Blood Colony

by Tananarive Due

  Dawit stood up to block Cal’s return path. “Cal, don’t ever let my Brothers hear you address Teka with such disrespect. I give that advice in the strongest possible terms.”

  Cal’s face turned bright red. His hair had gone white, but he was still full-faced and thickly built, and suddenly his chest was thrust out like a bar brawler’s. His eyes flared. “Or what?” he said, pouring on his thick Georgia twang.

  “Cal…,” Lucas warned. He met Cal’s eyes to telegraph a message: Careful.

  Jessica reached up to gently pull back on Dawit’s arm, and he took his seat again, eyes on Cal. The sadness and shock on Jessica’s face turned to alarm.

  Something had happened here overnight. Despite all of their differences with the Life Brothers, yesterday this had been a single colony with a unified mission. Today, Lucas felt like a stranger. An outsider. And Alex had known much more than she had told him, even after all they had endured together. Lucas felt pissed off and betrayed, which only sharpened his grief.

  “This is a hard day, and we’re all emotional,” Jessica said. “But we’ve been family for a long time, so let’s not turn on each other. Ask me your questions, and I’ll answer them.”

  “Shouldn’t Sharmila and Abena be here too?” Nita said. Two of their colony’s other women were married to Teferi, and they lived in separate houses on the western side of the colony, ensconced in their own lives. Their three children attended school with Hank and the twins, but the women rarely socialized. Lucas knew there would be no privacy if they were here.

  “Let’s keep this to just us, for now,” Lucas said.

  “If it’s privacy you want, I’ll join Teka,” Dawit said, meeting Lucas’s eyes so squarely that it was as if the man had heard his thoughts. “Will you be all right here, Jess?”

  Jessica nodded, resigned. Dawit leaned close to Jessica’s ear, but they could hear him. “Alex will be herself again. I won’t rest until Fana is home. Please don’t complicate matters.”

  Jessica closed her eyes as Dawit left the room. Her face was at war.

  “They’re thick as thieves,” Cal muttered, watching the front door close behind Dawit.

  Nita sat down beside Jessica, taking Dawit’s place. She clasped her friend’s hand. “Honey, I’m sorry…,” Nita said. “I know you’re hurting and Fana is your little girl, but you need to talk to us. We’re all very nervous right now.”

  “Scared to death is more like it, Jess,” Lucas said.

  “And when did Justin and Caitlin get here?” Cal said. “That’s news to me.”

  “First things first,” Lucas said. “Tell us about Fana, Jess. Please. Everything.”

  “Everything is a long story,” Jessica said.

  “We quit our day jobs a long time ago, sugar,” Nita said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

  Staring at the braided rug four feet ahead of her, Jessica didn’t look like she was ready to talk yet. Nita got up and went to the kitchen, angling her wide hips through the French doors; she’d gained forty pounds in ten years, blaming Bea’s cooking. Lucas sighed and glanced at Cal, who gazed back with lips pursed hard.

  The French door flew open, and Nita came back with a tray of slightly burned biscuits and coffee, remnants of the breakfast Bea had been starting before her daughter had been carried to her doorstep. A lump in his throat, Lucas reached for a cold biscuit and buttered it. Cal and Nita followed his example. The biscuit was a rock in Lucas’s mouth, but at least the coffee was warm.

  Once, Lucas had been naive enough to think that he had lived to see almost everything: raised in Georgia at the end of segregation, an MD degree from Meharry, an adventure in the Peace Corps, and a Lasker Prize for his smallpox research. He’d gone through hell when his first wife had died, but Cal and Nita had helped him through it. He and the Duharts had lived across the street from each other on a shaded Tallahassee road.

  Then Jared had been diagnosed with leukemia. Lucas had gone to Botswana to chase down a rumor about a clinic with blood that could heal anything. Everyone, including Cal and Nita, had thought he’d been acting out of desperation. For a while, he’d been afraid they were right.

  But he’d found Alex, and the blood. Or, rather, Alex and the blood had found him. Chaos had come crashing into his life on the heels of his discovery, and the trauma of that time had torn a hole in his memory. But Alex remembered. Sometimes, Alex woke up trembling and sweating with memories of torture. She was afraid it might happen again.

  Lucas had died, after all.

  Lucas hadn’t been surprised that awful day when he’d felt a gun’s nozzle against the back of his head. He’d heard a bullet cycle into a chamber before the explosion behind his ears. As an end to one’s life, Lucas’s had been extraordinary: Mercenaries. A hurricane. And miraculous blood.

  Lucas remembered the eerie few seconds of consciousness after he knew he would die. He’d felt his thoughts go white and his body sink into stony paralysis. A euphoria had swallowed him, much more intense than the mental rush from a shaman’s ayahuasca he’d once sampled in Peru. Jessica, Bea and Alex would say he’d felt the first welcoming winds of Heaven. But it had been DMT, of course. Dimethyltryptamine. Humans experience the release of DMT twice in their lives—at birth and at death. Nature’s way of easing the transitions.

  Lucas didn’t remember the rest. Dawit had brought him back with his blood, as he had once brought back Jessica. The cost had been high, but the blood’s rewards, it seemed, were boundless. The blood had overtaken Lucas’s system, rewiring his cells so that they forgot how to age. And the healing! When Lucas was cut or bruised, he healed in eight to ten hours without a trace of injury.

  And the blood could help others. Trace amounts were slowly reaching select rural portions of the world, controlled and contained. In their lab, Lucas and Alex kept a computer model of the raging impact of AIDS, whole nations and regions painted in bright red, and they watched the statistics fading before their eyes.

  Fewer orphans. Fewer young people cut down. More industry. Botswana had rebounded so quickly, no longer saddled with its health crises, that it was second only to South Africa in its regional influence, creating one of the best universities on the continent. It only made sense: When your people are sick, what else matters?

  Lucas had more influence on world health than he had ever believed possible. But five years ago, the Brothers had banned Lucas from visiting clinics and officials in Ghana and China because he’d become too easy to recognize. That damned Lasker Prize and his renown when he’d worked for the National Institutes of Health had stripped him of the anonymity he needed. Too many people recognized him as Dr. Lucas Shepard.

  Dr. Voodoo, he’d been called. His fame had outlived its usefulness.

  Long ago, Lucas had torpedoed his career because people had thought he’d believed in magic, and now he couldn’t say Told you so. Lucas had made his peace with that. Hell, he’d planned to retire in his sixties anyway, and he’d just turned sixty-nine. He wished he’d gotten the blood when he was thirty, but freezing time at fifty-five wasn’t shabby. And he had a gorgeous lab to study his blood.

  Lucas had joked, cajoled and begged Alex: You’ve earned the right to this blood. Tell Jessica and Dawit to give you the Ceremony so you’ll be like us, too. Put my worries to rest. But, like her mother, Alex had refused. Would Alex ever have the chance now, or had he just lost another wife? Lucas didn’t want to live a single day without Alexis, much less hundreds of years.

  “Jess?” Lucas gently prodded his sister-in-law, who was still staring at the floor. “Please.”

  Jessica looked up and nodded, sighing.

  “Fana isn’t the only one who can reach people with her mind,” she said, pausing between sentences. “The Brothers are telepaths. The Blood seems to open up a new mental receptivity, depending on how much it’s nurtured. Some, like Fana, have a more natural talent than others. That means, among other things, that they know what other people are thinking. I don’t know yet if I can lear
n it—or you, Lucas. It takes years, Teka says.”

  Lucas’s mind went blank, just like the day he’d felt the life leaving his body. The room was so silent that it was as if no one had heard.

  “You mean like aliens?” a voice said. Hank was leaning into the entryway, eavesdropping. At fourteen, Cal’s son was stocky, just like him. “Vampires?”

  “Where’s your brother and sister?” Cal snapped.

  Hank ignored the question. “Look, I know something happened to Aunt Alex. I have a right to hear, too.” He reminded Lucas of Jared as a young boy, when illness had made him old for his years. Cal, Nita and Jessica shook their heads in unison.

  “Go mind Maya and Martin. Pronto,” Cal said.

  “Look, I’m not a little kid,” Hank said. “I just want—”

  Nita shot to her feet. “So help me, if you don’t get moving right now, I will break off a switch and wear your behind out. I don’t care how old you are,” she said. “Go, Hank. And don’t come back in here.” She sounded like Alex, except for the terror hidden in her voice.

  Jessica mustered a smile as placid as Teka’s for the boy. “Alex will be fine. Really,” she told Hank. “Do what your mom says, hon. This is a meeting for the grown-ups.”

  Hank gave them a nasty look, but he retreated. Cal nudged Hank along, then watched his son walk to the playroom on the other side of the house. Lucas heard the door slam. Hank was getting close to the age when he would want to decide more things for himself.

  “He still doesn’t know where the blood comes from,” Nita said softly. “Not really.”

  “Keep it that way,” Jessica said. “Ignorance is his protection.”

  “Not in my experience,” Lucas said. “Go on. You say they’re telepaths…”

  Jessica spoke rapidly, still in a hush. “They can hear what you’re thinking, if they want to. They can send thoughts into your head, especially the stronger ones, like Teka.”

  Lucas remembered the eerie sensation of hearing Teka’s voice in his sleep when he’d woken up that morning. His skin suddenly felt frigid, as thin as paper. Teka had roused him from sleep without making a sound!

  “Dawit too? He can read your mind?” Nita said, taking her seat beside Jessica. When Jessica sighed and nodded, Nita gave her a sympathetic, disbelieving look.

  “What are Fana’s capabilities?” Lucas said.

  Jessica didn’t blink. “Teka says she’s the strongest of them, in that way. But Fana’s never done anything like what happened last night. Not since…” She stopped talking, as if she’d forgotten what she wanted to say.

  Lucas’s heart bounded. “Since when?”

  “Since she was three. She hurt people.” When Jessica gazed at Lucas, her arms fell flat at her sides, as if she were awaiting judgment. “People died, Lucas.”

  The entire morning had felt like a dream, but now he was getting lost inside it.

  Jessica gulped at her coffee, as if for strength. “When she was three, unexplained things started happening. We lived in Botswana then, and a neighbor boy had an argument with Fana. That boy fell into a state very similar to Alex’s now. Alex told me she thought Fana had something to do with it, and she was right. Fana admitted she’d put the boy to sleep. When we confronted her, Fana woke him up. That was how it started.”

  Fana woke him up.

  Lucas’s brain struggled to keep pace with Jessica’s story. Could blood create an actual link to the nervous systems of others, or was it a conduit for some other unknown human functions? He had always assumed that telepathic claims were bullshit.

  “Dawit and I weren’t together during that time…” Jessica’s voice became more strained. “I didn’t know what to do with Fana, so I took her to the original colony to find Dawit. I can’t say where it is, but the visit was a mistake for Fana. Going there scared her, and we weren’t welcome. They resented Dawit for changing my blood and for creating a child they considered a mutation. But we learned more about the immortals. There are fifty-eight of them left. Only a few of them came here, following Fana. I was warned that Fana is powerful.”

  “Warned by whom?” Lucas said.

  “The leader of that colony. You haven’t met him. He gave all of them the blood. That’s all I can say about him. I’m sorry.”

  Khaldun was his name, meaning “eternal” in Arabic. Alex had mentioned that much, at least. Khaldun claimed to be two thousand years old, according to Alex. But apparently Jessica had decided to keep that part of the story to herself; that was the way of life here. Lucas knew better than to say some things to Cal or Nita, but he hadn’t realized how ignorant he was too.

  Jessica went on. “Our only allies there were a small number of Life Brothers who were most loyal to their leader. Teka was one of them. He’s been a friend for a long time, and I believe he cares for us. I don’t think we have any reason to be afraid of him.”

  “Duly noted,” Cal said, impatient. “Go on.”

  “Most of the others only ignored us, but a few were hostile. One of them attacked me. I was hurt, and it was a horrible thing for Fana to see. I lost my left hand.”

  “Lord have mercy…,” Nita whispered, rubbing Jessica’s knee. She stared at Jessica’s hand, now restored and folded with her other hand across her knees.

  “Fana saw the attack, and she was hysterical. I really don’t believe she ever had conscious control, but…she killed the man who attacked me, without touching him. He bled to death.”

  Lucas’s mouth went dry. “Fana killed who? An immortal?”

  “They’re not immortals. We’re not. It’s possible to die, it’s just much harder. Fana drained the blood from the body of the man who attacked us. She wasn’t even in the room with him, but I believe to my soul that she did it. The colony’s leader said she had killed others, too. I don’t have evidence to support it…but I believe him.”

  “Why the hell would you believe that about your own kid?” Cal said.

  Jessica rubbed her cheeks with her palms, then went on. “Hear me out, Cal. This was when Fana’s catatonia began setting in—the way she was when you first met her, Lucas.”

  Lucas nodded. In the beginning, he had thought Fana was autistic, since she’d been withdrawn almost beyond reach. He and Alex had tried every therapy technique they’d been able to research, but she’d rarely responded. Only Teka had made headway with her, and now Lucas knew why: Teka could communicate with her using his mind!

  “Dawit and I realized we had to leave the colony for Fana’s protection. After we got back to the clinic in Botswana, we found it in shambles. Alex was gone, and there was blood everywhere. I thought Alex was dead…and Fana probably knew everything in my mind. She began having episodes…like epilepsy. She made objects move from across the room.”

  Jessica sighed. “The bed jumped. The television screen blew out. Violent things happened when she was scared or mad.” Jessica swallowed hard, flicking away a tear. Lucas felt the nagging sense, again, that Jessica had left out part of the story.

  After a pause, Jessica went on. “Fana doesn’t remember any of it, and we kept quiet for her sake. It would have influenced Fana’s feelings and beliefs about herself if the people closest to her were afraid of her. It does.” Jessica lowered her eyes, almost wincing. Then Jessica looked up and smiled. Her smile looked sincere but misplaced, like Teka’s. “But whatever happened behind the school, I know Fana didn’t mean to hurt Alex. It was an accident. And if Teka says Fana can heal her, she can. I’ve seen what Fana can do.”

  Spoken like a true convert, Lucas thought. Other than that, he didn’t know what to think.

  “What’s Teka teaching Fana, Jess?” Lucas said. “I’ve never understood that.”

  “I don’t know all of it, I admit,” Jessica said. “Teka gives me generalities: Focus. Thought literacy. Stillness. Fana has trouble expressing her lessons in words. She’s helped me with my meditation—when we meditate together, she guides me. She tries to show me some things, but…mostly she’s too far beyond me.
Her mind is different. Except for the telepathy, Fana says she doesn’t have any power. But I know that’s not true, and so does Teka. She’s just buried her access to it. Teka says she has to learn conscious control or she might hurt someone.”

  Amen, brother, Lucas thought. He took a deep breath, and his lungs cinched. Mist cleared from his mind, a realization. “Whatever happened with Caitlin must have been pretty drastic,” Lucas said. “Otherwise, why would Fana run? She had to be desperate, to hurt Alex that way.”

  Jessica looked at him with sad, grateful eyes. “Yes, Lucas. She had to be.”

  “What scared them off?” Cal said.

  Jessica looked at the floor again and told them the story Alex had told Lucas last night; Caitlin O’Neal’s Glow and Justin’s theft in Ghana. Suddenly the whole tragedy made sense: Fana had run away because the O’Neals were in jeopardy, maybe the whole family. Cal cast a long glance Lucas’s way, as if to say Are you hearing this?

  “Was Caitlin right to fear for her life?” Nita said.

  Jessica paused so long that Lucas’s heartbeat sped. Her silence sounded like a yes.

  “Lord have mercy,” Nita said.

  “I know they wouldn’t have killed Caitlin,” Jessica said. “She’s Fana’s friend. But…they might have been planning to take other action against the O’Neals. Dawit says there was evidence that Caitlin was being followed, that someone looking for the blood got too close to her. She’s considered a danger now. She is a danger now. To all of us.”

  “What does…‘take other action’ mean?” Cal said in a long drawl.

  “What will they do when they catch her?” Nita said.

  “And her father?” Lucas said. Justin O’Neal’s future suddenly seemed highly pertinent.

  “I don’t know,” Jessica said. “I’m trying to see to it that we’ll all have a say in that.”

  If we don’t have a say, Justin O’Neal is the least of our problems, Lucas thought.

  Nita wrapped her arms around herself suddenly, gazing at her husband, and Lucas knew what she was thinking: Nita was content at the colony because she was writing successful mystery novels under a pseudonym, but Cal was restless. He’d amused himself with his building projects, especially the plank-by-plank re-creation of Lucas’s old Frank Lloyd Wright house in Tallahassee, but he complained he felt useless at the colony.