Miracle - Chapter 5: Chapter 5

As I pedaled my bike as fast as I could, ducking to avoid the empty soda cans being pelted at my back, I was regretting leaving Maddy behind this morning.
I usually went to the library by myself. It wasn't really Maddy's scene, and I kind of enjoyed the scenic, quiet bike ride in solitude on the way there. I'd made this trip a hundred times without a problem.
But today, I'd ridden past Adam Thatcher and Isaac Melton, two guys from my grade in school. I hadn't thought they had a problem with me. Or at least, they seemed ambivalent last school year. So when I coasted by, I made the mistake of raising a hand in greeting.
Apparently unacceptable, by the way they'd stopped teasing the dog they were walking and instead unleashed him on me. And while I could definitely outpedal the two of them so long as they were on foot, that dog was another matter. I finally got far enough ahead that the boys couldn't hit me with the stuff they were throwing, but the dog, some kind of Rottweiler-shepherd mix, was keeping up. They were urging him on with cries of, "Sic 'im, boy!" and "Tear his legs off!" And the critter seemed eager to please. His snarls behind me were terrifying.
I was running out of steam. My leg muscles hurt and were going to start cramping soon. My lungs burned and I could barely see through the bitter Texas dust in my eyes. But the sound of the animal behind me kept my feet pumping in desperation.
About a block from the library, I skidded around a turn too fast and my bike slid sideways out from under me. I hit the sidewalk and fire swept up my hip, elbow and the side of my hand. I barely managed to throw my arm up in front of my face as the dog, slobbering and barking, charged me.
I was expecting teeth to tear into my forearm, but instead the watch on my wrist vibrated. Suddenly the dog's growls turned into a questioning whine, and he stopped in front of me.
Now that he wasn't trying to kill me, I could see how beautiful he was. Elegant long face and lean muscled shoulders, a black coat with tan eyebrows, muzzle and underbelly, and a floofy tail that was wagging cautiously. He ducked his head, tucked his ears back and took a hesitant lick at my watch, as if apologizing.
I lowered my arm in wonder. After a second, I reached out and patted his head, because he was giving me such guilty looks that I felt bad for him. And that's when I noticed it—a nearly inaudible, ultra high pitched sound coming from my wrist. I turned the watch toward me and stared at it. Only the heartbeat icon and the concentric circles were displaying. The heart was gradually flashing slower, and all the rings were green except for the one on the outside that was yellow. I guess that meant my injuries from yesterday were healing, though my abdomen still ached when I moved.
Had Ezra known I was in trouble? Did he just save me?
I hadn't hit the S.O.S. Honestly it hadn't occurred to me, I was too busy panicking about being chased. I looked all around, but didn't see Ezra's hulking silhouette behind any of the trees or cars nearby.
He'd said the watch was connected to his phone. That he'd know if I was in danger. So maybe he had saved me. Though how he'd known to turn on that dog whistle thing was a mystery.
Unless he could hear me? Maybe the watch had a microphone. A camera, even. That probably should have been a sinister thought, that he could be spying on me at any moment, but I actually found it... comforting. I scruffed the dog's soft ears, and turned my wrist so that I could see the watch face.
"Thanks," I whispered.
Adam and Isaac came running around the corner, whooping, with the dog's chain dangling from Isaac's fist. When they saw the dog standing over me, they started shouting.
"What're you doing, stupid mutt? Get 'im!"
"Useless critter, we're gonna beat the shit outta you!"
The dog swung his head around and bared his teeth. The boys had just enough time to register the gathering of his back and leg muscles. Their eyes went wide and they turned to run. He sprang after them, with more snarls and infuriated barks. I watched them all disappear around the end of the block, but heard the boys yelling and cursing and the dog's triumphant snarls.
If the dog had any sense, he'd scare them off only enough to make a run for it. If they caught him, it wasn't going to turn out so well for him. And it was pretty obvious that he wasn't the bad guy.
I peeled myself off the sidewalk. My left elbow and the side of my hand had been skinned raw. My left hip had some bleeding spots too. But my bike was okay. The frame wasn't bent and the wheels and tires were all right, which meant I could get home on my own. I got back on and rode, much slower, the rest of the way to the library.
Inside, Ellen Pemberton came fluttering at me like a worried mother hen. "Oh my goodness, Connor, what happened to you?"
"Fell off my bike," I said, and she clucked her tongue.
"Wait here, I'll get you fixed up."
As she wiped and disinfected my scrapes, then taped gauze over them with supplies from a first aid kit, I kept a wary eye on her. She was a pretty lady for her age, full figured, with graying brown hair pulled into a bun and a hint of tattoo peeking from the sleeve of her blue, fifties-style sailor dress. She wore bright red lipstick and a pair of cat-eye glasses, which gave her the look of an aging rockabilly secretary. Thankfully, she wasn't giving me any disgusted glances, or acting troubled by me. I guess her husband hadn't told her about yesterday's encounter. That was a relief, because I really didn't want anything to change between us. She was one of the kindest, most fun people in this godforsaken town.
Once she finished patching me up, I asked to use the computers. She gave me the day's login code, so I went over to the wall of computer stations and got to work.
A Google search of Elioud Biogenesis didn't turn up any more than what I'd found on my phone yesterday. I got into the library's catalog, but there were no books on it either.
However, when I tried searching for the word Elioud by itself, I found a Wikipedia article and learned that the Elioud were a mythic race of evil beings from Biblical times. They were mentioned in a couple of Jewish manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, so they had this ancient historical fantasy thing going on that was right up my alley.
For a while I got lost down a rabbit hole of fascinating, if completely irrelevant, research. The Elioud were said to be children of the Nephilim, a race of giants who had been created when the angels of Heaven decided to procreate with human women. All the angel-human hybrids were apparently assholes who went to war against each other, massacred humans, birthed monsters, spread forbidden magicks like astrology and blacksmithing, and basically turned the whole earth into a shithole. Eventually God got sick of their crap and sent a flood to wipe them out.
I knew the Great Flood, of course, because the Noah's ark story was a cornerstone of every good Southern Sunday school. Nobody ever talked about Nephilim or Elioud though, because the books that mentioned them weren't considered the real word of God. Some stuff they said contradicted other books of the Bible, so somebody somewhere had decided that made them fiction.
After about an hour, I forced myself back to the problem at hand. I still needed to find something that would help me figure out what my mother was up to, who she'd been getting money from all these years, and who she could be handing Maddy and me over to.
Biogenesis also had its own Wikipedia article, and a dictionary definition. It was the scientific premise that all life had to come from pre-existing life. There was a ton of arguing about it, particularly between religious groups who held that biogenesis was evidence a supernatural being had created the universe, and naturalist scientists who believed life evolved from nonliving matter.
Equally interesting, but none of it explained what Elioud Biogenesis was, or whether it had anything to do with Maddy and me.
After clicking through a dozen websites, scrolling through long lists of library books containing the separate terms—but getting zero results when I searched for them together—I was pretty convinced I was wasting my time. It was starting to look like I was going to have to get ahold of Mom's phone again if I wanted to find anything else.
In irritation, I typed the words into the library catalog one more time, put quotation marks around them, switched the search parameters to "all," and hit enter.
2 Results.
I sat up straight in my chair and scrolled. Both references were something I'd never seen before, a series of dates and numbers that didn't look anything like the shelf designations I was used to. I called Ellen over, pointing at the screen.
"Do you know what these are, Mrs. Pemberton? Are they books? Where can I find them?"
She leaned over my shoulder, and smiled in delight. "Those are microfilm," she said, patting my shoulder. "Golly, I haven't had a request for one of those in forever! Do you want me to look these up for you, Connor?"
"Yes, please."
"All right, come with me. Ooh, it's been ages since I've played with the microfilm machine! This is going to be fun."
Microfilm, it turns out, was a way of preserving old documents before digital scanning had been invented. It was basically a long reel of photographic film that got set up into a big machine that looked like an ancient computer. Ellen showed me how to work all the buttons and dials, how to mount the film over the viewing plate and slide it under the microscope so that the image displayed on the monitor.
Then she brought me the two reels that my search results had referenced. They were from old local newspapers, the Amarillo Sentinel and Dumas News.
"Both of these periodicals went out of print in the 80's," she told me as she handed me the boxes and checked the printout of my search results. "On this one, you're looking for the December fifth, nineteen seventy-nine edition. And this one needs September twenty-third, nineteen eighty-four. Happy hunting!"
Hunting, indeed. It took me twenty minutes of scanning through the first reel before I found the December fifth paper. And then I skimmed through all twenty-seven pages, looking for the elusive name. Nothing jumped out, so I went back again page by page, slowly. Learned all kinds of things about what Amarillo was like in the late seventies. Saw dozens of hilarious hairdos and scathing critiques of President Carter. Found out that eleven people had been trampled to death at a The Who concert in Cincinnati. Raised an eyebrow at the copious cigarette ads, including one bragging that Camels were the brand doctors smoked most.
Nothing, nothing, nothing... wait.
Down near the bottom of page seventeen there was a small advertisement, maybe three inches tall. It had a blurry black-and-white photo of a naked pregnant woman, her arm artfully covering her breasts.
Expecting Single Ladies!
Worried about supporting your new little one?
Elioud BioGenesis wants to help. Call to find out more.
Discreet ** Professional ** Monthly Payments For Those Who Qualify
My breath caught. I zoomed in on the ad and hit the print button. A few seconds later, the machine spit out a paper copy. I stared so hard that the image was appearing behind my eyelids when I blinked. There was an 800 number printed at the bottom of the ad, so I pulled out my phone.
"We're sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again."
I'd Google it, then, when I got back to the computers. But first...
I carefully unloaded the microfilm and placed it back into its box. Then I got the other reel out, queued it up, and started scanning. This time, once I found the right date, the information jumped out at me right away. It wasn't an ad, it was a news article.
Heartbroken Mother Sues Fertility Doctor for Son's Death
Patricia Riker, 36, of Dumas, has filed a lawsuit against Dr. Ariel Mekas and his research institute, Elioud Biogenesis. The suit claims Mekas is responsible for the mental breakdown and eventual suicide of Riker's son, Timothy, who took his own life last year at the age of 17.
Riker claims she was recruited for an experimental study offered by Mekas. Some time after Timothy turned fifteen, he began displaying disturbing behaviors that Riker believes led to his death.
"The doctors promised no ill effects for my baby," Riker told the Dumas Times. "But anybody could see Timmy wasn't normal. Dr. Mekas wouldn't tell me what his treatments had done so that I could help my son. Now Timmy is dead, and it's not right. He took my child from me."
The suit is requesting $100K in damages. Mekas and his institute did not respond to requests for comment.
I read it about a dozen times. Research institute? Experimental study?
Anybody could see Timmy wasn't normal.
Ezra's words played back in my head. Yours isn't going to be normal.
I read the article again. Some time after Timothy turned fifteen...
You're fifteen. Things are going to change. You're going to need me.
A connection. Not a particularly solid one, but I felt to the very core of me that I'd stumbled onto the right path. My thoughts started tumbling over each other to shape a story.
Mom had gone to this Elioud Biogenesis place while she was pregnant with Maddy and me. Probably for the money, since our father wasn't in the picture. They had done some sort of experiment on her, then sent her payments every month after we were born. They were only interested in Maddy, not me, so maybe I didn't meet the requirements for a test subject.  And now, all of a sudden, they were making arrangements to take Maddy away.
So it likely wasn't porn or prostitution or anything like that. But becoming a lab rat was scarcely any better. Who knew what these people planned to do to my sister. Cut her up, inject her with weird drugs, sell her organs on the black market?
Hell no.
Displaying disturbing behaviors that Riker believes led to his death.
The only disturbing behaviors I'd run into lately were from other people. Marvin's hair-sniffing came to mind. Tyler's kiss, though that dude was always a creep. Maddy hadn't been acting any different either, though I guess her story about the fight at the pool could be classed in the disturbing category.
Mental breakdown and eventual suicide.
Something still wasn't adding up. These people wanted to take Maddy somewhere, but clearly this kid Timothy had been left with his mother. Maybe the research folks didn't want him? Why? Did it have something to do with him going crazy? Had they known that was going to happen, so he was disqualified? And if so... was that why they didn't want me? Was it going to happen to me too?
And just how the hell did Ezra fit in to all this? He definitely knew something about it. Did he work for them? But if he did, why was he following me and not my sister? She was the one they wanted. And while these doctor people sounded like bad news, I just couldn't believe that of Ezra. He was good. Perfect, and beautiful, and definitely a hero. I was sure of it.
I rushed back to the library computers for more searching. Googling the 800 number got me nowhere. Googling "Timothy Riker" presented several Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, but no mention of a kid who'd killed himself in the early eighties. "Patricia Riker," though, brought me to another news article from the Moore County News-Press, from just a couple months ago.
And my jaw dropped.