Nocturnal

The RapScan Machine

Pookie, wake up.”

Robin pushed at Pookie’s shoulder. He was on her couch and might as well have been dead for all he moved. She poked him again. “Come on, sleepyhead. Rise and shine.”

“Five more minutes, Mom,” he said. “I promise all my chores are done.”

“You told me to wake you when the tests were almost finished.”

That got his attention. Pookie pushed himself to a sitting position. He rubbed his face. “That coffee I smell?”

“Of course,” Robin said. “Go to the table, I’ll get you a cup.”

For the second night — or morning, depending on how you looked at it — her apartment had become their war room. Bryan was already sitting at the dining-room table, his hands around a mug, his eyes staring off into space. John’s chair was empty; he was at the hospital.

Robin had turned her dining room into an impromptu sample prep area. The RapScan machine sat in the center of the table, processing the two samples Bryan and Pookie had brought a few hours earlier. She’d loaded the cartridges and set the karyotype test to running. Any moment now, and it would finish.

She walked to the kitchen and came back with the coffee carafe and a mug for Pookie. She filled his mug and refilled Bryan’s. Both men looked absolutely exhausted. Pookie had given her the sample materials, then headed straight for her couch. Bryan hadn’t said a word since he’d arrived; he just sat in his chair, first drinking a beer, then a scotch, then moving on to caffeine. Robin thought it best just to leave him be, let him work through whatever it was that was on his mind. If he wanted her help, he could ask for it — she was done trying.

“Sounds like you boys had quite the adventure,” Robin said. “I’m just glad no one got hurt. Other than Erickson, I mean.”

Pookie nodded and took a sip of coffee. “Yes, no one got hurt. Permanently, anyway. How much longer until that test is done?”

She looked at the machine’s touch screen. “About five minutes, maybe less. Are you guys going to tell me who the second sample is from?” She knew the first sample was from Erickson, but they had avoided her questions about the second.

“A perp from Erickson’s house,” Pookie said. “We didn’t catch him.”

Once again, there was clearly more to the story than Pookie wanted to let on. Not surprising that he did the talking — he was a far better liar than Bryan.

Bryan’s head came up. He blinked rapidly, as if he’d been cat-napping and was just becoming aware of his surroundings. “The ear,” he said.

“What?”

Pookie nodded. “I forgot about that.”

“Me too,” Bryan said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a plastic evidence bag and held it up for Robin to see.

“Bryan,” she said, “why do you have a human ear in a baggie?”

“It’s from a stuffed person we found in Erickson’s basement. Can you run DNA on it?”

She reached out and took the bag, looked at the contents. The skin looked dry and brittle, almost like leather. “When you say stuffed, you mean like a big-game animal? Stuffed for display?”

“Yeah. Can you test it for the Zed chromosome?”

“Not here,” she said. “The tanning process destroys most of the cellular DNA. I’d need a biology lab, something with the equipment needed to try and extract any remaining DNA and a PCR machine to amplify it. A university lab would work. Maybe SFSU, or I could try the hospitals. But that’s going to take a few days, and I wouldn’t hold your breath that it’ll work.”

Bryan just looked at her. His eyes burned with both anger and anguish. He was a cauldron of emotions, so much so that Robin couldn’t really remember the old Bryan, the one with the cold, unfeeling stare.

The machine beeped. Robin looked at the little screen.

ERICKSON SAMPLE COMPLETE.

She pressed the icon and read the results.

“Zed-X,” she said. “Wow, Erickson is a Zed.”

Bryan and Pookie didn’t look surprised in the least.

“Related?” Bryan said. “Is Erickson related to the others?”

Robin tapped the touch screen, scrolling through to the familial indicators. There it was — a match.

“Bingo,” she said. “Jebediah Erickson, Rex Deprovdechuk, Blackbeard and Oscar Woody’s killer all have the same mother.”

Bryan seemed to shrink into himself. He leaned back in his chair. His chin dropped to his chest.

Pookie shook his head. “Wait a minute. We think Marie’s Children are these Zeds. If so, Erickson isn’t just killing his own kind, he’s killing his direct family? What is that all about?”

Robin shrugged. “If Erickson is in custody, can’t you ask him?”

“Might not be talkative,” Pookie said. “You know, considering he’s in the ICU after taking a knife to the belly.”

Bryan looked up. “He’s a Zed. He’ll heal fast. We can go to the hospital and question Erickson directly — we just have to get around Zou.”

Pookie thought this over, then sipped at his mug. “Robin, you’re a doctor — can you find out Erickson’s condition without anyone knowing that we’re asking?”

She hadn’t been part of the hospital system for years, but many of her friends still worked there. “I probably can’t get detailed patient info, but I can find someone to tell me if he’s out of the ICU.”

The RapScan beeped.

SAMPLE TWO COMPLETE.

“Here we go,” she said. She clicked the icon and the results flashed up. She saw the marker for an X, then a Zed … and also a Y. “This one is trisomal. It’s X-Y-Zed, just like Rex. In fact” — she thumbed through the screens, looking for the familial indicator — “yes, once again, the same mother. All these guys are one big, happy family.”

Pookie’s eyes widened.

Bryan’s eyes burned with intensity, maybe even rage. “The same mother? You’re absolutely sure?”

Robin nodded.

He stood and held out his right hand to Pookie, palm-up. “Keys,” he said.

Pookie looked worried. “Going somewhere, Bri-Bri?”

“Keys.”

“Maybe I should drive you,” Pookie said. “We could—”

“Give me the fucking keys!”

Pookie leaned away. Robin held her breath. She’d never heard Bryan raise his voice before, not ever, not even during their worst fights.

Pookie dug his hand into his pocket and handed Bryan his car keys. Bryan took them and walked out of the dining room. Emma followed, tail wagging. The apartment door opened and shut. Emma came wandering slowly back into the dining room, looking for someone else to pay attention to her.

Why had Bryan stormed out like that?

“Pookie, what the hell just happened?”

Pookie leaned forward, rested his head in his hands. “I think Bryan needs to go see his dad. Fuck this. I’m going back to sleep.”

He stood up and and pulled out his phone. He walked into the living room, his fingers texting out a message as he went. Without breaking stride, he finished the text, put the phone back in his pocket, then collapsed onto the couch, his back facing out into the living room. Emma shot in like a black-and-white streak, jumped up after him and settled into the crook of his legs.

Robin stared at Pookie. He was wiped out. Something big was happening between him and Bryan, and she didn’t know what it was.

Why wouldn’t they trust her?

She wasn’t tired, not at all. She found her phone and started scrolling through her contacts, looking for people that still worked at SFGH.