He made a gagging sound, and his chest curved inward. He covered his nose and mouth with his hand and muffled another heave.
Owen walked in a short loop and refused to look back. “Only you, Tor, only you would do something like this.”
I leaned around the open hood of the trunk and peered up at the house. “Keep your voice down,” I hissed, and listened for the stirring sounds of my mother. I thought back and was comforted by the memory of the open bottle of gas station wine, half empty, and that had only been at nine o’clock. I rested my palms on the lip of the trunk. “This doesn’t change anything,” I said. And it didn’t, because even if I had known that Owen’s breakthrough was not actually the breakthrough, I might have done the same thing. It was the spark of recognition caused by his text that set the wheels in motion, the detection of possibility. “Now, are you going to help me or not?”
“No. No way. I want no part of this.” But his gaze seemed to land instinctively back on the stony face lying at the bottom of my trunk. “Christ, he’s dead,” Owen whispered, and I wasn’t sure why he’d said that.
The boy’s eyes were wide open, and they stared straight back at us. It shaved my nerves down like a cheese grater.
Owen pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets and squeezed his eyes closed like he was trying to gouge the image from his mind. “Think about what you’re doing, Tor. There are … ethics to consider. Even if … even on the off chance that it…”
“That hasn’t seemed to bother you before,” I snapped.
Slowly, Owen raised his head and looked at me. “But this is a human we’re talking about. You have to see the difference. You’re playing God here.”
“I’m not playing anything. I’m being a scientist.” Owen’s face twisted like he’d just bit into a lemon. I relaxed my shoulders and turned from the boy in the trunk-coffin. I moved closer to Owen until I could feel the heat from his chest. I grazed his hand with mine and peered up at him. “We have the chance to save him, Owen. To fix this.” Owen started to open his mouth but I gripped his hand and held it. “You can’t reverse the past.” And Owen understood that I knew this better than anyone.
He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose, the fight visibly draining out of him.
There was a long pause and then—“Okay.” It came as a breath.
“Okay,” I replied.
Without another word, we returned to the car. I ducked and slid my hands underneath the boy’s shoulders. My back strained as I heaved him up, and his head flopped backward. His jaw fell open, exposing the roof of his mouth and a pink tongue contracting toward his throat. I grunted.
Owen muttered something unintelligible but reached for the boy’s ankles. We dragged the body out, and his waist plopped onto the ground. Owen and I both shook out our arms and wrists. Silently, we grabbed either end of him. His body formed a swinging arc as it dangled. The stained shirt he was wearing slid up from where I was holding him by the armpits to reveal the bottom of the violent gash. Owen looked away.
We waddled with the cadaver between us to the hatch door and began our descent into the cellar. I picked my way backward down the steep flight of stairs, gingerly feeling for the next step. My grip on the boy was slipping. The belt on his jeans skimmed the edges. Owen had his tongue pinched between his teeth. His glasses were held on by only the tip of his nose.
The boy was heavy. Gravity seemed to be working double to pull him into the earth where he now belonged. With the end in sight, I hiked my knee under his back so I could reposition my grip, but when I did, I lost my grasp entirely. His torso crashed onto the stairs, and his legs were ripped from Owen. It was all I could do to jump clear as the body went tumbling down the remaining steps.
My eyes met Owen’s. He massaged the spots above his eyebrows.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“None of this was supposed to happen.”
“Right, well, at least we’ve got him down here.” I clomped down after the body and stared at the placid face for a long second before diving into action. The key, I figured, was to act professionally. I’d go about the same preparations I would for any other lab and avoid addressing the reality of working on a human subject until the last second.
In a plastic tub I tossed alkaline, salt, vials, thread, a scalpel, and thin conductor wires—all the ingredients to land me on a TSA watch list for the next twenty years at least.
The variable, I thought now. That was the critical point. The trick was the level of voltage. Surely, Mr. Bubbles couldn’t spring back from the dead because … because why? Because there wasn’t enough power to reactivate the brain patterns. I found a dropper and added it to my collection.