CHILLER Read online

  The dean frowned and waved his right hand. His Yale class ring caught the yellow sunlight that was slanting lower, reaching into the hushed recesses of the room. “A minor distinction. They’re gone, Dr. Hagerty.”

  “For us, yes. Maybe not for medicine fifty years from now. Or a century.”

  “See?” Blevin pounced on her words with a quick, thin grin. “Just as I said. She believes all this crap; supports—”

  “Are my personal beliefs at issue here?”

  The dean looked at her levelly for a long moment. “I believe they must be.”

  “Only my actions are subject to UCI review.”

  The dean said judiciously, “Your outside sources of income are, however, also our concern.”

  “That’s not the issue here,” she said, “and you know it.”

  Blevin said, “They must have a hard time finding legitimate medical people to give them a pretense of competence. You provide that—for how much?”

  “I receive no money from them.”

  The dean said slowly, “I’m afraid we’ll need proof of that.”

  “I’ve kept entirely inside the professional standards—”

  Blevin said, “You have involved UCI in this fraudulent, crank—”

  “Do I have to listen to this?” Susan addressed only the dean, not letting herself even look any longer at Blevin’s reddening face.

  The dean’s eyes were distant. “No, Dr. Hagerty, but you do have to answer for your intertwining of legitimate UCI research with these—these freezer people.”

  “Have they been paying you to sign death certificates?” Blevin asked, his voice tight and high.

  She still refused to look at him. “Of course not.”

  “Do you appear at their sales meetings?” Blevin asked.

  She had always believed that the person who kept calm and polite in the face of anger won the moral victory. This idea obviously had not occurred to either of these two.

  “There are no sales meetings.”

  “You help them con customers, though, right?”

  “You speak out of utter ignorance.” She kept staring straight ahead.

  “Well, maybe you should enlighten us.”

  “Why do I suspect that would be pointless?”

  “You have abused your UCI association—”

  “And you have abused my privacy. I—”

  “Now, now.” The dean held up both hands, palms out, an expression of stern control bringing a certain character to his face. “I don’t believe we need to have a preliminary discussion decay into this.”

  Susan asked quickly, “Preliminary to what?”

  This seemed to take the dean off guard. “Well, I was thinking, perhaps I should refer this to an ad hoc review committee.”

  “What will be the charges?” she asked, looking not at Wronsky any longer but over his head, out the window, at the distant slumped peaks of Saddleback Mountain. Should I explain? Try to head off this committee? Her judgment said it would do no good. And Blevin, sitting here like a vulture to snap up any gobbets of information, might get some valuable clues.

  “Well, I don’t think the word charges quite describes our customary review process,” Wronsky said.

  “What does?”

  “Uh, I shall ask the committee to review your actions, in light of the standards of our university and our profession, and recommend what sort of discipline is—”

  “You’ve already assumed discipline is called for?”

  “No, no, I certainly didn’t mean to imply—” Wronsky halted, undoubtedly calculating whether his wording here could be used against him, a landscape of possible, hideously expensive lawsuits looming up in his mind’s eye. “I am asking only for a scrupulous review. A thorough one. Recommendations, of course, will be made.”

  “I see.” She stood, her shoes sinking into the thick Chinese carpet. Somehow it was important to stay ahead of the ball on this one, not allow Wronsky to bury everything under a pile of fuzzy, slack sentences. She felt a sharp desire to be quick, lean, sure.

  Then it hit her. Her computer log-in had shown an unexplained intrusion. Somebody sniffing around.

  Blevin. And no possible way to prove it.

  Blevin said, “Wait, I want to ask her—”

  “Stuff your questions,” Susan said, finally turning to look at him. She smiled bitterly. “To ascertain where, consult your proctologist.”

  Wronsky rose to his feet, his sharkskin suit falling without wrinkles. “Now, I hardly think such language is necessary—”

  “Good day, my colleagues,” Susan said, and walked out.

  The shock of emerging into the cool, ceramic light of the hospital was refreshing. To be among precise lines and hard facts, after the muggy evasions of that pleasant, soft office, was a genuine pleasure. She didn’t even mind the faint antiseptic tinge that invaded her nostrils like a clarifying breeze as she strode energetically back to her office, knowing that ahead lay a protracted hard time.

  8

  GEORGE

  He returned to his cool, sharply appointed apartment as dusk fell upon the sprawl of Garden Grove. He had spent the day setting up a profitable little sideline in real estate, the enduring obsession of Orange County, and looked forward to his rest.

  Reverend Montana had called Los Angeles the “Metrollopis” last night, then explained that a trollop was a whore. True enough, George thought, for the women bared themselves here, displayed their carefully tended skins like fine wares. He was still getting his bearings in this concrete-subdued land where a twenty-two-foot tower of wooden beer pallets became an official San Fernando Valley cultural landmark. The palm and eucalyptus trees were imported, but its morality was home-grown. Real estate was the cornucopia here, gushing forth profit without work—California Schemin’. When the developers got through, orange trees would be as rare in Orange County as seals in Seal Beach.

  George slumped down before his TV and started the VCR tape recorded this morning. Mornin’, L.A.! was the usual vacuous stuff, but as soon as the man Alex Cowell came on, George sat up, a bite from his TV dinner forgotten in his mouth.

  When Cowell said outright that freezing corpses was a holy mission, George spat food onto the carpet.

  When Montana said forcefully, “I know the hand of the Black One when I see it!” George applauded, the claps ringing hollowly in the shadowed recesses of his apartment.

  When the Reverend stormed off the show, refusing to abide this man Cowell and his insults to God, George shot to his feet, shouting at the screen.

  Cryonics. And their company, Immortality Incorporated—smug Cowell couldn’t resist getting in his plug, right at the end of the show—its very name a travesty, an insult to God.

  It did not take George long to use his computer and modem to track I2 through the labyrinth of telephone logic. Their system defenses were good, but he was better. He had made the most of his special scholarship in Information Science, a fancy name for computers, though the tricks he had learned would not have pleased his professors.

  In a few minutes of adroit maneuvering he found the I2 public records—data that their staff could access from outside. Duty roster, a work calendar, schedules. Easy, using his craft, his offering to God.

  His narrowed eyes slid down the work calendar. They had somebody there twenty-four hours, overlapping duty rosters, all neatly arranged. He was about to close out on the file when one name caught his eye. HAGERTY.

  Could it be the same? The woman doctor?

  Joy rushed into his chest, brimming his eyes with tears. So he had been intended to go to the hospital, to check if the waitress had babbled anything about him. After doing that, he had been beset by a buzzing anxiety. His passion-self had done that, going to UCI when it wasn’t smart to reveal himself.

  Now he saw that the impulse had come from the Divine Shepherd. Not for George’s sake, but for the Lord’s. As part of a design.

  He checked the work schedule. HAGERTY. She would be there in a fe
w hours from now. At night.

  He rewound the VCR tape and sat through the whole exchange, fuming, his meal forgotten. Then he replayed it again, listening to Cowell’s smug distortions of Scripture. To heal the sick, to feed the poor, to spread the word, to raise the dead.

  Only God could do that. George quickly found it in Ezekiel 37: “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel,” he quoted to the inky silences, with Alex Cowell’s head freeze-framed on the TV. “And ye shall know that I am the Lord!” he shouted.

  He replayed the tape again and again. With each viewing the insolent, smirking face of Cowell had another wreath of color surrounding it, filaments of burnt orange, virulent yellow, electric blue, hotblood red. The colors danced and sizzled, as they had around the woman in the alley, around others who had stood in his way before, jimmy-john hard and hot. The Lord’s sign.

  George watched the tape for another hour, letting it do its slow, sure work upon one part of him, while the other thought calmly and clearly about what had to be done. About the devil dog, a creature of the night that now walked the day.

  A wind from the desert brushed his cheek. It was like a warm caress from his long-dead mother, who now slumbered beneath desert sands, where the eternal dry breezes could sing her praises. He had not visited her grave in nearly a year. The thought stabbed him with gray remorse, but the fleeting emotion was consumed in the thudding momentum of his rage.

  George made his way along the rocky hillside, trying to pick through the snagging branches of chaparral bushes. The abrasive dryness of the winds made his flesh jump. Not even Arizona had possessed these harsh breezes that rubbed like sandpaper, sending electrical snaps and tingles through him.

  He had parked on Santiago Canyon Road and hiked over a ridgeline to come down on the Immortality Incorporated building from behind. It was a mere half hour’s drive from the Marble Cathedral. So near, yet such a strange place. The ordinary cinderblock shape was illuminated by parabolas of actinic light at its corners, casting pale blue shadows across the parking lot at the front. Two cars in the lot. Little traffic on the highway.

  The self George thought of as his shell, his clear and certain self, could carry him no further than this. His inner self—the true-running and deeper person he was now, the George who could remember the nickel skatekey from his fourth birthday and the heady, swarming smell of the leather in his fielder’s glove—that inner George had no plan. He had come to do the Lord’s work, and the Lord would provide.

  Just as He had always before. There had been that night when George had sat up in bed, sweaty from fitful dreams in which he had been swimming, endlessly swimming through a thick, sweet ocean of something that swarmed up his nostrils, trying to get into his mouth—and he had awakened to the realization that it was blood he had been swimming through, not fresh-spilled and bright red but brown, muddy, coagulating around him as he struggled. That had been a portent, one of the Master’s Messages.

  And that coagulating night had been like this, the air roiling and spitting with electrical urgencies. George had pulled himself up from that murky dream, rolled out of the swampy-wet sheets, feeling his feet strike the cold tile floor of his apartment—and had known in that sliver of an instant what he must do.

  So he had. The next night, after his shell-self had carefully thought it through, he had gone forth. Careful, swift, silent. Clad in black, with dark high-top tennis shoes to smother sounds. Into the rustling gloom.

  He had found the right neighborhood, crossed lots, slipped down alleys where momentary whirlwinds churned cyclonic spires of dust. And at last he had stood in utter silence and solemn certainty, safely immersed in pools of inky dark, waiting.

  At 10:23 P.M. the back door on a ranch-style house had opened, letting a wedge of yellow light into a back yard, picking out neatly arranged beds of flowers. A man had come shuffling out, one hand filled with the evening’s garbage. The Lord had been with George and so the man was indeed the one he sought, not the teenage son he knew this family had. The principal of the school, the jellyfish, had lifted the lid on the battered can, dumped the trash, clanged the lid back down.

  With infinite care George slid forward through the shadows. He cradled a smooth, hefty rock.

  As George came soundlessly out of the engulfing night, he saw the man’s head, the bushy hair lit from behind by the glaring porchlight. A radiant aura, a nimbus of hot colors. Strands of hard yellow and searing gold. Sizzling, sliding markers that he knew came straight from the Lord. The fiery streamers had been a wonderful gift from God, a vibrant sign at the crucial moment, an instant when he might have weakened.

  George had struck then, slamming the rock down on the man’s neck, feeling cartilage crack and give. The principal had folded with a coughing gasp. George caught him by the shirt collar and held him up. Receive justice like a man. Two more swift blows to the temples caved in the skull like tissue paper.

  Getting the body over his shoulder had been simple, for George crouched and caught it with one quick muscular motion. A glance at the house. No face at a window, no noise, nothing.

  His outer shell had read up on the twisted complexities of the law, and he knew that the crucial element was witnesses. Without them, circumstantial evidence was a thin reed, unable to coax a guilty verdict from a jury.

  Swift, sure, silent, invisible—that was the way his outer shell led him. But the deeper, seething caldron fed his engines, drove him forward.

  He had carried the limp, heavy body down the alley to the drainage ditch that paralleled it. There were no lights here. A pale glow oozed between the houses from distant halogen street lamps. As planned, he simply tossed the body down into the concrete-lined ditch. The sound of it smacking hard at the ten-foot drop was satisfying. He had scrambled down the slope and found the hefty stone he had left there from his reconnaissance earlier that day.

  He had to work in nearly total darkness, too cautious to use a flashlight. He struck the principal as hard as he could in the neck with the stone. The sharp snap was so loud, he looked around, sure someone would hear. But there was nothing afterward but the stirring and rasping of dry wind in the desert brush.

  And so it was again tonight. The sighing, rubbing wind.

  George made his way down a stony gorge that led into a large, broad arroyo. He had no plan, only a certainty that weighed in his belly, rock-heavy, a solemn duty.

  The principal’s death had been reported in the newspapers as an accident, but the police had admitted that there were “curious features” to the case. So George had been even more cautious in the weeks and months following his night of retribution. He had built the Bruce Prior identity and several others. And the Lord had seen fit to warn George when the Feds closed in, by the amusing but profound mechanism of the noisy party across the street. Maybe they were after him for his credit card empire, though it seemed to George perfectly legal, or maybe for the principal. It did not matter. The Lord caused His all-searching light to shine down in protection and solace.

  But works were necessary to repay this holy favor. Works that could not be done by the ordinary devout. Only a man who stood outside the sheep of His flock, who resembled more nearly a wolf, could do the necessary deeds.

  George crouched and worked his way among the fragrant manzanita of the arroyo. He had no weapon, but the Lord would provide. Tonight would be no different. He felt the night wind charge him with purpose, send snapping currents along his prickly skin.

  The commonplace, boxy construction of the building ahead was itself like a taunt. Ordinary, innocent—yet here they sundered innocent people, splitting soul from body, so that the spirits of the cruelly betrayed could not find their place in His reward. George wondered if these spirits gathered here, each in agony because of its separation from the Lord. The wind’s churning howls sounded like the moaning of lost souls. Could they know that he was here? Would they assist him?

  George bent over onto al
l fours, creeping forward. No sign of movement near the building. Immortality Incorporated—a slap in the face of every Christian. An insult to even the heathen, steeped in darkness but still acknowledging the lesser teachings of Mohammed and Buddha.

  He panted with excitement. This was like that other night, when he had struck back at the principal and the corrupt school system. A night ordained for retribution, for destiny working through his hands.

  He heard a small thump. Peering through bushes, he saw a woman emerge from the rear door.

  Her. The Lord confirmed his faith, her white doctor’s smock fluttering like a flag. One of those who banished the dead into a frozen limbo, made them into the word the Reverend Carl had told his horrified congregation—into chillers.

  George searched for a rock.

  9

  SUSAN

  “Come here, Sparkle!” Susan Hagerty called.

  The sleek red-brown mass came padding quietly over to her. She ruffed the floppy ears and stroked the freshly cleaned fur. “Good dog! So smart! Hey, do you know what this is?” The offered meal bone disappeared in a flash.

  “She’s eating better,” Alex volunteered, leaning against a steel-jacketed liquid nitrogen cylinder. This was his night to stay until midnight. When she had come into the Immortality Incorporated building he had been tinkering with a pump assembly in faded, greasy blue jeans.

  “Good. I stopped by on my way home, to leave off her test results. Sparkle’s in reasonable condition.”

  “Great. How ‘bout the rest?”

  Susan sat in a wheeled office chair, feeling her fatigue. Seldom did a thorough workup on a patient bring solely good news. “There are some neurological deficits.”