The Reincarnation

Victor Grey was “off.” When he was “off” he rested, read some, kept up with the news, watched movies, and led a quiet, if prosaic, life. If he was “off” for too long, he grew restless and bored. He hadn’t been “off” long.

Grey was a manhunter. He had tracked some very valuable people for the Church in the past. He had mostly been instructed to kill them once he found them, but he enjoyed this almost as much as he enjoyed hunting them down.

He loved everything about the chase. Compiling the evidence. Locating the person. Stalking them. All these actions were associated with different sensations, and when he was “off” he played these sensations over and over again in his mind. Pausing them here, slowing them down there, rewinding them and playing them again. He had lots of sensations to carry him through his “off” time.

At the moment, he was replaying a particularly grisly scene from about a decade ago. The Eco-Assassins – whom Grey referred to merely as The Eco-Asses – had convinced a Vice President at MCA Financial to end his life with a bang. The VP had developed skin cancer, and as he slowly died he became crazier and crazier, the cancer eventually ravaging his central nervous system. The Eco-Asses had talked – brainwashed – him into bringing a bomb into his building and blowing it up. Grey had been called in to see what he could find out about the man’s motives. He had searched through the rubble for days, never really sure which of the piles of twisted metal and heaps of severed limbs he searched through were the remains of the VP’s office. After a few days of digging he gave up, realizing he was wasting his time.

He did, however, manage to track down an Eco-Ass who had been less than careful. Thwarting a favorite Eco-Ass trick, he had taken the man’s suicide pill away from him. It had been carefully sewn into a seam of the man’s shirt, but Grey had found it nonetheless – he had smelled it. Grey couldn’t get the man to talk, so he had infected him with a rotting disease, holding the cure up in a vial between his index finger and thumb as enticement to tell him everything. The pathogen worked from the inside out, gradually eating away organs, muscle tissue, and eventually bone. He hadn’t gotten any information out of the man, but he had at least gained some amusement.

And the smells, he thought now, he did it so he could savor those wonderfully unique smells of decay as the man’s body putrefied. They were so much different than the smells of the carnage at the bombing site – the smells coming from the dying man were actually sweet, like overripe fruit. He wasn’t sure why this was, but he didn’t question the smells, he simply memorized them.

Grey was particularly fond of smells. They enchanted him. He could smell the subtleties of fear, anticipation, anger, lust, greed. Each emotion flowered in his mind when he caught scent of it.

By smell, he could tell a lot about a person. What they had eaten recently, if they drank too much, whether they took cream or sugar in their coffee, if they’d had sex recently; lots of things. He took to scents as a composer takes to music. They were his lifeblood. And he kept them all sorted in his mind like notes on a score.

Smell had always fascinated him because he felt it was the strongest, yet most elusive of the senses. He remembered the times when he was young, catching whiffs of things that reminded him of something that had happened years before. The smell would tap into a place in his mind he hadn’t visited in years. He would try to locate the source of the memories these smells carried with them. It wasn’t easy at first. He would beat himself up trying to pinpoint when in the past he had smelled the scent before. When it finally came to him, memories would come along with it, flooding his mind. All at once, the scene would explode, giving him every nuance of the emotions he had felt when he first smelled it.

He realized smells were powerful, but more, no one really understood them the way they did the other senses – sound, sight, taste, or touch. Grey was determined from early on in his life not to have one of his senses betray him. So he practiced, eventually getting all the smells in his life catalogued in his mind, so he would never again feel the frustration of them eluding him.

His least favorite sense was sight. It betrayed, showing things that weren’t true. Something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye couldn’t be trusted.

He also enjoyed early morning calls. In fact, he enjoyed them almost as much as he enjoyed smells. To him, they indicated just how important he was becoming to the Church. How important damage control becomes to organizations that are too large for their own good. They could own the magazines, the newspapers, the television stations, the film distributors, the radio stations, the news bureaus – they could own everything. But despite all that control and all that supervision over what the public could and couldn’t see, when all hell broke loose he received a phone call – that’s how important he was, he told himself. He was more powerful than all of that. He picked up the phone.

“Grey here. Yes, immediately, sir.”

He always had a bag packed, and he went to the closet and got it. He drove to the airport and boarded a private plane.

He was headed for the Lab.