SERGEANT LEONARD

Jericho pulled himself to a sitting position and hissed with pain. He was sore and his shirt was off. The faded scar, which snaked down the front of his broad chest, was now partially hidden by a layer of soft down. There was a new wound—a stitched hole above his left pectoral muscle—and Jericho remembered being surrounded in the woods, remembered the gun going off and the impact. He pieced together what must have happened and realized with growing horror that Evie must know everything now. But there she was on the other bed, asleep in her clothes, her shoes still on. She’d stayed with him, he realized. She’d found out and chosen to stay.

Jericho lay back down on his side, watching her breathe just an arm’s length from him. She was not beautiful while she slept; her mouth hung open and she snored very lightly, and this, despite everything that had happened, made him smile. Dreaming, she stirred and stretched, and he looked away. The first glimmerings of dawn showed through the window. The tiny tin clock on the bedside table read ten minutes past five. Evie’s eyes fluttered open, and Jericho quickly pulled the sheet up to cover his scars.

“Jericho?” Evie asked, her voice still sleep-caked.

“What happened, Evie?”

“You were shot. Unc and I got you back here,” she said carefully. “Jericho, what’s in those blue vials?”

“How many did it take?”

“Three.”

“Did I… did I hurt you or Will?”

“No,” she lied. “Jericho, please.”

“You won’t understand,” he said softly.

“Please stop telling me that.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t unless you tell me.”

“The infantile paralysis. There was no miracle. It burned through me just like it did my sister. It shut down my legs, then my arms, and finally my lungs. They put me in the metal coffin and told me I’d be in it for the rest of my life. Trapped. I’d never breathe on my own. Never walk or ride a horse again. Never touch anyone.” His gaze flicked over the curve of Evie’s body. “Never do a thing but stare up at that ceiling till I died. After the war, there were soldiers coming back with their arms and legs missing. Men blown apart. They had a secret innovation they were trying—the Daedalus program—to help the soldiers coming back.”

“What sort of innovation?”

Jericho took a deep breath. “A merging of man and machine. A human-automaton hybrid,” Jericho said. “They would replace what had been damaged beyond repair in the war or by disease with steel and wires and cogs. We would be the perfect miracle of the industrial age. The robotnik. You’re staring.”

Evie quickly looked away. “I… I’m sorry. It’s so fantastic. I just don’t understand….” She looked at him again. “Please.”

“We were the test subjects,” Jericho continued. “They wouldn’t tell us anything except that the machinery would replace our defective parts and, over time, fuse with our very human systems. This was achieved by a new miracle serum—the vials of blue liquid—and vitamin tonic. It was supposed to keep the balance between our two selves. We would change mankind, they promised.”

“That’s astonishing. But why hasn’t it been in the papers? Why isn’t this the biggest story since Moses brought down the Ten Commandments?”

“Because it didn’t work,” Jericho said bitterly.

“But… I don’t understand.”

“I told you there were others.” With one finger, Jericho rolled a spent ampoule in his palm. “Their bodies rejected the formula, or the machinery, or both. It might be a few days or a few weeks, but then they’d turn feverish as the infection burned through their ravaged bodies, proving just how human they were after all. But the ones who died were lucky.”

“Lucky?” Evie said, incredulous.

Jericho’s expression darkened. “Some went mad. They’d see things that weren’t there, talk to nothing at all. They’d rage with prophecies. Or they’d go wild until the orderlies would have to come with the restraints, and even then it took an awful lot of men to hold them down. The doctors doped them while they tried to figure out what to do. I watched them shrink back into themselves. Husks sent off to asylums to die.”

Jericho placed the ampoule on the bedside table. The glass still had a blue cast to it. “There was this soldier in the bed beside mine. Sergeant Barry Leonard, from Topeka. I remember he told me that if I wanted to know what Topeka looked like, I should just imagine hell with a dry-goods store. And the dry-goods store didn’t have anything you wanted, anyway. He was a pretty funny fellow.”

Jericho grinned at some private memory, then went serious again.

“He’d come back from the war with both legs and an arm gone. Less than half a man lying in that bed. People walked right past him. They wouldn’t even look. It was as if they were afraid that if they looked, they’d catch his bad luck. His pain was more terrifying to them than death.”

Evie bent her arm, propped her head up with one hand. Jericho sat up and draped the sheet around him, but not before Evie sneaked a furtive glance at his chest—the soft golden hair, the beautiful muscle, the long older scar alongside the newer one made by Uncle Will. She wanted to touch him, to place a kiss at the center of his chest.

“They took us both for Daedalus, said we were good candidates. They wheeled us in together. Just before I went under the ether, I saw Sergeant Leonard grinning at me. ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels, kid.’ That’s what he always used to say.” Jericho’s smile was wan. “I still remember what it felt like to wiggle my toes for the first time in months. You wouldn’t know that a big toe could be so incredible. The first time I walked outside and felt the sun on my face…” He shook his head. “I wanted to reach up and pull the sun down, hold it like a ball you get for a birthday when you’re a kid, never let it go. Within a week, I was running. I could run for miles and not tire. Sergeant Leonard ran alongside me, daring me to keep up. When we finished, he patted me on the back like a brother. He said we were a new breed, the future. The way he said it, full of wonder and hope…” Jericho shook away the memory. “We would sit together on the bench in the courtyard, looking out at the sun setting over the hills, marveling at the constancy of it.”

Evie felt like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound hollow. Besides, Jericho was talking to her, telling her the story she’d wanted to hear, and she was wary of breaking the spell.

“It started with his hand.” Jericho paused, sipped from Evie’s glass of water, resumed. “One day, he couldn’t make a fist. I remember that moment so clearly. He turned to me and said, ‘It’s like my doggone hand is drunk. Kid, you didn’t take my hand off base for a quick one while I was sleeping, didya?’ He said it like it was a joke. But I could tell he was scared. He didn’t tell the doctors, though. He just kept telling them he felt fit as a fiddle.”

Jericho worried the edge of the sheet between his fingers, pulling it taut, relaxing it again.

“He would get awful moody. Agitated. Once, he threw a plate of potatoes against a wall, and it left a hole there. His eyes were haunted. He asked me to run with him. He ran me into the ground. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. I let him go; I couldn’t keep up. Later, I saw him standing in the courtyard in the rain. Just standing there, letting it wash over him. I ran out to tell him to come inside, and he said, ‘It’s like I’ve got too much inside me. It just pushes and pushes with nowhere to go.’ I got him to come inside and lie down. I could hear him in the dark, whispering, ‘Please… please… please.’ Anyway, one night he went a little crazy. He stripped off all his clothes and ran through the hospital like an ape, swinging from the pipes, smashing windows. ‘I am the future!’ he screamed. It took four orderlies to catch him and strap him to the bed. The doctor came in and explained that the process had become unstable. For his own good, they’d need to stop it.”

Jericho buried his head in his hands for a minute before continuing.

“He was shouting at them, screaming, ‘You can’t do this to me! I’m a man! Look at me—I’m a man!’ over and over. They gave him a shot of something to calm him, but he kept struggling, kept screaming that he was a man, he had his rights, they just needed to give him a chance, a stinkin’ chance. Then the drug began to take effect; he couldn’t struggle much. He was crying, begging, pleading with them and God as they wheeled him out.” Jericho shook his head at some memory beyond words. “They reversed the process, I heard. Even worse, they had to take the other arm, too. It had spread throughout his body.”

Jericho fell quiet. Outside, someone was trying to start a car in the cold. The motor protested with a shudder.

“He hung himself with his belt in the showers.”

“Oh, god,” Evie said. “How horrible.”

Jericho nodded mechanically. “They couldn’t figure out how he’d done it, with no legs and no arms.”

The car’s motor caught, and they listened to the comfort of its banal purr as it shook, idled, then spurred into action and drove away. Jericho’s voice grew even softer, until it was almost a whisper.

“It was late; I’d been sleeping. I woke up to the sound of him crying. The ward was dark, with only the light from the nurses’ station bleeding in. ‘Kid,’ he said to me, and his voice… his voice was like a ghost. Like that part of him had already died and had come back for the rest. ‘Kid, this is worse than Topeka.’ He told me that once, in the war, he’d come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn’t speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier’s head. He didn’t do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another. ‘One soldier helping another.’ That’s how he put it.” Again, Jericho fell quiet for a moment. “He told me what he needed me to do. Told me I didn’t have to. Told me that if I did, he’d make sure God would forgive me, if that’s what I was worried about. One soldier helping another.”

Jericho fell quiet. Evie held so still she thought she might break.

“I found his belt in the dresser and helped him into the wheelchair. The hall was quiet on the way to the shower. I remember how clean the floor was, like a mirror. I had to make a new hole in the leather to tighten it around his neck. Even without his arms and legs, he was heavy. But I was strong. Just before, he looked at me, and I’ll never forget his face as long as I live—like he’d just realized some great secret, but it was too late to do anything about it. ‘Some craps game, this life, kid. Don’t let ’em take you without a fight,’ he said.”

Silence. A dog barking in the distance. A puff of wind against the glass, wanting to be let in.

“After, I took the wheelchair back and parked it in the same spot. Then I slipped under the covers and pretended to sleep until it was morning and they found him. Then I did sleep. For twelve hours straight.”

Evie’s throat was dry, but she didn’t want to reach for her water. She swallowed to soothe her aching throat, trying to make as little sound as possible, and after a moment Jericho continued.

“I don’t know if that story about the German soldier was real or something he made up to get me to help him. It doesn’t matter. Neither does God’s forgiveness. After Sergeant Leonard’s death, they shut down the Daedalus program. It was too much of a risk. The doctors and scientists wanted to shut me down, too. They were afraid of what might happen with me. They would’ve put me right back in that iron coffin to rot, but your uncle stepped in. He said he’d take me home to die with dignity. Then he loaded up a kit with serum. As far as they’re concerned, Jericho Jones died ten years ago. If Will hadn’t taken me in, I’d be there now, staring at that same ceiling, with no soldier to help me out.”

Evie sat up. “But you were cured. You could be the key to some astonishing advance.”

“Cured?” Jericho scoffed. “I live every day knowing something could go wrong, and I’ll be back in that iron coffin. I’m the only one of my kind. Half man, half machine. A freak.”

“You’re not a freak.”

“I don’t even know what I am,” Jericho said. He glanced at Evie. “You’re different, too.”

“So it seems.”

“Two of a kind.” Jericho reached out and took Evie’s hands. He turned her hands palm up and rubbed his thumbs over the insides of her wrists. The softness of her skin was a miracle. Jericho didn’t know if he would function like a normal man. He only knew that he had all the feelings of one. He wanted Evie. He wanted her desperately. With his hands on hers, he imagined what it would be like to kiss her, to make love to her. She was a little spoiled and often selfish, a good-time girl with a surprising kind streak. She ran toward life full tilt while Jericho held back, not daring. She made him feel alive, and he wanted more of it.

A loud bang at the door made Evie jump. She was afraid it was the innkeeper come to throw them out, but it was Will who stood outside the door, his hat on and his pocket watch open. The sky was already graying toward daybreak.

“Ah, good. You’re up. Almost dawn. Time to go, before the Brethren come looking for us.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 761