Nineveh's Child

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “What’re your names?”

  “I’m Dinah, and this is my friend. I found him in town, but he doesn’t talk.”

  Redmon gently took Dinah’s face and looked her over, as if trying to recognize her or maybe check her for injuries. She had rough, callused hands like Uma’s, and nothing like Michelle’s. “Are you not from there?”

  “They hit our home further to the south a few weeks ago. They killed my aunt. They took my sister prisoner and burned out our neighbors.”

  Redmon nodded and continued with the pat down. “I can’t promise to keep you safe or to even be able to feed you. Others have fled to the north. That’s where I’m sending everyone. You’ll stay the night with us and decide where you want to go in the morning. Sleep here. Don’t leave camp.”

  “Thank you for saving me.”

  The boy had already curled up on the ground, his doll tucked between his knees. Dinah found a tree to lean on and looked over in Karl’s direction. She didn’t know what he was in for. But she had some power now. She could speak up that she knew him, that just weeks before he was a provider and almost a father to her. Or she could tell Redmon that he was one of the hunters, and one of the worst kinds of men: a betrayer of trust. Uma died because of him.

  Karl wasn’t saying anything.

  Redmon set a watch, and her other rescuers went to sleep. Dinah kept awake for as long as she could. She wasn’t used to having so many people around.

  15. Before: Nineveh

  Getting to see her brother became a rarity, and then it stopped altogether. He was never in the library in the morning, and when she asked she was told he was working long hours and would be brought to see her eventually.

  She believed the promises the first few times. They could get her through the day. Dr. M had made another promise just that morning. Ruben would be out at lunch, and they could eat together. Dinah almost enjoyed the morning’s class with the other students.

  “Please repeat your answer,” Dr. Hel said.

  Dr. Hel could never follow Dinah when she started to speak quickly, but Dinah couldn’t help it. It was the only way to get everything out at once.

  Dr. Hel put up a hand. Stop sign. Dinah shut up.

  “Show me your work,” Dr. Hel said.

  Dinah looked down at the whiteboard set on the desk before her. The other children in the class were working the problem out with classic longhand multiplication-solving techniques that just baffled her. She glanced over at Stevie and at his work. He was almost done solving the problem. The numbers he had written down began to dance in a swirl. She shook her head and looked up at Dr. Hel.

  “I can’t,” Dinah said. “I just see the numbers stack up in my head. I shuffle them together like cards. They add themselves. I keep shuffling and adding, and that’s how I get 33,793,749.”

  Dr. Hel just looked at Dinah like she was crazy. The other kids kept quiet, but Dinah knew that was what they thought, too. They’d share their opinions later when no one was looking. For now, they shot her with looks that concealed none of their animosity.

  Dr. Hel crouched by another student to help her with a question.

  Dinah reread Dr. Hel’s twenty math problems written on the large board at the front of the class. The last one was giving her problems, but that was only because Dr. Hel’s marker had run out of ink, and there was a smudge from the teacher’s sleeve that made one of the sixes look like a five. Dinah would stick with the notion that it was a six. The square root problem unfolded before her as she applied a possible guess number and watched the numerals stack in her head of their own accord. She was wrong with her first number but not with her second.

  She looked over at Stevie. He had started working on the second problem. More long multiplication. A big number times twelve.

  Why can’t he see it?

  His marker squeaked as he wrote nonsense.

  “Stevie,” Dinah whispered.

  Stevie just frowned and hunkered over his board so she couldn’t see.

  “Let Stevie do his own,” Dr. Hel said. “Are you already finished?”

  Dinah shrugged. When Dr. Hel waited for a straight answer, Dinah said, “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  But Dinah couldn’t. She simply rattled off the answers like she was reading from a bingo card from hell. The other kids stopped working and stared at her. Dr. Hel twisted her lips and looked down at her answer sheet. When she returned her attention to Dinah, Dinah knew she was right about the six in the final problem. She was right about the rest of it too.

  ***

  As usual, she sat alone in the cafeteria with a tray of food before her. A thin slab of tilapia waited for her, along with peas, gray porridge, and steamed spinach that glistened with a thin white cream. Fish had always been a staple. Nothing else that comprised lunch surprised her or would taste particularly good. She pushed the tray away. She wasn’t hungry anyway.

  Shannon and Alena and three other girls from her class sat at a table nearby. Shannon looked over her shoulder in Dinah’s direction. The five girls all started giggling, and Dinah began to blush.

  Stevie came up next to her holding a tray with an identical lunch. “How do you know all that stuff?”

  “The numbers just line up is all. I can’t help it. I could try to teach you how to do it. I’ll go slow, I promise.”

  He made a face that mirrored how she felt about lunch, except he was looking straight at her. Then he went and sat with the girls.

  “Maybe I was bitten by a magical serpent and was granted the powers of math!” she said a little too loudly. The kids at the surrounding tables ignored her.

  “I always knew you were a mutant,” a voice said.

  She hadn’t seen Ruben in a month. His nurse wheeled him against Dinah’s table and set the brake. By his disposition, Dinah could tell right away it had been a bad day. He sat at an angle and wasn’t able to straighten himself in his wheelchair. The nurse went away only to return a moment later with a tray of finely cut-up and pureed food. She began to try to spoon the food into Ruben’s mouth, but he just turned his face away.

  “Can we have a moment?” he asked.

  “You need to eat to keep up your strength,” the nurse said. “That’s not optional. And they need you back soon.” But she got up and left them alone.

  The kids at the closest table got really quiet. They actually ate their food, while stealing glances in Ruben’s direction. The older kids and the other grown-ups at the further tables paid them no mind.

  When the corner of Ruben’s mouth rose, Dinah knew he had something to share.

  “So you’ll never guess what I get to do today.”

  “Stick your fingers into a socket to get you to sit up straight?”

  “Even better. I get to look at the code. They’re giving me full access.”

  “Why would they let a freak like you touch the mainframe?”

  “Because they don’t know ‘that which is crooked cannot be made straight.’”

  “I’ll say. They haven’t given up on you. So what are you going to do with the code?”

  “You probably haven’t heard.”

  “Heard what?” She turned toward him and made a show of putting her chin on her hands, like she was all ears.

  Again with the crooked smile. More of a smirk, because Ruben could always tell when he had her interest. “It’s above your pay grade and clearance level.” Pause. She just waited. “I now have access to manufacturing. Environmental controls, too. See your friends over there? I can have the oxygen sucked out of their rooms. They’ll look like blueberries come morning.”

  She grinned. “Can you increase the air pressure so they pop like grapes?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll work on it. But manufacturing is big. You have no idea what it’s capable of. Neither do they. All the history is so muddled. One department doesn’t know what the other is doing. That’s why they’re so careful with it. They think plugging me in will help them manage it all. They need it
to work, but there’s no one left who knows how to fix it if it breaks.”

  “It’s broken?” She leaned closer. But he stopped talking, his eyes flickering over Dinah’s shoulder.

  The nurse returned, sat down without a word, and tucked into her own food. She had squirted each compartment of her tray with the separated ketchup found at the end of the cafeteria line. The food was enough of an insult, but the ketchup was like adding sugary vinegar to everything.

  “You have ten minutes to eat,” the nurse said without looking up from her own food.

  Dinah looked at Ruben’s tray. The food was all puddles and chunks. She said, “It’s like three different people all barfed in the same place.”

  But Ruben didn’t smile. The muscles in his neck and jaw were twitching. She heard a choking sound. The nurse heard it, too, and she was up in an instant. His left arm jerked and knocked his utensils away. The tray of food would have gone flying, but Dinah pulled it away. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  The nurse backed the wheelchair from the table and squatted down in front of him. White froth bubbled at the corner of his mouth. The nurse undid one of his shirt buttons, and Dinah saw that the convulsions were running down his body. When his head lolled forward, the nurse pushed it gently back to the wheelchair’s headrest.

  “Oh, my god!” one of the girls screamed. She was joined by a gaggle of others who murmured among themselves in fascination and horror. No one got close.

  “He’s drooling,” Stevie said.

  “It’s just a seizure,” Dinah said.

  “Shouldn’t the nurse hold him down?”

  She didn’t dignify him with an answer. She watched the nurse. The woman’s complete attention was on Ruben. She let him ride the seizure out and only touched him when his head bowed too far forward. After a few minutes, he started trying to draw each breath through his nose, and it sounded like he wasn’t getting enough air. Ruben caught Dinah’s eye, and they locked stares. She bit her lower lip and took his hand.

  And just like that it was over. The tremors ceased and he relaxed into his chair and sighed, his chest rising and falling steadily. His shirt was drenched with sweat. The nurse took a napkin and dipped it in a cup of water. She wiped his face down.

  “Lunch is over,” she said. She got behind the chair and removed him from the cafeteria.

  The students were all very quiet. After a moment, one of the girls offered a small laugh. In the moment it took Dinah to turn and face the group, they had all settled into their own tables again, and she couldn’t tell which of them had made the sound. The rest of the cafeteria got busy with their whispers and their trays of food.

  Dinah got out of there as fast as she could. She went to her room and sat on her bed, and she heard a low bump at the door.

  “Go away, Beast.”

  She wanted to cry, but instead she looked up at the air vent above the door and wondered if the ventilation system could indeed draw air completely out of a room.

  16. Resentment

  Dinah woke to the sound of Karl screaming. She popped up to her feet, instinctively reaching for a stick or club that wasn’t there. A group of dark figures were huddled around him, and his cries were quickly muffled. One man carried a small burning torch, but it was held low to the ground and she could see none of the group in much detail. Soon whatever they were using to gag Karl slipped, and he howled. They struggled to hold him in place. She heard muttered voices from the group, single-syllable curses, a laugh.

  One voice belonged to the young man, Trevor. “I’m next.”

  The little boy was now up. He started to back away. She could see the moonlight reflected in his wide eyes as he stared across the camp at what was happening. He looked taut, like a held spring ready to fly. She reached out to him. Karl screamed again, followed by a stream of curses that were muffled as his tormentors succeeded in shoving something into his mouth. The boy would have run, but she took hold of him and drew him close.

  “Shhhhh,” she whispered into the boy’s ear. She began rocking him, the way Uma had comforted her when she had arrived at the farm. She’d experienced a bout of panic trying to sleep that first night. The farm had been a place of new sounds, but it was the silence that had frightened her. She had lived for so long under the ground where the constant churning white noise of the redoubt had been her comfortable reality, especially in the hours of night.

  What are they doing to him?

  Now the big man was making strangled noises. She heard a woman in the group give an uncomfortable giggle. One of the men held something short and shiny: a knife. He leaned in over Karl, began doing something that she couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, yet she didn’t look away. She felt a strange twist in her gut, a sick pleasure mixed with a righteous anger. Part of her wanted to rush over and stop whatever these people were doing. But another part wanted to join in. Would she giggle just like the woman?

  Karl was responsible for what was going on. The murders, the burning, the smell of death that had clung to her since seeing the last village. Yes, it was others committing the crimes, but Karl was with them and he was here, now. Dinah belonged with those hurting him, should be letting his pain flow over her as a healing salve. Uma was dead because he allowed the hunters to come to their home. To her home. He’d known they were coming and had done nothing to stop them. He had betrayed.

  She realized the children in the redoubt must have had this same feeling. The enjoyment of power over another. The inflicting of righteous torment on someone who was helpless and weak. She felt dizzy with the thought that she was now as bad as Stevie. Or Rosalyn. She was worse than either had ever been because this was worse.

  The thought of Rosalyn brought her back into the moment.

  The displaced refugees that now dispensed their bitter vengeance had lost everything. She had no true notion of what they had endured to survive. These people had seen their parents, children, and siblings butchered and burned. Dinah still had a sister.

  Where did they take her?

  Karl screamed again.

  Suddenly Redmon appeared, pulling away the men and women that surrounded the prisoner. “That’s enough,” she said.

  The other woman in the group shoved her. “Back off, Redmon.”

  “He deserves this,” Trevor said.

  Redmon struck him with a lightning-fast backhand that sent him to the dirt. She pulled a machete from her belt and pointed it at the woman.

  “You idiots. This gets us nowhere. We need him.”

  No one moved. Karl lay in a trembling heap next to the dropped torch. Redmon didn’t say anything else. Dinah felt herself flush with shame at not having done anything.

  Trevor got up. He stood staring at Redmon for a moment as if he were working up the nerve to speak. The rest of the valley people dispersed back into the dark corners of the camp. Trevor joined them without a word.

  “It’s over,” Dinah whispered. The little boy stayed tense. But like the little survivor that he was, he remained silent.

  Redmon stomped out the torch. The camp became cold, indeed.

  ***

  Redmon hissed for Dinah to wake up. She didn’t remember falling asleep, having curled up at the base of the tree with her head against one bent arm that was now numb. The boy had his head tucked against her legs, the doll gripped close under his chin.

  Dawn was less than an hour away. The edge of the eastern sky was a light gray, and only a few of the most stubborn stars and a couple of planets remained shining in the heavens. Dr. Hel had loaned her an astronomy book once—it was fascinating, and Dinah had finished reading it in two days—but trying to understand the real night sky, the sheer magnitude of it, proved overwhelming. She did know it would be a warm day, as there was no fog. “Get your work done early,” Uma would have said.

  Redmon moved among the other campers, nudging some, speaking to others. Half were already up. They quietly gathered their few possessions and checked what weapons they had. Karl lay in the ce
nter of them all, still trussed up. Dinah could see his chest rise and fall. One of the men pulled him up to a sitting position, where he remained.

  When Dinah tried to get up, she felt a sharp throb begin in her head. It was as if something were trying to get out, and she knew that in the next few minutes she would do anything to oblige. She lay back down on the dirt. The pulse started at the back of her brain and moved forward to her eyeballs. She gritted her teeth and winced. The boy gripped her tight. When he tugged at an arm, she pushed him away. By the time Redmon returned, Dinah was hugging her knees and panting.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Dinah couldn’t speak. She just shook her head.

  “She gets headaches,” Karl said. His voice sounded thick. “Severe ones.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Redmon said. “Get up.”

  Dinah held one arm over her eyes, as even the low light of the morning was delivering pain.

  “She won’t be able to travel,” Karl said. “Get her a blanket to block out the light.”

  “Shut up.” She tugged at Dinah’s arm. Dinah moaned.

  “Just…leave me alone.”

  “We aren’t staying here. We’ll have to leave you behind.”

  Dinah didn’t care. If only Redmon would stop talking, would go away and take the sun with her. Her addled mind thought of the little boy’s warren. If she could somehow return there, the world could pass her by, and she would be fine in the darkness underneath the ground. The sunless realm of the worms would become her own.

  Other refugees consulted with Redmon. Dinah tried to tune them out, but from what she did hear, they would be heading north. Footsteps tromped the ground around the camp. A small blanket was put over her. The little boy whimpered, still at her side. The group got itself together, and soon she heard no sounds at all.