Petrified (2 page)

‘Sir – please try to stay calm,' said a black woman paramedic. ‘The firefighters are going to do everything they can to get your daughter out of there.'

Braydon was coughing so hard that he couldn't answer her. He tried to swing his legs off the gurney but the paramedic pushed him back. She was chunkily built, and unexpectedly strong.

‘Please, sir. Please stay here. There's nothing you can do.'

‘My daughter's dying in there!' Braydon told her. ‘My daughter could be dead already!'

‘I know that, sir. But all we can do right now is pray for her.'

The firefighters were spraying the wreck with compressed-air foam, and clouds of it were dancing across the highway and flying up into the air. The orange flames reluctantly retreated and shrank back under the trailer, and then they died out altogether. Six or seven firefighters approached the burned-out shell of Braydon's Caliber and Braydon could hear them shouting out for hydraulic lifting equipment and cutters.

‘You have to let me out of here!' said Braydon. ‘That's my Sukie in there! That's my little girl!'

‘Sir – please,' said the paramedic. And at that moment, two officers from the Philadelphia Highway Patrol appeared at the back of the ambulance, in their distinctive crushed caps and black leather coats and riding boots. One of them was tall and thin and sandy-haired, and the other was stocky, with a walrus moustache.

‘Sir, you really need to stay here. There's absolutely nothing you can do.'

‘Oh God,' Braydon wept. He pressed his left hand over his mouth. ‘Oh God, it was all my fault.'

‘I don't think you should blame yourself, sir,' said the sandy-haired patrolman. ‘That semi had a multiple blow-out and skidded clear across to the northbound side of the highway and there wasn't nothing you could have humanly done to avoid it. Wasn't nothing that
nobody
could have done.'

‘Here,' said the paramedic. She pulled up his sleeve and gave him a shot of oxycodone for the pain. Then she strapped an FLA splint to his fractured wrist, while the patrolmen asked him his name, and his address, and Sukie's name.

‘Susan Amelia Harris,' said Braydon. ‘Born April seventeenth, two thousand seven.' He didn't tell them that he had long ago lost custody of her, and that he had been kidnapping her, and taking her back to his home in Connecticut. What would have been the point of it? He felt guilty enough already.

When the patrolmen had finished questioning him, he sat in the ambulance watching the firefighters at work with their cutters and their spreaders. Now that the oxycodone was beginning to take effect, he was beginning to feel strangely detached, as if that burned-out wreck on the other side of the highway wasn't really his car at all. The paramedic gently lifted his elbow into a sling, and all the time she kept on asking him ‘Is that OK, sir? Is that comfortable? Does that hurt?' but he didn't answer her, or even glance at her. If he had answered her, that would have confirmed that he was really here, and that his daughter Sukie was really trapped inside his car, and that she had probably been killed.

‘How are you feeling, sir?' the paramedic asked him. ‘You're not feeling faint at all, are you?' But he still refused to respond.
I'm not feeling anything. This is not me.

It seemed to take hours for the firefighters to attach a steel hawser to the front of a fire truck and drag the Caliber out from underneath the trailer, so that they could begin to open up its crushed rear section. With a last few spiteful flickers and a last few sulky rumbles, the thunder and lightning were gradually moving off toward the north-east, but the rain continued steadily to dredge across the surface of the highway.

Braydon saw showers of sparks as the vehicle's roof pillars were cut apart, and then four firefighters lifted the roof clear off and laid it down on the road.

Three paramedics reached inside the rear seat. Braydon began to shiver uncontrollably.
Oh God almighty she's dead and I've killed her. Oh God have mercy on me. Oh God, my poor little Sukie.

The woman paramedic unhooked an oxygen mask and pressed it over his face. ‘Just breathe normally, sir. We don't want you going into shock.'

Braydon rolled his eyes and stared up at her. He took four deep breaths and then he lifted the mask away. ‘She was so darn
unhappy
. That was the trouble. She kept on begging me to take her away with me. But now look what I've done.'

‘Sir, this was an accident. You heard what the officers told you. This was not your fault. But now I think we need to take you to the ER. There's nothing more that you can do here.'

‘Please – I have to see her. I have to know for sure.'

Just then, another ambulance backed up to the wreck of Braydon's Caliber, and its rear doors opened. Less than a minute later, it sped away, with its siren screaming.

‘What was that? Was that Sukie? Where are they taking her?'

A gray-haired paramedic walked across to the back of the ambulance and climbed up the steps. For some odd reason, he reminded Braydon of the actor Lloyd Bridges. ‘We got your daughter out, sir. She's alive.'

Braydon coughed, and coughed again. He could hardly breathe. ‘How badly is she hurt?'

The paramedic looked serious. ‘I can't yet tell you the full extent of her injuries, sir, not until the doctors have examined her. But I have to warn you that she's suffered some very serious burns.'

‘Oh, God. Oh, God, no.'

‘We've sent her directly to the burns center at Temple University Hospital. It's the finest burns unit in the country, bar none, and it's only a few minutes from here. We'll take you there right now, so that you can be with her.'

He climbed down and closed the ambulance doors behind him. The woman paramedic said, ‘Why don't you lie down, sir, so's I can strap you in? You'll be safer.'

Braydon shook his head. ‘Who cares if I'm safe? What difference does it make?'

‘It makes
all
the difference, sir. From now on, your Sukie's going to need you more than ever.'

Braydon lay back on the gurney and the woman paramedic buckled him in. He closed his eyes as the ambulance swerved and bumped its way to North Broad Street. He didn't pray any more. All he wanted to do was to fall asleep. If he could fall asleep, maybe he could wake up and find that it was still seven a.m. this morning, and that he hadn't yet set out for Baltimore to kidnap Sukie from Melinda's parents.

He would rather that he had never seen Sukie again than have her burned alive.

He would rather that she had never been born at all.

THREE

Monday, 6:17 p.m.

N
athan tore the wrapper off his Baby Ruth bar and bit off almost half of it at once. ‘Well,
compadres
,' he said, with his mouth full of chocolate and peanuts. ‘We're about as ready as we're ever going to be. In about ten minutes' time we're going to make scientific history. Either that, or we're going to end up as a laughing stock.'

‘We've done everything according to the book, haven't we?' Kavita insisted.

‘Oh, sure. But what a book!
Kitab Al-Ajahr, The Book of Stones
. An eighth-century treatise on alchemy. It's not exactly
Kleinman's
Mesenchymal Stem Cell Regeneration
,
Volume Three
, is it?'

‘You should have more faith in yourself,Professor,' said Aarif. ‘And faith in the wisdom of Abu Musa J
ā
bir ibn Hayy
ā
n.'

‘Abu Musa J
ā
bir ibn Hayy
ā
n died over thirteen centuries ago.'

‘What does that matter? It is one of the greatest scientific collaborations of all time, you and he. It is like Francis Crick working with Copernicus.'

‘I hope this isn't a prelude to your asking for a pay rise,' said Nathan.

‘I admit that I would not refuse one, if it were offered,' Aarif replied. ‘However, I am simply speaking the truth. Look what you have done here. You have given life to a creature which has not been seen on this earth since the days of Rameses the Fourth.'

‘Well, yes,' said Nathan. ‘But like I've said so many times, a worm is one thing and a bird is quite another.'

‘We shall just have to see if you and J
ā
bir can prove between you that this is not so, and that a worm can also be a bird, and a bird can also be a worm.'

The early-evening skies were beginning to clear, and in downtown Philadelphia an orange sun was making a brief guest appearance behind the trees around the Schiller Medical Research building, so that Nathan's fourth-floor laboratory was filled up with honey-colored light.

The light lent an almost holy radiance to the huge vivarium made of Pyrex glass that stood in the center of the workspace, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Roughly heaped on the floor of the vivarium was a tangled nest of twigs and leaves and dry vegetation; and resting on top of this nest was a fat pale-gray worm that was nearly twenty-two centimeters in length and eighteen centimeters in circumference. Its skin was thick and wrinkled and covered all over with coarse knobbly spots. Kavita had already dubbed it ‘Grubby'.

Nathan was exhausted. His short blond hair was scruffed up and his eyes were puffy. He had been preparing for this final experiment for over a week, and for the last four nights he had slept on an air bed in his office, so that he could carry out two-hourly checks on the worm's development.

For the past forty-eight hours the worm had shown no increase whatsoever in size or weight, and its movements had slowed down to a barely-perceptible ripple, so Nathan guessed that it must have reached maturity. It had to be a guess, because this was the first worm of its kind that had been conceived since 1150 BC.

If the eighth-century alchemist J
ā
bir was right, the worm was ready to enter the most dramatic stage in its life cycle, just as a chrysalis bursts open and a butterfly emerges. As the critical moment came nearer, however, Nathan was beginning to harbor a nagging suspicion that in
The Book of Stones,
J
ā
bir might have simply been retelling a well-known Egyptian myth, rather than describing successful experiments that he had actually carried out in his own laboratory.

He held up the most recent CGI scan. ‘This is what concerns me. There's still no suggestion of any incipient bone structure inside the nematode, only these random clumps of fibrous tissue.'

‘But J
ā
bir says that once the fire has reached a sufficiently high temperature, the bird's skeleton is created by fusion,' said Aarif.

‘Well, that's your interpretation. What he actually says is “at their hottest pitch, the flames of the inferno take on the shape of wings”. That's if my ancient Persian serves me right.'

Aarif shook his head. ‘You should not be so pessimistic, Professor. After all, this entire project came from your inspiration. We are standing on the brink of a defining moment in modern science.'

‘I don't know,' said Nathan. He rubbed his face with both hands. ‘I've been here too many times before, standing on the brink of a defining moment in modern science. And what happened? Last time I ended up with a rotten gryphon's egg with a stink that hung around for a week.'

‘This will be different, Professor. I am convinced of it.'

‘Me, too,' said Kavita. ‘It's going to be fame at last! We'll all be on the cover of next month's
Time
magazine. Or
American Biology Today,
anyhow.'

Nathan managed to smile. ‘You're right. I guess I'm bushed, is all. Listen – I just want to call Grace and tell her I'm going to be late. Aarif – can you make sure that all of the video and infrared cameras are up and running? And run another soundcheck, too?'

‘Of course, Professor,' said Aarif, with a courteous nod of his head.

Aarif was in his late twenties, a tall Egyptian, thin as a rail, with a vertical shock of wiry black hair and near-together eyes and a hawk-like nose. He was a graduate in developmental biology from the University of Cairo. He was polite and good-humored, but almost terrifyingly academic. Nathan had first met him when he flew over to Egypt last summer to collect DNA samples of dragon-worms from the Nile basin at Ain Shams.

Aarif had helped him to collect his samples, and had then volunteered to return with him to Philadelphia so that he could assist with this experiment. After seven months, and more than three hundred tests, they had at last succeeded in fusing the DNA from a dragon-worm with the DNA from an Egyptian scavenger hawk, and the result had been this fat gray phoenix-worm. Half worm, half bird. Theoretically, anyhow.

‘How about you, Kavita?' Nathan asked her, laying his hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all set?'

‘All set, Professor. I sorted out that glitch with the multi-gas monitor, and all of the other instruments are reading well within tolerance.'

Kavita was a young biochemist whom Nathan had wooed away from SupremeTaste Pet Foods in Pittsburgh. Now that he was privately funded by Schiller, he had been able to tempt her with nearly double the salary that she had been making at SupremeTaste. But it wasn't only the money that had attracted her; the cutting-edge stem cell research that Nathan was working on was infinitely more glamorous than dog-food development.

Kavita's mother was a full-blooded Mohawk, and Kavita had inherited her glossy black hair, her sharp, distinctive cheekbones, and her full, pouting lips. She also had a figure that had led Nathan's son Denver to ask if he could help out in the laboratory after school, even if it meant sweeping up.

It was Kavita's job to filter and analyze the airborne chemical residue that resulted from this experiment. Then she had to produce a computer model of exactly what had happened during combustion – even if it turned out to be a disaster.