Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul’s eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James’s eyes went wide in surprise.

Paul reacted using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the intruder like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap—a twig, a branch, something in the man’s chest—and they rolled apart, the intruder doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.

There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry.

The man came at him again, and it was only Paul’s size that saved him. He grabbed one arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. They rolled, knocking over the table, and Paul came up on top. A pushing down of his will into three square inches of the man’s throat—a caving in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the empty eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Paul rolled off the dead man and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn’t a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious, the neck wound a surgical gash at the carotid.

The blood from Paul’s eye spattered the red beard, mixing with the blood that ran onto the bed.

“Don’t bleed on me, man,” James said. “I know all about you promiscuous Americans. No telling what you might carry, and I don’t want to have to explain it to my girlfriend.”

Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James’s hand until he stopped breathing.

Paul’s eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. “Where am I?” Paul asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who’d eaten glass.

“Maumere,” the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written all over him.

“How long?”

“A day.”

Paul touched the bandage over his face. “Is my eye…”

“I’m sorry.”

Paul took the news with a nod. “How did I get here?”

“They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room.”

It came back to him then, all of it, like a weight settling onto him.

“So what happens now?”

“Well, that depends on you.” The man in the suit smiled. “I’m here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close.”

“Quiet?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Margaret? Gavin McMaster?”

“They were put on flights back to Australia this morning.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I’m just answering your questions.”

“What about the bones?”

“Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig.”

“On what grounds?”

“It is their cave, after all.”

“What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?”

“They’ve been confiscated and destroyed.”

Paul sat quietly. He looked at the man, imagining his skull beneath the thin layer of epidermis. He knew all his bones would be smooth and fine, with hardly a mark of muscle attachment, the perfect gracile skeleton.

“How did you end up in the street?” the man asked.

“I walked.”

“How did you end up naked?”

“I figured it would increase my odds.”

“Explain.”

“I knew what they wanted,” Paul said. “And I was bleeding out. Being naked was the fastest way to prove I wasn’t armed and didn’t have the samples. I knew they’d still be coming.”

“You are a smart man, Mr. Carlsson, leaving those in the hotel room.” The suited man stood, apparently satisfied with Paul’s answers. “So you figured you’d just let them have the samples?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

The man nodded his good-bye, then turned to leave. He closed the door behind himself.

“Mostly,” Paul said.

On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.

He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road Paul yelled, “Stop!”

The driver hit the brake. “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’ve forgotten something.” He climbed off the bus and walked back to town, checking for a tail. No car followed.

Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it: the flowerpot with the odd pink plant. The flowerpot whose appearance and location he’d memorized the week before, when he’d first left the hotel room covered in blood. He scooped dirt out of the base.

An old woman shouted something at him, coming out of her house. He held out money. “For the plant,” he said. “I’m a flower lover.” She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no.

Just two.

All of Australoid creation like some parallel world.

But why would God create two Adams? That’s what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn’t.

Two Adams.

Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace line.

Paul imagined that it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

Paul understood the burden Abraham had carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt of the flowerpot. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

He slid the last remaining DNA sample into his pocket.

He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with beautiful teeth like dentists might dream. She reminded him of someone. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island, fashioning tools from bits of stone.

He handed her the flower. “For you,” he said.

He hailed a cab and climbed inside. “Take me to the airport.”

As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye patch. He saw the driver glance into his rearview and then look away, repulsed.

“They lied, you see,” Paul told the driver. “About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways.”

The driver turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul pulled off the bandage. He grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips, pain exploding in his skull. It was more pain than he’d ever experienced in his life, a white-hot nova in his head. The gauze made a small, bloody pile on the seat next to him.

“A prophet is one who feels fiercely,” he said, and then he slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

Gavin stepped out into daylight and spit blood onto the sun-bleached concrete. New South Wales, the sound of jets.

He scanned the faces at the airport entrance, looking for the familiar, the unfamiliar, the out of place. He saw people coming and going. Taxis and buses and cars. People in a hurry, people laughing or frustrated, people towing suitcases or duffel bags or children. He stood, and he watched, and he saw no one he recognized. He saw not a single thing to arouse his suspicions.