Suffer the Children

by Craig DiLouie

  “Cool. Do you think my blood tastes sweeter? You know, with me being a diabetic and everything?”

  David asked him to make a fist.

  “Don’t bother the doctor,” said Ramona Fox, who sat next to the teenager. “I’m paying you for a pint, not to be an asshole.”

  “I’m an asshole free of charge,” Mitch said, leering back at her.

  “Charming.” The woman glared at him with thinly veiled disgust.

  “If my blood tastes sweet, it should be worth more, don’t you think? There are lots of other moms online who would think so.”

  They’d dropped the pretense that Mitch was Ramona’s cousin doing his part for the family—a lie they’d told because selling blood was illegal. David guessed Ramona had forgotten or had grown too tired and strung out for lies. Likely, she’d found him on some website. The going term on Craigslist was babysitting.

  He tuned out their bickering as he tapped the teenager’s median cubital vein.

  He’d trained to become a pediatrician for eleven years. College, then medical school, then three years of residency. Pediatricians didn’t make as much money as some other doctors, but as a young man, he’d considered it a noble profession.

  When Nadine gave birth to Paul, it became his life’s calling. Every day, David treated coughs, broken bones, and the common cold. Anxious parents would call him at all hours of the day and night. He’d woken up every day and gone to bed every night worried about his patients’ health.

  His patients had all died a month ago, yet he’d never been busier.

  He was now a phlebotomist. He felt more like a medieval quack.

  Sometimes, he treated one of his old patients. Herod brought the children back exactly as they were, chronic health conditions and all. Kids who were alive only an hour or two a day still managed to sprain their ankles and catch colds.

  Most of the time, though, David drew blood.

  He swabbed Mitch’s vein with a prep pad. The air filled with the crisp, clean smell of alcohol. He waited for it to dry.

  I’m your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, and the drug is you.

  When word had gotten around that Nadine was making house calls, she began to receive nonstop requests for help. Having a medical professional draw blood with sterile equipment was highly preferable to cutting open veins with straight razors.

  At first, David wanted nothing to do with it. The parents were trying to keep their children alive. He understood that. But they couldn’t see beyond the next fix. The math was simple. The ninety thousand children in Plymouth County would need about sixteen million pints of blood to live about an hour a day for a year. Two million gallons. Fifty thousand barrels, enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every drop of blood in one and a half million adults. There were less than half a million adults in the entire county.

  I’m the prison doctor who removes the appendix of a death row inmate, saving his life so he can be executed anyway.

  Shannon Donegal had died horribly, fed upon by the child she carried in her womb. She’d died a gray, desiccated husk. Charlie had told him she’d fought against going to the hospital right to the end. She knew little Jonah was too young to survive outside the womb, with or without blood. The same fate awaited all the parents, though in a less direct way. The children were draining them dry one pint at a time, one day at a time.

  When he and Nadine went to Paul’s grave on New Year’s Day to mark the one-year anniversary of his passing, he’d expected a healthy renewal of grief. Instead, she talked about the children. How Paul’s death had prepared her to help them. That all they had to do was hang on a little longer until the blood sacrifice was complete, and then the children would stop dying.

  David didn’t see the hand of God in these events. He saw a greedy parasite with an appetite for blood that would never be satiated. The world couldn’t move on until Herod was destroyed, but that meant letting the children go.

  Nadine had asked him to help. It was getting to be too much for her. She wanted to set up the office as a blood clinic. Come in, get your blood drawn, and leave with a pint of life in a plastic bag. Desperate parents were slashing themselves. They were dying. They needed professional help. Others were helping. Why not him?

  As a doctor, he’d taken the Hippocratic Oath. The original version of it, written way back when people swore to Apollo, included the well-known proverb that a physician should do no harm. David had no idea what that meant anymore. If he refused, parents died. But there were too many mouths to feed. Ben, who was still convalescing at home, kept in touch with the medical examiner’s office. He said the number of “suicides” was going up, but so was the homicide rate. An elderly couple was found strung upside down, their throats cut, drained of blood. A woman paralyzed from the waist down had her femoral artery slashed. Several hemophiliacs had been cut and bled out. The police even found a man who’d been hooked up to a dialysis machine in a botched attempt to suck the blood out of him. The official report said the walls had been painted with it. This was where everybody was headed. They were blinded to it, but David could see the future all too clearly. Soon, soccer moms would be slaughtering each other in their living rooms with the TV turned up so the canned laughter would drown out the screams. Walls painted with blood.

  I’m Dr. Kevorkian, assisting the suicide of the human race to relieve it from its suffering.

  The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath had an even more appropriate admonition against playing God.

  Standing on Paul’s grave with its little headstone, David still didn’t know if Nadine had lost her mind or was simply making a moral choice he didn’t agree with. Do it for Paul, she’d said. Do it for me. In the end, that simple argument won out. He’d seen her only rarely during those weeks of house calls. They’d been distant since Paul’s death, but now he was officially losing her. It was a strange feeling to long for your own wife. He agreed to help because he loved her. Just as the parents would do anything for their children, he would do anything for Nadine.

  He guessed that made him a junkie as well as a dealer.

  “Dr. Harris?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Yes, we can proceed.”

  “Hold it a minute,” said Mitch.

  Ramona’s eyes narrowed. “Now what?”

  “I’d like to stretch this out to a pint and a half. Can I do that?”

  David sighed. “It’s possible. You’re young and in good health. It’s just not recommended.”

  “I won’t die or anything, will I?”

  “That’s highly unlikely. But you won’t feel well for a while.”

  “Then I’d like to do it.” He winked at Ramona. “That’s, what, another hour you could spend with your little boy?”

  The woman chewed her lip, clearly torn between greed and suspicion. “And you want what for it?”

  Mitch shrugged. “I don’t know. I give more, you give more.”

  “I need a price. I’m not made of money.”

  He smiled. “Maybe I don’t want money anymore.”

  Oh God, it’s come to this. David sat in his chair wearing the white medical jacket that used to actually mean something to people, used to make him feel respected, while he waited like an idiot for them to finish their crude negotiating.

  At first, the parents had come. They gave everything they could. Next came friends and family. They gave all that they were willing. Now David drew blood for the most part from undesirables. Assholes, as Ramona put it so nicely. The assholes were here for money. And whatever else they could get. Parasites themselves, searching for symbiosis.

  David missed working with children. Living children with real problems for whom his skills could make a real difference. He missed doing good.

  The coy haggling went on until he decided to tune them out. He thought about Herod.

  About how Herod killed its victims.

  Everybody was infected. He had it, Nadine had it, everybody did. But it only killed the children. Not a
single child was immune. Why? How did it survive in adults? Where did it come from? What had triggered it across the entire globe at almost the same time? And: Could it be cured?

  The key to this last mystery resided in the blood.

  The heart pumped the blood and kept it circulating through the body’s highway system of arteries, veins, and capillaries. The blood itself consisted of blood cells floating in plasma, mostly water plus proteins and other substances. The purpose of blood was to carry oxygen and nutrients to the body’s cells and carry away metabolic waste—such as carbon dioxide—to the lungs to be exhaled. Most blood cells, in fact, were red blood cells rich in iron-containing hemoglobin, which carried oxygen. Blood also contained white blood cells, which defended the body against infection and parasites. As Nadine liked to say, blood was life itself.

  Herod somehow eluded the body’s immune system. The autopsies revealed massive clusters of complex molecules in the blood and concentrated in the brain, nervous system, heart, and stomach lining. At first, scientists theorized a chemical had bonded with the children’s hemoglobin. That left less of it to bond with oxygen and resulted in asphyxiation similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. Subsequent research quickly revealed that these objects were dormant but alive—parasitic organisms that ate red blood cells. Their feeding starved the brain of oxygen and caused death by cerebrovascular accident, or stroke, which explained the burning smells, headaches, numbness, and other symptoms.

  Since Herod only infected children under the age of puberty, the answer had to be found in their unique physiology. Puberty, however, involved numerous chemical changes in the body. The process began in the central nervous system, one of the areas of the body where Herod resided, and involved the brain’s hypothalamus, anterior pituitary and sex organs, and about ten major hormones. Besides that, scores of plasma proteins changed during the transition from child to adult. In short, singling out the specific difference between children and post-pubescent teens that resulted in Herod’s being active or not was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  The whole mystery was so complex that if David weren’t a scientist, he would have been tempted to believe in a supernatural cause if only to satisfy Occam’s Razor—the logical law stating that the simplest explanation is usually true. He’d fallen for that idea once. Never again.

  In any case, David still believed the children themselves could not be cured. Right now, Herod appeared to be the only thing keeping them alive. To destroy Herod was to destroy the children. Even if a cure existed, it would take too long to manufacture enough doses for all of them. The cure would be for the adults. They had to be cleansed of the parasite. After that, its natural reservoir had to be found and destroyed.

  The current generation was doomed, but there was still a chance to save future babies and, with them, the human race.

  The problem was, the world might not survive the transition.

  “We’re ready for you, Dr. Harris,” said Ramona.

  Mitch grinned. “We sure are.”

  “One or one and a half pints?”

  “One and a half.”

  David nodded and slid the needle into the boy’s vein.

  “Ow. Damn, doc. A little warning next time.”

  David’s lips curled into a slight smile. The blood flowed through the tube and began to pool in the plastic bag on the floor.

  Down the drain, he thought.

  Mitch fidgeted. David told him to keep still.

  “So how long do I have to sit here?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “Shit, you should put a TV in here.”

  Ramona pulled a celebrity magazine from her purse. David wondered if it was a new or old one. He doubted new magazines were being printed anymore and couldn’t imagine people actually caring about which actress was dating which rock star, or what TV shows were being canceled. Technically, they all were. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, ignoring Mitch’s attempts at further conversation.

  He wanted to think about Nadine. He thought more about Herod. How it fed.

  Vampirism had existed in nature for millions of years. Vampire bats hunted in the dark. They made a small cut with their incisors and lapped blood from the wound. Some bloodsucking leeches used a series of tiny blades to incise the flesh. An anticoagulant was injected to reduce clotting. The mouth, located behind these blades, ingested the blood.

  Scientists had even come up with a plausible explanation for the popular concept of human vampirism. The hereditary disease porphyria prevented its victims from breaking down old red blood cells to make new ones, resulting in anemia with very pale and light-sensitive skin, sores, and reddish teeth. Victims were even advised to stay away from garlic, which exacerbated the symptoms.

  Real living human vampires didn’t exist, however—at least before Herod’s syndrome came along. Humans couldn’t live on blood for the simple reason human physiology wouldn’t allow it. The digestive system in vampire bats had evolved to process blood as food; the stomach lining absorbed it quickly to produce hemoglobin for the body. Some leeches stored up to five times their body mass in blood, which they digested very slowly; their digestive system produced an antibiotic that retarded putrefaction of the blood.

  But not humans. Blood contained iron, which irritated the human stomach and digestive system. Anything more than a few teaspoons induced pain and vomiting. The human body also had a hard time getting rid of it. Even if somebody could ingest large amounts of iron without becoming ill, over time, the result would be hemochromatosis, a condition whose symptoms included cirrhosis of the liver, joint pain, and heart disease.

  Herod changed that. When the children drank blood, they didn’t get sick because they were already dead, and rich concentrations of the parasite in the stomach lining absorbed the blood directly and passed it on to its companions in the heart, brain, and nervous system, each of which performed their own specialized functions.

  It was a complex and fascinating path for obtaining food, which is all it was, no matter how diabolical it looked. What was truly diabolical was how it modified the behavior of its hosts, or rather, the behavior of people who cared for the hosts.

  Many parasites exerted control over the organisms they infected, and in different ways. Rabies caused the host to become aggressive and produce more saliva, so it could spread by biting. Rats infected with Toxoplasma gondii lost their instinctive fear of cat pheromones, which increased their chances of being eaten; the parasite spread through cat droppings. (Some infected humans became more loyal, law-abiding, and neurotic.) The Spinochordodes tellinii hairworm forced grasshoppers to jump suicidally into water, which the parasite needed to reproduce. The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus turned ants into zombies compelled to climb plants so that its fruiting bodies could explode and spread spores over a large area.

  Herod was different in that it influenced the behavior of its host only when it got what it wanted. In doing so, it manipulated others who loved the host to provide it. By taking this path, Herod had almost everybody on its puppet strings. Every day that David continued to draw blood, even he was doing exactly what the parasite wanted him to do.

  He checked the time and inspected the bag. He had enough. He disconnected the tube and needle and dropped them into a biological waste bin for sterilization.

  “How do you feel, Mitch?” he asked.

  “Like shit.”

  He sealed the bag. “That’s normal.”

  Mitch reached for it. “I’ll take that.”

  He winked at Ramona, who looked like she was about to be sick. David guessed it was dawning on her that she’d gotten what she wanted and was now going to have to pay for it.

  David decided to help her get rid of at least one parasite in her life. He eyed Mitch as he pulled off his gloves. “You should avoid any physical activity for at least a few days.”

  Mitch scowled but said nothing.

  David next turned to Ramona and said, “We’re
out of anticoagulant, so you should take this straight home and put it into your refrigerator as soon as possible. Otherwise, as you probably already know, it will start clotting. Store it between thirty-four and forty degrees Fahrenheit. It should be okay at a typical refrigerator setting.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” said Ramona.

  David smiled. He pitied her. She was a beautiful, strong woman weakened by inner frailties. She reminded him a great deal of Nadine. Unfortunately, she was doomed like all the rest.

  “I hope I’m not being too personal,” she said, “but I understand you and Nadine lost a son. Back before Josh became your patient. I just wanted you to know I’m glad you’re a parent like me. You understand. There are two types of people in the world now. People who have kids and people who don’t.”

  “That’s not true,” he said quietly. “We’re all in this together. Everyone’s trying to help. But life can’t just be about the children.”

  She snorted. “What should it be about then?”

  He had no answer to that.

  Mitch did. He stood and grinned at her. He held up the bag and shook it. “Yum, yum.”

  As always, the young had their own ideas.

  NINE

  Ramona

  36 days after Resurrection

  Ramona took her time leading Mitch to her car.

  They had unfinished business, but she was in no hurry to pay up. The idea of touching him in a sexual way made her want to vomit. It was too late now to wonder if she was doing the right thing. She’d made a deal. She either had to give him what he wanted or give up the blood. A pint of whole blood was worth twelve hundred dollars, and the price was going up by the hour. He’d easily find another buyer, and they both knew it.

  In any case, the world had changed. Old notions of right and wrong meant nothing anymore. There was only what kept Josh alive, which was good, and what didn’t, which was evil. By this simple litmus test, giving Mitch whatever he wanted was good as long as he gave her the blood.