Alien Nation #3 - Body and Soul (25 page)

On the way they stopped by Zepeda’s desk. “Beatrice, have you seen Albert?”

She chucked a thumb in the direction of the holding cells. “He’s with the big guy.”

George nodded, figuring that he should have known that. As he headed off in that direction, Sikes asked, “Any luck on that Opsil thing?”

She shook her head. “Still working.”

This puzzled Sikes. Zepeda was the best when it came to this kind of thing. If it was taking her this long, then it must be buried pretty deep in somebody’s system.

He turned to ask George for his opinion, but the Newcomer had already gone on ahead. Matt tossed off a salute to Zepeda and hurried off after George, but then was interrupted when the phone on his desk rang. In a way, he decided, maybe that was better. George and Albert would probably benefit from privacy when George had to give him the bad news.

“Sikes,” he said, picking up the phone.

“Matt, this is Cathy . . .”

For a moment the picture of her as a human, with that thick auburn hair, flared across his memory. Then he extinguished the flare. “Yeah, Cathy.”

“Matt, something’s happened that I thought you’d want to know.”

“Got a feeling it’s not good.”

George stopped several feet away from Albert, who was standing and staring at the imprisoned giant as if he were in a trance. The giant was as listless as he had ever been.

George cleared his throat. He couldn’t put this off any longer. “Albert . . .”

“They shouldn’t move him,” said Albert, not taking his eyes off the giant.

“What?”

“He’s supposed to go to county jail today. But he’s sick.” He pointed. “Look.”

Indeed, Albert seemed to have a point. Upon closer inspection, the giant had gone beyond listlessness. His face was ashen, and when George listened carefully, he could hear a raspiness in the giant’s breathing. Even his eyes were starting to glaze over.

“He does look ill,” agreed George. “I’ll speak to Captain Grazer.” Then he steeled himself once again. “Albert, I need to talk to you.”

“He can’t live without the baby.”

This was becoming somewhat frustrating. Every time George managed to get up the nerve to broach the subject, Albert made it clear that he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention. Trying not to sound frustrated, George said, “How do you know these things?”

“I just do,” Albert said with a shrug.

There was a long pause, and then Albert said, “Is something wrong, George?”

This was it. He was going to have to face Albert’s disappointment, and try to cushion it as best he could. “Albert . . .”

“Hey, George!”

This interruption from a new source was almost enough to make George punch the wall. Matt had come in, bustling with urgency, and before George could ask him to come back in a few minutes, Sikes said, “Cathy just called. The baby’s real sick. They’ve taken her to the hospital.”

Stunned, George said, “Let’s go.”

But as he was about to, Albert said to him, “George, was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Oh. Right. Albert. Uhm . . .” He looked into the young janitor’s eyes and then said, “I want you to keep an eye on the giant for us. Do exactly what you have been doing. Monitor him constantly. You’re now an . . . unofficial part of the investigative team. Can you do that for me, Albert?”

Albert nodded, looking very serious. “You can count on me, George. You too, Sergeant Sikes.”

“Thanks, Albert. I knew we could. C’mon, George.”

They headed out, and as they did so, Sikes said in a low sarcastic voice, “That’s the way to handle these things, George. Honest and direct.”

“Buzz on, Matt.”

“Off, George. Buzz off.”

“That, too.”

When Sikes had been very little, his mother had taken him to a local production of
Peter Pan.
The thing that he remembered most distinctly about it was the part where Tinkerbell—represented, as she so often was, by a small spotlight—was dying. She was depicted by a light that became smaller and smaller in diameter and then began to flicker. And you just knew that when the light was gone altogether, so too was Tinkerbell’s life.

Now, standing next to the infant’s bed in the hospital’s pediatric ward, Sikes was experiencing the same feeling.

The child, who had seemed to radiate light before, now looked as if some technician somewhere were rendering her dimmer and dimmer. A liquid crystal monitor above gave her life readings, but Sikes did not even pretend to understand it. All he knew was that he wanted to burst into applause in some desperate attempt to keep the infant going.

Of course, that would not have helped in the slightest. But as Cathy finished examining the child (for the third time within the last half hour) and turned to face the police officers, Sikes got the distinct feeling that clapping would have been as useful as anything else medical science was going to be able to provide.

“She’s failing,” said Cathy, trying to sound as businesslike as she could. It was clear to Sikes that all her attempts at professional distancing were not particularly successful. It was as if Cathy were living and dying with each labored breath the infant took. “Respiratory and cardiac rates are up. Blood pressure is down. Bi-tozeg function is almost nonexistent.”

Although he suspected he already knew the answer, George still said, “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Cathy a bit desperately. “Her physiologic status is an unknown. She’s very difficult to evaluate.” She pointed to the monitor as if George or Matt could make any sense of it. “Look at her arterial oxygen saturation. It’s normal for a Newcomer, but it would be fatal to a human.”

George and Sikes looked at each other. “The giant is sick, too,” George told Cathy while watching Matt. Matt simply nodded in agreement. “Albert thinks they need one another.”

“Albert’s no doctor,” said Cathy more sharply than she would have liked. She stopped and composed herself, rubbing the bridge of her nose in a manner that indicated she hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. “Then again, I am. And I certainly don’t have any scientific explanation, much less an unscientific answer. Maybe he’s right.”

At that moment, a nurse walked in and asked, “Excuse me, are you gentlemen Detectives Sikes or Francisco.”

“I’m Sikes or Francisco,” said Matt.

“You have a call,” she said, chucking a finger at her desk.

“I’ll take it,” George volunteered, and immediately headed out to the desk.

Matt and Cathy stood there, shuffling their feet a moment in discomfort. “What are you going to do for her?” he asked finally.

“Try to fashion some sort of life support,” said Cathy. “We’ll do the best we can. But it doesn’t look good.”

“Maybe we should try bringing them together . . .”

Cathy shook her head. “I have strict orders against it.”

“But if you could explain the situation . . .”

“We don’t have a situation, Matt,” she said patiently. “We have Albert’s hunch. That’s it. If I can uncover a medical reason, that will be a different story.”

“I see.”

The silence fell between them again. Sikes desperately tried to come up with something he could say that would bridge the gap between them. “Cathy—” he started.

George came back in, not giving Matt a chance to proceed, which wasn’t that cataclysmic, since Matt really hadn’t a clue as to what to say anyway. “That was Zepeda,” said George. “She traced Opsil. It was a classified government operation run through the Bureau of Newcomer Affairs. There’s a man at the federal building we can talk to.”

“Let’s do it,” said Matt. “Cathy, it might be that the baby’s only hope is finding a medical reason to bring her and the giant together. Otherwise . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Really . . . there was nothing he could say.

F
AR FROM THE
concerns of hospitals, giants, and police officers, Emily Francisco and her friend Jill were sprawled on the grass in a park, doing their homework. Jill, blowing bubbles with her gum, had been staring at the same paragraph in her American history text for the last fifteen minutes. Finally, she rolled over onto her back, her arms spread wide.

“Manifest destiny,” she moaned. “I hate manifest destiny.”

Emily was lying flat on her back, having finished the text twenty minutes previously. Her chin propped in her hands, she said, “The Indians didn’t like it either.”

Suddenly Jill sat bolt upright. “Oh, shoot! I gotta go! I promised my dad I’d clean the aquarium!” Not that, under ordinary circumstances, she’d really give a damn about remembering to clean the aquarium or not. But when it came to excuses for ditching homework, Jill was a master. She started gathering her materials together and asked, “You wanna come over?”

Emily shook her head. “I’m gonna get a little more UV before the sun goes down.” She lowered her head and rested it on its side.

Jill shoved her books into her backpack, heedlessly crushing two important notices for her parents. “ ’Kay. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

Emily closed her eyes as Jill ran off. The sun was warm on her face. She listened to the gentle noises of kids calling to each other in the distance, tossing a Frisbee around. There was a rustling of the trees as the wind passed through them, and a bird took off—she could hear the flapping of its wings.

Then she heard footsteps coming in her direction. She waited for them to veer off, but they didn’t. Instead they stopped not too far from her. She looked up, opening her eyes and squinting.

A Newcomer teenager boy was standing directly in front of her, backlit by the sun so that he had a sort of aura about him. He was eyeing her appreciatively, and with a guilty inner thrill, she realized that he was regarding her potniki. “Hi,” he said. His voice was low and confident.

“Hi,” she replied.

“My name’s Dirk,” he said. “Dirk Knight.”

“Emily Francisco.”

He squinted at her. “You go to Marshall High?”

A little warning bell went off in the back of her head, informing her that maybe this was more than a casual question. It might be that he was trying to get a feeling for her age because . . .

Nah. He just wanted to know if he was talking to some dorky junior high school kid or not.

“Uh-huh,” she lied.

“I’ve never seen you.”

“I just transferred,” she said easily. That was the wonderful thing about lying. Once you’ve done it, it becomes that much easier with every passing moment.

He nodded in the general direction of some other Newcomer teens who were in the distance. “I’m with some friends. We’re looking for lichens. There’s some really good rock moss in the trees over there,” and he pointed in the direction of the trees. “You hungry?”

“Yeah,” she said as eagerly as if she hadn’t eaten in two days, instead of, in fact, having snacked up less than a half hour ago.

She stood and they started toward the trees. He looked at her with what appeared to Emily to be mild suspicion. “How old are you?”

Coyly she said, “How old do I look?”

He shrugged, unsure. “ ’Bout fifteen.”

She was thrilled beyond belief. Fifteen! That was practically grown-up! Jill had to trowel makeup on her face and wear nylons to look older, and here Emily seemed fifteen just from her stylishly low-cut sweater. Not to mention, of course, the very mature way in which she presented herself.

“Good guess,” she said cheerfully.

She went with him, walking side by side and chatting amiably as they walked through the trees and into a clearing surrounded by tall pines. Emily paused as she entered, and the first buzzing of being uncomfortable started to trill.

There were several Newcomer couples seated on blankets. They were engaged in activities that were not exactly conducive to scrounging around rocks. The earth term was
making out.
They were rubbing temple to temple, humming low and melodiously. One of the couples was even further along, with the girl fondling the inside of the boy’s elbow. He looked as if he was about to pass out from the enjoyment.

Emily gulped.

“So much for the rock moss,” said Dirk, not sounding particularly upset about it. “Y’know . . . my ankle’s sore. Let’s sit down.”

He guided her over to a fallen log, now limping somewhat noticeably . . . which was odd, Emily realized, considering that he hadn’t been limping at all up until that point. They sat and watching the young couples who were so involved in pleasuring each other that they were totally oblivious to the presence or existence of anyone except themselves.

“Looks like fun,” Dirk observed.

Emily gulped even more loudly than before.

Dirk didn’t seem the least bit deterred by her obvious nervousness. In fact, he seemed oblivious to it. From his backpack, he withdrew a rather grubby looking, single-serving milk carton and offered it to her.

She shook her head and waved it off. Dirk looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then downed some of the sour milk himself. He licked his lips, moving his tongue very slowly and in a manner that would have been suggestive to Emily, had she been savvy enough to know what he was suggesting. “Y’know, Emily, I really like that sweater.”

“Thanks.” Before she would have been thrilled for an older boy to say something like that. Now, though, it made her feel creepy. Reflexively she crossed her arms.

“You cold?” he asked, upon seeing the movement. He slipped his arm around her back, and partly by accident—but mostly intentionally—let his fingers drift over her potniki as if to warm them. She gasped quietly.

“No . . . I’m okay,” she said, her voice partly strangled.

“Yeah,” said Dirk appreciatively, “you sure are.” He continued to rub her back, and said, “Why don’t you have a little sour milk. It does a body good.”

Emily wanted to stand up. She wanted to run. But she couldn’t get her legs to support her. “I . . . better get home.”

“You just got here,” he protested. He moved in to nuzzle her temple. Her eyelids fluttered, her body was starting to turn to warm Jell-O—and then her eyes snapped open, her brain screaming a kick-start warning to the rest of her that this was going too far, way too far.