“Yeah.”
“Something was killing them, and the hemoglobin this released into his system was very slowly destroying his kidneys. We should have seen it, but so many of the symptoms overlap with the flu.”
“What if it wasn’t flu at all?” asked Lyle. “Just a prolonged kidney failure that looked like a flu?”
“That’s the thing,” said Allgood, “this kind of kidney failure isn’t usually prolonged—red cell destruction typically happens in one big swoop, like you’d get from a bad blood transfusion. The antibodies from one blood type attack the red blood cells of the other, and the whole body falls apart. That could even explain the stroke, if enough of the dead cells got into a bottleneck in his brain.”
“So is that it?” asked Lyle. “Did he get a transfusion?”
“Not in our hospital,” said Allgood, “and nowhere else that his friends or family were aware of. So it has to be something else, we just don’t know what.”
“There’s no way he could have gotten foreign blood into his system?”
“Not as far as we can tell. We couldn’t even find any needle marks aside from our own, and we know we didn’t do it.”
Lyle sighed and rubbed his eyes. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
Allgood laughed again, a dry, humorless cough. “Tell me about it.”
Four hours later Lyle was back in the hospital lobby, staring listlessly at a mirrored wall. He’d gone through everything in the folder, found every scrap of evidence he could, but none of it led anywhere. All I need is just one clue, he thought, just one clue that can tie all the symptoms together—not just Jon Ford’s but everyone’s. Why had William England’s skin turned Caucasian? Why had Pedro Trujillo’s bones elongated? Why had Christopher Page lost so much weight? If there was a common trend, he’d have something to work with—if everyone was losing weight, or if everyone had bone deformation—then he could at least identify the direction of the problem, if not the cause. As it was he had nothing: no trends, no hypothesis, nothing.
Lyle thought about Christopher Page’s face in the grocery store—his own face—and shivered at the remembered shock of looking into his own eyes, familiar and foreign at once. He looked across the floor at his reflection in the mirrored wall—a man on an identical bench, tired and scared, the hospital bustling unnoticed behind him. Who was he, really? Who is Lyle Fontanelle? A chemist. A developer. If I’d never taken that first cosmetics job, would I be here now? Would I be somewhere else? Or would I be someone else—another Lyle altogether, living another life?
Lyle’s reflection stood up, and walked toward him.
“Holy—!” Lyle jumped back in shock. The reflection scowled angrily, pointed, and started running straight at him.
“You did this to us!”
In the seconds before he was tackled, Lyle had just enough time to realize two things: first, there was no mirror at all, simply another bench lined up beside another identical pillar.
Second: the other Lyle had a Mexican accent.
11
Tuesday, May 1
6:39 P.M.
Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan
227 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The new Lyle smashed into the old with horrific force, tackling him to the ground and knocking the wind from his lungs.
“This is all your fault!”
Lyle gasped for breath, struggling to crawl away; he almost managed to inhale before something solid slammed into the side of his head, and his vision exploded in white stars. He fell on the floor, blind and deaf. His lungs ached for air, and he gasped a ragged breath. Somebody pulled the other Lyle off of him, and when his hearing returned he could hear the same voice again, with the same Mexican accent, ranting angrily.
“He did this to me. You see my skin? You see my arms? He did this to me!”
“Please calm down, sir, just tell me what’s wrong.”
Lyle saw himself standing about ten feet away, held tightly by a pair of hospital orderlies. The haircut was different, but close; the clothes were the same general color as Lyle’s. At a distance you might not be able to tell them apart.
It’s Christopher Page, thought Lyle. But no, he doesn’t have an accent.
“I do not look like this,” the man growled. “He ruined my bones, my skin, my whole life!”
“Wait,” said Lyle, clambering to his feet. He stared at his other self. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am!” the man shouted. “I am Pedro Trujillo—you used me like a rat in a lab, testing your poison, and then you called me on the phone. Don’t pretend you don’t know me!”
“Pedro Trujillo,” said Lyle, realization washing through him like nausea. “You can’t be Pedro Trujillo—you’re nearly five inches taller than he is. And you’re white.”
“I know I’m white!” Pedro screamed.
One of the orderlies looked at Lyle. “Is this a … relative of yours?”
“No, he’s a … business acquaintance.” When Lyle had called him before, the same day he called the others, Pedro had mentioned intense leg aches but he hadn’t blamed Lyle or NewYew for any of it. “Pedro,” said Lyle, “why didn’t you tell me about the skin bleaching?” That’s two subjects with a similar symptom—the first match I’ve found yet. But what does it mean?
And why does he look like me?
“The skin change is new,” Pedro spat, “but I know that you did it—that’s why you called me, to see if it had started yet. When my skin changed, I knew you must have done something to my legs, as well.”
“What are you talking about?” the orderly asked. He looked at Lyle. “What is he talking about?”
