by Robert Ovies
It was Marie who answered the doctor’s question. She said in a voice that sounded as dead as her aunt, “Leah was killed, Uncle John.”
Kieran wheeled to face Crawl. “What about Brenna? Tell me what happened!”
The doctor’s right hand released the open door of the truck. He moved toward Crawl and Kieran.
“I told you, she’ll be here!” Crawl yelled at Kieran. “So ask me again and I’ll blow your face off. My brother is dying, Kieran, don’t you see this?”
He turned to the doctor. “My brother dies, your niece dies!” His voice shimmered with rising panic. “And her baby dies, too! So get over here and help me with him. Now!”
The wind gusted hard, filling the gathering darkness with clouds of dust.
Kieran backed up another step. He kept his gun leveled at the doctor. He was shaking his head, muttering, “This is unbelievable. This is unbelievable.”
The doctor set his jaw and slid his arms under Michael’s knees.
Crawl, pulling to lift Michael’s shoulders, said to Kieran, “Keep the girl in sight. She runs, this whole thing’s for nothing. She’s already tried it, so stay with her no matter what.”
But Marie did not run. Her expression looked very much like that of the man being pulled from the open tailgate of the pickup.
Kieran stood beside her. “Nobody will hurt you, girl. I promise. Nobody wanted this.”
Marie turned to him with a blank look. She whispered, “You go to hell.”
Kieran grasped her arm lightly and guided her toward the front door.
Crawl and the doctor were right behind them, carrying Michael by his shoulders and knees as his head bobbed like a heavy branch in the wind.
“You drop him,” Crawl said to the doctor, “and I swear it, your sister won’t be the only dead one in your family.”
The doctor shot Crawl a steely glance but said nothing.
Kieran swung open the front door of the house. He flipped the light switch inside the door and guided the girl through the front hallway, then pulled her aside to let the men pass with Michael.
As Crawl struggled past him toward the living room, Kieran asked him again, this time in a groan, “How did all this happen, Crawl?”
“I don’t know,” Crawl said bitterly, without looking up. “I wasn’t there.”
Michael had bled six drops on the polished oak of the doctor’s entrance hall. He bled more, both from his mouth and his nose, as his head sagged sideways into the cushion of the beige couch in the living room. But he was still breathing.
“Fix him,” Crawl said to the doctor, partly commanding, partly asking. Anything to keep Michael alive.
The doctor said, “Elevate his feet,” and Kieran lifted Michael’s ankles onto the opposite arm of the couch.
Marie walked to a leather chair and lowered herself to the edge of the seat. No longer dazed, she was staring at her uncle, who had gone down on one knee to open the shirt of the man who had killed his sister.
“He’s still bleeding,” the doctor said.
“He’s still alive,” Crawl countered.
“It’s internal.”
“You can fix him.”
“He has broken ribs. He sounds like he may have a collapsed lung.”
“Somebody collapsed it for him.”
The doctor looked up. “Leah hit him with her car?”
“Just fix him. You were an internist. You’ve done surgery.”
“This man needs a hospital. What can I do here?”
“He’s not ‘this man’. He’s my brother, Michael.”
“He’s a badly injured man who needs a hospital.”
Kieran said to Crawl, “He has a lab. It’s upstairs. An office, too, where the computer is. I put the phones in there, but he may have one I couldn’t find.”
“He may be bleeding from his stomach,” the doctor said. “In his chest cavity, his lungs, around his heart. He needs a hospital. Not a mountain clinic, the hospital in Santa Fe.”
Crawl said, “If he’s bleeding inside, he hasn’t got time to get to a hospital. You know that better than I do.”
“I can’t even take an X-ray.”
Crawl said, “You’re very close to having a dead niece, I swear to God.”
“And you’re very close to letting your brother die. You could meet the ambulance halfway, between here and Santa Fe. You could be twenty miles closer to them by now, they, twenty miles closer to your brother.”
“You can stop the bleeding,” Crawl said, raising his voice. “Do it, you son of a bitch.”
Kieran stepped forward. He said to the doctor, speaking loudly, with an urgency of his own, “How much can you do?”
The doctor looked at Marie. His niece’s eyes were closed. He thought for a second. He said in a flat voice, “I can equalize his lungs. If it’s pericardial, I may be able to draw blood from around his heart. A catheter to his stomach, if that’s bleeding. Let gravity drain it. I don’t know.”
Crawl said, flatly, “Michael can’t die, Kieran.”
Kieran handed Crawl his gun and thrust one arm under Michael’s shoulder. His other arm went under Michael’s knees. “He does cloning here,” he said, standing up with Michael in his arms. “He’s got his own lab. He can stop Michael’s bleeding here.”
The doctor looked again at Marie. Her eyes were still closed.
He said, “Marie?”
Kieran was moving Michael to the stairs.
“Marie,” the doctor said again.
She still didn’t open her eyes.
Crawl said to Kieran, but loudly enough so all could hear, “If Michael dies, Kieran, don’t you get in my way.”
Brenna hated the last half hour more than she had hated anything she could remember in her whole life. She hated the blood, the stupidity; how everything suddenly went to pieces with the biggest chance she would ever get—all going to hell with no sense to it at all. She hated the violence of it, too. She hated being terrified, being in a foreign country, having to get into the car next to the dead woman, having to push her puffy body to the side and sitting in her bloody seat.
She hated it so much she talked out loud to the old lady all the way to the swampy area of the woods. She told her, nearly shouting, that it must have been her fault that the old man wanted the DNA in the first place. Told her she was glad she was dead, that none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for her. Asked her why she wasn’t happy just to be rich and to live in America in a big house with her smart brother and her pretty little niece. But no. She had to give her brother crazy ideas about raising Jesus and then to harass him until he went along with her.
She said all of that and more.
She never said she was sorry.
When she arrived back at the house she was red-eyed, bloodied and out of breath, her hands and arms soiled from digging to hide the gun.
She rushed into the house just as Kieran was approaching the stairs with Michael limp and bloody in his arms. The tall man, the one she knew must be the doctor, stopped to stare at her with dark, glaring eyes.
He was wishing her dead and she knew it.
She looked away, first at the girl, who was in front of Crawl and who seemed drugged, then at Crawl with an automatic hanging from each arm as if they weighed fifty pounds.
She moved closer to Kieran, not knowing what else to do, and touched Michael’s arm. “Oh,” she whispered, “he’s so bloody. Will he make it?”
“He’s alive,” Kieran said.
“Thank God.”
Then she saw Crawl staring at her, and the look in his eyes took her breath away. He looked so different from the man they had downed many stouts with and had laughed with and had come to America with on a great adventure for seven and a half million U.S. dollars, which would fall into their laps without anyone getting hurt.
He looked as though he hated her. But why? Her heart raced. Did Crawl know that she had set off the whole bloody episode? Did the girl tell him that when Crawl had her al
one on the way back to the house?
She felt like screaming again or running or both.
Kieran started up the stairs, moving away from her. The doctor followed him.
Crawl moved toward her.
She wondered with an overwhelming sense of helplessness if her expression was confirming what she was sure he had heard. She struggled to breathe normally, swallowing hard, mindful of her eyes and her lips, holding them in what felt like a relaxed position, trying to keep them slightly open, not tense.
“You stay down here with the girl,” Crawl said quietly.
Brenna breathed more easily.
“Keep her in the other room, out of our way.”
She nodded and closed her mouth. Her mind groped desperately for something to say that would turn his attention away from her.
Incredibly, she heard herself say, “Are you going to get him to transfer the money now, from upstairs?”
It was her own voice and her own question, but the sheer stupidity of it startled her. It was why they had come to this terrible place where everything had gone wrong, but even as the words came out of her mouth, she realized that, with Michael maybe fatally injured and Crawl tied so closely to him, she had made another terrible mistake.
She said weakly, before Crawl could respond, “When Michael’s okay, I mean. You know what I mean.”
Crawl nodded and looked her up and down, as if figuring out the answer took an enormous amount of thought. “In due time,” he muttered.
Brenna nodded back at him as she edged away and moved toward Marie.
She saw Kieran with Michael, both of them motionless at the top of the stairs, Kieran watching her and Crawl with sad eyes.
He seemed to have climbed a thousand miles away from her.
16
Blood bubbled on Michael’s lips as he labored on the white-sheeted table in the doctor’s upstairs lab, trying not to leave his brother and wife and son forever.
The doctor cut away his shirt. There was a bloody tear in his chest, on the left side and low, and deep bruises had already formed across his abdomen. His skin looked as thin as toilet tissue.
Crawl stood at the foot of the table, staring.
Kieran, standing at his side, muttered, “At least there’s breath.”
It meant nothing to point it out. He just wanted it to be said.
The doctor, looking grim, gathered a stethoscope, a blood pressure monitor and a stainless steel instrument case, which he placed next to Michael’s head. Then he brought out several hypodermic needles, including one that was very large, plus two small bottles and a small stack of white towels.
“Tell us what you’re doing,” Crawl said.
The doctor slipped the stethoscope on and pressed its black circle against Michael’s neck, chest and abdomen. “I’ll try to equalize his lung,” the doctor said with neither inflection nor emotion. “It’s punctured.” He picked up the largest of the hypodermic needles and inserted it deep into Michael’s chest, on the left side, between the third and fourth rib.
Crawl started to pace, his eyes locked on Michael.
Kieran said, very quietly, “Easy, Crawl.”
Crawl looked at him and muttered in a hard voice, “He’s gonna kill him, Kieran. He’ll kill Michael to get even for his sister.”
The doctor said without looking up, “If you care about him as much as you want us to believe, you’ll let me call an ambulance.”
“He dies, the girl dies,” Crawl repeated in a sharp, low voice. “And the clone baby, too.”
“Maybe we should let him call the ambulance,” Kieran said.
“All an ambulance gets us is the police. If Michael dies, just don’t get in my way,” Crawl said again.
Kieran fell silent. He watched the needle in the doctor’s hand and noticed the glisten of sweat on his brow. The doctor, not knowing what to do. Something new for him, Kieran felt sure. He was thinking, though, Kieran was sure of that. All the time the doctor was working on Michael, the man was getting ready for something, like a cornered bear.
Kieran wondered if they were watching Michael’s life drain away or if he really had any chance at all. And if he did die, it wouldn’t be only his life that was lost, but the plans they had made together, the money, and, in fact, their lives too, his and Brenna’s.
For the first time, he felt fear grip at him like a claw. It was all going to end badly, and they wouldn’t even be at home in Ireland when it happened.
Michael dies, the girl dies, Crawl said. But who was he to make that decision? If Michael dies, don’t get in his way, he said. Twice now. But who was he to tell Kieran that, when his and Brenna’s lives were on the line?
Deeper memories surged back. Belfast and home, the smell of cold rain on cold streets, school lunches of biscuits and sausage eaten on hardwood green benches, his mother singing her gospel songs with his sister, Colleen, who died before any of them and who really did look a lot like the girl Marie.
He moved suddenly, jerking his head up and inhaling deeply.
The doctor had finished aspirating the lung. “I’ll see if his stomach is bleeding,” he said flatly, eyeing both of them for several seconds. “I’ll try to drain it with a catheter. The ambulance could have been halfway here by now. You’d be meeting it already, back on the highway to Santa Fe.”
Michael, still with them, moaned lightly.
Crawl said something to Kieran from what seemed like a distance, but Kieran wasn’t paying attention. He wondered if Michael felt pain while he was dying in front of their eyes, and, if he did, if it was deep and terrible or something as distant and as light as his moan.
And he thought again about the black-haired teenager, not much younger than Colleen was when she died, who was sitting downstairs assaulted and scared on the couch with Michael’s blood on it. The only one of them that hadn’t done anything wrong. The one with God-only-knew-what growing in her belly and having to come out.
Crawl had moved to Michael’s side, across the table from the doctor.
At least he still had his weapon, Kieran told himself. He and Brenna both.
The doctor had gathered several feet of thin, clear plastic tubing. He was applying a lubricant to the end of the tube.
Kieran stepped abruptly forward and exclaimed, “Wait!”
Crawl stared at him blankly. So did the doctor.
“Get the tape!” Kieran said, suddenly animated with a surge of excitement. “Get the tape that touched the shroud, the tape with the blood on it!” He rushed to Crawl and grabbed him by the arm. “Crawl, we can try the tape on Michael!”
“Try the tape? What does that mean?”
“The blood. Remember what he said about touching the tape to his niece if she was dying, because if it really was the blood of Jesus, it could heal her?”
“But she wasn’t dying,” Crawl said. “He was lying and he’s crazy. What are you talking about?”
Kieran waved his hand and shook his head. What were the right words? “I’m saying, it doesn’t matter if he was lying about the girl having cancer, not if the blood is real. If it’s the real blood of Jesus, it’s worth a try, isn’t it? What if it does have power? What if it would make him well?”
Crawl was incredulous. “Touch him with it?”
“Yes! Just touch it to him and let’s see what happens.”
“Touch Michael with his tape?” he said angrily, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
Kieran swung around to face the doctor. “Get the tape!” he demanded. “It’ll take you ten seconds.”
Crawl’s eyes had narrowed to slits. “You’re serious,” he said.
“Ten seconds, Crawl. Nobody’s ever touched it to somebody who’s been dying. We can try! Why isn’t it worth a try?”
Crawl paused, blinked, then nodded firmly and said, “Okay. Ten seconds.” He spun to the doctor. “You’ve got ten seconds. Get the tape!”
“I don’t understand,” the doctor said, looking puzzled.
“Get the tape!” Crawl turned suddenly, rushed to the counters and shelves on the other side of the room and began sweeping bottles and silver containers with instruments in them onto the floor as quickly as he could rifle through them. “Where do you have it?”
“I don’t have it.”
Kieran moved toward the doctor, his weapon held chest high. “You wouldn’t lose something like that,” he said. “Get the tape!”
The doctor shook his head. “After I was sure the implant was successful,” he said, “I took the tape into the woods and buried it where I could never find it again.”
Kieran grabbed him by the lapel of his sport coat with his free hand and pushed him against the wall. “This is not the time to be lying.”
The doctor stared at him without expression. “You thought of it yourself, don’t you remember? What happens if I make fifty clones, or a hundred? I deliberately confused my path so I couldn’t do that. This is a work of God. I was afraid I’d make it my own work, be tempted to go back and do it again and again. I did the only thing I could think of to protect myself from that, and now I can’t get it back. It’s impossible.”
Crawl’s outburst had scattered instruments and materials across the floor. He shook his head suddenly and said to Kieran, “The hell with it. It’s a joke, anyway.” Then, he wheeled around again and shouted at the doctor, “Do the catheter. Now! Now! Now!”
Kieran’s expression hardened, but just for an instant. “Start the catheter,” he said. “But I’m going to try something better than the tape.”
Crawl said, “Like what?”
“I’m going to get the girl.”
The doctor’s head came up and his eyes flashed.
“She doesn’t know where he’d have the tape,” Crawl said. “She didn’t even know about it.”
“Leave the girl alone,” the doctor said, nearly growling.
“I don’t mean so she can find the tape,” Kieran said, animated again. “I mean, if it’s really Jesus’ DNA, then she’s carrying his own clone inside of her, and that could mean she has powers you and I can’t even imagine.”
Marie didn’t like the red-headed woman staring at her, not talking, sitting on the far arm of the couch with both feet on the cushion, her left boot on one side of the dying man’s blood, her right on the other. The woman held her gun in her right hand, her arm hung over her knee. Her other arm rested along the back of the couch.