Stigma

by Philip Hawley Jr

  Luke sucked in a lungful of air and wheeled in the opposite direction. He struggled onto his one good foot.

  Megan wobbled on one knee near the edge of the landing pad.

  Calderon was sidestepping around Luke in a wide curve, circling his prey while rubbing blood from his eye. Then, suddenly, he charged.

  Luke let out a roar, leapt into the air and spun in a 360-degree arc.

  His foot landed cleanly on the side of Calderon’s head.

  Calderon rocketed sideways as if struck by a projectile, rolling three times before tumbling over the roof’s edge.

  And taking Megan with him.

  Her scream pierced through the police helicopter’s thwack-thwack-thwack.

  “Megan!”

  Luke dove for the roof’s edge and grabbed the large hand clutching to its rim. He worked both hands around Calderon’s wrist and tightened his grip, then peered over the edge.

  Megan was wrapped around Calderon, her head buried in his stomach, her legs clawing at the side of the building.

  Four stories below them was the blacktop roof of a two-story clinic building that extended out beyond the rest of the structure.

  “Megan, hold still!” he yelled.

  Luke dug his fingers into Calderon’s sweat-drenched wrist and reached for Megan with his other hand.

  He was several inches short.

  “I’m slipping,” Megan said.

  Luke’s foot found a rounded metal vent or pipe. He wedged his good ankle around it to hold his weight and leaned out over the edge.

  The tips of his fingers found the collar of Megan’s jumpsuit. He got a small purchase, but she moved and his grip broke free.

  “Megan, try to hold still.” Luke squeezed tighter around Calderon’s wet wrist.

  Calderon looked up at Luke and curled his bloodied face into a sickening grin. His steaming nostrils pulsed with each breath.

  “This is almost better than how I’d planned it,” he said.

  Then he let go.

  “No!”

  But Calderon had already slipped through his grip.

  There were no screams—just a sickening thud that struck his closed eyelids like a blast wave.

  When he opened his eyes, the world around him went silent.

  On the blacktop, forty feet below, framed by the helicopter’s twitching beam of light, Megan and Calderon’s bodies lay on top of each other, their limbs spread in the awkward angles of death.

  64

  “Stay where you are and put your hands above your head,” the helicopter speaker commanded.

  The words didn’t register. Luke rolled onto his back and covered his eyes. He lay there for a span of time that was lost to his senses.

  Eventually he struggled to his feet and started limping toward the Sikorsky.

  “Stop. Right there. Do not move!” the loudspeaker ordered.

  • • •

  The sharpshooter raised his rifle. “I got you, you bastard.”

  O’Reilly’s hand pushed the barrel aside. “No.”

  The sniper turned to the detective, staring in disbelief. “You just bought yourself a shitload of trouble, pal. Get your goddamned hand off my rifle.”

  The radio crackled. “What’s happening up there?” the SWAT commander asked.

  O’Reilly pulled back his arm. “I’ll do it again if you aim that rifle at McKenna.”

  The sniper said into his microphone, “Seems we got a reluctant soldier on our team.”

  • • •

  Caleb Fagan hurried down the second-floor hallway with Mr. Kong in tow, asking himself how one man had wreaked such havoc on what was to be his life’s legacy.

  For Kaczynski, their quest was little more than an egocentric testament to the man’s scientific talents. The man was a narcissistic intellectual who would accept any social construct that gave his work a veneer of legitimacy.

  Caleb had lived the pain of giving life to a genetic mutant. Rather than fathering the son he had imagined, the son he deserved, a spontaneous and random mutation had corrupted one of his wife’s otherwise healthy eggs. During the five excruciating years that his only child had lived, he’d watched the anguish consume his wife like a slow-growing cancer.

  She had never recovered. Twenty years later the woman still spent her waking hours in a darkened corner of their house, wearing a hollow death-like mask.

  Caleb shook his thoughts free of the torment as they neared the microbiology lab.

  He had told the cops who were using his office to peruse the hospital’s floor plans that he’d return in a few minutes, after checking on a patient.

  Caleb and his team were out of time. If his men weren’t done preparing the mosquito transport, they’d have to abandon their plan.

  McKenna had survived.

  And if they were going to escape, Caleb and his men had to leave now.

  When he opened the door to the laboratory, he saw that the guard who had been stationed outside the malaria lab had left his post.

  Mr. Kong reached under his jacket to the gun in his belt holster.

  “Uh-uh, partner. Don’t touch that thing,” came the voice from behind the door.

  Caleb spun around and looked at the large ivory-handled revolver in Ben Wilson’s hand.

  Elmer McKenna was standing beside the pathologist. Each man had a pair of handcuffs fastened to one of his wrists. A doorknob assembly hung from Elmer’s cuffs.

  “We would’ve been here sooner,” Ben said, “but I had to stop by home and pick up my daddy’s favorite pistol.” The pathologist’s gaze shifted to Mr. Kong. “I haven’t shot it in a long while—not since I was a kid—but it’s loaded. I checked.”

  “Where is everyone, and what’s this all about?” Caleb blustered.

  “Sorry, Caleb. That ain’t gonna work,” Ben said. “But in answer to your question, your people are tied up in the next room. That’s one of the many fine things about growing up in east Texas. You get real good at tying knots.”

  Just as Ben said the last word, Mr. Kong grabbed the semiautomatic from his Velcro holster and dove to his right.

  A gun blast shattered the silence and a red spray exploded from Kong’s right shoulder.

  Elmer leaned away, holding his ears.

  Caleb looked down at his bodyguard. The Chinese man was writhing on his side, groaning in pain.

  Ben walked over to the Asian and kicked the man’s gun across the floor.

  “I lied about being outta practice,” Ben said to Kong. “I go target shooting every once in a while. I was sorta hoping you’d do something stupid.”

  Caleb heard a stampede of footsteps in the distance.

  “Sounds like we’re gonna have company,” Ben said. “Before the cops get here, Caleb, tell us. You weren’t planning to come back from China, were you?”

  Caleb looked at each man in turn. “You can’t stop this. If not me, then someone else, but it’s going to happen. It’s only a matter of time before we step outside the artificial walls we’ve built around our work. Eventually, someone will take us where we need to go.”

  Elmer was shaking his head. “Caleb, too bad you can’t see the imperfection of the human condition for what it is. It’s not a curse. It’s filled with lessons—for all of us.”

  • • •

  Luke pulled a coil of nylon rope from the chopper and hobbled back to the edge of the platform. He tied one end of the rope to a metal strut and went over the side.

  He was already touching down on the blacktop when he heard men storming onto the rooftop four stories above him.

  He paid them no attention. He shot a glance at the corpse lying beneath Megan. Calderon’s eyes stared out from a lopsided skull.

  He knelt next to Megan and his hand went to her neck. Her pulse gave back the fading, agonal cadence of death.

  He lifted his head, fighting back a wave of nausea.

  “Get a trauma team out here,” he shouted at the spotlight circling above him.

  The l
oud flutter of the helicopter’s rotors drowned out his voice.

  Luke looked back at Megan and brought a hand over her head—his palm rising and falling at first, as if withdrawing from some unseen force. After a long moment, he gently drew back the hair over her face and tucked it behind her ear. Blood dripped from her nose.

  He blinked away the wetness in his eyes.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. “What have I done?”

  Ten feet away, a window exploded and a herd of SWAT officers streamed through the breach.

  Luke reached for the side of Megan’s face, wanting to feel her warmth once last time, but a furious gang of hands yanked him away and threw him onto his stomach.

  As they cuffed his wrists behind his back, he stared through Megan’s still countenance, damning himself for the choices he had made.

  65

  Five days later

  Luke absently ran his fingers across the etched granite headstone, tracing over the letters of her name.

  “Son, you okay?”

  Luke nodded, all the while knowing he’d live the rest of his life wondering about the things he could have done differently.

  It had been drizzling intermittently since Luke and Elmer arrived at the cemetery and they had taken almost five minutes to walk up the sweeping eastern slope of Forest Lawn to her gravesite. Elmer’s were the first words that had passed between them in several minutes.

  Luke was stooped next to the headstone and his entire body ached, but he didn’t give a damn about his physical discomforts.

  The D.A.’s office had finally dropped all but the assault charges stemming from his escape into Griffith Park. Luke had walked out of jail after posting bail that morning.

  He had missed the funeral, but it wasn’t difficult to locate her gravesite. Hers was the only plot on the hillside marked by a rectangle of freshly planted sod.

  The police had held him for five days while sorting out the mess left from two weeks of relentless chaos. CHEGAN remained the lead story in almost every newspaper across the country. The New York Times had quoted his father for an article that featured statements by government officials from all five countries linked to CHEGAN. The leadership of four countries had openly denounced the gene-purifying scheme and reported that investigations were underway. The fifth—China—had condemned the plot but stopped short of admitting that anyone in their political hierarchy was involved.

  Caleb Fagan was being held at the Federal Detention Center in downtown L.A. The freighter carrying Kaczynski had arrived in China, and reportedly he was in custody and sequestered at an undisclosed location. A Los Angeles Times article had quoted several experts as downplaying the risk that any remnant of CHEGAN acting alone could implement Kaczynski’s plan. Releasing mosquitoes across a large geographic area was an enormous undertaking, they explained, requiring a well-coordinated plan and legions of personnel. According to them, a project of that scale just wasn’t feasible without the full support and cooperation of numerous governmental agencies.

  Luke hoped they were right.

  Zenavax’s fate was more certain. Two local papers had confirmed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was preparing criminal charges against the company, and University Children’s would undoubtedly file a patent infringement lawsuit. Every legal pundit agreed that Zenavax was finished.

  “At least she didn’t suffer,” his father said. “I’m sure she died instantly.”

  Megan’s plunge came back to Luke in a nightmarish flash.

  “Just like your mother,” Elmer added in a quavering voice.

  Luke turned to his father, who was wiping a sheet of tears from his cheeks. The recent mayhem had dragged his father back into the wrenching memory.

  The truth of his mother’s death had no place among his father’s recollections. Luke was accustomed to the burden of unshared secrets. He could carry another.

  “Dad, we should go. Ben’s waiting for us.” He glanced over his shoulder at the pathologist, who was standing by his car at the base of the hill.

  Ben had ferried Luke and his father to the cemetery. His friend had been waiting with Elmer amidst a crush of reporters when Luke walked out of jail that morning.

  Luke winced at the sharp pain in his ankle when he raised himself.

  As he started down the incline, he wondered at the perverse wickedness that commanded innocents to pay the price for wars they had no part in starting.

  When he had walked halfway down the slope, Luke turned back and looked one last time at Kate Tartaglia’s grave.

  • • •

  “Any change?” Luke asked the red-haired nurse as he walked with his father and Ben into the hospital room at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said while taping an IV to Megan’s arm.

  The top of Megan’s head was wrapped in a thick gauze dressing that extended down and over her right eye and ear. She lay motionless, unaware of the world around her.

  Luke’s heart felt as if a clamp were tightening around it.

  When the nurse completed her task, she smiled weakly in his direction and left the room.

  Luke came around to the side of Megan’s bed and reached for her left hand. He lifted it and gave a gentle squeeze.

  Her arm hung limp in his grasp. Megan had made little progress since coming out of trauma surgery the morning after her four-story fall. After stabilizing her at University Children’s, a transport team had rushed Megan to Saint Elizabeth’s, where CT scans revealed a brain hemorrhage, collapsed lung, fractured pelvis, and ruptured spleen. A team of seven surgeons had waged a twelve-hour battle against death during which her heart twice stopped beating.

  She’d had a stroke during surgery and still wasn’t moving her left side. An EEG from two days ago had shown mostly disorganized brain wave activity. Megan had come off the ventilator and was breathing on her own, but she hadn’t uttered a word and only twice had opened her left eye for a fleeting moment. The only glimmers of mental responsiveness—if he could call them that—were her occasional bouts of agitation in response to sounds and spoken words.

  Her doctors had said the usual things: The outcome of traumatic brain injuries was difficult to predict; Megan was young and her body still had significant regenerative capacity; and occasionally, patients recovered most or all of their physical and mental capabilities.

  Luke knew the lines. He’d said them himself, usually to parents too anguished to hear his words. He also knew that most patients with injuries as severe as Megan’s never recovered, a prospect his heart was fighting mightily to push out of his mind.

  Except for visiting Kate’s gravesite while Megan was in radiology for a brain MRI, he had been at Megan’s bedside since his release from jail earlier that day.

  Sammy was at the same hospital, in the ICU on a ventilator. The knife tip had pierced his lung; half his chest had filled with blood before surgeons finally stopped the bleeding. They expected him to live but he remained heavily sedated.

  The LAPD hadn’t been so lucky. Two SWAT officers had died at the scene—casualties of a war they had fought simply because it was their job.

  “Dr. McKenna?”

  Luke turned. A neatly dressed man with a briefcase was standing in the doorway.

  Elmer was already shaking the man’s hand. “Come in, Mr. Sutton.”

  The name was already familiar to Luke. He had called his father from jail and asked Elmer to find an immigration attorney to look into Frankie’s situation. To this point, all of the conversations had been between his father and Sutton.

  “I’m sorry to come here like this,” the man said to Elmer, “but I need to talk to your son.”

  After introducing himself, Luke asked, “Any news?”

  “I got a judge to stay the boy’s deportation pending an asylum hearing in ten days.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?” Ben asked.

  “It means that Frankie’s not going back to Guatemala immediately,” Sutton said. “More than
that, I can’t tell you. We’re just going to have to see how this plays out, but I think we have a decent case. We’re claiming the boy could be targeted by leftovers of that group—”

  “CHEGAN,” Luke said.

  “Yeah. I’m going to argue that he’s at risk and should be allowed to remain in the U.S. until Guatemalan officials can demonstrate that they’ve purged the bad guys.”

  “Where is Frankie?” Luke asked.

  “At an INS holding facility.” Sutton placed his briefcase on the arm of a chair and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “As soon as you sign these papers, they’ll release him.”

  “Where will he go?”

  “That’s up to you. You’re his guardian now. That is, until his status is cleared up at the hearing.”

  “What?” Luke churned through the papers. “Me? Look after Frankie?” His eyes came back to the attorney. “Have you met this boy?”

  “Your father told me that you’d accept temporary custody.”

  Luke shot a glance at Elmer.

  The old man shrugged sheepishly.

  “This order is only valid for twenty-four hours,” Sutton said. “I have to get it over to INS with a signature by five o’clock today, or he’s going back to Guatemala tomorrow.” The attorney shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  Luke turned to Ben.

  “Don’t look at me,” Ben said. “I got my hands full trying to house-break a teenage daughter.”

  “What were you thinking?” Luke snapped at his father. “I can’t take care of Frankie…”

  A soft cough came from Megan.

  Everyone turned.

  Megan’s right hand was twitching.

  Luke stepped around her bed, cursing himself for raising his voice.

  “It’s okay, Megan.” He rubbed her hand. “Everything’s okay.”

  Her left eye opened slightly and her head swung slowly toward Luke. She wiggled free of his grip, and in an unsteady motion raised her right arm.

  “I think she’s pointing at Mr. Sutton,” Elmer said.

  Megan’s lips moved.

  A moment later she made a breathy sound.

  Luke glanced at his father, then leaned over Megan and placed an ear next to her mouth.