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.And the damage is donenot in weeks, but days. From the little I know, d Winter interrupted, I ll bet the farm that the authorities will take the tack to nukeAngel City just to bottle the disease.Give them just the excuse they ve always wanted. Piper slipped his pointed chin into his thin hands. You re serious, aren t you? Deadly, said Dee.Chapter22ON A DEEP, VERY DEEP,and almost instinctual level, Romulas O Connor knew he was dead.He remembered dying, he supposed.Orwas that a dream? Had he dreamt that he had died? Or had he died? The memories were faded, woolly, as ifthey were not his memories, but something he had been told, or something he had seen, or perhaps read.Perhaps it had been in a vid, or on a newspot.Now, sitting on the edge of a bed which he dimly rememberedas his in fact he had died in this bed! in a house which he definitely knew was his, because he had anintimate memory of the geography of the rooms.Snippets of memory came sliding away as he reached forthem.Half-formed thoughts and fragments slithered and slid from his grasp, and all he was left with were bitsand pieces, but he was unsure in his present state whether he was actually remembering real events orsimply recalling other images or ideas.Romulas O Connor lay back on the bed.It took him two attempts because he could not make his legsrespond and swing themselves up onto the coverlet, and he was eventually forced to physically lift his legsup.But once he was lying supine, his face towards the ceiling or the coffin lid, his eyes closed, a sequenceof events locked into place, and he had a brief flash of what he was fairly sure was a real memory.One of hisown memories.Something that had really happened. It was night.Dark, but the room was illuminated by the sulphurous acid rain etching itself down the iron-glasswindows.He remembered thinking that he would soon have to have the windows replaced; the lifespan of theglass was becoming shorter and shorter as the acid grew ever more corrosive.He had dined well and perhapsnot too wisely.The meal imported lamb from Ireland, chicken eggs from an independent Russian state, wildrice from a Chinese backwater province, and potatoes from a State Farm somewhere in Canada had beenabsolutely delicious.Every morsel radiation and hormone free not like that shit he served up to hiscustomers.Some of the stuff that his fishermen were pulling up out of the ocean looked like a Bosch-inspirednightmare or, even more disturbingly, was beginning to display ever more humanoid features.There werespecies of squid down there that were beginning to resemble human foetuses, and only last week they hadpulled up a five-hundred-pound tuna that had a distinctly human face.Complete with wispy beard.There wasno way he was going to eat anything pulled out of that open sewer that was calling itself the Pacific Ocean.He had even heard of whales that were so diseased that they were officially declared as toxic waste.After the meal there had been what? a bottle of he remembered the taste, because it has been one ofthe last things he had tasted before the& the confusion.But he could not remember the name.A bottle ofsomething dark and bitter, tainted in his memory with the faintest must of a too-dry and brittle cork.Then,afterwards, he had come up the stairs and found& and found& what was her name? She was his wife, hethought, young and pretty, but he could not remember her name.She had been in bed this bed.Waiting for him.Not naked, no, but wearing clothes that made her all themore appealing, all the more exciting.He had& he had& gone to the next room, the bathroom, and had looked at himself in the mirror, and heremembered wondering how a very beautiful woman what was her name? could find him attractive.In hismind s eye he could recall his own reflection.He was too old, too fat, too bald, too jowly, his cheeks andnose flushed mottled red.It took a tremendous effort to roll from the bed.Arms and legs seemed to workindependently, and he found himself sitting in the one position for possibly a long time because he hadforgotten what he was going to do next.Once he got to his feet, he directed himself towards the bathroomdoor, but when he got there, he found he had quite forgotten how to turn the handle to open it.He knew whathe should do; knew that his fingers should close around the handle and turn, but he simply could not makehimself do it.Finally he leaned against the door, and it moved gently inwards.Romulas O Connor stepped into thebathroom and was immediately presented with multiple images of himself from the mirrored walls.He thoughthe looked very good.Better than he was before before the blackout.His skin was pink and healthy, lookingfirm and taut and a little of the flab seemed to have disappeared from around his gut.He tried and failed toremember when he had last eaten.Earlier that evening he had sat down to a meal, he thought.Or he shouldhave.Only his eyes bothered him.They looked like the dead orbs of something that would turn up in his nets.Under the too-bright bathroomlights, his skin shone with an oily sweat, and he raised trembling fingers to his brow.It took two attempts totouch his forehead.Romulas O Connor brushed his fingers across his brow.In the mirror the movements wereerratic, and his thumb kept waving independently of the other fingers.His hand came away from his foreheadcovered with an oily sweat.Under the lights it ran with a shimmering luminescence, rainbowlike tendrils of oilon water.Maurice watched it, fascinated.He brought his palm to his nose and tried to smell& but he couldn tdraw breath into his lungs&.Absently wiping his fingers on a pristine towel, leaving a shimmering tendril of slime clinging to the cotton,Maurice pressed both hands to his chest.There was no movement beneath his sternum because his lungsweren t working, not filling with air which meant& Romulas struggled for the concept.Which meant that he wasn t breathing.He pressed fumbling fingers to his wrists, but he couldn t hold bothhands steady enough, so he gripped the side of his wrist, seeking a pulse.There was nothing.For somereason that bothered him
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