Toil
Over the course of the next week, Gabriel’s life became a narrow tunnel. He devoted every ounce of his energy to the cure, an antidote for his old cure. The Schist vaccine had betrayed him. It was time to have his revenge. Nothing else mattered.
Gabriel barely slept, and he ate even less. When nurses questioned his health, he brushed them off with assurances that he was fine. He wore the same set of stained clothes seven days straight. Even on bathroom trips, he took a notebook and pen. He collected more blood samples from trash cans and tested different chemicals on the beach sample he’d gotten with Michael. Bernard continued his constant ritual of ringing the call bell every few minutes, but Gabriel became adept at tuning out his roommate. The skeleton dolls sat on his desk, silently urging him on with either judgment or support; Gabriel could never tell which.
By the end of the week, his back ached from all the hours he spent hunched over his desk. But Gabriel’s mind was working at a level beyond his wildest dreams. He didn’t let exhaustion, old age, or Alzheimer’s get in his way. Finally, his new ideas began to take shape. Just as the Black Virus wasn’t quite a virus, his antidote wasn’t going to be quite an antidote, either. He was almost ready to kick the ball into the goal.
On the eighth night, Gabriel snuck back into Edna Foster’s room. He stretched on a pair of gloves and checked her pulse.
“Mommmmmmy…” she whispered.
As he reached into his pocket for a slide so he could take a blood sample, her frigid fingers curled around his other hand. The pressure was so gentle that he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it.
“Hold on, Edna. This will be over in a sec.”
She didn’t flinch when he pricked her finger. He tucked the sample back in his pocket. As he pulled off his gloves, the door opened behind him. Gabriel ran through a mental list of excuses for why he was hanging around in an infected resident’s room and drawing her blood. Unable to think of anything, he turned to face the music, desperate to plead his way out of a one-way trip to Level Five.
“Hello, Mr. Schist.” Victor leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed. He was wearing one of his standard black tuxedos with a blood-red tie. His expression was unsmiling but not hostile.
“Hello, Mr. Calaca.” Gabriel walked over and peeked around Victor to make sure no one else was out there. “Before you start lecturing me again, why don’t you answer a question for me?” He cut his eyes in Victor’s direction. “Why the hell did you leave those skeleton dolls in my room?”
Gabriel expected Victor to flinch and make excuses, or at least to be surprised, but instead, the man grinned. “Well, I’m quite glad you figured that out. What gave me away?”
Gabriel stepped into the hallway and turned to head toward his wing. “I asked around. No one knew anything. That itself was a big hint, given your normal secrecy. Then, I noticed something about that look on the dolls’ faces. Their cheerfully mysterious expressions somehow reminded me of you. God, skeleton dolls? Who the hell does something like that?”
“I do.” Victor shrugged. “If one wants another person to remember an important message, particularly if that other person has trouble remembering things, then one does their absolute best to make that message as memorable as possible. That way, you see, it sticks. The messages I wanted to convey to you were significant, and you must admit, those figures are fairly memorable.”
“Keep your messages to yourself from now on. I have work to do.” Gabriel walked faster.
Victor kept up easily. “I know what you’re doing with this new rush of activity. What do you honestly expect to accomplish with this process, other than mass homicide?”
“I’m trying to kill the Schistlings. Isn’t it obvious?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Gabriel.” There was a new aggressiveness to his tone. In the past, Victor had always spoken with utmost precision, as if conversation were a meticulously orchestrated dance, but he was cutting right to the chase. “I know that you’re well aware of the risks regarding the Schistlings.”
“I am.”
“You still don’t quite understand them, do you?”
“Nor do I have any desire to. I want them dead. That’s it. And I’ll do whatever it takes to ensure that my Frankenstein’s monster gets destroyed, even if I have to chase it all the way to the North Pole.”
“So you fail to see the tactical importance of understanding one’s enemy? You’re making assumptions. You’re prejudging their intentions and jumping in blindly.”
“I don’t care to ponder this issue philosophically. I’m working on a practical solution for a practical problem. That’s all I care to think about right now.”
“Gabriel Schist! You cannot just treat these Schistlings like spilled milk! You are not the only force at work here. Every action has repercussions. Every accident has consequences. If you simply try to wipe up that milk without deducing why exactly it spilled in the first place…” Victor’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets. An X-shaped vein had popped out on his forehead, and his normally perfect hair was a bit frazzled.
They reached the threshold of Gabriel’s room and walked past a pants-less Bernard, who was standing just inside, drinking a cup of fruit punch. Gabriel sat at his desk, and Victor hovered behind him.
“Forget it, Victor,” Gabriel muttered. “I beat AIDS, and I can beat this. I don’t need or want any assistance.” He flicked on his desk lamp. The dark, Nosferatu-like silhouette of Victor’s shadow appeared on the wall behind the desk.
“Explain your plan,” Victor said. “Or do you even have one, now that you have chosen to abandon the slugs?”
“Oh, about that. What exactly do you know about the slugs?”
“Everything there is to know.”
“Is that vague response the best you can give me? Fine.” Gabriel spun his chair around to face Victor. He held up his new sample of Edna’s blood. “The antidote is almost ready. If I work fast enough, it should be done by tonight. There’s just one little issue.”
“Which is?”
“Well, I can’t simply shoot the vaccine into uninfected people, one by one. It won’t work. Because if the Schistlings do possess a collective consciousness, then killing one Schistling will only piss off the rest, and then the game’s over. Even my testing can only be done on residual traces and blood samples. When I figured that out, I also realized that I needed something meaner than a vaccine and that if I’m going to strike them, I need to do it at their center.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed. “You mean that thing in the ocean?”
“That disgusting maelstrom? Yes. I’ll bet you that it’s their life source. That thing has been formed by their combined body mass. It’s their center. So if I perfect this antidote tonight, then tomorrow, I’m going to go out there and—”
“Don’t be a damned fool. That thing is God-only-knows how many miles off the coast, and you’re an old man with a bad leg.”
“I thought about that. There’s a public dock less than a quarter of a mile down the coast. I’ll sneak a boat out of the dock and take it right into the maelstrom, right to the center of their consciousness. And then”—Gabriel snapped his fingers—“I’m going to kill them. Because this antidote I’m making… well, it’s not really an antidote, so to speak.”
“Then what, pray tell, is it?”
“It’s a poison.” Gabriel smirked. “Carefully designed with the Schistlings in mind. Just as bitter and acidic as they are. If my theory holds true, this poison will rot them from the inside out and dissolve them into nothingness. Once I feed it to them, then all of them will die in moments. Ashes to ashes. I can’t cure the people already infected. I’ve realized that. But I can kill the Schistlings and prevent them from spreading.”
“But what happens to those who are already infected? The Schistlings will certainly murder all of them as soon as they feel the poison.”
“Without that center holding it together—that brain, if you will—their collective body will cease to function. I’m convinced that the maelstrom is the force that sends out a signal to the individual vaccinated immune systems of human beings across the planet, and that signal is what first awakens the so-called Black Virus. Once the Schistling is awakened by that telepathic signal, it begins the process of destroying its human host. So if I kill the source of that signal”— Gabriel spread his hands—“Boom!”
