Bug Jack Barron

17

Guns and a long white corridor… green mountains looming over ether-smelling sheets… lemon-colored ceiling… soft sunlight shadows becoming bright-blue fluorescent operating-theater glare lying warm and weak on a soft pillow… the guns of the guards lifting him on to the stretcher-table… pentathol-needle of drowsy indifference… wheeling the table past looming cool mountains… cold white robes of the cold white doctors… nurses burbling machines… impersonal steel of scalpels blued by harsh fluorescent lighting… cotton swab in the warm comfortable bed with the shadowed mountains on the ceiling… smell of hospital mingling with the smell of fir trees… the needle dripping sleep in the pit of his arm… And behind him he sensed another table’s vibrations, wheeling into the blue-white operating theater behind him (Sara?) on the shore of the consciousnessless sea unable-not-wanting to move… the white robes… blue-scalpel machinery of the operating theater blurring to white sheets, lemon-colored ceiling, cool green mountains… anesthesia-euphoria of awakening-weakness… smell of ether to pine needles, lemon-colored doctors…

Then (when?) the blurring became a memory of a moment past—and Jack Barron was awake, fully conscious, aware in retrospect of an interminable sojourn on the interface between sleep and wakefulness, images of the preoperative past molding with the postoperative indefinite present as if that unrememberable moment of crossover had been prolonged ten thousand years. But now he was finally awake all the way, and he was:

Lying in bed, his head on a warm white pillow, his unfocused eyes staring up at a lemon-yellow ceiling, and to his left was a full-length door-window looking out past buildings on the Rocky Mountains, and the smell of pine drifted in past the heat-curtain shimmer that kept out the cool mountain breeze.

Jeez, he thought, what day is it? How long have I been out? No calendar in the plain white-walled room, only the bed and a small hospital table, not even a clock. And if they used Deep Sleep recovery, which they probably did, no way of telling how long I’ve been out.

Confused memories swam into focus. Those cats with the guns took me to the operating… No wait, they took me to this room, put me on a stretcher-table, gave me a needle, and I was already half out when they wheeled me into the operating room, and then they wheeled someone else in after me—must’ve been Sara—last thing I remember. Sara must be immortal now too.

Immortal…? Don’t feel any different, at least I don’t think I do. Tuning in on his body Barren felt a slight soreness in the muscles of his stomach, a barely noticeable kink in his back, felt kind of comfortably weak and drowsy, like lying in bed the morning after a hard night. Nothing different, really, I still feel like me, is all.

Is anything different?

Barren strained his mind trying to remember just exactly how his body had always felt, not something you’re really aware of unless you’re real tired or sick. My imagination, just looking for it, or do I feel just a little different? Hard to tell. I don’t feel sick. A little weak from the operation, maybe, that’s for sure. Weak, yeah, but it’s a funny kind of weak, feels almost too good, like when I get up I could go run a mile… or is thinking maybe I’m immortal just playing games with my head?

Immortal… Shit, how do you know you’re immortal till you’ve lived a couple hundred years? No reason to suddenly feel different. Thing is, I suppose, you just keep feeling the same, young and healthy and strong the way you started, when you turn forty, fifty, seventy, a hundred… What feels different, I guess, is you don’t ever feel different, forty, a hundred, two hundred years, and you still feel the same, and that can’t feel different till after it hasn’t happened.

Immortality—no reason to feel any different, they could tell you it was just your appendix out, and you’d never even know.

Hey, am I immortal, or could the whole thing be a shuck? How the hell can I know, got only Bennie’s word for it. Could be they just faked it to cool me, I’d never know, can’t trust Bennie, and that’s for sure. Well, it doesn’t make any difference, win or lose, that game’s played out. Either way, when I get back to New York, Bennie’s had it. Next show I’ll really do him in… got those tapes safe and sound to make sure I get out of here alive, immortal or not, and maybe…

Why not? Get Bennie on the line, then play the tape on the air… What can he do? Sue me for libel, when it’s his own voice libeling itself? Dunno, better check first with lawyers—tapes can be edited, faked; they’re not evidence in court. Does that mean I’d have to prove another way he’s a murderer, or else he’d have a libel case? Unless I can con him with the tapes into confessing on the air… Shouldn’t be too hard to do. Seems like he’s finally flipped all the way, the way his eyes looked… maybe I could pull it off. It’d sure be nice and tidy, but dangerous as hell if I couldn’t bluff him. Better think about that, and get some good legal advice… maybe GOP lawyers…?

The door opened, and a dark man in a white tunic, obviously a doctor, peered inside, said: “Ah! Mr Howards, he’s awake. He’s come out of it.”

And Benedict Howards followed the doctor as he stepped inside.

“Well, Palacci,” Howards said, “go examine him. Tell me if it took.”

“No need to, Mr Howards,” the doctor replied. “If he’s alive and awake now, it took. The only danger was that the antibody suppressants might not work and his body would develop an allergic reaction to the grafts. That does happen, you know, in about two cases out of a hundred. But if it had happened, he’d be running a high fever, probably in a deep coma. In fact, by now he’d most likely be dead. It’s all right, he’s immortal and well, just like the woman.”

“Sara!” Barron shouted, feeling a stab of guilt that he had forgotten. “Sara’s all right?”

“Better than all right,” said Howards, and his eyes were still mad and gleaming the way they had been in the office… How many days ago? “She’s immortal now, just like you. And like me. How does it feel, Barron? How does it feel to wake up immortal, smell that pine in the air, and know you’ll never have to die? So long as you cooperate, of course.”

“I don’t feel anything, Howards,” Barron said guardedly. “I don’t feel any different at all. How do I know you didn’t just open me up and close me, or just drop me in a Deep Sleep chamber for… How long has it been? What day is this, anyway?”

“It’s Monday,” the doctor said. “You’ve been—”

Benedict Howards raised his hand, cut the doctor off. “I’ll do the talking,” he said. “When can he get up, Palacci? There’s a few things I want Mr Barron to see. Time he knew for certain, dead certain, who’s boss.”

“With forty hours of Deep Sleep recovery, he could get up right now. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a major operation. We don’t have to plant the grafts very deep.”

“Well, then go get him his clothes,” Howards said. “Mr Barron and I have a few things to talk over in private.”

As the doctor left, closing the door behind him, Barron propped himself up against the bedstead. He felt surprisingly strong and much more in control of the situation than he did flat on his back.

“All right, Howards,” he said, “so prove I’m immortal. I’ll admit I have no idea how it should feel, but it seems to me all I’ve got is your word for it, and all your word and thirty cents’ll get me is a ride on the subway. Just remember those tapes. You gotta keep me happy to keep me cool, and you gotta keep me cool just to stay alive, and you better not forget it.”

“Sure, you and your smart-ass tapes…” Howards smirked. “When you get back to New York, you’ll mail all the copies to me and we’ll have a nice little bonfire.”

Barron smiled. He’s really flipped for sure. “What planet you say you’re from, Bennie? You prove you really delivered, and I just might let you off—just maybe, depends how I feel. But those tapes are the property of yours truly, and I think I’ll just keep ’em around to keep you—you should pardon the expression—honest. The penalty for murder is death in the chair, and you better keep that in mind.”

“I’ll try to keep it in mind, Barron,” Howards said. (But his paranoid loonie eyes were laughing. Laughing!) “And I think you’d do well to remember it too. And you are immortal, and I will prove it. I’m gonna show you everything, give you a guided tour of the whole operation. You’re gonna find out just how you were made immortal, and believe me, that’ll prove to you that I really delivered.”

“You’re gibbering, Howards. How’ll that prove anything?”

Howards laughed, and in the chill certainty behind his paranoid eyes Barron got a flash of mortal dread, knowing for certain, dead certain, that Benedict Howards was now sure he had everything in the bag.

“All in good time,” Howards said. “You’ll see. You’ll see what my percentage was in making you immortal all along. Maybe those tapes do put my life in your hands, but your own immortality is what gives you to me. All the way, Barron, I own you now, you’re my flunky now, and you’ll never be able to forget it. But wait till your clothes get here, then you’ll see. Oh, man, will you see!”

“You see, Barron, what they tell me it’s all in the glands,” Benedict Howards said as the elevator finally stopped, down in what Jack Barron figured had to be a deep subcellar of the hospital.

Wouldn’t be surprised to see a Frankenstein Monster slimy-stone passageway, he thought, as the elevator door slid open and anticlimactically revealed an ordinary white-walled, windowless, fluorescent-lit hospital corridor.

“Endocrine balance, that’s what they call it, endocrine balance…” Howards continued babbling as the two guards, with their pistols conspicuous but holstered, led them out of the elevator and down the hall. Apparently the guards already had their orders, since Howards hadn’t spoken a word to them after they had left the hospital room, just kept babbling a lot of stuff about hormones and glands.

Barron was hardly listening. Howards’ abstracted, glazed eyes, the way he kept talking a blue streak, turning his head here, there, here, like a frightened bird, convinced him that Bennie was way ’round the bend. And, he thought, all this fucking medical jargon he obviously only half understands…

But that, Barron suddenly realized, that’s the kicker. If it were all a shuck, he wouldn’t know all this stuff unless he had memorized the whole set-spiel just to put me on, and then he’d be way smoother, Bennie’s not show biz enough to pull a con this subtle off. Which means…

It’s for real; at least it’s possible. Immortality. Maybe I really got it, he’s not putting me on? Immortal! I don’t feel any different but why should I, I’m young and I’m healthy, and if it’s true, I’ll never feel different, not now, not in half a million years…

Or will I? he wondered. Bennie’s sure different, more paranoid by the minute since this whole thing started. But maybe the whole Foundation schtick was a paranoid bag for openers, and the more money Bennie’s got, the longer he’s got to live, the more he’s got to be scared shitless to lose. Which puts him exactly where I want him.

But then why’s he so fucking sure he’s got me where he wants me?

All this screwing around… Then it flashed like cold fire through him: Howards’ been dying to make me immortal all along. And now I’ve been had? But how? He can’t touch me now, and I can walk all over him. The treatment… yeah, he got uptight every time I tried to find out what the fuck it was, and now he’s telling me and I’m not listening! And whatever it is, pretty safe bet it’s really been done to me. Listen, you prick, for chrissakes listen, isn’t this what you played all those games to hear?

“Man’s as old as his glands,” Howards was saying. “You could keep the hormone balance you had as a kid, you’d never stop growing… No, that’s wrong, I think… or… but that’s not important. Point is, you’re no older than your glands. Up to a point, a kid’s glands keep his body from aging, something about anabolism exceeding catabolism, whatever that means. Anyway, whatever it means, the moment it reverses you start to age, start dying, fading black… Way they explained it, normally a human being’s either growing or aging, never inbetween, depending on the balance of his glands. It’s like a clock at midnight—between one tick and the next it’s a different day, one tick you’re growing, next tick you’re aging. You keep growing, sooner or later it kills you, they told me, but I don’t really understand why… . But anyway, the moment your glands pass over that line, sometime in your teens, they say, you start to die. You see, Barron? You see? Immortality’s all in the tick.”

“Tick, schmick,” Barron finally said. “What’re you gibbering about?”

“You’re pretty dumb, Barron, can’t you see it? If it’s exactly twelve o’clock Tuesday night and you stop the clock right on the moment it stops being Tuesday, and before it can start being Wednesday you’re caught inbetween. Not growing, not aging. That smart-ass Palacci calls it ‘Homeostatic Endocrine Balance.’ Stop that gland ‘clock’ right between ticks and keep it there, balanced between growing and aging, and that’s immortality. That’s what we’ve got, way to take all the glands and keep ’em balanced what they call homeostatically forever. Forever! We got glands that’ll stay young forever, Barron. That’s why we’ll never die.”

Makes a kind of screwy sense, Barron admitted, fishing in his memory for two terms of Berkeley biology. “Anabolism and catabolism equal metabolism,” the meaningless phrase from some old gypsheet popped into his mind. But what the fuck did it mean? Lessee, metabolism’s like a biological checking account: anabolism is growth, catabolism’s decay—or the other way around? Anyway, in a kid, growth exceeds decay, so the account’s solvent. And in an adult it’s vice versa and you’re overdrawn, so you start to die. Yeah, but if you were just even, and could keep it that way, like Howards says, you’d be immortal! That all immortality is, tuning up the old glands in the shop the way they tune the Jag’s engine? But how do they do it?

“I think I dig now, Bennie,” he said. “Just out of curiosity, how do your boys do it—I mean, tinker with all those glands?”

Howards leered at him, and the cold words he spoke were somehow totally obscene: “Hard radiation and lots of it. An overload of radiation kept up for two days.”

Barron went cold. Radiation—a witch-word, like cancer. Overload of radiation for two days! But that means—

Howards laughed. “Take it easy, Barron, you’re not gonna die. I’m not dead, am I, and we’ve both had the same treatment. My boys found out something about some special kind of radiation—in big killing doses, it freezes the balance of the glands in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance thing, if you catch ’em young enough…”

“But all that radiation, what’s it do to your body?”

Howards grimaced, his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were running some dirty movie on the screen in his head; he muttered something crazy about niggers, then seemed to snap out of it as the guards halted outside a plain steel door.

“I never seen it, but they say it’s pretty awful,” Howards said. “Flesh starts to rot and fall off and the whole body breaks out in a million little cancers… but the glands are okay, if the quacks time it right. Better than—”

“You crazy fucker!” Barron howled, half-lunged at Howards, then stopped as the guards whipped out their pistols.

“Don’t foam at the mouth, Barron, no one said you were irradiated,” Howards said, caressing the knob of the steel door. He laughed. “I’ll show you why we’re both all right, be all right forever, and why I’ve got you right where I want you. I said you had glands that’ll stay young, keep you young forever…” Howards’ eyes were black pits of feral paranoid madness as he turned the doorknob and said, “… but when did I ever say they were yours?” And opened the door.

Beyond the door was what at first glance looked to be a pretty ordinary hospital ward: A long, narrow room, with a central aisle dividing two rows of about a dozen beds each, headboards set flush against either wall. At the far end of the room was a large complex of consoles facing a small desk behind which a white-smocked man sat, apparently monitoring them. To the right of the desk was another door.

But it was the occupants of the beds that made the room a chamber of grotesquerie, filling Barron with a disbelieving nauseous dread.

Two dozen beds, in each of them a young child, none younger than six, none older than about ten, and more than half of them black. All were being fed intravenously, but the tubes feeding the needles taped in their armpits led not to drip-bottles but to a master-tube that ran along each wall and back to the complex of consoles at the rear of the room. A similar arrangement emptied the catheters that snaked out from under each set of bedclothes. Each child had electrodes taped to head and chest, the wires converging in trunk-line cables that ran along either wall to the monitor consoles. There was no sound as they entered the ward, not a head turned, not a muscle moved; the kids were all in deep comas.

The ages… the preponderance of Negroes… Christ on a Harley! Barron thought. These gotta be the poor kids the Foundation bought!

“Neat, eh?” Howards said. “I mean, when you think what a mess it could be, a whole roomful of squalling brats, and the personnel it’d take to take care of ’em… In the short run, all this equipment’s real expensive, but when you think of what it saves on food and salaries and trouble and amortize it out… well, even in the medium run it saves an awful lot of money.”

“What the fuck are you doing to these poor kids?” Barron said. “What’s wrong with ’em, why are they all out cold?”

“Wrong with ’em?” Howards said neutrally, but with some kind of terrible mania leaking out of his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong with ’em, they’re all perfect physical specimens, or you can bet your ass we wouldn’t be blowing the money it takes to keep ’em here. We don’t do anything to them here, this is just our nursery. The whole process is perfectly painless for the kids. From beginning to end they don’t feel a thing. What do you think I am, some kind of sadist? We just keep ’em out and quiet and feed ’em on glucose till they’re ready for processing. Saves time and mess and money this way—one man at the instruments there can run the whole show.”

Can’t be happening, Barron told himself as Howards led him and the guards down the aisle. But he knew damn well it was. A death-stench of madness so thick you could cut it as they walked past the rows of sleeping children plugged into tubes and wires like some hideous circuitry—and that’s all he sees, fucking production line, is all. Production of what? Bennie’s gone totally ’round the bend, and when I get him on the show I’ll tear him to pieces, then tear the pieces to pieces… He’s stark staring mad!

Yet he found himself listening in dread fascination, unable to think past Howards’ words as Bennie babbled on like some damn production manager conducting a guided tour of a refrigerator factory:

“Of course this is just a pilot plant… If we could solve the problem of safe revival from the Freezers we wouldn’t need all this crap—just irradiate ’em as soon as we get ’em and drop ’em in Freezers, then thaw ’em out when we need ’em, save a lot of money. We’re working on it, but they tell me that’s still years away, so we gotta make do. Keeping ’em alive after the radiation’s the real bind. What with the radiation disease and cancer, none of ’em last more than a couple of weeks. So the timing’s real tricky, keeping a dozen or so always ready. Damn, if they’d only figure out how to keep glands viable in the Freezers we could get rid of all this mess.”

As they reached the door at the far end of the ward, the man behind the desk looked away from his dials briefly as Howards said: “Don’t pay any attention to us. I’m just giving the guided tour to our very first client.”

Then he turned to Barron, his eyes unreadable beacons of madness, and said, “Still, a pretty neat set-up for a pilot plant, eh, Barron?”

Barron felt the flood of unbearable sensory data finally getting through to where he lived. Murder. Some kind of crazy mass-murder! He’s killing these kids, killing ’em slow, gotta be totally nuts to show me all this. What’s he think I am… gotta know I’m gonna nail him to the wall…

“What the fuck is this?” Barron shouted. (And seeing a window in the door before him opaqued with ripples like a toilet window, he moved toward it.) “And what the hell’s behind this door?”

Swift as a cat Howards was between him and the door, his eyes wide with terror. “You don’t want to look in there,” he said, his voice frenzied and shrill. “Take my word, you don’t want to see. That’s the post-radiation ward… cancer… rotten flesh… falling apart… It’s ugly, Barron, they tell me it’s real ugly. I’ve never been in there, I don’t want to see. Doctors, they’re used to that kind of stuff… But we’d both be sick if you opened that door.”

“What are you doing? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

“Stop raving, Barron, haven’t you guessed? With enough of the right radiation, kids’ glands can be retarded just enough so they stay in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance, keep the body the way it is, never aging, forever. Immortality, but with two big catches. First, it only works with children under twelve, so that’d mean no immortality for grown men—for us. And it wouldn’t work anyway, ’cause the radiation we gotta use to balance the glands is a fatal dose. Big joke, eh? Got a way to make kids immortal, only the treatment kills ’em—the operation was successful but the patient died.

“But the glands don’t die, Barron. After they’re irradiated they’re still perfect and balanced to keep a man alive forever. The radiation doesn’t kill the glands at all, all they need is a healthy new body to keep ’em alive, and they’ll keep that body young and alive forever. Just a simple transplant operation, and with the stuff they got today, transplants almost always take. They don’t even have to put the glands where they’d be in a normal body, just a package in the gut and another in the back, not even a major operation—duck soup for my quacks. See what I mean? We got glands that’ll keep us alive forever now, but that doesn’t mean they gotta be ours.”

Snakes undulating slug-slime oozing all over his skin, Barron felt mindless urge to tear it all away, rip himself apart with his fingernails, tear out the soft green pulsing globs of flesh dripping stolen life-juices of Forever, death-junk, drip-dripping eternally into his veins… Images of sleeping faces of mountains of Evers’ slum children Franklin’s smashed face hard metal bee by his ear gutted bodies exploding garbage can slime rivers of blood thick like slime in which he was drowning! drowning! in slime in bodies of niggers crawling all over him maggots inside him—all burned unforgettable tracers of anguish through the quivering meat of his brain.

“You fucking crazy ax-murderer!” he screamed. “You monster! You got no right to be alive! And you won’t be, Bennie, I swear, one way or another I’ll kill you! Got those tapes… I’ll get you even if you kill me right here right now! Go ahead, have your apes shoot me right now! You better! Kill me! Kill me! Either way, I’ll kill you! You fucking—”

And with an animal growl, he lunged at Howards, felt the tips of his fingers just touch the scaly dry skin of Howards’ throat—and the guards grabbed him, one to each arm, snapped his arms behind his shoulder blades in a vicious double hammerlock.

“Murder?” Howards whined. “What do you mean, murder? So the two of us are alive, and two of them are dead… How long would they have lived, at most a century, and then, either way, those kids’d be the same place—dead. So it costs two lifetimes to give us two million lifetimes, don’t you see, life comes out ahead on the deal a million to one. That’s not murder, that’s the opposite, pushing back the fading black circle, pushing it back, back, back, opening, not closing fading black circle of death, pushing it back a million years! What do you mean, murder, it’s life, man, it’s life. Not to do it, that’s murder… murdering yourself, throwing yourself to the fading black circle, six feet of eviscerated nigger maggots ten million years of vultures laughing with plastic beaks up nose down throat fading black circle of death and murder…”

As Howards screamed at him, eyes rolling in pure terror inches away, face to face, hate to hate, Barron felt himself turning cold—the cold logic of light years of electric-circuit-insulation distance, the kinesthetic horror of the things sewn into his body becoming phosphor-dot images of death on the screen of his mind. He scrabbled for purchase and found it in the reflexive satellite-network interface forming between his consciousness and the phosphor-dot mosaic-image of madness in Benedict Howards’ eyes.

Cool it, he told himself, you’re kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, and you’re alive. And knowingly, he conned himself, sucking up the vidphone-TV-screen-interface anesthetic reality, forced himself cold.

Gotta stop him, kill him, finish him, is all. Got the muscle to do it, got murder tapes, Bug Jack Barron hundred million Brackett Count pipeline, GOP insurance; you got him cold.

But glands in your body like green slime crocodiles dripping blood of murdered babies to keep you alive…

He saw that Howards too had retreated to a more bearable level of reality. “So you see, I got you right where I want you after all. Murder, yeah, legally it’s murder, and it’s gonna take some doing before I can change the law. Before we change the law—’cause you’re in just as deep as I am, Barron. Your contract… I’ll bet you didn’t read all the fine print, the part where you agree to accept full liability for any results of the treatment. Thought that was just to cover us in case you died?

“That contract was drawn up by some mighty high-priced lawyers. It’s ironclad, and it’s a signed legal admission to accessory to murder in any court in the country. It’s a confession, and if you blow the whistle on me, I’ll buy twenty witnesses who’ll swear you knew all about the treatment when you signed it. We’re in this together, Barron. You want to stay alive, you take your orders from me.”

A blind berserker flash erupted through Barron: Ruined bodies soft slimy gland-slugs drip-dripping their eternal vampire-slime filling his veins with the blood of broken babies crocodile mouth of Howards’ madness chewing gobbets of cancer forever, so long as he was alive, so long as Howards was surrounded by guns by fifty billion dollars by Freezer Bill by bought President (bought with what?), Congress, safe forever, immortal vampire monster going on and on and on…

“You really think that matters, Howards?” he howled. “Think that’ll save you? With… with (scrunching his body in anguish) these things inside me, you so sure I want to live? I’ll get you, Howards, there’s not a thing you can do about it. I’ll get you even if it does cost me my life.”

“Not just your life,” said Benedict Howards. “You don’t like immortality, okay, you got a right to be crazy. Who cares? You feel rotten, want to die, that’s your business. But if finding out did this to you, what’ll it do to your wife?”

“Sara—”

“You’ve got a short memory, Barron. Your wife signed the same contract too—makes her an accessory to murder just like you. There’s any murder trial, it’ll be a triple trial, she’s in it with us. And she never knew what was coming off, did she? You got her into it, and if you don’t play ball it’ll be you killing her. Don’t hand me any crap about murder. You’re a murderer too, Barron, whichever way you turn.”

“You… you’ve told her…?”

“Do I really look that dumb?” Howards said. “You’re a lunatic, who knows what you might do, even with your own life on the line. But Miss Sara Westerfeld, or Mrs Jack Barron—whichever the hell it is—we know what she’s like, don’t we? Of course I haven’t told her. Why should I, that’s my final insurance. I don’t tell her a thing, so long as you play ball. That’s how I know I’ve got you. And I do have you now, don’t I, Barron? Come on, say it, I want to hear you say it.”

Shit, Barron thought, he does have me. He knows it, I know it, he knows I know… I’m trapped! Can’t tell Sara, she’d… worse than leave me, she’d freak out altogether. Gotta… gotta… what? What the fuck can I do?

“All right, Howards, for the moment we’ll play it your way.”

“For the moment! That’s good, that’s real good, Barron. For the moment. For the next million years! And you know something, friend? Sooner or later you’re gonna thank me, you’ll see what I mean. You can’t help wanting to stay alive, can you? Immortal… fifty years or so, and you’ll understand it’s worth anything to be immortal, anything… eviscerated nigger bodies in heaps of… You’ll thank me, Barron. You’re immortal, you’re more than a man, your life’s worth a million of theirs. Give it time. You’ll learn to like it, my guarantee.”

And from Howards’ mad eyes Barron sucked a fear, a mortal fear the like of which he had never felt before: fear that Howards might be right, fear that in fifty or a hundred or a thousand years the things inside him would rot him to a gutted hulk, fear that someday he might stare into those paranoid monster eyes and see—himself.