Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “Pregnant tree?”

  “Up there. You see that?” Jake said. “Partway up the hill. There.” He took off, running up the rise toward a strange-looking tree, its trunk bent. In profile, the bend looked like a protruding belly.

  Maggie was right behind him. “It has to be it. The ‘tree pregnant and showing.’ ” She read the next lines: “then seek among fallen one whose life’s long bereft.” Just downhill from the pregnant tree was a fallen trunk, well on its way to total decay. She made her way over, palms sweating now. She ran her fingers over the green and brown moss clinging to the exterior of the trunk, tapped on it with her knuckles. It responded with a soft thunk.

  “It’s hollow,” she said. She knelt down and aimed the flashlight inside. The core of the trunk was completely gone. Diffuse light filtered partly down the hollow horizontal shaft, but the trunk bent and the deepest reaches were hidden in darkness. She felt her way along the soft, wet, decaying wood.

  “Ahh!” she yelped, and whipped her hand out.

  “What?”

  “Something moved in there.”

  “What?”

  “I think it was a worm or a bug or something.” She put her arm back in, shoulder pressed hard against the opening. “Nothing.”

  Jake read the next lines.

  “A new kingdom you seek, so continue the fight,

  to a marriage of royals, darkness and light.

  Can’t find them here, this geezer and hag?

  Then seek among stones, don’t dally or lag.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I think I get it now.”

  “What?”

  “How much do you know about the kingdoms of life?”

  “There are six, right? Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi. And the other ones.”

  “Archaea and protists. Now. Look what Liam said. A marriage of royals. Different kingdoms. I think he meant a lichen. A lichen is a symbiote, part fungus and part algae. The fungus gives the algae water and minerals, like a gardener. The algae, in turn, produce food for the fungus by photosynthesis. A symbiotic relationship between different kingdoms.”

  Jake finally got it. “A marriage of royals.”

  Maggie nodded.

  Jake shook his head. “You’re telling me Liam wanted you to look for a lichen?”

  “I think so.”

  ONCE THEY HAD THE IDEA, IT TOOK LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES to find it. Maggie squatted before a collection of rocks arranged in a loose pile. She lifted one off the top and showed it to Jake: a mottled, crusty growth on the rocks, like old paint, some patches reddish and the others yellow. Separating them was a twisted pattern of cracks, like dried mud.

  “It’s two species of crustose lichen,” Maggie said. “When they meet, they put out chemicals that repel each other, form a kind of barrier. The black sections are the no-man’s-land. They both agree to stay off each other’s turf. They’re intertwined but two distinct organisms.”

  She picked up the lichen-covered stones until she found a square metal box below.

  She stood, the object cradled in her hands. Jake held the flashlight on it. It was a rusted lunchbox, Scooby-Doo on the outside.

  Tears came to her eyes. “I haven’t seen this in years.”

  “It was yours?”

  Maggie nodded. “Pop-pop bought it for me when I was maybe six.”

  Maggie unfastened the latches, her fingers trembling.

  Inside was a plastic Baggie containing something hard and disk-shaped. She stood, holding it in her palm gently. She could make out three luminescent smears on the disk, each a different color. “Turn off the flashlight,” she said.

  “Wow,” he said. “It’s glowing.”

  The glowing slowly pulsed, brightening and fading, almost like breathing.

  She carefully opened the Baggie. Inside was a round piece of wood. On it were three patches of fuzzy fungal growth, like mold on bread, except that each was glowing a different color, one red, one green, one yellow. Three distinct patterns. A yellow mushroom. A green arrowhead. And a red spider-creature that looked, Maggie realized, like a MicroCrawler.

  Maggie understood.

  The symbols for her. Dylan.

  And Jake.

  She looked to Jake. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  The three symbols pulsed with life.

  Though comes the darkness, though the cold winds blow,

  This will banish the worst, set the whole world aglow.

  “Jake?”

  “I don’t understand. The colors.”

  “Green fluorescent protein. It’s a gene extracted from a jellyfish. The red is…” She stopped, too choked up to speak. She turned to Jake, then looked back down at the three symbols. Her tears were flowing now, buds of rain sliding down her cheeks.

  She looked again at the piece of wood. “Why?” she said, her voice cracking. She started to quiver, as if the pent-up grief was about to burst through her skin. “This is all you left us, Pop-pop? You shove a few genes in a fungus, make it glow? Why?”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie.”

  She looked out at the woods as though Liam was there, waiting. “This is your goodbye? This is it? This is all you have to say?”

  15

  TISH PAIGE WAS PASSED-OUT TIRED. THE ER HAD BEEN RELATIVELY quiet, but she’d been on duty for twelve hours straight. And before that, a marathon clubbing stretch followed by maybe the best sex she’d ever had. A speed-freak boyfriend was proving to be hard on her. If he wasn’t so damned cute, she’d toss him out. She’d get off shift, he’d be at her flat, one day naked, the next day dressed to the nines, but always with an agenda that would sweep her away from all the blood and broken needles. Didn’t matter the time—she typically dragged in around two a.m.—because as far as she could tell, he never slept. She was beginning to think that was what he saw in her—the odd hours of an ER resident. Someone to be up with him while the rest of the world slept.

  “Dr. Paige? We got an odd one.”

  She pulled herself to her feet, entered the staging area. The patient on the gurney was an Asian male, strapped down at the waist. An intern named Kaster was working him over.

  “What is going on with him?”

  “We don’t know exactly yet. A woman dumped him off in Times Square. Had him in the trunk. He was screaming in the ambulance, so they sedated him. Said it took their entire stock.”

  Paige looked him over. Japanese, she thought. His right hand was bandaged, bloody.

  “What’s the deal there?”

  “Missing his middle finger. Recent. Last forty-eight hours. Someone cut it off, then crudely cauterized it.”

  She scrunched her nose. A strong odor, like urine, was in the air. “You smell that?”

  “Yeah. He stinks. It’s coming off him. Like it’s in his sweat.”

  “Vitals?”

  “Reasonable, except his temperature. It’s low—96.5. Don’t know why. We’ve started standard toxicology tests, but nothing definite yet. I’m betting it’s one of the new designer drugs gone bad. Whatever it was, it packed a punch. Look at this.”

  Intern Kaster pulled open the gown, revealing the strange symbols on the man’s chest, some kind of Chinese lettering. What looked like a lowercase t, followed by three horizontal dashes, then a single dash.

  Kaster pointed. “See the crusts of blood around the wound? Dried. It’s been there for a while. You think he carved it himself?”

  “No,” said Paige. “The cuts are remarkably clean. Someone took some care here. He looks way too messed up to do that. You know what it means?”

  “We got Yasuki, the X-ray tech, up here. He said the first part is a number—731. The second line is Mandarin for Devil.”

  Paige frowned. “You said a woman dropped him off. Maybe some kind of S-and-M thing?”

  “If so, count me out.”

  She started a physical investigation of the man. Young, fit. No needle tracks. None of the loose skin or bruises she normally found on a drug addict, even functioning ones. Pai
ge nervously tapped a fingernail against her front tooth.

  She wasn’t sure what, but something about all this struck a chord. Especially the number. She looked at Kaster. “Google 731.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  She checked his pulse. It was slow, steady. Then the pupils. They were saucers, and completely unresponsive to light. But she couldn’t be certain if it was because of what he’d taken or the sedatives the paramedics had loaded him up on. She glanced at Kaster. She was bent over the computer, clicking on the keys. Kaster said, “Oh, wow.”

  “What?”

  “There was something called Unit 731. During World War Two.” She went quiet, scanning the screen.

  “And?”

  “It was some kind of bioweapons research facility. Japanese.” She kept reading, her face going slack. “Jesus. Listen to this. They used Chinese civilians as test subjects. Some American and Russian POWs, too. The guy who ran it, Shiro Ishii? They say he was the Japanese equivalent of Josef Mengele.”

  Paige froze. “They used people as guinea pigs? For biological weapons testing?”

  She nodded. “It gets worse. There’s a big warning on this page—saying that the pictures on this site are extremely graphic. Don’t go any further if you are easily upset.” Her fingers clicked on the keyboard. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Paige looked over her shoulder. On the screen was a black-and-white photo of a Japanese doctor next to a metal autopsy table. The man on the table was sliced wide open. “Look at the caption,” Kaster said. “The guy was alive when they did this.”

  “Live autopsies? How come I’ve never heard of this?”

  “I don’t know. But apparently these guys were working on everything. Anthrax. Black plague. Everything.”

  “He’s moving!” Paige said. He’d gotten the strap off his waist and had lifted himself up on one arm, turning sideways. They grabbed him, and he fell back down on his stomach. In a few seconds, he was limp again. “Come on,” Paige ordered, all the weariness gone. “Let’s get full blood panels on this guy.”

  Kaster whistled. “Look at that.”

  A number was freshly tattooed low on his back, across the lumbar region.

  800-232-4636

  Paige was in hypervigilance mode now. Every nerve was standing on end.

  “What do you suggest we do?” Kaster said.

  “Call it.”

  Kaster picked up the phone on the far wall, punched in the number. A second later, she lowered the phone, looking ashen.

  “And?”

  “It’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

  Paige snapped up straight. “No one leaves. Seal off this room. Now.”

  16

  JAKE AND MAGGIE STOOD ON THE BACK PORCH, LEANING ON the railing and watching the darkness. When they’d returned from Ellis Hollow, Maggie had shown the glowing fungi to her son. Dylan had been solemn, watching the red, green, and yellow fungi slowly pulse and fade. Two months ago, Dylan said, Pop-pop had been telling him about the latest Nobel Prize in chemistry. It was for the use of fluorescent proteins, how the genes for them could be inserted into any organism, and that organism would glow. He’d promised Dylan a demonstration. Apparently, this was it.

  Maggie, with an assist from Dylan, had convinced Jake to stay. Her housemates were there, along with two boyfriends: Josephine, Eric, Yvette, Cindy, and Bryan. Yvette and Josephine had dinner going; everyone drank wine from old jelly jars. Jake was completely taken in by the conversation, the mix of warmth and humor, sadness and hope. The quiet but steadfast sympathy they all expressed to Maggie and Dylan. Jake had the strong sense of family, even if no bloodlines were shared. He knew that Maggie’s parents were both dead, and her aunt and cousins were not due until the funeral.

  Afterward, Jake and Maggie had drifted away from the rest, onto the back porch, winter coats on and holding steaming mugs of tea. They’d swapped stories about Liam for the better part of an hour, missing him more with each one. The last story had been Maggie’s, about the time Liam had taken her fungus hunting in Treman State Park, a few miles to the west. “I was six,” she said. “Believe it or not, I found a new species. He named it after me.”

  “Really?”

  “Cordyceps margaretae. It makes an immunosuppressant that is sometimes used in transplant surgeries. I still get a little in royalties.” She laughed. “It was a setup, I’m sure. But he always denied it. Said I was the luckiest little girl he’d ever seen.”

  The back door opened and Dylan came out, Turtle trailing behind. The two dissolved into the darkness of the yard, barely visible in the spare moonlight. Dylan stopped under the lights at the door to the greenhouse, then cupped his hands together and blew into them. He held his hands out, as if he was ceremoniously letting the breath go. After a few seconds, he dropped his arms and continued on inside the greenhouse.

  Maggie saw Jake watching, puzzled.

  “The spreading of the breaths,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “An interesting little fact. How every breath contains every other one.”

  “I’m not getting it.”

  “Do you know how many gas molecules are in a breath?”

  Jake started working on it. “Let’s see. Air is about a thousand times less dense than water. So—”

  Maggie smiled. “Wait. I’ll tell you. About ten to the twenty-second power. And that’s about the same as the number of breaths in the world.”

  “Okay…”

  “It means that once Dylan’s breath spreads out, when someone, anyone, anywhere in the world takes a breath, it’ll have one molecule from that breath Dylan just released.”

  Jake inspected the idea, looking for threads. “It must work the other way, too? Every breath we take in has a molecule from every breath anyone else ever took?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s disturbing somehow.”

  “It can be.”

  “You taught Dylan this?”

  “Liam did.”

  Jake heard a band of geese flying overhead. Heading south. “He was a helluva man, your grandfather. One of the few people in the world I truly looked up to.”

  She turned to face him. “He really respected you, Jake. He thought you were a very decent man.”

  “It’s an ex-soldier thing. Different armies, different wars, it doesn’t matter. There’s a bond.”

  “It was more than that.”

  Jake didn’t know what to say to that. Instead he watched Dylan at work in the greenhouse, a watering can in his hand.

  “Can I ask you something?” Maggie said tentatively. “Something I always wondered?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why did you join the Army?”

  “You want the real answer?”

  She laughed. “No. Give me the fake one.”

  “Okay, I will. The fake one is that I needed money for college.”

  “And the real one?”

  “I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  She took it in, nodding. “That’s more or less what Pop-pop said. Why he joined during World War Two. The Irish hated the British, had been under their thumb for eight hundred years. Some people called him a traitor.” She glanced at him. “What was it like?”

  “The Gulf War? The thing I remember most is the sand. It got in everything, in your hair, in your bed, in the guns, in the food. You got used to the grind of it between your teeth.

  “We spent six months in the desert, waiting, in the sand. I was a combat engineer. In the Forty-sixth Battalion. We were in support of the First Infantry Division. We made the bridges. The camps. The roads. We had it best, the engineers. We had something to do. We were always at work, putting up new forward compounds, improving the roads, clearing them after the sandstorms would sweep through. The combat grunts had it worse. They just sat. Waiting to fight. Digging foxholes, the sand filling them, digging them again. It was hell on them, you could tell. They got crazier, weirder.”
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  “How long were you there?”

  “Almost six months. It was so damned hot, and as the invasion got close, every couple of days the bioweapons sirens would go off and we’d have to suit up. Everybody was sure Saddam had anthrax weapons, God knows what else. So we’d put on these full-body suits, gas masks, and sweat it out. You wanted to rip the damned thing off and at the same time you worried that some little microbe was going to sneak through a faulty seal and kill you.

  “Then, boom, the orders come down. We’re on the move, going in, crossing the border into Kuwait. Our orders are to blast forward, destroying everything in our path. But the Iraqis have all these trenches dug, these bunkers of sand pushed up. It was a total pain in the ass. You could blow them up, but there weren’t enough bombs to do the whole thing. So the plan was send in the armored bulldozers, create a breach, then we’d send in mechanized units to get in behind them, then attack from the rear.

  “But then someone had an idea. Use bulldozers.”

  Jake looked up. “It was one of those ideas that had a kind of rough elegance. Why the hell not? Who needs to kill them with bullets when you can bury them in sand? All you need is a big shovel. The idea floated up through the chain of command, then came back down again. Get your bulldozers ready.”

  Jake shook his head. “You know, we engineers, we’re one step away. We just built the roads. It’s different, building the roads.”

  “It sounds terrible.”

  “It was. The Iraqis didn’t have a chance in hell. Some saw us coming and ran. Others stayed, just disappeared as the sand swept over them, like a crab on the shore when the tide pushed in. The worst were the ones halfway between. They’d finally get what was about to happen, and they’d pop up, maybe thirty yards in front of the blade. But it was too late. Our orders were clear. Keep plowing.

  “One guy I’ll always remember. He charged me. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. He had this stupid sidearm, he was running at the bulldozer, firing into the blade. He wasn’t even trying to hit me. He just kept firing into the blade. He was screaming. You couldn’t hear it, not for the engines, all the other crazy shit happening, but he was screaming, yelling, charging. Then he went under, like all the rest. He was gone.” Jake shook his head. “Can we talk about something else?”