Blood Colony (24 page)

Abena cast wary eyes back at Jessica but forced herself to smile. “Teferi says wives should trust their husbands, but why is there a drill at this hour?” Teferi’s senior wife, an Indian woman named Sharmila, was bolder and often spoke for both of them.

“Teferi and Dawit are worried that an old enemy may be close. They’re very protective.”

Abena sucked her teeth. “Too much, I think.” And she moved the boys along.

Jessica gazed across the hall at the Duharts’ closed door. She could hear Maya and Martin crying inside their family’s quarters. She wanted to go in and comfort the children, who were like a niece and nephews, but Nita didn’t want to see her. Jessica hoped she would think of the right thing to say to the Duharts by morning.

“The Duharts’ door stays unlocked,” Jessica told Yonas, to be sure.

“Yes, Blessed Mother. As you have asked.”

Fasilidas sprang behind Jessica like a cat when she walked toward her quarters. When she stopped abruptly, he nearly ran into her.

“I am s-so sorry, Blessed Mother,” he said. Mortification shadowed his angelic onyx face. She felt a maternal instinct toward him, until she remembered his true age.

“My name is Jessica, Fasilidas,” she said.

Fasilidas grinned. His teeth were large, scrubbed to shining. “As I know well, Blessed Mother. Jessica, daughter to Beatrice and Raymond. Stepdaughter to Randall. Granddaughter to Charlotte and John, and Lucille and Marion. Wife to Dawit. Jessica, a name from the tongue of the ancient Hebrews, meaning one who has wealth.” His recitation was breathless.

She could forget about the call-me-Jessica routine, she realized.

“Wake me if Jared or the Duharts ask for me, no matter what the time,” she said.

Another bow. “My honor, Blessed Mother.”

Jessica’s room was equipped with beds, a bathroom, and a corner kitchenette. The units all looked like modest hotel rooms, except for the fine woodwork. Cal had helped the Brothers fell the Douglas firs and maple trees for the lacquered walls.

Inside Jessica’s room, Alex and Bea lay in the beds meant for her and Dawit. Teka still sat where she had left him, his eyes closed in the recliner beside her table.

Jessica stood over Bea’s bed to watch her mother’s sheets rise and fall with her breathing. Despite Bea’s complaints, her nostrils had been fitted with oxygen tubes, as Lucas had advised. Jessica was glad her mother was sleeping.
Hurry and wake up, Lucas, in case she needs a doctor.

“She is weak, Jessica,” Teka said before she could ask. His eyes were open. “As Lucas feared.”

Jessica’s heart trembled. “How weak?”

“The excitement has had a toll. Her heart struggles. Her medications are useful, for now, but the heart is an unpredictable muscle in one so aged. It has already served her past its time. The Blood is her surest remedy.”

Teka had all but said what Jessica had known for six months: Bea was dying. Now Bea would have no choice but to accept an injection of blood, once she understood her condition. Jessica expected the weight of Teka’s words to fall on her, but she felt numb. Was Teka easing her emotional burden for her with his mind? Maybe she needed him to, just for tonight.

Teka smiled at her. “Your strength, Jessica, is not my doing,” he said. His smile faded. “But I should have soothed Cal. I promised Lucas I would not interfere too soon—instead, I waited too long. Their suffering was so easily avoided.” He clucked, shrugging.

“It’s not your fault,” Jessica said. “It’s mine.”

She should have encouraged Alex and Lucas to go as soon as the O’Neals had gotten in trouble. The Duharts would have happily left, and with Fana here, who would have stood in their way? And she never should have disclosed so much to Cal, Nita and Lucas, just as she should have found a way to delay Justin O’Neal’s sentencing. Would she ever grow wise, or would the years pass her unmarked in every way?

“What about Cal?” Jessica said.

“I only made him sleep at the steering wheel before he could do more harm. He is awake again. But his mood—”

“Leave him alone, Teka. Lucas was right. He’ll survive his mood.”

Teka shrugged. “But will the rest of us?”

Jessica felt hot irritation. “God gave us free will, Teka. It offends us to our souls when it’s taken from us.”

“As it should, Jessica,” Teka said, and he smiled. But Jessica knew what he left unsaid: Dawit had confessed that Khaldun had exerted a form of mind control over his colony for centuries. Khaldun had been the Life Brothers’ example of leadership, and old habits were hard to break.

“I have had a message from Fana,” Teka said.

“When?”

Teka’s smile widened. “During my meditations earlier tonight, I sensed a presence close to me. I wasn’t certain at the time, but now I believe it was Fana. Mahmoud’s warning held great resonance because he confirmed what my unconscious had already learned from Fana’s visit. She warned me of danger from others with the Blood.”

“Then she knows?” Jessica said, elated. If Fana knew, she could protect herself!

“What else she knows, I cannot say. But this is very much to the good, Jessica. Fana is exploring her gifts. She will need them. We all may.”

Jessica sat on the floor at Teka’s knees, the student’s position Fana often assumed, like the Japanese sitting style in yoga. Legs folded beneath her, she cupped her kneecaps with her palms. Jessica understood why Fana and the Life Brothers trusted and respected Teka so much; a foot in front of him, she could feel the incandescence of what might be his aura. She had felt nothing like it since her audience with Khaldun in Lalibela.

“Teka, tell me about the other child,” Jessica said. “Dawit doesn’t believe in him.”

“He doesn’t want to,” Teka corrected her. “But he believes in the possibility, certainly.”

“Did Khaldun know?”

“I would not presume to say what Khaldun did or did not know. He never said so.”

“Would this other child…have Fana’s gifts?”

Jessica saw something she didn’t recognize play across Teka’s lips. Was it fear?

“If he exists…he may. Yes.”

“Would he be as powerful?” She almost said
dangerous,
the truer word.

“If he has had fifty years, as Mahmoud claims, he knows himself in ways Fana cannot. Especially if he has had a good teacher. But even without a teacher…” Teka closed his eyes. “Fana may not have the capacity to match him. Not yet. Her best hope is to elude him.”

Jessica’s knees shuddered against the floor. A being
more
powerful than Fana?

“What will happen to her?”

Teka’s eyes opened. “I do not share Khaldun’s gift for future sight, Jessica. But I will go to my quarters and sit in stillness. Perhaps she will find me again.”

“What can I do for her?” Jessica had felt useless since the day Fana had disappeared into trance, where only Teka could truly reach her—and Khaldun, when he chose. But Fana said she had not sensed Khaldun in many years. Khaldun had left the Lalibela Colony after more than five hundred years, believing that Fana’s birth had set him free. How could Khaldun remain so remote, when he considered Fana so vital? How could Khaldun abandon his legacy?

“Protect her home,” Teka answered her. “Protect the ones she loves.”

Jessica thought of Bea, fighting to breathe. Alex, piteously silenced. Lucas, bruised and broken. Jared’s anger and disappointment. The horrible, unintended betrayal of the Duharts.

Yes, she wanted to protect the people Fana loved.

But protect them from whom?

Casa Grande
5:07 a.m.

J
ohnny hadn’t slept all night. He heard Charlie’s soft snoring beside him, and the mingled heavy breathing from Fana and Caitlin beyond the wall. How could
anyone
sleep?

He had to get out of here. Johnny had made his decision right after midnight, and he should have been up long before now.

His plan was simple: disarm the alarm, sneak out of the house, find a phone, call his parents. To make sure the call couldn’t be traced to the Rolfsons, he would take a bus to another city, which would take most of the day. He’d find a wireless kiosk with ’net phones. He had one of his dad’s credit cards, so the call wouldn’t be traced to his name.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was the only one he had. Now he needed the nerve.

Johnny was good at creeping around his roommate, so he dressed without a sound. In his wallet, he found a business card he’d taken from someone offering him a summer job at Tallahassee Memorial. He sacrificed the hookup to write Caitlin a note:

Johnny was glad he wouldn’t be here when Caitlin woke up and saw his note.

He crept to the other side of the room and recognized Caitlin’s breathing from the bed closest to him. Caitlin’s covers were pulled to her chin, bunched up as if to protect her. When she’d spent the night in his bed at Berkeley, she’d stolen all of the covers and wrapped herself around the wad like a fetus. A blanket hound. He could have learned to live with it, though.

Johnny stared at Caitlin’s sleeping face until he could see her lips, loose and pink.

I might as well kiss her good-bye,
he thought. Caitlin would never speak to him again.

But if he had to lose Caitlin’s friendship to jump out of this insanity, fine with him. He wanted Glow for Omari, but he wasn’t going to follow Caitlin to Mexico.

“Sorry, Caitlin,” Johnny whispered. “This is too much drama.”

If he got arrested for anything to do with Glow, no med school in the country would consider his application. Wouldn’t he do the world more good by getting his M.D. degree?

Johnny slipped the business card as close to Caitlin’s face as he dared, at the edge of her mattress. On the way to the stairs, Johnny walked softly past Fana’s bed.

Fana slept flat on her back, her arms planted at her sides as if she had forced herself to sleep by pure will. Fana was in a deep sleep, but her face looked so troubled that Johnny wanted to shake her and take her with him. But fanaticism burned in Fana’s eyes when she talked about Glow, like she thought she was Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman. Fana wouldn’t turn back.

Johnny gazed at the bulb of her nose, the dip between her chin and lips, her high-hewn Ethiopian cheekbones and striking eyelashes. Fana wasn’t little anymore, but she wasn’t as adult as she thought she was. He’d ask Dad to call Fana’s parents too, if he knew how.

A few strategic bumps with his shoulder, and the door opened with a quiet
swish
against the tiled floor upstairs. He was glad he was skinny and could slip through a narrow opening. No one in the hallway. No one in the darkened kitchen. Silence in the house except the humming fridge.

Johnny closed the hidden door and bookshelf quietly behind him. A dislodged hardcover bounced on his head, but he caught it before it hit the floor, his heart racing.

Johnny let himself breathe. So far, so good.

The alarm panel was near the kitchen entry. Johnny pushed Disarm, and a friendly green light came on. Now all he had to do was open the front door and disappear.

But he didn’t. Johnny’s nose caught an undercurrent he thought was from the kitchen, maybe from a meat package left on the counter overnight. But suddenly he realized the smell wasn’t coming from the kitchen at all: It was from
left
of him. The hallway.

Johnny smelled blood. A lot of it. He’d never worked in an emergency room, cleaned up a car accident or stepped on a mine, but he knew the smell by instinct. Wet, rusting copper.

Johnny’s peripheral vision sharpened, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed giant letters scrawled on the hallway wall behind him. There was just enough light thrown against the wall from the kitchen window for Johnny to see what was written:

AND BLOOD

TOUCHETH BLOOD

The two-foot-high letters took up much of the wall, two words stacked upon two in a script that would have been perfect except that it was runny at the loops and edges. The words had been written with great care. With effort and time.

In blood.

Johnny gagged. He pinched his larynx to stop its flailing. His fingers and neck pulsed with a manic call and response.
Where did that come from?

The bloody writing on the wall was sharp under his nose, but it wasn’t enough to fill up the hallway. Johnny was sure there was more blood close by. His heart whipped his rib cage, urging him to run, but his legs were locked, knees unsteady.

A doorway was open six paces ahead of him, on the left. Nate’s room. Nate had invited him into his room yesterday to show him his collection of Zonehead graphic novels, Japanese manga. The deepest dread of Johnny’s life burrowed into his stomach in the hall.

Just leave NOW.
Johnny was shocked at how certain his inner voice sounded, without any worries for the welfare of others; a clean line of thinking.

“Nate?” Johnny called anyway. His voice was thin and wavering.

Johnny walked past the bloody message to Nate’s waiting room, half-hidden in darkness.

Nate was lying on the floor, facedown in plush carpet. He was wearing brightly colored pajamas, Mutant Men. He lay not two steps from his doorway. Nate’s bare heels were so pale that they seemed to glow in the dark. Nate wasn’t moving.

Please let this be a joke,
Johnny thought.

“Stop playing around,” Johnny said. He nudged Nate’s shoulder with his toe, and his shoe sank into moisture. He stepped away, leaving a dark footprint on the hall’s white tile just outside of Nate’s door. But Johnny saw a large purple ring in the blue carpet around Nate’s head. The smell gave it away: The carpet was soggy with blood. A stain was creeping onto the hall tile beyond the room, like spilled paint.

“N-Nate?” Johnny said. His heart pummeled him. “You OK?”

Johnny knelt beside Nate and immediately felt blood seep through the denim at his knees. The blood was cold. Nate was definitely not OK.

But Johnny felt for a pulse anyway. His fingers slipped across Nate’s slick neck. Nate’s skin was slightly warm, but Johnny couldn’t feel any sign that his heart was beating.

Johnny grasped Nate by his shoulders and rolled him over to start CPR.

Nate’s face was painted red with blood. His eyes and mouth were wide open, all dribbling blood. His nostrils were caked with blood, runny. Bloody teeth grinned at Johnny. Nate’s face looked waxen, cheeks hollowed, skin ghostly pale. Nate was dead. Nate hardly looked human.

For the first time in his life, Johnny screamed.

The next thing he exactly remembered was Caitlin crying. And arguing between Caitlin and Charlie. But that must have come later.

At some point he had opened every door in the house until he found the Rolfsons’ master bedroom, which smelled of blood, too. The husband and wife lay at arm’s length from each other, both lying on their backs, bloody eyes staring, sightless, at their bedroom’s wood-beam cathedral ceiling and a skylight above them; an uncaring eye of morning light. Mitchell Rolfson’s hair and beard were so damp with blood that they were matted to his skin. Their pillows were crimson.

Behind him, Caitlin was crying. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
fuck
.”

When Caitlin wasn’t crying, she was swearing. Pacing. Grabbing handfuls of her hair.

“Who did this?” Caitlin said. “Who could d-do this?”

Charlie was running around the room like a bandit, stuffing clothes into duffel bags, his hands in gardening gloves. “
Chica,
I don’t know shit,” Charlie said, “but we need to get ghost.”

Caitlin suddenly looked at Charlie as if she had never seen him before. Wild-eyed. “Where were you last night?”

“Oh, sure, I came up for a drink of water and then I killed everybody,” Charlie spat, red-faced. “What the fuck are you talking about? Ask this guy where
he
was.”

Johnny had a headache, and the arguing was unbearable. His knees felt weighted with fifty-pound sandbags, as if he’d been bedridden. He walked to the Rolfsons’ oak sleigh bed and turned on the nightstand lamp so he could see better.

Johnny tried not to notice the wedding photo on the night stand, smiling faces on a Hawaiian mountainside. He tried to forget that Sheila Rolfson was a minister, and that her congregation was expecting to see her on Sunday morning. And that their son was lying dead down the hall. Remembering those things only made him tired.

Johnny tipped the lampshade for an unflinching beam on Mitchell’s face. This man had the same ghostly pallor as Nate. As if every drop of blood in his body was gone.

“There are no injuries,” Johnny said quietly. “Just blood.”

Caitlin and Charlie gaped at him. Caitlin had grabbed the sleeve of Mitchell Rolfson’s sweatshirt when she’d first gotten to the room, but she hadn’t come within five yards of the bed once she’d realized how much blood there was.

“Don’t touch him,” Caitlin said.

“Hey, man, don’t leave fingerprints!” Charlie said. “Let the cops do that.”

Five years ago, when Johnny had been a high school freshman, he and his classmates had lined up in the auditorium to file past a table where bored government clerks had taken their fingerprints. When he’d applied for a driver’s license, he’d had to submit to fingerprints again. Dad had told him there had been a time when only criminals and government employees had had their fingerprints on file, but now everyone did. His fingerprints were all over the house. Charlie had been trying to clean their fingerprints away, but he would miss plenty. Johnny couldn’t change that now.

“I’m just saying,” Johnny said. He lifted up Mitchell’s sweatshirt and found loose skin with no visible injuries; just the same pallor, glowing through uneven tufts of dark hair. “They bled out from their faces. Mouth, nose, eyes. None of us did this, unless it was poison. But I don’t know a poison that makes people’s eyes bleed. There’s viruses, like Ebola….”

He was babbling. Ebola was confined to faraway jungles, and no one in the family had looked sick yesterday. The Rolfsons had not died of Ebola.

“What are you, a damn doctor?” Charlie said.

Johnny shook his head. He didn’t have time to tell Charlie that he’d been a science geek all his life.
I have to know. Maybe I can handle waking up to a house full of dead people if I can understand.
But he didn’t understand. Something unnatural had happened to these people. Johnny remembered the eerie writing on the wall outside, and his hands shook.

Charlie walked behind Johnny and put his hand on his shoulder. “Hey, man,” Charlie said. “I get it. You should have seen what they did to Ethan. They left him in the road like a dog. It’s fucked up, but we’re all in serious shit if we don’t haul ass out of here. One, whoever did this may not be gone. Two, the cops will nail us for this. Think about it: Glow dealers murdered? With Ethan, they made it out like a turf war. We need to get out of here.”

“Oh, God,” Caitlin said, a deeper realization. A wail. Her eyes cleared, and she looked around the room, frantic. “Where’s Fana?”

“Who?” Charlie said.

“Bea-Bea,” Caitlin said. She rushed to the Rolfsons’ bathroom to look for Fana.

But Fana wasn’t in the bathroom. Johnny remembered clearly now, because he always noticed Fana: She had come stumbling out of the basement to see why he’d been yelling, and she’s stopped short when she’d seen the writing on the wall. She’d stared and stared.

Then had been seen her slip into Nate’s room and close his door, mumbling to herself.

Fana had been zoning, but he couldn’t judge her. He was zoning, too.

“She’s with Nate,” Johnny said. “She said she would try to bring him back.”

The bloody rooms were no worse than last night’s dreams of wind, rain and death, if only this was a dream too. But the waking sunlight told Fana the truth.

No dream. She was awake.

And blood toucheth blood.

Fana sat on Nate’s bed, her hands on her knees as she stared down at his body on the floor. The bed still smelled like freshly bathed skin, scented sweetly like a boy. His toys were everywhere: Action figures, games, comic books, trophies, a GamePort like Hank’s at the foot of his bed. Gum wrappers on his nightstand, another pile on the floor. A pair of spotless white Nikes on a shelf beside his closet, treasured. The weight of his unfinished life.