the ranges are too small. And as far as we know, gravity doesn’t carry information. That leaves EM waves.”
“Like light and radio waves.”
“Yeah, but to pick up thoughts of someone five miles away, you’d need a power source that would cook your brain. And Gretch was in Connecticut.”
“So how do you explain it?”
“I can’t, but Elizabeth would say you experienced the supernatural.”
“But what do you think?”
She shook her head. “I’m still a skeptic. Either an unknown medium—something we’ve never seen before. Or we’re missing something in the diagnostics. Don’t get excited, but the only way to know for sure is more suspensions.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
“But what if she’s right? What if there’s a whole other level of awareness—what mystics have been talking about forever? Some kind of mind pool I tapped into.” He finished his milk and walked to the sink. “My head feels haunted. And it’s been this way since I started these friggin’ tests.”
“Did you ever, you know, ever have psychic experiences before?”
He could hear the guardedness in her voice. “Once.” And he told her about the night at the Foxwoods Resort Casino.
“How come you never mentioned that?”
“Because I thought it was nothing but a weird coincidence.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you made a freak connection or something. That’s something you should have told Elizabeth and Morris.”
“Elizabeth and Morris have done enough damage.” He moved to his desk and removed some papers and handed them to her. “Three homeless people were found dead with tetrodotoxin in their bloodstreams over the last two years.” He poured himself another glass of milk and warmed it in the microwave while she read the articles. “Each of them died bizarre deaths. One guy was mercy-killed with a baseball bat. Another threw himself under a truck. The third, a woman, rammed a screwdriver through her ear into her brain.”
“What?”
“According to friends, each complained of headaches and bad visions. One guy claimed he was possessed by demons. Another said bugs were eating out his brain. Whatever, they were tormented to death because of their suspensions.”
Sarah continued reading.
“The kicker is that each of them had tetrodotoxin in them—nothing the police had seen before.”
“Because it’s a research drug.”
“That’s my point.”
Her face clouded over. “All our drugs are under lock and key, and we’ve never had a break-in. ’Least not while I’ve been there.”
“I think they were test subjects before you came aboard.”
“No way. If subjects complained of a side effect, they’d stop the tests. Besides, volunteers came from local colleges, not homeless shelters.”
“But you’ve only been there a few months.”
“So?”
He turned one of the articles toward her. “The guy who threw himself under a truck had a friend who said he began to complain about beetles and terrible pain in his head after some scientist guy offered to pay for sleep tests.”
She read where he pointed. “This doesn’t have to be us.”
“How many labs you think are doing sleep tests using tetrodotoxin?”
She stared at the paper. “I don’t believe this.”
“Tell me about it. Since you started, how many subjects have you suspended?”
“I don’t know, maybe fifteen out of a hundred interviewed.”
“You know how many since they started?”
“I never checked the records.”
“You might want to, because I think you’ll find a bunch of illegal aliens and bogus names.”
65
Sarah left, saying that she would drive to the lab first thing in the morning to check the records.
Meanwhile, Zack took two sleeping tabs and turned off the light, hoping to shut his mind off from speculating on the hideous options. Like Sarah, he did not believe in ghosts. And his mind refused to accept insanity or the possibility that he had murdered three people and repressed the acts from conscious memory. That left some psychic awareness he had tapped into—some alien sentience that had left his mind feeling contaminated.
After several minutes, he slipped into a drowsy twilight, feeling himself fading into a dreamless void. He didn’t know if at first he was imagining it, but he thought he heard something outside his bedroom door.
His first thought was Sarah. Maybe she forgot something. Or maybe her car didn’t start. He called her name. Nothing. Then he reached over to turn on the light when a bright flash went on in his eyes and a hand with a white towel clamped down on his face.
As he thrashed against the pressure, harsh chemical fumes filled his head. Chloroform. He recognized the odor. He also recognized the bald-headed male as his body pressed across his own, the towel smothering his face.
But before he could connect it, his mind faded to black.
“
Zack squinted at the bright light.
But then taking shape was the textured, translucent panel that covered the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling of the lab. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were restrained, and he was wired up with contacts to his chest and an IV line in his arm.
Standing beside Elizabeth Luria in street clothes were two men. One had a hairless domed head and fleshy pink face. A face he had seen before. The other was thin, with glasses and dark hair.
“I’m sorry, Zack,” she said. She was standing on the other side of the gurney.
He tried to say something, but she depressed the plunger, and he was gone.
THREE
66
“You knew about these deaths. You were there.”
Morris Stern was at his desk in his office at the Tufts University School of Medicine, hunched over a cup of coffee he had been sipping before Sarah pushed her way in. But for the twitching tic of his left eye, he stared blank- faced at the photocopied articles of street people found dead.
“They could have come from any number of other labs.”
“What, the Zombie Research Center?”
“That’s not particularly funny.”
