“My parents loved my sister just as much as they loved me.”
“I’m not saying my parents didn’t love my brother-I believe they loved him very much-but still he was a …” Matheson tilted his head back and forth, searching for the right word. “Well, a burden. And not just on my family, either. There were the people who came to work with him. The staff at school. The doctors and nurses and everyone else. And I realized it wasn’t just my brother-it was all these people with disabilities, all over the world. They were draining the life from their families, from their caregivers, from the people who came to work with them. Some might find a place in society at some point performing menial tasks, but most of them would do nothing more than take up space until the day they died.”
Matheson shook his head slowly, staring past Eli.
“I knew it didn’t have to be that way. I knew that, in theory, these mutations could be eliminated. It would take hard work, and it would take smart people, but I knew it was possible, and I wanted to be the one that helped find a cure.”
“What changed?”
Matheson blinked, looking at Eli as if just remembering that he was there. He took a deep breath.
“The simple realization that even if these mutations were eliminated, it wouldn’t change anything. Yes, we might manage to do away with mental retardation and autism, but what then? That wouldn’t save the world. If anything, it would cause even more trouble.”
“How so?”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Matheson said, leaning forward in the wheelchair, his voice gaining in pitch, “the world is going to hell. War, famine, genocide-you name it, it’s happening.”
“Is that why you created an army?”
“You think you know what this is all about, don’t you? You know nothing. The world is falling apart, but the people I work for are going to save us all.”
“Well,” Eli said, “judging by the last thirty years, they seem to be doing a bang-up job.”
“The time is coming soon. When, I don’t know, but in the next several years it will happen.”
“What will happen?”
“Change. A tide so large and powerful it will alter our entire society for the better. I’m just disappointed that I may not be around to see it happen.”
“Why?”
Matheson’s frail and bony hand, marked with liver spots, floated dismissively between the two of them. “Cancer. Despite everything we’ve accomplished, we have yet to find a cure for cancer.”
“So now what happens-you’re going to kill me?”
“Eventually.”
“You didn’t have to kill the others.”
“But I did, Eli. You understand that, don’t you? Their deaths were all part of your punishment.”
“What is the rest of my punishment?”
Matheson released another deep breath, his frail body looking as if it was about ready to sink in on itself.
“That’s a good question. I’ve been waiting for this day for so long, you’d think I would be better prepared. There are so many different options worth exploring, but killing you outright isn’t one of them. What fun would that be? After all the trouble it took to get you here, why would I just end your life? No, now that you are finally here, I think we’ll come up with something much more appropriate and fitting.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Eli said. “You don’t want to die before I do.”
Matheson smiled. “Not to worry, I won’t.”
“ ‘Nothing beside remains.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“That line you had up in your office, the one from ‘Ozymandias’-‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’ You do know what that line is really saying, don’t you?”
Eli could see from the slight wrinkle in the old man’s eyes that he didn’t. For years-decades, even-Matheson had probably had that line up in his office, always chuckling about it, always quoting it, but had never taken an extra minute to read the entire poem.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Eli said. “Some day soon I will die, you will die, everyone will die, and nothing of what you are trying to build will remain.”
Matheson leaned forward in his chair, the slight movement clearly causing him pain. “That’s where you’re wrong, Eli. It will remain. And even if I’m not alive when it happens, people will know what I did. They’ll read about how I helped change this world for the better. That’s my legacy. What’s yours?”
A hurried knock came from the door, and the two men from earlier entered.
Matheson turned awkwardly in his chair. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The taller of the two men approached the bed, carrying an electronic device. “I’m sorry, sir, but I need to check something.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“I’m afraid not.”
The electronic device was the size and shape of a flashlight. The man flicked a switch and hovered the device first over Eli’s feet, then began to move it up his legs.
That harmonic hum started up once again as Matheson turned the chair around, his face growing red. “You fool. You didn’t scan him already?”
The man didn’t answer. He slowly moved the device up the length of Eli’s body.
“Apologies, sir,” the other man said, standing by the door. “We did scan him when he first arrived, but Zach just wants to-”
The device beeped, a light on it turning red.
Zach paused, keeping the device hovered right above Eli’s stomach.
“What is it?” Matheson’s voice had turned to a growl. “What does that mean?”
Before anyone could answer him, the lights in the ceiling flickered as the room trembled slightly. Almost immediately, a small LED just above the door began to flash red.
Matheson stared up at the ceiling. “What in the world is that?”
“That,” Eli said, staring straight back at the scientist with a cold smile, “is my legacy.”
sixty-three
When the first bomb goes off, it goes off. For some reason I was expecting the same kind of blast that those charges had made back on Martha’s Vineyard, the ones we used to bring down the trees, but this one creates ten times the blast, if not more, the whole world momentarily shaking.
“You okay?” I ask Ashley, who’s crouched beside me, taking cover behind a fallen tree, the both of us maybe three hundred yards away from the building.
She nods distantly, her gaze focused on the smoke and fire and all the bits and pieces of concrete the explosion has created. I had set the charge at the corner of the building, away from the garage entrance. The building itself is two stories tall, seemingly abandoned, the parking lot small and empty with faded white lines. Weeds stick up through cracks in the concrete, the surrounding grass high and ragged. The building sits a quarter mile off the main highway, hidden behind a cluster of trees, a sign along the highway announcing that a lease is pending.
My mind usually isn’t one to jump to crazy conspiracy theories (at least not until the past couple of days), but I’m guessing that this building is meant to look abandoned, and has looked like this for several years, just as the lease has probably been stuck in pending purgatory for just as long. It’s enough of an eyesore that nobody wants to give it a second glance, but not too much of an eyesore that it will stick in anyone’s mind.
It’s just an empty building, one of thousands across the country, except this empty building has state of the art security cameras bolted near the roof. They’re almost impossible to see-almost too tiny, little black circles-but I saw them as I circled the building to drop off the charges. Whether those cameras are connected to anything, it’s impossible to say, though I’m betting they are. I can even imagine a room somewhere packed with computer screens, all the screens showing different views of the surrounding area. Several of those screens would have shown me only minutes ago, sprinting forward to do what I needed to do, because this wasn’t a time to act inconspicuous, especially considering that there’s nobody around, and my fingers were crossed the entire time that there was nobody currently viewing those computer screens, and if there was, that maybe they had taken their bathroom break for the minute or two it took me to do what I needed to do and hurry back for cover.