Shadowfires

and for a long pleasant moment he
watched as a bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips,
and popped. His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he
closed them was the vague-almost invisible-scar along her jawline,
where she had been cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.
    Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for
Eric Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the
closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the
only-and best-answer to death was loving. Loving.

----
16 IN THE
ZOMBIE ZONE
    For part of the night he lay fully clothed on
the bed in the cabin above Lake Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than
sleep, deeper than coma, his body temperature steadily declining, his
heart beating only, twenty times a minute, blood barely circulating,
drawing breath shallow-ly and only intermittently. Occasionally his
respiration and heartbeat stopped entirely for periods as long as ten
or fifteen minutes, during which the only life within him was at a
cellular level, though even that was not life as much as stasis, a
strange twilight existence that no other man on earth had ever known.
During those periods of suspended animation, with cells only slowly
renewing themselves and performing their functions at a greatly
reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for the next period of
wakefulness and accelerated healing.
    He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour,
almost visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were
scabbing over, closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the
bruises that he had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage
truck, there was already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood
from crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was
awake, he could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing
insistently into his brain, even though medical wisdom held that
tissue of the brain was without nerve endings and therefore
insensate; it was not a pain as much as a pressure, like a Novocaine-
numbed tooth registering the grinding bit of a
dentist's drill. And he could sense, without understanding how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening. That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital after major surgery. In a month he might be fully recovered, although he'd
always have a slight-or even pronounced-depression along the right
side of his skull.
    But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical
regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration
close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief
periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual
capacity he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally
aware that for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state,
with frequent lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually
animalistic condition.
    He had strange thoughts.
    Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently
graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was
actually past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was,
especially when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar
reference points to his own past life; overcome by confusion, feeling
lost and sensing that he would forever be lost, he had to pull
over to the edge of the highway until the panic passed. He knew that
he had a great goal, an important mission, though he was never quite
able to define his purpose or destination. Sometimes he thought he
was dead and making his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean
journey. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, although he could
not remember who, and then he did briefly remember and shrank
from the memory, not only shrank from it but convinced himself that
it was not a memory at all but a fantasy, for of course he was
incapable of cold-blooded murder. Of course. Yet at other times he
thought about how exciting and satisfying it would be to kill
someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they were
after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards,.as they