Suffer the Children (14 page)

She’d begun to learn little things about him. He’d been engaged once but never married. He was biding his time, waiting for the right woman, and that was okay because he knew what he wanted. He was somewhat straight edge; he didn’t drink or smoke and had never even had a joint in his life, his main vice being caffeine. The man was a connoisseur of coffee. As she already knew, he didn’t take work very seriously. He exercised every day to stay fit. He liked to golf in the spring. More for the exercise than the sport, he said. He loved the smell of fresh-cut grass.

She didn’t care about any of it. This was going all wrong, she knew, and it wouldn’t end well. She didn’t need a boyfriend. She needed a therapist.

They wandered toward a hill occupied by a crowd of other mourners. The glow of candles along the ridge lent the place a holy atmosphere, making the journey there something of a pilgrimage. It seemed to promise something; Ramona felt drawn to it.

At the top, she found nothing but empty night sky that chilled her even more.

Then the stars came out. Millions of points of light. Ramona imagined they were reflections of the candles on the hill. The souls of the dead children. She tried to decide which one was Josh. He lived up in the sky now.

“Wow,” said Ross. “Look at that.”

She looked down and saw it. One of the children’s burial grounds. The crowd had come here to take in the view of their children being laid to rest, not the stars. It was several miles away, but she could see headlights moving across the fields and hear the distant hum of the big digging machines. The burial ground spanned the horizon. She resented how the sheer size of it trivialized her loss. Made Josh’s death seem insignificant.

Josh had been taken there for burial. Now was the perfect time to say good-bye, but she refused. She couldn’t let him go. His physical form was one thing. His spirit was another.

A female voice: “Ramona?”

Ramona turned and said, “Joan.”

They leaned close enough to exchange body heat. They had a connection they only now perceived and didn’t yet understand, taking comfort in sharing space, like survivors of the same plane crash.

Ross cleared his throat and introduced himself. Joan introduced her family.

“I have pictures of Josh I want to give you,” she said.

“Thank you. And sorry.”

“I’m sorry for your loss too. Josh was a great kid.”

“I meant about Josh getting sick. I said some stupid, hurtful things. I’m sorry for that.”

“I honestly forgot all about it until now,” said Joan. “But thank you.”

“He really liked you and your kids. You’re a great mom, Joan. I think maybe I resented you a little for that. How you always seemed so comfortable in your own skin being a mother. It was harder for me. I’m sorry I felt that way.”

“Being a mom is hard, period,” Joan told her. “Nobody understands this. Sometimes even moms forget. Don’t beat yourself up—you did just fine by Josh.”

They hugged and parted ways. Ramona headed back down the hill with Ross. It had felt good to say those things; honesty, once so rare and precious, had become easy. Her eyes stung as she considered the small piece of wisdom Joan had shared with her.

“Where do you want to go now?” Ross asked her.

Ramona sighed. “I don’t care. Let’s just keep walking.”

“There’s a special place I’d like to take you tomorrow, if you’re up for it. It’s got an incredible—”

“
No.
No plans. Please.”

“All right, I guess. I’d still like to come over, though. Can I do that?”

“Let’s just be quiet for a while, okay?”

They reached the bottom of the hill and stood under a pathway
light. She watched the others wander about in varying states of shock. She saw them not as mourners but survivors. They moved in near silence broken by periodic wails of grief. Many wore photos pinned to their coats, as if declaring they weren’t people anymore, but merely placeholders for their missing children.

A bell tolled, loud and crisp. The sound resonated in her brain. She knew what it meant.

The last child in the world is dead. Just as the scientists predicted.

She didn’t want to be here.

“Kiss me,” she said on impulse.

Ross snorted. “What? I don’t know if we should do
that
again.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“I want to help. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to take advantage.”

Ramona leaned against him. “Kiss me.”

He did. It was a test, and it worked. Her mind blanked out. She wanted more.

Ross smiled. “Wow.”

Scattered screams erupted along the top of the hill. At first it was easy to ignore, but the screaming didn’t stop. Instead, it multiplied. Screams of horror mixed with hysterical, joyful crying, all of it tinged with a chilling quality, something like insanity.

“What the hell is going on up there?” Ross wondered. “Listen to them.”

“The bell tolled,” she said bitterly. “It’s the end. Herod won.”

The vigil offered her nothing. No peace of mind in any case. Only the certainty that all the world’s children were now dead, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. No way the parents they’d left behind could move on from the depths of shock.

“Something else is going on,” he said. “It’s giving me goose bumps. It’s like the mall—”

She leaned against him again. He felt warm. This she could believe in.

“Take me home, Ross.”

His eyes widened and his arms loosened. “Like I said, I don’t want to—”

She nuzzled his throat. “Yes or no, Ross. Say yes.”

“Wow,” he whispered, and she kissed him again, hard.

“Is that a yes?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s a big yes.”

“
Mommy
,” Josh said.

Ramona turned and stared at her boy in shock.

“Holy shit!” Ross cried, and lunged backward.

“Josh?”

Her voice came out as a tiny whisper. Her lips tingled. Stars sparked in her vision.

Ross shook his head. “It’s him.”

She fell to her knees. “Josh? Is it really you?”

The boy stared straight ahead, his face slack and his clothes splattered with frozen mud. He didn’t blink. Several other children marched past, trailing puffs of quicklime.

“The children,” Ross said. “Oh, Christ.”

Josh’s eyes flickered for the first time, looking over Ramona’s shoulder to regard Ross with his unblinking stare.

“Why were you kissing that man?”

The shock wore off. Ramona screamed.

Hour of Resurrection

The Children’s Hospital had been converted into a giant morgue filled with people in scrubs opening bodies, drawing blood, slicing organs, mopping bodily fluids.

David Harris raised his clear plastic face shield, peeled off his gown and gloves, and stretched. It was nearly midnight. He’d done two bodies in ten hours, and he could feel one muscle after another clench, while the burning ache in his leg increased in volume, threatening to become a scream.

He endured it. This was where he belonged. Outside the hospital, the world reeled in shock and tried to find meaning in what had happened. In here, people worked around the clock to help the CDC determine the cause of Herod’s and defeat it. If only Nadine could understand that, she might understand him. He wished she were here, fighting at his side.

He gritted his teeth against the pain as he limped away from the table to dry-swallow another Vicodin. A diener—responsible for transporting the bodies and preparing them for autopsy—placed the body David had just finished onto a gurney and wheeled it out of the room.

“Bring me another one, Sam,” David called after the muscular Asian-American. “And a bucket.”

The recovery beds had been converted into crude autopsy tables. Covered in plastic and tilted to allow gravity to control the flow of bodily fluids into a waste bucket. During a bathroom break after the first body, somebody had stolen his bucket, and now the legs of his scrubs and shoe covers, not to mention the floor, were covered with blood and chunks of tissue.

His mind flashed to Shannon Donegal wailing and hugging her swollen belly in his office. He winced at how he’d handled delivering the news of her baby’s fate. He knew too well what she was going through and the hell to which she had to look forward, but the elephant in the room had demanded his attention. Her child couldn’t be saved. None of them could. But they had a chance to save billions of future children. Humanity itself.

The process of finding that cure began here.

“Take a break.”

He turned and saw Ben Glass. His friend looked terrible. The man hadn’t slept or eaten well in days and was overworked to boot.

“One more,” said David.

“You’ve done two back-to-back. Take a break, David. Eat a sandwich. Drink some OJ.”

“I’ll take a break when you do.”

The bodies were decomposing. They all had a brief window to collect fresh samples, and that window was closing.

Sam returned to strip the gore-splattered plastic sheeting from the bed and unroll a new cover for the next body.

Ben rubbed his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here, David. I really am.”

“This is where we’re going to beat Herod’s.”

“You’re doing a great job. You picked up the ABCs in no time.”

“It’s been a long time since I cut into a cadaver. Medical school.”

“If you’re interested in a career change, you might think about forensic pathology.”

“I’d rather work on the living. But thanks.”

“Just remember to take care of yourself. If you feel yourself losing it at any time, call for help, and someone will take over. People more experienced than you have already lost a finger because of fatigue. Okay?”

“Got it. I’ll be careful.”

Sam brought another body. Undressed, washed, and weighed.

“Looks like you’ve got another customer,” Ben said. “I’d better get back to it myself. CDC wants more X-rays, and I have to beg St. Catherine’s for another machine.”

“Too bad for the living.”

“They’ll complain, but that’s a privilege of being alive. Good luck here, David.”

“It’s just you and me now, kid,” David told the body, a boy who looked about six years old. He pulled on a fresh gown and two pairs of gloves. He read the chart. “Jonathan Ford. Great name.”

Sam placed a plastic bag filled with medical textbooks under the boy’s back as a body block to make his chest protrude. “You okay, doc?”

“I’m a pediatrician,” David told him. “Old habits die hard. I’m not trying to be creepy.”

“No, I like it,” said the diener. “Treat them like people, doc. They deserve it.” He turned as somebody called his name. “I’ll be around if you need me. Just holler.”

“Thanks.”

Time to get to work. David narrated into a handheld recorder as he inspected the body. Jonathan Ford was Caucasian, male, brown-haired, blue-eyed, six years old, and had a tiny birthmark shaped like the state of New Jersey on his left leg. His legs also had white patches where there was no skin pigment, indicative of vitiligo.

Otherwise, David found no abnormalities. The body was stiff from rigor mortis. The abdomen swollen from gas. Light bruising along the front of his body, which was livor mortis. Jonathan had fallen facedown after he died. Sometime afterward, he’d been turned onto his back. Approximate time of death: three days ago, when Herod’s struck.

He scanned the tools on the instrument cart. Bone saw, bread knife, several types of scissors. Hooked hammer, scalpels, skull chisel. Rib cutter, toothed forceps, electric saw.

David selected a large scalpel from the tray. The boy’s eyes shined a bright blue even in death. He closed them with his thumbs.

“You don’t want to see this, Jon.”

Who are you, Jonathan Ford? Who would you have become?

He’d asked these same questions at Paul’s grave. He pushed them aside and focused.

What caused you to die?

He stared at the boy’s chest. He’d done just three autopsies so far, two of them supervised as part of his training. He found it helped if he visualized the procedure before doing it.

First, he would make an incision from shoulder to shoulder, meeting at the breastbone and plunging down to the pubic bone, creating a Y shape. He would pull the chest flap up and over the boy’s face, exposing the rib cage, which he’d cut and remove using the rib cutters. Then he’d detach the organs, arteries, and ligaments. He’d start with the larynx, where the epiglottis, a flap of cartilage behind the tongue and in front of the voice box, constricted to produce laughter.

David thought about how Paul used to make him laugh. He’d once read the average adult laughed four times a day. He’d beat that in just an hour with his boy. Over a typical day, he’d set a record for laughing.

He hadn’t really laughed since Paul left his life.

Exhaustion was making his mind wander. He wagged his head to clear it.

“After I take care of you, Jon, I’m going to have a nap.” He snapped his fingers and tried to focus. “The organs, the organs.”

Once he detached the organs, he’d pull out the entire set in a single piece for dissection and study. Individual organs would be weighed. Slices taken with the bread knife. Blood vessels bisected. The stomach opened and examined. It was grisly work. But vital.

In particular, he’d obtain samples of the strange blood from the femoral artery and the right atrium of the heart. In the bodies of the children, some of the blood had congealed, as one would expect. Some of it, however, had become dry, spongy, and pinkish in color. Right now, it was the only abnormality showing up in the initial autopsy results. An important clue. Herod consumed some components of the blood while chemically altering others, leaving behind a moist pink Styrofoam.

After taking these important samples, David would open Jonathan Ford’s skull using a Stryker electric saw and the hooked hammer, and remove the brain for study.

The final step was to put Humpty Dumpty back together again piece by piece. He’d end the procedure by sewing the incisions closed with a heavy needle.

A single body took hours of grueling, methodical, detailed work. The task daunted him.