the spikes of light moving across the display: “Still two hundred a
minute but the rhythm’s there now … steady … steady.”
Similarly, the electroencephalograph showed alpha and beta brain waves
within normal parameters for an unconscious man.
“There’s self-sustained pulmonary activity,” Ken said.
“Okay,” Jonas decided, “let’s respirate him and make sure he’s getting
enough oxygen in those brain cells.”
Gina immediately put the oxygen mask on Harrison’s face.
“Body temperature’s at ninety degrees,” Helga reported.
The patient’s lips were still somewhat blue, but that same deathly hue
had faded from under his fingernails.
Likewise, his muscle tone was partially restored. His flesh no longer
had the flaccidity of the dead. As feeling returned to Harrison’s
defiled extremities, his punished nerve endings excited a host of tics
and twitches.
His eyes rolled and jiggled under his closed lids, a sure sign of REM
sleep. He was dreaming.
“One hundred and twenty beats a minute,” Kari said, “and declining …
completely rhythmic now … very steady.”
Gina consulted her watch and let her breath out in a whoosh of
amazement. “Eighty minutes.”
“Sonofabitch,” Ken said wonderingly, “that beats the record by ten.”
Jonas hesitated only a brief moment before checking the wall clock and
making the formal announcement for the benefit of the tape recorder:
“Patient successfully resuscitated as of nine-thirty-two Monday evening,
March fourth.”
A murmur of mutual congratulations accompanied by smiles of relief was
as close as they would get to a triumphant cheer of the sort that might
have been heard on a real battleground. They were not restrained by
modesty but by a keen awareness of Harrison’s tenuous condition. They
had won the battle with Death, but their patient had not yet regained
consciousness. Until he was awake and his mental performance could be
tested and evaluated, there was a chance that he had been reanimated
only to live out a life of anguish and frustration, his potential
tragically circumscribed by irreparable brain damage.
Enraptured by the spicy perfume of death, at home in the subterranean
bleakness, Vassago walked admiringly past his collection. It encircled
one-third of the colossal Lucifer.
Of the male specimens, one had been taken while changing a flat tire on
a lonely section of the Ortega Highway at night. Another had been
asleep in his car in a public-beach parking lot. The third had tried to
pick up Vassago at a bar in Dana Point. The dive hadn’t even been a gay
hangout; the guy had just been drunk, desperate, lonely-and careless.
Nothing enraged Vassago more than the sexual needs and excitement of
others. He had no interest in sex any more, and he never raped any of
the women he killed. But his disgust and anger, engendered by the mere
perception of sexuality in others, were not a result of jealousy, and
did not spring from any sense that his impotency was a curse or even an
unfair burden. No, he was glad to be free of lust and longing. Since
becoming a citizen of the borderland and accepting the promise of the
grave, he did not regret the loss of desire. Though he was not entirely
sure why the very thought of sex could sometimes throw him into a rage,
why a flirtatious wink or a short skirt or a sweater stretched across a
full bosom could incite him to torture and homicide, he suspected that
it was because sex and life were inextricably entwined. Next to
self-preservation, the sex drive was, they said, the most powerful human
motivator. Through sex, life was created. Because he hated life in all
its gaudy variety, hated it with such intensity, it was only natural
that he would hate sex as well.
He preferred to kill women because society encouraged them, more than
men, to flaunt their sexuality, which they did with the assistance of
makeup, lipstick, alluring scents, revealing clothes, and coquettish
behavior. Besides, from a woman’s womb came new life, and Vassago was
sworn to destroy life wherever he could. From women came the very thing
he loathed in himself: the spark of life that still sputtered in him and
prevented him from moving on to the land of the dead, where he belonged.