Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (7 page)

We stood at the edge of the foundation, looking down into a hole in the weeds with a jagged border of splintered wood all around it. I could see no stairs. Our reflections glared up at us from a scummy pool on the basement floor, monochrome doppelgangers guarding a surrogate womb. The luxuriant stench of countless varieties of fungus ran riot here, even over the stink of burning.

“You still want to go in? That smell’s just a preview, I can tell you, and it’s only a crawlspace, about waist high, inside. The fireman that fell through the kitchen floor compounded his ankle trying to get out. He must’ve kicked her or something, and she started screaming her head off. They had to use axes on the storm door, over here.”

I stepped back where I couldn’t see my reflection. “I don’t think there’s any reason to go inside.”

“There sure isn’t.” It was obvious something more than just the basement disturbed him.

We circled back to the sidewalk, where I returned the hardhat. I thanked him and started for my car, when he said, “That storm-door had been nailed and caulked shut for years when they broke it down.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Her daddy locked her in there at least ten years ago and never went down there again.” He took a deep breath to anchor himself. “You saw the only way in, and the nails in that door were rusted over. So was the padlock, and the key was broken off in it. All the vents around the foundation were plugged up. Neighbors could see into the backyard, and they never saw him, or anybody else, out here. It’s like you said—anything’s possible, right?” He smiled as DT cases often do when trying to convince others to see their pink elephants.

“Are you the only one who’s noticed this… evidence?”

“Firemen told me about it, but they couldn’t put two and two together.”

“Then I don’t think telling me is the best course, unless you need someone to recommend you for a leave of absence.”

“I’m fucking serious! I’m not putting any of this in my report, because I know how it sounds. But either that little girl’s the New and Improved Jesus, or she’s been living off toadstools and her own shit her whole life. We didn’t find any of that laying around, by the by. The whole goddamned thing—” He settled back against my car door, his gaze still locked on the ruin.

“Did you consider that what the fireman fell through was probably a trapdoor? Listen, I’ve really got to go—”

“Have they done anything about her, um… bleeding?” he asked.

“She sustained no injuries that I was aware of. Why do you ask?”

“No, nothing like that. Her, you know... her
period
. I was on-site when they brought her to the ambulance. I saw blood running down her thighs. Unless she was hemorrhaging, it had to be her period. Do starving cave-kids get their periods regular, doc?”

“Her development has been stunted to such a degree that menstruation would be highly unlikely. I suppose you were the only one who saw this, as well.” I sidestepped Shanley and slipped into my car. His eyes on the ground, he returned to the gutted house as I drove away.

I’d decided not to report Shanley’s hysteria by the time I arrived at the hospital. Everyone was upset by the case, particularly those who were parents. I suppose this was why I’d been chosen to treat her. I never had any family myself, so I could remain detached.

The drive back was all gridlocked freeway again, and Jane Doe Cykes’ magic had long since worn off. I spent every minute of the ninety it took to return considering the girl. In the scant few similar cases on record, years of intensive treatment had left the patients with little better than a four-year-old mentality. When the doctors exhausted their pet treatment theories, the patient cycled through abusive foster homes and ended up in a state institution, the forgotten flotsam of another failed experiment.

I sincerely thought I would succeed where they all failed. Jane Doe Cykes would be moved out of the quarantine cell as soon as she regained consciousness, and her humanization would commence.

Shanley’s delusions and Fuchs’ unreasoning rage kept intruding on my thoughts. If I had children of my own, would such melodramatic notions affect me as well?

I found Ms. Fuchs asleep in a chair outside my door, her files spilled out around her. I snuck past her and sat at my desk, then checked my messages.

The forensics team had uncovered a steel case in the ashes. It contained several journals filled with markings in an erratic code, probably devised by Cykes. Very likely it would never be deciphered, as it had meaning only to his disturbed mind.

The case had also contained six one-liter mason jars full of dark crimson fluid. They were marked “ROJA.” They were full of human blood.

I had a nurse bring coffee and woke Fuchs. She already knew.

“I’m sorry I nodded off, there. I can’t believe—”

“I know. What’s been done with the remains?”

“You mean the jars?” she asked, and I nodded. “They were brought here by ambulance. The lab tested them. San Diego has no patient records for Roja Zachardo, because Cykes stole them, but the blood tests out almost identical to our girl, so it must be hers. This is all so sick…” Her chest quavered, and a sob escaped. I drew the curtains.

I elected not to repeat what Shanley had told me about the cellar. She’d take it too seriously, I thought, wondering if she had children of her own, or wished she had. I excused myself and went to see the patient.

Dr. Randels was checking Jane Doe Cykes’ pulse, his eyes on his watch. I’d seen Randels professionally on a few occasions, so I expected him to behave somewhat distantly. He was the kind that tries to get laid at funerals, but a decent pediatrician.

“Dr. Shields, I know you were briefed by Ms. Fuchs,” he whispered. “All in all, she’s doing amazingly well.”

I looked past him at the delicate figure in the bed. The oxygen tent had been taken down, but she still seemed scarcely human, an elfin changeling. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I studied her frail musculature and birdlike bones. She’d come out of total solitude, her whole world shaped by the darkness, the mysteries of her own body and the formless phantoms of her own mind. Perhaps years had passed between the thunder of each heartbeat. Had they frightened her? Or did they sound like God, speaking only to her?

“Yes, it is quite incredible,” I returned.

“Her growth was a touch stunted, and her muscles are atrophied, but her blood sugar’s not much below normal. Whatever else he did, he didn’t starve her.”

“How much longer do you plan to keep her under? I’d like to get some EEGs and an MRI before she wakes up.”

“I don’t see why we can’t let you have at her as soon as she regains consciousness, but we want to leave her alone until then. Waking up to a brain-mapping would freak out a normal person. We’ll move her into pediatrics as soon as she learns to adjust to the light. Right now, that’s our biggest obstacle. The outside world’s going to be one hell of a shock, I don’t have to tell you.”

Randels scooped his clipboard up off the EKG monitor and walked to the door. He furtively picked his nose. “I’ve got to see another patient upstairs. You coming?” Afraid to let me alone with his star patient, I knew.

I leaned over the girl. Randels opened the door so that only my shadow sheltered her from the beam of an orderly’s flashlight. Her lustrous black hair drank in the glow from the light off her translucent skin. The dark canals of her veins stood out, the only part of her that seemed alive.

“Is there any possibility she may have entered her menarche?”

I felt, rather than saw, Randel’s bemusement, as he sprayed it in my ear. “Impossible. She’s of the right age, but her bodily functions have been heavily traumatized, as you know. Why do you ask?”

“Just something somebody thought he saw.” I followed him out and gently pulled the door shut.

“It’s funny you should mention blood, though,” Randels said. “You heard about the jars?”

“Yes, I was told. Symptomatic of an obsession with his studies. Perhaps a memento.”

Ms. Fuchs was nowhere to be found. I was bone-tired and looking forward to a nap in my office. I folded out the cot I keep in my closet. I’d never been able to sleep comfortably on my couch. No doubt I associated it with the sacrifice of power it would’ve symbolized, although at the time I only thought it was too soft for my back. I sat at my desk to sort through the file the social worker had left for me, wanting to get some work done even as my eyelids began to droop. Before I realized this, I was asleep.

And when I awoke, I was wet.

Warmth and moisture covered me, my clothes clinging all over. Absurdly, I believed I’d spilled something on myself, or wet the cot.

I’d left my desk lamp on, but the room was now pitch black. I reached for the switch. Streams of liquid force coursed up my torso and enveloped my face. Involuntarily, my mouth opened and I gagged on hot, salty foam. The intruding fluid gushed at once up my sinuses, forced itself over my palate and down both my esophagus and trachea, bored into my ears.

I could hear only the pulse of the incoming tide, feel only a simultaneous probing at every orifice, taste only a briny tang like seawater. The pressure in my head was terrific, and mounting as the volume of fluid rose. I was unable to expel it by coughing or choking, and my hands passed through it without effect.

I found the switch. The blackness became uniform red. It felt as if the fluid had managed to penetrate as well as cover my eyes. Dimly, I felt alien warmth coursing up my rectum and the channel of my urethra. My bowels swelled to the limits of their flexibility, but the fluid continued to seek entry. My equilibrium failed as blood poured into my inner ears, and, flailing in my chair, I collapsed on the floor. Straggling droplets filtered through my pores and merged with the ocean within.

I was a red world. I was the mouth of the river of Life, and she flowed into me.

Plasma chimes sounded in my arterial heavens, resounding down through capillary alleys and cardiac abysses. Torrents of divine incarnadine mingled with my own insensate blood, singing a hormonal lullaby that stilled all circulation. My lungs subsided, turgid, dormant; red tides effortlessly conducted oxygen directly to my cells, braced their membranes against the hydrostatic surge of redoubled pressure. My brain lolled in a languid current that whispered and murmured in time to the alien tocsin that stirred my heart. Cell by cell, it engendered understanding.

It wanted its daughter back.

The blood had existed symbiotically with Roja Zachardo all her life without her knowledge. Norman Cykes discovered its secret and impregnated the host, forcing it to split itself into a daughter, then locked it away. He drained the blood from Roja’s body and for years experimented with it, sometimes injecting himself, though the transfusions all failed. The blood would only bond of its own free will. Bereft of its host, the mother craved reunion with its daughter body.

I located Jane Doe Cykes for her; rapture bereft me of any secrets. I could hold nothing back. In return, she shared herself with me.

I/We could feel nothing outside my/our own body, could see no sense in ever wanting to, ever again. Outside the sub-molecular intimacy of our embrace was only infinite, empty space, the lonely pain of which I could not imagine enduring again. We were closer than the most passionate sexual act could bring two separate beings. I/We encompassed each other totally, sharing body and thought.