Alex was not content. And that was unusual. Usually Alex was quite content.
And as usual, Alex was extremely ignorant. That is not to say that Alex was not intelligent, for he was. Both of his parents were very intelligent, quick to comprehend things, and capable of logical thought processes and so was Alex, but Alex really had no current basis for making informed decisions. The problem was twofold.
One was experience. Alex didn’t have any. His life was generally unchanging. The temperature was always pretty much 37 degrees Celsius. The relative humidity was always ..and I do mean ALWAYS 100%. Where Alex was, it was always fairly dark and even if he would have had enough light to see, he’d have only been looking a couple of inches to the other side of the uterus, and it really wasn’t like that ever changed.
The second reason he was ignorant was more complicated. He was in fact incapable of having long term memories because he was incapable of sustaining short term memories. He could only retain memories about two hours, due to the relative absence of something called sphingomyelin. Sphingomyelin was used by the body to make myelin, which was kind of an insulation for the white matter of the brain. Since short term memories seem to need to stay around about eight or nine hours before they can be recorded by protein synthesis into long term memories, this meant that the only experiences Alex could ever remember were the ones that had occurred in the last 2 hours, and he really didn’t know how to interpret those. And even if he did, in two hours he'd forget again anyway.
Alex really didn’t think much, again because he was so ignorant his thoughts really didn’t have any context, but if he had thought, he probably wouldn’t have minded not having long term memories because normally life was….well pretty boring, really. And he was content with that.
But right now, Alex was NOT content. The adrenalin rush from Liz’s fear had easily crossed the placental barrier, and Alex’s relatively low level of consciusness increased considerably. His fight or flight reflex was hardwired in to his little medulla, pretty much like anyone else’s. Of course, it’s hard to flee when you are surrounded by a uterus.
Another reason Alex was not content, was that electric shock. Although Alex didn’t remember it, because it had happened over two hours ago, Alex had experienced electrical shocks previously, most recently the preceding day when Liz had zapped Radoslav and Tony D.
But this last shock hadn’t been generated by Liz, which largely shielded her internal organs, it had been external. His muscles weren’t well developed…you don’t really need them when all you do for a living is float in amniotic fluid, but what little muscle function he had twitched like crazy, and he had found it decidedly unpleasant. This too raised his level of consciousness.
The shock of the 115 grain slug entering Liz’s abdomen at 1200 feet per second had put a lot of energy in the soft tissue, over 350 foot-pounds. Although the trajectory was above the uterus and much of the energy was spent burying the slug into the muscles in the posterior abdomen, a small but very irritating portion had been transmitted through the uterine wall. This too both irritated and stimulated Alex.
Now all of those things were unusual, but if nothing else had happened Alex might well have just ignored these things. And in two hours, wouldn’t have remembered any of it.
But some very strange additional things were happening, and these too both stimulated Alex and made him less than content. The first of these things was that Liz’s heartbeat had rapidly gone up over 140 and then just plain became too weak to even hear. That alone was bad enough. The other thing was….well, it was getting kind of stuffy in here, and that just never happened, which to Alex meant he couldn’t remember it doing that in the last two hours. Last but not least, he’d always felt a kind of gentle hum in his mind, that was Liz up there thinking. He didn’t really know that’s what that hum was, but he sure noticed that it wasn’t there now.
Now in fact, Alex was better able to tolerate Liz going into shock than she was. His blood supply was not directly connected to hers. Just because she was losing blood, didn’t mean that Alex was. In fact, he was not. And even though Liz was so much in shock she really wasn’t breathing effectively, Alex still had an advantage. His fetal hemoglobin would suck oxygen out of her blood to bring it to him far more efficiently than she could provide oxygen to her own cells. Not only was Alex’s little brain much less demanding of oxygen, it was much more tolerant of the lack of oxygen. Basically, even if Liz died, Alex was likely to survive her for five to ten minutes.
People have said that the two great universal drives are to survive and to reproduce. Alex was way too young to reproduce.
It was perhaps the ultimate in chutzpah for any mere human to talk about universal drives. The universe is, after all, a pretty damn big place. But despite the obvious gross over generalization, the will to survive did seem to be a fundamental to life on Earth…and on Antar.
Had he merely been a human kid, he might have simply died, never really understanding why. But Alex was stimulated, irritated, not at all content, and becoming increasingly alarmed. And he wasn't just a human kid....he was his father's son.
It actually was pretty easy for him to make the connection to Liz. I mean, ….she was all around him.
But unfortunately, when he made the connection...nobody was home. Liz wasn't dead...yet, but the deep shock had put her consciousness into La-La land. All Alex found was her memories.
He looked at the short term memories first, because that was really all he was used to. They were, to say the least, kind of alarming. And each of these short term memories had connections to long term memories, much like HTML links, and these he found amazing. Liz's brain was a virtual cornucopia of information...exhausting in its richness. He would have liked to wander there forever but...the place was still getting stuffy. Eventually Alex decided to call her Mom, since he could see in her long term memories he would eventually have to anyway. And perhaps it would warm everyone's heart to think that what he would subsequently do would be out of love for his mother, but it wasn't. Oh sure, someday if he survived, he would love Liz, but not today. This was purely self-interest today. The place was getting stuffy, and he could see from his mother's mind that she was dying and that was why it was getting stuffy. And Mom knew her biology, and he could tell from what she knew that her death would quickly lead to his, and he wanted to survive.
Now it might seem strange for a 26 year old fetus to think all this so quickly, but physiologically it wasn't. Brains are slow because nerve conduction is slow. It just takes time to go from one part of the brain to the other. But if the brain is smaller...and uncluttered by long term memory storage, it kind of went a lot faster. Alex's advantage was even greater. He could access his mother's memories, through the connection, at the speed of light, processing the info faster than she would have been able to herself. That was why kids learned foreign languages so quick, the younger the quicker. And a 26 week fetus is pretty young.
Realistically, compared to his mother and father Alex was kind of like a transistor radio compared to the old tube-type radio, or perhaps like a modern computer chip to an old IBM punch-card model. As long as he could pick his mother's brains for long term memory, the kid's little brain could fly.
Alex really didn't have enough experience to be anything but surprised by the information he found, but something that really did surprise him was that this wasn't the first time Mom had taken a bullet in the abdomen. It had happened before, and some being he supposed he might as well call Dad had undid the damage. And when the Dad-guy had done that, Mom had gotten flashes...flashes that told what he was doing.
If Alex had more life experience, he would have undoubtedly wondered why Mom hadn't just made the white light and fixed the problem herself. She was bigger than he was, and obviously more powerful. But being so ignorant, Alex really didn't know how to wonder much, so he just made the white light himself. He was immediately aware that he was not nearly as strong as this Dad-guy. It would likely take almost all of his energy to fix the problem, but if he suceeded it would possibly stop being stuffy....
As Alex started, he decided he really didn't have the energy to dissolve a big slug of lead. Maybe he could just use his telekinesis to push it out the way it came in. Also, while the memories were a help, he'd really need to know what was going on out there in real time. Through the connection, he opened her eyes to take a look around.
Tony D. was not particularly smart, and likely couldn't have defined 'catatonic' to save his life. When Nila had retreated into her own mind he had simply assumed that she was faking it. Multiple shots with the TASER hadn't affected her though, and now in frustration he was simply beating her face. It wasn't that Sergeant Andrews was queasy about Tony D. smashing in Nila's face, he'd beaten a few women himself, over the years. But it was a little disgusting to see the grin on the guys face, it was like he was getting off doing it, and that's why he turned his eyes away, toward the dying Liz.
"Son of a bitch!," yelled Sergeant Andrews when he saw the bullet slowly emerge from the wound in her abdomen, and the bleeding from the wound suddenly stop. But when her eyes opened.....they were still lifeless and unmoving, but he'd actually seen them both suddenly fly open......but his terror worsened when he saw the soft white light coming from her abdomen...bathing the area of her wound. Before his eyes, he watched the wound close.
Sergeant Andrews was very close to complete terror when he pulled out his service piston and pointed it right between those open but lifeless eyes.
NO GOOD DEED redux Mature (CC M/L) 10/2/06 complete 11/21
Moderators: Anniepoo98, Rowedog, ISLANDGIRL5, Itzstacie, truelovepooh, FSU/MSW-94, Forum Moderators
Alex was still abysmally ignorant, but as his mind feasted on Liz's memories he was learning fast. From her memories his Mom had apparently not cared much for Sergeant Andrews. Actually, she hadn't appeared to care for any of the men within Alex's field of vision as he peered out through her eyes. He knew that the guy he hadn't yet met....the Dad-guy, would have likely powerblasted Sergeant Andrews. Alex was pretty sure he didn't have power enough to do that. It might not have been a good idea to do that from inside his Mom's uterus anyway. High potential for collateral damage there. But he knew he had to do something. It was getting REAL stuffy in there.
Even though Alex and the placenta.....which was really just an eventually disposable part of Alex, had their own blood supply, they were very significantly affected by Liz being in shock. While the blood flow between him and the placenta was just fine, Liz's blood flow had slowed to a crawl and there was precious little oxygen in the blood in her uterus for the placenta to extract from. Liz was already in something called anerobic metabolism, a kind of low efficiency metabolism where you burn sugar incompletely to sustain yourself and Alex himself was starting to do that. In fact, unless Alex managed to finish pushing all the blood pooled in Liz's abdomen back through the holes the bullet had made in her blood vessels and get them sealed, Liz was going to be dead in about two minutes, and Alex about five minutes after that. And while Alex didn't know the exact numbers, he was by now pretty sure this would be the case. As he saw the man start to reach for his gun, Alex was pretty sure what was coming. Liz's experience with guns hadn't been all that good.
Liz was a scientist and it became apparent that Alex was his mother's son. Sometimes science was little more than trial and error. Alex pushed out his powers to see if he could telekinetically affect the gun, to keep the man from drawing it. It continued to move from the holster. Oh Alex had felt it, alright. His powers seemed to have a lot more range than those of his Dad. In that one experiment he had been able to feel...to sense the presence of 56 people within range of his powers. Including the four he could see, fourteen of these were males with guns. Forty-two were females...all tied up. He tried molecular manipulation and found he could do that...even at a distance. But not much. Somehow he had to figure this out. Desperately he plunged deeper and deeper into Liz's memories as he saw the finger go to the trigger of the gun. Just brute force wasn't going to work. Alex didn't have that and what little force he did have would be little more than enough to complete the healing.
Sergeant Andrews wasn't as abysmally ignorant as Alex was, but he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, either. He actually knew less about what was actually going on in Liz than Alex did. His mind was thinking about ghosts and goblins and zombies and old Twilight Zone episodes because over the decades these had been the kinds of associations that his experiences had taught him should be made with dead...or almost dead...people opening their eyes and looking at you. And as his brain slowly, at least slowly in comparison to Alex's brain, went through all these things, his years of police training superimposed itself on his fear, and he reverted to the habits of that training. He called for backup.
"Lieutenant! Look at the woman," he screamed. "Son of a bitch...look at the woman."
Alex was largely using Liz's mind now, and her analytical powers were honed by years of science and they were....well, pretty good. The situation as Alex saw it was this:
Priority number one- complete the repairs on Mom.
Priority number two- There were 14 potentially hostile lifeforms in the area. They had to be kept from hurting Mom/Alex, at least until Dad arrived.
Alex didn't really know that much about Dad, but Mom seemed to have an unshakable faith in him. Mom believed that he'd likely get there in an hour or two and that everything would then be alright. Dad would protect Mom/Alex. For the first time in what would turn out to be a long long relationship, Alex decided he'd just have to trust his Mom. He took that on faith and just plunged back into her memories, looking for something.....anything, that might be helpful.
Even Tony D. stood in amazement as he saw the glow from the woman's abdomen and the 9mm slug laying on the floor beneath her. As Little Tony and the Lieutenant drew their pistols and also pointed tham at Liz, Mike D'Angelo crossed himself. In retrospect it would appear that Mike had the better handle on the situation.....
As he watched through her open eyes, Alex was starting to panic as he saw the three fingers start to squeeze on the three triggers. He was desperately searching through Liz's memories for something...anything, that would stop those fingers from squeezing those triggers. He pulled from Liz's mind the anatomy of the hand...saw how the tendon was pulling the trigger finger as the flexor digitorum muscle contracted....muscle....Hmm, did Mom know anything about muscles?
Wow! Did Mom EVER know about muscles! Mom had done a Master's thesis about muscles.
Desperately pulling information out of Liz's long term memories, and using her mind to sort it all out, even knowing that he had only seconds, Alex was unable to keep himself from stopping briefly to contemplate the wonderfulness of his Mom, and to think something that he would think again and again in the years to come. 'She's amazing. My Mom knows everything....'
The first clue that Little Tony, Royce Miller, and Frank Andrews had that they were going to have a really bad day was when they tried to pull the trigger and the muscles of their hand didn't work. As they collapsed to the floor along with Mike D'Angelo, their minds churned with all sorts of questions, and a grim determination to get to their guns and kill that .....thing, as soon as they could. Mike? He was just saying Hail Mary's in his mind. Like I said, Mike seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the situation.
Alex, like I said, was pretty ignorant, and though he'd done a pretty good job of picking Liz's brain considering he'd only had access there for a few minutes, he still just didn't know much. He sort of hoped he'd be able to keep the bad guys paralyzed for two hours....until this much ballyhooed Dad showed up. He was doing this by modifying the molecular structure of a key enzyme in the calcium channels of the muscles. Something that his Mom had discovered in her research. This was the key switch to control muscle contraction and even though it didn't require MUCH energy for him to do that, and even though he was getting a little more energy now that Liz had taken her first couple of breaths and was gradually coming out of shock, he wasn't altogether sure that his energy would last long enough for Dad to get here and if he didn't...well, as soon as they were no longer paralyzed, those guys would be able to get up, pick up those guns, and start firing. So little Alex was really putting his heart and soul into keeping those guys paralyzed for that two hours. But he wouldn't be successful.
Had Alex only worked on the four guys in the room he might have lasted the two hours. But by including the other ten guys.....well, they weren't really close, and Alex hadn't had time to search in Liz's memory for something called the inverse-square law. By including those others, Alex used a lot of energy unnecessarily. He used up the last reserves of his energy and lapsed into a peaceful sleep in only a little over twelve minutes.......
Even though Alex and the placenta.....which was really just an eventually disposable part of Alex, had their own blood supply, they were very significantly affected by Liz being in shock. While the blood flow between him and the placenta was just fine, Liz's blood flow had slowed to a crawl and there was precious little oxygen in the blood in her uterus for the placenta to extract from. Liz was already in something called anerobic metabolism, a kind of low efficiency metabolism where you burn sugar incompletely to sustain yourself and Alex himself was starting to do that. In fact, unless Alex managed to finish pushing all the blood pooled in Liz's abdomen back through the holes the bullet had made in her blood vessels and get them sealed, Liz was going to be dead in about two minutes, and Alex about five minutes after that. And while Alex didn't know the exact numbers, he was by now pretty sure this would be the case. As he saw the man start to reach for his gun, Alex was pretty sure what was coming. Liz's experience with guns hadn't been all that good.
Liz was a scientist and it became apparent that Alex was his mother's son. Sometimes science was little more than trial and error. Alex pushed out his powers to see if he could telekinetically affect the gun, to keep the man from drawing it. It continued to move from the holster. Oh Alex had felt it, alright. His powers seemed to have a lot more range than those of his Dad. In that one experiment he had been able to feel...to sense the presence of 56 people within range of his powers. Including the four he could see, fourteen of these were males with guns. Forty-two were females...all tied up. He tried molecular manipulation and found he could do that...even at a distance. But not much. Somehow he had to figure this out. Desperately he plunged deeper and deeper into Liz's memories as he saw the finger go to the trigger of the gun. Just brute force wasn't going to work. Alex didn't have that and what little force he did have would be little more than enough to complete the healing.
Sergeant Andrews wasn't as abysmally ignorant as Alex was, but he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, either. He actually knew less about what was actually going on in Liz than Alex did. His mind was thinking about ghosts and goblins and zombies and old Twilight Zone episodes because over the decades these had been the kinds of associations that his experiences had taught him should be made with dead...or almost dead...people opening their eyes and looking at you. And as his brain slowly, at least slowly in comparison to Alex's brain, went through all these things, his years of police training superimposed itself on his fear, and he reverted to the habits of that training. He called for backup.
"Lieutenant! Look at the woman," he screamed. "Son of a bitch...look at the woman."
Alex was largely using Liz's mind now, and her analytical powers were honed by years of science and they were....well, pretty good. The situation as Alex saw it was this:
Priority number one- complete the repairs on Mom.
Priority number two- There were 14 potentially hostile lifeforms in the area. They had to be kept from hurting Mom/Alex, at least until Dad arrived.
Alex didn't really know that much about Dad, but Mom seemed to have an unshakable faith in him. Mom believed that he'd likely get there in an hour or two and that everything would then be alright. Dad would protect Mom/Alex. For the first time in what would turn out to be a long long relationship, Alex decided he'd just have to trust his Mom. He took that on faith and just plunged back into her memories, looking for something.....anything, that might be helpful.
Even Tony D. stood in amazement as he saw the glow from the woman's abdomen and the 9mm slug laying on the floor beneath her. As Little Tony and the Lieutenant drew their pistols and also pointed tham at Liz, Mike D'Angelo crossed himself. In retrospect it would appear that Mike had the better handle on the situation.....
As he watched through her open eyes, Alex was starting to panic as he saw the three fingers start to squeeze on the three triggers. He was desperately searching through Liz's memories for something...anything, that would stop those fingers from squeezing those triggers. He pulled from Liz's mind the anatomy of the hand...saw how the tendon was pulling the trigger finger as the flexor digitorum muscle contracted....muscle....Hmm, did Mom know anything about muscles?
Wow! Did Mom EVER know about muscles! Mom had done a Master's thesis about muscles.
Desperately pulling information out of Liz's long term memories, and using her mind to sort it all out, even knowing that he had only seconds, Alex was unable to keep himself from stopping briefly to contemplate the wonderfulness of his Mom, and to think something that he would think again and again in the years to come. 'She's amazing. My Mom knows everything....'
The first clue that Little Tony, Royce Miller, and Frank Andrews had that they were going to have a really bad day was when they tried to pull the trigger and the muscles of their hand didn't work. As they collapsed to the floor along with Mike D'Angelo, their minds churned with all sorts of questions, and a grim determination to get to their guns and kill that .....thing, as soon as they could. Mike? He was just saying Hail Mary's in his mind. Like I said, Mike seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the situation.
Alex, like I said, was pretty ignorant, and though he'd done a pretty good job of picking Liz's brain considering he'd only had access there for a few minutes, he still just didn't know much. He sort of hoped he'd be able to keep the bad guys paralyzed for two hours....until this much ballyhooed Dad showed up. He was doing this by modifying the molecular structure of a key enzyme in the calcium channels of the muscles. Something that his Mom had discovered in her research. This was the key switch to control muscle contraction and even though it didn't require MUCH energy for him to do that, and even though he was getting a little more energy now that Liz had taken her first couple of breaths and was gradually coming out of shock, he wasn't altogether sure that his energy would last long enough for Dad to get here and if he didn't...well, as soon as they were no longer paralyzed, those guys would be able to get up, pick up those guns, and start firing. So little Alex was really putting his heart and soul into keeping those guys paralyzed for that two hours. But he wouldn't be successful.
Had Alex only worked on the four guys in the room he might have lasted the two hours. But by including the other ten guys.....well, they weren't really close, and Alex hadn't had time to search in Liz's memory for something called the inverse-square law. By including those others, Alex used a lot of energy unnecessarily. He used up the last reserves of his energy and lapsed into a peaceful sleep in only a little over twelve minutes.......
Nila was still in the room, quivering with fear. She had felt presences at the door a number of times.....but the locks had held. She had started to believe at last that the door would hold...that she could keep all the ugliness, keep all the pain, keep all the terror out, if she would only just not open the door. And she wouldn't open the door....not ever. She knew that, knew that with a certainty that burned to her very core. Because what the door couldn't keep out was the regret.....the sorrow.
She would never go back to that world out there, she knew that with certainty. Because even if her body weren't broken and disfigured, even if somehow she could be protected from the terror and the pain, she didn't want to live....knowing what it had cost Liz and Max Evans.
'No good deed goes unpunished,' was the old saying. Liz had been her salvation, had asked nothing of her, had given her everything. And she had led the young woman back into a trap. She'd seen the love in the girl's eyes...and the regret, just after the bullet had hit her. That would haunt her for all eternity ... and she could picture in her mind the look on Max Evans when he found out how much he'd lost....how much Liz's help to her had cost them. Even if everything else could somehow be made better, Nila had no wish to go back to see the tears that would fill those big amber eyes.
She continued to watch the door....she would always watch the door. But Nila was surprised...surprised and afraid, when the space next to her rippled and a figure appeared.
She shrunk back against the door in terror but as the figure coalesced, she saw it was a young woman, a beautiful young woman. She was still frightened....yet there was something about her face that called to Nila....she'd seen it once before.....many years ago....back in Roswell.
"Isabel Evans....?"
The woman looked at her with a sad smile. "That was a long time ago, Nila. It's Isabel Ramirez now."
"I'm hallucinating, aren't I."
"It's a little more complicated than that, Nila...., Max says that you are locked up in your own mind...that you won't come out." The woman looked at the door. "You need to open the door, Nila. You are the only one who can."
"How did you get here?"
"I'm not really here, Nila. Right now I'm in my own bed, home in Boston. I'm asleep too. I'm dreamwalking you."
"And where am I?"
The young lady smiled. "You're in our spare bedroom, actually.You've been there for almost three months. But you need to wake up now, Nila. You need to open the door."
"I have nothing to go back there for, Isabel. There is only pain...a broken and disfigured body...and guilt."
Asleep in bed, Isabel was thinking. 'Max was right. He said that she'd never come out....she'd stay there forever...unless we told her the truth.'
"Your body is fine, Nila. There isn't a scar, isn't a blemish. Max healed it."
"How could he do that?"
"The same way he healed those children that Christmas Eve, Nila."
At that point Nila ignored the door, her attention only on Isabel as she told the story.....the story of foundling kids and pod chambers and Christmas Eve visits to a children's ward and what really.....reallly happened at Florence Junction. And in the end...Nila believed, she really did, but it just didn't make any difference.
"I still can't go back, Isabel."
"Nila, you must..."
"I can't ever go back...I couldn't face Max....not after what I've taken from him."
"Nila, that's silly, you haven't taken anything from Max."
"Only his wife and child, Isabel. Only that!"
"Nila..... Liz is OK. She got home from the hospital four days ago. She's staying here with me because Max is on-call tonight."
"She's....alive? She was in the hospital for ...three months?"
"Uh..Yes,...and no.... She's alive, she was OK after they found the two of you...at least after Max got done healing her. She was in the hospital having my nephew....Alex. Open the door...please, Nila. I think they are waiting for you."
And those were the words that did it. The only words in the universe that would have made Nila open that door. The only words that would give her a hope greater than her fear.
With a trembling hand Nila started to open the locks on the door.......
She would never go back to that world out there, she knew that with certainty. Because even if her body weren't broken and disfigured, even if somehow she could be protected from the terror and the pain, she didn't want to live....knowing what it had cost Liz and Max Evans.
'No good deed goes unpunished,' was the old saying. Liz had been her salvation, had asked nothing of her, had given her everything. And she had led the young woman back into a trap. She'd seen the love in the girl's eyes...and the regret, just after the bullet had hit her. That would haunt her for all eternity ... and she could picture in her mind the look on Max Evans when he found out how much he'd lost....how much Liz's help to her had cost them. Even if everything else could somehow be made better, Nila had no wish to go back to see the tears that would fill those big amber eyes.
She continued to watch the door....she would always watch the door. But Nila was surprised...surprised and afraid, when the space next to her rippled and a figure appeared.
She shrunk back against the door in terror but as the figure coalesced, she saw it was a young woman, a beautiful young woman. She was still frightened....yet there was something about her face that called to Nila....she'd seen it once before.....many years ago....back in Roswell.
"Isabel Evans....?"
The woman looked at her with a sad smile. "That was a long time ago, Nila. It's Isabel Ramirez now."
"I'm hallucinating, aren't I."
"It's a little more complicated than that, Nila...., Max says that you are locked up in your own mind...that you won't come out." The woman looked at the door. "You need to open the door, Nila. You are the only one who can."
"How did you get here?"
"I'm not really here, Nila. Right now I'm in my own bed, home in Boston. I'm asleep too. I'm dreamwalking you."
"And where am I?"
The young lady smiled. "You're in our spare bedroom, actually.You've been there for almost three months. But you need to wake up now, Nila. You need to open the door."
"I have nothing to go back there for, Isabel. There is only pain...a broken and disfigured body...and guilt."
Asleep in bed, Isabel was thinking. 'Max was right. He said that she'd never come out....she'd stay there forever...unless we told her the truth.'
"Your body is fine, Nila. There isn't a scar, isn't a blemish. Max healed it."
"How could he do that?"
"The same way he healed those children that Christmas Eve, Nila."
At that point Nila ignored the door, her attention only on Isabel as she told the story.....the story of foundling kids and pod chambers and Christmas Eve visits to a children's ward and what really.....reallly happened at Florence Junction. And in the end...Nila believed, she really did, but it just didn't make any difference.
"I still can't go back, Isabel."
"Nila, you must..."
"I can't ever go back...I couldn't face Max....not after what I've taken from him."
"Nila, that's silly, you haven't taken anything from Max."
"Only his wife and child, Isabel. Only that!"
"Nila..... Liz is OK. She got home from the hospital four days ago. She's staying here with me because Max is on-call tonight."
"She's....alive? She was in the hospital for ...three months?"
"Uh..Yes,...and no.... She's alive, she was OK after they found the two of you...at least after Max got done healing her. She was in the hospital having my nephew....Alex. Open the door...please, Nila. I think they are waiting for you."
And those were the words that did it. The only words in the universe that would have made Nila open that door. The only words that would give her a hope greater than her fear.
With a trembling hand Nila started to open the locks on the door.......
The sheets were soft as Nila woke in the darkened room, the small night light barely illuminating the young woman rocking there, holding the infant. Nila let out a long breath...not realizing even that she'd been holding it. In the silence of the sleeping house, even that was noticeable. The face of the woman looked up from her baby and her eyes saw Nila.
"Nila?"
"Liz.....oh he's so beautiful. Isabel said his name was ...Alex?"
Liz nodded her head and smiled at the baby, but then looked up again at Nila. Nila saw fear in Liz's eyes then. Six months ago, Nila might not have picked up on the fear there, but Nila had come to know fear real well since then. She had experienced a graduate course in fear. Intuitively she knew...Liz was frightened...of her.
"What's wrong, Liz?"
The tears came then, as Liz's control appeared to break down.
"We ran for almost two years, Nila. Running from the Special Unit..., having people hunt us because they thought we were monsters. You can't tell anyone....you can't publish anything about what happened. I can't let Alex go through what we went through.....I can't have people think that my son is a....a monster."
She was weak, after three months in bed, but not too weak to move to the side of the bed....to reach out and take the little baby.
"He's not a monster, Liz. He's beautiful. I ... I would never tell anybody, you must know that. I would never think that your baby was a monster. No one would."
She thought it might help, and it appeared to...a little. But there were still tears coming down, and still fear in Liz's eyes when she looked back, her eyes somehow pleading to Nila to understand.
"When Max finished healing me...the brain swelling from the shock...when I woke up the next day, Nila....the memories were there. I had memories of Alex...of everything he had done. You have to understand....he hardly knew anything...he had so little time...so little time to learn. He just wanted to stop them from using their guns, Nila...that was all. All of his life he'd been sleeping, warm, comfortable, getting water and nourishment and oxygen from his umbilical cord. He didn't know, Nila...He didn't know those men had to.... had to ....breathe."
Nila stayed for ten days...not to convalesce, but to help Liz with the baby. Liz was alright, really. It was partly post-partum depression, partly from a 26 hour labor four days earlier and it was partly exhaustion. Liz and Isabel had been playing nurse to Nila for the last three months. Nila thought the least she could do was return the favor a little bit.
Nila hadn't seen Max in many years. He was as charismatic as ever. They were a lovely couple. She never asked them about Tess.....she sort of had the feeling that the subject was off-limits from what Ava had said. Maria and Michael flew in from the West Coast. She had a chance to talk to Michael, he told her the story. He said he'd never seen cold fury like he'd seen from Max when he thought he'd lost Liz. They met up with Ava and heard the story of what had happened. They really hadn't known that Liz and Nila were back at the warehouse, but Max had insisted they go there...figuring that the people there were the ones who had killed Liz.
Michael had shaken his head then. 'I really think he just wanted to kill someone...I've known him my entire life ...and I've never seen him that way.'
But Max hadn't killed anyone. Michael and Max and Ava and Kyle had arrived at the gate, certainly ready to kill the guards....but they were too late. The gate guards were already dead, same for the door guards, and a couple more thugs they'd seen, and then the four in the room. They'd found Liz and Nila then. Nila was barely alive, Liz unconscious but not really in that bad a shape. They didn't understand the iridescent splotch on her lower abdomen...at least not until she woke up the next day and explained it to them.
Max had stabilized Nila and they'd loaded Nila and Liz in the car and just gotten the hell out of New York City. It took Max awhile to fix Nila's injuries, she'd been pretty well worked over. But she hadn't come out of her catatonic state, even when she'd been healed. Maria had suggested Isabel dreamwalk her...it'd been hard. She'd come close a couple of times, but it took her almost 2 months to finally get in to whatever place Nila had fled to.
Waving goodbye to them as she went through security at Logan Airport, Nila knew it was going to take awhile to get her life back in order. Her editor had NOT been pleased that she'd dropped out of sight for four months, particularly when he knew the case she'd been working on had exploded about the time she disappeared. He'd figured she was dead, and while he was glad she wasn't....really hadn't believed she didn't know more than she was telling. And she was, of course. She was sitting on the biggest story on earth. And she'd continue to sit on it, she knew, for the rest of her life.
6 weeks later
The weather was cold in Burgas, a chill wind blowing east off the Black Sea as the man put his bag up on the table for inspection and handed the man the passport. The agent scarcely looked at the passport before stamping it, and waved the suitcase by without opening it. 'This was too easy,' thought Big Tony. People smuggled stuff out of Bulgaria, not into it. He'd paid well for the false bottom suitcase, and the silenced pistol in it. He might just as well have carried it on his person. His in-laws had been right, traveling by freighter to this seaport town...well there really was no security.
He thought of his in-laws and his wife. This really wasn't personal, even though he'd told them it was. The fact was that he really didn't care about Little Tony. His wife had spoiled the damn kid...Big Tony was just as glad he was dead. But the way he had died....that'd been an embarassment, and before Big Tony could go back...well, he had a score to settle. This was business.
Big Tony shook his head. He should never have gone along with his idiot son and those two cops. That had been dumb. The Bulgarian...well, he should have known the extra money wouldn't have been enough....he was different, that one. He'd made that clear, ...it wasn't all about the money with him. And he hadn't listened....he'd listened to his idiot son. He really didn't care that the guys in Vegas were pissed at him. Those idiots had deserved to die. Big Tony had never been east of Chicago, but even he knew that you didn't act inconspicuous in Tucumcari New Mexico by driving into town in a fuckin' Lincoln Town Car. 'If those assholes had driven an old pickup truck with a half load of horseshit in it, they'd have probably fit right in.' No, screw the Vegas guys, he didn't care about them. But to get his credibility back on the East Coast, he needed to take care of the Bulgarian for ratting. It wasn't personal, just business.
As the man shoved his bag into the trunk of his rental car and drove off to his hotel, the agent watched him depart. He smiled as he picked the phone up from the receiver and punched the number. The phone was answered on the third ring. "You're company has arrived."
Three weeks later
It had been a long, hard, ten-hour day at the newspaper, and Nila was beat as she got home to her apartment. During her three months "vacation" as her editor kept referring to it, a lot of her sources had dried up and of course the New York Post had scooped her on the other story...at least as much of it as she could tell. In fact, if she and her editor hadn't worked so well for so long, she probably wouldn't even have a job. But there were worse things, she figured. She picked up the mail at the box....not much, a card and a small box. The card was from Boston...probably a Christmas card. She opened it first, even as she walked up the stairs to her apartment. The picture was cute...all three were in reindeer antlers, Alex looking puzzled by the whole thing. Liz said that they'd be in Roswell for Christmas...invited her to come if she could..meet the folks. Nila knew she'd like to...but she owed the editor a story...a big story, before asking for more time off, and she wasn't sure she'd have one.
She sat the package down on the desk and changed into more comfortable clothes before returning to look at it. When she saw the funny stamps she was puzzled, and reading the postmark didn't help much either. She was pretty sure she didn't know a soul in Sophia, Bulgaria. She opened it expecting a note, but there wasn't one.....just a DVD. She placed it in her laptop and let the ant-virus program have a look at it...surprised to see it was actually a video disk, apparently without any viruses. Shrugging her shoulders, she hit play.....
The voice chilled Nila to the core, even before she saw the slate-grey eyes she remembered so well looking out at her....but the eyes were somehow softer than they'd ever been before she decided, as she heard his words continue.
"You can not imagine my surprise...or my joy, Nila, when I found on the internet that you had returned to your work. When I went to sea I was sure....certain that you were dead. When I got home and read about the warehouse....I was still certain that you were gone....so certain that I could never tell you.....that I could never make amends.
You must understand, my Nila it was never personal...never, and now.....well now you are a friend, Nila, I could do nothing like that to you now. In fact, I am now almost retired, Nila...just a few more hours."
He stood back from the camera then and as he walked the autofocus showed the person garroted behind him, a grey cloth bag covering the face. Nila's body started to shake involuntarily as she saw Radoslav pull the hood off. Nila winced when she saw the face.....someone had apparently enjoyed their work a lot. In fact, Nila honestly couldn't tell who it was until she hear Radoslav tell him that he could talk now.
Whatever other failings Big Tony had as a person, Nila decided, he had a damn fine memory....at least once Radoslav had...stimulated it. He talked steadily for almost an hour and a half, giving names, bribe amounts, what accounts they'd come from, what accounts they'd gone to...., tons of information....enough information to bring down most of the mob on the East Coast. Then he'd looked up at Radoslav,,,his eyes pleading. Radoslav nodded at him. Just before he gave him the injection Radoslav stood before him...looked him in the eye and said, "So you know this....wherever you are going....take this with you. This was personal."
"Well I am retired now," he said as his grey eyes looked out her from the screen, "and you I think have a good story." Radoslav sighed deeply and smiled, the first time, she thought, that she'd ever seen him smile. He had a nice smile. "If I were twenty-five years younger Nila....ah, but I am not. You were the best, Nila, the best that I ever confronted. I am wiring you some money...mostly for those young women...to get them treated...to help them start a new life. Don't worry, I have enough, and this is not really mine anyway, and.." he looked at the dead body behind him, "...Mr Diglio won't be needing the money from that account. But if you have some extra, after you help all those girls, perhaps you could travel...come to Ruse...the Danube is beautiful in the Spring. I have friends in the border guards...they will tell me you are here. We could have coffee together, overlooking the Danube...or dinner if you would prefer. For old times sake......"
and then there was a twinkle in his eyes as he finished, "..and perhaps, my Neonila, you could explain to me what really happened in that warehouse...explain to an old man how two young women who are tied up suffocate fourteen men. That would be a story, I think...worth hearing. But not if you do not wish it, of course. For you are a friend. Just sitting by the Danube, enjoying an espresso with you, that would be enough. Think about it. Oh, and I saw your picture also....you might also tell me how the burns went away...and left no scars. I was pleased to see that...although... you were always beautiful to me."
She would play the DVD through three more times that night, copying down names of corrupt police and judges, crimes that had been done,....all the information that it would take to bring down the East Coast mob. And each time she wondered as she heard his invitation...wondered if she would go there...have that cup of coffee with him. She didn't think so, but she wasn't sure.
Then she'd think about what she would tell him if she did go, how she would explain it all to him. She smiled as she realized there was really only one answer.
She picked up the framed picture on her desk. She liked her godson better without the reindeer antlers...he was a beautiful child, with his father's amber eyes, and his mother's raven hair. 'Sometimes you just get lucky,' she would tell him. 'Sometimes you just get lucky...'
The end
"Nila?"
"Liz.....oh he's so beautiful. Isabel said his name was ...Alex?"
Liz nodded her head and smiled at the baby, but then looked up again at Nila. Nila saw fear in Liz's eyes then. Six months ago, Nila might not have picked up on the fear there, but Nila had come to know fear real well since then. She had experienced a graduate course in fear. Intuitively she knew...Liz was frightened...of her.
"What's wrong, Liz?"
The tears came then, as Liz's control appeared to break down.
"We ran for almost two years, Nila. Running from the Special Unit..., having people hunt us because they thought we were monsters. You can't tell anyone....you can't publish anything about what happened. I can't let Alex go through what we went through.....I can't have people think that my son is a....a monster."
She was weak, after three months in bed, but not too weak to move to the side of the bed....to reach out and take the little baby.
"He's not a monster, Liz. He's beautiful. I ... I would never tell anybody, you must know that. I would never think that your baby was a monster. No one would."
She thought it might help, and it appeared to...a little. But there were still tears coming down, and still fear in Liz's eyes when she looked back, her eyes somehow pleading to Nila to understand.
"When Max finished healing me...the brain swelling from the shock...when I woke up the next day, Nila....the memories were there. I had memories of Alex...of everything he had done. You have to understand....he hardly knew anything...he had so little time...so little time to learn. He just wanted to stop them from using their guns, Nila...that was all. All of his life he'd been sleeping, warm, comfortable, getting water and nourishment and oxygen from his umbilical cord. He didn't know, Nila...He didn't know those men had to.... had to ....breathe."
Nila stayed for ten days...not to convalesce, but to help Liz with the baby. Liz was alright, really. It was partly post-partum depression, partly from a 26 hour labor four days earlier and it was partly exhaustion. Liz and Isabel had been playing nurse to Nila for the last three months. Nila thought the least she could do was return the favor a little bit.
Nila hadn't seen Max in many years. He was as charismatic as ever. They were a lovely couple. She never asked them about Tess.....she sort of had the feeling that the subject was off-limits from what Ava had said. Maria and Michael flew in from the West Coast. She had a chance to talk to Michael, he told her the story. He said he'd never seen cold fury like he'd seen from Max when he thought he'd lost Liz. They met up with Ava and heard the story of what had happened. They really hadn't known that Liz and Nila were back at the warehouse, but Max had insisted they go there...figuring that the people there were the ones who had killed Liz.
Michael had shaken his head then. 'I really think he just wanted to kill someone...I've known him my entire life ...and I've never seen him that way.'
But Max hadn't killed anyone. Michael and Max and Ava and Kyle had arrived at the gate, certainly ready to kill the guards....but they were too late. The gate guards were already dead, same for the door guards, and a couple more thugs they'd seen, and then the four in the room. They'd found Liz and Nila then. Nila was barely alive, Liz unconscious but not really in that bad a shape. They didn't understand the iridescent splotch on her lower abdomen...at least not until she woke up the next day and explained it to them.
Max had stabilized Nila and they'd loaded Nila and Liz in the car and just gotten the hell out of New York City. It took Max awhile to fix Nila's injuries, she'd been pretty well worked over. But she hadn't come out of her catatonic state, even when she'd been healed. Maria had suggested Isabel dreamwalk her...it'd been hard. She'd come close a couple of times, but it took her almost 2 months to finally get in to whatever place Nila had fled to.
Waving goodbye to them as she went through security at Logan Airport, Nila knew it was going to take awhile to get her life back in order. Her editor had NOT been pleased that she'd dropped out of sight for four months, particularly when he knew the case she'd been working on had exploded about the time she disappeared. He'd figured she was dead, and while he was glad she wasn't....really hadn't believed she didn't know more than she was telling. And she was, of course. She was sitting on the biggest story on earth. And she'd continue to sit on it, she knew, for the rest of her life.
6 weeks later
The weather was cold in Burgas, a chill wind blowing east off the Black Sea as the man put his bag up on the table for inspection and handed the man the passport. The agent scarcely looked at the passport before stamping it, and waved the suitcase by without opening it. 'This was too easy,' thought Big Tony. People smuggled stuff out of Bulgaria, not into it. He'd paid well for the false bottom suitcase, and the silenced pistol in it. He might just as well have carried it on his person. His in-laws had been right, traveling by freighter to this seaport town...well there really was no security.
He thought of his in-laws and his wife. This really wasn't personal, even though he'd told them it was. The fact was that he really didn't care about Little Tony. His wife had spoiled the damn kid...Big Tony was just as glad he was dead. But the way he had died....that'd been an embarassment, and before Big Tony could go back...well, he had a score to settle. This was business.
Big Tony shook his head. He should never have gone along with his idiot son and those two cops. That had been dumb. The Bulgarian...well, he should have known the extra money wouldn't have been enough....he was different, that one. He'd made that clear, ...it wasn't all about the money with him. And he hadn't listened....he'd listened to his idiot son. He really didn't care that the guys in Vegas were pissed at him. Those idiots had deserved to die. Big Tony had never been east of Chicago, but even he knew that you didn't act inconspicuous in Tucumcari New Mexico by driving into town in a fuckin' Lincoln Town Car. 'If those assholes had driven an old pickup truck with a half load of horseshit in it, they'd have probably fit right in.' No, screw the Vegas guys, he didn't care about them. But to get his credibility back on the East Coast, he needed to take care of the Bulgarian for ratting. It wasn't personal, just business.
As the man shoved his bag into the trunk of his rental car and drove off to his hotel, the agent watched him depart. He smiled as he picked the phone up from the receiver and punched the number. The phone was answered on the third ring. "You're company has arrived."
Three weeks later
It had been a long, hard, ten-hour day at the newspaper, and Nila was beat as she got home to her apartment. During her three months "vacation" as her editor kept referring to it, a lot of her sources had dried up and of course the New York Post had scooped her on the other story...at least as much of it as she could tell. In fact, if she and her editor hadn't worked so well for so long, she probably wouldn't even have a job. But there were worse things, she figured. She picked up the mail at the box....not much, a card and a small box. The card was from Boston...probably a Christmas card. She opened it first, even as she walked up the stairs to her apartment. The picture was cute...all three were in reindeer antlers, Alex looking puzzled by the whole thing. Liz said that they'd be in Roswell for Christmas...invited her to come if she could..meet the folks. Nila knew she'd like to...but she owed the editor a story...a big story, before asking for more time off, and she wasn't sure she'd have one.
She sat the package down on the desk and changed into more comfortable clothes before returning to look at it. When she saw the funny stamps she was puzzled, and reading the postmark didn't help much either. She was pretty sure she didn't know a soul in Sophia, Bulgaria. She opened it expecting a note, but there wasn't one.....just a DVD. She placed it in her laptop and let the ant-virus program have a look at it...surprised to see it was actually a video disk, apparently without any viruses. Shrugging her shoulders, she hit play.....
The voice chilled Nila to the core, even before she saw the slate-grey eyes she remembered so well looking out at her....but the eyes were somehow softer than they'd ever been before she decided, as she heard his words continue.
"You can not imagine my surprise...or my joy, Nila, when I found on the internet that you had returned to your work. When I went to sea I was sure....certain that you were dead. When I got home and read about the warehouse....I was still certain that you were gone....so certain that I could never tell you.....that I could never make amends.
You must understand, my Nila it was never personal...never, and now.....well now you are a friend, Nila, I could do nothing like that to you now. In fact, I am now almost retired, Nila...just a few more hours."
He stood back from the camera then and as he walked the autofocus showed the person garroted behind him, a grey cloth bag covering the face. Nila's body started to shake involuntarily as she saw Radoslav pull the hood off. Nila winced when she saw the face.....someone had apparently enjoyed their work a lot. In fact, Nila honestly couldn't tell who it was until she hear Radoslav tell him that he could talk now.
Whatever other failings Big Tony had as a person, Nila decided, he had a damn fine memory....at least once Radoslav had...stimulated it. He talked steadily for almost an hour and a half, giving names, bribe amounts, what accounts they'd come from, what accounts they'd gone to...., tons of information....enough information to bring down most of the mob on the East Coast. Then he'd looked up at Radoslav,,,his eyes pleading. Radoslav nodded at him. Just before he gave him the injection Radoslav stood before him...looked him in the eye and said, "So you know this....wherever you are going....take this with you. This was personal."
"Well I am retired now," he said as his grey eyes looked out her from the screen, "and you I think have a good story." Radoslav sighed deeply and smiled, the first time, she thought, that she'd ever seen him smile. He had a nice smile. "If I were twenty-five years younger Nila....ah, but I am not. You were the best, Nila, the best that I ever confronted. I am wiring you some money...mostly for those young women...to get them treated...to help them start a new life. Don't worry, I have enough, and this is not really mine anyway, and.." he looked at the dead body behind him, "...Mr Diglio won't be needing the money from that account. But if you have some extra, after you help all those girls, perhaps you could travel...come to Ruse...the Danube is beautiful in the Spring. I have friends in the border guards...they will tell me you are here. We could have coffee together, overlooking the Danube...or dinner if you would prefer. For old times sake......"
and then there was a twinkle in his eyes as he finished, "..and perhaps, my Neonila, you could explain to me what really happened in that warehouse...explain to an old man how two young women who are tied up suffocate fourteen men. That would be a story, I think...worth hearing. But not if you do not wish it, of course. For you are a friend. Just sitting by the Danube, enjoying an espresso with you, that would be enough. Think about it. Oh, and I saw your picture also....you might also tell me how the burns went away...and left no scars. I was pleased to see that...although... you were always beautiful to me."
She would play the DVD through three more times that night, copying down names of corrupt police and judges, crimes that had been done,....all the information that it would take to bring down the East Coast mob. And each time she wondered as she heard his invitation...wondered if she would go there...have that cup of coffee with him. She didn't think so, but she wasn't sure.
Then she'd think about what she would tell him if she did go, how she would explain it all to him. She smiled as she realized there was really only one answer.
She picked up the framed picture on her desk. She liked her godson better without the reindeer antlers...he was a beautiful child, with his father's amber eyes, and his mother's raven hair. 'Sometimes you just get lucky,' she would tell him. 'Sometimes you just get lucky...'
The end