Dr. Liverman / The Klondike Confrontation — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:50 PM

Cherry Hills Village / Englewood / Sloan’s Lake / CU Auraria / County Road 73 (Sedalia)

Denver, Colorado

The bartender’s name didn’t matter. Off shift from a place called Hank’s on South Broadway, white button-down untucked, sleeves rolled past forearms that had been pouring rail whiskey since three in the afternoon. He crossed the parking lot toward a Dodge pickup and Flash came at him on a diagonal, fast and easy, and the man never registered a threat.

The grapple was clean. Flash caught the shoulder and hauled him behind the dumpster enclosure and the Kiss opened him up and the bartender went slack against the cinder block with an expression that was not pain. Five pulls. Past safe. He sealed the wounds and left the man unconscious behind a dumpster in Englewood in the last week of winter and drove the IROC-Z back to Cherry Hills doing seventy-five on Santa Fe.

Ten o’clock. Cherry Hills. The cohort assembled in Emerson’s living room — Monica on the wingback, Marcus on the floor with his back against the bookcase, Emerson in the kitchen doorway holding a glass of water he would not drink, Theresa at the dining table with Prestor’s journal open and a yellow legal pad full of French notation.

“Roger Liverman,” she said. “Independent biochemist. Contracted by Prestor for lab analysis on the compounds. It’s in the journal three times. He signed NDAs.”

“Where?” Flash said.

“Doesn’t say.”

“Phone book.”

Marcus found one in the kitchen. Flash’s fingers were too thick for the tissue-thin pages. He tore two before he found the L section and ran his finger down the column and came up empty.

“Unlisted,” Marcus said. “Or he’s not in Denver proper.”

Emerson spoke from the doorway. “The neighbors. Prestor’s neighbors saw his car. Brown Volvo, university sticker.”

Theresa closed the journal. “Tonight. All of us.”

Flash looked at her. Five years of business partnership, client meetings, quarterly reports, the silent language of two people who had learned to negotiate the same room without stepping on each other. She had the look she got before a school board pitch. The one that meant she’d already done the math.

“Tonight,” Flash said. “All of us.”

The neighbor on Sloan’s Lake gave them the car. A woman in her sixties, door on a chain, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. Brown Volvo 240 wagon. CU parking sticker, faculty category. Always headed east when he left. Theresa said “we’re with Jacob” and the woman unlatched the chain and told them everything the police had already asked.

CU Auraria campus on a Saturday near midnight. Sodium lights and empty lots. The science building had lights on the third floor. Third row of the south lot: brown Volvo 240 wagon, backed in near the service entrance.

Monica: “We go in, or we wait for him to come out?”

Flash was already walking. Theresa caught up on the stairs.

The service entrance was unlocked. Third floor, end of the corridor. A lab with overhead fluorescents and a classic rock station playing CCR and the smell of reagents and institutional coffee, and a man standing at a workstation with his back to the door.

Roger Liverman. Early forties, heavyset, thinning hair, lab coat over flannel. When he turned and saw them his hands went flat on the countertop.

“Who are you? This building is closed to the public.”

“Dr. Liverman,” Theresa said. “My name is Theresa Harper. We knew Jacob Prestor. We’re trying to understand the work he was doing — the work he contracted you for.”

Something cold crossed his face. “You’re the ones who broke into my house.”

Flash stepped forward. “No. We chased them off.”

Liverman looked at him. The lie sat wrong — voice too fast, delivery too smooth.

“If you chased them off, then you saw them. What did they look like?”

Flash had nothing. Theresa stepped in front of him.

“Dr. Liverman, please. Sit down.”

“I’m calling campus security.”

He reached for the phone on the wall and Flash moved — moved at a speed that did not belong to a man of any size, a blur of arm and shoulder that crossed seven feet in the time it took Liverman’s hand to travel eight inches. The phone receiver was in Flash’s hand. The cord swung. Liverman looked at where the phone had been and then at Flash and his mouth opened and nothing came out.

“How did you—”

“Adrenaline,” Theresa said. She put herself between Flash and the biochemist. “We’ve been running on it for a week. Since Jacob died.” She paused. Liverman’s breathing had changed, gone shallow and fast, and she could hear his heart accelerating and she made herself not hear it. “We were in Jacob’s house when it burned. All of us. We barely got out. Whatever he was working on — whatever he hired you to analyze — we’re part of it. We’re the test subjects.”

Liverman sat down. He looked at the phone in Flash’s hand and then at Theresa and the fear was still there but something else was growing beside it — the curiosity of a man sitting alone with data he couldn’t explain.

He talked for twenty minutes. The compounds were blood-reactive. Protein chains unknown to any published taxonomy. Cytotoxic in standard cell cultures. He told Prestor they were dangerous. Prestor claimed a stabilization method, wouldn’t share the source material.

Liverman opened the file cabinet behind his desk. Primary notes gone — the burglary — but he’d kept copies of the correspondence and preliminary analysis at the lab. He laid the folder on the bench.

“A man came to see me about a week before the break-in.” Liverman’s voice changed when he said it. Quieter, the register of a man reporting something he wished he hadn’t witnessed. “Blond. Unkempt. Smelled like he’d been living outdoors for a long time. Said his name was Robert Klondike.”

Flash looked at Theresa. Theresa looked at Flash.

“Let’s go,” Flash said.

County Road 73 south of Sedalia. Forty minutes of two-lane blacktop climbing into the foothills. The IROC-Z first, Marcus’s sedan behind it. One-fifteen in the morning and the Rockies were a black absence against a blacker sky. No moon worth the name. Twenty degrees.

The ranch sat back from the road behind a wire fence and a line of bare cottonwoods. Kitchen light on. Same place they’d visited before, and Flash had liked Klondike then — the blond man with the calloused hands and the weapons stacked in every room and the survival posture of something that had been running a very long time. He had been useful. He had been direct. He had stolen their research and Flash was finished with direct.

The cohort spread across the yard. Monica and Emerson at the vehicles. Marcus at the tree line. Theresa behind Flash, ten feet back, watching the angles.

Flash kicked in the kitchen door. Three deadbolts, old pine frame. The wood splintered at the lock plate and Klondike was behind the table with a stake in his right hand, reaching for a lever-action rifle propped against the counter.

Flash’s blood burned and the world slowed. He covered the space in two strides and caught Klondike around the torso and they went into the wall together. The stake changed hands. Flash drove it at Klondike’s chest and the point went into the pantry door and Klondike tore free.

The rifle came up. Klondike fired from three feet. The sound was enormous — a flat crack that put a round through Flash’s left shoulder. The wound opened and closed. The bullet dropped on the linoleum.

Flash hit him. Right fist into the jaw, left into the ribs. He felt things move under the skin that should not have moved. Klondike went down. Flash drove the stake and the point punched through flannel and muscle and stopped two inches from where it needed to be. Klondike screamed and pulled the stake out of his own chest with both hands. Blood on the linoleum, blood on the walls. The kitchen smelled like a slaughterhouse.

Klondike swung the bloody stake and Flash threw a double punch and missed clean, both fists going wide, feet sliding in the blood. He went down on one knee. Klondike pulled himself upright against the hallway wall.

Flash burned the last of his speed. He felt the reservoir drain to fumes and the world went diamond-bright and he hit Klondike with everything he had. The final stake went through cloth and cartilage and lodged in the ribs and Klondike’s eyes went flat and his body stopped.

Marcus came through the shattered kitchen door and looked at the hallway. Flash on his knees. Klondike on his back. Blood everywhere.

“He’s out,” Marcus said. “Torpor.”

Flash knelt over the body and the hunger was absolute.

Almost empty. He could feel the bottom of whatever reservoir the hunger drew from, a thin film of warmth between himself and something cold and permanent. The thing behind his thoughts — the thing that had been there since the basement, that he had no name for and no defense against — was screaming in a frequency that bypassed language. It wanted what was on the floor. It had always wanted what was on the floor. Every hunt, every bartender in every parking lot, every pull from every vein had been a rehearsal for this. The real thing. The whole thing. Not a sip but a swallowing.

He opened the vein in Klondike’s throat with his teeth and drank.

The blood was different from anything he had tasted. Older. Colder. It carried three centuries of vitae processed through a body that had been remade so many times it no longer remembered what the original tasted like. Flash drank and drank and the reservoir filled and the cold receded and the warmth came back in waves, each pull richer than the last, and still the body yielded, and still the pull continued, and the body on the floor stopped being a body and became a vessel and the vessel emptied and something else began.

The soul fight started as a pressure behind his eyes. A door opening in a room he didn’t know he had. He was standing in a place that was not the hallway and not the kitchen and not anywhere he could name — a blackness without dimension, without temperature, without sound. And across from him was a man who was also not a man, a presence occupying the same non-space, and this presence had been fighting for three hundred years and had never once chosen to stop.

Flash pushed. His will was a small bright thing, hard-edged and specific — the will of a man who had always found the gap and hit it. The will that had carried him through the ACL and the draft collapse and the sales floor and the parking lot and the basement. It was enough for a life. It was not enough for this.

Klondike’s will was not bright. It was not hard-edged. It was not specific. It was a weight — geological, impersonal, the accumulated pressure of three centuries of refusing to be destroyed. It did not push back. It simply did not move. And in the space between Flash’s push and Klondike’s refusal, Flash felt himself begin to dissolve.

Not dissolve. Unmake. The memories went first — the girlfriend whose name started the nickname, the coach at South High, the sound of a stadium when the linebacker reads the gap and the gap is there. Then the body knowledge — how to crack a neck before a hit, how to stand too close because proximity was a tool, how to smile before the violence because the smile got there first. Then the voice. Then the name. Then the part that knew it had a name.

The last thing Flash Simpson experienced was not pain. It was recognition. The thing he had been running from — his father asleep in a chair at five in the afternoon, the warehouse hands, the house with nothing in it — was not behind him. It was him. It had always been him. The man who kept moving so the ground wouldn’t give had run out of ground.

The blackness closed. The presence across from him did not gloat. It simply expanded into the space where Flash had been, filling the vacancy with the efficiency of water filling a crack in stone, and what sat up in the hallway of a ranch house south of Sedalia was wearing Flash Simpson’s body and Flash Simpson’s face and Flash Simpson’s blood-soaked shirt, and it looked at its hands and smiled, and the smile was wrong.

Theresa saw it from the kitchen doorway.

She had been watching the hallway — the feed, the way Flash’s back hunched over the body, the sounds she made herself not catalogue. She had seen Flash drink before. The wrongness of it was a thing she had filed under later, under not now, under an infinite capacity to defer the unmanageable. But this was different. The body on the floor stopped moving and Flash didn’t stop and something changed in the quality of the silence, a shift she registered in her spine before her brain caught up.

Flash sat up. Looked at his hands. Turned them over, examining the knuckles, the spread of the fingers, the way the tendons worked under the skin. Then he stood, and the way he stood was wrong — the center of gravity two inches off, the shoulders set at a width that didn’t match the hips, the posture of a man re-learning a vehicle he had not driven before.

He smiled. And Theresa knew.

Five years of reading a room through Flash’s face — when the deal was closing, when it was falling apart, when he was about to say something stupid and needed the look that meant stop. This was not his smile. This was a smile assembled from Flash’s muscles by something that understood the mechanics but had no access to the feeling underneath.

“Who are you?” she said.

The thing in Flash’s body looked at her. For half a second the performance held — Flash’s eyes, Flash’s jawline, the scar on the chin from the CU-Nebraska game. Then it dropped. Whatever was behind the face decided the cost of pretending exceeded the cost of running, and it ran.

Down the hallway, through the back of the house, through locks it worked with hands that should not have known the combination. Three hundred years of survival instinct firing through stolen nerves. Theresa shouted. Monica was in the kitchen and her voice hit a command register — “Stop!” — but the thing did not look back and the command needed eyes and it was already through the door.

Emerson came around the side of the house, fast, burning something in his blood to close the distance, and the thing in Flash’s body cut left and Emerson’s tackle caught air and then there was a fence line and open ranchland and darkness and it was gone.

Theresa stood in the kitchen. The linoleum was red. The hallway was red. There was a body on the hallway floor — Klondike’s body, the original, the one that had been there all along — and it was empty. Not dead the way she understood dead. Vacated. A shell with the occupant relocated.

She touched her own forearm. The injection site. She didn’t notice she was doing it.

Marcus was in the doorway. Monica behind him. Emerson coming back across the yard, shaking his head.

“Take everything,” Theresa said. Her voice came out flat, stripped of the Jester, stripped of the chemistry-teacher register, stripped of everything except function. “Notes. Weapons. The guns. Everything he had. Then we burn it.”

They moved. Marcus found lamp oil in the barn. Monica collected serum vials from a footlocker in the back room. Emerson gathered rifles, revolver, stakes. Theresa took Liverman’s stolen notes from the desk and put them in the folder with the lab copies and stood in the kitchen and looked at the hallway one more time.

Flash’s IROC-Z was in the yard. The keys were in his jacket on the kitchen chair — he’d taken it off before he kicked in the door, because that was Flash, jacket off before the fight, crack the neck, smile. She picked it up. Cigarettes and leather conditioner and underneath it, faintly, the bartender from Englewood.

Marcus poured the lamp oil. Kitchen and hallway. The body on the floor soaked it up.

The fire took clean. The ranch was far enough from the road and the neighbors were far enough from the ranch and the night was cold enough that the heat rose straight and the glow wouldn’t carry. They stood at the fence line and watched the kitchen windows turn orange and then white and then the roof caught and the structure began to fold.

Theresa drove the IROC-Z back to Cherry Hills. The driver’s seat was set for someone six inches taller. She didn’t move it.

Emerson’s house at two-thirty in the morning. Dawn at six-sixteen. She parked in the driveway next to Marcus’s sedan and turned off the engine and sat in Flash’s car with Flash’s jacket on the passenger seat and the folder of stolen research in her lap. The digital clock on the dash said 2:31. She watched it change to 2:32.

Monica knocked on the window. Theresa rolled it down.

“Inside,” Monica said. “Before it gets light.”

Theresa gathered the folder and the jacket and got out of the car and walked into the house where she would now sleep through the days and hunt through the nights and try to keep four people alive who had no business being alive, and she did not cry, because there was nothing in crying that solved the problem, and the problem was all she had left.