Fledgling(63)

The doctor was one of Hayden’s symbionts. She was an internist named Carmen Tanaka, and she was assisted not only by the two nurses, a man and a woman, but by three other symbionts. She was busy but not too busy to lecture me.

“You stay out of the sun,” she said. “You’re blistering.”

“I came to see whether I could be of use,” I told her. “I don’t know whether there is anything I can do to help heal symbionts not my own, but I want to help if I can.”

Carmen looked up from the leg wound that she was cleaning. The bullet had apparently gone straight through the man’s calf. “If any of them were in danger or likely to be in danger before their Ina awake, I’d ask for your help,” she said. “But as things are, you’d just cause them unnecessary pain and create problems between them and their Ina.”

I nodded. “Let me know if anything changes,” I said. “I’m going to do what I can for the raiders who survived. We’re going to want to talk to them later.”

“Is this one?” she looked at my companion.

“Yes.”

She looked at the bite wound on the man’s neck and nodded. “If you bite the others, you’ll help them avoid infection and they’ll heal faster and be more manageable.”

I nodded and went out to tend to the raiders. Once I finished with them, I took my raider back to the guest house, gave him a cold bottle of beer from the stock we’d found in the pantry, and sat down with him at the kitchen table.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Victor Colon.”

“All right, Victor. Tell me why you attacked this place.”

He frowned. “We had to.”

“Tell me why you had to.”

He frowned, looking confused. It was a kind of confusion that worried me since it seemed to me that it could mean only one thing.

Celia and Brook came into the kitchen, saw us, and stopped.

“Come in,” I said. “Did you come to get food?”

“We missed lunch,” Brook said. “We probably shouldn’t be hungry after all this, but we are.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Eat something. Fix some for Victor here, too. And sit and talk with us.”

They didn’t understand, but they obeyed. They cooked hamburger sandwiches for themselves and one for Victor Colon. They had found loaves of multigrain bread, hamburger meat, and bags of French fries in the freezer, and had put the meat and bread in the lower part of the refrigerator to thaw. Now, they fried the meat and the potatoes in castiron pans on the stove. There was salt and pepper, mustard and catsup, and a pickle relish in the cupboard but, of course, no fresh vegetables. At some point we were going to have to find a supermarket.

Once they all had food and bottles of beer from the refrigerator, and I had a glass of water, the confused man seemed more at ease. As he ate, he watched Celia and Brook with interest. He was seeing them, I thought, simply as attractive women. He stared at Celia’s breasts, at Brook’s legs. They knew what he was doing, of course. It seemed to amuse them. After a few glances at me, they relaxed and behaved as though Victor were one of us or, at least, as though he belonged at our table.

Celia asked, “Where do you come from?”

Victor answered easily, “L.A. I still live there.”

Brook nodded. “I went down to Los Angeles a few years ago to visit my aunt—my mother’s sister. It’s too hot there.”

“Yeah, it’s hot,” Victor said. “But I wish I were there now. This thing didn’t go down the way it was supposed to.”

“If it had, we’d be dead,” Celia said. “What the hell did we ever do to you? Why do you want to kill us?” Oddly, at that moment she handed him another bottle of beer. He’d already finished two.

Victor frowned. “We had to,” he said. He shook his head, reverting to that blank confusion that so worried me.

“Oh my God,” Brook said. She looked at me, and I knew she had seen what I had seen.

Celia said, “What? What?”

“Victor,” Brook said, “who told you and your friends to kill us?”

“Nobody,” he responded, and he began to get angry. “We’re not kids! Nobody tells us what to do.” He drank several swallows of his beer.

“You know what you want to do?” Brook said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Do you want to kill us?”

He thought about that for several seconds. “I don’t know. No. No, I’m okay here with you pretty ladies.”

I decided he was getting too relaxed. “Victor,” I began, “do you know me? Who am I?”

He surprised me. “Dirty little nigger bitch,” he said reflexively. “Goddamn mongrel cub.” Then he gasped and clutched his head between his hands. After a moment, he put his head down on the table and groaned.

It was clear that he was in pain. His face had suddenly gone a deep red.

“Didn’t mean to say that,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to call you that.” He looked at me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it.”

“They call me those things, don’t they?”

He nodded.

“Because I’m dark-skinned?”

“And human,” he said. “Ina mixed with some human or maybe human mixed with a little Ina. That’s not supposed to happen. Not ever. Couldn’t let you and you … your kind … your family … breed.”