The Physician's Tale

by Ann Benson

  “Okay, see you out there.”

  When he was alone again, Bruce sat down and rested his elbows on the surface of the desk. He put his face in his hands and just sat there for a moment, gathering himself.

  I’m not a warrior, he told himself.

  His deeper self answered, You are what you need to be in any given moment, or you are dead.

  He rose up and left the lab, then traveled through the maze of underground corridors that once teemed with students going from dormitory to class to dining hall and back again, all sheltered from the wicked winter weather that settled over the Blackstone Valley for more than four months of each year. They’d had a bit of luck—the wells, blessedly, had continued to produce good water; the enclosed quadrangles were sunny and fertile enough to grow their vegetables. And there was a near-lifetime supply of canned and dry goods in the storage areas adjacent to the dining hall.

  Before joining his companions on the far side of the quadrangle, he made one stop. He stepped inside one of the aviaries and was greeted with the usual chorus of protests from the territorial birds of prey that were housed within.

  “Hello,” he said aloud. A symphony of bird cries came back at him.

  He put his hand into a small tank and brought out a salamander. He dropped the slimy thing through the bars; it landed on the floor of the cage, just below a wood branch, on which was perched a young eagle. The bird shook its leg a few times in an effort to dislodge the small metal box that was attached just above the foot.

  “Better get used to that thing,” Bruce said. “We won’t let you go until you do.” This was a chick from one of the eggs they’d taken from the veteran female 908; the young bird’s behavior of late had been strange. “Let’s hope you do better than your mama seems to be doing lately.”

  The bird screamed in its baby voice.

  “That’s right, squawk all you want. Did anyone ever tell you that you sound just like a dinosaur?” He clicked his lips to mimic the sound that the eagle’s mother would have made in feeding him. “But I have to tell you, if we’d been around then, we would have survived all that climate change too, because we can think.”

  The baby jumped down off the perch and sucked in the salamander. Then he fluttered back up to the perch again. As he swallowed, he flapped his wings furiously.

  Bruce moved along the cages until he came to one that housed a young turkey vulture. He opened a metal food container attached to the bottom of the cage and turned his head away in disgust as he pulled out a putrid hunk of rabbit flesh with a metal tong. He pushed it through the cage wire and held it in place until the bird had eaten the whole thing.

  “That’s right,” he cooed, “eat up! We have plans for that stomach of yours.”

  He left the aviary and went out into the relative silence of the quadrangle. He looked up into the gray sky; a storm was in the air. It was bad news for the double deltas who would be arriving, starting today, if their interceptions were true. They would arrive with hearts full of good intentions. He and his cohorts would watch and, if their equipment would allow it, listen—hopefully without revealing themselves—to make sure that no harm came to them. He wondered if there would be anyone watching behind them and envisioned, with a small sense of irony, a daisy chain of watchers extending around the world, to Afghanistan, Iran, Eastern Europe, maybe all the way to China. Who knew where the Coalition’s reach might have extended?

  As he steeled himself for what might come, the hackles on his back were rising. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but it didn’t matter. He’d know soon enough if the Coalition was primed to swoop down on their favorite prey. It was coming down to a war of the birds. He’d been through it in his mind so many times, and he always came to the same conclusion: that they were using some kind of bird to carry their new bug out into the world and inject it into the native rodent population. They’d discovered this by sending out their own birds, the beautiful eagles, with sensors on their legs. And in the end, it would be the turkey vultures—he hoped—that carried the seeds of a cure.

  All he had to do was make it work.

  “There’s a house up ahead,” Lany said. “Should we check it out?”

  “Probably,” Janie said. “There’s not enough light left to go much farther.”

  With the horses tied up behind the house, they went together from room to room, Lany with her gun out, Janie with knife in hand.

  “Seems empty,” Lany said when they finished inspecting the second floor.

  “I’d feel better if it was a little farther off the road.”

  “Me too, but I think it’ll be okay.” Lany snapped the safety in place and put the gun into the holster on her right leg. “There’s a back stairway if we need to make a quick exit.”

  “Let’s go get the horses, then.”

  They brought the animals inside the first floor of the house and closed the door.

  They settled themselves into one of the upstairs rooms. Janie was about to light one of their small lanterns, but Lany stopped her hand before the match hit the wick. “Do you really need the light?”

  After a few seconds, Janie said, “I don’t suppose I do. But I’d like it. We need to eat.”

  “I just wonder if it might not be a better idea to keep it dark. We’ve got sandwiches; we don’t need light to eat them. We know there are people out there now, and I worry about someone seeing us. We don’t know if there are more groups, but it stands to reason that there would be—that dead man had to come from somewhere.”

  Janie knew she was right, but still she resented the darkness. She found some comfort in the meal, however; the sandwich of coarse bread and hard cheese might as well have been filet mignon for how delicious it tasted after a long stretch without food. When she was finished eating, she crept carefully down the back stairway, feeling each step in the blackness. Once outside, she moved a few steps away from the house and relieved herself, quickly and in the open. No mountain lion would get her now.

  The darkness was stark, with no moon and a layer of clouds obscuring the stars. The chill night air assaulted her skin. She shivered as she made her way back up the unfamiliar stairs and dove into the sleeping bag with her teeth chattering.

  With nothing to occupy her senses but the sound of insects outside, her mind went straight to pain.

  Oh, Tom, I miss you so much tonight. Had he not lost his leg, he would have insisted on going along, double delta or not. She hugged her own arms around herself, but it brought no comfort. And please, God, take care of my son. Tears filled her eyes and nose; she sniffed and wiped them away with the cuff of her sweater.

  “You all right?”

  She sniffed once again. “No, not really. I miss my husband, I’m worried about my son, and I can hardly remember why I’m huddled here in the dark, far away from the things I love and need. I didn’t really want to go on this trip, but once we got started, I was hoping it would take my mind off—everything. So far it hasn’t made a bit of difference. And I just can’t seem to get warm. I can’t stop shivering.”

  Lany hitched herself, still in the sleeping bag, across the floor until she was very close to Janie. “Here,” she said, “unzip your bag and hook it to mine. I’m plenty warm.”

  The conditioning of a lifetime made her hesitate.

  But how many times had Alejandro slept in the same straw bed as another person, just for the warmth?

  Somehow in the dark they managed to hook up their bags. Warmth returned, but the aches were not banished. She tried to hide the sound of her weeping, but Lany heard.

  “Go ahead,” Lany told her. “Cry if you want to. You don’t have to keep a brave face for me. And no one will care tomorrow if your eyes are swollen shut.”

  Janie wept bitterly until, finally, sleep took her.

  They rose up very early and got moving fast. The remaining distance to Worcester—geographically the most accessible place in Massachusetts—took four hours to cover. By noon, they were installed in a thicket of brush o
utside the armory, silently watching the comings and goings of more people than either of them had seen in years.

  “Three dozen people waiting outside.” Lany extended her hand and offered the binoculars. “Here, take a look.”

  Janie positioned the eyepieces and adjusted the focus, then watched intently for a few minutes. “Someone just came out the front door,” she said. “He’s talking to the people who are waiting.”

  She handed back the binocs.

  “They’re going in,” Lany said as she looked. She set down the viewers. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Run,” Janie said. “As far and as fast as possible. This all scares me to death.”

  “It scares me too, but we’re here, so we might as well finish what we started. We can leave the horses here and continue on foot, see if we can get close enough to hear what they’re saying. Hell, we’re supposed to be in there with them.”

  “Leave the horses? What do we do if someone steals them? Walk back to Orange?”

  Lany considered that comment for a moment before responding. “You stay here, then, and I’ll go closer. I’m smaller, anyway. They won’t see me as easily.”

  She handed the binoculars to Janie. “Keep an eye out. Can you whistle?”

  “Badly, but yes.”

  “Whistle if anything looks like it might be a problem.”

  “Okay.”

  Lany patted the gun on her thigh. Earlier, before they’d entered Worcester, Janie had watched her open the chamber and remove and then replace all the bullets.

  “You’ve got your knife, right?”

  Janie patted her own ankle.

  “Good. I’ll be back as soon as I can. No more than an hour.” She took a few steps forward, then turned. “If I don’t come back in an hour, you have to go back without me.”

  “I’m not going to leave you here alone—”

  “Oh, yes you are. I would leave you alone if the situation were reversed.”

  Janie stared at her for a few seconds, then said, “Okay.” As she watched Lany disappear into the brush, the cold terror of solitude settled over her. She raised up the binoculars again and watched as, one by one, the invitees—all presumably double deltas—stepped through the door.

  It terrified her to see each person slip out of sight. Did these people all know and trust one another, or were they strangers, as Lany and she would be if they chose to join the party? And why would anyone step through a door not knowing what might await them on the other side?

  She heard the voice of Myra Ross in her mind. Over a long-ago lunch, Myra had spoken of her passage from Berlin to Auschwitz. We went into the boxcars because they told us to. They told us not to worry, that we would be safe.

  Chills and tingles, the icy fingers of warning, ran up and down her spine.

  Janie wanted to stand up and scream to them. She managed to contain herself, though it took all of her will. She continued to watch, her mind exploding with silent nos, until a movement in one corner of the lens distracted her.

  It was Lany, on the edge of the wooded area that surrounded the building. There was a chain-link fence; Lany was trying to squeeze her way through what appeared to be an opening. Janie watched as she put one leg through, then bent down, as if to slip inside.

  And then, behind Lany, there was a man—a very large man with a ponytail.

  Janie’s heart leaped into her throat and she stood straight up. She tried to whistle, but it was as if she were trying in a dream—she had no spit, and her furious efforts resulted in no sound. She watched in horrified helplessness as Lany was pulled back through the opening in the fence and then disappeared from view.

  Bruce walked slowly around the chair in which Lany was seated. No one was expecting the Coalition to send a woman; they’d been caught off-guard, just as the Israelis had been in the time before when the Palestinians began sending women as suicide bombers. He chided himself for his failure to see it coming. “I’ll ask you again,” he said, “where do you live?”

  He got nothing but silence in return.

  “Look,” he said, “we know what’s going on. I just want to know what your part is in the whole thing.”

  He placed her gun on a nearby table and the PDA next to it. He saw her eyes dart from one item to the other, and then she looked straight out, focusing on nothing.

  “Good weapon,” he said, “and pretty advanced communications. You must have a good-size cell. How many are there, two hundred, five hundred? More than that?”

  She counted silently and came up with a figure of fifty-six between the two allied colonies. It seemed laughable that he should be estimating hundreds. She said nothing to his question.

  “What do you have planned for the deltas?”

  Still staring ahead, Lany said, “I should be asking you that question, don’t you think?”

  “And how am I supposed to know?”

  Finally, Lany looked straight at him. It was hard to do; one eye was twisted by scar tissue, in keeping with that whole side of his face. The other side of his face hinted at handsomeness, once upon a time. She didn’t really know which eye to engage—and despite the fact that she was his captive and ought to be spitting into one of his eyes or the other, it seemed impolite to ask.

  But the questions he was asking her made no sense. “You were watching too,” she said. She stood, bringing the chair to which she was handcuffed up with her. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  For a moment, he seemed stunned. Then the look of shock disappeared from the half of his face that could show such expressions. She had managed to unnerve him, however momentarily. He could not let that happen. “No,” he said quietly. “But I think you are.”

  Lany threw back her head and laughed aloud. “Not me,” she said. “I came here to see what they’re up to.”

  Once again, he asked, “Where are you from?”

  It was a number of seconds before Lany finished weighing the possible answers. “Let’s just say we’re not close neighbors. I live a pretty good distance away from here. Someone—I have no idea who—sent me an e-mail invitation to this meeting and I thought I’d better find out what was going on.”

  It wasn’t precisely a lie; the e-mail had been sent specifically to cop@orangecommunity.net. But her captor didn’t seem to buy it, at least not completely. He took her gun and the PDA and left her alone in the room.

  Stay and wait; see if she gets out. Go after her. Go back to Orange. Go back to the mountain and forget any of this happened.

  Janie was deeply rattled; all she knew was that she had to stay hidden, at least for the moment. A brutally honest assessment of her own capabilities and resources led her to the painful conclusion that it would be an act of sheer insanity to try to find Lany and rescue her. She could go to Orange and enlist their help in getting Lany back, but every bit of her wanted to go straight back to the mountain, to her son and husband.

  I can contact Orange from there, she told herself. It was home, it was safe, it was where she belonged. She unfolded the map and looked over the routes.

  Almost fifty miles, she calculated. Two long days. She left Lany’s horse tied up; if she got free, she’d need her mount to get away.

  “Come on, darlin’,” she said to Jellybean. “Take me home.”

  There was a small window in the room, looking out into the quadrangle. It looked so different with its gardens and play areas and clotheslines than it had when she’d trained there years before. She followed a young man with curly dark hair with her eyes as he made his way across the grassy expanse. He carried a box of some sort and wore—if her eyes were seeing it correctly—some kind of leather shield on his arm.

  Falconry came into her mind. But here, in the middle of what had once been a city? They did it in castles, she reminded herself. Castles were the cities of their time. Everyone she’d seen seemed healthy and well fed; maybe the falcons were trained to bring back small game, rabbits, pheasants, squirrels…

  Rats, mice, f
errets, snakes…

  Her mind pushed the distasteful images away. If they fed her, she would look carefully at what was on her plate.

  The door opened; she moved away from the window quickly and stood in one corner of the room as her captor entered again.

  He had two glasses in his hands. He offered one to her. “Lemonade,” he said.

  She stared at the glass as the shock set in.

  “You have lemons?”

  “And limes. We grow them in a special room that’s environmentally controlled. We use solar power and ultraviolet lights.” He raised the glass in offering again. She eyed it suspiciously. He took a sip from both glasses, one after the other. “There,” he said. “Not poisoned or drugged. All natural, just like the good old days.”

  She came forward and took one of the glasses from him. “Thank you,” she said. When the lemonade hit her tongue, it felt like heaven. “Thank you,” she said again, with more emphasis. “My God, that tastes good.” She drank the rest of the lemonade in one long and thirsty pull.

  Bruce smiled and sat down in one of the chairs. “Look,” he said, “I’ll get straight to the point. There isn’t any time to fool around.”

  Oh, yeah, she thought suspiciously, butter me up with lemonade, then pump me for information….

  “We know there’s a cell in New Jersey. We think that’s the closest cell. Is that where you came from?”

  Cell? New Jersey? She was completely confused.

  “No, I…didn’t come from New Jersey.”

  “There’s another cell close enough for you to travel here?”

  “What are you talking about, cell…”

  “Don’t play with me.”

  She stood, bringing up the chair again. “I’m not. And I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I told you already. We received an e-mail at—home. It took us to a Web site for double deltas. We read about the meeting.”

  Bruce let a few moments pass as he stared at her in an attempt to determine if she was as genuinely confused by what he was asking as she appeared to be. Finally, he tossed out the burning question: “Did the Coalition send you here to spy on this meeting?”