Pale Highway
Copyright © 2015 by Nicholas Conley. All rights reserved.
First Edition: September 2015
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to my father, may he rest in peace.
This book is also dedicated to the countless victims of Alzheimer’s, as well as their families, and all those who help them cope with their daily struggle.
That’s right, guys. This one is for you.
Prologue
Summer 2018
The patient had charcoal-black eyes, hard and cold, as if rounded chunks of volcanic rock had been shoved inside her eye sockets. Her skin possessed a sickly white pallor, as if it had been sucked dry of all its nutrients and hung up on a clothesline. Dark veins crawled over her body like wriggling snakes, pulsing with every unsteady heartbeat. Her mouth hung open, and a pockmarked grey tongue dangled uselessly over her lower lip. Her bedridden form emitted the stench of necrotic flesh.
Glenda Alvarez was sixty-three years old, young compared to the other residents. Just last week, she’d had her hair permed and her nails manicured. The virus had hit fast.
It wouldn’t be long. She was just another unlucky victim of a plague that took no prisoners. She had all the symptoms of the toxicity passing through humanity, turning live bodies into black-eyed corpses.
The Black Virus. And somehow… somehow, Gabriel Schist was supposed to stop it.
The rain had stopped, but the moonlit ground was still covered in a glimmering sheen of moisture. Grimacing, Gabriel turned away from the open bedroom window, which was his lens to Glenda’s decline. He buttoned up his coat, hesitated, halfway unbuttoned it, then buttoned it up again.
He hobbled over to the smoking gazebo and lowered himself into the seat. His legs were rickety, and a sharp pain shot through his knee. His lower back felt as if the nerves were being pinched by a steel clamp.
He took out a pack of cigarettes and patted down his jacket for a lighter. It was in his inner pocket. When the flame sparked, he buried the smoke deep inside his chest, baking his lungs. His cigarette twitched unsteadily between two shaking fingers. Already, it was burning down, dissipating into nothing. Its tobacco-filled life was short and empty. It served one purpose, and then it died.
Gabriel looked back at the window. A nurse entered the infected woman’s room to fix her IV, noticed him outside, and closed the blinds.
Every fiber of his being, every piece of the man he once was, told him that he—Gabriel Schist, the oh-so-great-and-wonderful creator of the Schist vaccine—was the only one who could stop the virus. Years and years ago, he’d stopped a prior epidemic in its tracks. Why not this one?
But the Gabriel of the past was an altogether different Gabriel than the fidgety, broken creature that existed in his place. The real Gabriel Schist had been a younger man. A better man. A brilliant man.
As the cigarette’s glowing ember slowly burned to ashes, Gabriel wondered what had happened to that great man. Where had he gone?
ACT I of III:
GREY MATTER
“Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such are beauty, gratitude, an army, the universe.”
John Locke
Chapter 1:
