Suffer the Children (30 page)

“I’m sorry you don’t have enough medicine. But it’s not my problem. Now, please, leave us alone.”

She turned to comfort her daughter, who was whimpering in fear. The other women started to drift away, looking deflated. Joan sighed with relief. It was over.

Alice’s mom got back onto her feet with ragged wheezes. She held a glass bottle of barbecue sauce. She looked down at it as if trying to decide whether to buy it. Then she threw it.

The glass missile struck Jackie’s mom on the side of her face. She staggered, hands groping, and fell as if a rug had been yanked out from under her feet. She sat up in a daze and pressed her hands against her left eye.

“Mommy!”

Joan rushed to the cart to pull out the screaming girl. She couldn’t carry the weight. They collapsed in a heap. The girl howled in her ear.

Jackie’s mom moaned. “Jackie? Are you okay, baby?”

Alice’s mom snatched up another bottle and lurched several paces forward until she stood over the other woman, who was trying to get back onto her feet. She raised the bottle and flung it at the other woman’s head almost point-blank. It struck with a sickening thud.

“MOMMY!”

Jackie’s mom fell flat on her back to a flurry of screams. She was out cold. Blood oozed from a long, deep cut on her forehead.

Alice’s mom fell to her knees and dug into the woman’s purse. “Let’s see what you’ve got in here.” Two of the other women joined her while the rest fled the scene.

She held up a baby bottle. Tinged dark red, but almost empty. “Not good enough.” She ripped the cotton ball off the woman’s bare arm, revealing nothing but smooth flesh. Soft, pink, and warm. No punctures, no bruises. “Anybody got a needle?”

The kid from the deli ran into the aisle and skidded to a halt.
“What the hell is this shit?!”

“Call the cops!” Joan shouted.

“What’s wrong with her? What happened?”

“And an ambulance. Go!”

“I want my mommy,” the girl whimpered.

Joan hugged her close. “Your mommy’s going to be okay. Help’s coming. My name’s Joanie. I want you to be a big, brave girl for me.”

Behind her, the women argued.

“We can use a piece of glass.”

“Would a nail file work?”

“You can’t just take it from her. What if we kill her?”

“A pint. We’ll just take a pint.”

“A pint each?”

“Enough talking. I’m doing this with or without you. Are you in or out?”

They were in.

“Come on, we need to do this quick. This is my last hope for Alice.”

Joan gathered her breath and began to sing:

Mommy’s okay

Mommy’s all right

Mommy’s just fine

Behind her, the harvesting began.

Joan sang louder until the grisly sounds slipped away.

36 days after Resurrection

David checked the young man’s blood pressure. Normal. Mitch was a diabetic but had taken his medication the night before. He could give blood.

The lanky teenager sat in David’s office with his arm exposed and ready. David expected to answer questions about the side effects of giving blood, but all the kid wanted to know was what it tasted like.

“Like sucking on a penny,” said David as he tied an elastic band around the boy’s upper arm.

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Blood tastes like metal because of iron in the hemoglobin. That’s the chemical that makes red blood cells absorb oxygen.”

“Cool. Do you think my blood tastes sweeter? You know, with me being a diabetic and everything?”

David asked him to make a fist.

“Don’t bother the doctor,” said Ramona Fox, who sat next to the teenager. “I’m paying you for a pint, not to be an asshole.”

“I’m an asshole free of charge,” Mitch said, leering back at her.

“Charming.” The woman glared at him with thinly veiled disgust.

“If my blood tastes sweet, it should be worth more, don’t you think? There are lots of other moms online who would think so.”

They’d dropped the pretense that Mitch was Ramona’s cousin doing his part for the family—a lie they’d told because selling blood was illegal. David guessed Ramona had forgotten or had grown too tired and strung out for lies. Likely, she’d found him on some website. The going term on Craigslist was
babysitting
.

He tuned out their bickering as he tapped the teenager’s median cubital vein.

He’d trained to become a pediatrician for eleven years. College, then medical school, then three years of residency. Pediatricians didn’t make as much money as some other doctors, but as a young man, he’d considered it a noble profession.

When Nadine gave birth to Paul, it became his life’s calling. Every day, David treated coughs, broken bones, and the common cold. Anxious parents would call him at all hours of the day and night. He’d woken up every day and gone to bed every night worried about his patients’ health.

His patients had all died a month ago, yet he’d never been busier.

He was now a phlebotomist. He felt more like a medieval quack.

Sometimes, he treated one of his old patients. Herod brought the children back exactly as they were, chronic health conditions and all. Kids who were alive only an hour or two a day still managed to sprain their ankles and catch colds.

Most of the time, though, David drew blood.

He swabbed Mitch’s vein with a prep pad. The air filled with the crisp, clean smell of alcohol. He waited for it to dry.

I’m your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, and the drug is you.

When word had gotten around that Nadine was making house calls, she began to receive nonstop requests for help. Having a medical professional draw blood with sterile equipment was highly preferable to cutting open veins with straight razors.

At first, David wanted nothing to do with it. The parents were trying to keep their children alive. He understood that. But they couldn’t see beyond the next fix. The math was simple. The ninety thousand children in Plymouth County would need about sixteen
million
pints of blood to live about an hour a day for a year. Two million gallons. Fifty thousand barrels, enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every drop of blood in one and a half million adults. There were less than half a million adults in the entire county.

I’m the prison doctor who removes the appendix of a death row inmate, saving his life so he can be executed anyway.

Shannon Donegal had died horribly, fed upon by the child she carried in her womb. She’d died a gray, desiccated husk. Charlie had told him she’d fought against going to the hospital right to the end. She knew little Jonah was too young to survive outside the womb, with or without blood. The same fate awaited all the parents, though in a less direct way. The children were draining them dry one pint at a time, one day at a time.

When he and Nadine went to Paul’s grave on New Year’s Day to mark the one-year anniversary of his passing, he’d expected a healthy renewal of grief. Instead, she talked about the children. How Paul’s death had prepared her to help them. That all they had to do was hang
on a little longer until the blood sacrifice was complete, and then the children would stop dying.

David didn’t see the hand of God in these events. He saw a greedy parasite with an appetite for blood that would never be satiated. The world couldn’t move on until Herod was destroyed, but that meant letting the children go.

Nadine had asked him to help. It was getting to be too much for her. She wanted to set up the office as a blood clinic. Come in, get your blood drawn, and leave with a pint of life in a plastic bag. Desperate parents were slashing themselves. They were dying. They needed professional help. Others were helping. Why not him?

As a doctor, he’d taken the Hippocratic Oath. The original version of it, written way back when people swore to Apollo, included the well-known proverb that a physician should do no harm. David had no idea what that meant anymore. If he refused, parents died. But there were too many mouths to feed. Ben, who was still convalescing at home, kept in touch with the medical examiner’s office. He said the number of “suicides” was going up, but so was the homicide rate. An elderly couple was found strung upside down, their throats cut, drained of blood. A woman paralyzed from the waist down had her femoral artery slashed. Several hemophiliacs had been cut and bled out. The police even found a man who’d been hooked up to a dialysis machine in a botched attempt to suck the blood out of him. The official report said the walls had been painted with it. This was where everybody was headed. They were blinded to it, but David could see the future all too clearly. Soon, soccer moms would be slaughtering each other in their living rooms with the TV turned up so the canned laughter would drown out the screams. Walls painted with blood.

I’m Dr. Kevorkian, assisting the suicide of the human race to relieve it from its suffering.

The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath had an even more appropriate admonition against playing God.

Standing on Paul’s grave with its little headstone, David still didn’t know if Nadine had lost her mind or was simply making a moral choice
he didn’t agree with.
Do it for Paul
, she’d said.
Do it for me.
In the end, that simple argument won out. He’d seen her only rarely during those weeks of house calls. They’d been distant since Paul’s death, but now he was officially losing her. It was a strange feeling to long for your own wife. He agreed to help because he loved her. Just as the parents would do anything for their children, he would do anything for Nadine.

He guessed that made him a junkie as well as a dealer.

“Dr. Harris?”

He glanced at his watch. “Yes, we can proceed.”

“Hold it a minute,” said Mitch.

Ramona’s eyes narrowed. “Now what?”

“I’d like to stretch this out to a pint and a half. Can I do that?”

David sighed. “It’s possible. You’re young and in good health. It’s just not recommended.”

“I won’t die or anything, will I?”

“That’s highly unlikely. But you won’t feel well for a while.”

“Then I’d like to do it.” He winked at Ramona. “That’s, what, another hour you could spend with your little boy?”

The woman chewed her lip, clearly torn between greed and suspicion. “And you want what for it?”

Mitch shrugged. “I don’t know. I give more, you give more.”

“I need a price. I’m not made of money.”

He smiled. “Maybe I don’t want money anymore.”

Oh God, it’s come to this.
David sat in his chair wearing the white medical jacket that used to actually mean something to people, used to make him feel respected, while he waited like an idiot for them to finish their crude negotiating.

At first, the parents had come. They gave everything they could. Next came friends and family. They gave all that they were willing. Now David drew blood for the most part from undesirables.
Assholes
, as Ramona put it so nicely. The assholes were here for money. And whatever else they could get. Parasites themselves, searching for symbiosis.

David missed working with children. Living children with real problems for whom his skills could make a real difference. He missed doing good.

The coy haggling went on until he decided to tune them out. He thought about Herod.

About how Herod killed its victims.

Everybody was infected. He had it, Nadine had it, everybody did. But it only killed the children. Not a single child was immune. Why? How did it survive in adults? Where did it come from? What had triggered it across the entire globe at almost the same time? And: Could it be cured?

The key to this last mystery resided in the blood.

The heart pumped the blood and kept it circulating through the body’s highway system of arteries, veins, and capillaries. The blood itself consisted of blood cells floating in plasma, mostly water plus proteins and other substances. The purpose of blood was to carry oxygen and nutrients to the body’s cells and carry away metabolic waste—such as carbon dioxide—to the lungs to be exhaled. Most blood cells, in fact, were red blood cells rich in iron-containing hemoglobin, which carried oxygen. Blood also contained white blood cells, which defended the body against infection and parasites. As Nadine liked to say, blood was life itself.

Herod somehow eluded the body’s immune system. The autopsies revealed massive clusters of complex molecules in the blood and concentrated in the brain, nervous system, heart, and stomach lining. At first, scientists theorized a chemical had bonded with the children’s hemoglobin. That left less of it to bond with oxygen and resulted in asphyxiation similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. Subsequent research quickly revealed that these objects were dormant but alive—parasitic organisms that ate red blood cells. Their feeding starved the brain of oxygen and caused death by cerebrovascular accident, or stroke, which explained the burning smells, headaches, numbness, and other symptoms.

Since Herod only infected children under the age of puberty, the
answer had to be found in their unique physiology. Puberty, however, involved numerous chemical changes in the body. The process began in the central nervous system, one of the areas of the body where Herod resided, and involved the brain’s hypothalamus, anterior pituitary and sex organs, and about ten major hormones. Besides that, scores of plasma proteins changed during the transition from child to adult. In short, singling out the specific difference between children and post-pubescent teens that resulted in Herod’s being active or not was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The whole mystery was so complex that if David weren’t a scientist, he would have been tempted to believe in a supernatural cause if only to satisfy Occam’s Razor—the logical law stating that the simplest explanation is usually true. He’d fallen for that idea once. Never again.

In any case, David still believed the children themselves could not be cured. Right now, Herod appeared to be the only thing keeping them alive. To destroy Herod was to destroy the children. Even if a cure existed, it would take too long to manufacture enough doses for all of them. The cure would be for the adults. They had to be cleansed of the parasite. After that, its natural reservoir had to be found and destroyed.