The Furies

by Mark Alpert

  Gabe let his head fall back to the cushion. His mouth was dry and his stomach was empty, but he was too weak to get up from the couch. So he lay there and listened to his dogs barking. Maurice and Malaga were making a racket because the boys from the Somerset Street crew stood outside the fence, waiting for John Rogers to return. Gabe had told them that John would come back soon, although he knew damn well that the guy was gone for good. It was yet another fuckup, one more in a long line of them. He’d missed his chance to make some money and build some goodwill with his suppliers. And once the gangbangers realized they were waiting for nothing, they’d take it out on him. He didn’t even want to think about what they were going to do.

  He closed his eyes. For a moment he thought of John and felt a twinge of regret. The poor bastard had already suffered his fair share of tragedy, and Gabe wasn’t proud of ratting him out. On the other hand, they weren’t really friends anymore. Ever since John got out of the drug business he’d had a holier-than-thou attitude. He should’ve kept his head down like everyone else.

  Gabe tried to sleep but he knew it was hopeless. His mind was racing, already thinking ahead to his next fix. After a while he noticed that the dogs had stopped barking. That’s good, he thought. Maybe the gangbangers went home.

  Then he heard a crash. He opened his eyes and saw someone burst through his front door. Gabe could tell right away that it wasn’t anyone from the local drug crews. First of all, the man was white. Second, he was old, maybe fifty or fifty-five, although he looked pretty tough for an old guy. He was at least six foot three, and he had broad shoulders and a thick, muscled neck.

  The man strode to the couch. He wore boots and leather gloves and a bomber jacket. “You Gabriel Rodriguez?”

  Gabe tried to sit up but his whole body was shaking. He felt a sudden warmth in his boxer shorts. He’d pissed himself.

  Reaching down with a big gloved hand, the guy grabbed Gabe by the throat and pulled him upright. “You the one who said he saw John Rogers?”

  Gabe couldn’t answer, couldn’t breathe, but he managed a spastic nod. In response, the man let go of him and stepped back from the couch. In his other hand he held a knife, its blade smeared with blood and short hairs. Dog hairs.

  “What?” Gabe croaked. “What did you—”

  “You’re going to tell me everything. From start to finish.”

  Gabe’s eyes watered. He’d loved those dogs. “You didn’t have to kill them.”

  “My apologies. Your curs got in my way.”

  The man’s voice had changed abruptly. Now he was speaking with a British accent. For some reason this change was more terrifying than the knife. Gabe sensed that the man had just dropped a disguise because it was no longer necessary.

  “What’s going on?” Gabe screamed. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man smiled. “I’ve been using the name Van of late. Because it’s short and sweet.” He raised the knife and pointed it at Gabe’s face. The bloody tip was just an inch from his nose. “But I’ll let you in on a secret, friend. My real name is Sullivan.”

  SEVEN

  John stopped at an Exxon station in Chester Springs. The area was farm country, green and peaceful, and there were no other cars on Yellow Springs Road. The Kia’s gas tank was almost empty, but instead of heading for the pumps he parked behind the station’s convenience store, next to a couple of Dumpsters. He needed a secluded spot for this talk with Ariel, because he knew he was going to yell.

  But he never got the chance. As soon as he shut off the engine he heard a ripping noise behind him. When he turned around he saw Ariel tearing the bandages off her left thigh. Her face was grim. “I need to show you this.”

  “Shit! Stop!”

  “You won’t believe me unless I show you.” She peeled off the tape that held the bandages in place, exposing layers of red-splotched gauze. “You have to see for yourself.”

  John averted his eyes. “I’ve already seen it! I bandaged you, remember?”

  “Just look, damn it!”

  Bracing himself, he looked at her thigh. For a second he thought he was staring at the wrong leg. He’d expected to see a jagged, red wound, but instead it was pink and smooth. The stitched flesh had already knitted together. It looked like it had been healing for several days. “Whoa. What happened?”

  “It was the medicine. The herbs.” She picked up the water bottle in which she’d dissolved the crushed leaves and powders. “They contain chemicals that promote rapid cell division and growth. They also fight infections and reduce inflammation.”

  John shook his head. “This is crazy. When did you drink that stuff? It couldn’t have been more than two hours ago.”

  “The chemicals are drawn to the injured tissue. They accelerate the production of squamous cells, repairing the skin and blood vessels. The bones will take longer to heal, but I’ll be able to walk in less than a week.”

  “No, no way. There’s no way it could work that fast.”

  She pointed at her thigh. “But it did. You don’t believe your eyes?”

  He didn’t. He kept thinking there had to be another explanation. Maybe the wound hadn’t been so bad in the first place. But he remembered the gruesome sight so clearly.

  Ariel put down the water bottle and began to rebandage her leg. “Most of those herbs come from tropical ecosystems, where there’s an incredible variety of plant life. Scientists are just starting to discover the medicinal benefits of tropical plants, especially when they’re taken in combination.” She put the gauze back in place and rewrapped the tape around her thigh. “But the native peoples of Africa and South America have known about the benefits for thousands of years. And our community is devoted to collecting and preserving that knowledge. We’ve done a lot of work in the Congo and Amazon rain forests.”

  John stared at her. “I thought you said you came from Michigan.”

  “Yes, Haven is in Michigan, that’s our headquarters. But we have outposts around the world. Most of the outposts are small and temporary—our researchers move from place to place. Because our community needs to keep its existence secret, we can’t have too many people in one location.”

  He didn’t know what to make of all this. Ariel’s “community” still sounded like a cult. “Why do you have to keep everything secret? If all you care about is finding medicines, why not do it in the open?”

  “It’s complicated.” She finished working on her leg and reclined on the backseat. “We have a long history. Four hundred years ago our family lived in Europe. We were in France and Germany, and then we fled to England. We had to keep moving because we were persecuted everywhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we weren’t Christian, for one thing. Our traditions are older, they go back to the time before Christ. And there was so much suspicion and hysteria then. People hounded us because we were different. They burned our homes and farms. There were massacres, too. Sometimes they put us on trial before hanging us. They’d accuse us of poisoning their wells or murdering their children.”

  Although her face remained grim, John found it hard to take her seriously. Ariel’s story was strange as hell, and yet it was also familiar. He looked at the water bottle lying on the backseat, noticing the clumps of wet herbs clinging to the inside of the plastic. It’s a potion, he thought. Like something out of a fairy tale. “I’m sorry, but all of this sounds a little wacky. Are you saying you come from a family of witches?”

  Her reaction was instantaneous. She leaned forward at the waist, nearly coming off the backseat, and pointed at him. Her face reddened and her jaw muscles quivered. “Don’t use that word. Don’t ever say that word.”

  “What? Witches?”

  “I’m serious, John. It’s like saying the word nigger. You know what it feels like to hear that, don’t you?”

  He nodded. Technically, he was multiracial, but he knew where he stood. He’d been called a nigger his whole life, Philadelphia had its share of racists, and his skin color was dark e
nough to make him a nigger in their eyes. But he didn’t see the connection with witches. “I don’t get it. What—”

  “It was genocide. Tens of thousands of people killed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of them women.” She grasped a lock of her hair and held it out for John to see. “Red hair and green eyes run in our family, so the churchmen told their congregations to look for people with those signs, the signs of the Devil. But once the killing started, it went out of control. Most of the victims had nothing to do with our family. The churchmen and the mobs, they killed anyone who was different—hermits, foreigners, simpletons.” She let go of her hair. “That’s why we adopted our rules, why we all swear an oath of secrecy. We came to America so we could hide from our enemies. We separated ourselves from the rest of the world.”

  When she was done talking, Ariel lowered her head. She pressed her lips together and stared at her lap, and the look on her face was so desperately sad that John knew she wasn’t kidding around. She was telling the truth, or at least what she thought was the truth.

  “So how does it work now?” he asked. “I mean, how do you stay hidden? Don’t you have neighbors in Michigan?”

  “Haven is way up north, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s still a remote part of the country, mostly state forests. We own a nine-hundred-acre farm that grows corn and sunflowers, and our closest neighbors are miles away. Since the nineteenth century we’ve told the state and county officials that we’re an Amish community. We dress like the Amish, in plain old-fashioned clothing without buttons or zippers. We run our farm in the old-order, traditional way, and like the Amish, we don’t mingle with outsiders.”

  “Except when you want to have children, right?”

  Ariel nodded. “That’s the only time we have contact with the outside world. And the contact is brief.”

  This last statement infuriated him. John wanted to ask her what the hell was wrong with her family, why they chose to fuck strangers when they wanted to have kids. But something else bothered him even more. “You still haven’t explained the jar. What was inside the specimen jar.”

  She grimaced. Her expression changed in an instant—when she looked up at him, all her sadness was gone, replaced by a keen, green-eyed fury. “What kind of body part was it?” she asked.

  He felt sick again. “A hand.”

  “It’s a perversion. They’ve broken our laws and corrupted our traditions.”

  “You’re talking about Sullivan’s men?”

  “They weren’t happy with the progress we were making. We were trying to develop a new kind of medicine, something that would help certain members of our family. But Sullivan convinced his followers that we weren’t working fast enough. So they rebelled against us and started their own faction. Our Elders tried to stop them, but by that point Sullivan had dozens of men behind him. And hundreds of guns.”

  John thought of the men who’d attacked them in Bushwick. He pictured the one who shot Ariel, the bald guy with the spiderweb tattoo on his face. John realized that if you took away the asshole’s tattoo, he wouldn’t look so different from Hal or Richard, Ariel’s cousins and bodyguards. The bald guy was related to her, too. “So this whole war started because of a medicine?”

  “Sullivan thought he could make the drug on his own. But the main ingredient is a protein that’s found only in human fetuses.”

  John had guessed where the severed hand had come from—how else could it be so tiny?—but it was still a shock to hear his suspicions confirmed. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. “Jesus.” He swallowed hard, tamping down the bile rising from his stomach. “How do they get the … the fetuses?”

  “We think Sullivan made a black-market deal with someone who works for a medical-waste company. All we know for certain is that they’ve collected hundreds of tissue samples. They figured out a way to preserve the body parts without freezing them, and they hide the specimen jars wherever they can.” She shook her head. “Now it looks like they’re using our old caches. The specimen you saw was probably just an extra, a leftover piece of tissue that one of Sullivan’s men needed to hide quickly. We think they’ve stored most of the fetuses in the really remote caches, in the big national forests and wilderness areas.”

  He closed his eyes while she was talking. It was easier to fight the nausea this way. When he opened them a few seconds later, he felt a little steadier. “What kind of medicine are they trying to make? What the hell does it do?”

  She started to answer, then stopped herself. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. I’ve said too much already.”

  “Oh, come on—”

  “John, listen. If both my legs weren’t broken, I’d go to Michigan by myself. I’d hot-wire a car or get on a bus or just start walking. But I can’t do any of those things. I need your help.”

  “And I want to help you! But you have to be straight with me.”

  “You don’t understand. Your situation is more dangerous than you realize.”

  “I know it’s dangerous!” He raised his voice in exasperation. “Those assholes already tried to kill me!”

  “That’s not the only thing you need to worry about. Even if we outrun Sullivan’s men and arrive at Haven, you’ll still be in danger. Our Council of Elders will interrogate you. They’ll find out what you know.”

  “Your Elders? Aren’t they on your side?”

  “Yes, and they’ll be grateful that you helped me get home. But as I said, we have very strict rules. If you know too much, they’ll have no choice but to kill you.”

  John opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was dumbfounded.

  “I know it’s harsh,” Ariel added. “But we learned a terrible lesson from the genocide. Although the world is more tolerant now, people will still fear and hate us if they discover our secrets. Rather than risk another massacre, our Elders will eliminate any outsider who could endanger us. So please don’t ask me to tell you anything else.”

  Her voice was calm and reasonable, but the sound of it enraged him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this angry. “And you’d just sit there and watch while your Elders execute me?”

  “Of course not. But there’s only so much I could do. Our oath requires—”

  She abruptly stopped arguing and raised her head. She’d heard something, and in the sudden silence John heard it, too. It was a deep, guttural rumble, the sound of a pack of motorcycles. It came from the east, from Valley Forge National Park, roaring down Yellow Springs Road.

  “The gun!” Ariel cried, pointing at the iron box that John had tossed on the passenger seat. “There’s a gun in the cache, right?”

  Without hesitation, he reached inside the box, pulled out the Glock and handed it to her. “Who is it? Cops?”

  She ejected the Glock’s magazine, checking to see if it was loaded. Then she slammed it back into the gun and chambered a round. “Sullivan’s men ride Harleys. Instead of disguising themselves as Amish, they pretend they’re a biker gang called the Riflemen.”

  There was no time to escape. The motorcycles were just a few hundred yards away. They’d reach the gas station before John could drive the Kia past the pumps. Ariel leaned against the rear door on the right side of the car and rolled down the back window on the left. Then, holding the Glock with both hands, she pointed it out the window. She might be able to pick off a rider or two as they turned into the station. But once the men aimed their assault rifles at the Kia, the show would be over.

  John just sat there in the driver’s seat. He was amazed at how calm he felt. He didn’t even try to take cover. At least it’ll be quick, he thought. A storm of bullets, then lights out. And then I’ll be with Ivy. I’ll be with my daughter.

  When the motorcycles came down the road, though, he noticed they weren’t Harleys. They were big luxurious touring bikes, Hondas and Yamahas in neon-bright colors. The riders were overweight couples wearing matching silver jackets that said PHILADELPHIA PHREAKS on the back. They rumbled right past the E
xxon station.

  Ariel lowered the Glock and let out a long breath. John thought she might smile, but she didn’t. Instead she pointed at the box again. “Any license plates in there?”

  He had to think for a second. “Yeah. A couple of Michigan plates.”

  “Take your Pennsylvania plates off the car and put on those. Just in case the police are looking for us.” She removed the Glock’s magazine and pulled back the slide, ejecting the bullet from the chamber. “Then we’ll gas up and get the hell out of here.”

  John drove through the afternoon and into the night. He crossed the rugged hills of Pennsylvania, sticking to the back roads. Although he’d changed the Kia’s license plates, he didn’t want to take any chances with the state troopers on the turnpike. He stopped at a roadside convenience store to buy dinner—trail mix, Slim Jims, microwaved burritos—and then they cruised through the flat Ohio countryside. Taking the secondary roads slowed them down considerably, so it was almost midnight by the time they reached the Michigan state line. John was dead tired but he kept going north, driving for another two hours on an empty Route 52 until he reached the woodlands of central Michigan. Then Ariel leaned forward from the backseat and said, “In a couple of minutes you’re gonna make a left turn. I know a place where we can stop for a few hours.”

  John was surprised. He’d assumed she wanted to get home as fast as possible. “I don’t have to stop. I’m fine.”

  “We can’t make it to Haven tonight.”

  “How far away is it? Seriously, I’m not tired, I can keep driving till—”