James Rollins - Altar Of Eden

Randy faced her, balanced between fury and fear. He lunged at her. She took a startled step back. But he only grabbed her in a bear hug.

“Take care of my little brother,” he whispered in her ear, biting back tears. He straightened. “I know there’s bad blood between our families. But Jack trusts you. So I do, too.”

Lorna nodded.

Kyle took Randy’s shoulder. “Wanna beer while we wait?”

Randy sagged, nodded, and turned with Kyle back toward the stairs.

Lorna joined Mack in the captain’s cabin. The big man had Jack sprawled across the bed.

“Need a hand?” he asked.

“I could use the company,” she said, smiling wanly, not wanting to be alone.

He sank to the bed beside Jack’s head. She placed the drug bottle down on the bedside table. It was labeled sodium thiopental. She had taken it from the Malik’s surgical supplies. It was a common anesthetic used in animals, and considering Malik’s research, she knew the lab would have a supply.

But she intended to do more than just anesthetize Jack with it.

For years, thiopental had also been used by medical doctors to send patients into an induced coma. Though the drug propofol was employed more commonly today, thiopental was still useful in cases of brain trauma or swelling. The drug triggered a marked decrease in neuronal activity, which was the effect Lorna needed most right now.

Jack’s brain was on overdrive.

She had to turn that engine off.

Working quickly, she prepped Jack’s arm and established a tourniquet. Ready, she picked up a syringe that she had preloaded with the thiopental.

She met Mack’s gaze over his body.

“You can do this,” he said.

Swallowing back her fear, she inserted the needle, aspirated blood to make sure she had a good stick, then released the tourniquet.

Slowly she pushed the plunger and sent the man she was growing to love into a coma.

HALF AN HOUR later, Lorna stood on the stern deck of the ship. Mack continued to watch over Jack. She had needed to get some air. At least for a minute. Her body trembled with exhaustion and stress.

Standing by the rail, she took deep breaths and stared out at the dark sea. Stars glistened overhead, but the moon had not yet risen.

The scratch of a match made her jump.

She turned and found Bennett seated on a deck chair. Lost in her own thoughts, she had failed to see him in the dark. He brought the match to his pipe. The tobacco glowed ruddily as he puffed it to life. He stood up and joined her.

“How’s he doing?”

Lorna sighed. “I don’t know. His fever’s dropped. The anesthetic has quieted his spasms. But I don’t know if he’s still even in there. He’s been seizing for a long time.”

Bennett exhaled a stream of smoke. “You’re doing all you can do.”

They stood quietly for a long moment.

She needed to change the subject. “How’s the baby?”

“Sleeping. We found some formula. The captain’s wife has a four-month-old. Lucky for that.” Bennett turned to her. “Eve’s baby is a little girl, by the way.”

“How about the rest of the children?”

“They’re all sleeping in there with her. I think they recognize one of their own and want to welcome her into the fold. Or maybe it’s just plain childish curiosity. Hard to say.”

Silence stretched again, but Bennett was full of questions.

“Why do you think Eve gave her up?” he asked.

Lorna had pondered the same question. She couldn’t say for sure, but she could guess. “I think it’s the same reason they let us go… or rather let the children go.”

“What do you mean?”

“The baby’s pure. It’s neural net is still infantile. I think back at the villa the older ones recognized that the children were equally uncorrupted. In that moment of confrontation, the two hive minds met. One was pure and innocent, while the other had been tortured into psychosis. I think the older hive mind recognized that the younger ones were lost to them, that they could only offer poison and pain.”

She remembered the agony and grief in Adam when one of the little ones had offered his hand.

“So they did the only thing they could,” she said. “As a final gift and sacrifice, they let them go.”

“What about afterward? Do you think they knew they were going to be killed?”

She pictured Eve’s last expression. It had been full of peace and acceptance. “I think they did.”

Bennett spent a long introspective moment with his pipe. He finally got around to the true question that had been troubling him.

“Why did they protect me? It doesn’t make sense. The monsters were going to kill me.”

“You may know that answer better than I.”

He stared at her. Tears glinted in his eyes. He needed some direction. She didn’t know if he deserved it, but she took her example from the kids.

“They protected me, too,” she said. “Though they can’t bond to us as intimately as they can with each other, I think they possess a strong sense of empathy. They sensed something in you worth saving.”

“But what could that be? All that I did… all that I turned a blind eye to… and sometimes not even a blind eye.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know. I can’t read your heart. But maybe they recognized the possibility of redemption in you. And amid all that bloodshed, they couldn’t let it be destroyed.”

Bennett turned from her. He covered his face with his hands. His shoulders shook.

“What have I done?” he sobbed softly.

“That’s just it. It’s not what you did, but what you have yet to do.”

As those words passed her lips she took them to heart herself. For so long, she’d let her past define her, to isolate her, to keep her trapped in a limbo of her own guilt. No longer. Jack’s last words came back to her.

Tom’s gone.

It was time for her to truly see that, to act on it.

She prayed she still had the chance.

The uptown campus of Tulane University rose amid clusters of turn-of-the-century mansions, magnolia-shaded parks, and college housing complexes. It was only a short ride on the St. Charles streetcar from Lorna’s Garden District home.

Still, for the past three days, she seldom left the neurology department on the fourth floor of the Tulane Medical Center. She paced the hall outside the room, anxious for the neurologist to finish his exam.

Jack had been airlifted here from the Thibodeauxs’ fishing boat. Lorna had gone with him during that flight, explaining to the doctors about his treatment. She glossed over many details but was honest about his condition.

Half the hospital departments had been through Jack’s room. Once here, he had been switched to a propofol infusion to maintain his coma, his EEG was monitored around the clock, and his body was hooked to a battery of equipment.

But today was critical. The doctors had been weaning him off the infusion all morning, slowly allowing him to wake while closely monitoring his EEG for any sign of continuing seizure activity. So far so good. But a bigger question remained.

What was left of Jack?

The neurologist seemed confident that there was no permanent brain damage, but after such an injury, he could make no guarantees. Jack could remain in a vegetative state or fully recover. But the doctor had warned that the more likely result was somewhere in between.

So they waited.

Randy sat down the hall with Jack’s mother and father. Kyle had gone down to the cafeteria to fetch them all more coffee. None of them had slept. In the trenches these past days, they had all grown closer.

During their vigil, Lorna had finally shared the whole story of that night with Tom, of the loss of her baby, the attempted rape, Jack’s rescue, and its tragic conclusion. Once she started, it had poured out of her. There had been many tears, on all sides, but in the end, just as much healing.