The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  Did you know this is the same man who made your daddy hurt your sister? He used a gun just like that one to shoot at your mommy and your sister before you were born. Do you know why he tried to kill your mommy, Fana? Because he knew you were inside her. He’s wanted to kill you all along. And if he shoots you with that gun, you’ll go to sleep and he’ll make sure you never wake up again. And then what? You’ll be just like your sister. Everyone wants you to be just like her, Fana. Dead, dead, dead.

  “Fana, please look at me, sweetheart. Please come back to Mommy. Don’t be afraid. Send the bees back, darling. Please? We don’t need the bees. Everything is all right.”

  Fana, can’t you smell how scared she is? Why would she be afraid if she were telling you the truth? She’s lying, Fana. She’s afraid of you, too, just like everybody else. But that’s better for you, Fana. It’s good when they’re afraid.

  • • •

  Jessica was hardly aware of the tears streaming down her face, those mingled tears of terror and grief. She had faced many choices in her life, and many of them had been difficult, but the decision she was making now might cost all of them their lives.

  Her clothes felt soaked through from sudden nervous perspiration. Her hands were shaking as she tried to press her palms to Fana’s cheeks, and she could hear the violent wavering of her voice every time she spoke. “Fana? Come back to me.”

  Teferi had not turned to run when he heard Mahmoud’s voice. Was it cowardice or strategy? Jessica didn’t know, but she couldn’t change it now. Maybe she should have wrenched Fana from Teferi’s arms and turned to run as fast as she could in the opposite direction, but when she’d seen the vacant look on her daughter’s face, her mind had anchored only to that. Running would not bring Fana back. She could not shield her daughter from the horrors of the world; all she could do was try to teach her to cope with them.

  And the biggest lesson of all was right now. She could not have explained why, but Jessica had faith that David could reason with his friend. She did not believe Mahmoud would fire at them. And even if he did, Fana would retaliate; she didn’t doubt that. If she had doubted after the mess Fana had made of Kaleb, she would have been convinced by the approaching bees, that horrendous sound that made her skin quiver.

  But it was time for Fana to learn control. And while every instinct told her to run—Jessica was more afraid of the approaching bees than she was of Mahmoud’s gun—she forced herself to stand in front of her daughter’s face, trying to break into her head. She tried to pierce Fana’s eyes with hers, gazing at her so fiercely that her eyes hurt from being open so wide. She clung to her daughter’s cheeks, shaking Fana’s head as gently as she could afford to.

  “Fana? Do you hear me? Come back. This is Mommy, and I’m telling you to come back right now. Everything will be all right. Listen to Mommy, sweetheart. Listen to me.”

  But her words must not have reached Fana, she thought, because suddenly the hum became a roar.

  • • •

  It was a sight unlike anything Dawit had ever seen. His eyes riveted to the spot directly behind Mahmoud, he took a step backward, his open mouth robbed of words or sound.

  The tunnel in front of him had been completely sealed by throbbing bees, a mass of tiny flitting wings and fat, yellow-striped bodies packed so densely that it was virtually motionless. Except that it was made entirely of motion, crawling upon itself, oscillating to its own deafening din. The wall had been advancing, but it had stopped suddenly, as if it had come against a sheet of glass, and now it was standing in place like the tunnel’s walls of stone.

  It was a wall of bees. Not hovering, exactly, but moored in place; stopped.

  After seeing Dawit’s face, Mahmoud slowly turned his head to see what was behind him, not even two meters away. Surely Mahmoud must be able to feel it from where he stood, Dawit thought. Mahmoud, too, gazed up at the wall of bees in stunned silence. Dawit watched as his brother’s entire frame sagged low, his knees bending slightly as if he’d had a huge weight hoisted upon him. Mahmoud’s hand went limp, and the revolver clattered to the cave floor.

  “Praises to God,” Dawit heard Teferi murmur behind him in awe. “She is chosen.”

  Even with all the noise, Dawit clearly heard his daughter crying for her mother.

  34

  Somewhere in Botswana

  The scent of blood was thick and syrupy in Lucas’s nostrils, and his stomach heaved with a wave of nausea. His system had been trying to vomit for more than an hour, but to no avail. All he spat up was saliva, and it only soaked the sour-smelling gag tied across his mouth. His stomach was still painfully empty, although his hunger had long ago given way to the overriding feeling of terror that had left him trembling for long intervals. Whywhywhywhywhywhy . . .

  That question flew to Lucas’s groggy mind with every slamming beat of his heart.

  Despite his too tight blindfold, gag, and the shackles that held him sightless, mute, and immobile, Lucas knew he was inside some kind of a large recreational vehicle, because he had seen it parked outside the clinic before one of the men cracked him across the back of his head with the butt of a gun. He could vaguely smell kerosene, or some kind of cooking oil, that might have spilled long ago. The back of his head felt damp, so he knew he was bleeding, and the sore spot still throbbed as though sparks were flying from it, always threatening to steal his consciousness because of the lingering pain. The left side of his jaw was swollen, too, but that pain wasn’t as bad. Lucas could hardly be sure he was conscious, except for the bumping he felt against his tailbone from the road and the thick, awful smell of needlessly wasted blood. This camper had become a rolling tomb.

  Lucas’s memory of the past two hours was a series of horrible images, snatches of recollection that still made him flinch when they raced through his mind. It seemed to him that his last coherent thought had been wondering who was outside the clinic, who was at the door.

  Then, there had been chaos.

  In the early seventies, he’d had Black Panther friends pumped up on paranoia and despair who had talked about the oncoming revolution as if armed commandos were going to fly through the windows at any instant, as if a quiet meal might be interrupted at any moment by the crackling of random machine-gun fire. Be ready, my man, one Afro-sporting man with a goatee and sunglasses had warned him with a brotherly jab in the chest with his index finger. You better be ready for it.

  But he hadn’t been ready, had he? And sure enough, it had come.

  First, Lucas had heard a woman scream. He hadn’t known if it was Alexis Jacobs or her nurse because he’d been standing in the bathroom, frozen in front of the mirror. Or, he thought, maybe he’d heard the voice before the scream, a man with an Afrikaner accent, rough and angry.

  Where’s the fucking drug?

  Then, the scream had come. Stephen! My God—

  And Lucas had heard a sputtering voice he hadn’t recognized, it was so tattered and raw.

  J-just do what they say. G-give them the blood, Sarah.

  Then . . .

  Lucas had heard a strange muted cracking sound that was ominous even though he hadn’t been able to identify it at first because he’d only heard it in bad action movies before then, like a firecracker going off beneath a mattress. But his brain finally told him what it was: a gun with a silencer being fired. Then, there had been another scream, only more like a loon’s shriek this time. The sound held him rigid, startled beyond thought.

  “That’s one less Kaffir in the world,” the Afrikaner’s voice went on, dispassionate. “Now tell me where the drug’s stashed, or this little boy goes next. I’ll count ten.”

  Lucas didn’t recall leaving the bathroom, but he must have, because his next memory was of being in the hallway, where he could see a white man in dark slacks and a white shirt standing several feet in front of him, in the living room. He could see the gun in the man’s gloved hand, and the gun was pointed menacingly toward the table where Lucas had just seen Moses doing hi
s schoolwork. And Lucas could see an object on the floor near the man’s feet, something bloody and ruined that he would realize only later was Stephen Shabalala’s head, as if it were detached from his body. It wasn’t—Lucas could see a shirt and the curves of Shabalala’s shoulders from his narrow vantage point—but it had looked like a severed head. And it had been twitching.

  “Stop it! What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t shoot that boy!” Another man’s voice, this one maddeningly familiar. Had it been . . . his?

  More shouts, confusion. Two other men had appeared in front of Lucas, rubbing every crevice of his body as they searched for weapons—they’d pulled his wallet and car keys out of his pockets, he remembered that—and then they had dragged him into the living room. There, he’d seen four men in all, or maybe five, all armed. Quickly, Lucas had scanned the men’s faces: grim, sweaty, clear-eyed. And there was one casually dressed, dark-haired, quietly authoritative, who stood watching with consternation in the doorway. “Goddammit, hold fire,” the man in the doorway had said. “Keep your heads, all of you.”

  But the man who had killed Stephen must not have heard him or hadn’t wanted to listen.

  Lucas remembered gazing at the women’s faces. Alexis had been tight-lipped, her expression only casually surprised, but she was on her knees in her robe because her legs must have suddenly failed her. And Sarah’s arms had been flying like pinwheels, her mouth open soundlessly with shocked mourning and outrage while she gazed at her brother’s corpse. She began clawing at the man standing over her brother, the one pointing his gun toward Moses. She grabbed for his gun as if it were burning and she were determined to put out the flames.

  Craaaaack

  Sarah’s crown had vanished, blown off. She was wide-eyed, still shrieking, but the top of her head was gone. And then Lucas saw a brown blur, Moses, running madly past him, toward the hallway. The front door was blocked, so there was nowhere else to run.

  Craaaaack craaaack

  Sarah’s shrieking stopped abruptly as a gunshot opened up her chest, and Moses flew against the wall with a yelp as if he’d been pushed hard, leaving a patch of blood, but he didn’t fall. Miraculously, his legs kept pumping. This time, Alexis Jacobs was the one screaming.

  “Leave him alone! I’ll give it to you! Just I-let him go!”

  The man in the doorway was shouting at the gunman, red-faced in anger. Spittle flew out of his mouth, and he shouted orders, pointing. Stop your bloody shooting. Catch that boy before he wakes all the neighbors.

  Run, Moses, run, Lucas had thought. Run, Moses, run.

  Lucas had lunged, hurling himself into the gunman who’d tried to pursue Moses toward the hall. There had been pain later—a blunt kick across his jaw—but first there had been that glorious instant of overwhelming satisfaction, when he’d heaved against the man and felt him fall hard to the floor with a grunt. A second man had tripped over them, tangled. Lucas could hear the child’s retreating footsteps, the hard slam of a door. Yes, Moses, run. Run, Jared, run.

  “Let him go! He doesn’t know anything about it!” Alexis screamed again, pleading. “I’ll sh-show you where it is.”

  The muffled sound of breaking glass somewhere in the back of the house. Men pounding on the door. Go round front. He’s locked the door. He’s going out the window.

  This time, Alexis had tried to tackle one of the men; she was tall, strong for a woman, and the man closest to her was wiry, so his knees buckled beneath her. But he turned and hit her hard with the back of his fist, and she crumpled away. Another man grabbed a fistful of her short hair, literally dragging her backward. Give us the drug, bitch. Right now.

  The memories hurt. It had taken twenty seconds, that was all, maybe thirty. But in that short time, the gates of hell had thrown themselves open, releasing that awful, surreal chaos. And two people, maybe three, were simply dead.

  Craaaaack craaaaack craaaaack craaaaack

  A quiet, baffled sob rose in Lucas’s throat as the camper jounced along the road, but his sob soon flagged. He couldn’t allow himself to cry, he thought. Crying would mean he had given up, and his only hope now was to remain tethered to himself, no matter how much he wished he could dissolve into helpless shock. As unlikely as it seemed, there might be an opportunity somewhere, sometime, to butt one of his attackers with his head and stumble his way toward the light, toward freedom, where someone would see him and call the police. The camper might stop for gas or it might get a flat tire, and he had to be ready.

  He had to be ready for Jared.

  On this one day of unimaginable nightmares, Lucas clung to one tiny miracle: He still had the vial of blood in his pocket. It was so small, the gunmen had overlooked it during their search for weapons. And when Alexis Jacobs had given the men three pint-size bags full of blood she brought out of her bedroom, they had been satisfied. Oh, how he’d prayed the ordeal was over! Then, he’d seen the iron shackles in the men’s hands, and he’d realized, dear holy God, it was not over. It might never be over now.

  What was it the man in the doorway had said to him, flipping through Lucas’s wallet with an inconceivable grin on his face? Well, mate, you made it all the way to the other side of the world with this stuff you nicked, but this is your unlucky day—you’re going back home to the Sunshine State.

  “Where’d you find that fucking Boer arsehole?” A voice, from the front of the camper. Voices might have been there all along, but Lucas had not noticed until now. The voice Lucas had just heard was nearly buried beneath the hum of the camper’s engine, but he still detected the accent of what sounded like an Irishman, or maybe a Scot.

  “He’ll be talked to. Later.” The second speaker had an British-sounding accent, too, but it was English, more refined. Lucas thought he recognized his voice as that of the man who had been standing in the doorway with his wallet, who’d seemed to be in charge. “He got the courier to talk fast, I’ll give him that. But he panicked.”

  “Feckin’ plonker, that one,” the first man said. “He’s off his nut. Any fool knows you can’t go in shooting like that. What good’s a gun if people think they’re about to die anyways? That’s the only reason the boy ran, you know. We’re fierce lucky that wanker didn’t kill the one who knew where the drug was. Then where would we be?”

  Listening, Lucas felt his head spin. The man’s unfamiliar dialect only added to Lucas’s feeling of unreality, the sense that he had somehow fallen into a foreign world.

  “Oh, the bloke we’ve got in back knew, too,” the Englishman said. “I’ve had a look at his wallet, and he has all the science credentials. He’s the thief we’re after, and the women were likely working for him. We got everything we came for.”

  They were talking about him, Lucas realized dimly. But what in God’s name did they think he had stolen? The blood? But from whom?

  “But you see my point? The way he was shooting, he could’ve shot—”

  “Small worry, that. With the African boy loose, we’ll be lucky to get to the plane.”

  Moses! Lucas’s heart leaped. Until now, he hadn’t known if Moses had escaped or if he’d been shot to death by his pursuers. Grateful tears sprang to Lucas’s eyes, despite the disturbing reference to an airplane. Somehow that mattered less with Moses free. That meant someone had to be looking for them by now.

  Then, Lucas heard another sound close to him, a choked sobbing. It had to be Alexis, he knew. She was bound somewhere near him, close to corpses that must be sharing the cramped space with them, filling the thin air with the stink of blood. He could hear her rasping breathing, which suddenly sounded faster and louder. Maybe she had been listening, too, he thought. Yes, she must have heard. Her sobs didn’t sound anguished, they sounded relieved.

  “It’s okay,” Lucas tried to say through his gag, even though the sounds were strangled almost beyond recognition. “He’s okay.”

  At first, Alexis didn’t respond. She probably hadn’t understood him, he realized, and his chest knotted with frustration. But t
hen she struggled to make a sound, and when he clearly heard the word Okay emerge through her gag, he felt as triumphant as if he’d just found a key to unlock their shackles. They were communicating. And Moses was alive.

  “. . . You know I don’t ask questions, and I couldn’t care less why this drug is worth all the carry-on,” the first voice from the front continued, sounding more sober. “But one thing’s shook me: This drug looks to me like blood, right? And I understand not leaving the bodies behind, but why’d we have to put ’em in bags and tape ’em up tight like mummies? Puttin’ two and two together, it seems to me we should be wearin’ rubber suits like they do in flicks. I’m thinkin’ maybe there’s somethin’ could give me a bad dose, germ warfare or the like. You’d tell me if there’s a dodgy disease I could catch, wouldn’t you? I’ve a wife and kid at home, you know. We wouldn’t fancy any surprises, like puking up our guts in a week’s time.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” the second man answered quickly. “I’m following the client’s orders. He wants the bodies, and he was very particular. That’s all you need to know.”

  “You’re sure, then?” The man sounded genuinely frightened.

  “The only thing you need to concern yourself with is keeping your eyes on the road so we can get the hell out of Botswana.”

  There was a short pause, and this time the first man sounded almost cheerful when he spoke. “What’s the weather to be in Miami? I packed me swimming togs, but I’ve heard it’ll be bucketing all summer long.”

  “I didn’t see any rain when I was there. It was just bloody hot,” the Englishman said.

  Lucas’s heartbeat had come to a thundering halt, a mixture of disbelieving exhilaration and dread. Alex, too, had fallen deathly silent. Lucas was almost certain he couldn’t have heard right. These men were planning to take them to Miami, of all places? Why? My God, he’d be that much closer to Jared! He still had a chance, no matter what worse monster might be waiting for him there.