, that would make you old as Grandpa. What was it like growing up there after the bomb?”

  “They are pure torment, my memories—an exquisite torture.”

  Matt Reece turned the spit holding the rabbit, trying to absorb his shock.

  “That radiation altered an enzyme in my system, and that changed my DNA, which makes my body produce masses of highly charged human growth cells. Those cells rapidly destroy and replace old cells and keep my organs and tissue healthy.”

  The last of the sunlight bled from the sky. The temperature fell. It would no doubt be a cold night. Sparks rising from the fire raced red through the tree branches.

  Matt Reece took the last tortilla off the griddle, laid it on a stack of others, and set the griddle on a rock to cool. He wrapped a rag around the coffeepot handle, filled two tin cups, and carried one to Kenji. He walked back to the fire and knelt, sipping his coffee while staying within the circle of warmth. He threw more logs on the flames, hoping he’d gathered enough firewood to get them through the night.

  “Because of the radiation, I aged slowly until I grew to where I am now, and then I stopped aging altogether. Thirty years ago I hooked up with Consuela, and we’ve been researching how radiation changed me. Six years ago we discovered how to reproduce it, and now we can virtually reverse aging. It’s partly because of me that they built our research lab out in the middle of nowhere. Consuela didn’t want anyone discovering what we were up to, or noticing that I wasn’t aging.”

  Kenji talked about the impressive list of diseases this treatment cured. “This will eliminate the medical industry.”

  What could Matt Reece say? Outlandish? Yes, but he’d never known Kenji to lie, and hell, he could see for himself; Groucho lay by the fire after a hard day’s run.

  It grew so quiet that he could hear the faint sound of big rigs rolling along Highway 168, ten miles to the south.

  “What will happen to Grandpa?”

  “Barring murder or accidents, and with regular inoculations from the tricorder, he’ll live four, maybe five thousand years. Maybe forever. We just don’t know.”

  Kenji went on to tell how Matt Reece exposed himself while treating Blake.

  “Does this mean I’ll be eighteen forever?”

  Kenji explained that he had never experimented on non-Asian humans, and never on anyone younger than sixty years old. All his human experiments had been on elder Japanese men like himself, so he wasn’t sure what side effects would occur with non-Japanese DNA. That’s why he brought Matt Reece into hiding with him, to study the effects and to protect him.

  “Protect?”

  Kenji described Consuela’s and his intentions of keeping the findings to themselves for as long as there were weapons on earth. He told of the YouTube video that went viral and the fact that the whole world was now, no doubt, searching for them. “Scientists will want to dissect you in order to find out this secret. No telling what they’ll do.”

  “Is Grandpa Blake in danger?”

  “Hopefully he’ll have enough sense to keep his mouth shut.”

  Matt Reece spat into the fire. He’d been reasonably calm all day, and often happy to be on what seemed a grand adventure, but all this talk terrified him. He wished he could back up time by thirty minutes to a point before Kenji unloaded all this information. Being a dumb kid, he reckoned, had its advantages.

  “How long do we need to hide out?”

  “We’re headed to a place where it’ll be safe to be ourselves.”

  “Where?”

  “The last place on earth they’ll look for us.”

  “Jesus, sir, you’re making my goddamn head hurt.”

  “Sorry, but you’re the one who opened Pandora’s box.”

  “And you built the fuckin’ box!”

  Matt Reece turned his back on Kenji, wanting to quit this talk. He lifted the rabbit off the flame and set it on the flatiron. It didn’t look appetizing, and he wasn’t sure Kenji would eat it, but screw him. He could starve. Matt Reece pulled the meat from the bones with his fingers and piled it onto two tin plates. He peppered them with bottled hot sauce and carried the food to the blankets. They rolled stringy meat in tortillas and chewed while staring at the
fire.

  “It’s not all that bad,” Kenji said.

  “The hell it’s not! I’ll never see Jessup or Patrick or Grandpa again. And I’m stuck in puberty forever.”

  “I was talking about the rabbit.”

  Matt Reece scowled at him while he ripped off another bite and chewed.

  When they wiped their plates with the last of the tortillas, Matt Reece moved back to the fire. He cleaned the plates with a rag and held them close to the flames to kill any bacteria. He wrapped the rag around the coffeepot handle, poured two more cups, and carried them back to the blankets. Kenji pulled two wool serapes from the camp bag. Matt Reece set the cups between them and draped the blue serape over his shoulders, leaving the dirt-brown one for Kenji.

  He felt lost in such a large serape, but it would keep him warm. He pulled off his boots and stood them beside his bedroll, but he left his socks on. “It’ll take decades to destroy all the bombs and battleships. Maybe hundreds of years. If this cures cancer and AIDS and heart disease, what about the people who are sick now? How many will die before they de-arm the world?”

  “What’s the good of saving their lives if someone blows them up or shoots them in the streets? We have an opportunity to eliminate all weapons by dangling a golden carrot, otherwise it’ll never happen. It’s the only way to defeat war and gun violence, forever.”

  Matt Reece shook his head. “I can’t stomach so many good people dying when you can save them.”

  “Being a human being doesn’t make you ‘good,’ just like being a dog turd doesn’t make you anything but a pile of shit. You are one or you’re not—nothing good or bad about either one. And let’s not forget that as many people die at the hands of ‘good people’ with guns as die from any other group.”

  Matt Reece ran a warp-speed mind search for an effective counterargument, but he came up empty. He tossed the rest of his coffee on the ground, rested his head on the saddle, and looked up through pine branches at the sky. It was one of those nights when the sky rioted with stars and the earth seemed doubly black because of it.