Double Blind

by Hannah Alexander

  He sighed. “In war, killing is necessary, and this is a war we’re fighting.”

  “Against whom?” she demanded. “An isolated group of missionaries and schoolchildren?”

  “The children are test subjects.”

  “And you’re testing them with a deadly virus!”

  “It can’t hurt them,” he snapped, his eyes opening at that gibe. “It’s been attenuated. Weakened to protect the test subjects. Jaffrey shouldn’t have contracted the virus. We don’t test adults.”

  “What company would hire you?” she taunted angrily. “All I see is you terrorizing little kids with your elaborate wolf costume, luring them into the desert at night with promises of strength and then experimenting on their bodies, killing anyone, apparently, who gets in your way. Your amnesia drug doesn’t work every time. Sometimes your victims remember.”

  For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t respond. Then he said, “When my company hired me, I was a premed graduate with a phys ed major, also trained in phlebotomy. How I conducted my testing was up to me, and I had special training in mind control from one of my professors in college.” His eyelids drooped, as if it was too much of an effort to keep them open. “I work for DeBraun Pharmaceuticals.”

  “That isn’t possible.” Sheila refused to believe that this killer was employed by one of the most progressive, successful pharmaceutical corporations in the world.

  “It’s been supporting Johnny Jacobs’s schools for seven years now,” he said.

  “So you weren’t an employee when you murdered my mother?” she spat.

  “I was, but then federal regulations changed. Our double-blind studies would have been legitimate and voluntary, if the Feds had not shut down our operation soon after your mother’s death. We would already be prepared for any attack against our country.”

  “Johnny would never have accepted donations from a corporation that would use the children as test subjects.”

  “He doesn’t know who’s behind the donations.” Doc’s words were clipped now, impatient. “He’s so willing to keep his precious schools afloat that he’d accept help from the devil himself.”

  “Obviously, he has.” Heat from the fire drew perspiration from every pore of Sheila’s body; sweat slid down her back. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could a pharmaceutical company be so cavalier about the safety of children?

  “So not only are you evil,” she said, “you work for evil people whose hunger for power and wealth is endangering a whole population of people. The Dineh. Your own people.”

  “These tests could save millions of lives when the war hits us, and it will save the children here first. Bioterrorism will be the deadliest weapon on this earth, and our kids will already be inoculated against the worst terrors.”

  “And meanwhile, your employer will reap billions.” She knew something about the way the system of drug research worked. First, a company had to apply for a patent, and only then could it begin studies. The patents were good for twenty years before the generic equivalent could be marketed, and it could take nearly all those years just to develop a viable drug. How much more convenient to get all the testing out of the way illegally, before applying for a patent. The money donated to the mission schools would be considered a pittance compared to the wealth that would be accumulated.

  “How well your Navajo werewolf complements your employer’s lust for wealth and power,” she said, watching him.

  His breath came in shallow gasps, and he, too, was sweating copiously, but he truly believed what he was saying.

  “I was the one who saved Tanya’s life Sunday,” he told her. “Not Canaan or that E.R. doc, but me.”

  Sheila recalled the time he had spent alone with Tanya Sunday evening at the hospital. “How?”

  “She was the first test subject to receive full-strength Marburg to test our vaccine, but the vaccine didn’t work as well as we’d hoped.” He paused to catch his breath. “I had to give her the immunoglobulin. It worked. And the vitamins the kids received so religiously? They served a vital purpose. I watched them closely. If any showed signs of illness, they received the replacement vitamins we engineered to carry immunoglobulin through their system.”

  Of course. The vitamins. Sheila felt sick at the violations performed against so many defenseless children. How would these inoculations affect them in the future?

  The wolf had disguised himself so completely over the years that no one had known who was calling them out into the desert and using their bodies for experimentation. Everyone trusted Doc Cottonwood with their kids.

  He opened his eyes.

  Sheila gasped and stumbled away from him. Tears of blood coursed down his cheeks.

  She looked away, and her gaze fell on April, who sat shivering in the spot where she had first run from Sheila. The child’s black eyes reflected a deep, gut-wrenching horror.

  Sheila found a blanket beneath a workbench and took it to her. “You need to stay here, but you don’t need to watch this.” She wrapped the unresisting girl in the blanket and turned her toward the wall. “I’ll come back for you.”

  As she returned to the doorway, where Doc stood slumped against the wall, she fought to keep her mind focused. She wanted to grab April and run away from this place as fast as possible. Doc had killed Mom. He’d killed April’s parents, and apparently others who might have exposed his activities.

  Doc and his colleagues had wreaked havoc on this quiet, rural area, and she was so tempted to leave him alone to his fate.

  “Where is some of the immunoglobulin you used on Tanya?” Sheila asked him.

  He frowned, glanced toward the doorway, then up toward the roof of the hogan, as if he heard something.

  Sheila heard it, too. Tanya and Jamey? No, there was an engine outside.

  She knew the sound of that motor. It was Preston’s Jeep.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  P reston stopped the Jeep at the edge of a deep arroyo. “You kids ran all this way?”

  “We run in track,” Tanya said. “I’ll show you where she is.”

  Preston jumped from the Jeep. He and Jamey followed Tanya down the steep arroyo wall and into a small canyon overshadowed by the Twin Mesas.

  “This is the haunted valley,” Jamey said.

  “It’s where Sheila went,” Tanya said. “It’s where—”

  A scream rent the air and echoed from the valley.

  Tanya grabbed Preston’s arm. “It’s through these trees!”

  He crashed through trees and stumbled over rocks behind Tanya until they came to a hut built into a dirt ledge.

  “In there, Preston!”

  He shot headlong through the entry, then stopped.

  A man lay on the ground beside a smoking fire in the center of the room, panting in short, ragged gasps. Sheila knelt over him. Blood was everywhere.

  “Sheila!” Preston cried, then more gently, “Sheila?”

  Racing Deer is running…far from here…

  Doc felt the shock run through him, so painful that for a moment it blinded him. The blood that beat so hot and fast in his veins found the wound in his abdomen. He looked up at Sheila, but her face was fuzzy. The virus intensified the bleeding, and the wound was like a faucet, spilling his blood…his life…onto the dirt floor of the death hogan. The wolf had not protected him.

  “Get out of here!” he growled at Sheila, but she refused to leave. He felt a wet cloth over his forehead, hands on his throat feeling for a pulse.

  The pain shot through him once again, an icy-hot stab. He looked down to watch the blood stream down, shiny in the dimness of the hogan.

  Smoke burned his eyes. Sheila said something he couldn’t understand. He shook his head. The room spun around him. A whisper reached him from the farthest recess of the hogan. “Racing Deer is running, racing, running…”

  He clutched the wound with both hands. What was happening?

  He shook his head to dislodge the voice from his ears, but it continued
to taunt him. “Racing Deer is running, racing, running…”

  He closed his eyes. His hands grew numb. The numbness inched up his arm, spreading across his shoulders and down his other arm. The call continued, “Racing Deer is running, racing, running…”

  It was a child. A boy named Racing Deer—that had been his name long ago, when he sat in the silent cave, singing to himself in the darkness, alone, afraid and hurting. Singing to ward off his terror of White Wolf.

  “Racing Deer is running, racing, running. Racing Deer is running, far from here.”

  Doc knew that the curse he had sent out to Sheila had come back to him. But wasn’t that the way he’d really wanted it? He wanted to be Racing Deer again. He wanted to be free, the way Racing Deer had been before he came into contact with the spirit of the wolf.

  “Racing Deer is running, racing, running….”

  His mind went numb until a new pain burst through his chest. Darkness blotted out the fire.

  Voices danced in Doc’s head, spirits circled him, merging with the air, clawing at the witching heart that had festered and grown within Racing Deer for so many long, lonely years.

  “Racing Deer is running, racing, running. Racing Deer is running far from here.”

  The boy was coming for him at last. Now they would be free. Together, they would be free.

  But the boy changed. His face darkened. He grew hair. He reached for him. Billy Doc Cottonwood tried to cry out, but the wolf grasped him, pulling him into final darkness.

  Sheila allowed Preston to lead her from the dim hogan, aware of April’s sobs and Tanya’s comforting voice. Her senses gradually awakened to the sudden emptiness of the atmosphere, the dying fire, the dead body lying inside. Would she remember this? Or would she forget again and be haunted by whispers of it for years to come?

  They stepped out into the moonlight, and Sheila took a deep, cleansing breath of cold, dry air.

  Preston’s arm tightened around her. “Are you okay?”

  She looked up into his shadowed face and nodded. She felt the fresh kiss of wind against her face. Tears of pain and horror trickled down her cheeks, growing cold in the breeze.

  “Let’s get you back to the school,” Preston said.

  Sheila gazed once again at the tortured body of her mother’s killer, who’d been destroyed by his own actions. Sheila felt no satisfaction in this knowledge, only a deep, heavy grief.

  She gazed up into Preston’s face, lit by the fire from inside, and she drew strength from his kind eyes.

  As long as this world existed, evil would exist with it. The nightmare for the children had not ended with Doc’s death, just as hers would not end. But she had endured that nightmare before. She wouldn’t be alone.

  “Sheila, I love you,” Preston said softly. “No matter what happens, I love you. I’m not leaving your side.”

  She frowned. And then she realized the import of his words as she looked back toward Doc’s body. She could be infected with the Marburg virus.

  The drug had its way at last, and she felt Preston catch her as she fell.

  Three hours after bringing Sheila in from the desert, Preston sat beside her cot in the cafeteria, where the CDC had set up a quarantine area. Masked people in moon suits tested and treated a growing number of schoolchildren, staff and families, who had been rounded up from distant parts of the reservation by the FBI.

  A man could learn a lot if he became a fixture, sitting in one spot for three hours. For instance, through the simple art of eavesdropping, he had discovered that the dog, Moonlight, had not been shot by a shepherd boy, but by a research assistant who worked in a private laboratory owned by DeBraun Pharmaceuticals on the other side of Twin Mesas. The dog had been a research animal infected with plague organisms, and the CDC was now attempting to isolate not one, but two organisms, and perhaps a third. Three of the most deadly diseases known in the world had possibly been unleashed over these quiet, peaceful people. It had been discovered that Doc had been ill with plague because he handled the dead dog’s body.

  How many more patients would arrive, Preston didn’t know. He was in his own protective gear, and he was here for as long as it would take.

  Sheila’s hand tightened in his. “Hey.”

  He looked down to find her awake at last, though her face was still pale, her eyes bloodshot.

  “It’s about time,” he said. “You’ve snoozed half the night away. You could have warned me he drugged you. The agents combed the hogan and found an empty GHB vial.”

  She nodded.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine soon,” she said. “GHB has a short half-life.” She raised her head and looked around the cafeteria. “The CDC is here?”

  “They’ve been here almost as long as you’ve been out. They’ve got some pretty impressive equipment, and good physicians. They’ve left orders for me to let them know as soon as you wake up.” They were eager to debrief Sheila, but for the moment, Preston had her to himself. “Do you remember anything about the hogan?”

  A shadow settled into her expression, drawing down the contours of her face. She looked into his eyes, as if hoping to find that her memories were nothing more than bad dreams. Then she looked away.

  “Doc killed my mother.” All the anguish she must have felt in the desert with that madman made itself known in that simple statement. “He was the wolf. I remember it, not because I remember everything, but because I can close my eyes and see Doc looking at me with the eyes of the wolf.”

  “I’m so sorry. He’s dead.”

  He saw her surprise. “How?”

  “We can talk about all of it later. When I found you, you were kneeling at his side, trying to save his life.”

  She closed her eyes, squeezing them shut, wincing as if she felt again the awful pain of her discovery. A tear slid from beneath her closed lid. “I would have wanted to kill him.”

  “But you didn’t. I learned a lot from you today, and from Canaan. I learned how one quiet worship service in the name of Christ, in the middle of the darkest part of the Navajo reservation, touched Kai Begay’s heart and changed him. He endured horrible abuse as a child at the hands of a white man, he was manipulated by a teacher in college, and yet he allowed the spirit to change him.”

  Her hand tightened and her eyes opened. She didn’t say anything, but her expression changed, questioned, hoped.

  “You were right,” he said softly. “God does change things. Tonight you tried to save your mother’s killer. And I wasn’t even surprised, because I know the kind of person you are. You do good for others, despite what they do to you. God worked in Kai’s life, and he worked in my parents’ lives, my sister’s.”

  Sheila tried to sit up, but Preston gently eased her back down. “Don’t get up and move around. The results of your blood tests are negative for Marburg for now, but it isn’t definitive yet.”

  She frowned. “I remember blood. It was everywhere.”

  “Doc was bleeding from a knife wound from Steve Hunt.”

  “So Steve went after the wolf himself.”

  “And he received a flesh wound for his troubles. He’s fine. Steve said Doc was acting really strange, batting at the air like someone hitting flies.”

  “The spirits, Preston,” Sheila said softly. “They’re real. Never underestimate the power of those evil spirits that can control and deceive a person. The only power that can conquer them is—”

  “God,” Preston said. He leaned closer to her. “Our God.”

  Sheila blinked at the significance of those two words.

  “The evidence is irrefutable,” he said. “For so many years, I’ve blamed God for allowing my family to suffer through the horror of Mom’s schizophrenia, but as I look back, I can see the heritage of faith my parents gave me. I wanted God to change their lives and make everything better. He did something more important by changing their hearts.”

  “So you grasp the concept of God’s grace intellectually n
ow,” she said.

  “I grasp Him with everything I have—my mind, my heart, my soul. This is what I’ve longed for all this time, to see Him, know and grasp His Spirit for myself. It’s like all the pieces of a puzzle have fallen into place, and my life is whole for the first—”

  “Sheila Metcalf?” came a voice behind Preston. It was the FBI agent to interview her. The rest would have to wait until later.

  Epilogue

  T he clinic buzzed with activity and the chatter of children. Sheila worked beside Preston, watching him record a child’s vitals on a chart. Preston had been instrumental in helping the FBI research years of records to find activity of a certain anonymous donor—DeBraun Pharmaceuticals.

  The chaos of this day was nothing compared to the chaos of the past two weeks, as the CDC, FBI and Navajo Tribal Police quarantined the complete lower half of the Navajo Reservation—not an easy undertaking in such a rugged, rural area. Homeland Security placed a high alert. News media from all over the globe converged at the borders of the quarantined area.

  Not only had Doc been conducting research for Marburg, but the students of Johnny Jacobs’s other schools had been used as unknowing test subjects for double-blind studies. DeBraun had been illegally developing inoculations for hemorrhagic viruses, for plague, for anthrax.

  So far, one person had died from the plague. That person was Sheila’s beloved Betsy Two Horses. Sheila, and the rest of the school, grieved her loss.

  Preston finished with his patient and reached for Sheila’s hand. “What a coincidence, we’re synchronized, done at the same time for once. You ready for a break? You’ve been working a lot of hours.”

  She smiled at him. “So have you.”

  He didn’t release her hand as they walked from the clinic. They passed Canaan and Blaze arguing good-naturedly about a patient file. Canaan’s attention immediately went to Sheila and Preston’s joined hands, and he raised an eyebrow.