Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  “Come again?” Allen moved to catch up with him.

  “Psalm 132. David was determined to build God’s temple. Julia is determined to triumph over these people after us.” Stephen was walking in great strides now, either feeling no pain or simply ignoring it. The right side of his shirt clung to his skin. The blood on it had spread like a perspiration stain under his arm, spanning down to his hip.

  “We have been moved already beyond endurance and need rest,” Allen recited. At Stephen’s inquisitive look, he said, “John Maynard Keynes, first Baron of Tilton.”

  “‘Be strong, show yourself a man.’ First Kings.”

  Allen laughed. “‘A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.’ Steward Alsop.”

  “Oh-ho!” Stephen roared, ready to counter.

  They walked on like that, lobbing the wisdom of others at each other. Julia marched silently ten feet ahead, leading them toward the motel. While the bright sun warmed their skin, a gentle breeze sweeping off the mountains kept them from perspiring. Traversing this quiet back street so soon after arriving eased their sense of being pursued. This place, where an occasional dog barked from its backyard home and children drew hopscotch grids with colored chalk in driveways, was galaxies away from the pit that spawned germ-creating madmen and their bloody minions. Tension evaporated in the heat like morning dew. For a few minutes, they even felt safe.

  The slowing movements of Julia’s head revealed that her darting scrutiny of their surroundings had turned to careful observance. They deviated from their course once to patronize a drugstore she spotted across Broadway. Stephen purchased medical supplies and an XXL T-shirt emblazoned with the message HUGGABLE, which he probably should have slipped into at the store, but he decided to wait until they were ensconced in the motel. All three picked up toiletries.

  Ten minutes later, Julia brought the group to a halt.

  “Okay, there’s the motel.” A portion of its sign was visible over the roof of a house. “Allen, we’ll say we’re married. Stephen, hang out here for about fifteen minutes, then come. Our room will be the one with the washcloth sticking over the top of the door. We’ll try to get one around back.”

  In the glow of the first brotherly camaraderie he had experienced in years, Allen had almost forgotten their fugitive status. “Why should he wait here?” he asked.

  “Two shall live where three would die.” She grinned and walked away.

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Julia Matheson,” she called over her shoulder.

  Allen threw Stephen an exasperated look and hustled after her.

  forty-seven

  All the rooms at the motel faced busy Broadway Avenue, so Julia insisted on keeping the curtains closed. Even with the lamps on, the room, decorated in brown hues, appeared murky. It was the sort of room for illicit rendezvous, drunken binges, suicide. Allen was sure it had seen its share of each; the stark ugliness of it alone could drive someone to self-destruction. As Julia fiddled with the zipper of her gym bag, he plopped onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his face.

  “Did Goody say anything else?” she asked.

  He lifted the pillow up to look at her.

  “You said he mentioned Ebola, that it was man-made, coming here … Anything else?”

  He thought. “He said something-pora. I didn’t catch all of it. I thought maybe purpura, a rash of purple spots caused by internal bleeding. It fits. He mentioned some names. Karl Litt.”

  “Lit? L-i-t?”

  “I guess. I Googled Karl L-i-t and L-i-t-t. Nothing. He said to tell Jodi and Brice and Brett—”

  “Barrett.”

  “Barrett. He said to tell them he loved them.”

  “His wife and sons,” Julia said, dropping down on the bed, the laptop forgotten in her hands.

  “And you.”

  “Huh?”

  “After ‘Barrett,’ he said ‘Julia.’”

  “He did?”

  “‘Tell them I love them. Jodi, Brice, Barrett, Julia.’”

  Stephen’s hearty thumps resounded through the door. Allen rose with a groan to admit him.

  “Check the peephole,” Julia said, turning away, wiping her eyes as if she were scratching an itch on her eyebrow.

  “I am, I am,” Allen said, though he wouldn’t have without her warning.

  Even through the peephole’s fish-eye lens, there was no mistaking the hulking figure outside the door. Allen pulled it open. With the sun at his back, Stephen looked truly haggard. His hair and beard stood out in all directions; a tuft of fur protruded from a place just above his belly where his shirt had lost a button; blood, road dirt, and concrete dust scuffed his clothes; the lines on his face were deeper than they’d been the night before. Clutching the crumpled bag from the drugstore, he was a poster child for the homeless and destitute. He sauntered in, lowered himself into an armchair nearly as tattered as he. He stretched out his long legs and planted his feet on the bed.

  “I’m feeling my age,” he moaned.

  Allen took the bag from him and said, “Take off your shirt.”

  “I’m all right.” He raised his arm in protest and stopped short, skewing his face in pain.

  “Yeah, right. Take it off.” Allen began lining the supplies up along the bottom edge of the bed. “Needle and thread. Did you get needle and thread?”

  “It’s in there.” He tossed the shirt into a wastebasket by Julia. She moved it into the bathroom.

  “Get me some hot water while you’re in there,” Allen called. He found the small travel packet of thread and needles at the bottom of the bag and opened it. He knelt beside Stephen and started examining the worst of his wounds. “So where’d you learn that ‘dang you too’ stuff?”

  “Tang soo do. One of my parishioners runs a dojang. He thought it would help with my coordination and keep me in shape.”

  “It worked,” Julia said, setting down an ice bucket of steaming water and two washcloths next to Allen.

  “I attend his class twice a week and perform katas every day.” He glanced under his arm at Allen, seeming to assess his interest.

  “Katas?”

  “Formal exercises against imaginary opponents. They teach you how to control your breathing rhythm and eye focus; they develop balance, gracefulness, strength … stuff like that.”

  “What level are you?”

  “Second dan black—ahhhhh!”

  “Sorry,” Allen said, dabbing at a particularly dark clump of blood. “Black belt? That’s how you took down those guys at your cabin?”

  He glanced at Julia, heading into the bathroom. She looked back and winked. If she realized he was trying to distract Stephen from the repairs he was making to his flesh, then Stephen probably realized it too; he was allowing himself to be distracted.

  Stephen frowned. “The first one caught me off guard, the assailant, I mean. I just gave him an elbow in the face, pretty sloppy. My sa bom nim would have a fit.”

  “And the other?”

  “I was getting into form with him. I gave him a hammerfist strike to the temple.” He laughed. “I’d never seen it for real. Incredible.”

  Allen threaded a needle, prodded a spot on Stephen’s side, and poised the needle over it.

  “You still into meditation?”

  “Keeps me sane.”

  Julia stepped from the bathroom as she brushed her teeth. Allen could tell she didn’t want to miss the conversation.

  He flashed a big smile at her. “He used to disappear inside himself so deeply, he wouldn’t hear us yelling at him.”

  “I heard you.”

  “We used to say he was heavily meditated.”

  Julia laughed, a nice sound.

  Allen said, “You know, being a toothbrush is the worst job in the world.”

  Stephen blurted, “Tell that to the toilet paper!”

  Julia laughed again, spraying tiny droplets of toothpaste.

 
“Hey,” Allen said, “you stole my joke,” and Julia laughed harder.

  After a few moments, she spoke around the toothbrush. “I thought meditation was something Buddhists and New Agers did.”

  “Depends on where your mind’s at. I meditate on the ways of Jesus.”

  “But he got into it before all that Jesus stuff,” Allen said, unable to keep a measure of disdain out of his voice.

  “All right,” Stephen said. Soothing, placating.

  “This is going to hurt,” Allen said.

  “Just do it.”

  Allen looped the thread through a dozen times, cinching each stitch to close the wound. He remembered a joke about a new doc trying to suture a man with palsy. He turned to tell it, but Julia had disappeared back into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came out, but he wasn’t in the mood anymore. Instead, he asked Stephen, “Having a black belt, what do you think of the Warrior?”

  Warrior. With all the labels that described him—enemy, pursuer, assailant, killer, assassin—the three of them seemed to have settled on warrior. The title was disturbingly appropriate.

  “One bad dude.”

  “I mean in skill, fighting skill.”

  “Allen, were you watching? He had me, would have killed me if Julia hadn’t chased him off. He is faster, smarter, stronger than any man I’ve sparred with. He moved like he knew everything I was going to do and responded to it as though he’d had weeks to think it over.”

  “But we got away.”

  Stephen said nothing.

  “You seemed …” Julia paused, thinking about her words. “Hesitant to engage him.”

  When Stephen didn’t respond, Allen said, “He’s a pacifist.”

  Stephen shook his head. “C. S. Lewis said that unless you can show him that a Nazified Europe would be better than the war that stopped it, he could not be a pacifist. That’s how I feel.”

  “I’ve never seen a pacifist fight like that,” Julia said.

  Allen said, “I’m surprised you fought at all, after what happened.’”

  “What happened?” Julia looked between brothers, getting nothing back.

  Allen said, “He—”

  “I just swore off … being like that. That’s all.”

  Allen bit his tongue. He leaned back on his haunches, inspecting his work and the work yet to do.

  Despite the brief tension, a peace settled over them then—the tranquility that comes from being at ease with the people around you. The shared experience of fighting for survival had connected them in a way Allen didn’t understand. He felt it, nonetheless, and apparently the others did too.

  Julia was slouched in a chair, seeming to assess both brothers. A smile quivered against her lips like an incomplete thought.

  Memory has a tendency to seize upon moments that seem to an outsider mundane and unremarkable. The occasion is special only to participants, and even they often don’t recognize it as memorable. This moment would prove to be like that. They would remember the stillness in the midst of chaos, their casual postures in the shadowy room, the sense of camaraderie.

  The calm before the storm.

  forty-eight

  The gauntlet came down hard on the tabletop. It sat there, empty and cold and very frightening.

  “It’s the Warrior’s arm,” Stephen said, quietly awed.

  Julia nodded.

  Allen hopped off the bed for a closer look. Sure enough, the black, spike-knuckled gauntlet he’d seen shatter through the bank window lay motionless on the dresser. Somehow it seemed more sinister now. Before, he had not seen it in its entirety, bulging with artificial muscles, curled into a taloned claw. He reached for it, hesitated, then gripped its forearm. It was warm, like flesh, but firm as bone. He lifted it, surprised by its lightness.

  “It can’t weigh more than a pound,” he said, stunned. He tilted it. The fingers closed into a fist—

  Chick.

  He jumped back a step, letting the gauntlet slip from his grasp. Both Julia and Stephen jumped as well, thinking the thing had snapped at Allen or done something equally startling.

  “That’s the sound I heard last night in the cemetery,” Allen said, staring at the gauntlet, now palm-up on the carpet. “While the Warrior was searching for me: chick-chu, chick-chu, rhythmic like that.”

  “Clenching and unclenching his fist,” Julia said.

  Allen nodded, watching the gauntlet as if he expected it to scurry toward him.

  Stephen picked it up. He pushed his hand into it, reaching straight out. The gauntlet instantly took on the appearance of black skin, buckling a bit the way skin would when Stephen turned his palm up, bulging in the forearm when he squeezed his fist. “Incredible. Where’d this one come from, Wal-Mart?”

  “It was left in my car by the Warrior, the one who got blown away last night,” Julia said, holding out her hand.

  Stephen slipped it off—reluctantly, Allen thought—and presented it to her.

  Julia returned it to the gym bag. “Just another mystery, I guess. I don’t know how much good it’ll do us, but it is evidence … of some kind.” She tossed a folded newspaper at Allen. “Find us something to drive. Private party. Not too expensive. Something we can sleep in, if necessary.”

  “We can sleep in anything.”

  “Comfortably, I mean. A van or station wagon.”

  “I guess I can handle that.” He snapped the paper open.

  Julia said, “Whatever you find, make a big deal about looking it over, then tell the seller you prefer paying in cash. I doubt he’ll object. Have him drive you to that FirstBank we passed on the way in. While Stephen keeps him occupied, go ask the teller to break a hundred, and make sure you get one of those little cash envelopes. Before you leave, put the whole purchase price in the envelope. Then hand it to the seller.”

  “Why the big production?” Allen asked.

  “The alternative is to whip out a few grand in hundred-dollar bills. Just a bit suspicious. The cabbie thought there was a bank robbery in Knoxville. The media coverage might mention us, might not. In any case, we need to deflect suspicion as much as possible.”

  Allen smirked at her. “You ever get tired of thinking?”

  “Not when my life depends on it.”

  Stephen picked up the drugstore bag and headed for the bathroom. At the door, he turned back toward Julia. “Seems like you’re gaining momentum. Feeling better?”

  Her face was grim. “I’m just tired of holding the dirty end of the stick.”

  Atropos sat behind the wheel of his rented Buick and watched the Yellow Cab garage across the street. Sunlight poured into the canyon of buildings and blazed against the surface of the windshield, making it impenetrable to inquiring eyes. Good thing, too, for the stony scowl of the face inside was the seed of nightmares. If moods were animals, his would be an enraged tiger, hateful and destructive. The events of the night before had left him irreparably damaged. A black void swirled through his being, and only the blood of those responsible could possibly fill it. His soul’s need for their deaths was more acute than his body’s need for oxygen.

  He thought of the targets. Julia Matheson. Stephen Parker. Allen Parker. They had been full of fear and terror. They knew they could not win but had fought and run out of instinct. In the end, instinct would fail; where strength and skill were lacking, only hope had a chance to prevail, and he had given them no reason to hope. The ones who lasted longest were the ones who held to their belief that they would live—until their stopped hearts told them they didn’t.

  But there was something about them …

  He felt a pang of anxiety, just a fleeting flash of doubt. Trusting his own instincts, he pursued it. The big one, Stephen, had strength and a few good moves, he’d give him that. The woman was brave and feisty. That meant she couldn’t be counted on to behave the way most of his targets did when they knew he was after them. She wouldn’t cower. He had not seen the doctor in action, except to run. But he was a physician. Probably intelligent.
If he wasn’t merely a savant in the medical field, if he possessed the ability to focus his intellect on things outside his field of expertise—an ability few seemed to have, in Atropos’s experience—then the three of them together might make a challenging opponent. He’d have to pick them off one at a time. He’d have to stay sharp.

  This headache wasn’t helping. He’d downed half a bottle of Tylenol in the past two hours; it hadn’t taken the edge off at all. He pulled off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. He ran his fingers back through his hair, slipped the glasses back on.

  A cab was pulling into the garage, his cab. The prey’s accomplice had returned before the end of his shift, as Atropos knew he would. His wallet undoubtedly fattened, the man would have seen no reason to sweat through another three hours of drudgery. Predictable. Equally predictable was the lie he’d tell about the destination of his last fare and, ultimately, his telling of the truth as the bridge of his nose slowly collapsed.

  Chick-chu. Chick-chu.

  Atropos waited for the man to emerge and head for his personal car. When he did, Atropos hopped from the Buick and darted across the street, a disarming smile creasing his lips and a black-fisted hand concealed in his jacket pocket.

  forty-nine

  Alone in the shadows after Allen and Stephen left to buy a conversion van, Julia felt her adrenaline ebb. Malaise pressed on her like a warm blanket. She flung open the curtains, hoping the sunlight would dispel the room’s gloominess, and the traces of her own. A quick scan of the parking lot and the street beyond, then she stepped clear of the window. Previously, she’d wanted the curtains shut because of Allen and Steven’s naivete concerning covert operations. Her experience in babysitting government witnesses had taught her that most people will habitually step up to open windows at least a few times, even when they know better. Using the computer at the table and moving along the edges of the room, she would be invisible to the traffic on Maryville’s main thoroughfare in front of the motel. An enemy directly outside the window would see her, but that would mean their enemies had found them anyway.

  Which was a possibility she couldn’t dismiss. The Warrior’s appearance in Knoxville confirmed her suspicions that the people after them were powerful and resourceful. And Allen’s comment about the “resurrected” killer had jarred her. She’d decided during the cab ride not to ponder the metaphysical implications of a killer who appeared to have come back from the dead to hunt them. That an assassin with obvious black-op experience had targeted them was enough; contemplating anything deeper threatened to unravel the moorings her mind had on reality. Besides, asking unanswerable questions only fostered frustration and drained brainpower from more productive endeavors. Whatever the explanation, he was after them. Her job was to keep them alive.