Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

Carver gave Locke a squeeze on the shoulder and offered some reassuring words. The agent opened his eyes momentarily and bared a ferocious grin that left no doubt that the man would be on his feet again in no time and ready to settle the score. Carver pitied anyone who stood in Locke's way once he was strong enough to rip the IV out of his arm.

  He left Wolfe and slipped back out into the main room. All of the nurses looked away. He imagined it might have something to do with the haunted look in his eyes, the smell of gunpowder that clung to him, or, quite possibly, the fact that he was still covered with dried blood.

  Ellie was in the adjacent room. He slid back the door, sat in the chair beside the bed, and took her hand in his. It felt cold and fragile. IV fluids coursed into her arm, and the monitors above her head produced a steady electronic rhythm. When he looked at her face, he found her blue eyes staring right back.

  "I don't know what I would have done if..." he said, his voice cracking.

  "It wouldn't have made my day either." Her voice was a dry whisper, subtly slurred by the painkillers. She managed a weak smile.

  "How are you feeling?"

  "I've been better."

  The exertion took its toll as he watched. Her eyes drooped closed of their own accord. The smile lingered a moment longer. He thought for sure she had fallen asleep until she whispered something so softly he couldn't quite hear. Leaning across the bed, he kissed her gently on the forehead. Her eyes twitched under her closed lids. He was about to leave her to her rest when she whispered again.

  Ellie's words replayed inside his head when he left the room. At first he thought she had said "Take her," but with repetition came clarity.

  She had actually said "Tapir."

  * * *

  Carver swung through the emergency room and talked with the physicians who had received Hawthorne and Jack from the Flight for Life chopper. The doctors had managed to stabilize them and appeared genuinely pleased with themselves, but wouldn't offer better than even odds. Both had been rushed to surgery, where they were still under the knife. Hawthorne had taken a slug to the upper left side of his chest and another to the right side of his pelvis. His left clavicle was shattered, his lung collapsed, and his pleural cavity filled with blood. Add to that a compound fracture of the iliac crest, and even if he made it through surgery, rehabilitation was going to be a daunting task.

  Jack had taken the worst of it. Eight stab wounds from a scalpel to the abdomen. Had the blade been larger or any less sharp, Jack's viscera would have been unsalvageable. As it was, he had bruising and lacerations to his spleen, liver, right kidney, and his bowels had been cut to ribbons. The surgeons were going to have to resect feet of his intestines, sew up the liver, and quite possibly excise both the spleen and kidney. It would be touch-and-go for a while.

  Both doctors had been quick to point out that had either man lost any more blood in the field, they wouldn't have stood a chance. Carver thanked them, but didn't feel reassured in the slightest.

  He went back up to Ellie's room and again held her hand. This time she didn't open her eyes. The surgeons had been instructed to page him the moment either Hawthorne or Jack was out of surgery. So now he played the waiting game. He closed his eyes, listened to the reassuring sounds of Ellie's soft breathing, and pondered bats and tapirs. In no time at all, he was asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  What we call Man's power over Nature turns

  out to be a power exercised by some men

  over other men with Nature as an instrument.

  --C.S. Lewis

  I

  El Mirador Ruins

  North of El Petén, Guatemala

  Four Days Later

  Carver crouched beneath a ceiba tree. Waiting. The tourists had all left for the day, leaving the ruins no better off for the assault of flashbulbs and trash littering the paths and underbrush. Thirty years ago this site had been on the brink of renovation, which now only meant cordoned trails to funnel the curious from one temple to the next in a parody of the lives led here more than a thousand years prior. He was soaked to the bone and uncertain of exactly what he hoped to find.

  None of the others knew he was here. After all, like the other agents before him, this was his battle, his responsibility.

  Ellie was resting comfortably in a regular inpatient room, awaiting the final clearance from her doctor and biding her time watching television. The moment Locke had been able to stand on his own power, he had simply vanished, leaving behind a finger-pointing night staff and a neatly folded hospital gown. Wolfe remained to field the questions for which there were no answers, and to take the debriefing from the half-dozen different government organizations that needed to cover their asses. Worse still, he was in charge of keeping Hawthorne bedridden, at least until they were able to pull his chest tube. Once the doctors decided his lung was in no danger of collapsing again and that the Erector Set they had used to rebuild his hip would bear his weight, they'd allow Hawthorne to sign himself out against medical advice. They were tired of arguing and Hawthorne was a man accustomed to getting his way. He was also a man who wouldn't be particularly missed by the staff. Jack had come through surgery as well as anyone could have hoped. He was lighter for the four feet of jejunum, the spleen, and the kidney of which they had absolved him, but at least he was nearly out of the woods. The morning Jack had awakened, Carver had been almost crippled by relief. By lunchtime he had been on a plane to Los Angeles, the first of seemingly thousands of transfers that brought him to where he was now: drenched, exhausted, and praying he would get the opportunity to use the semi-automatic pistol in his fist. Just like his father three decades earlier.

  His brother had a four-day head start, but a pair of gunshot wounds might have slowed him down just enough for Carver to catch up with him.

  Ellie might have been delusional from the painkillers, but she had been right. The bat and the tapir. The clues had been right in front of him the whole time. Bats invariably returned to the darkness after a long night's hunt. They weren't migratory. They always came back to their home. In this case, the place of their birth. The El Mirador ruins, specifically the La Danta temple. La Danta, of course, had he but taken the time to learn, was Spanish for tapir.

  Their lives had now come full circle.

  At the stroke of midnight, he emerged from the protective foliage and met the true wrath of the storm. A startled spider monkey screeched above his head and hurled itself through the upper canopy. He heard the rapid clap of the wings of birds startled to flight, the slap of his feet through the ankle deep mud. Yellow ropes had been strung around the pyramid to keep people from climbing all over it like ants, but they only slowed him down for a moment. The side of La Danta that had been swallowed by the hillside had been nearly completely excavated, the dirt hauled away from a slanted path leading to the dark maw at the bottom. He had learned earlier on the tour that they were preparing to open the tunnels beneath to the public once they were retrofitted for safety. His guide had made no mention of any strange discoveries they might have found inside. If he knew Jack, every last piece of equipment had been unearthed and studied right down to the atomic level anyway.

  He reached the chain-link gate blocking his way into the temple and stopped. The picks were already in his hand. A minute later, the padlock was in the mud. He had been watching the pyramid for the better part of the night and had only seen construction workers pass through the gate.

  Readying his Beretta and flashlight, he opened the gate silently and crept inside. Walls formed of great stone cubes. Modern cables and lighting overhead. Floor thick with the dust of construction. He walked sideways with his back to the wall, directing the light deeper into the darkness, until the tunnel opened into a much larger room. Support columns had recently been placed in the corners and there might have been a small hole in the stone roof that served as a vent. There were sawhorses and stacks of wood in the middle of the room, metal pipes and tank-fueled arc welders. A rusted barrel was overflowing with
odd-sized wooden waste and the remnants of far too many lunches for it to have been dumped anytime recently. There were rows of hard hats and dirty overalls against the wall.

  Carver weaved through the mess of construction until he reached the far side of the room, from which three tunnels branched. The one to the left had collapsed, and not too long ago by the looks of it. The tunnel to the right housed a portable latrine. His choice made, he continued deeper. The air was heavy, laden with dust. With the complete lack of circulation, he wondered if he was breathing the same air as the long dead Maya. The walls were covered in hieroglyphics, large cats and stick men, permanently retired gods. There were even small holes bored into the stone where someone once might have run high-voltage cables.

  At the terminus of the corridor, tunnels branched to either side. He turned left, a decision apparently in his blood, and found a small doorway into a state of ruin. Broken chunks of stone filled the entryway. The room beyond was in the same condition, almost as though someone had ripped out whatever may once have been in the room, and had gone out of their way to nearly destroy it in the process. Or maybe this was just the natural condition following centuries of decomposition. Had he not known better, that might have been what he thought.

  He turned around and headed back down the tunnel, past the corridor to the outside world, and into the room beyond.

  This one was the same as the last. Stone crumbling away from the walls, the ceiling threatening to meet the floor at any second. Finger tight on the trigger, he swept the barrel from one side of the chamber to the other, the beam sparkling with dust. There was no movement. No sound. He pressed deeper into the room, peeling apart the darkness with the lone light, directing it farther to the right--

  The light flashed back at him.

  He was too late.

  Carver walked toward the point where the beam had reflected.

  A mirror from the inside of a medicine cabinet had been leaned against the wall on the rubble. The glass was a spider web of fissures, causing his face to appear as it might in the moment of impact with a windshield. Small amounts of blood lined the cracks.

  Carver stared into the mirror, but his brother stared back.

  Just like him, only broken.

  Epilogue

  No one thinks of how much blood it costs.

  -- Dante Alighieri

  I

  Denver, Colorado

  Six Months Later

  Moonlight diffused through the drawn blinds and sparkled from the glass shards on the carpet. The curtains billowed inward ever so slightly at the behest of a gentle breeze. The room smelled of leather and furniture polish, beneath which was a trace of the sweet scent of cognac. There was the clatter of a key hitting the lock on the front door. The men sitting in the darkness straightened in the high-backed suede chairs at the sound.

  Light from the streetlamp flooded across the tiled foyer floor as the door opened inward. It was momentarily eclipsed by a silhouetted form. The door closed and there was the click-click-click of their prey toggling the light switch in vain. With a muffled curse, the man strode into the living room, set his briefcase on the floor, and tried the switch on the freestanding lamp, again to no avail. The man froze, realizing too late the reality of the situation. He made a move for the sidearm under his jacket--

  "Don't even think about it," one of the men said from across the room. He turned on a flashlight and shined it directly into the startled man's eyes, which reflected twin golden rings before the man shielded them with his hands.

  "I'm a federal officer," the man said. He again tried to reach beneath his jacket--

  Pfoot.

  The lamp next to the man shattered.

  "Jesus," the man gasped. "What the hell do you want?"

  The man with the flashlight rose from the chair. It appeared to take significant effort. The other man stood as well, his movements fluid, almost serpentine.

  "You did a remarkable job of covering your tracks," the man with the gun said. He took a step forward and the dim light revealed his scarred forehead. "It took us much longer than I thought it would to track down the leak in the Bureau."

  "I don't know what--"

  Pfoot.

  The man cried out and grabbed his shoulder. Hawthorne directed the beam into the man's face. It shined from the liberal application of pomade in his slick hair, from the monster's eyes behind his brown irises. He wanted to memorize the expression of pain, the look on the man's face when he realized he wasn't ever going to leave this room again.

  "I should have recognized it immediately in your reaction when I first walked into your office. That was my mistake," Hawthorne said. "One I won't make again."

  He walked toward Moorehead, who retreated into the foyer. There was the soft sound of blood dripping onto the tile.

  "You see, I was looking for a payoff, some sort of money trail," Hawthorne said. "I never thought of looking for one of our own."

  Moorehead made a guttural sound that could have been a laugh and eased closer to the front door.

  "We were so focused on Dreck that we failed to consider Windham. At first, anyway. I don't believe Windham had any knowledge of what Dreck and Heidlmann were plotting, any more than his wife knew about the illegitimate child his mistress had given birth to five years prior to his death. But Dreck knew, didn't he? Before Windham died, his partner helped him set up a discreet trust to be paid out of his portion of the company's profits. Once we found that, it didn't take long to piece the rest together. The problem was that there was no failsafe in place to force Dreck to continue paying Windham's share of the profits. Your mother was worried that Dreck would end up exposing her or cutting her off after Windham died. So she cut a deal. She let your good old Uncle Avram inject you with the virus in one of its experimental stages, didn't she?"

  "Look to the future, Hawthorne," Moorehead said, cautiously reaching for the door. "The world is evolving and the human race is on the verge of extinction. Soon there will be a new dominant species and we--"

  Pfoot.

  Moorehead howled and fell to his knees. He cradled his hand to his chest. Blood poured from the hole in his palm down his suit jacket.

  "There is no we," Hawthorne said. He turned and gave Locke a single nod.

  A toothy smile spread across Locke's bearded face.

  "Four little girls were tortured and killed in the most horrible manner, Special Agent Moorehead, and you did nothing to stop it. They were beaten. Starved. Bled to death. Butchered," Hawthorne said, turning away from Moorehead. "Do you have any idea how they must have felt?"

  Hawthorne sat at the kitchen table and waited for the screaming to begin.

  "You will."

  II

  Chesapeake Bay

  Maryland

  The fifty-two foot Gillman Fiberglass Sportfisherman floated in the bay, just far enough out toward the Atlantic that Baltimore appeared as a faint line on the western horizon, the blood red sun setting over it like an atomic mushroom cloud. Jack was around back behind the cabin, reeling in his line for the last time, the cooler four thirty-plus-inch Rockfish and two perch heavier for his efforts. He still needed help landing them, but Carver never made him ask. It was just what sons did for their fathers, he supposed.

  Carver sat on the bow, bare legs stretched under the rail, his toes inches above the frigid water. The salty spray tickled the soles of his feet. Ellie sat beside him, her hand in his, only the sound of the waves between them. Her grant had expired and thus so had her work in the Nazca Desert, which left her free to explore her other options, the most appealing of which was the opportunity to study the Anasazi burial rituals in the Four Corners region in southwestern Colorado. Or maybe that option appealed most to Carver, who not-so-secretly wished she would decide to stay closer to him. He had made the trip to Peru twice in the last half-year, and hadn't found it remotely pleasant either time. Of course, now that he had found Ellie again, he'd happily visit her wherever in the world she might go. He was pr
etty sure she felt the same. They hadn't put a name to what they had, but they were both comfortable with it nonetheless.

  These most recent three days together had been wonderful. Unfortunately, tomorrow Carver would board a flight back to the real world, where bad men killed children and all kinds of monsters prowled the streets in search of blood and worse.

  But today none of that mattered. The world would still be waiting for him when he returned.

  The smell of fish preceded Jack up onto the bow, and by no small coincidence, reminded Ellie that the wine had reached her bladder. She kissed Carver on the lips and he nearly blurted out those most dreaded and wonderful words. Each time he came closer and closer to losing that battle. He wondered why he even tried to fight it. After everything they had lived through, he understood there was no guarantee the sun would continue to rise.

  "Was it something I said?" Jack said. He smirked and sat down next to Carver. After spending the last three months nearly exclusively on this boat, his tan made Carver look pasty by comparison.

  "More like something you sat in."

  "Ah, it's the smell of freedom, my boy. There's nothing in the entire universe like it."

  "You definitely reek of freedom then. I'm pretty sure that's why all the seagulls are circling the boat."

  Jack put his arm around Carver's shoulder, a gesture with which he was becoming increasingly comfortable. Carver nodded to himself, and stared blankly out over the sparkling waves, imbued by the color of the sunset, an endless ocean of blood.

  "Something troubling you, son?" Jack asked. The tone in his voice suggested he knew what was coming and was ready to get it over with.