One Door Away from Heaven

Honey-gold hair frames a centerfold face with eyes that match the color of the opal. Her mouth, the ripe centerpiece of a lipstick advertisement, is a frosted red like the petals of the last rose on a November bush.

If the boy had been Curtis Hammond for more than two days, say for two weeks or two months, he might have been so completely adapted to the human biological condition that he would have felt the stir of male interest that apparently had begun to tease the original Curtis into adding Britney Spears to the big posters of movie monsters that papered his bedroom. Nevertheless, although he’s largely still a work in progress, he undeniably feels something, a dryness of the mouth that has nothing to do with thirst, a peculiar tingle along the nerves of his limbs, and a tremble short of weakness in his knees.

“Curtis?” she asks again.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and realizes as he speaks that he hasn’t told anyone his name since he chatted with Donella in the restaurant at the truck stop the previous evening.

Warily she surveys their surroundings, as if to be certain they are not observed or overheard. A few men in the vicinity, staring at her while she’s focused on Curtis, look away when she turns toward them. Perhaps she notices this suspicious behavior, for she leans closer to the boy and whispers: “Curtis Hammond?”

Except for Donella and poor dumb Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker, and the man in the DRIVING MACHINE cap, no one but Curtis’s enemies could know his name.

As defenseless as any mere mortal standing before a shining angel of death, Curtis is paralyzed in expectation of being gutted, beheaded, shredded, broken, blasted, burned, and worse, though never did he imagine that Death would arrive in dangling silver earrings, two silver-and-turquoise necklaces, three diamond rings, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet on each wrist, and navel decoration.

He could deny that he is either the original or the current Curtis Hammond, but if this is one of the hunters that wiped out his family and Curtis’s family in Colorado two nights ago, he has already been identified by his singular energy signature. In that case, every attempt at deception will prove useless.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s me,” he says, polite to the end, and steels himself to be slaughtered, perhaps to the delight of

Mr. Neary and others whom he has offended with no intention of doing so.

Her whisper grows yet softer. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Resistance is as pointless as deception, for if she is one of the worse scalawags, she has the strength of ten men and the speed of a Ferrari Testarossa, so Curtis is road kill waiting to happen.

Trembling, he says, “Dead. Yes, ma’am. I guess I am.”

“You poor child,” she says with none of the sarcasm you might expect from a killer intending to decapitate you, but with concern.

Surprised by her sympathy, he seizes upon this uncharacteristic suggestion of a potential for mercy, which her kind supposedly does not possess: “Ma’am, I’ll freely admit that my dog here knows too much, considering that we’ve bonded. I won’t pretend otherwise. But she can’t talk, so she can’t tell anyone what she knows. Whether my bones ought to be stripped out of this body and crushed like glass is something we’re sure to disagree about, but I sincerely believe there’s no good reason for her to be killed, too.”

The expression that overcomes the woman is one that Curtis has learned to recognize on faces as diverse as the round physiognomy of smiling Donella and the grizzled visage of grumpy Gabby. He supposes that it implies befuddlement, even bewilderment, though not complete mystification.

“Sweetie,” she whispers, “why do I get the feeling that some awesomely bad people must be looking for you?”

Old Yeller has not assumed a submissive posture, but has risen to her feet. She grins at the woman in white, tail wagging with the wide sweep of expectancy, pleased to make this new acquaintance.

“We better get you out of sight,” whispers the angel, who now seems less likely to be assigned to the Death Division. “Safer to sort this out in privacy. Come with me, okay?”

“Okay,” Curtis agrees, because the woman has been given the Old Yeller seal of approval.

She leads them to the door of the nearby Fleetwood American Heritage. Forty-five feet long, twelve feet high, eight to nine feet wide, the motor home is so immense and so solid in appearance that—except for its cheerful white, silver, and red paint job—it might be an armored military-command vehicle.

In her acrylic heels, with her golden hair, the woman reminds Curtis of Cinderella, though these are sandals rather than slippers. Cinderella most likely wouldn’t have worn toreador pants, either, at least not a pair that so clearly defined the buttocks. Likewise, if Cinderella’s bosoms had been as large as these, she wouldn’t have displayed them so prominently, because she had lived in a more modest age than this. But if your fairy godmother is going to turn a pumpkin into stylish equipage to transport you to the royal ball, you want her to dispense with the mice-into-horses bit and use her magic wand to whack the pumpkin into a new Fleetwood American Heritage, which is cooler than any coach drawn by enchanted vermin.

The instant the door is opened, the dog leaps up the steps and into the motor home, as though she has always belonged here. At the suggestion of his hostess, Curtis follows Old Yeller.

Entry is directly into the cockpit. As he steps between the well-separated passenger’s and driver’s seats, into a lounge with flanking sofas, he hears the door shut behind him.

Suddenly this fairy tale becomes a horror story. Looking across the lounge, into the open kitchen, Curtis sees at the sink the last person that he might expect to find there. Cinderella.

He turns in shock, looking behind him, and Cinderella is there, as well, standing between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, smiling and even more dramatic-looking in this confined space than she had been out in the sun.

The Cinderella at the sink is identical to the first Cinderella, from the silky honey-gold hair to the opal-blue eyes, to the opal in the navel, to the long legs in low-rider white toreador pants, to the sandals with acrylic heels, to the azure toenails.

Clones.

Oh, Lord, clones.

Clones are usually trouble, and there’s no prejudice in this opinion, because most clones are born to be bad.

“Clones,” Curtis mutters.

The first Cinderella smiles. “What’d you say, sweetie?”

The second Cinderella turns away from the sink and takes a step toward Curtis. She’s also smiling. And she’s holding a large knife.

Chapter 41

SITTING IN THE fluorescent-flooded brick-and-mortar library but also outbound through cyberspace with its infinite avenues of radiant circuitry and light pipes, traveling the world on the swift wheels of electric current and microwaves, exploring virtual libraries that are always open, ever bright, poring through paperless books of glowing data, Micky found the primitive self-interest and darkest materialism of humanity everywhere in these palaces of technological genius.

Bioethicists reject the existence of objective truths. Preston Mad-doc had written, “There is no right or wrong, no moral or immoral conduct. Bioethics is about efficiency, about establishing a set of rules that will do the most good for the most people.”

For one thing, this efficiency means assisting suicide in every case where a suffering person considers it, not merely assisting the suicides of the terminally ill, not just of the chronically ill, but assisting even those who could be cured but are at times depressed.

In fact, Preston and many others considered depressed people as candidates not only for suicide assistance but also for “positive suicide counseling” to ensure they self-destructed. After all, a depressed person has an inadequate quality of life, and even if his depression can be alleviated with drugs, he isn’t “normal” when on mood-altering medication and therefore is incapable of leading a life of quality.

An increase in the suicide rate is, they believe, a benefit to society, for in a well-managed medical system, the organs of assisted suicides should be harvested for transplantation. Micky read many bioethicists who were gleeful at the prospect of alleviating organ shortages through managed-care suicide programs; in their enthusiasm, it was clear they would work aggressively to increase the number of suicides if given all the laws for which they relentlessly pressed.

If we are all just meat, having no soul, then why shouldn’t some of us join together to butcher others for our benefit? There will be an immediate gain and no long-term consequences.

Micky snatched her right hand away from the mouse, her left hand off the keyboard. To save electricity, the library was almost as warm as the day outside, but a chill slithered into her from the Internet, as though someone at a computer in Dr. Frankenstein’s castle had crossed paths with her in cyberspace, reaching out of the ether to trace her spine with a virtual finger colder than ice.

She looked around at the other library patrons, wondering how many of them would be as shocked as she was by what she’d read, how many would be indifferent—and how many would agree with Preston Maddoc and his colleagues. She had often brooded about the fragility of life, but for the first time, she realized with sobering acuity that civilization itself was as fragile as any human being. Any of the many hells that humankind had created throughout history, in one corner of the world or another, could be re-created here—or a new hell could be built, more efficient and more thoroughly reasoned.

Back to the mouse, the keys, the World Wide Web, and back to Preston Maddoc, the spider, out there spinning. . . .

The organs of the suicidal and the disabled were coveted, but Maddoc and others in the bioethics community expressed great sympathy for the harvesting of organs from the healthy and the happy, as well.

In The Elimination of Morality, by Anne Maclean, Micky read of a program proposed by John Harris, a British bioethicist, in which everyone would be given a lottery number. Then “whenever doctors have two or more dying patients who could be saved by transplants, and no suitable organs have come to hand through ‘natural deaths,’ they can ask a central computer to supply a suitable donor. The computer will then pick the number of a suitable donor at random and he will be killed so that the lives of two or more others may be saved.”

Kill a thousand to save three thousand. Kill a million to save three million. Kill the weak to save the stronger. Kill the disabled to provide a higher quality of life to the firm of limb. Kill those with lower IQs to provide more resources to those judged smarter.

Great universities like Harvard and Yale, like Princeton, once citadels of knowledge where truth might be pursued, had become well-oiled machines of death, instructing medical students that killing should be viewed as a form of healing, that only selected people who meet a series of criteria have a right to exist, that there is no right or wrong, that death is life. We are all Darwinians now, are we not? The strong survive longer, the weak die sooner, and since this is the plan of Nature, shouldn’t we help the old green gal in her work? Accept your expensive diploma, toss your mortarboard in the air to celebrate, and then go kill a weakling for Mother Nature.

Somewhere Hitler smiles. They say that he killed the disabled and the sick not to mention the Jews for all the wrong reasons, but if in fact there is no wrong or right, no objective truth, then all that really matters is that he did kill them, which by the standards of contemporary ethics, makes him a visionary.

Photographs of Preston Maddoc, as they appeared on the screen, revealed a good-looking if not handsome man with longish brown hair, a mustache, and an appealing smile. Contrary to Micky’s expectations, he didn’t sport a Universal Product Code on his forehead with the numerals 666 rendered in bar code.

His short-form bio revealed a man on whom Lady Luck smiled. He was the sole heir to a considerable fortune. He didn’t need to work in order to travel in style from one end of the country to the other in search of extraterrestrials who might have a healing gift.

Micky could find no story in the media exploring Maddoc’s belief that UFOs were real and that ETs walked among us. If it was a genuine long-held belief, he had never spoken publicly about it.

Four and a half years ago, he resigned his university position to “devote more time to bioethic philosophy, rather than teaching,” and to unspecified personal interests.

He was known to have assisted in eight suicides.

Leilani claimed he had killed eleven people. Evidently she knew of three who were not part of the public record.

A few elderly women, a thirty-year-old mother with cancer, a seventeen-year-old high-school football star who suffered a spinal injury… In Micky’s mind, as she read of Maddoc’s kills, she heard Leilani’s voice reciting the same list.

Twice Maddoc had been prosecuted for murder, in two different cases and jurisdictions. Both times, juries had acquitted him because they felt that his intentions had been noble and that his compassion had been admirable, unimpeachable.

The husband of the thirty-year-old cancer victim, though present during the assisted suicide, subsequently filed a civil suit seeking damages from Maddoc when an autopsy discovered that his wife had been misdiagnosed, that she didn’t have cancer, and that her condition had been curable. The jurors sided with Maddoc, nevertheless, because of his good intentions and because they felt the true fault resided with the doctor who had delivered the wrong diagnosis.

A year after the death of her son, the mother of the six-year-old wheelchair-bound boy filed suit, too, claiming that Maddoc, in conspiracy with her husband, subjected her to “relentless mental and emotional intimidation using techniques of psychological warfare and brainwashing,” until in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, she agreed to terminate her son’s life, for which she was remorseful. She dropped all legal action prior to trial, maybe because she didn’t have the heart for the media circus that began to pitch its tents or because Maddoc reached an undisclosed settlement with her.

Luck undeniably favored Preston Maddoc, but you couldn’t lightly regard the importance of the powerhouse legal-defense team that his fortune provided or the effect of the twenty-thousand-dollar-per-month public-relations firm that for years worked tirelessly to polish his image.

He kept a lower profile these days. Indeed, since he had become Sinsemilla’s devoted husband and deep-pocket pharmacy, he’d steadily moved farther off the public stage, allowing other true believers to man the barricades on behalf of their vision of a brave new world of greater happiness through useful killing.

Curiously, Micky could find no reference to Maddoc’s marriage. According to every thumbnail biography to be found on the Internet, he was single.