“Well, can you look at her leg?” Michelle was getting pissed. Adesina was so close, and all they needed was to get Joey’s damn leg looked at. How hard was that?
“Lie down on that bed and I’ll be right back,” the nurse said, pointing to the only empty bed in the ward.
Joey collapsed onto the bed. The woman in the next pushed herself up, then pulled her netting away. She was young, no more than a few years older than Michelle. There were scars on her face. It looked as if she’d been slashed by a knife.
“Hello,” she said in heavily accented English. “You are a long way from home.”
“Yes, we are,” Michelle replied. Where the hell was that damn nurse? “My friend’s leg is hurt.”
“I see that. May I touch your hair?”
The request was so odd it snapped Michelle out of thinking about Adesina. “Uhm, well, I guess so.” She walked over to the woman’s bed and bent down. The woman stroked the top of Michelle’s head, then ran her hand down Michelle’s braid. “Oh, it’s very soft. I’ve never seen hair like this before.”
Jesus, Michelle thought, I cannot believe I’m having hair chitchat right now.
“I use to braid my daughter’s hair.” Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “Your braid has come loose. I could fix it for you.” The nurse hadn’t come back yet and even though the request was odd, it wouldn’t take long.
“Sure.”
The woman undid Michelle’s braid, and then combed her fingers through Michelle’s hair before she started plaiting it. “I’m Makemba,” she said. “Will you be here long? Kinsangani is an odd place for you to be.”
“I’m looking for a friend,” Michelle said. It was close enough to the truth.
The nurse came back carrying a metal tray with disinfectant, gauze, bandages, a curved needle, a packet of suturing material, and a syringe. She told Joey to roll onto her stomach. Joey jerked when the nurse started cleaning the wound. “These look like claw marks,” the nurse said. “How did you get these?”
“We got attacked by some leopards.”
“It’s dangerous in the jungle,” the nurse said. “And these wounds will need stitches.”
“It’s fucking dangerous everywhere now,” Joey said. “Ow! You fucker! That hurts!”
“Shut up and take it.” Michelle expected Joey to glower at her, but Joey just closed her eyes.
“What happened to your daughter?” Michelle asked Makemba as the woman finished Michelle’s braid.
“She died,” Makemba said softly. “They came from Uganda and they killed the men in our village. Then they raped the women. All of the women were raped, even my daughter. She was six. They slashed some of our faces. Some of them raped us with their guns after they were finished raping us with their…” Makemba fell silent.
“Those fuckers did that?” Joey asked quietly as she opened her eyes. She began to shake.
“Oh, yes,” the nurse said, “but the Nshombos put an end to it. They punished as many men as could be caught. Then they put out bounties on the heads of the ones who’d escaped.” She paused. “All the women here have been raped.”
“ All of them?” Michelle felt sick. “Every one in this ward?”
“In the entire hospital. And this is just one of the hospitals for the survivors. It has been going on for years. They can’t go home. They’re outcasts now. But the Nshombos are taking care of them. It is Alicia Nshombo’s great work. She is the Mother of the Country.”
Michelle looked around the room. The women closest to them were all leaning forward in their beds. And they smiled at her. God, how can they smile at all?
Makemba pointed at the woman directly across from her. “She was raped by ten men. After they finished, they killed her sister and her mother. She had a baby from it and left it at an orphanage.” She pointed at the woman in the bed to her right. “They made her watch as they raped her eleven-year-old daughter. Then six men held her down and raped her. Then they used their guns to rape her. She no longer has control of her bladder or her bowels. The doctors have done four surgeries on her.”
Michelle held up her hands. “Please. No more.”
Makemba grabbed Michelle’s wrist. “You have to let your people know that the Nshombos are helping us. They are making our lives better. Without Alicia Nshombo we would all be dead or trying to live in the forest.”
Michelle pulled her hand away. The Nshombos ran everything in the PPA with an iron glove. They had to know about the experiments on children. But how to reconcile that with this hospital? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the Nshombos knew nothing about the children in the pit.
“Your leg will be fine,” the nurse said. “I’m going to give you a shot of antibiotics.” She reached into her pocket and gave Joey a small bottle. “Here are some more to take. One a day for seven days. Those stitches will dissolve on their own.”
Joey shoved the pills into her pants pocket. “Thanks,” she said gruffly.
“What do we owe you?” Michelle asked.
“Oh, nothing,” the nurse said cheerfully. “There is free health care since Dr. Nshombo came to power. I hope when you go home you will tell everyone how the Nshombos have made a real paradise of our country.”
The Red House
Outside Bunia, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“Gather round,” Tom told the child aces assembled in the dining hall of the big Red House, whose eye-watering smell of carbolic cleansers seemed barely to mask a scent of decay. Dr. Washikala hovered in the background, scrubbing gaunt brown hands against each other. The major commanding the security contingent stood listening keenly at military brace in his tan uniform, shades, and leopard-skin fez. He was middling tall and wiry, like all Leopard Men. The only fatso in the Leopard Society seemed to be its Mama Alicia.
The child aces turned apprehensive expressions toward Tom. “We got problems. Major problems,” he told them, his voice rasping. “The imperialists who attacked Nyunzu have now destroyed a medical barge and smuggled the children they stole across the border into Tanzania. We’ve lost Leucrotta, the Hunger, and Ghost. They failed to stop the imperialists. It’s up to us now, you dig?”
He stood a moment, surveying their small faces, unmarked human and joker alike. They shuffled nervously in their chairs or on the floor. Ayiyi scratched behind one ear with one of his mouth parts.
“Mummy and the Darkness are helping the Mother of the Nation now. Ayiyi, I’ll hyperflight you to Kongoville to guard the President-for-Life. Wrecker, Moto-you stay here and help defend your brothers and sisters. The rest of you… do what you can. Any questions?”
No questions. In fact, they were pretty quiet for a bunch of kids. Tom figured, vaguely, he’d dazzled them with his revolutionary eloquence.
Blythe van Renssaeler
Memorial Clinic, Jokertown
Manhattan, New York
“Wow, New York city,” Mollie said in tones of reverence. “It’s really… noisy.”
Noel was both amused and irritated by her simplicity. But that wasn’t fair. How could he expect eloquence about steel canyons and symphonies of taxi horns from a girl whose life experience consisted of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and that strip mall surrounded by freeways that was Los Angeles?
“Maybe we can go to Macy’s when we’re finished? And I’d like to see Central Park, and Tiffany’s, and the observation deck on the Empire State Building.”
Noel knew all the movies that had produced the list: Miracle on 34th Street, Barefoot in the Park, and Aces High, with its romantic version of Peregrine and Fortunato’s “affair.” “First let’s bring those children back to civilization,” he said.
He had taken Mollie to Katimba so she had a sense of the place. A joker nurse had gripped him by the collar with her twig fingers, and said a single word-“Hurry.” Now he and Mollie stood in an alley next to the Jokertown Clinic. Finn and an army of nurses and orderlies were mustered at the sliding-glass doors. He had alerted the centaur doctor to Gardener�
��s condition and given him a brief description of the steps that had been taken in the Khartoum hospital, to no avail.
He hated that so many people were going to witness Mollie’s power, but comforted himself with the knowledge that Americans never paid attention to news outside of the United States. And he had to do this. He had expended so much effort-emotional, financial, and physical-on having a child with Niobe, and now he found he reacted to every crying child. But not with the irritation that had been the reaction of an earlier self, but with a fierce need to react, protect, comfort.
He nodded to Mollie, and one of her doorways appeared in the grimy bricks of the neighboring building. A gust of hot, moist air blew through, and immediately became a cloud of fog when it met New York’s December chill. The doctors and nurses came through carrying children.
Noel dodged them in the doorway, and went to Gardener’s side. He picked her up. It was like holding a bundle of twigs. “You’re a miracle worker,” she whispered weakly. “Thank you.”
“I’m a practical man with a lot of contacts. And you’re welcome.” And Noel carried her back through to New York, and delivered her into Finn’s care.
Kisangani, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“I want to kill those fuckers,” Joey said. “The ones that did that to those women.” She was limping, but she seemed to be doing a little better.
“It sounds like the Nshombos have already punished most of them,” Michelle replied.
Joey glared at her. “You don’t understand.”
Michelle stopped. “Yeah, I do understand. You were raped, too. And every one of those women hurts just like you. Only worse. You can’t undo what happened to them, and you can’t undo what happened to you. I’m sorry. But right now, we can save one little girl.”
“It ain’t enough.” Joey’s voice was almost a wail and there was fury in her eyes.
“No,” Michelle replied with her mouth set in a grim line. “It never is.”
30
Friday,
December 25
Christmas Day
The Pampas
Western Uruguay
“You need to let well enough alone now, Mr. L.,” Mrs. Clark said sternly. “It’s not right to be moving the girl every few days hither and yon across the globe. By whatever unholy means you’re using to move us.”
The wind boomed and hissed and made the long green grass lie down by ranks and then pop up again as it shifted. It was a warm, fair spring day here in the Pampas, in western Uruguay. A crappy little country nobody up in el Norte knew about…
“I trust we’ll be able to leave the girl be for a spell, to find herself a place in this land, forsaken by the good Lord as it is,” Mrs. Clark said pointedly.
Tom shook his head. He realized his thoughts had wandered down a side path-and into a standing microsleep her voice had jarred him out of. It was the only kind of sleep he allowed himself these days. And mostly because he didn’t have a choice: it just snuck up on him.
“ Mr. L. Are you quite certain you’re listening to me?”
“Huh? Yeah. Sure. I-I just nodded off for a moment there. Been working late… in the office.”
She sniffed a sniff that plainly said, If you don’t want to tell me the truth, I’m sure it’s your business.
“Very well,” she said, taking in his red, sunken eyes and three-day stubble. “You can go in and see the girl.”
Nodding obediently, Tom stooped to pick up the big package he’d set before the doorstep. Its weight posed him no problem; it was big enough to be tricky to hold on to, though. It was wrapped in paper where fucking teddy bears cavorted with candy canes, and tied up with gold ribbon and a vast gold bow.
The girl of course was not much more than a decade the redheaded old dragon’s junior. But Sprout was, and would always be, a girl. The girl, to Mark.
“Tom!” he said aloud, snapping his head upright and clocking the top of it painfully on the doorjamb into the sheepherder’s hut he’d had refurbished as another bolt-hole months before. “I’m Tom, God damn it. Not fucking Mark.”
Behind him Mrs. Clark sniffed loudest of all. No need to wonder what that one meant.
“Sprout?” he called tentatively. “Sprout, honey?”
“I’m in here,” she called.
The place was dimly lit by electric lights powered off a generator fueled from huge buried liquid propane tanks-some of Tom’s make over. All his efforts couldn’t stop it smelling of lanolin and ancient cigarette smoke. Some elderly wool rugs, their once-bold patterns faded by age and various accretions, didn’t help much with either smell.
He knelt and set down the gift-wrapped box. Straightening and turning, he hit his head on the frame of the door at the end of the low hallway. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“ Mr. L.!” came Mrs. Clark’s reproving bark.
“Sorry. Fuck.” He ducked low and stepped in.
Sprout lay on her belly on a futon with a red and black flannel spread, her stockinged feet in the air. His heart turned over. The half-assed light of a bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling made her look for an instant as if she really was the age she acted. She was just turning, plucking an iPod earbud from beneath a sweep of grey-threaded blond hair.
“Daddy!” she said. Her face lit with a smile. She jumped off the bed, leaving a big hardcover book open to show color paintings of dinosaurs. She caught Tom in a fierce hug and buried her face against his chest. “You’re coming home.”
He blinked. He wasn’t thinking too clearly. But he’d be okay. He always was. “Uh-yeah. Yeah, sweetie. I’ll be coming home to stay. Like, soon. Once I take care of some… uh, business.”
A great sense of peace flowed through him. It was as if the warmth of her body suffused his soul. He sagged. His eyes sagged with foolish tears. Knock off the bourgeois sentimentality, he ordered himself sternly.
But it was just-just such a relief. To feel safe. Accepted. Loved.
I don’t want to leave, he thought.
His daughter pulled away. She looked into his blue eyes with clearer ones the same hue. Tears ran down her smooth cheeks. She smiled. It seemed a touch sad, somehow. “You’re going away,” she said.
He shrugged. “Well, sweetie, a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. It’s my duty. Like, destiny.”
She reached up and took his face in both hands. He blinked in surprise. She’d never done that before. Sprout pulled his face toward hers. Uncomprehending, he yielded.
She kissed his forehead.
“Good-bye,” she said, speaking more carefully than usual. “You tried your very bestest to make everything all right for me. Thank you.”
She let him go. He smiled at her. “Sure, Sprout. Anything for you, honey.”
He turned back to the low dim hallway. “Here,” he said, turning back with the huge box cradled dubiously in his arms. “Merry Christmas.”
She squealed with delight. “Oh, what is it? What, what, what?”
“Open it and find out.”
As she dropped to her knees and began to tug at the bow he crooked a grin and nodded at the open book on her bed. “I hope you like dinosaurs.”
Blythe van Renssaeler
Memorial Clinic, Jokertown
Manhattan, New York
The third season of American Hero was playing on the static-ridden television mounted in the corner of her room.
Jerusha watched it mostly because it was easier than turning her head. Peregrine was interviewing someone called Adamantine, whose disturbingly smooth body looked like it was computer-generated rather than real. Their words sounded like so much mush in Jerusha’s ear. “I’m very proud to have been chosen for this show,” Adamantine droned in a voice pitched heroically low. “I’m ready to prove myself here, and to prove to America that I deserve to be the next American Hero, like the great heroes who have been here before me.”
Do you know how stupid you all sound? she wanted to rail at Peregrine, at Adamantine.
It was all so petty, so unimportant. That was the one lesson she’d taken away from her own stint on the program: none of it mattered at all.
Dr. Finn cantered into the room, his hooves bagged in sterile slippers, muffling the clatter against the linoleum floors. The centaur snagged the chart from the wall holder, glancing over it. His blond head-the hair touched with grey at the temples-shook as he made a note and placed it back. He placed his pen back in the pocket of the lab coat he wore.
“Take two aspirin and call you in the morning?” Jerusha said.
He favored her with a wry smile. “I wish it were that simple.”
“Pretty much anything would be simpler than this.” Jerusha lifted an arm, stabbed with a double set of IVs. She was surrounded by a metal forest of poles with plastic fluid bags hanging from them. A tray piled with plastic-domed plates sat on one side of the bed, from which wafted the smell of cafeteria food.
Finn’s tail flicked, almost angrily. “Your body’s locked in overdrive, Jerusha. You’re burning up calories at an impossible rate. But your digestive system isn’t absorbing nutrients very well at all. That’s why you’re constantly famished. Your body’s devouring itself because that’s all it has to feed on.”
“So tell me that you can fix it.” She saw the answer before he spoke, and fear stabbed her. “You can’t, can you?”
“Not yet. We’re still running tests, and we have a few ideas to try. We’ll figure this out.”
“You do a good job of sounding confident, Doc. And if you don’t figure it out?”
“We will,” he said firmly. “Now, get some rest, and let me get back to my lab work. I’d hate for you to think that we’ve been taking all that blood for nothing.” He checked her IV levels, patted her shoulder, and left the room. She smiled at him, because she thought it was what he would want to see. The brave patient, suffering in silence.
When the door closed, she let the smile collapse. Dying. You’re dying. She could feel it, a certainty in the pit of her stomach. She was going to leave this all. Soon.
She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. She shouldn’t feel pity for herself, not when so many others were suffering and had suffered worse. She thought of New Orleans, of Bubbles, Ink, and Hoodoo Mama. She thought of her parents-on their way here from Yosemite, Dr. Finn had told her.
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