Chapter 5

I met him after his mother donated the money for my position. I was researching methods to encourage damaged neurons to regrow, and seeing patients with brain and spinal cord injuries. She was a good person, Caroline Frankenstein. It was a little embarrassing when she introduced me at a faculty meeting as a "present" to the hospital, but she always meant well.

She also introduced me to Victor, but I didn't see him often at first. We were in different departments, on different floors. Then he started asking me to have lunch, then drinks after work. I held off for a while. There's no rule against dating someone in another department, but it seemed like a bad idea to sleep with the son of the person who'd funded my job. But I guess he wore me down. Victor has this ability to be entirely focused on one thing at a time. And when it's you, it's intoxicating. Like you're his whole world.

I loved his family. They seemed so normal. My dad went to prison when I was four, and my mom overdosed not too long after. I was lucky that the Lavenzas adopted me, but still, I was one of eight kids in a four-bedroom house. When Victor took me to their ranch over Christmas, it was so nice just to be able to sit and have a conversation without yelling.

Then the virus came. We found out it was in Colorado in March, but it had been circulating in the ski towns since at least February. Caroline was fine one day, and gasping for air the next. I was only able to see her once in the hospital. She begged me to take care of Victor. I said I would. Then a day later she was on a ventilator, and a week after that, she was gone.

Victor took it harder than anyone. I think it was because all his focus was on what he lost. The rest of us cried and seethed and told stories about her – grieved. But Victor couldn't seem to do that. He was stuck on how unfair it was, and how little we could do. It was me making the Zoom calls to Ernie – that's Victor's brother – and his family, and to their dad. I wanted to stay connected to them, and to her. I tried to take care of Victor by nudging him to reach out, but he couldn't. Or wouldn't.

Finally, he told me he needed to go to the mountains, alone, to think things through. It didn't seem good for him to be alone. But I couldn't really stop him, so I asked him to give me a call when he got into cell range. I don't know if you've ever driven Interstate 70, but there are a lot of dead spots in the mountains. But he never called, and never answered my calls or texts. I started worrying he'd done something to hurt himself.

He came back, but he seemed even worse. He was constantly shaking and looking over his shoulder. He never gave me a straight answer about where he'd been, what he'd done, where his coat and phone had gone – nothing.

Sometimes I thought about calling it quits, but I'd promised Caroline. And gradually, he did get better. Suddenly, our relationship meant everything again. And I persuaded myself it was just the different ways people respond to grief.

But then we went to his dad's ranch for the annual cookout. Justine – Victor's sister-in-law – and I were having a good time in the kitchen, then Ernie burst in, with Will unconscious in his arms. Then we heard a gunshot, and Al followed, swearing he'd seen some kind of a monster. So I forgot about the chili and helped get everybody calm enough to talk to the police.

I couldn't explain to myself why Victor acted the way he did. He kept muttering about how the police would never find whoever did this; how would he know who did it? And then I woke up alone the next morning. No note. Just an empty space in Al's gun rack. We waited all day, and when he returned, he said he hadn't found anything. But I wasn't sure I believed him.

It finally came to a head after he said he needed to go to the mountains, alone, again. No explanation, just a plea to trust him. I said I was going to try to trust him. But I didn't anymore. So after a few days, I packed an overnight bag in my little Focus and drove up to Vail. I stopped first at his father's ranch. Al said he hadn't seen Victor since the party, and I believed him. He invited me to stay the night, but I turned him down. I was going to take a drive through downtown and look for Victor's car, but I saw it before I got that far. It was parked outside some ranch I didn't know. I pulled in and went up to knock on the door. If some woman answered, I was going to tell her she could have him. But no one answered, even after I rang three times and yelled. I admit I lost my sh- … my composure and gave the door a kick, though not enough to damage it. Then I realized I probably sounded crazy, and I stopped.

I turned back to my car and saw a man standing there. Not Victor. He had a hood pulled up over his face and his hands jammed in his pockets. I clutched the pepper spray in my purse.

"Are you Elizabeth?" he asked.

"Have we met?"

He shook his head, or at least I think he did. With the hood, it was hard to tell. "I heard Victor say your name."

"Do you know where he is? What he's doing up here?" He still wouldn't look at me. Then it hit me. "If you guys have something going on, just tell me. I'm all for equal rights, I just need to know where I stand."

"Something going on?" He sounded confused. Then he pulled out a phone. "If you want to know what he's doing, it's all in here. The passcode is his name." He set the phone down on the hood of my car. "Come back, once you've watched it?" And he walked off into the woods.

I didn't know what to make of him, so I ran to my car and headed for town. I did grab the phone, though. The code did open it. Victor using his own name was starting to sound about right.

I browsed the text messages and found some from men named Waldman and Krempe, about "materials" and an experiment. He didn't have any saved voicemails. Then I remembered the man had said, "once you've watched it," and opened the videos.

Dear God. It looked like Victor was sawing into corpses and stitching them together. His eyes were too bright, like he had a high fever or some type of mania. I started hoping he was putting together some sort of found-footage horror movie. That didn't make sense, but neither did anything else. I didn't sleep that night.

The next morning, after more espresso than is healthy, I drove over to the ranch where I'd seen Victor's car. It was gone, but the man who wouldn't look at me was still there, watching from the edge of the woods. I parked, locked my doors and rolled down the passenger window just a crack. He came over.

"What the hell was that?" I demanded. "Who are you? What are you and Victor doing?"

"You didn't understand the video?" He still kept his head down.

"He's running some kind of experiment?" He nodded. "Are you helping him?"

He threw back his hood and looked at me. And I saw the corpse from Victor's videos. Which couldn't have been a corpse, since we were having a conversation, but that didn't explain why Victor would operate on him outside a hospital. I couldn't help staring as I tried to process it all. He looked away and pulled the hood back up. "I think you're the only one who can help me. Please?"