The 13th Tribe

by Robert Liparulo

  When all she did was smile, he yelled, “Leave now and live. Stay and die.”

  She simply stared.

  “Take your friend and go!” He hoped he wasn’t making a second mistake of mercy. The way these people fought—the man and earlier the teen, who he was certain was part of them—they were people he didn’t want to underestimate.

  In the States, he’d have held the woman until the cops arrived, but he wasn’t confident the Egyptians would do anything or that she wouldn’t fight if she knew his intentions to turn them in.

  He looked behind him, a quick glance, which his mind processed after his eyes returned to the woman. The terrace was clear, at least as far as the light reached before the shadows devoured it. Not that he would see someone creeping up, not if the attacker was invisible.

  “How many are you?” he yelled at her over the ringing of the bells.

  “Inside? Now?” she called. “Just me and him. There was a third. He took off for our vehicle when Phin”—she nodded toward the downed man—“radioed that he had what we came for. Now he says your son took it.”

  The details made him believe her. But what would she say? Five more, and they’re right behind you? He could only hope she was telling the truth.

  She held her palms out, showing she had nothing in them. She straightened and took a step toward the man—Phin, she had called him—then stopped and cocked her head.

  He heard it too—barely audible between the clangs of the bells, growing louder: Tyler’s rattling utility case. It was coming from the walkway on the other side of the arch, and Jagger knew what it meant. Tyler had circled around to reach his father from another direction. If he believed the woman was pursuing him, of course he would try to get back to Jagger without crossing her path.

  “Tyler, no!” Jagger screamed, cursing the bells. “Stop!”

  But the rattling drew closer, and Tyler appeared. He slammed into a side of the archway, grabbing it to stop himself. He was panting hard; beads of sweat glistened on his face. Immediately his eyes found Jagger, and he grinned and bolted for his dad.

  “No!” Jagger said, holding up RoboHand, which was completely useless for making a stop gesture.

  He realized the woman was moving, reaching across her chest to a pocket under her arm. She produced a pistol and swung it forward, sidestepping to avoid his aim.

  He adjusted . . .

  Tyler stormed up, arms wide. His shadow fell over Jagger, and Jagger sensed his dropping toward him.

  She aimed.

  Jagger pulled the trigger. Click. The firing pin came down on a spent casing or an empty chamber. He pulled again. Click.

  She fired.

  Tyler’s face instantly changed. The smile snapped into a silent scream. His eyes flashed wide. Pain and surprise twisted his sweet face into a stomach-churning mask that would make angels weep. He flew into Jagger’s arms. His head struck Jagger’s chest and he crumpled into his lap, a rag doll.

  Jagger screamed. He dropped the gun and lifted his boy, bringing his face close. Tyler’s eyes rolled, found his, and communicated too much for Jagger to bear. His head dipped, came up, as though he were gripped by utter exhaustion, seconds from sleep. Through quivering lips he said, “Da-Dad?”

  “I got you, Ty. You’re okay, you’re okay, you hear me?” Jagger said, wishing it, wishing it. He cupped a hand on the side of Tyler’s head, then brushed his fingers down to touch his son’s lips, as if trying to stop what might come out—blood, last words, a last breath. His fingertips left twin streaks of crimson across Tyler’s cheek. Using the prosthesis to support his son, Jagger reached his other hand around to Tyler’s back and felt warm wetness, so much of it.

  “Dad?” Tyler said, barely more than a weak groan.

  Do something, Jagger thought, but all he could think about was holding his son, holding him together, keeping him here.

  “You’re okay,” he repeated automatically—the words coming out on gasping breaths. He turned his head away, whispered, “No, no, no, no . . .”

  A shadow slid over him. The woman walked near and knelt. She held the pistol close to her chest, pointed at Jagger, and reached for Tyler’s hand. Jagger turned away from her, pulling Tyler with him, but she grabbed Tyler’s wrist, turned it. His hand opened, and a small black object rolled out. She took it and glared at the thing as though it were a bug that had crawled out of her ear.

  “I was aiming for you,” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the bells.

  Jagger pushed his face into his son’s neck. He inhaled Tyler’s fragrance; it still smelled new, clean, free of the bitter tang of post-pubescent perspiration. But overpowering it like cigar smoke in a flower store was the sweetened coffee/metallic odor of blood, growing stronger with each breath.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  His tears poured onto his son as his hand found the hole in Tyler’s shirt. He stuck his finger through and tore the material away. He rubbed bare skin, slick with the lifeblood that Tyler needed inside, not out. He ran his hand up to the bullet hole, gently pushing the blood back in. He stroked more liquid up, squeegeeing it off Tyler’s skin, back into the hole, only vaguely aware that it was the act of an insane person. No matter how fast he worked, the blood kept coming, flowing out over his fingers, cascading down.

  He shifted Tyler in his arms and realized the woman and injured man were gone. He leaned his son’s head against his left bicep, stroked his face, ran his fingers through his hair, smearing blood everywhere.

  Tyler watched him, lids half closed. With great effort he opened his eyes wider, questioning. Jagger read in them a need to know: What’s happening to me? And more important, What’s going to happen next?

  “My boy,” Jagger whispered.

  Tyler smiled.

  Jagger smiled back, but he couldn’t hold it. His molars ground together, and he raised his face to the sky. “Not him, Lord,” he whispered. “Me, take me instead. Please. Not him, not him . . .”

  He lowered his head, touching his cheek to Tyler’s. He tried to stop weeping and couldn’t. He groaned. His head rolled back, and he was looking at the stars again. “Why!” he screamed, and the word became a long, loud wail.

  As if realizing their defeat for domination of the night air, the bells clanged their last and faded away.

  [ 49 ]

  The helicopter settled onto the slightly sloping rock in front of St. Catherine’s, and Owen climbed out. He stared at the smoking hole that used to be the front gate and realized he’d arrived too late. He leaned back into the cabin and spoke to the pilot, who switched on a joystick-controlled spotlight mounted to the nose of the copter. It bathed the destruction in white light. He started toward it and stopped.

  A woman was coming out, carrying someone over her shoulder, only feet, legs, and backside visible from this angle. He pulled his pistol and saw a small handgun clutched in her fist. Squinting, she aimed it at him, each of them watching the other over the barrel of a gun.

  “Stop!” he yelled over the sound of the helicopter’s engine and rotors. “I can’t let you take him.”

  She twisted her torso, showing him the man she carried. It wasn’t Creed.

  Owen gestured with his head for her to leave.

  “Get that light off me,” she said. “Or would you prefer I just shoot it?”

  He signaled the pilot, and the light snapped off.

  Pointing the gun, watching him, she stepped gingerly through the rubble. When she’d cleared the worst of it she picked up her pace, heading for the garden side of the monastery. As she passed his position, she rotated to keep her eyes and gun on him, sidestepping, then walking backward.

  At the end of the great wall, she stepped back into the shadows and disappeared. Owen kept his pistol aimed at the spot and slowly made his way toward the entrance.

  X I I I

  As Jagger lowered his head and closed his eyes, the bells continued to resonate in his mind, clanging unmusically, pounding, settling into an unwaveri
ng, high-pitched tone, a scream sustained through eternity.

  Something touched his head, and he raised it. Tyler was looking at him, through him, with unfocused eyes. His son’s hand slowly smoothed the hair on the back of Jagger’s head, caressing it. He coughed, too quietly to penetrate the scream that filled Jagger’s skull.

  Jagger said something—Tyler’s name, soothing assurances—but the scream stole his voice as well. Then other sounds did break through, rhythmic pulses, as if from a variety of drums scattered around a pitch-black stadium: his heartbeat, footsteps pounding and echoing in the monastery, the thu-thu-thu of a helicopter’s rotors.

  They’re leaving, he thought. What he wouldn’t have given at that moment for a rocket launcher. But he’d give more, he’d give everything, to save his son—to move and get him help. Move! Scratching in a deep recess of his brain, like a fingernail, was the thought that if he just stayed there, if he continued to simply hold his boy, time would stop, the badness would stop. Hit the pause button, freeze-frame this moment forever, the two of them holding each other, and what would happen next never would.

  But if he moved—if he did the very thing he knew he had to, what every cell in his body except that scratching fingernail screamed at him to do—then the movie would go on, fast-motion, rushing to events he didn’t want to experience.

  One of those drums in the darkness rose in volume, drawing close, then stopped. A scream—real now—reached him like a slap across his face. He looked over Tyler’s head and saw Beth frozen at the end of the terrace. She rushed forward. Her body broke up, prisming into disjointed shards. Jagger blinked his tears away, and her pieces came back together.

  “Stop!” Jagger said, shaking his head. Beth should be there, he knew. To be with her son, to give Tyler comfort, to force Jagger to move. But he didn’t want her to see Tyler this way, bloody, barely holding on. It would rip her apart. “Beth . . . don’t . . .”

  She didn’t slow but came full-on into his nightmare, tears already streaming down her face. She fell to her knees beside them. Her hands shot toward Tyler, stopped inches from him, hovered—wanting so much to touch him, but afraid her love would cause him pain, hurt him worse. Or was it, Jagger thought—scratch, scratch, scratch—that to her, physical contact and only that would make this horror real?

  “Jag—What, what—?”

  He heard the meaning behind each syllable. Tell me he’s fine! What do we do, what can we do?

  She groaned, a mother’s agony. “Tyler—”

  And what assaulted Jagger’s mind was everything Tyler ever had been—the wrinkled pink newborn, mad as a hive of bees at being extracted from the warm cocoon he had known; the five-year-old planting his entire face in his birthday cake and coming up a laughing abominable snowman—and as he was now, the boy whose love and joy was a sun that could burn away his parents’ gloomiest moods.

  Beth’s torment broke Jagger’s paralysis.

  “Give me your sweater,” he said. She stripped it off, and when he moved his hand from Tyler’s back to press the material against the wound, she caught a glimpse. She gasped as fresh tears poured down her face. She clamped a hand over her mouth. New energy surged through him, adrenaline and determination incited by the urgent distress of the woman he loved. In his weakest time she had become strong, willing and able to carry them both; now it was his turn.

  “Keep this pressed over the wound,” he said.

  She nodded and pressed her hands against the balled-up sweater.

  Tyler’s legs were sprawled across Jagger’s, his bare feet canted at awkward angles on the stone terrace. Jagger shifted and got a foot under himself. He rocked forward and rose up, pulling Tyler into his arms.

  “What are you going to do?” Beth asked.

  “We need Ollie’s Jeep.”

  “Help!” Beth screamed over her shoulder. “Someone! Help!” Jagger started to walk, Beth sidestepping with him, keeping her hands on the sweater. She said, “When I heard you and came out, I passed Father Jerome. He said they turned on the bells to call for help from the town. Someone should be coming.”

  “Who?” Jagger said, shaking his head. There was a doctor in town who manned a little clinic. He’d met him once, to get a prescription for stronger painkillers when a persistent ache in his stump had kept him up three nights straight. The doc looked as old as the monastery and moved like he had glass shards in his joints. He doubted the guy had treated anything more severe than a few cuts and bruises from clumsy tourists, a stomach bug now and then. But he was a doctor; he’d have equipment, supplies. Jagger moved faster.

  Before they’d crossed half the terrace, a stranger rushed up the stairs and pointed a gun at them.

  [ 50 ]

  Beth froze and Jagger turned, putting his body between the stranger and Tyler. The sweater fell away, hitting the terrace with a sickening plop. Frustration and anger made Jagger feel like a racehorse straining at the gate: he wanted to move, go crazy, stomp over anyone preventing him from getting help for his son. But giving in to that impulse would get him killed, and that wouldn’t be in Tyler’s best interest. So he held it in, waiting to explode.

  “What?” he yelled, glaring over his shoulder at the man with the gun.

  The man looked like a lumberjack: long-sleeved flannel shirt, worn workman boots, a shaggy mess of hair that flowed into an equally shaggy beard.

  “What do you want?”

  The man set the pistol on the terrace and kicked it away. “I’m sorry,” he said, walking forward. “I saw the destruction at the gate. I didn’t know who you were in the dark.”

  “Stay away,” Jagger said.

  The man stopped ten paces from them. He said, “I’m a doctor. I’m here to help.”

  “You’re not from the clinic,” Jagger said.

  “My name is Owen Letois. A man called me. He had a head injury, and the monks had taken him in.”

  Jagger thought it through quickly and decided it made sense. If this Owen guy was one of the attackers, why would he come back? If the woman had meant them further harm, she’d had the opportunity and no doubt the constitution to do it herself. He turned around, and Owen hurried to him.

  He dropped to his knees, reached into a pouch on his belt, and pulled out a penlight. He examined the wound. “No air. I don’t think the bullet struck a lung. Heavy blood flow, but it’s not pulsing out, so his major arteries are intact.”

  “But there’s so much,” Jagger said.

  Owen stood and offered a weak smile. “I’ve seen worse.”

  Beth grabbed Owen’s arm. “So he’ll be okay?”

  Owen frowned. “He could still bleed out, and I can’t know what organs may have been damaged.”

  Beth covered her mouth again and shook her head.

  To Jagger, Owen whispered, “What’s his name?”

  Jagger told him.

  The man leaned close to Tyler, took the boy’s head in his big hands, and gently turned it toward him. He ran his fingers over Tyler’s skin, along his forehead. “How are you feeling, Tyler? Sleepy?”

  Tyler nodded.

  Owen spread open Tyler’s eyelids and flashed the light into them. “I need you to stay awake, okay? Can you do that?”

  Another nod.

  “Do you feel sick, like you have to throw up?”

  Tyler’s eyes drooped shut.

  “Tyler?” Owen said, slapping his face lightly. “Wake up, son.”

  “Thirsty,” Tyler said.

  “We’ll get you some water soon.” Owen ripped open the boy’s khaki shirt. Buttons popped and tinked onto the terrace. He ran his hands over Tyler’s chest, stomach, neck, into his armpits and down each side. “No exit wound. The bullet’s still in there. If we move him too much it could do a lot of damage.” He turned to Beth. “Go get a bed, one of the little ones the monks use. Not the—”

  Gheronda and two monks appeared at the top of the stairs. Owen snapped his head toward them.

  “You?” Gheronda said.


  “A bed!” Owen yelled. “I need a bed, just the board, not the mattress or frame. Now!”

  Gheronda spoke to the other monks, and they hurried down the stairs.

  “And blankets!” Owen yelled after them. Gheronda repeated the call, then started toward them.

  Owen said, “Do you have any saline or blood expanders—Hetastarch, Voluven, Pentaspan . . . ?”