by Ann Benson
Janie suddenly felt a need to think happier thoughts. The first one that came to mind was a question, the one she would have asked anyway, under more certain circumstances. “So—how long have you known?”
It seemed to please Caroline that she wanted to know. “Since last night. I thought I had my period yesterday, but it was just some spotting and it stopped completely. So I took a test. And it was positive!”
“You’re absolutely certain.”
“Yes. No doubt.”
Janie put a hand on Caroline’s still-flat belly. “Pregnant. My God.”
“It seems crazy to even talk like this right now—but you’ll be Aunt Janie. And I’ll be Mom.” Her eyes gleamed, full of the future. “I was beginning to lose hope, I mean, after London …”
“Hey,” Janie said reassuringly, “one thing you should have learned in London is that there’s always hope. Always. I mean, you came back from the precipice. You were halfway over. And now look at you. Pregnant.” She let herself smile with complete abandon. “It’s terrific, just terrific. Now, since I’m probably the only doctor you’re going to be seeing for a while, maybe you should tell me how you’re feeling.”
“Wonderful. Perfect. Fantastic.”
The hormones, Janie thought. “You were limping a little when I came in earlier. How’s the toe?”
“It’s a little sore today, but other than that I feel terrific.”
“You’re probably holding a little water—it might be making your feet swell. Now, you know about all the things you have to be careful of now, no alcohol, no cats.”
Don’t leave your house, lock all the doors and windows.…
But if they could come with her to the camp, it wouldn’t be an issue.
“I know,” Caroline said. And then, as if she’d read Janie’s mind, she added, “If I have to stay in this house the whole time I’m pregnant, I will. Then I won’t need any maternity clothes—I’ll just wallow around in Michael’s big old shirts.”
She was quiet for a moment, then added, “Look, Janie, I want you to come and live with us. We’ll all be safe here.”
Janie was desperate to tell her about Burning Road, about Bruce, about what she’d found with Tom and how it had changed everything. But she held it all back somehow and let Caroline go on.
“I just think we can get through,” Caroline said after a hesitation, “whatever comes. We’ve weathered this sort of thing before, you and I, and we did fine, just fine.”
Janie tried not to show her confusion. She reached out and hugged Caroline with sisterly warmth and affection. Inside, she was pure turmoil.
The sound was breaking up on the cellular phone.
“Tom—” She held the phone out and gave it a few taps. “God, what a time for the phone to go hinky on me.” She raised her voice. “Can you hear me?”
The response came through in crackling little spurts. “Barely. Can you switch to V.M.?”
“Yeah.”
A few minutes later they were face-to-face on their computer screens. “You don’t suppose they’re already abandoning the utilities, do you?” Janie said.
“If you were a utility worker, would you be hanging around right now? I wouldn’t. I’d be gone.”
“I guess I would, too. God, Tom, this is all happening very fast. Too fast.”
“People remember, Janie. And no one who can avoid it is going to get caught short again.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I’ve been worried about you, wondering if everything went okay today.”
“As okay as it could go, I guess. I downloaded from the satellite just before I called you, and there was a lot of good news—confirmations that all but eight of the boys are under way to the foundation.”
“What did you do to Malin?”
“Not enough. I want to nail his smarmy ass to the wall and use it for crossbow practice.”
“But this may be all you get. And you got what those boys needed. You’ll find a way to deal with him once this is over.” He hmphed. “If he’s still alive.”
“You’re assuming we’ll be alive, Tom.”
His voice never wavered when he said, “I know we will. And you have more important things that need your attention now.”
He was right. It was unsatisfying, and it all felt unfinished. But there was no more time. “I got the journal,” she said quietly.
There was relief in his voice. “Good. Because I want you to come out to Burning Road tonight. I don’t like what I’m hearing from the other operatives.”
“What about Caroline and Michael?”
He was quiet for a few seconds. “Janie, we decided.”
Line in the sand, she thought as she blurted, “I’m not coming without them, Tom.”
“Please, don’t be like this.”
“Like what—loyal? A good and caring friend? Isn’t that what you’ve been to me? I would do the same if it were you out here. Or Sandhaus, or Kristina.”
“All right,” he said after a minute’s pause. “I’ll try again.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Janie didn’t like the look of Caroline’s toe, and the hangnail remained unhealed.
“Have you been soaking these?” she said.
“Yes,” Caroline assured her.
Then why are they not healing?
Michael came home a short while later. He headed directly to the sink, where he scrubbed his hands and face vigorously in a futile effort to remove the grim coating of horror that was settling on his skin, a little thicker with each new case of DR SAM he was forced to handle.
Janie followed him there. “Have you suited up yet?”
As he rubbed the towel on his hands and face he said, “They just made it mandatory.”
“You look exhausted,” Janie said.
“I am. We’ve got a new one coming in about every half hour.”
The numbers had been worse last time at the height of it all. But it was early yet. “Anyone started looking for the local source?”
“We haven’t really had time. Been too busy taking care of the victims.”
“So it could be anywhere.”
“Yes.”
Was it some bathroom floor, some old doorknob that hadn’t been replaced with a foot pedal yet? The font of holy water in a church?
Everything was suspect, absolutely everything.
“Has Caroline been out in the last few days?”
“She has,” he said. “She went out yesterday afternoon for the pregnancy test.”
“Do you happen to remember what she was wearing on her feet?”
“Sandals, I think. Her toe was bothering her. That’s what she wears all the time, though. Why?”
So the toe had been exposed.
I have to tell him, she decided. But just as she opened her mouth, she was summoned by the insistent electronic voice of V.M.
“Don’t leave,” she said. “I need to talk to you.” She left him at the kitchen sink and went to his study, where V.M. sat on the desk. She sat down in front of it and touched the screen. Tom’s face came into view.
“We worked out a compromise,” he said. “With conditions. They can come if they agree.”
Janie caught in a happy breath. “Oh, Tom, thank you.”
“You better listen before you get too excited. Michael has to bring his suit and all the rest of his paraphernalia. And he can’t notify anyone at Biopol that he’s taking off.”
Janie was quiet for a moment. “That’ll be the end of his service as a cop. You know that. That’s a pretty stiff entry fee.”
“Janie,” Tom said wearily, his face finally showing the strain, “we all pay a fee of some kind. Some are worse than others. But we all pay.”
After disconnecting, she spent a few moments in quiet thought in the study. Then she got up and headed for the kitchen. “Michael …”
“They’ve kept it pretty quiet,” Michael said. “No one at Biopol has said anything about a group like that.”
“They’ve been ve
ry careful. They—I guess I should be saying ‘we’ now—have a dedicated satellite for communications, and a system of computers with the operatives out in the field—which essentially means anything outside the camp now. They all report in on a regular basis.”
Michael remained stiffly silent while Janie explained what was required of him.
“I’m getting the feeling that they view me as some kind of prize catch,” he said. “I suppose I ought to be flattered.”
“What I think we should all be right now is grateful.”
“Good heavens—for having my career ruined?”
“For having your life saved,” Janie said.
He knew she was right. Eventually biocops suffered the same fate as medical workers. Continued exposure, protected or not, took its toll.
“Look, Michael, there’s another reason why I think you ought to go with me. I examined Caroline’s toe a little while ago, and I don’t like how it looks. There’s an infection there. She also has an infection of some sort in one of her fingers. I don’t know what it is.”
Alarm spread over Michael’s face. “It was all right this morning—I saw the toe when she was washing it.”
“Well, that may have been the case this morning, but it’s not all right now. Look, do you think you can convince her to go, without telling her what I’ve told you? I don’t want to scare her until I know for sure.”
“But if it’s DR SAM, they won’t want her in the camp.”
She knew he was right. She was in a tortured state of denial over just that notion. “Let me worry about that,” she said. “She’s obviously fighting off whatever is there—she feels a little warm, and that’s actually a good sign. Some people claim the immune system is somewhat heightened during pregnancy, and it makes sense. But we need to move quickly. I don’t need to tell you it could be only a matter of hours before—”
“No, you don’t.” He got up and paced around the study for a few minutes, one hand rubbing his chin, deep in thought. “I’ll be an outlaw if we do this, you know. It might be worth it if I thought Caroline would be okay, but you don’t seem to be giving out guarantees.”
She hung her head and was quiet for a few seconds. “We’re all going to be outlaws. I’m not going to be able to work as a physician for a very long time, if ever again. And there are no guarantees that any of us will be okay.”
Without thinking, Michael glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where Caroline was still sitting at the table.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Janie said. “You can decide to stay on the outside.”
“And lose my wife? Our child? When someone finds out, they’ll take her away. And I know what happens to those people who get taken away.”
“It may just be her toe acting up. Simple as that. And if it is DR SAM, well, my guess is—”
She wanted to say, “that it’s being contained by something.” But it seemed too wild an utterance. She said instead, “—she could beat it.”
“Less than two percent do that.”
“She lived through bubonic plague, Michael. She’s very tough. And she didn’t have anywhere near as much reason to live then as she does now.”
He sighed in weary resignation. “I’ll go speak with her, then.”
Janie glanced at the wall clock. “Better make it fast.”
He started through the study door.
“And Michael,” Janie said.
The expression he wore when he turned back to her was pure grief.
“Don’t say anything about her toe—please—not yet.”
The last thing Janie did before they departed was to bandage Caroline’s finger and toe in an impermeable biosafe dressing. The last thing Michael did, when all else was ready, when all his equipment was loaded in the back of Janie’s Volvo like the pile of tribute it had suddenly become, was to climb into his suit.
Never know but what it might come in handy on the drive.
As he was closing the door to the house, his helmet still tucked under one arm, he took a last look around at the things he and Caroline had amassed in their short but happy marriage. He realized, with a vague sense of shame, how superfluous it all seemed when the bell was about to start tolling again.
35
What de Chauliac saw as he watched a demonstration of the greatest new wisdom of his lifetime was not the sure-handed work of a master scientist, but instead the frantic, uncertain-looking ministrations of a bone-thin Jew to a small frightened boy, a child who suffered gravely from an affliction that was far more likely to claim him than not. At his side was a young woman, a widow well before twenty, whose suffering had already been boundless and stood only to worsen. And though the child they tended to would call the young woman “Aunt” under different circumstances, these two had no familial obligation to see the terrified lad through his trial by pest. The Frenchman knew that Alejandro’s guilt over deceiving the young countess could not possibly be reason enough to do what he now did for her ailing son. It could only be the incomprehensible honor of the man, the love he had for his art, and his desire to do it well. With care and tenderness, he and his daughter washed and cleaned and gave comfort to the child, even as they forced the terrible grayish slurry into his mouth, a cure prescribed by the wisdom of an old woman who had taught the physician how to do what needed to be done.
He watched in amazement, from the far corner to which Alejandro had banished him for his own safety, as father and daughter worked side by side without apparent regard for their own well-being, often through long periods of sleeplessness. They mixed their disagreeable potion to certain specific proportions—two knuckles of the powdered dried flesh to a cupped hand of the mysterious water. At precise times, without deviation, they administered the doses, grimacing through the child’s screams of objection as they forced the swill into his mouth.
And in the times when the boy’s pain seemed under control and he lay quiet, the physician sat at the bedside and told him stories, tales given to him by a long-dead companion who had seen much glory in war, of charging horses and jousts and fierce swordsmanship—things this very little boy would one day be called upon to do, were he to survive.
The girl will make a fine mother, de Chauliac observed to himself. And with a growing sense of respect for the Jew who had so tormented his thoughts over the years, he admitted to himself that the girl had been well raised. It was yet another thing the man did superbly.
When the boy’s fever finally broke and his buboes began to shrink, de Chauliac found himself filled with strange and unfamiliar joy. Not the sense of triumph he usually knew when conquering a fierce malady, but a simple happiness to know that the child would live to cling to his mother and follow his father, and deep pride in the way this enigmatic wanderer practiced his beloved art. He was, for once, humbled.
“Père,” Alejandro heard.
He came awake in the chair by the boy’s bed, and saw Kate standing over him.
“My belly wants to heave.”
His senses came alive almost instantly. He stood up, and made her take his place in the chair. “Has your water flowed?”
“I—I do not know,” she said nervously as she sat back. “I was asleep, by the hearth, but my skirts are wet, so I think it must have.” And then she doubled forward, clutching at herself. “Ugh,” she moaned. “Another heave … I feel it deep in my bowels.”
He had no idea what to do, so he went to the far corner and woke de Chauliac.
“The babe,” he said when the Frenchman was awake enough to understand.
“It is coming?”
“Aye.”
The Frenchman stood and adjusted his robes around him quickly so he might walk. Disregarding any danger to himself, he went to the bedside where Kate was still sitting in the chair.
“Describe your pain, madame,” he ordered.
“It begins in the very pit of my bowels and spreads around my belly until I feel as though the whole of my innards will be expelled,” she said
as she clutched her own abdomen. She looked helplessly at Alejandro and said, “This must be the pain of hell, Père, I am sure of it.”
Alejandro rushed forward to comfort her. “You shall never know that pain,” he said defiantly.
“We will take her to my manse. Quickly, before she can no longer travel.”
Alejandro turned and looked at the child on the bed, then faced de Chauliac again. “But the boy—”
“You can remain here with him. The girl will go with me. She cannot bring the child forth here—there is plague in this room, to which a new infant must not be exposed.”
“No,” Kate cried when she heard the proposal, “I beg you, Père, do not leave my side … I have no sister or mother to help me, I have only you.”
Alejandro gave de Chauliac a fierce look of resolve. “I will not leave.”
They both turned toward the long moan that poured desperately from Kate’s mouth. They watched with horror as she stood suddenly and raised up her skirt. A long streak of blood was pouring down her leg, staining her stocking as it flowed into the top of her leather shoe. Alejandro saw the knife she always kept there, the very knife that she had pressed against the Baron de Coucy when he tried to abduct her. It seemed so small, and yet she’d saved her own life with it.
Now the blood of that life poured out of her, and Alejandro felt his own bowels wanting to heave at the terrifying sight of it.
“Mon dieu,” de Chauliac whispered. “She will have to have the babe here, then.” He ran to the bell and pulled it, then went to the door and looked anxiously for the servant.
“Please summon the countess,” he said when the man appeared. “It is a matter of much urgency.”
“The boy …?”
“Just summon her!”
And a few moments later, Countess Elizabeth herself appeared. She stayed well down the hallway; the first thing she said was “What of my son?”
