Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  His distended veins began to collapse. Then I felt it. A firm, resilient slap against the tip of the needle.

  His heart.

  I fell back, quaking, tears scorching my face, sobs shearing my lungs.

  God, the needle…could have dislodged it.

  I fumbled for it. Still in—still in.

  Listen to his heart.

  Forcing myself back to my knees, I did. I only heard my own internal cacophony.

  Get a grip. Phase out your upheaval. Listen.

  I finally did. And what I heard drove my head to my knees, fetus like, gulping down excruciating relief.

  His heartbeats were no longer stifling by the second. Still muffled, but slow, steady.

  He was out of danger. For now.

  I exploded to my feet, ran out of the cavern, and almost bumped into Ed and José at its mouth.

  “I heard a shot come from here, but had too much on my hands to come right away.” Ed steadied me, his frantic glance roving over me. “You’re not hurt?”

  Gibberish spilled out of me. It must have made some kind of sense. It had Ed and José streaking away.

  What followed until they where back with a stretcher and Matt and Ayesha, until we had Damian back in the STS felt like a blink. It was followed by an eternity as we performed the emergency surgery. An eternity in hell as I sawed through Damian’s sternum, exposing his heart, and the damages Jake had caused it. Finding out their extent made it even more amazing that he’d survived. Having to invade his body to that level, to repair them was unspeakable. Insupportable.

  I finally understood what despair was. I could see myself going irretrievably insane if I failed to pull him through.

  But I did. We did.

  Damian was out of danger for real. I could breathe again.

  I could go after Jake.

  It had been over two hours since he’d escaped. But in his condition, he wouldn’t have gone far.

  I’d find him.

  Forty-Seven

  Before I’d put Damian under for the surgery, he’d regained consciousness. I bet he did only to insist that I take his team when I went after Jake

  But I knew if I did, it wouldn’t be a retrieval. It would be a hunt. Right or wrong, I couldn’t do that.

  Jake didn’t kill me when he had the chance.

  I owed him the same mercy.

  But to stop him, I had to find him first.

  To do that, I had to think like him.

  How would a mad genius think?

  I replayed every word of his horrifying confessions. One thing stood out. What he’d said about his suffocating parasites.

  He’d been counting on us freeing him from the militants. If I’d believed him over Damian, he would have been home free. As it had turned out, he now had to improvise to complete his quest for freedom. I had no doubt he’d work something out. He’d masterminded everything from the get go.

  We’d all been his marionettes all through.

  Ed had told me what had happened after my team had gotten to the base with Damian. His team had arrived right behind us, disposed of dozens of militants, secured the scientists, then the first explosion had rocked the base. Before they’d set off their explosives.

  It had been Jake.

  He must have long manufactured his own explosives and planted them. According to the plan I’d told him about, my team and I should have been in and out of the base within minutes, leaving Damian’s team deep inside the base.

  He’d set off the detonations to bury them, planning to run to me so we could ride into the sunset together.

  So many birds with one synchronized detonation.

  Then it had all gone wrong when I’d changed the plan to go in search of him. And it had been Damian who had run out to catch up to him.

  And here we were.

  As Damian’s people made sure the base and militants were wiped out, I gave them one order. No executing the scientists. Then I left. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.

  Jake had nowhere to go without transportation now the only vehicles left intact were ours. It left him with one option.

  To go back to the camp.

  He’d made sure the people he systematically experimented on and terminated thought him their savior. They’d shelter him, until he came up with another escape plan. He’d concoct one in no time. I bet he’d make an even more insidious deal with whoever took control of the region now the militants were decimated. Maybe even with the federal forces. Or Both. From what I now realized, there was no limit to his manipulative powers or potential damage.

  Once in the camp, I wouldn’t be able to tear him away. He had thousands of people to defend him there. Against even me. He’d had a huge head start. And I was really battered.

  But so was he.

  I’d catch up.

  I did.

  It took three hours. If anything, the route to the camp looked far scarier by daylight. But only bringing him back, finding a way to help him, to cure him, mattered.

  I came around a steep bend and there he was. Walking as if on an afternoon stroll. I knew he’d felt my presence before I saw him.

  He turned, his left arm in an improvised yet perfect sling, the muted lights of the freezing afternoon accentuating his bronzed handsomeness and jeweled eyes. My heart clenched.

  Jake, my once idol. My first lover.

  How flawless he looked.

  I’d thought he’d overcome his ordeals by hardening, by fulfilling the range of his complex potential. I’d thought the physical changes were a manifestation of his inner changes.

  But those hadn’t been changes. He’d been hurt too much. And he hadn’t survived.

  They had killed my Jake.

  This…entity was what now wore his body.

  A shudder rattled me to the marrow.

  “Cold, my love?”

  My blood congealed at his gentle croon.

  “Why, Jake?” I choked.

  He sighed, canted his head gracefully. “Because it’s the only way. To beat evil of the magnitude that festers in those regions you have to be even worse. Fighting the bad guys with the good guys’ methods had never worked. You reached the same conclusion, Cali. You’ve adopted violence and anarchy and systematized them. It’s only then that you became effective. Though you’re still bound by so many ethics, when both your adversaries and those you save are bound by none. The day you overcome your qualms, you’ll become unstoppable.”

  He knew what I did? What I was? How?

  But what was I even wondering? From what I learned in the past hours, he probably knew everything about me. It was becoming a certainty this had all been his orchestration.

  I still shook my head. “I draw the line at killing when not in self or others’ defense. Certainly at sacrificing innocents. It’s a line I’ll never cross.”

  His smile was forbearing, so much like my Jake’s it was heart wrenching. “There are no innocents here, Cali. Maybe in the law-controlled, secular region you inhabit, there’s an acceptable percentage of those. At least of the oblivious, the un-indoctrinated, the never-tested, the marginally beneficial and the not actively harmful. In other words, all those needed for a functioning and basically peaceful and prospering society. But that camp? Those villages and towns around here and in similar regions of chronic conflict and failure? They’re filled with oppressed people who are biding their time to become oppressors, who are that to anyone they can impose on or overcome. Wars ignited and sustained by racial hatreds or religious doctrines leave no innocents. Winners and losers, aggressors and victims, yes. And that’s only at a given time, with their positions exchanged when the tides change. But innocents? No.”

  “Even the children?”

  He shrugged. “Newborns, possibly, debatably up to three or four years. Those might be saved if they’re taken from their families and community. But once their awareness forms and their psyche is infected with their people’s disease, once they grow up warped by their infection and addicted
to their poison, they become time bombs. The percentage that doesn’t turn out to be that way is always negligible. And those either escape, or become pariahs within their communities, or victims of anyone who considers them threats to their monstrous way of life and beliefs, usually their closest people.”

  His every word fell on me like a hammer. Because I couldn’t contest any. Except with emotional debates and unsubstantiated hopes. Statistics not made for the public or serving plurality agendas proved that those raised in chronic conflicts who went on to become useful or even neutral members of modern civilization were a crushing minority. It was why such conflicts became chronic in the first place. Their victims perpetuated them, as they became the core of their identity. Their raison d’être.

  But… “It’s not up to us to say what a victim today will become tomorrow. You can’t kill them now because you hate what you think they’ll become.”

  His gaze was reproaching. “You know it’s not what I think. It’s an evidence-based fact of every conflict that carried through to this century unabated. But I’m not applying general knowledge to those refugees. What I believe and decided to act upon is what I heard them say among themselves. What they told me. That’s the epiphany I told you about.”

  I waited with bated breath, knowing what he’d tell me would muddy everything even more, churn me inside out.

  “Six years ago, I operated on a seven-year-old boy to save both his legs. In spite of my situation, and what I’d seen in the region so far, it always tore at my heart to operate on such abused by circumstances children. His mother was only twenty-six and she’d lived most of her life in such camps. She already had five children and was pregnant with the sixth. I asked why she wasn’t using birth control, that even if she didn’t have access to reliable methods in her situation, there are many others that had been practiced since the dawn of time, ones I could teach her and the other women in the camp. She said they were aware of all the methods, but would never use them. They were against their religion.

  “I expressed how inadequate a reason that was to bring children into such inhuman conditions. But through my probing questions and her mind-boggling answers, the whole truth came out. Her people needed as many children as possible as their future soldiers. She intended to have as many more as she could, half of which she’d dedicate to the ‘holy cause’, and half she’d keep for herself. Children were her best way of getting more rations, more aid whenever it came, and parents of many young children would be the first to be considered for asylum or relocation. Being perpetually pregnant also imparted many privileges on her, spared her from many responsibilities, both within her immediate family and her community. Having more children wasn’t an added effort for her, as the older ones took care of their younger siblings, and once they grew a little older, they’d work in her stead.

  “That angelic looking victim, that heart-wrenching waif, the mother all the world considers some sort of saint and martyr, the one to be helped and revered above all others, was the most horrifying parasitic monster I’ve ever faced.

  “And she wasn’t alone. The sweeping majority are bringing children into this nightmare by full malevolent choice and intent, weaning them on hatred and extremism, raising them as future weapons to perpetuate the strife and atrocities, and meanwhile using them as meal tickets, free help, human shields, insurance policies and humanitarian pressure cards.”

  The ugliness of what he said hurt the most because I knew it was true of so many cases. Too many. I never let myself think of the long-term sequels of saving those in need, focused on their immediate suffering. It had been the only way I could go on.

  But I’d asked him why. And he was bound on explaining to the last mutilating detail.

  He shifted his weight on to the leg that was clearly painful, before hopping back. “I tried to excuse her blithe viciousness as someone who’d been mentally raped from birth by dogma. I tried to see her exploitative heartlessness as a pragmatic survival mechanism of someone who’d been damaged beyond repair by hardships. I failed. But the worst part wasn’t even when I heard her talking to her boy in the dialect she didn’t think I understood, telling him to get better so he’d grow older and stronger, do their god’s will, kill the ‘infidel’ soldiers and enslave and debase their people in his name. The worst part came when the boy revived, and I saw in his eyes that this is all he lives for. All he’ll become.”

  So that was his epiphany. He’d realized at that moment that all his efforts to help those people, the reason he’d lost his own freedom and life, would only be keeping those diseased entities alive, helping them spread more hatred and madness and carnage.

  No wonder his mind had snapped.

  But no. I could see now this diagnosis was totally wrong.

  The most dangerous thing about him was that it hadn’t.

  His mind had crystallized. Become impenetrable. Around that realization, that belief.

  His gargantuan intellect, amalgamated with such unrelenting conviction, based on such incontestable evidence, was the most lethal weapon I could imagine.

  But in this compound mess, where all measures were inadequate, and continuously leading to worse complications, was that a bad thing? Maybe it would take such a mastermind’s preemptive methods to guarantee a real remission, maybe even a cure.

  And if I had to wonder, I might be losing my mind, too.

  He let me digest everything he’d said, watched me reaching that confounded conclusion before he went on.

  “So, no, Cali, being the current underdog doesn’t mean they’re worth saving. For now they’re only too weak to manifest their evil. Sooner or later, they’ll have the opportunity, and they will. They always do. Who do you think those militants you gladly killed today are? They are that child, and every child you agonized over and struggled to save in that camp, grown up.”

  His brutal logic swept through my mind like a tsunami, submerging every coherent argument, invalidating them all.

  I attempted a rebuttal, skirting his argument. “It’s still insane to treat evil by eradicating its current victim.”

  “If they’re breeding the evil and hell bent on escalating it, they’re only victims of their own intentions and actions. That’s why killing only the ‘current aggressors’ never works. In chronic conflict situations, all sides become diseased beyond redemption. They all form a macabre symbiosis, perpetuating the violence and madness. And wherever they go in the world, they spread their disease.”

  When I tried to shake my head again, he insisted. “What do you think those refugees will do if they gain asylum in a country governed by laws that don’t differentiate between its citizens based on race or religion or gender? You don’t have to wonder, since you already have the example of millions like them. Look at what those are doing to their hosting societies, the steady, premeditated, entitled damage they’re causing them, in record time, too.

  “There will always be a negligible minority that integrates into their new societies because they’re untouched or cured of their people’s disease, their so-called culture, those the media fraudulently tries to pass as the example of all the rest. But the benefit of those is but a drop in the ocean of destruction the majority causes.

  “The majority not only refuse to integrate, they continue their wars on those new soils. They nurture their victimhood on one hand, and their supremacy to the hosting culture and all others on the other, raising their children to carry on their historic enmities and to hate their new havens in preparation for an insidious invasion from within. They use the best that humanity has achieved, of human rights, personal freedoms, equal opportunity, tolerance and technology as a path to infest the societies practicing them, only so they can spread their tyranny and intolerance once there are enough of them.

  “They are starting to force their host societies to regress to more insular, less tolerant practices to protect themselves against their single-minded goal to swarm them with the very ideologies that destroyed their own countr
ies. Everyone in the world is suffering from the restrictions of such prophylaxis, yet those who can’t yet believe the danger they’re in are enabling that madness under the pretext of human rights. The very human rights those they champion aim to abolish. In consequence, everyone is on the way to becoming overrun by that fast-replicating malignancy.”

  He drew in a careful inhalation, let out a ragged sigh. “I spent years studying the world state and tracing back its roots and looking for solutions. There are none. Not with the political, humanitarian and even military bandaids the world provides. There’s only one solution. In the septic foci that are spreading their lethal infection to the world and setting humanity as a whole back, both ‘current’ aggressor and victim must be wiped out. And that’s where my weapons come in.”

  I had nothing to say. To think. To feel.

  I only wanted him to finish this. Expose the sheer apocalyptic magnitude of his plan and be done with it.

  As always, he obliged me. “My weapons will be both a radical surgery that will eradicate the disease with its carriers, and an overwhelming disaster of unprecedented magnitude. It will terrify the world into stopping its current disease-perpetuating ways. It will force everyone to reconsider everything, all their immigration laws and political agendas, all their alliances and enmities, even their very cultures and ideologies, because everyone will be scared of being next.

  “That negligible, undeserving of destruction percentage had their chance to change their societies. But they had no effect, either because they were too weak, too afraid or too unconcerned. But the main reason they need to be sacrificed with the rest is because they’re the human shields their monstrous kin hide behind, the ones who run interference on their behalf, the obstacle that will always stop any serious treatment efforts. That’s why they are a major cause of chronicity and spread. When they’re destroyed along with the rest, people like them might learn to stop letting their people’s evil spread by their self-serving, apologist disruption, their cowering enabling or indifferent inaction.”