The Living Blood

  They felt the floor shake above them as something crashed over. They had to be directly beneath the living room, she thought, because she could hear the voices of the strange men. She could also hear Aunt Alex crying. So, Aunt Alex wasn’t dead!

  “. . . under the floor in the cl-closet,” she heard Aunt Alex say. “I’ll show you.”

  “Search the rest of the house. Make sure there’s no one else here.” A man’s voice. “Well, hurry up, then!”

  More toppling furniture. And footsteps, traveling from one end of the house to the other. Fana shuddered when the footsteps thundered directly above them, because she believed the person must somehow know they were there, but the footsteps passed, not even stopping.

  Moses was muttering to himself as if he were remembering notes from school. “Afrikaner . . . Irish . . . and English, I think. Two of them from England, maybe.”

  There was a flurry of excitement from another corner, a cry of We found it!

  “Please just tell me what’s going on,” another man’s voice said, slightly muffled, and even Fana knew that accent: He was American, just like her. “What have we done?”

  “That’s him! That’s the doctor who saved me,” Moses whispered, happy.

  Yes, the sad man, Fana thought. The voodoo man.

  But it was getting darker. Even the dim light from the hole under the house was gone. Fana didn’t like it to get so dark. The awful smell had found them here, the Bee Lady’s smell. Fana was sorry now that she had ever eaten the Bee Lady’s cakes, and she was beginning to wonder if the Bee Lady was truly a woman at all. What would she have seen if she had pulled off the Bee Lady’s pretty pink robe? What was underneath, really?

  “Well, mate,” another man said above her and Moses, and this voice was faint, “you made it all the way to the other side of the world with this stuff you nicked, but this is your unlucky day—you’re going back home to the Sunshine State.”

  Again, Fana felt Moses shake her hard. Why was he shaking her? “Did you hear it, Fana? Did you?” Moses said, but his voice, suddenly, sounded far away.

  Fana had no idea where she was anymore. She wasn’t under her house, because she didn’t feel the dirt beneath her, and she couldn’t see Moses. He had stopped shaking her. She reached out to try to touch him, but nothing was there. Nothing anywhere. She was floating in stench and darkness. As far as she could see, there was nothing but shadows.

  • • •

  “Oh, thank you, Jesus. Thank you.”

  Jessica was drenched in perspiration. It had only been ten minutes, but when had ten minutes ever passed so agonizingly slowly?

  She had been talking quietly with David and Teferi in the hotel room, planning what to do next, when suddenly Fana had begun convulsing in the bed. Jessica had seen her daughter in trances many times, more often than she’d like to count, but she’d never seen her writhing that way before. And she’d never heard her scream so violently, as if she was in pain.

  The hotel manager and a handful of guests were standing outside their hotel room, agitated, wondering what was wrong, and Jessica was sure it would only be a matter of time before someone called the police. But she couldn’t worry about that now. Her child had sounded as if someone was trying to kill her.

  But now, Fana seemed to be all right. She was still whimpering, drawing her limbs close together, but at least she was blinking her eyes, and she seemed to recognize her name.

  “Fana? It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right.” Jessica had heard herself saying these words so often to her daughter in the past two weeks, they struck her as utter bullshit. Clearly, Fana was not all right, and in fact everything in their lives at this moment was far from all right. But she had to keep saying the words, because if she didn’t, she was afraid she would begin screaming and shaking herself.

  “My granddaughter, she once suffered such an episode,” a friendly, German-accented man’s voice offered from the faceless crowd in the doorway. “You might try medication.”

  Vaguely, Jessica heard Teferi thank the stranger for his concern, then he closed the door, explaining that he didn’t want to frighten his “niece” with all the commotion. Jessica knew Teferi was relieved, just as she was, that none of the curious onlookers seemed to have noticed that Fana’s bed itself had been trembling, its legs rattling insistently against the floor while the bedsprings squeaked beneath Fana. As if it had been trying to shake itself to life.

  But that was over now. That part had only happened for a minute or two.

  Now, David was kneeling beside Jessica while she wrapped herself around Fana. She could still feel her daughter’s tiny body shivering in the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. Jessica thought she had felt helpless the night David strangled Kira in a hotel room very much like this one, but somehow this was different. This was worse. At least with Kira, there was something she might have done. (Yes, you know you could have saved her, you could have jabbed her with that needle, but you didn’t, did you? You wanted to save her precious soul. You made the choice in the end, not David, so stop pretending it was him instead of you.) But now, she knew of nothing she could do. These episodes might come again and again, and Fana might do worse and worse things without even realizing it, and there was nothing Jessica could do.

  Please, God, don’t let anybody be dead this time, Jessica found herself thinking desperately, remembering what had happened to Kaleb. Don’t let anybody be dead.

  Even if she or Fana could have guessed it, neither of them might have minded knowing that a mercenary named Dwight Kreuger—who’d just awakened in Gaborone beside a high-priced blond prostitute he’d brought home to celebrate his last assignment (which he thought he’d performed quite well, despite the harsh words spoken to him at his dismissal)—had collapsed over the toilet while he was taking a piss, banging his head on the toilet’s ceramic rim hard enough to split his temple open. And they would never learn that a puzzled coroner would later decide that Dwight Kreuger had not died because of the head injury, but because his heart seemed to have been turned inside out (although, for the sake of his reputation, the examiner would officially describe the corpse as having a grossly enlarged heart). An even bigger mystery, perhaps, was the death of the prostitute herself; she had no injuries whatever, but she had died in bed at the exact same time.

  And even if Jessica had somehow divined that a newly named tropical storm had begun rippling the waters of the Atlantic Ocean along the Tropic of Cancer, roughly eight hundred miles from her hometown of Miami, she would never have connected that obscure weather event to her daughter’s recent episode. How could she? No one could, even Fana. After all, how could one child influence an event on the other side of the world?

  Jessica was only glad her daughter’s screaming had stopped, that Fana was awake.

  Fana was even talking, and her daughter’s random-sounding chatter made Jessica’s face flood with grateful tears, despite the growing, calcifying pain of her sister’s disappearance. Alex’s awful absence seemed even more real and irreparable now that another day’s sunlight was shining through the hotel room’s sheer curtains, but Fana was all right.

  “The bad men, they said they’re gonna take the voodoo doctor to . . . the sun-ny state,” Fana was murmuring, clinging tightly to Jessica. Her words would have sounded like nonsense to anyone else, but to Jessica they were a gift from God. “They’re gonna . . . take him home.”

  Yes, Jessica thought, and she and David shared a knowing look. Florida, the Sunshine State, had been their home once, too. She’d fled home long ago because of everything she’d lost there, but now she knew without a doubt that it was time to go back.

  38

  Miami Beach

  For at least forty minutes, Lucas had been murmuring a prayer of thanks. He was thanking God for whoever had opened the fast-food chain Pollo Tropical, because those had been the words stamped on the aromatic bags of food that had been brought to him and Alex shortly after their blindfolds were removed, and those we
re the first words Lucas had seen in twenty-four hours. He was thanking God for marinated chicken pieces, black beans and rice and fried yuca wedges. He was thanking God for Coca-Cola. He had never felt so satisfied from a full belly in his life, in a transcendent way that made his fear irrelevant, at least for the moment.

  In a keen way, he was thanking God that he was alive.

  Because he had to be alive for a reason. He was certain of that now. And even after the ordeal of the travel—he and Alex had been flown in an airplane’s freezing cargo bin for hours, bound and gagged—he still had his vial of blood. He’d moved the vial to his shoe during the short time he was permitted to use the bathroom, believing it might be safer if he curled his toes around it. And as long as it was there, he had a chance. He was in Miami, after all—even if he hadn’t overheard their ultimate destination back in Africa, he might have guessed after he was slapped by Florida’s sudden humidity, or when he heard the strains of rapidly spoken Spanish around him at the airport.

  Jared wasn’t that far away. They both only had to survive.

  And now, for the first time, he and Alex were alone. They were in a largely unfinished room with exposed concrete-block walls and industrial-grade brown carpeting. The room was long and wide, but with a low-hanging ceiling that had forced him to stoop slightly when he’d first been escorted here by four men. It had to be a shallow basement, he thought. Naked lightbulbs shone from the fixtures overhead, and there were no windows. The only way out was through a steel-reinforced door at the top of the concrete stairs, and it might as well have been miles away. First, Lucas was certain it was locked; and second, he and Alex were handcuffed to the thick pipes hugging the walls above the king-size mattress and box spring that had been brought down for them to sleep on. Absurdly, the mattress was fitted with elegant silk sheets, a luxury they had been given along with the over-stuffed king-size pillows to rest their shoulders and necks upon. Lucas was uncomfortable with both wrists restrained above him, but he was more comfortable than he’d been in a long time. These handcuffs fit much better than the shackles that had been chafing his wrists and ankles until now, and he was grateful to have his eyes and mouth back.

  He felt nearly free.

  The men who had brought them the food had been much friendlier than the pair who had brought them from Botswana. Unlike the first gunmen, these new men wore realistic rubber Halloween masks to conceal their faces—one was Richard Nixon, and the other was Freddy Krueger, whom Lucas would not have recognized if not for his wife’s fascination with trashy horror films. But instead of a gruesome, deadly glove with knives for fingers, this Freddy Krueger had soft, manicured hands, and he’d been wearing a white dress shirt and gray pinstriped slacks as if he were at a business retreat. Richard Nixon kept a gun trained on them at all times and stood at a distance (he was older, Lucas noticed, because his arms were covered with curly, white hair), but Freddy Krueger, with his gentle, conciliatory voice, seemed to be struggling to be a good host. And he’d been nervous, too. His voice had wavered.

  Did you get enough to eat? Do either of you need to use the bathroom? Should I try to find you some cleaner clothes? I hope you won’t mind, but someone’s going to come down here in a few minutes to draw some blood. After that, we’ll let you get some rest. I know you must be tired after such a long trip.

  The crook of Lucas’s arm still smarted from the indelicate jab of a needle into his veins by a muscle-bound man in a black T-shirt and nylon hose over his face, but even that indignity hadn’t been so bad. Nothing seemed too bad now that he’d had some food, now that his head was resting on a pillow, now that he could see the world around him, however bleak it might seem.

  Alex, lying three feet away from him on the other end of the massive mattress, sighed every minute or so, but she hadn’t spoken other than that. He’d imagined there had been countless things they had wanted to say when they’d been gagged in that camper, and then in the airplane’s cargo bin, but now they seemed to have lost their words. Or she had, anyway. Lucas had questions.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Alex, keeping his voice soft.

  Alex made a snorting sound, half laugh, half something else. “Fine as I can be, I guess,” Alex said tightly, her voice scratchy in her throat.

  He turned to look at her then. Her eyes were puffy and discolored, cherry red from her hours of silent tears. A ring of dried blood was around her left nostril, a souvenir from her blow to the face at the clinic. But Lucas saw more than that; he noticed her pronounced cheekbones beneath flawless skin, and he felt the same intrigue he’d felt when he’d first sat with her at the clinic. There was real beauty in her face, textured beauty, like a stone smoothed under a constant stream of water. Many might have missed it, he thought, but it was unmistakable to him now.

  “I don’t think we should talk, Lucas,” Alex said softly, glancing at him. “They might want that. Otherwise, I think we’d still be gagged.”

  Lucas had surveyed the room, but he hadn’t noticed any cameras or microphones. Not that they would necessarily be big enough to see, he reminded himself. Still, he was willing to take the chance. He didn’t think he could keep silent even if he wanted to.

  “Who are they?” Lucas whispered.

  Alex’s face grew rigid. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, meaning it.

  “Why did they take our blood?”

  At that, Alex closed her eyes with a frustrated sigh. She was silent for a long time, and during that pause Lucas heard the click of a water heater, or some kind of timer, preceding a low hum, barely detectable. The machinery in the basement was enabling life somewhere above them to go on as usual, uninterrupted.

  “I’m very, very sorry I didn’t help you, Lucas,” Alex said, ignoring his question. “I don’t know if I could ever make you understand why I didn’t—I thought I was making the right decision, for reasons I can’t say—but if I’d helped you, you wouldn’t have gotten involved in this. Nobody deserves this.” She sounded remarkably clearheaded despite the weight of grief in her words. She took a deep breath, whispering, “I’m going to tell them you don’t know anything about the blood. Maybe they’ll let you go.”

  “I appreciate the gesture, but something tells me they won’t believe that,” Lucas said, wincing as he shifted his weight to relieve a cramp in his upper arm. The cramp had been far worse on the plane, when he’d been even more restricted, but he still felt the throbbing. “They think I’m someone I’m not.”

  “I don’t . . . understand that part,” Alex whispered, measuring her words carefully. “I don’t know why they think you’re a thief, or who they think you stole it from.”

  “But you do understand why they drew blood from us.”

  Alex’s sudden silence was telling.

  “And you know why they brought the corpses bound up like that,” Lucas went on.

  “Lucas, please,” Alexis hissed. Her handcuffs clanked on the pipe above their heads as she turned to look at him with weary, frightened eyes. “Don’t do this. So many people have already been hurt, have died.”

  “Yes, Alexis, that’s right,” Lucas said evenly. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth, I think we’re about to join them. I’m not sure what’s in store for us tomorrow, but I can guarantee you it’s not going to be much fun, no matter how polite our friend in the mask seemed. And I don’t think it’s asking too much to know what I may be about to die for. So, Doctor, I’m going to ask you one last time: Why did they draw blood?”

  Alexis closed her eyes, her face wrenched in sadness. He saw a tear escape from her eyelid, but he couldn’t say any words of comfort to her despite the instinct that made him wish he could reach her face to brush the tear away. She was right; he’d never be here if she’d helped him in the first place, but she hadn’t. She owed him at least this much.

  “They’re looking for more healing blood,” Alex said finally, so softly he thought he could have imagined the words. His heart, which had spent itself in fear,
began beating slowly to life again.

  “And they think it could be in our veins,” Lucas said, more an amazed statement than a question. “And they think Sarah and Stephen Shabalala had it, too.”

  Her eyes still closed, Alex nodded. Lucas’s skin flashed hot. He had to swallow hard before he could force himself to say the next words, which were the next logical progression, but so improbable it was hard to even formulate the thought. “But there are people with this blood . . . and you know one of those people, don’t you? That’s where you got the blood for your clinic.”

  Now, Lucas’s heart was beating so hard that he felt blood flushing his cheeks. He watched Alex, waiting for some movement, some response. Finally, opening her teary eyes, Alexis Jacobs nodded. Her face looked slightly relieved, as if she was releasing a burden.

  My God, Lucas thought. The man he’d seen heal that woman in the Peace Corps nearly forty years ago hadn’t been a shaman—he’d been something else entirely! He’d been part of a species of man that had not been identified as yet, hiding right in their midst.

  “Where do they come from?” he breathed. “How many of them are there?”

  Again, Alex was silent. Damn!

  “You’re still trying to protect this person, aren’t you?” Lucas said. “Well, what will you say to these men when they ask you where you got the blood? Where we got it.”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded almost like a little girl, pleading for him not to force her to say anything else to him.

  But Lucas had to press on. “Alexis, I have a feeling those men in Botswana were sent to grab us under false pretenses. Someone was concealing the truth from them. But the ones here, the ones who took our blood, seem to know exactly what they’re looking for. They know about these . . . amazing people. Can’t you tell them the truth?”

  “Do you think it would matter if I did? Would it change anything for us?”

  This time, Lucas was the one who fell silent. There was no avoiding the nasty thought that whoever had abducted them had no reason to let them go, not after allowing others to be so brazenly killed before their eyes. Nothing Alex said, even the truth, was likely to matter.