Blade Phenomenon

by Josh Anderson

  Rickard looked matter-of-factly over at Delores’s body. “And we’ll incinerate her this evening.”

  “Doctor, you may not believe what I’m about to tell you,” Yalé said. “But please keep your mind open . . . ”

  CHAPTER 8

  January 17, 1989

  * * *

  The next morning

  Browning returned to the factory building early the next morning with a cache of medical supplies he’d pilfered from his own office, and the office of a surgeon friend of his on the Upper West Side.

  Whether or not Demetrius had really contracted smallpox by traveling through time, Browning could find no other medical diagnosis that made sense in light of the painful, pus-filled bumps on the boy’s entire body.

  Rickard, from inside his hazmat suit, eyed Browning as he exited the elevator without wearing one of the protective suits. “Wait! Aren’t you forgetting something doctor?”

  “I’ve inoculated myself,” he answered. Obtaining doses of smallpox vaccine for himself, Yalé and Rickard that afternoon had been less impossible than Browning had assumed. In recent years, the vaccine had proven somewhat effective in treating patients of a more contemporary worldwide epidemic called HIV, so it had become available again to medical professionals.

  Browning worked quickly over the next few minutes to inoculate both Rickard and Yalé against smallpox, allowing them to remove their heavy plastic suits. Each of them would develop a pus-filled blister in the next couple of days, much like the ones that covered Demetrius’s entire body.

  Most importantly, Dr. Browning got an IV of fluids hooked up to Demetrius. “If he’s going to come through this, it’s not going to be a miracle cure that does it,” Browning told the men. “It’s going to be from keeping him hydrated.” The doctor then applied the first coating of a salve used on burn victims to begin to treat Demetrius’s skin. And, finally, he gave him four ibuprofen to reduce inflammation and help with his fever, which had danced closely with the dangerous one hundred six threshold late yesterday evening before Browning left the boy to go on his supply run.

  The doctor returned again that evening, determined to treat these unique circumstances as if he were simply doing rounds in the hospital. While he was fascinated by the possibility that the people in the garment factory were actually time travelers, there was nothing weighing on him as heavily as his appointment in family court in less than seventy-two hours. If Allaire’s father asserted a desire for custody, there was likely nothing Browning could do. He had no hard proof that the guy was still using drugs, and unfortunately being an asshole loser didn’t disqualify someone from claiming paternity.

  He knew almost immediately when he exited the elevator of the Garment District factory building on the fifth floor that things were not going well. Yalé and Rickard were standing over Demetrius, watching him shiver, even underneath several heavy blankets.

  The boy looked scared. Browning had seen this look before and knew that the boy was beginning to feel what Browning could see—that his body was preparing to shut down. This strapping seventeen-year-old kid was about to be felled by a disease that had been mostly eradicated in the early 1900s.

  “We did everything you told us to before you left,” Rickard said. “Why isn’t he getting better?”

  Browning took the boy’s vitals again and it didn’t look good. “His heart rate is weak. He won’t make it through the night.”

  “Do something then,” Rickard said.

  The doctor knew not to take anything personally from the parent of a sick child, but Rickard’s tone was off-putting just the same. This tone, in the context of what he knew about these people, was especially off-putting. The time travel. The baby left at his doorstep seventeen years earlier. It all seemed surreal and impossible, and yet here he was, treating a teenage boy for smallpox in 1989.

  Browning put his bag down on a chair near the exam table and pulled out a syringe and a small vile of liquid. “I have no idea whether this is going to help,” he said. “For all I know this could kill him.”

  “What is it?” Yalé asked.

  “It’s a fairly common but strong antiviral. This medicine and this disease never existed at the same time, so I have no way of knowing what to expect,” he said. “Do I have your permission to try?”

  Rickard pointed at his son. “There’s not much time. Do it now, Doctor.”

  Browning loaded up the syringe and fed the dosage into Demetrius’s IV. He worried that, in his compromised state, the medicine could stop the boy’s heart immediately, but it didn’t. “If it’s going to help, we should begin to see progress within a couple of hours.”

  “Will you stay here?” Yalé asked, as Demetrius continued to writhe and kick every minute or two when the pain of swallowing or breathing through the pox in his nose hurt too much to bear. “We haven’t discussed payment, but we can pay you whatever you suggest.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Browning said. “Just give me a chair where I can rest, and I’ll stay the night to monitor him.”

  But the chair didn’t help the doctor sleep one bit. While Rickard slept, Yalé came to look in on Demetrius a few hours later. Dr. Browning could do nothing but fidget with his lucky shark’s tooth, trying to will himself to get a few minutes of sleep. They made eye contact and Browning stood and joined Yalé next to Demetrius’s bed. He started taking his vitals again.

  “Do they teach this type of compassion in medical school, Doctor?” Yalé asked, his tone sincere as always.

  “Where exactly do they teach time traveling?” Browning responded with a curious smile.

  “All I can tell you, I’m afraid, is that it’s a family secret,” Yalé said. “So long as we keep it that way, the danger to the rest of the world is contained. As I’m sure you can imagine, the idea of going back, or forward, in time is very appealing to people who haven’t done so.”

  Browning nodded. Yalé was polite enough to answer his question with good humor, but he could tell he wasn’t going to get any more answers on the subject. “You’re a good uncle.”

  Yalé nodded. “He’s like a son to me . . . My brother is a bit . . . Demetrius and I have grown close . . . Do you have children of your own, Doctor?”

  “Not exactly,” Browning answered. “I’m actually caring for someone else’s child right now and hoping it’ll become a permanent arrangement.”

  Yalé raised an eyebrow at him, and suddenly looked like he was hanging on the doctor’s next words.

  “She’s eight,” Browning said.

  “Ah,” Yalé answered, nodding, but lost in a thought. Browning knew what Yalé wanted to ask.

  “Who was he?” Browning asked, hoping to solve a years-old mystery. “The baby you left at my office.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d connected the dots,” Yalé answered, dropping his head a bit, possibly relieved that Browning had spoken of the great elephant sitting at their feet.

  “He was a lucky child,” Yalé said. “Wherever he wound up, I can say that he was lucky.”

  “Why would you just leave him?” Browning asked. “Was he a family member?”

  Yalé nodded and looked away.

  “I don’t understand,” Browning said. “Clearly family matters to you people.”

  “Not all family is created equal, Doctor,” Yalé answered. “Believe me. There’s much I would change if I could.”

  When he noticed that Demetrius’s vitals had improved a tiny bit, Browning was too excited to fall back to sleep. Instead, he continued talking with Yalé—two men tied to one room. Browning unloaded the entire story of Allaire’s custody. The older man had a way of listening that kept Browning talking, as if even the most mundane points the doctor raised were fascinating. The doctor explained that Allaire’s father had been abusive to her mother, but was never charged. When Allaire’s mother walked out on her daughter and Browning, there was no way he could simply hand the girl off to her father, even if he knew making it a permanent arrangement would
be a difficult road. So he’d kept Allaire himself, and she’d become the love of his life, the child he never had—that cancelled future from seventeen years ago, reborn.

  Yalé hung on every word, so Browning kept going. Despite the life and death matter in front of them, and the odd bit about the time traveling, his mind could barely focus on anything but Allaire.

  CHAPTER 9

  January 20, 1989

  * * *

  Three days later

  Dr. Browning had barely been home all week, spending his days shuttling between his own office and the factory building where Demetrius had been steadily recovering over the course of the past seventy-two hours. His evenings had been spent in his office, preparing for his appointment at family court this morning. He missed Allaire, who’d been shuttled between school, her babysitter Jessica, and Mrs. Appleton, all week with only tiny doses of Browning thrown in. Browning was glad that this wasn’t their usual routine—the monotony of a normal week feeling like an unobtainable luxury at this point.

  Although he assured Yalé and Rickard that he’d come back over the weekend to check on Demetrius, the boy’s condition had improved to the point that he wasn’t needed anymore. His skin would be forever scabbed and marked from the smallpox, but his fever was gone and he had even spent some time out of bed yesterday.

  The doctor felt a bit like Lazarus, having just raised the dead, as he walked into the family court building on Lafayette Street. But, then, sitting in the pew waiting for his case on the docket, he saw the judge take her seat behind the bench and his spirit plummeted like an air crash. Normally not someone to completely fool himself, Dr. Browning realized that he had almost no chance of winning custody against Allaire’s father. He simply didn’t have anywhere near the hard evidence he needed. All he could do was prove the man was poor and couldn’t hold down even a part-time job. If they took children away from parents for that, it’d be a vastly different world.

  As one case after another went before the court, he looked around for Allaire’s biological father, a man he’d seen only in pictures. Then, suddenly, it was Browning’s turn. He could feel the acids in his stomach eating him from the inside. Have I done enough? he wondered. Had he been fooling himself so thoroughly into thinking he could simply make the case that he was a better guardian that he hadn’t chosen to dig up whatever evidence he could to prove her father was an abusive drug addict? Even though the man was his opponent in court, Browning couldn’t bring himself to publicly shame the man. Not when the overwhelming odds were that the courts were simply going to hand the ex-convict custody anyway. Browning pulled his shark tooth from the pocket of his sports coat and moved it around nervously between his fingers.

  Just as the judge was reading their case number, the worst thought of all popped into Browning’s mind: Was he really the best guardian for Allaire?

  Before he knew it, the judge was reading from a piece of paper in her thick New York accent. “In the custody hearing to decide legal guardianship over Allaire O’Brien, the court has a letter to read . . . It’s notarized. Dated yesterday at 4:40 p.m. and signed by the child’s biological father.”

  Browning listened intently, both amazed and not surprised at all—given what he knew of the man—that he’d let a letter serve for him at a custody hearing.

  “I, Michael Peter O’Brien, hereby revoke all claims of custody over my daughter, Allaire O’Brien,” the judge read.

  Everything afterward was a blur. Somehow, Browning’s every prayer had been answered and Allaire would be his daughter forever. He could love her without a safety net now. Raise her to be the special woman he knew she was destined to become.

  He was walking on air, and despite the cold temperature he couldn’t bear to move into the tight confines of the subway when he felt like this, so he decided to walk the entire way back to his office. The babysitter would drop Allaire there soon, and even though he couldn’t explain to her what had happened, they would celebrate anyway. Pizza and ice cream. And finally—finally—he wouldn’t have to couch their plans about the future. He could finally promise her the moon, and have a chance to deliver the stars.

  How did this happen? Browning wondered. Every indication he’d gotten was that Allaire’s father was going to fight to get her back. If for no reason than to stop some uppity doctor from raising his daughter, as he’d written in a letter to Browning just weeks before.

  He’d started the morning feeling like Lazarus. And now, the future, which had been marked with such uncertainty, looked brighter to him than it ever had. It was actually Browning himself now who felt as if he’d been raised from the dead.

  CHAPTER 10

  January 20, 1989

  * * *

  A few hours later

  “Hey, hey, Woody. Where’s the stiff?” Michael Clark, the coroner on duty, asked Officer Woody Overton.

  Overton gestured with his head to the sidewalk behind him, on the corner of 29th and 7th, where the corpse was covered with a white sheet. Clark lifted the yellow caution tape and ducked under.

  “You got the car that hit him?” Clark called over as he made his way toward the sheet.

  “Hit and run,” Overton said. “Witness said he rolled across the hood of the car, so no chance the driver didn’t notice either. I don’t even have partial plates, though.”

  “Another asshole gets away with somethin’,” Clark said.

  “Same ol’, same ol’,” Overton answered.

  Michael Clark had several back-and-forths like this each day with the officers he encountered at each job. Handling death as a regular part of his day gave him extra incentive to cultivate good relationships with the live people he encountered when working. He wasn’t best friends with every officer in the NYPD, but having a friendly face nearby when you’ve just finished staring into the cold eyes of someone recently dead was one of the things he valued about his job.

  He was about to pull the sheet down from the man’s face when he saw a triangular object in the street. He could’ve mistaken it for a piece of trash, and for a second he recoiled thinking it was a body part—some organ that someone forgot to clean up. But, after he put his gloves on, Clark picked it up and saw what it was. “Hey, Wood-man, look at this. I found a shark tooth layin’ right next to my stiff . . . ”

  CHAPTER 11

  August 12, 1996

  * * *

  Seven years later

  Allaire was cornered, her sweaty shoulder practically stuck against the wall. She’d trained for this. She’d learned that a good outcome was always possible, even when the odds were stacked against you. Sometimes you move aggressively, when your opponent expects retreat, she thought. And sometimes you try to improve an already good position by acting less forcefully than anticipated.

  Her opponent was a physical specimen. If not for the scarring, which lent his entire body—face too—an almost reptilian texture, he’d have looked like one of the Beverly Hills 90210 guys. He licked his chops for a brief moment, changing the grip on one of his knives so his front arm held the blade overhand, while his back arm pointed a blade straight toward her, prepared for a direct kill shot.

  She squared up, the knife in her right hand—her stronger side.

  “Wrong hand!” he said to her, lunging forward with an overhand strike. As the blade came straight toward her nose, she rolled to her right, bouncing off the mat on the wall. Sometimes you gain the greatest advantage by moving sideways.

  Without a second’s hesitation, she swiped at her opponent’s leg, making contact with the blade across his hamstring. He knelt down as if his left leg were out of commission. She smiled to herself. “Yes!”

  “What are you doing?” he yelled firmly at her. “You don’t wait.”

  She quickly moved behind him, took his head in her left hand, and slid the knife across his throat.

  Demetrius stood up and tossed his rubber knives on the floor mat. He peeled off his sweaty t-shirt and toweled himself off with it. It would be quite a preca
rious real-world situation to square up against someone of his physical acumen in real combat. “Someone wounded and fighting for their life is more dangerous, not less. Never underestimate a person who’s already lost. There can’t be—”

  “There can’t be two winners,” she said with a smile. “But there can always be two losers . . . You know you tell me the same things every day, right?”

  “Sorry to bore you, Beachy. I ran through all my best stuff the first couple of years I trained you,” Demetrius said. He looked at Yalé, who sat in a folding chair in front of the mirrors they had set up for practicing their form. “I told you she was almost as good as I am, Uncle.”

  “Almost?” Allaire asked, rolling her eyes. He was probably right, but still . . .

  Demetrius flashed his most diplomatic smile at her. “You heard me. After all, I’ve kinda taught you everything you know.”

  “Please,” she said, rolling her eyes, even though in reality, it was very close to the truth.

  He smiled with that cocky grin of his. “Let’s see . . . Fighting, driving—”

  “I was a natural at driving,” she answered. “All you did was sit in the car with me while I taught myself.”

  “Yeah, and got my ass kicked for stealing my father’s car so you could practice,” he said. They’d gotten their theft down to such a science that it took months of joyriding before Rickard realized that his beloved white Mercedes was being stolen from under his nose every day.

  Now she smiled at him. He’d lobbed her a softball. “Big deal. It’s pretty easy to kick your ass.”

  Yalé stood up and followed as Demetrius and Allaire left the gym, built during the last half decade on the fifth floor of the factory building. He frowned at Demetrius. “I’m so glad that we have two such skilled fighters under our roof.”