them before, see, and kind of ‘accidentally’ let the dog off the leash. About seventy-five percent of the time, the dog would run to its previous owner. Even though the dog and the resurrected person had never met. I guess certain dogs tested higher. German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, poodles, golden retrievers. So those were the breeds that Clarksburg—I mean Clarkson—decided to work with.”
Ellen was kneeling beside a cage at the end of the room, petting one of the dogs through the bars. I think it was the black German shepherd. Omega. I kept telling her not to name them, that it made it harder to do the experiments if you got too close to the animals, but it was almost impossible to say no to her.
She had a way of getting whatever she wanted.
I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling awkward. Sometimes she made me wish that I had never met my wife, that maybe Ellen and I could have had a chance at something more permanent—although I never knew for sure if she felt the same way.
“We need to record the data,” I reminded her.
She nodded, and lifted the tag that hung on the shepherd’s cage. “Omega,” she said while I wrote down the information. “Life Fifteen: last death sequence on August third. Formula T3-a.” She moved to the next cage, where a Doberman cowered, unable to look her in the eyes. “Theta. Life Seven: last death sequence—” Ellen paused. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy with emotion. “—yesterday. That would be August fourth. Formula T3-b.” She walked to the next cage, to the open door where the dead golden retriever lay. “Epsilon. Life Ten: last death sequence this morning. August fifth at one A.M. Formula T6-a.”
“Still no signs of life?”
“No.”
“What’s the longest period so far between death and resurrection?” I asked as I flipped through the log.
She stared off into space. “That would be Tau. The time between her last death and resurrection was three hours. After that she only lived for about twenty minutes, and then she was gone for good.”
“Three hours.” I was trying to be objective, to avoid thinking about the golden retriever, the smiling dog that my little girl would have loved. “So Epsilon has been dead for almost nine hours…Do you think there’s any chance—”
“No.” Ellen shook her head. “But I’d still like to give her a little more time. Just in case.”
I nodded. Like I said, I would do almost anything for Ellen.
It was an ever-twisting road, this quest for immortality. It was a journey with no clear beginning or end. I felt like a pawn, a dead marionette hanging on tangled strings, and I could feel my conscience bleeding out with every injection I squeezed into a patch of coarse dog fur, with every gen-spike I slammed into my own muscle-weary flesh. I had to hide the stench of my addiction. The heavy fragrance of flesh decaying from within, the atrophy of muscles stretched past their natural limit followed me everywhere I went. I started wearing loose clothing so no one would notice the bodybuilder physique that came and went on a regular basis. I took four showers a day. I began to avoid intimacy with my wife, so she wouldn’t see the obvious evidence of genetic restructuring, and at the same time I opened my bed willingly to Ellen.
I think a part of me wanted to get caught. I wanted an end to the horror.
I just never expected the ending to come the way it did.
Like a crash of lightning. Immediate and irreversible. Like the death of my father.
With blood on my hands. Again.
She dropped by in the middle of the night once. I thought I was alone. This section of the lab was off-limits to the general staff. Not even Chaz was allowed back here.
They were all dying. Our experiments were failing. We lost three dogs in the middle of the night. One more that morning. Only one was left—the German shepherd, and he was pretending to be asleep. But I knew he was watching me.
He was always watching me. I was always the one who killed him.
I’d reached a limit, I guess, some line that I drew in the sand and dared myself to cross. I didn’t know what to do. We were one step away from losing everything, from failing.
And if I failed, they would kill my mother.
I got ready to euthanize the last dog, prepared the injection, set it on the counter and then stared