The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution) (25 page)

Ed and Bobby
had their private conversation. Ed never shared the details, not
even with his other sons. Local authorities agreed to let Bobby,
now charged with Clarisse’s murder, stay in quarantine, rather than
risk spreading the virus by transporting him to jail.

The next
night, Lorna came down with a spate of nausea, one of the early
symptoms of the virus. The old apprehension she cast aside since
reconciling with her parents ratcheted up a return off the slow
coiling in her chest. For a second, she panicked, but then took a
deep breath.

I can face this.
You will rule me no longer. Be gone.

The anxiety
retreated like a wild beast being coaxed away from the village with
torches. Nodding at her image looking back from the mirror across
the room, she accepted the victory she’d won over herself.

“Infirmary,”
the tired voice said. Lorna could relate to the sound of fatigue.
She knew all about morning shift.

“This is Lorna
Winters. I’m coming down to be screened.”

“Symptoms?”
inquired the suddenly alert voice on the other end.

“Mostly
nausea.”

“Any fever or
soreness?”

“No, just the
nausea.”

The
nurse paused, before answering. “We’ll be ready when you arrive.”
Lorna understood
the
confusion in her voice. Even with a layman’s knowledge of the
virus, her symptoms didn’t quite fit.

Lorna sat on a
padded examination table wrapped in a green gown that, unless she
took care, let her backside hang out. Upon arrival, the staff
hustled her into a closed room. After she stripped and took a
disinfecting shower, a nurse recorded vitals, insisting she repeat
the symptoms. A second nurse arrived later, asking the same
questions.

“Are you
trying to catch me in a lie?” Lorna asked, half kidding.

“No, ma’am,”
the interviewer replied, as if the integrity of the whole medical
data gathering system had been impeached. “We need to know every
detail of your symptoms. Things you may have forgotten in the
earlier intake.”

“God as my
witness, nausea is it.”

The doctor
arrived, bundled in a face mask because she was a vampire. Curls of
dirty blonde hair peeked out around the green surgeon’s cap. A pair
of brown eyes observed the world from above the mask. “What do we
have here?” She began reading the intake forms.

Attempting to
avoid another medical interrogation, Lorna spoke up. “No fever. No
chills. Nausea. That’s all. I swear.”

“I see,” the
doctor said. “Your blood work looks fine. I want to do just one
more thing.”

An hour
later Lorna walked back to her apartment in shock.
Pregnant? Now what
am I going to do?

Nostalgic
thoughts of the good old days at OPD returned. Her worst problems
were the cases, all situations involving other people. No matter
how things ended, they never affected her. Now she was pregnant,
and a constant threat of impending death dominated whatever life
remained. In the improbable event she survived this mess, what
then?

The government
abortion clinics on Trade Port seemed the best option. The
incentive of generous child support couldn’t offset the downside of
motherhood. The prospect of spending the next eighty years
listening to a bunch of hybrid angst held no appeal. Moreover, if
one of them resembled Ed, the child would mock and torment her for
the rest of its life. No, Trade Port provided the best option. Ed
must never know.

“We have a
problem,” Ethan confided three days later. It was noon time. They
spoke on the inter-office communication system, less convenient
than cell phones but more secure.

“What could
make the situation here worse?” Lorna asked. Dark humor seemed
appropriate.

“Bobby has
escaped the compound.”

“Oh my God.
He’s contagious.”

“Yes, and
determined to destroy all of our kind on Earth.”

“How?”

“We’re not
sure, but he had help from someone inside.”

Lorna turned
the faces of possible suspects over in her mind.

“Does Ed—your
father—know?”

“Yes, I
briefed him myself. His orders are to take Bobby alive.”

“We need to
find him first. Otherwise, he’ll inoculate the world within—what
did the report say—six months?”

“Yes, six
months,” Ethan said. “Six months to the end of us on Earth.”

“Not if we
have any option or hope left,” Lorna said. “We might go down, but
we’ll fight this until they pull a sheet over the last one of
us.”

“But what more
can we do?”

“The
solution’s there. I’m missing it. The answer must have something to
do with Cithara’s prophesies, I’m sure.”

* * * *

Over the next
week, fourteen more died. Since Bobby’s escape had compromised the
quarantine, Ed allowed anyone who wanted to go home to leave. A
glum procession of families and grieving relatives filed out of the
compound.

“If they’re
spread out, it’ll be harder to infect them,” Ethan said.

“True,” Lorna
agreed. No matter what, barring a cure, in six months, the point
became moot. On the day of the exodus, a thunderstorm drenched the
sad procession. Even the divinities seemed determined to add to
their misery.

The next day,
while Lorna visited the clinic for follow-up, a young female in the
late stages of the virus crashed out of her containment tent.
Before the human orderlies wrestled her to the floor, she coughed
full in Lorna’s face. The medical staff rushed to execute
disinfection procedures, understanding despite their best efforts
within a day Lorna would most likely be lying in one of the beds,
gasping for breath.

Upon learning
of Lorna’s exposure, Ed wanted to come to her.

“It would be
unwise, Father,” Ethan said. “Lorna concurs.”

“You’re darn
right I do,” she said from a quarantine bed.

“How do you
feel?” Ed asked.

“I’m tired of
being laid up. Otherwise, fine. More than twenty-four hours have
passed, and nothing’s happened. I don’t think my fate is to end
like this.”

“The doctors
recommended three days observation,” Ethan said.

“And so it
will be,” Ed announced, ending further discussion.

Three days
passed without symptoms. Cleared from isolation, Lorna wasted no
time returning to the quest of finding a cure.

“A call for
you, ma’am,” a worn, submissive voice said from behind, catching up
with her in the treatment ward. “It’s the Chairman.”

Lorna took a
break from work to clear her mind, passing the time by comforting
the late-stage patients through the quarantine tents.

Without the
usual civilities, Ed launched into the conversation. “There’s an
outbreak of virus among the New Orleans clan,” he said. “Do you
have anything?” By “anything,” he meant a cure.

“No,” Lorna
answered, taking an exasperated breath, “God help me, no.”

Ed, we need to
talk.

Before she
could speak, he hung up, like her, chasing whatever hopes existed
for the preservation of The Others. Lorna closed her eyes against
the tears seeping out. She pictured the heroic shepherd driven
without mercy by a quirk of DNA to defend the flock with everything
he had, to die for them without a second thought if the situation
came to that.

She had
another dream about Cithara. In it, she
repeated—
the
unborn are the solution.

The next day,
the words swirled around in her mind while she worked. They tied
into the prophecy somehow. Lorna believed herself on the verge of
an epiphany, needing one more nudge to push everything into focus
and understanding.

The
illuminated laptop monitor seemed to call out to her. The screen
rolled through the day’s news, the latest on X-10, a famine in
Kenya, the stock market. Then the display paused on a medieval
portrait of the Madonna. “Is God within her?” the caption read.

Lorna sat
upright with a gasp of revelation. “God yes, but also the cure,”
she said aloud in the empty room. Fingers raced across the
keyboard, calling up the data on the Muslim Bomb. For three hours,
she pored over pages of United States Army statistics. A list of
people who the virus bypassed blinked on the screen.

“What gave
them immunity?” Lorna asked herself.

Without
exception, familial groups made up the list. Lorna picked up the
internal phone, dialing the head of the in-house laboratory. He’d
provided the survival statistics, and he knew more about them than
anyone else in the compound.

“Dr. Kelso,”
she said when he answered. “I’m looking at a list of survivors from
the Muslim Bomb.”

“Yes.”

“Correct me if
I am wrong, but I see almost no record of anyone surviving who
lived alone.”

Dead air
filled the space between them while he put aside some paperwork.
“What screen are you on?” After calling up the same one, he browsed
the information for a few seconds. “Yes, Ms. Winters. You are
correct.”

“Also, each
surviving family has at least one adult female member. Is that not
also true?”

“Yes? Where is
this going?”

“Can we
determine how many of the surviving families had a member who was
pregnant at the time?”

“Possibly, but
for what purpose?”

“It may be
nothing, or maybe everything. Please put what you’re doing aside
and attend to this right away.”

The same
evening, Lorna, Ethan, Doctor Kelso, and Ed met in the big
conference room. “What do you have?” Ed asked.

Lorna’s heart
ached for him. Shouldering the burdens of the community showed. The
flesh on his face sagged as if infused with lead. A dark area, like
prunes, lay under each exhausted eye.

“Show him,
Doctor Kelso,” Lorna said.

“Ms. Winters
asked me to seek commonalities among families that survived the
Muslim Bomb attacks of the last century. Until now, the explanation
for their survival has been they possessed a shared genetic
immunity. Ms. Winters called my attention to two facts. First was
the perfection of the survival. The distribution of the genetic
predisposition for immunity is random. Some members of the
surviving families would have a lot, others less, and a few none.
We would expect the unprotected ones to have succumbed, but
survival was almost perfect, beyond what any mathematical model
predicted.”

“You’ll
forgive me, Doctor, but how is this relevant to our situation?” Ed
carped.

“You’re going
to want to hear this,” Lorna chipped in.

Ed brightened
at the sound of her presence. “Then continue, by all means.” The
edge left his voice.

“Then we
discovered the single factor each of the families had in
common.”

“Thank
goodness for the anally compulsive record-keeping of the military,”
Lorna said.

“Yes. Ms.
Winters asked me to find how many of the surviving families had a
pregnant member. We cross-referenced military data bases. All of
them had at least one. Our conclusion is pregnancy somehow
conferred immunity not just to the woman, but also to those close
to her. The hypothesis is she transmitted protection through touch
or breath or a more direct exchange of bodily fluids.”

“There’s
more,” Lorna said. “A pregnant lycan female here became exposed and
did not contract the disease.”

“Who’s the
female?” Ed asked.

Lorna thought
him pretty dense not to figure it out, until remembering everything
he had on his mind. “That’s not important now. Your laboratories
need to concentrate on this avenue of research. Isolate the
element, synthesize and produce a vaccine. In the meantime, keep
everyone in the vicinity of pregnant females.”

“This sounds
crazy,” Ed murmured listlessly. “Do you think it will work?”

“We have no
better idea and nothing to lose. Besides fitting the prophecy, in a
weird way, the idea makes sense.”

“Then I’ll
give the order.” Ed paused, looking Lorna straight in the face.
“Tell the blessed mother the hope and love of all our kind goes
with her.”

Lorna choked
up, but forced the build-up of emotions back long enough to say,
“She knows.”

Ethan, who’d
been silent until then, spoke up. “This work is also personally
important to me.”

“In what way?”
Ed asked.

“An hour ago,
the staff doctors diagnosed Wendy with the disease.”

Lorna jumped
to her feet. “There’s no time to waste. We have blood samples to
take.” She departed for the infirmary.

“Are you going
to leave some for me?” she asked after they took the sixth vial of
blood.

The
quick-moving little technician missed Lorna’s attempt to lighten
the mood. “So many tests to run. A sample goes only so far.” He
answered with the somberness of one who’d been in the trenches from
the beginning.

Lorna sat on a
chair at lycan Wendy White’s bedside. If there were any truth to
pregnancy protecting others by being near them, then her place had
to be with the sick. Ethan’s wife was as ill as they came. On the
other side of the bed, their images distorted by the plastic
quarantine tent, Ethan, accompanied by his hybrid sons, sat
silently, keeping vigil over the feverish bundle of pain in front
of them.

When Lorna
stood up to walk around the ward to visit the other patients, Ethan
followed. “Are the tests proceeding well?”

“I guess so.
For sure they took enough blood.” She repeated the standing joke
about feeding the vampires. Ethan smiled briefly. They came to a
bed holding a male. Lorna reached into the quarantine gloves,
stroking his sweat-glistened forehead.

“Aren’t you
going to touch them?” Ethan asked.

“Not with you
exposed. Later today, the staff will wheel all of them to the
containment room. They’ll seal me in so I can remove the tents. We
don’t understand how the source of protection works, or what
curative powers I have, so I breathe on them and have a lot of
physical contact, the obvious things.”