Marianne was sobbing. "How could I say it? What could we do about it?"
"Where's Randy?" Nelson asked her. "Where's Tim?"
"They're trying to help your family. We would have only slowed them down."
Javier's phone beeped. Not much longer on the battery.
"Listen to me," he barked into the receiver. Both Nelson and Marianne went quiet. "There's an illness spreading. A hunger, a terrible hunger." Like Marianne, he decided to spare Nelson the detail he could do nothing about-the rumor that the children were eating each other...and the possibility that if his son had survived the gas explosion, he would have been quarantined with a bunch of other children. "Is it the Canaan?"
Nelson's voice was quiet. Worn-out. Exhausted. "Yeah." He sighed. "The simplest way I can put it...it's basically...drugged. Not just Canaan, either. I think they had other distribution channels, too-Park Avenue, for sure."
"You know specifically how they managed this."
"Totally. And if it blew up in their faces, I can't say I'm surpr-"
"Can you prove it?"
"Prove...how, in a lab? Yeah, if you can pull a lab out of your butt."
"Can you explain it convincingly, in technical terms-without dumbing it down?" Javier's phone beeped again. "Not right this second. But could you?"
"Well, yeah-"
Javier glanced at his press pass, and the spark of a plan flared into being. "Can you walk ten blocks? Can Marianne?"
While Nelson conferred with Marianne, Javier's phone beeped again. The part of him that had been burned one time too many questioned whether it was actually wise to expose himself further to someone with no sense of loyalty...but time was running out, and in a last-ditch effort to salvage the rapidly deteriorating situation, Javier said, "Come to this address...."
Chapter 29.
Tim had thought they were on the lowest level of The Tombs, but he'd been wrong. Two more flights of stairs later, they found themselves at a barred metal door where a stout woman with a permanent frown looked like she was just waiting for an excuse to turn away someone who'd come this far. Tim and Randy both stood straighter and did their best to look trustworthy and earnest as she scanned their paperwork. "You're picking up Pham Duc Bao?" She said the non-English name with a surprising lack of hesitancy.
"Yes, ma'am," Tim said, projecting as much humility and respect with those two words as he could muster-though the emotions he was attempting to convey were probably lost amid the sound of wailing coming from the hallway beyond the bars.
"Boy or girl?"
"A boy. He's twelve years old, just under five feet tall-"
"End of the hall, turn right, give your forms to the guard." She pressed a button and the door gave a startlingly loud electronic buzz as it opened just long enough to admit them, then shut behind them with a clang that made the hair on the back of Tim's neck stand on end.
An eerie sound filled the guard station, growing louder as they approached the hallway-dozens upon dozens of tiny voices echoing through a metal and concrete warren that couldn't seem to absorb them, as if it had been built for larger voices, adult voices, and these thin, piercing sounds built and multiplied on each other in a macabre feedback loop. And while the sounds were bad, the smells were ten times worse. Feces, mainly. But underneath that, urine and sweat, and the stink of way too many unwashed bodies crammed far too close together.
Tim considered plugging his ears and breathing through his mouth. Sure, he'd look like he was crazy. Maybe he didn't care. But the thought of the molecules that carried the stink settling on his tongue convinced him that breathing through his nose, while unpleasant, was probably the best choice-albeit a choice from a range of options that all unequivocally sucked.
The hallway was cold and hard, concrete floors and walls trimmed in metal. At the end, a T-intersection led left and right. When Tim paused at the junction, Randy tugged his sleeve. "She said to turn right."
"I know, but...." The shrieking coming from the left passage was much more intense than the sound coming from the right.
"Let's get the kid and get the hell out of here," Randy said.
A shriek pierced the cacophony of yelling, and although Tim didn't have a child of his own, it seemed to him that something was really wrong when a kid made a sound like that. "Just a sec."
"If they catch us-"
"Then we say we're lost." Tim turned a corner into a hall lined with barred holding cells, each of them a bit smaller than his living room, about eight feet square. There was movement inside the cells-and lots of screaming-but the vertical bars that fragmented Tim's vision were playing tricks on him, like a strobe light, segmenting the scenes inside the cells into a bizarre tableaux that his overtaxed brain struggled to make sense of.
A shrill scream pierced the wailing, and Tim tried to follow the sound to its source, but still his brain only read bars and motion.
Until he saw the blood.
The lighting was terrible, full of confusing shifting shadows, but once he spied that telltale splash of red, suddenly it was all he could see, everywhere he looked. Red and red and red.
Tim said, "Oh my God," without even realizing he'd spoken, though Randy probably couldn't hear it, not over all the screams. The children were bleeding-not all of them, but enough of them-and not only that, but they were trussed to the bars with their arms spread wide like a crucifixion, one child after another, hand to hand so that their only their fingertips brushed. One child led to another, and another, and another, like a chain of screaming, bleeding paper dolls. The child closest to Tim shook her head back and forth as she screamed, and when her hair parted, he saw a mark on her forehead-a "+" symbol that had been scrawled there in thick black marker, like an obscene parody of Ash Wednesday. And now that Tim had seen the mark, he spotted it on the forehead of the next child, and the next, and the next. "Oh my God."
Convinced that he couldn't possibly be seeing what he thought he was seeing, Tim turned to Randy. He was smart and practical, and he wasn't prone to melodrama. He would understand-and then he would set Tim straight. But the look in Randy's eyes was anything but encouraging. He scowled, pulled out his cell phone, and snapped a picture.
"What is this?" Tim said. "What happened?"
Randy shoved his phone into his pocket, grabbed Tim by the arm and steered him back toward the hall.
"Wait..." Tim said. "They were bleeding."
"They said the kids were sick, remember?" Randy hustled Tim into another hallway. "What if it's like leprosy? Or AIDS? What if it's like that flesh-eating bacteria?"
"But it can't...be..." Tim had read enough safe sex pamphlets that he was pretty sure it was nothing like HIV, but he had no idea if it could be like leprosy, flesh-eating bacteria, the black death, bird flu, or anything else. Nelson might understand. But Nelson wasn't there, and without Internet access, there was no way of asking him.
Randy said, "What if we caught it just by breathing in that air?"
The thought of odor-molecules lighting on his tongue, now carrying the germ of some deadly plague, made Tim turn his head to spit-and then feel phenomenally self-conscious about spitting indoors.
Randy said, "We gotta grab the kid and get outta here. Right now. Before we catch-" they rounded the corner and stopped short, stunned.
The right-hand hallway, the one to which they'd originally been directed, wasn't as loud as the one with the screaming, bleeding children bound to the walls, but it was just as bizarre-and just as horrific. The cells were the same, eight by eight and barred. But these cells were packed with children, as many children as they could hold. Children's arms strained through the bars toward the man in a stained and torn uniform, a guard who walked carefully up the center of the aisle so that not a single child could touch him. A plastic bucket swung from one arm. He dipped his opposite hand in and came up with a handful of manna-glistening pale manna that quivered in his grasp. He flung it sideways as if he was scattering road salt on an icy walkway, and the manna struck the bars and spattered into the cell. Most of the children flinched back, but some did not. They grabbed the manna from the floor and swung around to turn their backs from the other children while they stuffed the soft manna flecked with hair, dirt and concrete crumbs into their mouths.
Randy wasn't even looking. He was busy trying to locate Nelson's son, but since all the children surged toward him, wailing for help, it was impossible to pick out the boy they'd only seen once, briefly, back at Nelson's apartment.
The guard with the bucket rushed over to them, slid on a patch of manna, waved his arms and then righted himself. More manna spattered from the bucket, but he didn't notice, or maybe didn't care. "Hey, you," he hollered over the cries of dozens and dozens of children. "How'd you get in here?"
"They sent us here," Randy bellowed. "We got papers. We're picking up a kid. Pham Duc Bao."
"Well? Which one is it?"
It?
Tim turned away from the guard and searched desperately for Bobby. There he was...no, wait, that was a girl. There-no, that kid was a lot taller. Tim was looking for dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. He was looking for an Asian kid-but since so many of them had been rounded up in Chinatown, about half the children were Asian.
And while Tim had always prided himself on his civil activism and his political correctness, he realized with growing dismay that (to him, at least) all the screaming, crying Asian kids looked more or less...alike.
Two more blocks. Two more completely fucked up blocks full of garbage and rubble and, heck, probably a dirty syringe or two just waiting to pierce the duct tape wrapped around Marianne's socks. If there'd been time, Nelson would have cut something up to use as a sole, and tested a few different wraps of the tape to see how he could get the most support and the most flexibility out of the job. But there wasn't any time to screw around with homemade shoes, there wasn't any time to screw around with anything-so he'd given Marianne's feet a few quick wraps, then hoisted her onto his back and staggered toward Javier's place with her bitching all the way.
"I can walk. Damn it, I can walk!"
One and a half more blocks. Despite Marianne's arms in a chokehold around his neck, her butt sagged low, and was creeping lower with every step. He hitched her up and jogged forward a few steps, barely catching himself from overbalancing and sprawling face-first on the sidewalk.
"I can walk!"
"Not much farther now." Nelson barely got the words out. He'd meant them to be encouraging, but instead they'd sounded labored and strained, like they'd come from a guy on the verge of collapse. He should have kept his mouth shut.
Story of his life.
Nelson dodged a skeezy-looking guy who was eyeing them with too much interest, and then swerved around a puddle of vomit at the last second.
"I can wa-"
Jimmy-leg. Nelson pitched sideways, and both of them hit the front window of a hardware store that was surprisingly intact. The Plexiglas flexed, and the image of an overturned car on the street that was reflected in its surface shifted, smaller, then bigger, then smaller again. Marianne slid from Nelson's back. Nelson clenched himself from head to toe, curling in on himself in anticipation of the shatter. Fracture dynamics in plexi were nowhere near as hazardous as they were in real glass, but even so, getting nailed by a shard of plexi wouldn't exactly tickle. The window wobbled, then held.
Almost there. Nelson knew he should straighten up, grab Marianne, and keep going. Except he couldn't; he felt like he'd clenched so tight, his muscles had locked into place and they weren't about to give up so easily. Something about assuming the fetal position made him want to crawl into a hole and simply stay that way. Because what good was he, anyway? All the forced optimism in the world wouldn't make things right, not if he couldn't even fucking walk.
"Are you okay?" Marianne said.
He didn't answer. He suspected that maybe he wasn't.
"Nelson?"
For all that most people might consider him a failure, Nelson had always seen himself instead as someone who had not succeeded. Yet. It wasn't quite optimism, though there was some element of optimism to the attitude. Sure, Edison had invented the stock ticker, a half-dozen types of telegraphs, and, heck, even wax paper by the time he was thirty...but that didn't mean Nelson was a failure. It just meant he hadn't found his stride.
So he'd thought. Until now. Because what if there was no stride? Or, worse...what if there was? And what if Nelson wasn't man enough to walk it?
"Nelson!"
Marianne shook him. He felt numb. Disconnected. Leaden.
"Oh my God, it's not your head, is it? Please say it's not your head."
What good were all the brains in the world if you never did anything meaningful with them?
What good was it to love someone if you couldn't protect them when they needed you the most?
"Do you need a pill? Maybe we can find a drug store. I think there's a drug store around the corner."
Despite the futility, despite the grief, before he could check himself, Nelson laughed. The sound was so atrophied with bitterness, it didn't even sound like him. "How would we pay for it? By selling a kidney?" He closed his eyes against the weight of the world as if that would stop it from crushing him, but all it did was make him feel the pain of his own helplessness more acutely. "Never mind," he said quietly. "I don't need a pill."
"Are you going to throw up? Should I find you some water?"
Marianne reminded him of Tuyet-of how she might be without her accent, anyway. Persistent. Loud. And thinking about Tuyet led to thinking about Bobby, and how maybe both of them would have been better off in Hanoi, markless or not, if this was all the good Nelson could do them when they needed him the most.
"Come on." Marianne grabbed him by the arm and slung it around her shoulders. Hell, she even felt like Tuyet, same height, same stature. She heaved, and Nelson felt himself reluctantly rise, and steel himself to keep going. "We're almost there."
The sidewalk seemed unusually crowded. Javier wasn't certain whether people were trying to get to work, or maybe checking on their loved ones, or if they were just out looking for something to steal. Whatever they were up to, most of them knew better than to trust the buses or the subways, which were running on huge delays...if they were even running at all. He watched from his front stoop as a gap opened in the crowd and he caught sight of Nelson's hair. He walked with his arm around Marianne-poor Marianne, with her feet, and her hormones-and at first Javier assumed Nelson was helping her walk. But then it became clear that his skin was the color of chalk, and it was she who was propping him up.
Javier sighed and slipped out from the shadow of the doorway to usher them both into his shabby building, and his shabbier room.
He was still disappointed with Nelson. Livid, was more like it. The only reason he'd even spoken to Nelson was his desire to see Canaan Products held accountable for what they'd done. Now, though, seeing Nelson like this, struggling to even make it down the street...Javier felt a pang of sympathy even as he kept himself from demanding how Nelson planned to live with himself after turning on someone as decent, as trusting, as Tim. "You're still sick?" was what he said, instead.
"No, I'm...." Nelson brushed off both Marianne's assistance and Javier's halfhearted attempt. "I'll be fine. Just tell me what it is about this manna mess you need me to prove to you."
"It's not me you're going to prove it to. It's the world."
Chapter 30.
Javier's room was spartan, like something from a 40's noir film, minus the lit cigarettes and the bleached blonde secretaries. Once upon a time, Nelson would have found that observation interesting. Now, it was hardly even a blip on his radar.
"What I don't get," Marianne said, "is why you'd get him booked on a show like Manhattan Minute? Isn't that kind of conservative?"
"I had a connection there," Javier said. "That's all."
"But if Nelson can prove that Canaan Products has been messing around with the food supply, wouldn't every news outlet be dying to snap up the story?"
"If we could get through to them. If they would take the time to check my credentials. If they weren't being flooded with conspiracy theories from every crackpot in the city."
Nelson didn't give a damn if he was going to appear on Manhattan Minute or the Mickey Mouse Club. He'd told Javier he could explain the Canaan Products reformulation, so he'd damn well do it. Because explaining science was something he could do. Unlike marching down to Chinatown and figuring out where his kid was. He would have liked to think he was entrusting Tim with that job because Tim sounded like he had it under control. Really, though, he suspected he was leaving it to Tim because he couldn't physically do it. In fact, he didn't suspect it...he was sure of it. His legs were shaking with constant tremors now and everything looked slightly green, and much too bright. His logic told him he was better off to let someone with functional brain chemistry-and a vehicle-handle the situation.
But despite all the reasons his logical brain could provide for focusing his effort on the task he had some chance of accomplishing...he still felt like a shitty excuse for a dad.
Javier crossed his arms, looked at Marianne, and said, "Do you know how to cut hair?"
"You want to cut off his hair?"
"Appearance is everything on television news. He needs to look credible. He needs to look like a scientist."
"Yeah? Well, he'll look like a joke if he gets a haircut from me."
"We'll put it in a ponytail," Nelson said, not because he gave a damn whether they hacked it off or not, but because he felt profoundly sick, not just in body, but in spirit. "It'll be fine."