by E. A. Copen
This part is one of my favorite parts to tell out loud, how I carried a werewolf with two broken legs in his underwear up a rope ladder. We must have looked the sight, him pulling, me stepping and doing my best to keep a balance by grabbing the rope with one hand, holding his legs with the other. At any time, Zoe could have lowered us a rope to tie around him and hoisted him up that way. LeDuc could have come to see us himself and that would have made my life all that much easier. Someone that thought he was that important probably couldn't be bothered to do so. I thought we'd never reach the top that way but, somehow, we did. Ed pulled himself up and collapsed, exhausted, and I climbed up in a hurry, placing myself between Zoe and Ed to make sure she didn't shoot him.
Zoe frowned at us, lying there, gasping for breath. “Stubborn,” she growled and pointed to an old, rusty wheelbarrow leaned against the wall. “You can put him in that. This will take too long if you have to carry him the whole way.”
I glanced around. “No other guards? What's to stop me from just killing you and making a run for it?”
“For one, I have the gun. Two, you'd never find your way out. This place is a labyrinth. Your friend would die of infection before you could get out. Third, we still have your son.”
I closed my hand around a rock sitting next to me. “How do you know I won't just kill you out of spite?”
Her eyes were cold and emotionless as she stared me down. “Because you love your son. You want him back, don't you?” I didn't tell Zoe that I wasn't going to make any deals with LeDuc in order to get my son back. That wouldn't have been true. I would have done anything to make sure he was safe. She pointed again to the wheelbarrow. “It's a limited time offer. You'd better hurry.”
It took a lot of doing but, eventually, I managed to get Ed into the wheelbarrow. Meanwhile, Zoe sat by, taking some of the scopes off the sniper rifle so that it was more manageable at a walking pace. When she was done, she pointed it at me and waved me forward. “Walk. I'll tell you which way to go.”
Zoe had called LeDuc's lair a labyrinth. That was the understatement of the century. Labyrinths have some sense of order and logic to them. Those caves had nothing of the sort. There were narrow walkways that opened into wide, gaping mouths of a room and wide openings that dropped off to nowhere. Alone, without a guide, I would have been trapped and wandering for days. To this day, I still have no idea how Zoe knew which way to go. It seemed as if we were walking around in circles to me. Doing that with a high caliber rifle pointed at your head is pretty exhausting, especially when the only sound is your own footsteps echoing back against you.
When I couldn't stand it anymore, I turned my head slightly and decided that it was worth the risk to appeal to her as a woman and mother-to-be. “How far along are you?”
“None of your business,” Zoe snapped. “Keep walking.”
I slowed my pace and turned a little more. “You've dropped. That means you've got less than two weeks to go. Is Andre going to make you raise your baby in a cave? Sounds pretty unsanitary to me.”
“This place is equipped with a state of the art laboratory. I’m better off having her here than in that butchery Eden calls a hospital.”
“It's pretty shitty of him to make a pregnant woman do all the heavy lifting,” I continued, slowing even further. “In fact, he hasn't done much of anything, has he? If the cops busted in on this operation, I bet he'd make it out scott free, leaving you to take the fall. I guess raising your baby in prison is better than in a cave.”
“Andre is a great man,” Zoe said, her voice proud. “Scientific advancement exists outside the realm of right and wrong. You can't apply ethics to a sterile situation. All it does is slow progress.”
“I bet Hitler thought the same thing.”
Zoe passed me, turned and pointed the gun at my head, forcing me to stop. “What is it with you people? He's trying to save you. Do you really want to be feared and hated by the rest of the world, shoved into reservations and killed more often than you stand trial?” She shook her head. “Do you really think that BSI is going to just let you retire one day? Or is it more likely that, once you've outlived your usefulness, you'll simply disappear?”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But maybe I don't want innocent kids to get hurt just because I got dealt a shit hand in life.”
Zoe lowered one hand from the gun and touched it to her swollen belly. “All happiness comes at a price. The difference between you and I, Black, is that I was willing to pay it.”
I dropped the wheelbarrow and stepped toward her. “Look me in the eye, Zoe, and tell me you're really happy with how things have turned out for you.”
Her eyes met mine but her lips trembled. She waved the gun sideways. “Move. No more talking.”
“Why'd you shoot your man?”
“Oswald?” She laughed. “Ozzie was never my man. He was always Andre's. That rat bastard had it coming. He never could keep his hands to himself. You should be thanking me. That fanged freak didn't have a gentle bone in his body. He plays with his food, sometimes for days.” She rounded me and pressed the barrel of the gun gently into my back. “Now, move.”
We came to a large chamber with a long table and some chairs. Though it looked as if the hall could seat a dozen or more, it was completely empty now. “Through the opening on the other side,” Zoe directed. “Quickly.”
I took a few steps and then slowed my pace again. “You know, you don't have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Listen to LeDuc.”
“You don't know what you're talking about.” She shoved me forward. “Get going.”
“I know plenty. I know you left Sal. I know about the child you two lost. That must’ve been terrible.”
“You have no idea.”
“You said he doesn’t deserve to take the fall for this. You still love him, don’t you Zoe?”
“Love,” she mused with an icy chuckle. “What’s the point of love? We stand up there in our pretty dresses and sing about a feeling but it isn’t real. Love dies. We all die. When that happens the only thing that lives on are our children. Our children, Judah Black, make us immortal. If we can’t have children…” She paused and adjusted her gun. “If we can’t have children, why are we here?”
“That’s a question you have to answer for yourself, Zoe. But I know being a parent doesn’t make your life worth any more or less. You can’t do it if you’re not whole first. Having a baby isn’t going to suddenly fix everything for you.”
“Shut up. That’s none of your business. You don’t even know me.”
“Whose baby is it, Zoe? Given the timeline, that could get a little murky, couldn’t it?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“How about the kidnappings? Is that you or LeDuc? You’re in this too deep, Zoe. You really think you’ll get away clean? Even if you kill me, there’s no way you walk away. LeDuc is going to betray you.”
She came around in front of me again and smacked me in the face with the rifle. The strike was momentarily blinding and I stumbled. Zoe stood over me, chest heaving. “Andre was there for me when the rest of you weren’t. Do you want to know what love gets you, Judah Black? Love gets you a husband that would rather drink himself into a stupor and leave you crying and alone than comfort you. Love gets you long weekends spent alone while he runs around with his friends doing God knows what. Love gets you questions. It gets you loneliness. It gets you pain. What Andre has given me is greater than any love. He’s given me life, a life free of the fear of death. When has love ever given anyone that?”
I picked myself up off the cave floor and gawked at her, an explanation suddenly clicking in my brain. Zoe couldn’t leave LeDuc, not because she loved him but because she literally had no idea how to survive without him. “My God...He’s made you like him, hasn’t he? He’s turned you into a monster.” Zoe lowered the gun and her eyes started to water. I knew I'd hit the nail on the head then.
“Andre I-”
“We'll talk about it later. Go and get ready. I'll deal with the riff-raff.”
“Yes,” Zoe stammered blankly. “Of course.” She turned slowly and went back the way she'd come with LeDuc staring after her.
“Good women are hard to find these days,” said LeDuc, and then he smiled at me. “Are you a good woman, Agent Black?”
“Where's my son?”
“All business. That's what I like about you. Of course, if you'd just learned to keep your trap shut, it wouldn't have to come to this.” He turned and walked back to the table, sitting down at the head. “Come,” he said, kicking out another chair. “Sit.”
“I'll stand, thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He dropped the gun on the table in front of him and then leaned on his hands. “I'll get straight to the heart of the matter, then. I'm prepared to return your son to you unharmed. In return, you will tell me where to find Maria Castella. You will also give me the names and addresses of everyone who knows anything about this case. Failure to make the disclosure in full will nullify our deal and, believe me, Agent Black, I will find you and I will kill you and everyone you know or care about.” As he spoke, he lifted a pitcher full of lemonade that was waiting on the table and poured it into his glass. My mouth watered at the sight of it.
“And Leo Garcia?”
“Who?”
“Marian Summers? Sara Greenlee? The children you kidnapped. What are you going to do with them?”
LeDuc swirled the lemonade as if it were wine and passed it under his nose. “That's not your concern.”
I looked down at Ed in the wheelbarrow who had passed out again and was snoring gently. “I can't do that.”
LeDuc sighed. “You don't seem to understand. My terms are non-negotiable. Take your boy and leave. Don't make me kill you.”
I took a quick glance around the room. There were a lot of things in there that could potentially be weapons: chairs, silverware, even the walls themselves. But I'd put three silver bullets in LeDuc's head. If that didn't kill him... “How's your head?”
He laughed at that. “I’m doing much better than Chanter. Don't get me wrong, Black. It was never my intention that the old man get hurt. He was never part of the equation. That was Zoe's doing. She has a rather deep running distaste for him, with the way he handled her dead child and all.”
I stepped out from behind the wheelbarrow. “Sal told me she miscarried.”
He looked up and shook his head. “Late term ones are always so messy. He should have let her hold it at least. Let the poor woman grieve. She had to dig up the body.”
“Why did you turn her?”
He smiled and offered me the seat again. This time, I took it. “It used to be easy, finding food. Pose as a kindly old doctor and people practically throw their dead and dying at you. They don't bat an eye when a liver or a stomach goes missing, either. Nobody notices. But it was never enough.” He licked his lips. “Zoe and I met on the internet. I arranged for the body of her child be brought to me for a thorough examination alongside her to see what went wrong. She was desperate. Not for him. Not because she loved him. Because if she wasn't going to be a mother, what else was there? For the price of the one dead child, I promised she would birth a nation.”
“And the gig in Toronto?”
“All an elaborate ruse. Her now ex-husband was too busy wallowing in his own drunken misery to even know that I was stealing his wife from under him. The poor woman was so desperate to be comforted, to be loved and touched that I was able to bed her that very first night.”
I shook my head. “You took advantage of a broken woman. That’s sick.”
He leaned forward and jabbed a finger into the table with a sneer. “I survived. When all the rest of my kind had died, I persevered. Through colonization, the loss of ancestral hunting grounds, smallpox, civil war, influenza… Survival isn’t about ethics, Judah. It’s about living at all costs, even at the expense of other, less deserving life forms. When the world was wild and untamed, I was the perfect hunter but even I cannot match the ferocity of your government’s eradication. No experiment in eugenics has been so great as the one carried out and conducted by the United States government against the Native Americans.”
“Why the hell do you even care about it?” I asked.
“The same reason the Great Plains Indians cared about the near extinction of the American Buffalo, Judah. The same reason the mountain ape rages when humans come to cut down his trees. When your government came and claimed the land, you did more than just destroy centuries of tradition and dozens of ways of life. You eradicated my kind. Or so you thought.”
He rose and began to pace the room. “For nearly three hundred and fifty years, we have been forced to live on the very fringes of society, always on the brink of starvation, minds ever occupied with the growing problem of securing our next meal. Imagine my delight when I was approached with a proposition: agree to participate in some research trials and never go hungry again. I was ecstatic…Until that freak of nature, Doctor Han, brought me my first meal. Synthesized meat, artificially grown organs tacked onto the backs of rodents for development. I refused to honor the bargain and, in return, I was tortured. The experiments were…brutal. But necessary. I see that now. Before, I was a crawling, mindless worm of a creature. My brain worked at half the capacity it does now. Under Doctor Han’s tutelage, my IQ tripled. I passed every test and earned his trust until one day he discovered that I had surpassed him in intelligence. You see, I knew the thing that had been eluding Doctor Han, the answer he so desperately sought. And do you know what he did to me when he found out I had all the answers?”
I gripped the table tightly, fingers inching toward a spoon he had carelessly left on the table. “No,” I said trying not to draw too much attention to my movement.
“He lured me into this very cave which he had wired with explosives. I survived the detonation but only barely. And I have come here to finish the work that Doctor Han could not and I’m going to be filthy rich by the end of it.”
“What problem?” My fingers crept toward the spoon only to have LeDuc come and sweep it back out of reach. I glared at him.
“The cure, of course,” he said and sat back down. “Once I sell my cure to your government, the entire country will be eating out of my hand for a change.” He grinned. “The world will be my oyster and I its savior. America will be the first supernatural free nation in the world. In one fell swoop, I will eliminate from the gene pool all of my potential competition in the food chain. Once again, I will be the apex predator, unkillable, unstoppable.”
I shook my head. “I don't care how you look at this, LeDuc. It's ethnic cleansing and you're not going to get away with it, no matter how much money and science you have behind you.”
“You can't stop me,” he spat back at me. “Marcus Kelley and his hack staff geneticist couldn't stop me. I cannot be killed. Soon, there will be breakthroughs in that area, too, all of it based on what I'm doing here.” He spread his arms wide. “You humans, you will become my perfect flock, free of illness, age and death, able to regrow lost limbs and organs. You will become a self-sustaining food supply for me and my kind.”
“And what about Zoe?” I asked. “How does she figure into this?”
LeDuc smirked. “How can I rebuild my species without a female? You see, Judah Black, I am this planet’s new God, creating an Eden in my perfect image.”
“You're not a God. You're a wendigo, an ancient, flesh eating m
onster and all you've done is turn Zoe into one just like you. You forced her to ritually cannibalize her own child. And in return for her company, you promised her living children. I bet that child of hers isn't even anything special. You're just blowing off ego steam.”
“Oh,” said LeDuc with a chuckle. “I don't need to prove anything to you.”
“What about the kids you’ve been taking? How do they figure into all of this?”
“Can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,” he said with a shrug. “I need living tissue to synthesize the cure from. Young children with their ability to heal and adjust provide the best, most viable tissue samples. Besides that, they just taste so damn good.”
“You’re sick,” I repeated and turned away.
LeDuc crossed his arms. “This is the last time I'm going to make this offer. Yes or no, Agent Black? Live or die? The choice is yours.”
I narrowed my eyes and stared at LeDuc, the same way I'd stared down Reed in the church, focusing straight on his eyes. LeDuc didn't turn his gaze away but I did see something interesting. The corner of his eye was bleeding. “I want to see him first to verify that he's unhurt.”
“You'll have to take me on my word here, Black. No deal, no boy.”
A hidden door opened, just to the left of the door he'd come through, and Zoe entered, wiping what looked like blood from her fingers onto a towel.
I rose from my seat. “Hunter!”
“Sit down,” said LeDuc, pushing me back into my chair. “I swear on my own body that he is unhurt. Now, do we deal or no?”
I looked back at Ed, lying unconscious in the wheelbarrow. With his fever raging and his body in shock, I knew I shouldn't have pushed him so far. If he didn't get emergency medical care soon, he was going to die. And Hunter was probably somewhere within earshot. LeDuc was offering me the chance to take my son and go. Wasn't that what I wanted? Isn't that why I'd put Ed and everyone through hell the last day or so? No one else had to die. We could all walk away right now.