Apocalypse

51

Lopez twisted the throttle of the battered old scooter as she zipped between two carts of junk hauled by haggard-looking mules, along a dusty, winding track that led toward the Septentrional mountain range in the north of the province. The summit of Pico Isabel de Torres loomed nearly eight hundred meters above them, lost in wreaths and ribbons of cloud.

She and Bryson had landed half an hour previously at Gregorio Luperón International Airport, hiring a pair of scooters and racing away from the coast toward the interior. A brief stop at an IRIS-sponsored medical camp had gained them directions to a village in the interior where Katherine Abell had last been seen.

‘It must be out this way somewhere!’ Lopez shouted over her shoulder.

Bryson weaved between the two carts behind her before drawing his scooter alongside, a dressing around the bullet graze on his forearm flapping in the wind. His piratical eye twinkled in the flickering sunlight that beamed in shafts through the canopy of palms and towering ferns.

‘If she’s as much of a goddamned philanthropist as you say she is, we’ll find her in the poorest village around. People like her like to suffer for their work. They’re not happy unless their clothes are rotting and they’re eating cold gravel for breakfast. Look at Mother Theresa!’

‘She’s dead, Scott,’ Lopez pointed out.

‘That’s what I mean.’

The track climbed away from the long, flat beaches of the coast, the forests ahead cloaked in ethereal veils of humid cloud. The engine in Lopez’s scooter clattered noisily up the hillside, a faint haze of blue smoke trailing in her wake, and she silently prayed that the ancient motor wouldn’t give out before she reached the villages perched precariously amidst the prehistoric-looking wilderness.

‘There!’

Bryson pointed ahead to where a few rickety shacks peered from the tropical gloom. The clouds were directly overhead now, the air laden with moisture that clung to Lopez’s skin like a hot, heavy blanket. The last six months of the year in Puerto Plata were wetter than the first, the seasonal rains regular enough to prevent any real respite from the intense humidity. Lopez slowed her scooter as it rattled into the center of the village, hordes of young children in brightly colored clothes flocking out to greet her with bright smiles that belied just how little they possessed.

Lopez killed the engine on her scooter just as Bryson rolled up alongside and did the same. As they stood amidst the children grabbing at them for attention, Katherine Abell stepped out of one of the shacks that formed a circle around the edge of the village.

Lopez recognized her immediately: the square line of her jaw, the cool green eyes and the long auburn hair; but everything else had changed. Gone was the power suit and the elegant stride. Instead, she wore khaki shorts and a loosely buttoned shirt with simple sandals, and her long hair was tied up in a loose ponytail. Her clean features were scoured of make-up.

Katherine turned away the moment she saw Lopez. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

Lopez strode forward. ‘We need your help.’

Katherine moved back into the shack without another word.

‘She could be sitting on her husband’s luxury yacht,’ Bryson said as he followed Lopez, ‘sipping a cocktail while servants manicure her nails…’

‘It’s called charity,’ Lopez replied. ‘Good will and all that?’

Bryson shrugged as he followed Lopez into the darkness of the shack.

The air within smelt of herbs, dried fruits and ancient soil, a haze of incense smoke struggling to conceal all other odors. Laying on a bed in the center of the shack was a girl whose age Lopez guessed at fourteen, maybe fifteen. Her belly was distended as though filled with gas, the deeply tanned skin laced with veins.

Katherine Abell knelt alongside the girl and gently drenched her forehead with cool water from a chipped porcelain bowl. Lopez eased closer and saw that the girl’s breathing was erratic, her eyes rolled up in their sockets.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Lopez asked. ‘Malnutrition?’

Katherine Abell did not look around as she replied.

‘She’s pregnant, but the baby is breach and I can’t turn it.’ Katherine scooped up some more water and spilled it across the girl’s glistening skin. ‘She’s dying.’

Lopez winced and looked again at the girl’s face.

‘She looks too young.’

‘She was raped,’ Katherine replied without emotion, as though such a tragedy were all too common, a daily occurrence.

A thick loathing stuck in Lopez’s throat as though a ghost had just joined her in the room, and her voice fell to a whisper. ‘Why didn’t she have a termination?’

Katherine Abell peered around at Lopez as though she were crazy.

‘Because the government here outlaws abortions in all cases,’ she shot back, ‘including those resulting from incest and rape, even those that endanger the mother’s life. They’re bullied into it by Catholic dogma, made to live as though they’re in the Dark Ages, so poor young girls like Isabella here are forced to carry the child or die trying. And all because of people who call themselves pro-life.’

Lopez stared at the wall of the hut, her eyes glazed.

‘You okay?’ Bryson moved to her side, one big hand resting on her shoulder as his normally arrogant features folded into something that might have been concern. ‘You look like somebody’s walked over your grave.’

‘I’m fine,’ Lopez uttered.

Bryson’s eye peered at her. ‘You and I both know that’s women’s code for “something’s wrong”.’

Lopez ignored him as she looked down at the pregnant girl.

At the age of fourteen, Nicola Lopez had become pregnant to a 16-year-old farm boy from Coroneo, the tiny municipality in which they lived, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, deep within the Vedeer Mountains. Lopez had always been a child willing to take chances, to run where other children would not, to disobey and to confront. Armed with a ferocious temper, high intelligence and a mischievous sense of humor, she had inevitably sought the company of older friends. What she could not have understood was the difference between their motives and her own.

In a tiny, musty-smelling stall on a ramshackle farm, Javier Ruben, a tall and strikingly handsome boy who had taken an interest in her, overpowered her while they were fooling around and hurt her in a way that she could neither comprehend or resolve. While she had not exactly fought her amorous companion off, nor had she realized the consequences of his actions. She had been unable to sleep for days, had wandered Coroneo in a state of shock, and had frequently found herself crying unexpectedly.

And then her menstruación had abruptly ended, along with her childhood. In an instant, the sleepy cobbled streets, soaring mountains and quaint churches of her homeland had become the features of an implacable, ferocious enemy.

At the time, Guanajuato, a conservative state whose leaders were held in grim and bigoted thrall to Catholic dogma, had denied every petition by a pregnant rape victim for abortion services, and over a hundred of its residents had been arrested for seeking or providing illegal abortion. Worse, more than a dozen women had been sentenced to up to thirty years in prison for the same ‘crime’. Faced with prison if her pregnancy was terminated, Lopez had no choice but to throw herself upon the mercy of her family. None had abandoned her. Her terrible secret remained exactly that, until four months later she suffered a natural miscarriage and lost the child.

Lopez knew what pro-life meant, and it was sure as hell nothing to do with compassion.

‘Really,’ Lopez said, leveling Bryson with a steady gaze. ‘I’m fine.’ She turned to Katherine. ‘We have to leave right now.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I have work to do.’

Scott Bryson’s voice cut in from behind Lopez.

‘You don’t move right now, you won’t have anywhere to do your work.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘This area is about to be hit by an earthquake,’ Lopez said.

Katherine’s eyes narrowed. ‘How can you know that?’

‘Because your husband has built a device that can cause earthquakes,’ Lopez said. ‘If we don’t leave in the next few minutes we might not be leaving at all. Do you understand?’

Katherine shook her head slowly.

‘No, he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t — he knows that I’m here.’

‘We wouldn’t have come all of this way if we weren’t pretty damned sure,’ Lopez cut across her. ‘We have to move, now!’

Katherine stared down at the girl.

‘But Isabella…’

‘We’ll take her with us,’ Lopez said.

‘She can’t travel, and I can’t leave her here alone.’

Lopez was about to answer, when Bryson suddenly shouldered his way past and knelt down alongside Isabella’s prostrate form. Lopez watched as Bryson ignored Katherine’s protests, his thick and calloused hands gently probing Isabella’s belly as he looked up at the ceiling, seeing with his hands.

‘She’s got plenty of amniotic fluid,’ Bryson said, still looking up at the ceiling as he felt around. ‘Baby feels fine. Do you have any anesthetics?’

Katherine blinked away her confusion.

‘She’s on painkillers right now, but they’re making her pretty drowsy. I don’t want to think what they might be doing to her baby.’

‘It might help,’ Bryson said. ‘I’m going to try external cephalic version.’

Lopez stared at Bryson. ‘The hell you think you are now, Dr. Kildare?’

Bryson grinned and winked at her. ‘Watch and learn, honey.’

Bryson turned back to Isabella and leaned in, gently massaging her belly. Lopez realized that Bryson was skillfully pushing the baby back up from the girl’s pelvis, then easing its head around from the top of the womb to the bottom.

Bryson ministered to the girl for several minutes, gently working his way around her body as Katherine watched, just as enthralled as Lopez. Finally, he leaned back and looked down at Isabella. The girl was no longer writhing, and some of the sweat on her skin had disappeared. Lopez realized that the girl’s fluttering breath was now more even and regular.

Katherine Abell stared at Bryson. ‘Thank you.’

Lopez watched wide-eyed as Bryson stood. He glanced down at her. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Lopez uttered. ‘I’m just amazed, is all.’

‘You think they only taught us to kill in the SEALs?’ he guessed. ‘Hearts and minds, honey. We were also trained to help locals in foreign countries, to win their support and friendship.’

Lopez looked at her watch. ‘Shit, we gotta go, right now.’

Katherine Abell stood up.

‘I don’t see why I should go anywhere. This is where I’m needed.’

‘No,’ Lopez shot back, ‘where you’re needed is back in court, because only one person on earth knows Joaquin Abell’s mind, and that person is you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re going to end up in court whether you like it or not,’ Lopez snapped. ‘You can either be in the witness stand or you can be in the dock. Your call.’

‘I won’t turn against my own husband!’

‘Then why are you out here?’ Lopez challenged. ‘As far away from him as you can get?’

Katherine’s lawyerly cool seemed to have deserted her as she flustered.

‘IRIS is still a force for the good. Prosecuting it through the courts will do more harm than good to its charitable causes.’

‘There are no charitable causes!’ Lopez insisted. ‘IRIS is a fraud, Katherine, and Joaquin is a megalomaniac bent on creating disasters in order to generate debt in entire countries. He knows that you’re here. Don’t you see? He’s trying to silence you too!’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Katherine gasped. ‘I won’t believe it.’

‘Is that a gamble you want to take?’ Bryson asked her. ‘Where are your kids?’

‘They’re at school in Miami, far from here,’ Katherine said. ‘This is ridiculous. Even if Joaquin were to target me, he would never harm our children!’

Lopez was about to argue further when a deep, shuddering noise rumbled across the mountains as though some careless god were dragging their heels across the earth. In an instant the walls of the shack began swaying. Lopez reached out to steady herself.

‘It’s starting!’ she shouted. ‘Get out, now!’