James Gunn - The Immortals

Then the motorcycle lurched into motion, its roar modulating into a husky snarl, and Pearce had no more time for reflections on his folly. Instead he hung on to the old man’s emaciated waist as wind and dust tugged at his clothes and hair and beat into his face. The night was chilly, and the cold ate through his clothing and down to the bone. Now that they were traveling, the old man wasn’t coughing as much, as if the strength of the machine he rode seeped up into his body through some kind of sympathetic magic.

The old man avoided all but short stretches of the trafficways and their patrols. Instead the motorcycle weaved through unlighted side streets, avoiding potholes and wreckage as if by instinct, skidding around corners, going over sidewalks and through yards to avoid barricades behind which lurked dangers that Pearce did not want to consider.

The experience was far different from traveling the same distance by car. After his terror subsided to a constant fear punctuated by panic, Pearce began to feel the inner city as a place where people lived rather than a jungle to be flown over or passed through. Like a medieval leech drawing blood from a patient dying of anemia, the suburbs had drained wealth from the inner city, and what the suburbs had started the Medical Centers had completed, taking block after block of housing for their expansion, pricing their snake oils and nostrums beyond the reach of the people in whose midst they lived and thrived. And yet the citizens endured. In spite of everything, they endured.

That was the strength of the people, he thought. They endured and they survived, and after all those who elevated themselves above their fellows had decayed from their excesses and destroyed themselves, the people remained. Pearce saw them now, looking out their windows into the uncertain night, standing on their porches to stare at the unaccustomed noise, in hovels falling apart around them, and realized their strength.

Their lives were short and disease ridden—no better than the animals of the fields or the forests—which is why the Medical Centers remained in their midst, harvesting their antibodies and their antigens, their gamma globulins and their vaccines, even their organs. But they survived. They nourished each other between casual killings, they dreamed, they loved, they raised families, they got old too soon, and they died, often among friends, as opposed to the sterile dyings in the Medical Centers, no matter how long postponed, ignored by everyone except those paid to administer the medical last rites.

By then they had nearly reached their destination as they crossed the divided thoroughfare of the Paseo and slowed on what Pearce glimpsed on a sagging street sign as INDEPE… VEN… The motorcycle veered off the poorly illuminated, four-lane street into a darker drive behind a dark building that hulked against the late evening sky like an abandoned warehouse. The old man who had ferried him here like some latter-day Charon cut off the engine and waited a moment in the sudden silence, testing the night for danger. Then, as if deciding for the moment that movement was safe, he removed the bags from the containers, handed them to Pearce, and motioned Pearce to follow.

As they entered a dark door Pearce noticed a sign above it, still intact. It was like an omen: CHILDREN’S MERCY HOSPITAL, it read.

The building had been taken over by the homeless. The old hospital, once the new one had been built, had been used for a few years as offices for social welfare, then as an orphanage, and finally boarded up and forgotten. The poor had not forgotten. They had pried open doors and windows and made the building a warren for their fertility. Children played in the halls, barely lit by an occasional oil lantern, or stuck their heads out of doors to inspect the strangers passing by. Some came to tug at Pearce’s clothing or the bags in his hands until the old man shooed them aside. Sometimes an adult made an appearance, an unshaved face to glare at them or a curious woman with a toddler tugging at her leg.

Children’s mercy, Pearce thought. He hoped they got it, but he knew that this was a world that had little mercy except for those it favored, and they lived outside the inner city and had few children.

On the second floor was a room that Pearce recognized. He had never been there, but the layout was unmistakable. It was an operating room, no matter what uses had intervened. Glareless lights once had turned this room into day. Dials and gauges had lined the walls. Bottles of oxygen and anesthetic had been nearby. Tables and autoclaves for instruments. A T-bar for infusions. And a stainless steel operating table in the center.

Now it was lit by candles. It held only battered, old furniture pushed against the walls and in the middle a narrow bed. On the bed, propped up with ragged pillows, was Marilyn Van Cleve. She had her eyes closed but turned as Pearce entered with the old man and gave them a half-smile that turned into a grimace as a contraction seized her body. “You came,” she whispered.

“I said I would,” he answered.

“Not everybody keeps promises.”

“I’ve always kept mine. When did the contractions start? How far apart are they?”

“Almost twenty-four hours ago,” she said, panting. “They were ten minutes apart twelve hours ago, about an hour ago they were five minutes apart, and now they’re down to two. I—just—can’t—squeeze—him—out. I think it’s time to help him get born.”

Pearce nodded. “Get some boiling water,” he told the old man who waited by the door.

“Too long,” she said.

“At least,” he said, “get me some soap and water to wash my hands.”

While he waited for the old man, he folded back Van Cleve’s long dress to just beneath her breasts and placed his hands on her belly to feel the contractions. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I hope it hasn’t been too long. And these operating conditions—they’re beyond contamination.”

“You can’t hurt a Cartwright,” she said.

“You’d better be right.”

When the old man returned with a bucket of dirty water and a thin bar of soap, streaked with dark veins, Pearce shrugged and washed as thoroughly as he could. “I need more light,” he said, and the old man brought two kerosene lamps that he placed on either side of the bed at Van Cleve’s hips.

From the second bag Pearce removed a large plastic bag and from his black bag a bottle of alcohol with which he swabbed his hands and Van Cleve’s belly before wiping it a second time with iodine. He pulled on a pair of clear plastic gloves that shrank to fit his hands and picked up an instrument that looked like a fat stainless-steel pen.

“I could give you a shot for the pain,” he said, “but I’m not an anesthesiologist, and I don’t know the effect on the baby.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Knowing that injuries aren’t fatal helps control the pain.” And she did not make a sound as the laser made a vertical cut through her belly and into the womb.

He worked quickly, as if he knew what he was doing, and when the cutting was done reached his hands into her body and lifted out the baby, trailing its umbilical cord. The baby began to cry, loudly.

He looked up at Van Cleve. She was still conscious, though clearly in pain. “You have a son,” he said. “I’m no expert, but he looks as big and healthy as any baby I’ve seen. I’d say ten or eleven pounds. No wonder you had trouble.”

She laughed. “Give him to me.” She held out her arms.

“Just a moment.” He tied off the cord close to the baby’s navel and again a few centimeters away before he cut it. “I need a blanket or a sheet or something,” he said.

“Never mind that,” she said.