Suffer the Children (17 page)

“Well, that’s lucky for you,” said Otis, “because thousands of them haven’t had the chance.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m happy your kids are back. I really am. It’s a goddamn miracle. God bless you. But there are still thousands of kids out at the sites. The ones who went home weren’t buried yet. The rest are still down there in the ground.”

Doug hadn’t thought of that. “All right, I’m listening.”

“We have to
dig them up
. It’s going to be a hell of a lot tougher to get them out than it was putting them in. Hard, delicate work. We’ve had crews working all night, and they’re dropping. We need more people on-site. We need you.”

Doug heard frantic music and a giggling cartoon voice in the living room. Joan had put on a DVD. He thought about spending the day with his children. His children with their dead faces.

“My grandkids are still down there, Doug,” Otis pleaded.

“I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

Otis hesitated. Apparently, he’d been unprepared for Doug to agree so readily. “Well, good. God bless you, Doug.” He paused again. “Everything okay there?”

“Yeah, just peachy,” Doug grated. He hung up.

He returned to the living room. The children’s eyes were glued to the flickering images on the TV. Joan stared at them with naked love. She wasn’t going to like his leaving right now. He steeled himself for a fight.

“Sorry, babe. I have to go to work.”

“Fine,” Joan said absently, still watching her kids.

“It’s an emergency.”

“Great. You should go. Do what you have to do.”

“I’m thinking about stopping for a beer on the way home,” he tested her.

She didn’t answer; she’d stopped listening. Her easy agreement stung. Doug had always figured she would choose the kids over him if push came to shove. He’d always accepted this. He still didn’t like it.

Fifteen minutes later, he was driving to the burial ground with a thermos of coffee between his legs and his flask snug in the inner breast pocket of his denim jacket. Church bells tolled in the distance. He dialed around the AM talk radio stations and found a guy who was saying the children’s resurrection was a sign of the End Times.

“The final judgment is coming, friends. It’s practically here. Now, the question you need to be asking yourself is: Am I right with God?”

Doug turned it off and dry-swallowed some Tylenol. He felt hot and flushed; the guy and his gravelly voice had gotten to him. Just a day ago, he would have welcomed Judgment Day. He’d had a thing or two to tell God when he met Him. But not now.

Doug wasn’t a religious man, but he believed in a God who kept score. Taking the children home and playing with them as if they were dolls struck him as an abomination. If his children were truly dead, then they should have stayed dead. It was sad as hell, it was hard, it had broken him and Joan, but it was the natural order.

Those things in his house were not his kids, plain and simple. They were ghosts. A mocking imitation of the children he loved more than himself.

The soldiers waved him through the checkpoint. He thought about the thermos of coffee warming his thighs and decided to have a snort of Jim Beam instead.

The sky had turned even grayer this morning as the temperature dropped and snow began to fall. The big machines growled as they reopened the trenches. Work crews followed in their wake, digging up the children.

Ahead lay the sprawling compound of trailers where the operation was managed, now even bigger with Red Cross tents, ambulances, and school buses filling with children bound for home.

They couldn’t get them all. As Doug approached the parking area, he saw dozens of children walking off singly or in groups across the frozen fields. Drawn to the warmth of their homes like moths seeking light.

His skin crawled at the sight. He couldn’t shake his sense of foreboding. Fear both primitive and primordial, rooted in millions of years of evolution.

His instincts warned him the long nightmare wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

10 hours after Resurrection

David stepped aboard the idling school bus with his medical bag, ready to do some good.

The Red Cross had called for volunteers to help care for the children being dug out of the ground at the burial site. He’d come without a second thought.

The children at the hospital had returned from the dead. He’d seen it happen firsthand; it still haunted him. It may have been a miracle to most, but it was a medical mystery to him. In time, the scientific community would need to understand why the children came back as much as why they died in the first place. In the meantime, they needed his care as a pediatrician.

The bus was full. The children stared at some distant horizon, their faces slack and their mouths hanging open. Dead and arranged in this creepy diorama. A gray-haired man in a red ski jacket crouched next to a girl and shined a flashlight into her eyes.

The wall of stench forced him to back off. He waved down a passing paramedic.

“They’re all dead in there. Where are the walking ones?”

The woman handed him a surgical mask that reeked of women’s perfume. “On the bus. This will help with the stink. See the doctor. I think Dr. Simon’s on that bus.”

What a mess
, David thought.

He put on the mask and breathed through his mouth. He steeled his nerves and climbed back aboard, extending his hand as the gray-haired man approached. “Dr. Simon? I’m Dr. Harris.”

The man handed him a clipboard and pointed. “Check vitals on the last five rows on the left and fill out these forms.”

“Why? They’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Oh yeah? How’d they walk here then?”

He remembered how little Jonathan Ford had sat up and hopped off the dissection table. He’d appeared dead as well, as had all the rest at The Children’s Hospital. David nodded and approached two girls sitting next to each other.

They were holding hands.

“I’m Dr. Harris,” he told them. “I’m a pediatrician. That means I specialize in helping sick boys and girls get better. First, though, I have to figure out why they’re sick.”

The girls stared straight ahead. If they heard David speak, they showed no sign of it.

He smiled at the one closest to him. “So let’s start with you. What’s your name?”

No answer.

Unresponsive to verbal stimuli
, he scribbled.
Makes no sounds.
His hands shook a little as he wrote, a symptom of too much stress and Vicodin.

(and fear)

He put the pen down and flexed his hand.

“That’s okay.” He checked the yellow laminated card tied to her wrist. “Sally. I’m going to touch your hand and put a little pressure on your fingernail. Can you tell me if you feel it?”

Any conscious human being would react to the pain.

Unresponsive to pain. Makes no movements.

On the Glasgow Coma Scale, these children were in a state of deep unconsciousness. But the Glasgow Coma Scale no longer applied.

“Okay, Sally. Now I want you to look at the light for me.”

David produced a pocket flashlight, clicked it on, and shined it in her eyes one at a time.

He sighed, scribbling.
Pupils do not contract in response to bright light.

He reached into his medical bag and retrieved his stethoscope. He touched the girl’s wrist, intending to search for a pulse, and recoiled at the feel of cold, hard flesh.

“You’re doing great, Sally.” He tried again.

Nothing.

No pulse
, he wrote.
No respiration. The skin is cold.

Outside, the snow reflected the gray sky. He sighed again.

“That’s it, Sally. Normally, at the end of an examination, I’d give you a lollipop, but—”

Sally’s eyes shifted to regard him with their icy dead stare.

“I’ll be damned.” David shivered with revulsion as he noted it on the form. He tried to sound natural. “That’s great, Sally. Really great.”

People thought life was a miracle, but it wasn’t. Life was everywhere. The miracle was knowing you were alive. Sentience. Mind. That was the rare, precious gift.

He looked at the dead girl in front of him and knew there was a mind still in there.

His phone rang. He peeled off his gloves and answered it.

“David, I’m glad I caught you,” said Ben. “I’m hoping you can help me. Have you had a chance to examine any of the children yet?”

“You’re in luck. I’m just finishing up my first examination right now.”

“I’ve been hearing they don’t show vital signs. Is there any truth to that?”

“The child I just examined exhibited no heartbeat or respiration nor any response to external stimuli except a movement of the eyes.”

“What do you mean? There was pupil contraction in response to light?”

“No, not at all. But her eyes turned to look at me when I mentioned I normally give lollipops at the end of patient exams.”

“Shit,” said Ben.

David noticed more of the children were looking at him. He turned away and said quietly, “What’s going on?”

“Listen, once you examine a few more, I need you to bring me the reports right away. As fast as you can get here. Will you do this for me?”

“Of course. But why?”

“CDC thinks the children might be afflicted with some type of disease, a sleeping sickness that
imitates
death but is not real death.”

“Something like tetrodotoxin poisoning?”

“Something like it, yeah.”

Tetrodotoxin was a toxin found in a number of animal species, parasites, and bacteria. The toxin blocked communication between the central nervous system and other nerve cells in the body. In small doses, it was used to treat migraines and heroin withdrawal. Large doses paralyzed the diaphragm and caused respiratory failure and death.

In certain amounts, however, the toxin left its victims conscious but in a state of near death for days, which led ethnobotanist Wade Davis, author of
The Serpent and the Rainbow
, to theorize tetrodotoxin was a key ingredient in voodoo ritual used to create zombies.

“Ridiculous,” said David. “This isn’t a simulation of death; it’s real death. Their bodies are decomposing. There’s no heartbeat, no respiration—”

“But there is some brain activity, right?”

He considered this. Traditional Western medical practice had held that death occurred when your body stopped breathing and pumping blood. Then people invented machines that could breathe and pump blood for you. As a result, the model language in the Uniform Declaration of Death Act, which became accepted in Michigan and other
states, legally defined it as “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”

If the children had any brain activity, people like Ben Glass could be in a lot of trouble.

“David, I ordered the autopsy and cremation of hundreds of bodies. If the children were alive in any acceptable definition of the word, I could be considered a mass murderer.”

David swallowed hard. “I autopsied four children. Am I a murderer too?”

Silence, then: “You might want to lawyer up.”

“Jesus,” said David. “Surely, people understand the children were dead in every perceivable sense.
Legally
dead. There was no movement of the eyes. No brain function. No circulatory or respiratory function. My conscience is clear, and I hope yours is too. Dead is dead, Ben.”

“And yet,” said Ben. He sighed. “Listen, my friend. Legally, I think we’re in the clear. Probably. It’s an unprecedented situation. But imagine you’re a parent who’s lost a child, and then all the children come back from the dead except yours because some doctor cut him open and cremated his remains. How would you feel? Shit, David. Every death certificate has my name on it. We printed thousands. There are people who want my head on a spike.”

The death of the children had deranged everybody, David knew. The mass die-off, the burials, the dead returning, the odd stasis that the children now exhibited between life and death; it was all too much for the human mind to bear.

“What can I do?” he asked his friend.

“I need to know whether the children are, in fact, returning to normal, or whether the resuscitation of brain and motor function was temporary. If they recovered some function, but that function is gone or deteriorating, we are in the clear in every way we want to be.”

“It’s a hell of a thing to wish,” said David.

“I’m not wishing for anything. I just need facts.”

“I’ll do it. I’ll do ten examinations and bring the results right over.”

[“Thank God you’re on my side, David. You’re one of the few people who still have their heads screwed on straight in all this shit.”

David hung up and called Nadine, who’d given him a ride to the site that morning because his leg hurt too much to drive. He told her he needed a lift to the hospital in about an hour. She was still visiting with Caroline and her daughter Kimberly, and sounded happy.

As he ended the call, he noticed all the children in the back of the bus were now staring at him. He offered them a weak smile.

“Okay, who’s next?”

David completed his ten exams, each producing the same results, which he noted dutifully on his forms. This done, he folded the papers and put them in the breast pocket of his coat. He stepped off the bus feeling like a thief.

Nadine had parked her Ford at the edge of the compound. She honked at him and waved. David hurried his pace. He felt eyes burning into his back, certain somebody was going to call him out for stealing critical medical information.

Nadine unlocked the door for him. David sat next to her, sweating.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Just my imagination, it seems.”

The operation here was a mess. Nobody was in charge. He could have stolen the bus and driven it to Detroit, kids and all, and nobody would have noticed.

The children might have. If I stole the bus and tried to drive out of town, I think they’d tear me to pieces.