Across the Universe

39 AMY

“OH.”

I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

But I know this man.

Mr. Kennedy had worked with my mom, and I’d always thought he was a little creepy. He was one of those old men who never got married but who thinks that because he’s old, he can be a pervert and get away with it. He was always looking down my mom’s shirt or getting me to pick up something off the floor whenever I came to the lab to visit my parents. Mom always laughed it off, but I wondered what Mr. Kennedy did at home with his memories of my mom’s wrinkled cleavage or my panty line.

And now he’s dead, floating in the cryo liquid with his eyes opened and his irises milky. His skin is sallow, as if soaked with water like a sponge. His mouth is slack, and his cheeks sag, creating tiny water-filled balloons at his jaw.

“Number 63 was a distraction,” Elder says.

“I don’t think so,” Doc says. “This one has been out for a while.” He lifts the lid of the glass box up, and Harley and Elder help him set it down on the floor. Doc dips his finger into the liquid Mr. Kennedy floats in. “The water’s cool, but not cold. He could have been unplugged yesterday, last night at the latest.”

Elder catches my eye. While we were running through the rain, laughing, Mr. Kennedy was drowning. As that couple made love on the bench by the pond, Mr. Kennedy was dying. As I stripped off my wet clothes and stood in the steamy shower, as I fell asleep gazing at the dark fields, Mr. Kennedy was swimming in death.

Another thought: Harley was here the same time the killer was.

“Why?” I ask.

Doc taps on his thin computer thing. “Number 26. A man named—”

“Mr. Kennedy,” I say.

“Yes.” Doc looks at me, surprise on his face.

“I knew him before.”

“Ah. I’m sorry,” he says, but in an offhand manner, as if he’s just saying it to be polite. “Number 26—”

“Mr. Kennedy.”

“Mr. Kennedy was a weapons specialist.”

“Really?” I ask. Even though Mr. Kennedy worked in the same department as my mother, I’d never known that he had anything to do with weapons. My mother didn’t. She worked on genetic splicing. She dealt with DNA, not weapons.

Doc nods. “He was well learned in bio-weaponry. It says here he worked with the government to develop eco bombs.”

“Who is doing this?” Elder asks. “Who is unplugging all these people? First William Robertson, then the woman, Number 63, now this guy.”

“And me,” I add.

Elder’s brow furrows as he stares at me.

“Two victims — two near misses,” the doctor says.

“And no reason why.” I stare at the empty cryo chamber, where Mr. Kennedy once was. And past it, to the rows and rows of little doors with numbers scrawled on them. How many cryo chambers will be empty before we can stop the killer?