It was inconvenient, being dead. It took two days before the blood bubbling from Herbert’s mouth began to slow, and another three before it mostly stopped. Adjusting the reagent’s formula to prevent spontaneous breakdown of the blood vessels was on his to-do list.
Refueling was a problem, too. After several experiments ended with Herbert vomiting into the nearest waste basket, he was now on a liquid diet. Broth, mostly.
“People can’t live on just broth,” Dan said.
Herbert did not point out that he’d had the same medical education as Dan (more or less). He said, “I’m not really living, remember?”
Dan paled as if he were the one who’d coughed up half a body’s worth of blood in the past two weeks. That hadn’t really been Herbert’s intention; he’d just been stating the facts. Dan looked like he was working up to another apology, though, which would be just as pointless and upsetting to them both (well, mostly Dan) as the others had been.
“You can get some Jello when you go out,” Herbert offered: a compromise.
“Sure, okay,” Dan said.
He brought back a whole case of the stuff and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. “Calories,” he said firmly, as though he expected Herbert to argue.
Herbert didn’t. His sense of taste was dulled, but he could still catch a hint of the syrup flavor, and the fizziness was a pleasant distraction from—well. Other sensations he was choosing not to tell Dan about. Dan would get that furrow in his brow again.
Herbert took another gulp of soda, swallowed thoughtfully, and wrote in his notebook, possible decomposition of esophageal lining.
Dan had found them the house they were currently renting. Of course he had, because he was the one who could still speak to other people; Herbert’s appearance would raise too many annoying questions, such as What’s wrong with him and Is it contagious. Dan bought the groceries and supplies, too, paying for them from Herbert’s store of cash and the contents of Dan’s checking account, withdrawn before they left Arkham.
Herbert didn’t remember their departure. He’d been tied down in the trunk of Dan’s car, insensible. By Dan’s estimation, rational thought hadn’t returned for almost forty-six hours. Herbert would have preferred more precision, but he kept that thought to himself.
It infuriated him that Carl Hill was better at coming back from the dead than he was. There was some consolation in the fact that Hill’s skull had been crushed into a pulp, while Herbert’s remained not only intact but attached to his body. (Mostly. A line in his notebook: minor tearing in left sternocleidomastoid.)
(Two days later, another line.)
Dan kept Herbert company in his new basement laboratory, and somehow he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. He spent most of his time in a stuffed chair that had been abandoned in a corner by a previous tenant. Sometimes Herbert straightened up for the first time in hours to work a cramp out of his back (before it became permanent) and found Dan staring at him. Had he looked away once the whole time Herbert worked? Herbert couldn’t be sure.
Sometimes Dan slept in that chair, making little snuffling sounds. “You should sleep, too,” he said one night, rather than commenting on the shattered beaker that had awoken him, shards sprayed over half the concrete floor.
“I can’t,” Herbert said. He clutched the edge of the table to hide the shaking in his hand. “I have to keep working.”
Dan unfolded from the chair, long and lean. He was taller at his full height than Herbert: not the sort of detail Herbert had ever bothered to notice when he was alive. It was as if his ability to focus had been choked from him in that elevator along with his breath, and like his breath, only some of it had returned.
“I can help,” Dan said. “I’ve done lab work, too, you know.”
Herbert snorted. “I assume you mean in chemistry class.”
Dan shrugged. He wouldn’t get far in research, Herbert thought. He had no competitive drive at all. He never pushed back. “Clean this up, then,” Herbert said.
Dan went away and returned a few moments later with a broom. After a while he was sweeping around Herbert’s feet. Herbert ignored him, continuing to note down his most recent results. Slight tremors, he wrote last, in shaky penmanship.
A hand gripped Herbert’s shoulder, firm and warmer than it ought to have felt. He’d need to take his temperature again. “What?”
With grating earnestness, Dan said, “You need to sleep.”
Herbert was tired of the earnestness. He was tired of all Dan’s worried gazes, of that furrow that kept appearing in his brow. He was tired of writing down new observations in his notebook about the gradual degradation of bodily integrity and processes.
He was tired.
“I can’t,” he admitted quietly. “Dan, I can’t sleep.”
Dan’s eyes, already wide, grew huge with worry.
“Don’t,” Herbert warned.
“Herbert,” Dan said sadly, as if his very name were a disappointment.
“I was dead. I think I’m doing remarkably well, considering.”
Dan mouth got a stubborn twist to it. Herbert supposed it must have been there every time he’d attempted to resuscitate an obviously dead patient. Herbert had heard the stories. Everyone said the same: Daniel Cain didn’t give up, even when it was stupid to keep trying. Fortunate indeed that he’d chosen Herbert as his latest lost cause.
“Rest, then,” Dan said now. “Just for a little while. It can’t hurt.”
Dan’s eyes were brown, which was another of those value-neutral facts that had no place in Herbert’s notebook. His eyelashes were long, perhaps a full standard deviation longer than average. His hand was still gripping Herbert’s shoulder, still warm. Warm: a relative term, scientifically meaningless without a frame of reference.
“Fine,” Herbert said.
He’d been vaguely aware that there were bedrooms in the house. The one Dan led him to had a bed that must have come with the place. There was an indentation in the bedclothes where someone had lain fairly recently, so Dan didn’t get all his sleep in that musty chair in the basement. Good.
(In that little notebook Herbert kept only in his head, a new observation: uncharacteristic concern for Dan’s sleep habits.)
Dan turned to go. Herbert felt the irrational urge to call him back, but with what excuse? I don’t want to lie here alone wasn’t a very good one, even though it was true, and besides it gave the wrong impression. So Herbert let Dan leave, and he lay down on the bed, already knowing it was futile.
It was more than an hour before Herbert opened the door again. He staggered down the hall to the living room and found Dan leaning into the arm of the sofa, fast asleep—of course, because he’d given Herbert his bed. He looked exhausted, like Herbert felt.
Herbert shuffled closer—there was something wrong with his left ankle now—and Dan’s eyes fluttered open. The crease reappeared between his eyebrows. “Herbert—”
“Don’t move,” Herbert said. He sank unsteadily onto the sofa and leaned against Dan: warm, solid Dan. Dan whose heart still moved blood through his veins at a steady sixty-four beats per minute. (Herbert had timed it once while Dan was sleeping. It was important to have a baseline, just in case.)
“Herbert,” Dan said again. Cautiously, slowly he put an arm around Herbert and pulled him closer, until Herbert’s head rested against his shoulder.
“I could feel everything,” Herbert said. “Every disintegrating joint. Every malfunctioning process.”
Dan didn’t say anything. His breath was a consistent, soothing inflation and deflation. After a while, Herbert added, “I’m not doing that again.”
“Okay,” Dan said.
They sat like that until Dan nodded off again. Herbert rested against him a while longer, soaking in his body heat, listening to his breath. Then he got up and went back to work.
“Herbert,” Dan was saying. “Herbert.”
Herbert kept on staring at the glass thermometer sticking out of his lower abdomen. He’d been working at the work bench when something gave—his ankle, he thought—and he’d fallen, taking his work with him. The thermometer had reached the cold concrete floor before he did.
“Herbert!”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Herbert said. His ankle did a little, a dull, grating sort of ache, but from the puncture in his abdomen, he felt no sensation at all.
“What?”
With nerveless fingers, Herbert tugged the slender glass cylinder slowly free.
“Wait, no!”
But Dan was too late. Herbert dropped the thermometer, pulled the fabric of his shirt away from his skin, and stared at the hole he’d just put in himself. A thin, yellow fluid seep from it. There was no blood.
Herbert started to prod at the hole, but Dan grabbed his hand and held him still. “It doesn’t hurt,” Herbert said. He looked up into Dan’s eyes, the pupils and brown irises and healthy white sclera, unmarred by burst blood vessels. “It should, but it doesn’t.”
“I’ll stitch it up,” Dan said. “Don’t move, I’ll just—”
“There’s no point,” Herbert said. “You do know that, right?”
“What are you saying?”
Laughter bubbled up in Herbert’s throat like the blood had, back when he’d still had some. “As if you don’t know. Quit pretending I’m not a corpse.”
“Don’t say that,” Dan said in that soft, reproving tone he got when confronted with facts he didn’t like. “You’re going to find a new reagent, and—”
“It took me years to discover the first one. You think I can find a whole new formula in a matter of weeks?” Herbert wasn’t even sure how long he’d been trying. Time passed strangely when he never slept and rarely saw the light of day.
“Put me to work,” Dan said. “I told you, I can help. I can be your hands. I can—”
“You can’t!”
But Herbert had spoken too emphatically. Something tore in his throat, and he ended up in a coughing fit, dry and raw and distantly painful. He focused on containing it, on preventing any more tearing. When the fit had passed, he found Dan’s hands clasping his shoulders, his eyes full of that doctorly concern that medical school made such efforts to beat out of its students and that Herbert had never been burdened with in the first place.
“You can’t,” Herbert rasped. “I’m just another of your patients, dead on the table. You should know by now when to quit, Doctor Cain.”
Dan flinched. Herbert almost regretted the words, but they’d accomplished what he wanted. When Herbert struggled to his feet and began an unsteady climb up the stairs, Dan let him go without protest.
Herbert didn’t know why he ended up on the house’s back step. What little appeal fresh air had once had was lost to him now. Perhaps it was a strictly irrational impulse, yet another sign of deterioration. The sun dropped nearer and nearer the horizon, casting golden light over the slats of the fence and the leaves of the yard’s single tree. Herbert’s ass grew cold on the concrete.
The door opened behind him, then closed. Dan sat next to him. A sidelong glance told Herbert that Dan was angry, which was likely better than the other options, even though Herbert was exhausted by the prospect of further argument. That was probably the real sign of how far gone he was.
And yet what Dan said next surprised him. “You’re not just another one of my patients.”
Herbert scoffed. “No?”
“No.” Dan glared fiercely: offended, but Herbert couldn’t imagine by what.
Instead of explaining, Dan gripped Herbert by the shoulder, leaned over, and put his lips on Herbert’s.
Herbert didn’t have much breath left to steal. He sat very still while Dan mouthed at him. After a while Dan pulled slowly away. He was still glaring, and his chin was tipped up, a sign of challenge Herbert had observed in plenty of men stupider than Dan.
Herbert cleared his throat, or tried to. “That can’t have been pleasant,” he said.
Dan huffed softly and looked away. “You’re such a dick.”
He moved to stand, but Herbert caught his arm. They looked at each other, Dan into Herbert’s eyes which were no doubt both bloodshot by now, Herbert into Dan’s wide brown ones, fringed with those absurdly long lashes. Something twinged in Herbert’s chest. He slid his hand down and cautiously twined his fingers together with Dan’s.
Something gave way in his hand, perhaps a tendon, but he ignored it. There’d be time to make notes on it later. Probably.
[end]