Blade Phenomenon Read online

  Dr. Browning’s office receptionist, Mrs. Appleton, stopped in the doorway as she passed. She’d told him again today that she planned to retire at the end of the year, but she said that every couple of months. “The Douglas boy is here a few minutes early.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Appleton,” Browning answered. “Please let me finish my lunch, and I’ll be right out.”

  “You’d forget she’s only a child by the way you talk to her,” Mrs. Appleton said. Even at nearly eighty-five years old, she didn’t miss anything spoken within earshot.

  Browning smiled at her, practiced in taking the bad with the good when it came to his long-time employee. “No sense being anything but honest,” he said with the big smile that usually got her off his back. “At least that’s what I tell myself.”

  “Will you ever choose to stop loving me?” Allaire asked after Mrs. Appleton went back to the front office.

  “That’s just not possible,” Browning said, putting his hand on her slight shoulder. Sometimes he couldn’t believe what a wisp of a thing she was. She was so much tougher than he could ever be despite barely cracking fifty pounds.

  He’d thought medical residency was about as hard as things got, and then he saw a six-year-old girl watch her mother leave the two of them, and never come back. The doctor had loved Allaire’s mother up until the minute she broke his heart, and probably well beyond. Maybe even still. She was everything he could want—feisty and stunning—but no more suited for the placid life as a doctor’s wife than she was for motherhood. He couldn’t help but adore Allaire, and maybe the love he showed her with his decision to raise her—at least temporarily—wasn’t really a choice at all. It was easier to think of it as one, though.

  “No matter what?” she asked, seemingly satisfied enough now to go back to her art work.

  He wanted to choose his words carefully. He wouldn’t ever stop loving her, but in three days he’d have a much better idea whether their unusual little family life could continue indefinitely or not. If he was being completely honest, which of course, he could never really be with Allaire about all of this, he’d begun preparing himself for the eventuality of letting her go. Losing her was never not going to hurt, but unchecked optimism was only going to make it hurt worse.

  “There’s nothing in this world that could stop me from loving you,” he told her. He adored the way she puffed up when he told her he loved her. It never failed to happen, and it never got old.

  Allaire’s mother falling completely off the map was a bit of a curse for them now. It was no doubt that both of them were better day to day. She had been no better a mother to Allaire than she had been a partner to Dr. Browning.

  But, while he was covered on his own character witnesses, he had no one he could call upon in court to verify the horror stories he knew about Allaire’s biological father. Based on what his lawyer told him, the father’s two stints in prison were not going to be enough for the court to choose a third party over a natural parent. He wanted to believe the result of the custody hearing was more than a foregone conclusion, but again, optimism wasn’t his friend at this point. It was likely that, in a few days, a court order would proclaim Allaire’s father as her legal guardian.

  Dr. Browning tossed the white wax paper wrapper from his sandwich into the trashcan beside his desk and stood up. “This is my last appointment, sweetheart. How would you like to spend the rest of the day?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Do I have karate tonight?”

  “It’s cancelled for the holiday,” he answered, “so we can do whatever. Pizza and a movie?”

  Allaire looked up at him and smiled. “Laser tag?”

  “I don’t know if my pride can handle it,” Browning answered. “You kick my butt every time.” It was uncanny, and he actually followed her for an entire round last time he’d taken her to the one laser tag arena in Manhattan to see if she’d found some way of cheating. She hadn’t, though. She was just naturally skilled at the game.

  “Please?” she asked, knowing she had him.

  Browning smiled, nodded and headed out to the waiting room. He spotted Will Douglas and started to call him in when he saw an older man walking toward him.

  “Doctor,” the bald man said. “May I have a moment of your time?”

  Browning looked through the reception window at Mrs. Appleton for some sort of indication, but she was strangely quiet while looking on. She motioned with her head for him to come talk to her.

  “Excuse me one moment,” Browning said, and stepped back through the waiting room door. Mrs. Appleton was waiting for him in the hallway between the door and her office.

  “That’s the man with the baby,” Mrs. Appleton said.

  Browning hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

  “The one who left the baby here back in ’72,” she said. “You do remember the baby that was left here, don’t you?”

  “Are you quite sure, Mrs. Appleton? That was a long time ago,” Browning asked.

  Mrs. Appleton looked different right now. Emotional almost. Quite unusual for her. “I’m positive. I’ve always remembered his face. You don’t forget a man who leaves a baby to your care. To this day, I pray that the woman who came in really was the boy’s mother like she said. We should’ve found a way to verify it. I still feel just awful about that entire mess.”

  Browning took in what she said, nodded at her, and went back out to the waiting room. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked the man, who was still standing in the same spot.

  “There’s an emergency at my home, and I need your help,” the man said without irony, or any sense of understanding of how nervy he sounded.

  “Sir, you need to call 911 if there’s an emergency,” Browning answered. “If you’d like to use our phone to call them, you’re welcome to. EMTs will be able to do a lot more for you than I would, especially without any equipment.”

  The bald man moved his face close to Browning’s ear and spoke softly. “Calling 911 is not an option—”

  “Why not?” Browning cut in, backing away from the man.

  “A boy’s life depends on you, doctor,” the man answered, looking sharply into the doctor’s eyes. “Please help.”

  “What’s wrong with the boy?”

  “He’s very sick. We don’t have much time,” the bald man answered. “Follow me?”

  Browning looked at Mrs. Appleton, and at Will Douglas and his mom. He felt steamrolled by this man he’d never met before. What was a decent human being—a decent doctor—to say? A person might imagine someone in Dr. Browning’s position making these kind of high-drama decisions all the time, but they were almost non-existent in reality. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Douglas. There’s been an emergency. We’re going to need to reschedule Will’s check-up.”

  He quickly ducked back into his office to grab his London Fog trench coat and blurted a quick plea to Mrs. Appleton to keep an eye on Allaire, without ever looking her way. He hoped to avoid what was surely a look of shocked disappointment from her. Humoring his perversions of decorum was one thing. But for Mrs. Appleton to watch him blindly follow the man who left a baby, almost literally, on their doorstep years ago, was another.

  CHAPTER 6

  January 16, 1989

  * * *

  Moments later

  The man led Browning on a short walk to an old garment factory building on West 36th Street. Something from the 1920s or even earlier, Browning presumed. They took the elevator up to the third floor and stepped out into a large empty space. The middle of the room had a wide round structure running from floor to ceiling, but otherwise, there was nothing obstructing Browning’s view of the entire layout. The area looked like it had been completely gutted long ago, or never used in the first place. All the bald man—who’d introduced himself as Yalé—would say on the short walk over was that the boy had returned ill from a trip a week earlier and gotten progressively sicker.

  Yalé led Browning to two folding chairs, each wi
th a plastic white suit on it. When Yalé started to put his on, Browning realized it was a CDC-grade hazmat outfit. “You’ll want to put one on, Doctor. As a precaution, of course.”

  “Quite the precaution,” Browning said. “I run a family pediatric practice. I don’t have much experience with the kinds of illnesses that would require one of these.”

  “Neither do I,” Yalé said. “Thus, the abundance of caution.”

  After they outfitted themselves, they took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and Yalé led Dr. Browning into a room where a patient was lying under several blankets on a metal examination table, which looked like something out of World War II. Another man in a hazmat suit stood next to him, grim-faced and focused.

  There was another exam table pushed into the corner of the room—a body on top of it, covered with a sheet.

  The kid’s eyes were glassy and he moaned in discomfort. He was sweaty, but Browning could tell that his fever was high enough that without the blankets, he’d suffer unimaginable chills.

  “The boy’s name is Demetrius,” Yalé said. “And this is his father, Rickard.”

  Browning nodded curtly at Rickard, and continued examining the boy with his eyes. “How old are you, Demetrius?”

  The boy took a moment to look up at Browning. “Sev . . . Seventeen,” he whispered through gritted teeth. It looked like pain was rolling through him.

  His face had red marks on it, which Browning could see extended down to his neck, and likely to his trunk as well. “Has he had the chicken pox?”

  Rickard nodded slowly. “When he was a child.”

  “Hmmm,” Browning said. It was almost unheard of to get chicken pox twice.

  “Hello, Demetrius,” Browning said. “Can you point to what’s hurting you?”

  The kid looked at his father. Then he pointed to his nose, and then his throat.

  “Has he been taking fluids?” Browning asked, looking at Yalé and Rickard for an answer.

  Rickard frowned. “It seems to burn so much when he swallows that he hasn’t had much water at all. And he hasn’t eaten in three days, since the red marks appeared.”

  Browning couldn’t believe his ears, even as everything was muffled through the hazmat suit. “Why did you wait so long? You need to call 911 and get him to a hospital. I’m serious about this.” He looked at Demetrius and saw his scared eyes, so Browning didn’t say the last thing he wanted to: He’s going to die if you don’t listen to me.

  Rickard and Yalé looked at each other. Browning inferred this may be a matter of one or the other feeling strongly, for whatever crazy reason, about keeping him away from the hospital.

  “He needs this,” Browning added.

  Moments later Rickard gave a quick shake of the head to Yalé, whose face fell. Rickard turned around for a moment, looking off across the room.

  Yalé took a deep breath. He had that distinctly pained look of a man advocating for something he didn’t agree with. “Doctor, assuming the hospital is not an option, what can be brought here to aid in his recovery?”

  Browning felt incensed for the kid. He was tempted to try to wheel him out of there himself and get him into a cab to Roosevelt Hospital, except the extreme skin rash looked imposing enough that he worried about the health risk to the public.

  “You said he came back from a trip,” Browning said. “Where did he go?”

  Again, Yalé and Rickard looked at each other.

  “Listen,” Browning said, raising his voice a little. “Whatever this is, between the two of you, it’s not helping Demetrius.” He looked at Yalé. “You need to be straight with me here.”

  Yalé looked at Rickard. Demetrius moaned again in pain.

  “Hey!” Browning yelled to Yalé. “Look at me, not him. You brought me here. Why? So I could tell you this kid’s very sick? You knew that already. Give me a chance to help him. And, what happened to that one?” He pointed to the body in the corner, covered by a sheet.

  “Same symptoms. She died last night,” Yalé answered.

  “There’s no treatment you can recommend for him, based on examining him? Isn’t that what doctors do?” Rickard asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m treating! If he hadn’t had chicken pox, I’d say maybe this was a severe case. If it were the 1800s, I’d tell you he had smallpox. But, I don’t have—”

  “Suppose it could be smallpox,” Yalé said.

  Browning couldn’t hide the surprise in his face. The plague called smallpox had been eradicated as a communicable disease in all but a small part of Africa by the mid-1970s. There hadn’t been a major outbreak in the United States in a generation. “Smallpox only exists in laboratories now, and with all due respect, I don’t assume whatever you’re doing here would qualify for the government clearance needed to house live samples of the disease.”

  Yalé looked at Dr. Browning, and then at Rickard. “Telling you anything more is Rickard’s decision, Doctor.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rickard said. “Can’t you just treat it as if it’s smallpox?”

  Browning smiled incredulously. “You’re talking about a disease I’ve never treated before . . . And there’s no cure for smallpox. There’s a vaccine, which is why it’s basically extinct. And treating it like smallpox would ignore the basic fact that he’s sick with something. The longer it takes to figure that out, the worse the outlook gets. Help me help you, and tell me what’s going on here. Please.”

  “I’d like a word with you, Yalé,” Rickard said. “In private.”

  CHAPTER 7

  January 16, 1989

  * * *

  Moments later

  If there was one thing Yalé couldn’t stomach, it was hypocrisy. Especially from his normally unbending brother.

  “This is exactly the kind of situation when our people have made exceptions before,” Rickard said to his brother, pulling the headpiece of his hazmat suit off. “If not, then why does our gift even matter? It’s a curse if we can’t actually use it to help one of our own.”

  Yalé pulled off his headpiece as well and put his hand on his Rickard’s shoulder. “Brother, listen to yourself. We live for this ideal. I can understand that your son getting sick would cause you to question some things, but—”

  “I’ve already lost my wife today,” Rickard said. “All I’ll do is go back and warn Demetrius to leave 1863. It will be easy.”

  “You know tragedy can’t be undone,” Yalé said. “That bill gets paid one way or another, Rickard. That’s exactly why we don’t make exceptions. Even for family. This wouldn’t be going back and cleaning up a mess someone made. This would be creating a new mess ourselves.”

  Yalé wished he could cave for his brother here. Wished there was a way he could reason that this was the right decision. But, the universe had spoken and given Demetrius a terrible disease. Their ancestors had made this folly enough times for there to be no question in Yalé’s mind that he couldn’t stand down. Unfortunately, the final decision was, as always, Rickard’s.

  “I have to try,” Rickard said, a look of fear on his face.

  “We haven’t even given this doctor a chance,” Yalé answered. He wished Rickard had shown the same level of concern for Demetrius before he seemed deathly ill.

  “What becomes of our bloodline if he dies?” Rickard asked.

  “Give the doctor a chance,” Yalé said. “You’re still young enough to create another heir.”

  Rickard backed away from him, clearly angry he couldn’t get Yalé on board. “I don’t need your permission, second son.”

  “This isn’t about permission,” Yalé answered weakly. “This is about preserving the sanctity of the tunnel. Our people have died undoing the problems caused by rogue weavers.”

  “Where did you find this doctor anyway?” Rickard asked. “He acts like practicing medicine is new to him.”

  “I trust him,” Yalé answered, and then took a deep breath. “Let’s give this doctor the information he needs to treat Demetrius and
give him a chance to live. He isn’t my son, but you know I’d do whatever it takes to keep him alive.”

  Rickard looked him in the eyes. “It’s settled. I’m going back. I should’ve gone back with him in the first place. What was I thinking sending Frederick with him?” Frederick, who worked for the family, was one of the few outsiders given the authority to time weave so that young Demetrius wouldn’t be out on his own in the timestream as he learned his way.

  “You’d really compromise everything we’ve built here before you’d let another outsider in on our secret? We can control him!” Yalé said. “What we can’t control are the repercussions if you go back and try to fix this.” Yalé knew everything about repercussions. He never knew what it was like to be a fully functioning man simply by virtue of having been born second in his family.

  Rickard had fire in his eyes as he turned away, and then quickly turned back. “So then what? He just goes back to being a doctor and we depend on him to keep this a secret for the rest of his life? To never tell his family?”

  “He knows where we are,” Rickard continued. “Where we build the blots. We could wind up with the government, or the police, inside our sacred tunnel if this doctor decided to lead them here.”

  “He’s a man of integrity,” Yalé answered.

  “And this is the greatest secret mankind has ever known,” Rickard said. “If we tell him—”

  “Don’t say it,” Yalé said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  Moments later, they were back in the main room. The doctor was checking Demetrius’s vital signs. Rickard nodded at Yalé.

  Yalé walked around the exam table, closer to the doctor. “We’ve already lost two people to this disease and we want to avoid losing a third—”

  “Two? Where’s the second one?” Browning asked. “Keeping bodies in here is a major health risk.”

  “The other one didn’t make it back from the trip he took with Demetrius,” Yalé said.