The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  Anna’s face crumpled, her shoulders began to heave, and her mouth distorted into a silent oval as if issuing a howl of rage, the only sounds being the “chuff” of expelled breath through her tube as she sobbed.

  He moved to put his arms around her, half expecting to be pushed away, even in her weakened state. But she didn’t resist, rather clung to him, as volley after volley of mute crying continued to convulse her body. Finally she clasped his face between her hands. Tell me everything, she mouthed.

  He talked about his time with Yuri, every detail, until, to his surprise, he found himself laughing over the man’s outrageous exploits, from charming and bribing his way past officials to hiding in a hologram.

  Did he fuck the co-pilot? Anna scribbled.

  Terry nodded.

  Then he died a happy gangster.

  Strange. She’d always refused to act like the conventional ex-wife, but her lack of jealousy rang hollow. “No,” he said, wanting to give Yuri greater due. “He died trying to save a little girl, and the whole trip was his way to save you and Kyra. I liked him, Anna. I goddamned grew to like him.”

  Anna smiled and went to work with the pencil again. He was always my and Kyra’s guardian angel. No matter what trouble he got into, he’d ultimately put us first.

  Terry’s mind added, And I didn’t.

  Anna fell asleep in his arms. The feel of her against him--the physical sensation of her skin, her scent, the specific cadence of her breathing, all without the passion from years ago--ignited an odd sense of emptiness. The remnant--a sadness for what she’d lost or endured at the hands of himself, Yuri, the general, and everyone else who’d used or turned on her--settled over him.

  He continued to hold her, afraid she might wake with his leaving. Best not to disturb what fragile rest she could grab before the morphine wore off. She’d need all her strength to comfort Kyra. He’d be there as well, if wanted, to tell a daughter first hand how bravely her father had danced and weaved between the two most powerful nations in the world--all to protect his two greatest loves.

  * * * *

  An air ambulance arrived for Anna by early afternoon. Seaside, the downdraft from its rotors joined gusts of a raw east wind in sending spume fresh off the tops of waves and dervishes of snow spiraling across the lawn.

  Terry walked beside the stretcher as the attendants wheeled her toward the craft. Jade accompanied him, clinging to his hand, afraid to leave his side since waking up in a house full of strangers. She kept glancing up at him, her round face luminous in the silvery, winter light, fear shimmering in her black eyes. Her small body seemed lost in the folds of a cranberry-red coat that one of the Secret Service women had fetched from a cedar chest in Anna’s condominium.

  “I used to wear that,” Kyra said to her, somehow able to manufacture a kind smile. “It’s nice and cozy.” Otherwise she seemed to float across the frozen ground, face blank and her gaze raw with pain.

  Terry didn’t know if she’d even heard all the things he’d said about her father’s bravery, or if any of that could even matter to a thirteen-year-old who just wanted her dad back.

  As they neared the helicopter, he leaned down to bid Anna goodbye. “I’ll phone ahead and make sure those Harvard whiz-kids treat you right.”

  She pressed a note into his hand.

  Kyra climbed on board, unable to look him in the eye. It was as if she feared seeing Yuri’s final moments locked behind Terry’s pupils, playing over and over.

  He and Jade stepped back, allowing the attendants to slide the door closed. Through the portal, he saw Kyra continue to avoid his gaze.

  He opened the note.

  Look after her for me, Ryder. You’re the only one I can ask.

  Love,

  Anna

  Chapter 37

  Weeks later

  Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital, New York City

  Two doomed women had entrusted their daughters to him, and a lot of other people were still going to die. Then there were those for whom arresting the advance of symptoms meant a status quo of intractable pain, malignant personality changes, or crippling disability. A rolling motion in his own arms shook him with more vehemence by the day, like an angry rebuke from a punishing spirit. Delays in treatment hadn’t helped.

  “Don’t move, Dr. Ryder.” The disembodied female voice came through overhead speakers, its hypnotic mellowness meant to relax him. It didn’t. His hands vibrated as he tried to rein them in, and the upturned faces of the five thousand on the Reagan visited as they often did, still holding him to his charge. Had he avenged their deaths? Of course not. Only God could do that. Yet a verdict on his actions remained frozen in their collective gaze, neither releasing nor condemning him. Yes, he had exposed those who’d murdered them. Yes, those directly involved in creating, testing, and releasing SHAKES had been dispatched with a rice-and-bullet breakfast. But no, this had not been justice, only a cover-up. Life would never be the same for so many, yet so few co-conspirators, instigators, and enablers would not pay a price or so much as say, “I’m sorry.” Their follies of greed, banditry, power, paranoia, hate, love, and ambition would go unpunished.

  As for the general, he spent his days incommunicado at Guantanamo Bay, awaiting court marshal and fending off China’s press for his extradition.

  “You must remain still, Dr. Ryder,” the technician reminded him.

  Easier said than done. Carla had reassured him that the tremors would get a little less once antibodies stopped gnawing at his brain. That didn’t help him now. “How about my mood swings? I’m thinking of keeping those,” he’d replied, half in jest. “It’s great how they let me slice and dice the idiots of the world.”

  “They also make you wildly impulsive. It’s sexy,” she’d said.

  He lay naked on a tray, targets painted on his skin with magic marker, and about to be slid into a gleaming metal cylinder that would destroy his immune system. The last thing he felt was sexy.

  Stunned might be a better word. Despite there being so much left to be done, his job was to lie still and do nothing. The president herself had ordered him into treatment. “Physician, heal thyself. The rest is up to a world of others, Ryder. You’ve shown the way. Let them put the remedies into play.”

  From mobilizing care for the hundreds of millions already sick to immunizing the billion-plus who still incubated rogue proteins at sub-clinical levels, the tasks were mammoth, the uncertainty paralyzing. When asked by reporters how long it would take for humankind to recover, he had said, “The middle ages had their wars that lasted a generation. I think we’re facing an aftermath of equal proportions. Look in any country. Societies all over the planet will be organized around the care of their sick from this thing, and that’ll be a burden for our lifetimes.”

  Except in China, he said to himself. In a fair world, they’d be made to shoulder the load. But Phillippa Holt’s decision to sit on their secret to avoid World War III, like his limb-for-a-life tradeoffs in ER, had nothing to do with fairness. It bought survival.

  A soft hum sounded under him, and the tray advanced into the tube, where he immediately felt claustrophobic, his nose two inches from the circular wall. “Just hurry it up. Now I know what those circus guys feel like waiting to get shot out of a cannon.”

  The technician laughed. “Lie still,” she repeated.

  Trying to will himself motionless, he felt increasingly suffocated in the closed space. Distracting thoughts raced to the rescue.

  He’d watched Carla receive her stem cells. The doctor who had spoken with him on the plane to Alberta, Sandra Dey, adapted a technique employed in marrow transplants, injecting the new tissue into the core of Carla’s femurs using a syringe the size of a turkey baster. The underlying premise--that omnipotent stem cells would develop into mature lines of leukocytes, thereby restoring her immune system, then read the rogue proteins already in place as normal host tissue and no longer mount a response against them--was like attempting to hit a RESET button. Whether
reality coincided with theory, time would tell. In the meanwhile she, as would he, must live in a space suit to avoid opportunistic infections, and take eight pills a day to stop any more production of the offending proteins. As for sufficient amounts of stem cells, no problem. China, it turned out, had been harvesting, culturing, and stockpiling them in bulk for years, building up the world’s single largest supply. Their labs could fill orders from anyone on the planet who could afford the price.

  The all-enveloping machine made a series of quiet clicks as the tray continued to feed him through the tunnel. “Down the rabbit hole,” he said.

  He’d been to his new job.

  And the nightmares of the chimera had returned.

  When he held Carla and told her about the horrors that stalked his sleep, it served as a surrogate confession, a way for him to unburden himself of the real-life obscenities in Robert Daikens’ secret laboratory that he walked among every day. Without her calming touch, he’d have suffocated whenever the massive doors guarding that chamber of secrets rumbled shut behind his back, and the elevators swallowed him into the earth.

  In time, he’d chain up those microbial armies by developing the antidotes and treatments to defeat them. I think the nightmares are gone, Carla, he would tell her one night in bed, the warmth of her body transferring optimism to him like heat.

  She would snuggle against him, and say, Good. They won’t dare come back, not with me on the job.

  At least his return to hope had begun.

  “All done, Dr. Ryder.” The tray rolled him out of the tube as if he were some new being coming off an assembly line. “Please get dressed, and put on the bioprotective suit,” his unseen, marrow-zapping techie instructed. “I left it with your clothing. You’ll find it much lighter and more comfortable than your hospital models. Best of all, the portable batteries are good for thirty-six hours. Just a warning--you may experience some nausea. For now, don’t stray far from a reverse isolation room, so you can peel off before you puke. Otherwise, you’ll never get that smell out of those outfits.”

  Carla stood in the reception area, waiting for him in her own state-of the-art biohazard suit. On her right, little Jade watched him warily with luminous eyes that were dark with worry. At her left, Kyra, still gaunt, but grief unable to flaw the inherited beauty of her mother’s porcelain features, attempted a smile. Since Anna’s death--the sepsis had overwhelmed her within days of her arrival at Mass General--Kyra had recognized in Jade a sister orphan whose loss had been as great as her own. With wounds so fresh, she took comfort from caring for the little girl to the point that Jade became her sole reason to get up in the morning. Risking even a tiny show of concern toward someone else at this point was a big step. Terry smiled back a her, grateful to be the recipient of so delicate a trust.

  Carla had an arm around each girl. Having opened her heart to them as if they were her own little sisters from day one, her ebullient spirit nurtured their courage, and had everything to do with Kyra’s and Jade’s bit-by-bit willingness to engage life again. “Look at the space man,” she said. “Let’s give him a big hug. He looks like he needs it. Then we leave Mr. Sicky-pants in his room, and go shopping. If I’m going to teach you guys how to surf snow, we’ll require boots and boards.”

  Their little circle closed around him, the embrace reigniting another type of optimism that had enveloped his thinking lately. Better alive with a mottled brain, shaky arms, and an uncertain future than dead. It was the old ER trade-off. For starters, not knowing whether he had weeks, months, or years certainly concentrated the mind. Plans became near-term, procrastination a scourge, and where the possibility of Carla’s death had nearly immobilized him, the prospect of his own demise energized him. From here on in, it would be seizing opportunities at hand and savoring every moment to the max. Nowhere did their urgency grow more heated than in bed. “Care to come back to my room after you settle the girls?” he whispered to Carla when Kyra and Jade were out of earshot. “I thought we might do a little more of our story telling.”

  She flushed, then smiled. “I’d like that.”

  Terry and Carla strolled to the glass foyer of the hospital, arms linked, and in the fading light of a winter afternoon, fell into a casual discussion about their immediate options, the way lovers often do. First off the mark, they finalized plans for his new-found family to “surf snow” in Colorado. If soaring down the slopes could be part of the healing, so be it. They also deemed opening up his homestead and settling in to be a doable, near-term goal. Beyond then, who knew? Carpe Diem. One day at a time. No man is promised tomorrow--all the clichés were true. As for seeing twelve moves ahead, kiss that strategy goodbye. Sure, someday he might dare look far enough forward to think, If we’re truly blessed, Carla and I will be there, side by side, to see them grow up. But for now, he’d settle on living in the present and having a chance, a day-at-a-time kind of hope. In a broken world awash with loss, just the possibility of spending a tomorrow with Carla, Kyra, and Jade made him the luckiest of men.

  They fell silent, watching Kyra lead Jade outside and show her how to make a snowball. “A chance,” he said, Carla tucked in close at his side, their arms still entwined. “We’ve bought ourselves a real chance.”

  Epilogue

  The Great China Earthquake that caused the northern half of Guangdong province to slough toward the south, swallowing everything in a hundred foot wall of mud, including Military Base 682, occurred three years later, on the morning of January 7, 2012.

  Dr. Terry Ryder got the call at 2:05 A.M.

  “What’s happened?” Mrs. Carla Ryder asked after he’d hung up.

  Terry lay back on his pillow.

  Five thousand upturned faces released their hold on him.

  “The damnedest justice,” he said, unable to speak much louder than a whisper.

  Copyright © 2010 by Peter Clement Duffy

  Originally published by Belgrave House (ISBN 9780984414451)

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  This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.