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  Tyler Willis lay on the gurney, shivering from the cold and the loss of blood that now lay in thick congealing pools beneath him. The conversation outside of the door had ended, and he realized that Ethan Warner had failed. Beside him, Lillian Cruz stood with tape over her mouth and the heavy-set guard watching over them both.

  Jeb Oppenheimer walked back into the lab, closing the door behind him and putting on his gloves. The old man walked across to Willis and picked up the scalpel once more, looking down and without hesitation pressing the sharp blade across Willis’s flank. A white-hot lance of pain surged through his body and he gagged in agony. Oppenheimer ripped the tape from his mouth, and through his tears and terror Willis spluttered, ‘I swear to you, I don’t know anything. I don’t know where Hiram Conley got that infection.’

  Oppenheimer’s face filled his vision as he glared down at him.

  ‘So then, how about that kidney?’

  31

  GOLDEN

  NEW MEXICO

  8.37 p.m.

  The late-summer sun was sinking behind the mountains to the west, casting long black tiger-stripe shadows against the glowing desert as Lee Carson rode slowly down the main street of the town, a pair of tumbleweeds rustling as they rolled across the dusty earth, vanishing past the old merchandise store. His horse whinnied softly beneath him and he patted her flanks with a gloved hand, trying to forget the horrific image of what lay within it.

  The store was made of bricks, but the long landing and porch were clapperboard, the paint faded beneath the wrath of a thousand suns. Rows of sagging buildings lined the streets, the low sunlight beaming through their long-abandoned interiors, while the crumbling ruins of the old San Francisco church and cemetery basked in lonely shadows nearby. Most people would never have dreamed of coming here at nightfall, but for Lee Carson it was one of the few places where he felt at home.

  A ghost town.

  Golden had been abandoned for at least a hundred years, its postal service discontinued in 1928. A town constructed far out into the wilderness like many others, its church had been built in the 1830s, but the demise of pioneers and gold rushes had seen the town eventually abandoned to the desert. There were others: La Bajada, Glorietta, San Pedro, Dolores. Carson remembered them all, not as they were now but as thriving towns built around mines and cattle stations, or along the routes of the great western railway lines that crossed the endless wilderness. Now, most of the roofs of the mud-brick buildings were sagging or had caved in completely, leaving skeletal timber frames exposed to the harsh elements. A few faded signs still adorned the awnings of shops, advertising ironmongery, farriers, even a jewelry boutique, distant memories of a once thriving community.

  A hot wind moaned down the street, carrying with it the spectral sounds of horses, people and carts, whispers of the past haunting Carson’s ears. He turned in his saddle, looking over his shoulder into the deepening shadows behind him. Nothing moved but for a spiraling dust devil whipping up a vortex of sand.

  Carson stopped his horse in the center of the street, listening to the ancient town’s soft noises, creaking timbers and rustling grass. He closed his eyes.

  ‘State your business!’

  Carson’s heart bounced against the inside of his chest as he whirled around in his saddle, drawing a pistol from a holster beneath his jacket and aiming the weapon behind him.

  An older man leaned back against the wall of the abandoned merchandise shop, lighting a pipe that flared orange in the shadows and illuminated his wide-brimmed Stetson and tasseled hide jacket. Blue smoke smoldered from the pipe as he extinguished the match, peering out at Carson from beneath the rim of his hat.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Carson said, lowering his pistol.

  ‘We ain’t got nothin’ to say, boy,’ came the reply, casual and without interest. ‘You’ll be on y’way now.’

  The man turned, his boots striking the clapperboards the only sound echoing through the town’s long shadows. Carson cursed beneath his breath, turning his horse and cantering across the street to cut the man off.

  ‘I’d say we’ve got plenty to be discussin’,’ Carson snapped, yanking the horse up at the end of the shop’s landing.

  The man looked up at him curiously, still sucking on his pipe.

  ‘You lost that right, Carson,’ he said, a thick moustache rising and falling with each word. ‘’Bout ninety-five years ago, if ma memory serves me, when you decided to spend your days bedding high-falutin’ women and your nights drinking Pop Skull from cheap bottles.’

  Carson vaulted out of his saddle, tying the horse to the nearest awning pillar with a loose flourish of the reins before walking up to the man and standing directly in front of him.

  ‘As opposed to what? Foraging for scraps of hardtack out in the desert for ninety years gone by? That what you calling horse sense now, Ellison?’

  Ellison Thorne stood to his full height, a good two inches above Carson’s, and Carson fought the urge not to take a pace back. Carson was young and strong of build, clean of features as they used to say, but Ellison Thorne was a legend amongst men, barrel-chested and well over six feet tall. It was once said that during a fire-fight with the Confederates out Fort Union way, a stray musket ball had started a fire near a barrel of powder on the siege lines. Most men had run away from the impending explosion. Ellison Thorne had run toward it, picking up the hundred-pound barrel and hurling it across the lines toward the enemy. Twenty yards, they said it had flown.

  ‘You turned your back on us,’ Ellison boomed, ‘right after you joined the Jesse Evans Gang.’

  Carson sighed. ‘Jesus, Ellison, that was a hundred thirty years o’more ago. Can’t you let it lie?’

  Ellison Thorne had fallen in with cattle farmer John Tunstall during the Lincoln County War of 1878, a bitter county-wide dispute over the control of the monopoly on the dry-goods trade. Thorne, along with his comrades from the Civil War, had served in the deputized posse of the Lincoln County Regulators alongside Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre and Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. Together, they’d killed a number of Evans Gang gunfighters, including Buckshot Roberts, at the gunfight of Blazer’s Mills. Carson, resenting Thorne, had gone across to the regulators’ arch enemies under Jesse Evans and Lawrence Murphy. The battles between the gangs had gone down into Wild West legend, although Billy the Kid had been pinned for far more killings than he’d been responsible for, and had never led the regulators. Ever since, Carson had ridden alone, rarely meeting Ellison Thorne.

  ‘I got somethin’ that’ll interest you now, Ellison,’ Carson insisted, ‘whether you like it or not.’

  Ellison Thorne loomed over him, the glow from his pipe demonically illuminating his drooping moustache and craggy features.

  ‘What could you possibly have that would interest me, boy?’

  Carson stood his ground and ripped off his gloves, holding his hands up.

  Ellison Thorne looked at those ruined hands for a long few seconds, reaching up slowly for his pipe and puffing thoughtfully before nodding once.

  ‘Interesting.’

  Carson stared at him for a moment.

  ‘That’s all you can goddamn say? Interesting? Jesus Christ, my hands are falling off and you’re more interested in your pipe than . . .’

  Ellison Thorne stood back a pace and slipped off his jacket. Carson’s voice trailed off like the summer winds into the night as he stared. Thorne’s shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and in the golden half-light of the sunset his thick forearms were a tangled, sinewy web of desiccated muscle and sagging gray skin.

  ‘Gotten your fill?’ Thorne rumbled at him.

  Carson nodded blankly as the big man slipped his jacket back on and watched him for a few long seconds.

  ‘What do we do?’ Carson asked in dismay. ‘This ain’t happened afore now.’

  Ellison Thorne took his pipe from beneath his moustache and examined its contents as he spoke.

  ‘I haven’t
heard from the others yet,’ he said ominously. ‘What were you plannin’ on?’

  Carson blinked, and shook his head.

  ‘I ain’t got no plan,’ he admitted helplessly. ‘Old man Conley was trying to get help from some guy up Santa Fe way, afore he got shot. He opined that we might find a cure for this affliction.’

  Ellison Thorne nodded.

  ‘He was a Jonah who went out on his own hook, mixin’ too much with the natives when we needed to keep this amongst ourselves. It ain’t what we agreed.’

  ‘We weren’t dying when we agreed to anything,’ Carson protested. ‘Besides, I didn’t agree anyways. Why’d I want to be stuck out here on my own, away from civilization? We got nobody out here to help us!’

  Ellison Thorne nodded thoughtfully and drew again on his pipe.

  ‘We’ll meet the day after tomorrow, usual place and time. It’ll give us the cover we need to blend in.’

  Carson shook his head.

  ‘Another meeting. All that jawing hasn’t fixed us up one bit, Ellison. We need something done about this! How well do you think we’ll goddamn blend in if we’ve got bits falling off us all the time?’

  Ellison Thorne pushed past Carson with his shoulder and strode slowly out into the darkness.

  ‘Getting yourself into a conniption fit ain’t gonna help anyone. The day after tomorrow, Lee. Don’t be dawdling.’

  ‘We’re dying,’ Carson said sadly.

  Ellison Thorne slowed and turned to look at him over his shoulder.

  ‘Only temporarily,’ he rumbled. ‘There are bigger things than just us to consider, Lee. You should have paid heed to that before you started living in the cities, drinking and whoring. Hankerin’ after a quick fix now’s a lost cause. Stay out of sight until we meet.’

  With that, Ellison Thorne walked out into the night to where Carson could see a horse tethered in a dense thicket of bushes no more than fifty yards away. How he hadn’t seen it on the way in he didn’t know, but then he had long since lost all the survival skills required out here in the lonely deserts. Ellison Thorne and his men had instead remained here for the past hundred forty years.

  For the first time in a century and a half, Lee Carson felt lonely and afraid.

  32

  SKINGEN CORP

  SANTA FE

  11.14 p.m.

  The laboratory was a windowless cell but the clock on the wall told Lillian it was night and she had been working for almost six hours straight under the silent gaze of a SkinGen security guard. She hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing and the guard had even escorted her to the latrine. Tyler Willis lay nearby on the mortuary slab, groaning and shivering occasionally. To her relief, Jeb Oppenheimer had refrained from slicing the poor guy’s kidneys straight out of his body, deciding instead to leave the threat unfinished in order to force Lillian into working further on Hiram Conley’s remains.

  Lillian had been happy to see him leave; she would obey his parting command to find out once and for all what had infected Hiram Conley’s body before he finally died. But she was also certain that Oppenheimer had absolutely no intention of letting either her or Willis leave the building alive. They had witnessed too much. Lillian had to escape.

  She turned, putting down the scalpel with which she had been dissecting Conley’s crumbling corpse, and looked at the guard.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t go on without something to eat and drink.’

  The guard glared at her but remained silent.

  ‘What?’ Lillian asked. ‘Too many words at once for you to understand? Food. Drink. How’s that?’

  The guard took two paces across the room and grabbed her throat with one chunky hand, shoving her backwards into the worktops and straining her arm against the handcuff still pinning her to Conley’s mortuary slab.

  ‘You stay until you’re finished.’

  ‘I can’t work properly,’ Lillian shot back, refusing to be intimidated, ‘if I’m exhausted, hungry and thirsty. I’ll make mistakes, miss evidence. You want your boss to find out that you half-starved me and then I screwed up?’

  The guard held her for a moment longer, the handful of cells in his brain churning laboriously as he considered her point of view, and then he dropped his grip on her and turned for the door without another word. Lillian watched as he unlocked the doors and left the laboratory, locking the doors behind him.

  Lillian waited until he was out of earshot and then looked at Willis.

  ‘Tyler? Wake up!’

  Willis groaned, his head lolling to one side as he tried to focus on her. Lillian waved a hand in front of his face.

  ‘Tyler, I need your help.’

  Willis licked his parched lips, struggling to remain conscious.

  ‘Water,’ he said. ‘I need water. And my stomach hurts.’

  ‘The guard’s on his way back here with something to drink,’ she said. ‘I can give you more morphine, but you’ve lost too much blood to give it intravenously – it might kill you.’

  She turned to face his body, his chest and stomach now sealed by a neat row of stitches that she’d administered as soon as Oppenheimer had left. The old man’s cuts had not been deep, and none of Willis’s internal organs had been damaged as far as she could tell. But he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood, and the old bastard hadn’t even given Lillian a saline drip to replace Tyler’s lost fluids.

  God only knew what Oppenheimer would do to him when he returned. Lillian closed her eyes, and made a swift decision.

  Using a syringe, she extracted morphine from the small vial she’d been supplied with, and glanced up briefly at the camera staring unblinkingly down at her from one corner of the laboratory. She turned to shield Willis’s body from view, tapped the needle, and then slipped it gently into Willis’s femoral artery.

  Slowly she saw him relax, his breathing calm and the sweat dry from his forehead. Using her scalpel, she began easing off some of the dressings now brittle with blackened, congealed blood, replacing them as she went. She dabbed at the skin under the dressings with a soft, cool cloth.

  ‘That’s good,’ he whispered.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ Lillian said. ‘Tell me why he’s doing this to you. To us.’

  Willis swallowed thickly and shook his head.

  ‘I can’t, it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ Lillian retaliated in a harsh whisper. ‘Do you honestly think we’re getting out of here alive? We’re already screwed, so the least you can damned well do is explain to me why the hell I’m stuck in here with you!’

  Willis sighed.

  ‘Hiram Conley came to me a few weeks ago,’ he said, lifting one hand to massage his temples, ‘with a sample of halobacteria that he said came from a hidden cave somewhere in New Mexico. He refused to tell me where, only that I should check the bacteria out and then he’d visit me again, said that I’d understand. I did what he said and put the bacteria in solution. Damn me, if they didn’t revive. When we checked the age of the samples they came in at two hundred fifty million years old.’

  ‘Bacillus permians.’ Lillian nodded, glancing at the close-circuit camera and keeping her voice down. ‘I read about it in the papers, the oldest revived species ever discovered.’

  ‘Conley met me again a week or two later, and told me he was infected with the bacteria,’ Willis went on. ‘He told me he was a hundred ninety years old.’

  ‘He was, give or take a few years,’ Lillian confirmed. ‘I’ve run every test on him since Oppenheimer brought me here.’

  Willis smiled despite his discomfort.

  ‘I didn’t believe him at first,’ he said, ‘but pretty soon I realized he was telling the truth, not least because he was dying and was searching for a cure.’

  ‘The decay?’ Lillian asked. ‘On his arms?’

  ‘Yeah, it was like he was coming apart at the seams. Some kind of cellular breakdown.’

  ‘So, you were working with him to try and reverse that?’

 
Willis sighed again, his eyes closing as Lillian continued replacing the bandages on his stomach.

  ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘I’d been approached recently by Jeb Oppenheimer, not long after I’d published the papers on Bacillus permians. He wanted to hire me as a specialist, offered to treble my salary. I said no; I knew I was onto something big and wanted to keep it to myself. But when Hiram Conley came on the scene, I decided that if I could figure out what was keeping him from aging, I could sell it to SkinGen for far more than just a fat salary.’

  Lillian stopped working, looking down at Willis.

  ‘You sold out,’ she said finally.

  Willis nodded.

  ‘I’m not proud of it, but I was looking at retiring at thirty-five years of age. Who wouldn’t have taken the chance? Sure, I could have stuck with it and figured it out myself, but I thought: what the hell? Let Oppenheimer sort it out, and I’ll buy myself a condo in the Bahamas and spend the rest of my life sipping cocktails on a yacht somewhere.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked him.

  ‘I offered to take Hiram Conley’s blood to Oppenheimer, who could then use it for tests, but Jeb wanted Hiram Conley to come in himself. I met Conley out in Glorietta Pass, and was trying to convince him it was a good idea when he suddenly pulled his gun and shot me.’

  Lillian frowned.

  ‘So how come Oppenheimer’s got you here now? Surely he could have just left you alone once he’d grabbed Conley’s corpse from my morgue.’

  ‘Because I didn’t tell him about the cellular degradation,’ Willis said. ‘He only figured that out once he’d taken a look at the corpse and realized that his people at SkinGen didn’t have the skills necessary to manufacture or engineer a genetic copy of the infection. Even the blood samples I’d taken from Conley had degraded. I’d pitched the whole thing to him as good as I could to get the most money, and he was stuck with a corpse that he couldn’t use. I guess Oppenheimer wanted revenge, and for me to figure it out along with you.’