Petrified Read online

  Jimmy collapsed on to his knees, too shocked to comprehend what had happened to him. He tried to stand up, but then he dropped back on to his knees again, quaking. He could feel warm blood soaking through his sweatshirt, but when he tried to look down at his chest and see where it was coming from, he realized that he was partially blinded. He tried to shout out for help but nothing came out of his mouth except a honking sound.

  He crawled over to the side of the archway and made another effort to stand up, holding on to the wall to support himself. He stood there for a moment, trying to get his breath back. He felt blood coursing down the back of his throat but he couldn’t spit it out because he no longer had any lips. He was gradually beginning to understand that his face had been hideously mutilated, but he didn’t want to touch it to find out just how much. The pain was intense, but somehow it was beyond unbearable – so overwhelming that he felt it was being experienced by somebody else, and not by him at all.

  He heard a flapping noise, and let out another honk.Flap, flap, flap over the river, and growing louder with every flap. With his one remaining eye he saw the creature flying around and around, slow and leisurely, but coming closer to the bridge every time it circled. It was going to catch him. He was sure of it. It was going to catch him and it was going to tear him apart. It was almost as if he could read its mind.

  You have to get out of here, Jimmy. It’s no good thinking that it won’t come after you just because you’re under the bridge. You have to get out of here and get yourself some help, otherwise you’re going to die here, and Heatseeker is going to die here with you.

  He turned around and started to hobble back along the trail. He felt as if he had no strength at all, and he could barely drag one foot in front of the other. But once he was out from under the bridge, maybe he could cross over Kelly Drive and make his way into the park, and maybe the creature would lose sight of him under the trees. Or maybe he might get lucky, and a passing motorist might see him, and take him to hospital. A Good Samaritan.

  He reached Kelly Drive and stood swaying in the parking area beside the bridge. The highway was deserted, with no cars traveling in either direction, and no recreational vehicles parked anywhere in sight. The trees in the park on the opposite side of the road were shushing and whispering to each other as if they knew what was going to happen to him but didn’t want him to hear.

  Dear God help me. Dear God somebody help me. The pain was growing much worse and Jimmy didn’t think he was going to be able to bear it. All the same, he started to shuffle across Kelly Drive toward the park, making that honking sound with every agonizing step.

  He was only halfway across the highway when he heard the flapping again. This time it sounded much quicker and stronger, as if the creature were building up speed. He turned around, almost falling over as he did so, just in time to see the creature rising up from behind the bridge, its wings plunging up and down as if it were swimming the butterfly stroke through the air. Its eyes were staring and its beak was drawn back in a hideous grimace, baring its two curved fangs.

  It reached over a hundred feet in the air, and then it hovered, and howled even louder than before. Its howl echoed across the river, and in every arch beneath the bridge – creating an unholy chorus that sounded like six creatures instead of only one.

  Jimmy tried to run. He crossed Kelly Drive with a dot-and-carry limp, his right foot dragging behind him. He almost wished that a truck would come roaring along the highway and put him out of his pain. As he stumbled over the opposite curb, the creature’s wings were flapping so close behind him that he could actually feel the draft of each flap.

  When it hit him, it hit him as hard as a bomb going off. He was blasted apart so violently that his head went tumbling and bouncing down the highway, while his ribcage exploded and his lungs and his stomach were ripped into bloody tatters. His pelvis and his legs performed one disembodied cartwheel after another, with yards of small intestine unraveling behind them like a fire hose.

  The creature let out another howl, gaining height and circling out over the river again. Almost immediately, however, it swooped back down over Jimmy’s scattered remains, plucking his heart from the roadway with its beak.

  Then, without another sound, it flew away, heading south-westward.

  The distinctive flapping of its wings had long since died away by the time Stuart Williams came along Kelly Drive and saw what was left of Jimmy lying in the road. Stuart was a short-order chef at the South Street Diner, which was open twenty hours a day, and he had just finished an eight hour shift cooking breakfasts for other night workers and people who simply couldn’t sleep.

  At first he couldn’t work out what all that red shiny mess was, strewn along the blacktop. He was about to put his foot down and keep on driving when he caught sight of Jimmy’s head. He pulled in to the parking area, waited for a moment, and then climbed out of his car. He walked back and took a closer look, just to make sure that it was a human head, and not the head of some deer or some dog that had been run over, or some store window dummy that somebody had left there for a joke. But Jimmy stared back at him with one eye, his scalp torn, his mouth bloody, and there was no doubt about it. Until very recently, this red shiny mess had been a man.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Stuart. He took his cellphone out of his shirt pocket and dialed 911.

  ‘What’s your emergency?’ the girl on the switchboard asked him.

  ‘I don’t rightly know. It looks like some dude got himself disassembled. God alone knows how.’

  ‘Disassembled?’

  ‘That’s the only way I know how to describe it, miss. There ain’t one single part of him that’s still connected to no other part.’

  ‘Please wait there. We’ll be dispatching an ambulance directly.’

  ‘With all due respect, miss, I don’t think you need to send an ambulance. All you’re going to need is a bucket.’

  SIXTEEN

  Thursday, 7:07 a.m.

  Nathan had slept only fitfully during the night and when Aarif and Kavita appeared he was dozing. Aarif stood by his bed, watching him for a while, and then he gently shook his shoulder.

  ‘Professor? Professor, wake up.’

  Nathan opened one eye and stared up at him. ‘Aarif. What time is it?’ He blinked, and then he said, ‘I can’t believe it. I was dreaming that I was out in my back yard, grilling burgers.’

  ‘Not surprising, Professor, when you consider what you did to your hand.’

  Nathan winced, and sat up. He held up his hand in its plastic glove and he could see that it was already beginning to fill with watery yellow fluid. ‘If I’d known that it was going to hurt as much as this, believe me, I would have thought of some other way of making my point.’

  Aarif held up the blue canvas bag that he was carrying. ‘We have the phoenix stem cells in here, professor. You can have you first injection immediately.’

  ‘That’s great. How did Torchy take it?’

  ‘He was not pleased when we anesthetized him. But he is fine.’

  ‘What about Ron Kasabian?’

  ‘I think he is still very angry with you. He has to make a report to the board about what happened, and explain why you burned yourself. But as I said yesterday, what is done is done, and cannot be changed. A shout can never be unshouted.’

  ‘Too right.’ Nathan looked across at the digital clock on his nightstand. ‘But, hey – you’d better make it snappy. They’ll be bringing me breakfast at seven thirty.’

  ‘Everything’s ready,’ said Kavita. She sat down on the side of the bed and tugged on a pair of latex gloves. Then she carefully lifted Nathan’s left arm and pulled up the sleeve of his pale blue pajamas, all the way to the elbow. She wiped his forearm with antiseptic wipe and Aarif passed her a hypodermic syringe.

  ‘We decided that instead of injecting the stem cells into the burn itself, it would be better to inject them into the nearest large skeletal muscle, which is the extensor pollicis longus.’

>   ‘Oh, yes?’

  She smiled at him. ‘That way, we can inject you repeatedly without causing you any extra trauma or risking any additional infection. They do the same with heart patients these days, rather than inject stem cells directly into the heart muscle.’

  She took the plastic cap off the syringe and held it up to make sure that there were no air bubbles in it. Then, without hesitation, she stuck the needle into Nathan’s arm, and pressed the plunger. She waited for a moment, staring unblinkingly into his eyes, and then took it out.

  ‘Didn’t feel a thing,’ said Nathan. ‘You should have been a nurse.’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s going to feel like when it starts to take effect.’

  ‘Let’s just hope that it does take effect. I don’t think Grace is ever going to forgive me if it doesn’t.’

  ‘I talked to Grace,’ said Kavita. ‘She thinks that you are mad to do what you did. But all the same she admires your bravery, and your belief in yourself, and so do Aarif and I.’

  ‘We will return this evening, Professor, and give you a further injection,’ said Aarif. ‘Meanwhile, all we can do is pray.’

  At that moment, Doctor Berman came into the room, followed by two of his juniors – one of them a young Korean woman and the other a light-skinned black man who bore a distinct resemblance to Barack Obama.

  ‘Professor Underhill,’ he boomed. ‘How’s the hand coming along?’

  Nathan held it up so that he could examine it. ‘Making progress,’ said Doctor Berman. ‘It’s macerating, as you’d expect, so we’re getting plenty of fluid. I know it looks awful, but it’s a sign that it’s starting to heal. We’ll change the dressing today and maybe give you a semi-permeable glove with Gore-tex in it. That should reduce the maceration.

  ‘The main thing is to control bacterial infection. A burn wound is dynamic and infection can convert it from partial thickness to full thickness. I want you to get the use of your hand back, Professor – at least some limited use, anyhow.’

  Nathan said, ‘Thank you,’ and smiled. He wasn’t going to tell Doctor Berman that he was hoping for so much more than that. He looked across at Aarif and Aarif bowed his head as if to acknowledge that he understood the need for secrecy, at least for the time being. If Doctor Berman knew that Aarif and Kavita had just injected him with stem cells from a mangy-looking mythical bird, he never would have allowed them back into the hospital again.

  ‘We must go, Professor,’ said Aarif. ‘We have a small friend to take care of.’

  ‘OK,’ Nathan told him. ‘Be sure to give him a dead mouse from me. He deserves it.’

  Doctor Berman and his juniors looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.

  ‘He’s a bird,’ Nathan explained. ‘He just did me a favor, that’s all.’

  ‘A bird did you a favor?’ asked Doctor Berman.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Nathan told him.

  ‘Well . . . you must be sure to tell me sometime.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Nathan. Maybe sooner than you think.

  Grace came to see him after breakfast, and brought him blush pears and Florida oranges. She stayed for an hour, although she had her own practice to take care of. One of her specialties was geriatric care, and she had to visit the Burmont Rest Home out at Pilgrim Gardens, where forty-three seniors needed every kind of treatment from earwax to eczema.

  She was calmer today, although she didn’t hide the fact that she still felt resentful.

  Nathan said, ‘Kavita gave me my first injection of stem cells this morning.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Your hand doesn’t look any better. In fact it looks revolting. All squishy.’

  ‘Come on, Grace, it may be a miracle cure but it’s going to take time. I don’t know how long. But I still believe that it’s going to work.’

  ‘I hope it does. I really do. There’s a little girl along the corridor who’s had all of her face seriously burned in an auto accident. I feel so sorry for her. I talked to Doctor Berman about her and he said that she can never hope to look the same again.’

  ‘That’s exactly the kind of person I’m trying to help.’

  ‘Great. By setting fire to yourself.’

  ‘Like Aarif says, honey, it’s done now.’

  ‘Just because Aarif has an Egyptian proverb for every possible eventuality, that doesn’t mean that Aarif isn’t talking out of his ass. You know me. I’ve never been a fatalist.’

  ‘I’d agree with that, one hundred percent.’

  She leaned over the bed and kissed him. ‘Please God I hope this works,’ she told him.

  He managed a light breakfast of one pancake and a cup of lemon tea. After that he watched TV for a while, but gradually fell asleep again, even though his hand was still throbbing. He didn’t hear the anchorwoman on Eyewitness News say, ‘The body was identified as that of twenty-one-year-old James Hallam Junior, a postgraduate student from the Moore College of Art and Design. Police have given no details about how he died but say that he suffered massive trauma equivalent to being struck at high speed by a very large vehicle.’

  Nathan slept dreamlessly, but he was woken up less than hour later by a fiery sensation in his hand. He felt as if his flesh, already raw, were being dragged slowly through a blazing briar bush, so that it prickled and burned, both at the same time.

  He pressed the button on his morphine dispenser to give himself another shot of painkiller, but even after five minutes had gone by, the burning was just as agonizing, if not worse. He tugged the cord to call for the nurse, and then lay on his side in a fetal position, his eyes squeezed tight shut, grunting with pain. He could almost see his pain in his mind’s eye, five fingers crawling with barbed-wire flames.

  Two nurses hurried in. ‘Professor Underhill? What’s wrong?’

  Nathan lifted his hand but his teeth were clenched so tightly together that he couldn’t speak. One of the nurses took out a hypodermic syringe and gave him an extra shot of morphine, while the other gently levered his left arm down and laid his hand on a white gauze pad.

  ‘Dah – that really – careful! – ahh!’

  ‘It’s all right, Professor. I’ll be very gentle with you. I just have to cut off this glove and change your dressing. It looks like your hand has been weeping real bad.’

  ‘Please, I – hah! hah! – God almighty – it’s worse than when I first burned it!’

  ‘It might have gotten infected. Almost all burns get colonized with bacteria in the first few days.’

  ‘Now I’m a colony? That’s terrific – hah! ahh! That really, really hurts!’

  The nurse cut away the transparent plastic with surgical scissors and drew off the remains of the glove. It was filled with watery serum, which she carefully dabbed clean with lint. Then she sprayed his hand with antiseptic, which stung even more. He closed his eyes tight and said, ‘Jesus!’

  There was a long pause. Then the nurse who was treating his hand said to her companion, ‘Edie – come over here, would you? Take a look at this.’

  Nathan heard her companion walk around the foot of the bed. There was another pause, and then her companion said, ‘How about that? I never saw nothing like that before. I’ll go call Doctor Berman.’

  Nathan opened his eyes. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked, trying to lift his head up.

  ‘No, Professor. Nothing wrong. In fact something’s a whole lot righter than it ought to be.’

  Nathan looked down at his hand. The nurse had cleaned off all of the serum, and although it was still bright scarlet, his hand looked surprisingly unscathed. The skin on the back of his hand had suffered full thickness burns, and Doctor Berman had been talking about a split skin graft. The palm had been burned less severely, but it would still have needed a full thickness graft, because the inside of the hand needed to be covered with much more robust skin.

  Now, however, glossy red skin had already crept back as far as his knuckles, and when he turned his hand over, he saw that his palm was healing, too. Even his lif
e line and his fate line were reappearing, and they had been totally obliterated.

  His hand wasn’t simply healing; it was regenerating itself.

  The phoenix, he thought. The dragon-worm had blazed and then reappeared as a bird in only a matter of seconds. His hand had taken a little longer, but it was still astoundingly fast by human standards. A hand that had been burned as badly as his would normally have taken months to heal, and he would have needed numerous skin grafts and months of therapy even to be able to pick up a pencil.

  ‘It’s working,’ he croaked. It still hurt like hell, although the extra shot of morphine was beginning to take effect. But who cared if it hurt like hell if it was actually returning to normal, and with such rapidity? Maybe the regrowth of a few square inches of burned human skin barely even counted as a miracle when he compared it with the phoenix itself, which could reconstitute itself from nothing but a heap of ashes. But it would dramatically change the lives of millions of badly-scarred people.

  Doctor Berman came in. The nurse must have interrupted his lunch, because he was still wiping his beard with a paper napkin.

  ‘Professor Underhill?’ he said. ‘Nurse Johnson here tells me that something remarkable has happened.’

  Nathan held up his hand, and turned it from side to side. It was still red, but it was healing almost visibly by the minute. The nurse handed Doctor Berman a pair of latex gloves and he put them on, frowning at Nathan’s hand as he did so. Then he sat down on the side of the bed and examined his hand intently – first the dorsum, then the palm, then each individual finger. The renewed skin was smooth and dry. There was no bacterial infection, no further maceration, and no obvious contracture of the tendons.

  Doctor Berman looked Nathan straight in the eye. ‘You know that this is impossible, don’t you, Professor?’