The Rising

by Heather Graham

  Your son is not dead, but he should be, he told me. There can only be one explanation for this. Even if it makes no sense, it’s all we’re left with.…

  You’re not human, Alex.

  55

  BLINDS

  RATHMAN’S TEAM HAD THE FedEx Office surrounded, all exits covered. He’d been viewing the store’s interior through his Brunton Eterna ELO Highpower binoculars ever since arriving fifteen minutes ago. At just thirty-two ounces they delivered a crisp, clear image thanks to a bright fifty-one-millimeter objective and BaK-4 prism glass with fully multicoated lenses. But such high-tech lenses had trouble penetrating even the thin blinds that had been drawn over the store’s windows. Maybe they were there all the time, to shut out the harsh afternoon sun. Rathman didn’t know, didn’t care.

  A young man and woman sat side by side behind one of the computers rented by the hour. Used to be hotel rooms were sold like that. Now computers were, cars too. The world had come a long way.

  Or maybe not.

  Even when Rathman caught a head-on look at the young man and woman, the flimsy blinds obscured their faces just enough to prevent positive identification of his targets.

  Well, mostly.

  This was the store to which the now deceased motel clerk had provided directions. A young man and young woman matching the descriptions of Alex Chin and the young woman driving the Volkswagen were inside. The only thing that made Rathman uneasy from a planning perspective was the absence of the Volkswagen from the parking lot. It must be parked out of sight somewhere, something that made perfect sense.

  What didn’t make sense was whatever had transpired in the boy’s house.

  Marsh had provided no details on the subject. His quantum computer had pinged, because the circumstances of the Chins’ murders, coupled with their son gone missing from a hospital where his doctor had been killed, raised flags. But the machine couldn’t tell Rathman what those flags were.

  He needed Alex Chin to tell him that. Now, while the scene was contained and under his control.

  His phone rang.

  56

  THE IMPOSSIBLE

  YOU’RE NOT HUMAN, ALEX.…

  Alex and Sam continued to stare at the screen, at An Chin’s frozen image.

  Her words made no sense and perfect sense at the same time.

  “Just like the CAT scan,” Alex muttered.

  “What? Huh?”

  “The doctor ordered another one, because he must’ve seen something that made no sense, either—that shadow, maybe more. Just like the blood tests Dr. Chu kept doing. Oh, man…”

  Alex dropped his face into his hands, covering it as if everything might be different as soon as he took them away. But the words, his mother’s message, wasn’t about to change.

  You’re not human, Alex.

  “Guess I’m an illegal,” he tried to joke. “The mother of all illegal aliens. Jesus Christ, what does it all mean?”

  He started the video running again, hoping his mother would tell him.

  * * *

  That’s why we never let you have another blood test. Your father and I made up the excuse that our Buddhist religion forbade it. Never an X-ray, either, because we didn’t know what that might show. Your father and I should have known better than to let you play football. But you loved the game so much and were so good at it. We wanted you to fit in, to blend. Bad enough you were the English son of Chinese parents, but if those Chinese meddled in your life it would be even worse. We wanted you to be happy. That’s all we ever wanted.

  We never ceased to acknowledge that you were different and we didn’t care. You are our son and you’ll always be our son, no matter what the DNA says. You wouldn’t have been ours if you were human, would you? So what was the difference?

  You need to know that Dr. Chu’s words made us love you no less. It made us love you even more, in fact. Because you were truly a gift, a miracle, given us by some cosmic force we could never purport to comprehend. The heavens have a strange way of doing things sometimes, and if they heard my prayers and delivered you to us, who were we to think different of you because your blood was different?

  But you need to hear what Dr. Chu said.…

  * * *

  Alex swiped the tears from his face with a sleeve and sniffled. All his parents had done for him, never stopped loving him even after learning he wasn’t human. And his last memory, the thing he would always take away, would be an argument.

  And yet, and yet …

  Who am I?

  The most clichéd question ever posed, but so appropriate right now because Alex had absolutely no idea.

  “Alex,” Sam prodded, fidgeting in her chair. “We’ve been here too long. We need to hurry.”

  So he turned back to the screen and listened to his mother again.

  57

  DR. CHU

  HE WAS A SAINTLY man with hair the color of birch bark. An immigrant who’d earned his medical degree and settled amid his familiar native populace clustered around the San Francisco area. That sense of comfort providing the strongest rationale for your father and I to remain in the area even after slowly coming to grips with the truth about you. At least here we’d be able to blend in better; then again, being the Chinese parents of a Caucasian child would stand out anywhere we went.

  The day of the “explanation,” as I would come to call it, or jiěshì, in Chinese, Dr. Chu asked me to return with your father after office hours. The fog had rolled in off the bay, a perfect complement for the thoughts clouding my mind. I had prepared myself to make a stand, to argue at wits’ end for a rational explanation for what we were facing here. Chinese history was full of mysticism, jam-packed with it, but Dr. Chu’s claims about you stretched way, way beyond that into a new scientific realm that challenged the very nature of reality as it was currently perceived.

  Because if you really weren’t human, then what were you?

  I clutched your father’s hand as we walked up from the parking lot through the fog, with you tucked into your car seat, sleeping soundly. My mind suddenly felt cluttered with thoughts of Laboratory Z. That was the missing piece, whatever the mysterious experiments being conducted there had unleashed, what doorways they had opened. I had never been told a thing about it. As I was part of the maintenance staff, though, people talked around me like I wasn’t even there. I melted into the scenery and they spoke in my presence as if I were no more than a wall or a chair. Only one word that made any sense, recalled from half-heard conversations:

  Doorways.

  Whatever that meant. I have no more idea today than I did eighteen years ago. And from the moment I found you, all that seemed inconsequential. Bringing you home was day one in the rest of my life, all that came before dissipating into memories that were as obscure as any other sight gleaned through the fog wafting over Dr. Chu’s office.

  He was waiting at the door when we arrived, drawing it open before your father could even ring the bell. The waiting room beyond was empty, a single table lamp illuminating a colorfully painted wall dominated by smiling animal figures with tools in their hands.

  “Come,” he said, and led us into his office. Closing the door, even though no one else was about. “I know this is hard for you.”

  He moved behind his desk, but stopped short of taking the chair set there. Your father and I took the matching chairs set before the desk, your car seat resting between us where I could stretch a hand down to gently rock you. I looked down at your sleeping form, feeling uneasy about continuing in your presence, as if not wanting you to hear what Dr. Chu had to say. Might you somehow be able to? I wondered, lapsing into a brief moment where I actually felt uncomfortable around my son.

  Stop it! I scolded myself.

  “When blood test results come back,” Dr. Chu continued, “the lab highlights anything anomalous in red.” Adding, “Here are Alex’s results,” as he handed stapled sheets of paper to both your father and me.

  Everything, every single line item, was
in red. Your readings on the left with the normal baseline reading variances on the right.

  “Now,” Dr. Chu resumed, as your father mouthed the lab results silently to himself, “the first thing to keep in mind is that functionally, Alex is totally normal.”

  “What does that mean?” your father asked. “‘Normal.’”

  “His heartbeat is strong and sound. His lung function is perfect. All his muscle reactions and reflex coordination is textbook. In all those respects, he is a perfectly healthy baby.”

  “Those respects,” I repeated.

  Dr. Chu leaned over his desk, sighing deeply as he interlaced his fingers on the blotter just short of an embossed placard that read TRUST ME … I’M A DOCTOR. “In other respects,” he continued, “there are factors the tests revealed that I can make no sense out of, because they don’t make any sense. It’s why I ordered a new batch of tests, on the chance that the samples I took had been somehow corrupted the first and second times. But the results were the same, identical.”

  * * *

  The results of all those tests Dr. Chu did are here in a file. We never had any more bloodwork done. And the whole time, while you grew up, you know what your father and I worried about the most?

  You getting sick.

  Dr. Chu never said as much, but it was pretty clear your immune system didn’t work like ours, at least not exactly. The first time you caught a simple cold, we were afraid it might kill you. But you hardly ever got sick at all, and never seriously so. I guess the germs and viruses could never find a home inside you because your metabolism worked so different. Not better or worse—just different.

  I know what you’re thinking right now, my son, because I’m thinking the same thing.

  So many questions.

  You ask one and a hundred others pour out, each leading to the next. What’s your life expectancy? Will there be any changes as you age? I’ve avoided talking about puberty here for obvious reasons, but your father and I were terrified when it struck you. For how could we know if growing more body hair and your voice changing would be all of it? Maybe something far more dramatic was going to happen. I never speculated beyond that—I was too scared—and then it came and went with only the normal drama.

  I haven’t got much more to say, my son, but I think it’s important I cover one thing Dr. Chu told me: that you are different, different from human beings born on Earth, but you are still Homo sapiens, just like your father and I, just like everyone else. Your DNA strands are the same, just infinitely more progressed. And while there are some minor variances accounting for the issues with your blood, you are most certainly a person.

  Which begs the question I know you want answers for just as I always did: Where exactly did you come from? How could you be alien and human at the same time?

  I avoid thinking about Laboratory Z as much as I can. But I can only assume that you came through whatever it was they were experimenting with there, just before the explosion that caused the fire and destroyed the building. Only, you couldn’t have come alone. Someone handed you to me. Someone must have brought you through and that same person might well have been the one who triggered the explosion, so no one else could follow them through. I wonder if it was your real mother or father. No—strike that, because we’re your real mother and father.

  That, though, doesn’t change the fact that you were brought here for a reason. And it also doesn’t change the reality we must face—well, you must now—that they might come back for you. The most important thing since we learned the truth in our minds has been to keep you safe, to do everything we could to blend in and make sure you did too, so no one would ever suspect. We thought of moving but thought that might be one of the things they’d look for. So we stayed. And let you play football, even though we knew there were risks.

  There are risks with everything. Your father and I learned that firsthand back in China before we immigrated.

  You immigrated too, Alex. That’s the way you must look at this.

  I’d love to end this here, but I can’t. Because if you’re watching this, it means something bad has happened. It means the worst has happened and they came back for you. I wish I could tell you who “they” are, but I can’t. But I know they’re out there. A few times I thought I could feel them, a mother’s intuition. I don’t believe they ever totally let go or gave up. Wherever it was you came from, they haven’t forgotten you. And I know they’ll be back.

  If you’re watching this, know that it brings me great joy even though it almost surely means your father and I are gone. But your viewing this means you’re still alive and now you know everything I do, hopefully enough to help you survive against the ones who have come for you. I don’t want to stop talking, don’t want these to be my last words to you. You were the light of our lives from the day the fates brought you to us. We knew, your father and I, we needed to protect you, not just raise you as our own. All things come with a purpose and plan. The Chinese believe happiness lies in plugging gaps, having no great chasms into which our lives might plunge. Saving you filled our greatest gap but we knew the day would come when someone would come for you, someone from Laboratory Z or the parties from whom we kept you hidden. Our questions stopped there. You were a gift willed to us by fate and we chose to leave it at that.

  There’s one more thing you need to know. When you were just starting to speak, sometimes your words came out in an indecipherable language. Your father and I thought it was just jibberish at first, but at night we’d hear you mumbling in your sleep. Your native language, Alex, language of the world from which you came. You must’ve recalled it somehow. You’d only mumble in the midst of a terrible dream and we thought you might be suffering from night terrors. Then the dreams and the mumbling passed, and we let it go, trying not to wonder what you had seen and experienced before you came to us.

  But now we all know those terrors are real, and they won’t only come at night.

  58

  THE CHRYSALIS

  “TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED during that follow-up CT scan,” Sam said, after the screen froze on An Chin’s sad expression.

  “It was crazy,” Alex said, when he’d finished the tale of bursting bulbs and fried circuits. “It felt like, I don’t know, like I was making it happen.”

  Sam shrugged, all this a bit beyond even her.

  “What do you think it was?” Alex more demanded than asked.

  “I … don’t know.”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “Something magnetic.”

  “Huh?”

  “A CT scan uses electromagnetic waves. Picture what happens when you stick something covered in tinfoil into a microwave.”

  “Sparks, like miniature lightning,” Alex offered. “Come to think of it, yeah, that pretty much describes what happened in the exam room. Only, I wasn’t covered in tinfoil.”

  “You wouldn’t have to be, if there was something inside you.”

  “Inside me? Like what?”

  Sam shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Guess.”

  “I can’t. We’re in uncharted territory here.”

  “Then answer me this: Why didn’t the same thing happen during the first scan?”

  ”I can’t. More uncharted territory.”

  “Connected maybe to that shadow Dr. Payne spotted in the first scan?”

  Sam shrugged again.

  Alex shook his head. “You’d make a lousy football player.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re afraid to take a chance.”

  “I thought you just wanted me to take a guess.”

  “So go ahead.”

  Sam looked around her. “Later. When we get somewhere else.”

  Alex returned his attention to the screen and clicked on the next file, containing the results from Dr. Chu’s tests the recorded image of his mother had referred to. “I want to print this first.”

  59

  THE SIGNAL

  “WE�
��RE PREPARED TO MOVE, sir,” Rathman had told Langston Marsh, through the Bluetooth device clipped to his ear. “We have the situation contained.”

  “You have a positive identification?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rathman responded, perhaps more surely than he should have. “And my men are in position both front and rear, all exits covered.”

  “What’s the boy doing in there?”

  “He’s on a computer. The girl’s next to him.”

  “We’ve got more on him, Colonel. He was admitted to California Pacific Medical Center two nights ago now after suffering a football injury believed to be a concussion.”

  Rathman was nodding to himself impatiently, wishing Marsh would get to the point. “This would be the hospital where a doctor was found dead around the same time the boy fled the premises.”

  “We must assume that he’s dangerous. You should proceed with caution.”

  “Understood.”

  “And we need this one alive, Colonel.”

  “Also understood, sir.”

  “Then see it done.”

  “Yes, sir. Prepare to move on my signal,” Rathman said into the throat mic connecting him to his men.

  60

  THE MEN AT THE DOOR

  ALEX COLLECTED THE PAGES from the printer, the medical tests compiled by Dr. Chu all those years ago filling a few scant pages. But his mind was back at his house, confronting the drone things and ash man who’d killed his parents.

  We are your family. We have our orders. You must come with us, Alex.

  I’m not going anywhere with you.

  You don’t have a choice.

  But the thing dressed as a cop was wrong; Alex did have a choice. They weren’t his family. Theirs wasn’t his world, any more than China had been his parents’ world. They’d fled to America, just as he had, in a manner of speaking. The Chins might not have birthed him, but he was more like them than he could’ve possibly realized, something he found sadly ironic.