James Gunn - The Immortals

The address was in an area that once had been middle class but had been sliding down the income slope ever since. The neighborhood was poor, but the people within it were not yet hopeless. It lay outside the inner city, but the inner city was metastasizing toward it, and Pearce had been forced to cross oncological arms after leaving the comparative safety of the interstate. He had kept the bulletproof windows of his armored car rolled up and a prayer on his lips to Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen, that his engine had been well and truly made.

The house stood among narrow, two-story residences on narrow lots. Once, no doubt, they had been single-family homes, but now, Pearce suspected, they were carved up into single rooms for multiple families. The computer map had got him this far, but Pearce could not have deduced which house was his destination had he not been able to determine from an old street sign that this was Tenth Street and from an intact house number that he was in the 3400 block. The house just to the west had a 4 and a 1 hanging awry beside it from the edge of the front porch roof, and the one in front of Pearce, a 6. Behind it, in the dusk, loomed the blank wall of a structure built of concrete blocks, either a small factory or a large garage. Beside the house was a lot piled with old iron pipes and littered with rusting construction equipment, and the remains of a small drilling derrick.

What once had been a small front yard had been paved for parking, but the only other vehicle was a rusted hulk from which the wheels had been removed. Pearce would have preferred to pull his car around to the back and out of sight, but the lot was too narrow for a driveway and he had to trust his vehicle to luck and its own defenses.

He stepped out cautiously, his black bag in his hand, wondering why he was responding to this anonymous cry for help. It might well be a trap. Physicians had been abducted before by gangs desperate for medical treatment, or for their instruments and drugs. But seldom had a plan been laid to lure a physician into danger, and he did not think Aikens would join any such attempt.

He moved carefully up squeaking wooden stairs, shining a light onto a porch with boards missing like a ghetto-dweller’s teeth. The front door was unlocked, and when Pearce pushed it open, he noticed that the frame had been splintered, not once but many times, until, no doubt, the residents had surrendered to the inevitable.

The hall was dark. Above, Pearce’s light revealed an empty socket; if a bulb had been available, and the electricity had not been cut off long ago, it would have been stolen. Stairs led up from the hall to a landing and a door and then turned to ascend toward a mysterious second floor. To his right was an archway, perhaps to the building’s one-time living room, but the arch had been closed by plywood covered with graffiti. The plywood had been painted and repainted in a futile effort to maintain a minimal level of self-respect, but the graffiti showed through like palimpsests of earlier civilizations.

In the middle of the plywood was a hinged panel that served as a door. No name or number on it—anyone who had reason to be there knew who lived within, and anyone else had no good reason to be there. Except himself, he thought, and knocked.

“Come in,” a woman’s voice said.

He pushed open the panel to find himself blinded by a flashlight. He had a feeling there was a weapon behind it. “Marilyn?” he asked.

The light went out. “You’re Doctor Pearce?”

“Yes.” Several moments passed before his eyesight returned.

“I’m Marilyn Van Cleve, and I need your help.”

He could see now. An oil lamp on an old card table illuminated a woman seated beside it in a large, shabby recliner. She had a flashlight in her lap and an old-fashioned revolver on the table beside the lamp. She was an attractive woman with brown hair cut short and large brown eyes that looked at him warily but unafraid. Her most attractive feature, however, was her health; in the midst of a sea of sickness, she glowed with a well being that made her seem lit from within.

At first glance Pearce thought perhaps she was in her early twenties, but then he looked again at her eyes; they had seen a great deal of human joy and sadness and suffering.

“What kind of help?” he asked.

“You’d better come in and lock the door. It won’t hold anybody out, but it would give me time to get my defenses ready,” she said calmly.

“Who are you expecting?” he asked.

“You and whoever may be following you.”

“No one is following me,” Pearce said impatiently. “I ask you once more, what kind of help?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said. She stood up. She was a sturdy woman of medium height, and she was, indeed, pregnant, perhaps eight months along or more, Pearce guessed.

He half-turned toward the door. “I’m not an obstetrician. I have delivered only one baby in the last sixty years. What you need is a midwife.”

“This is going to be a difficult delivery. I’m going to need more help than a midwife can provide.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” she said.

“Then you belong in a hospital. Even if you can’t afford it, there is a clinic for indigents. Medical students need the practice.”

“They’d draw blood,” she said simply.

“They’d do some routine tests, typing in case of the need for transfusions, checking for drugs, diseases, anemia—but that’s all to the good.”

“I can’t,” she said. “That’s why I need you.”

He shook his head wearily. “It’s been a long day. If you can’t use a midwife and you can’t go to the hospital, then I can’t be of any help to you.”

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “I’m a Cartwright.”

Pearce’s mind slowed, waiting for the implications of Van Cleve’s statement to seep through the walls he had built around the image of Marshall Cartwright. After fifty years of searching, he had found his Holy Grail. But she was also in terrible danger—and so was he.

“Clearly you can’t go to a hospital,” he said. “Even if I were to admit you myself, I couldn’t deliver your baby without attracting attention, and attention could be fatal. But why do you think the delivery will be difficult?”

“Cartwright women mature late. I’m fifty years old—”

“The first generation,” he said. Cartwright had wasted no time putting into action Pearce’s admonition to be fruitful and multiply.

She nodded. “But menopause may have no meaning for us. That remains to be seen. Our organs are tough, however, and the mouth of the uterus may not expand sufficiently to allow the baby to be born. Although I never get sick and injuries heal quickly, and the baby will be the same, it can strangle or suffocate. A Caeserian may be necessary.”

Pearce looked around the room. It was not dirty. It had been swept, perhaps even scrubbed, but grime was embedded in the painted walls and the wooden floor and the ancient furniture so deeply that mere soap and water could never reach it. “Not exactly the most sanitary of conditions.”

“Not here,” she said. “The time is not yet right.”

“How far along are you?”

“Nine months.” She held up a hand. “But Cartwright babies take a week longer. I got that from my mother. She died when I was only five years old. She never really got over the trauma of my birth. But she told me about my father—a wandering man, she called him, who loved her, she said, but could not stop to take care of her, or me. So I’ve been on my own since then, and I’ve done all right, in spite of the knowledge that I had to hide who I was, that people were searching for me. But then—” with a hint of bitterness—“women have always had to hide their superiority from men.”