Halfway to the big house, Hannah a boulder in his arms and the sun beating down on his head, Cord began to cry.
He couldn’t brush away the tears. He let them run, along with his nose, finally stumbling clear of the mesquite when he returned to the creek. He lay Hannah down for a minute on the rough grass. He had to; his arms ached. Then, as he straightened, swiping at the snot on his face, something happened.
A picture. In his mind. Clear as if he’d seen it out a window, accepted as matter-of-facfly as the day’s work schedule. There could be no doubt, no mistake. The picture in his mind was a message.
The pribir were coming.
CHAPTER 24
Frank, Loni’s brother, stood outside the birthing house with Keith, the father of Loni’s babies. Jason, the father of Angie’s children, was out on the range. Frank and Keith looked at Cord, and he saw from their faces that they’d received the image, too.
Frank said simply, “The pribir are coming.”
Cord nodded. What he had to say next tore at him. Frank was Hannah’s son. Cord had left Hannah’s body, still wrapped in his jacket, on the bench under the cottonwood grove. Frank and Keith didn’t even notice that Cord was without his jacket, or that he had blood on his light undershirt. They were too bemused.
A baby’s cry shrilled into the air.
Keith jumped as if he’d been shot. Against orders, he flung open the door of the birthing house. “Loni!”
“She good, she fine, go away,” Carolina yelled, and shut the door again. Another baby cried, or the same baby again.
Cord looked at Frank, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say, Your mother died of a bioweapon and buzzards have been at her and somebody has to go bring her body up from the creek before other scavengers find it. He couldn’t do it.
Emily was the doctor. Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne were in charge of the farm. This was their job. All Cord had to do was tell Dr. Wilkins and Emily and the whole burden would be shifted to them, who would at least know what to do. They would know how to find out what micro had killed Hannah, what to do with the body, how to tell Hannah’s children and Mike. This was their job, babies or no babies. And the pribir was coming—he had to tell them that, too!
Cord pushed open the door and did not let Carolina close it until he was inside.
The room smelled of blood and sweat. It was infernally hot, the windows shut tight against infection. At a far bed Sajelle bent over Angie, who was panting like a coyote in August desert. Emily waited at Angie’s feet. At a table Dr. Wilkins stood over a newborn baby, collecting stem cells from its umbilical cord. Carolina put something in a basket, and Sajelle fussed over more baskets. Thin high wails pierced the fetid air. In a bed closer to the door Loni lay, evidently finished. Her hair stuck to her scalp in sweaty coils. A bloody sheet had been thrown over her, and her eyes were closed.
A gust of air blew in with Cord, hot dry high-plains air but not as hot as this terrible room. Instantly Loni opened her eyes. Feebly she tried to raise her head, let it drop back to the bed, sniffed the air. She looked straight at Cord.
“The pribir are coming,” she said.
Six beautiful infants. Two boys and four girls, born with minimal labor of mothers who immediately fell into deep, healing sleep. Two sets of perfect triplets, and the adults hardly mentioned the children. The pribir were coming.
They had all smelled it, Cord’s generation and their parents and even the white-haired Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin. “It’s like the first time,” DeWayne said quietly, holding Sajelle’s hand.
Emily held one of the new babies against her shoulder, patting the baby’s back. “Only we didn’t know if you young ones would smell it, too.”
“‘Young ones,’” spat Aunt Robin. “You’re what, twenty-nine yourself, Emily? Why shouldn’t the ‘young ones’ be able to smell the pribir? They’re the ones that got everything, all the fancy genemods to survive.”
Nobody answered her. Instead they looked at each other, glanced away, were drawn back to stare again into each other’s eyes. The pribir were coming. They were really coming.
“I wish they’d just stay away,” Alex said in a low voice, and there it was, out in the open, filling up all the space in the great room. The older generations thought the pribir would bring only more trouble. “Controlling our minds, slicing into our bodies… they better not try that shit again,” Alex added, still in that quiet, menacing tone. Sam and Bonnie and Sajelle nodded. Emily looked fearfully into the infant’s face.
Everyone of Cord’s generation, except the perverse Ashley, was filled with eagerness and hope.
They knew better than to say so. Not even Taneesha or Bobby, usually so scrappy, did anything but let their eyes meet, wide and wondering. All rejoicing had to be silent. Hannah had been hastily buried under the cedars beside Grandmother Theresa. Dr. Wilkins, gray-faced, had done a quick blood analysis and identified the engineered virus that killed her. Hannah’s sons and Mike were absent from this meeting, grieving privately, remembering years no one else had shared. Lillie, worse again and given a sedative by Emily, slept heavily in a back room.
“So what are we going to do about the bastards?” Sam said.
Uncle DeWayne said, “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can do anything. You should know that even better than I. You were aboard their ship.”
“I won’t let them use us again! Not us, not the kids, not these new babies! Not any humans!”
Sajelle said sharply, “How you going to stop them, Sam? You got a plan, hmmm? You going to just develop ways to block out those smells that control our minds?”
“I can at least wear a filter!”
‘Yes,” Emily said thoughtfully. “And perhaps stay outside. Their most concentrated effects were in the ship, a closed system. Out here the winds will dilute the olfactory molecules.”
“Oh, yeah, like they did fifteen years ago at Andrews,” Bonnie said sarcastically. “The pribir had no trouble getting their message through then, and they can do it now.”
“Still,” Emily said, “filter masks might help.”
Sam said, “The only thing that’s going to help is to kill them the second they step off their shuttle.”
Kella gasped. And Cord, unable to contain himself any longer, burst out, “Don’t you touch them!”
Deep silence fell over the room.
Cord looked at the faces. Keith, his brother, nodding slightly. Kella, with Lillie’s gold-flecked gray eyes, creasing her forehead in anxiety. The bitter downturning curves of Aunt Robin’s mouth. Rafe, his face clouded, remembering some past event unimaginable to Cord. Jody, who neither had known the pribir nor was their product, warily waiting. Emily, her pale skin mottled with suppressed emotion. And Dr. Wilkins, tired, his neck marred by the start of still another purplish skin cancer that he hadn’t yet had time to inject.
Spring, their eternal peacemaker, had the last word. “Maybe the aliens won’t come down, after all.” But no one believed him.
One day, two days, and the pribir didn’t come down. Cord could no longer smell their image. Felicity gave birth to triplets, all girls. An easy birth, said Carolina, smiling hugely. Not even the threat of aliens could overcome her delight in babies. “Primita,” she crooned over one of the small wailing bundles. Little cousin.