Atomic Runner

The baby was fresh. Most of those rotting in the overflowing dumpsters were not, but this one wasn't stuffed under all the grunge and grit, laid to rest beneath six feet of pungent, corrosive waste. An unwound pair of Titty Twisters were loosely coiled around its neck and it was partially concealed by a ripped Class 1 radiation suit, but otherwise it was unmarred and unspoiled. Jaime already had his gloves on - Dr. Gruber insisted that he wear them at all times on his missions - and he gingerly picked up the abandoned infant, put it in his messenger bag, hopped down from his perch upon an antique plastic milk crate, and took off for Atomic Strip.

He was so lean and gangly that his rubber-soled footsteps were soon drowned out by the sounds of the main drag, the same sounds he'd left five minutes before: bleating antiquated car horns; the bass thumps of music so long off the music charts that even his dearly-departed mama wouldn't have remembered the songs; Whores and hawkers alike calling out, enticing passersby with their wares. As Jaime reached the mouth of the alley between the old Paradise Hotel and an enormous, refurbished pawnshop, a Troll stepped across his path. A bundle of rats were thrown over one shoulder, their worm-like tails tied together with frayed twine. He hissed once at the seventeen-year-old, a hundred more lines creasing his wrinkled face, and sped up, the rats bouncing with each hurried step. Jaime ignored him and stepped onto the sidewalk that lined this side of the strip. Most Trolls were tiny little nuisances and nothing more.

"Ooh, lookit the pretty!" A Whore bounced up to him, her six-inch fuck-me heels propelling her like miniature rocket launchers. The Gang scar slashed down her cheek, the scar that made no difference now except to mark her as undesirable, was livid in the neon lights, a blazing blue on this section of the strip. It clashed with the bright artificial yellow of her hair, the mossy green of her teeth, the tumor pulsating under the skin of her left breast. It hung freely of the loose satin vainly clinging to her torso.

Before he could flee, she was upon him, one hooked finger trailing across the goiter scar at the base of his neck. "Hey, we match," she whispered, also treating Jaime to a metallic blast of GetYouOffGood, the alcoholic drink of choice for Whores in these parts just beyond the blast radius of the last Fire War. Her eyes, glassy and overly bright, examined his chest and crotch. "You got somethin' else in there that matches?"

She meant thyroid cancer, like just about every other kid in town. Jaime shook his head. Dr. Gruber had taken care of that when Jaime was twelve, saving his life, taking him under his wing shortly afterward.

The Whore shrugged. Her next step put her so close that they could have been mistaken for some of the freako twins around town; the ones with heads or legs or even stomachs melded together. "Oh, well," she sighed, and grinned lasciviously. "Maybe we can make somethin grow." Her hand snaked down and clamped firmly over his crotch. Jaime gasped as she said, "Wow. You ain't messed up none at all."

Jaime wriggled loose of her toxic grasp. "I gotta go," he said, and took off, still feeling the sick warmth from her palm on his pants.

The Whore cackled. "What's the matter, purty? You got a sweet girl waitin' at home for you?" Her voice lifted over the whirling night sounds. "Ain't no sweethearts in this town!"

Jaime clutched the messenger bag slung across his front and wended through the crowds. Although it was night, the constant clouds blocking any moonlight, the neon eerily distorting, most everyone he made eye contact with nodded his way. He returned their greetings with a silent bob of his head. Before the Fire Wars, Atomic City was a large metropolis, sprawling into the desert, but now it was a small, cozy little colony regulated by the Republic and its imposed borders heavily guarded. From what? Jaime had once wondered. No one would live out there in the scorched earth except the Muties. Nothing else could survive.

The Strip had once been the hub of activity, its lights beckoning to all corners of the old United States, but now all gambling was illegal. The bulbs on the old casinos were still lit, but their glorious, undulating facades were just pretty wrapping on empty boxes. The Republic believed that the appearance of some of the old ways were enough to keep the citizens of Atomic City in line. They were not; illegal gambling dens were scattered throughout the city. If the Guards knew, they didn't care, and such was the blurriness of Atomic City. Say one thing, do another as long as a semblance of peace was kept. Guards that regularly patrolled the Strip walked alongside tattooed Gangers; regular policemen, irreputables that had somehow moved up the food chain chatted amicably with branded Whores and shrill Trolls.

As he passed the Boob Tube, a virtual titty-licking den, Jaime nodded at a Giant lounging in the doorway. The Giant nodded back, the gaze beneath the massive shelf of his forehead straying to the messenger bag. He was quick to look away as he saw the lump molding the bag, and Jaime nodded again, this time to himself. Most knew exactly who he was: Dr. Gruber's runner. Dr. Gruber's It Man. Sometimes he was the one who came when things got bad. For that reason, he was left alone; a skinny kid with no muscle tone and usually a pocketful of change, generally a prime target. Sometimes it made him feel good, proud; other times, when the sack was particularly bloody, he just wanted to be left alone.

Saturday night was still the night for partying, even in these new times (and Jaime had no firsthand knowledge of the old, born after the last bomb was dropped), and the crowds were especially thick, the sidewalks teeming with those out for a good time and those just looking to escape. The six-minute walk to Dr. Gruber's street took twenty this time, his steps faltering as he struggled through clumps of agave chompers, a disinterested line of Republic Guards questioning a weeping Whore ("He punched me in the gut an' took my Clean Air Snorter! Those're legal! Ain't you gonna do somethin'?"), a Mexican hawking hemp sombreros, his reedy spiel alternating between Spanish and English. A large crowd of Burnies were contemplating purchase, but when they saw Jaime approach, they gave him a wide berth, allowing him passage. He could feel their silent, wide-eyed pleas from behind their protective goggles and hidden faces, and his cheeks burned. It was the only time he did not smile or nod. He couldn't. He didn't want to give any of them false hope; not when there were so many of them and only one Dr. Gruber. Still, he felt their stares long after he’d turned at the end of the Strip and onto his street, and like always, wished he could have brought them all along.

Dr. Gruber said the old Colonial took him back; gave him peace in these troubling times. That he was even allowed to live there boggled Jaime's mind, for it was an upscale neighborhood, one sectioned for career Republicans and appointed colony officials. He'd asked about that, soon after moving in with the doctor.

"Mayor's wives need plastic surgeons, too," he'd answered. "And they don't want it done in back alleys or under the uncomfortable gaze of those whose enslavement they condone." And that was that. The tan clapboard had three stories, the cellar serving as an infirmary and operating room. The front room on the first floor was for waiting patients, but late on Saturday night, the lights were off, the patched old leather couches and chairs empty. Jaime let himself in, taking care to shut the door softly and lock it, and tiptoed across the room toward the rectangle of light shining out of the kitchen doorway. Usually, he tagged and bagged the babies and put them in the refrigerator in the cellar, leaving them until the doctor went to work in the morning. But as he passed the study across from the kitchen, the light sprang on, startling the boy. Dr. Gruber sat behind the desk, his long, old face shadowed in the weak light.

"Jaime?" he asked, and there was that eagerness of late in his voice. "What did you find?"

"A good one, sir." Obediently, Jaime walked into the room, removing his bag and handing it over as soon as he reached the desk. Liver-spotted hands took it, laid it gently on the silver blotter.

"Ah." His tone was that of a lover receiving a caress, and his hands hovered over the bag before undoing the clasps and opening the flap. A tiny, stiff hand stuck out. Jaime was used to the bloody ones, the ones with missing appendages or organs growing on the outside of the body, and he couldn't control the shudder that briefly wracked his bones.

Dr. Gruber snapped on a pair of latex gloves and removed the dead baby from the bag. "Beautiful," he whispered, shoving aside the bag with one hand while placing the baby on the sterile blotter with the other. "A girl. Newborn." Once again, his hands hovered. "Fresh. So fresh. Where--?"

"On top of a dumpster."

"Not beneath anything?" Dr. Gruber did not look up, but shook his head. "No. Of course not. She still smells like her mother. My goodness, she really is perfect."

The doctor did not lament that a mother would leave such a healthy-looking baby in a dumpster. It was what he lived for; to him, it was not a sin, as the government decreed. If the baby could not live its own life, then it would help others live a more normal one.

At seventy-six, Dr. Gruber was older than anyone else Jaime had met, even Old Gringo, who sold dildos and tainted agave out of the trunk of a rundown Chevy Hover on Atomic Strip and Moses Avenue. The hair on his head was as wispy as cotton candy, as white as dentures, and the wrinkles that lined his face and neck were as deep as the crater between Atomic City and New Angeles. He had more liver spots than Jamie had hairs on his head. But his hands did not waver as they reached for the engraved wooden box to the right of the blotter, opening it and dipping inside to retrieve shiny steel instruments. A mirror and scalpel. They gleamed under the glow of the lamp.

"Perfect," Dr. Gruber whispered, before the first incision. "What an immeasurable find. Jaime, you are a treasure."

Jaime beamed as the doctor sliced.

"Once upon a time, burn victims did not have enough undamaged skin to replace what had been destroyed elsewhere on their bodies. Doctors experimented with skin from cadavers, but those trials failed. But one hundred years' passage has brought knowledge, and cadavers can now be used to transform horribly disfigured bodies back to normalcy."

The doctor told this to Jaime years ago. But in Atomic City, as in many other penal colonies, all corpses were cremated. The bodies that were found. Most women, even if the babies were stillborn and useless, wouldn't have them put in an incinerator, and that was how Dr. Gruber found that infant skin was better than adult's. It was brand spanking new, unaltered by the ravages of time in the irradiated world, and therefore more appropriate for his surgical procedures. Best of all, its elasticity was one hundred times greater than that of an adult's, which meant less skin could cover more area. When once a Burnie could only be repaired in patches, now she could get a new arm if she wanted. Or a new face, which most needed. Dr. Gruber was more than willing to provide this, for the Burnies were not like the Whores and Gangers and renegade Judges that trolled the streets of Atomic City. They were unwitting victims of the Fire Wars, the last hoorahs of the enemies before the Republic regained its upper hand on the world; charred, blackened and forced to live under the fall of night simply because of the places they'd chosen to call home.

Dr. Gruber did not believe it was right. Jaime agreed.

The baby was not fresh. It had died with blue-stained lips and a bulbous growth on the back of his neck-his brain, encased in fluid and a thin covering of scalp. The head was empty, lolling at a ninety-degree angle to his body, all covered with the mother's fluids and blood. And something else: scales. Patches that gleamed iridescently despite the gloom of the room caked the infant's elbows, knees, feet. A large segment banded the baby's stomach.

He was still between the mother's sprawled legs. She was a Fagger, and the entire room reeked of her impending death. Kaposi's sarcoma was eating its way out of her naked body. As Jaime stood, unmoved by some unnamed spell, she let out a sob and yelled, "Get it the fuck outta here!"

He was startled into action. Gloves on, he knelt on the bed and scooped the baby up, deftly shoving it into a plastic bag. She'd already cut the umbilical cord, the lifeblood still staining her teeth and lips, so there wasn't that to deal with. Jaime stuffed the corpse into his messenger bag and left the bed.

"Sorry," he mumbled, and tossed a crumpled New Fifty onto the bed. He preferred finding the corpses in dumpsters and dark entryways to this. It felt worse than stealing; it almost felt like he'd taken part in the baby's death.

"Fuck you!" she screamed at his retreating back, but Jaime's pace did not quicken, nor did his heartbeat, as he quietly let himself out of the single-room apartment, then the building. Most of them were like that: if not angry, then dangerously suicidal. And he was relieved to be done. This was more than two weeks' work finished in a morning, and it was only eleven o'clock. The doctor would let him have the rest of the day off, and he planned on going to one of the virtual shooting galleries on the Strip. It was one of the few places in Atomic City that he could hang out with boys his age, albeit boys with goiters and dim eyes and those who shot terrorists with their toes instead of fingers.

Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Gruber was not pleased. They were in his study again, for perhaps the hundredth time since Jaime began running, and although someone was screaming in the infirmary below and the waiting room was stuffed with Burnies, their faces hidden behind scraps of burlap and thick black Republic-issue goggles, the doctor had been waiting for Jaime. Waiting for him to return with the prize.

The silver blotter was smeared with blood that glinted in spots. With a slender set of tweezers, Dr. Gruber was peeling away the scales, his scowl deepening as each one was removed. He'd been muttering since Jaime put the corpse on his desk.

"No good, no good," he said in his cultured voice. "Perhaps under this one...No, no, this isn't psoriasis, nor is it cradle cap-of course not! It's not on the scalp!...I should have an idea-fetch me my book! No, don't!" he cried, and Jaime halted halfway between the desk and single bookshelf that lined the wall. "If not psoriasis...it's not working. This damned thing is useless." He tossed the tweezers down. They clinked against the blotter, inches away from a tiny pile of scales, but as far as Jaime could tell, the doctor was right. He could not see where the scales had been removed from the corpse's body. "Something as treatable as psoriasis isn't treatable at all when the subject is deceased," Dr. Gruber whispered, one gloved finger reaching out to poke the baby's belly. It jiggled slightly and fell still.

Jaime sat in the chair opposite the desk and asked, "You can't use it?" He felt crestfallen; being unable to have some fun time was one thing, failing the doctor was another.

"No," Dr. Gruber admitted. "There's not enough. Perhaps for a child...but there are no Burnie children, are there? So resilient...except in the face of a nuclear weapon. Scorched parents, forcing themselves across the burnt desert...some of them dragged the corpses of their children along. Did you know that?" Jaime nodded, but Dr. Gruber was still staring at the baby.

"The Republic would not let them bring the corpses into town. They would not even let them bury them. From what I know, the Muties stole out at midnight and ate them. It is...supremely unfair...to live in a ruined body while knowing that your child became a midnight snack for a Mutie."

Jaime was unused to this unconscious muttering, and he shifted in the moldable chair, its contours shaping his as he rearranged his rear, his gaze fixed on the doctor's downward cast. He was accustomed to an elderly yet strong man with no end of assured answers; a man who filled his days with counseling and surgeries, not this neglect by waiting around for Jaime to return with a body. And what of the corpses? When once there had seemed to be plenty, although not enough to sizably repair the Burnie population, now there were too few to be found. Perhaps many of Atomic City's citizens-prisoners-had decided they could not bear any more stillborns, any more deformities, any more growing to love a child only to have it taken away by cancer or even the measles, which Dr. Gruber had said everyone used to be immunized against. The last was something Jaime could understand, for even his own dearly departed mama had wondered aloud why she'd introduced him to such a cruel world.

"It won't stop," the doctor said, rousing himself out of an unknown reverie. "There will be more of this...more disfigurements, less elasticity. But I have to finish my work. Jaime, you understand that, don't you?" His gaze lifted to meet the boy's, and Jaime was suddenly unnerved by the frantic gleam in his guardian's eyes. "I saved you...without me, without your mother's will and verve, you would be dead, for I don't normally remove tumors, do I? No. I...took pity on you. Just like I take pity on all those blasted by the bombs! I-I have to finish!"

"I know," Jaime agreed, unable to think of another answer. And what else could he say? Dr. Gruber was a physician—to save people was his job!

"They have to be perfect, Jaime," the doctor said, leaning forward, splaying his old, gnarled hands on either side of the corpse. "The bodies...I can't take more of these. There isn't enough skin to give a Burnie a proper nose, let alone an entire face! This—this is ruined!" He slashed one hand over the baby, his upper lip sneering in disgust. "I can't fix this! I can only fix this if it's alive!"

Dr. Gruber quieted, splaying both hands again, and lifted his gaze to the boy. Inside his belly, something awoke and uncoiled; a worm of doubt that he'd never felt before, and Jaime stilled in his chair, unable to drag his gaze away from the doctor's. No smile arose from either male, but a new urgency entered the doctor's voice.

"It is all about freshness, Jaime," Dr. Gruber told him. "You understand that, of course."

Jaime swallowed. "Yes."

"I was not right when I said stillborns are ideal, the epitome of what type of skin I need. Or rather...I was not entirely truthful. Because there is something better than dead skin...especially when there is so little unblemished dead skin left."

"What?" Jaime asked, for he did not want to believe that his thoughts were correct.

Dr. Gruber leaned forward. "Living infant tissue."

Jaime wasn't a stupid boy-he knew right from wrong. But there was right, and then there was right in Atomic City. He felt more than obliged to carry out the doctor's plan, he felt compelled, but the more he looked for the solution to Dr. Gruber's practice, the more a certainty was presented to him. Much could be said for the citizens of the colony, but a true fact was that they were not sent there, or kept within, because of their physical beauty. No; to be beautiful and whole meant living outside the colonies, in the megalopolises: domed cities in which state-supported Housewife Hubbies sat on park benches and observed their test tube wards; malls that stretched for block after city block were the hubs of capitalistic activity; where the streets shined and children were not born with hideous defects.

Atomic City was a scarred city, healing with incisions made from goiter and cancer removal, fights between old rival Gangers, and then the Whores, not only marked by their old pimps but the Republic, for a used woman was of no use in this new world. The Judges would have had scars had they been able to remove their robes, but they were sewn into their skin, and the former righteous men were now oozing, smelly body bags. Then there were the tumors: black, pulsating things that grew on necks and breasts and any other body part they could pollute. Jaime was one of the lucky ones, with only a small scar on his neck that he refused to have an infant's flesh wasted on, but he was of a small minority. Everywhere he looked, he saw psoriasis, ringworm, visible melanomas, fungus, warts, Kaposi's sarcoma, oozing irradiated sores and outright black rot. And the little ones, those who could have been bright, beautiful spots in the ugliness, seemed to be gone.

He still had a sniffer for the dead ones; if he'd been born with a skill, that rightly could have been it, but they were the same as most of the ones before: wrinkled and misshapen or missing appendages (including one without a face-he'd screamed and stuffed that one back into a garbage can before regaining his wits), or already peppered with rot. One infant boy was stillborn without bones, and Jaime had taken it from between the legs of its dead mother.

Dr. Gruber rejected them all. "Living, not dead!" he shouted, slamming his gnarled hands down on either side of the silver blotter, the blobby corpse before him jumping. The crowd in the waiting room, the crowd that kept growing with no relief, ceased its hushed babbling, and Jaime's fists balled by his sides.

"Sir?" he whispered, gaze steady on his sneakered feet. "Can I ask you something?"

Dr. Gruber exhaled, his breath shaking. "What is it, Jaime?" He hadn't called him 'son' in weeks.

"I can't find any more good ones," Jaime said. "Maybe...why don't you go back to using grownups?"

"After all this time, I find that you haven't listened to a word I've said," Dr. Gruber answered, and Jaime looked up to see the anger in the old man's eyes. So rarely had it been directed his way that it shocked him, and he backed up a step. "You know why, Jaime. It's out of the question. Even had I access to a morgue, the corpses' skin would be useless to me! Utterly useless!" Dr. Gruber dragged himself to a stand, albeit a hunched one; his fists still balled on the desk. "If you cannot find useful subjects, then I'll have to find another runner. And I'm sure you'll find that without my protection, you'll be a sitting duck in this town."

Jaime turned and fled, not wanting to hear more, unable to stand a single second more of that malicious stare, and thirty-two pairs of goggled eyes followed him as he raced across the waiting room and out the door.

He spent much of the day in the sunken doorway of an old pawnshop just off Atomic Strip. The shop was empty of products, its contents looted long before the Republic cordoned off the city, but at least the door was still there. Jaime scuttled back against it when the rains began to fall: oily, smelly drops of water that did nothing to freshen the stench of the city. The boy wrapped his arms around his knees and looked through the rain, his mind on pretty, unblemished babies.

Had his dearly departed mama still been on this Earth, she wouldn't have told him of moral quandaries, for she hadn't that kind of vocabulary. More than likely, she would have slapped him upside the head and scolded him for even contemplating taking away a woman's child. The problem was, Jaime hadn't met many women interested in their offspring. Too many dead babies in dumpsters, hidden under the shells of burnt-out cars, and strangled after birth had jaded him to the joys of motherhood. His mind ticked over the list that he'd created over five years, and the body count was high. So many dead babies that it was a wonder a woman could even get pregnant anymore.

When the light began to fade from the grey sky, Jaime stood and stepped out into the rain. By the time he reached the mouth of the alley his face was streaked with brown grime, his clothes plastered to his body, but he matched everyone else on the Strip, and he walked through the glowing patches on neon, his eyes searching the crowds, the doorways, the windows above. This time he did not head back toward Dr. Gruber's but away from his street and toward the desert. Giants nodded and took note of his empty bag, Trolls sneered and gave him a wide berth. He was propositioned by two Whores, one going so far as to grab his balls, and Old Gringo called out to him, asking him if he wanted agave to lighten his mood. Jaime ignored them all, his radar on high, wiping out all thoughts and emotions that might hold him back, and when he reached Atomic Strip and Abraham, he stopped, the rain pelting him but forgotten.

The baby was fresh save for the ringworm. The circles were angry, vividly red even through the nasty rain. The girl holding the baby didn't look any older than Jaime, her skin as unblemished as his, but he knew there was something wrong with her. Maybe a tumor in her lungs or candidium foaming out of her vagina. Maybe she had ringworm, too. There was always something.

They were sitting just inside the stoop of a dilapidated apartment building, and the girl clutched the baby tighter as Jaime trudged up the steps. "Hey," he said, stopping on the stoop. Warily, she studied him as the baby began to struggle in her grip.

"Hey," she finally said.

Jaime nodded at the baby. "Cute kid. What's his name?"

He'd guessed at the sex. "William," she answered, and the baby, clad in a t-shirt and diaper, his eyes wide and blue, his scalp covered with a surprisingly thick head of black hair, stopped squirming and goggled at her.

"Nice name. He yours?"

She frowned. "You think I'd be holding him if he wasn't?"

Jaime shrugged, glanced over his shoulder at the street. Several Republic guards were strolling by, their tasers hanging loosely at their sides, but they paid him no mind, their attention on a Troll struggling with a mesh sack filled with canned meat.

"I don't know," he resumed. The baby was now staring at him, his toothless mouth hanging open. Other than the ringworm, he looked fine. "I work for Dr. Gruber," he said. "You heard of him?"

"He fixes up the Burnies." Jaime nodded and waited, but if she knew who he was, what he did, she gave no indication, just continued to cautiously study him.

"Yeah," he finally said. "He's branching out his practice now, offering free medicine to kids around town."

She scoffed. "There ain't no medicine in this town."

"Dr. Gruber's special. He can get medicine. Anyway, I saw your kid. Ringworm, right?"

She dared to look away from him to her son, who'd begun to pull on her long brown hair. "I don't know what to do for it. It won't go away." She turned to Jaime again. "He really has medicine?"

"Yeah. If you want, I can take him to Dr. Gruber, have him fix William up, then bring him back."

"No, I don't think so." The girl hugged the baby tightly. "Why can't I come?"

"Dr. Gruber doesn't work that way. No family members around when he's treating a patient."

"Why not?"

"It interferes with his concentration."

She pursed her lips, looked back and forth between Jaime and William, and her teeth began to worry her lips. "How long's it take?" she asked. A drop of slimy rain fell into Jaime's eye, and he blinked it away.

"Just three days. Three days and he's good as new."

"Really? That's all?"

"Yep. I'll bring him back when he's all better."

She paused. "How much does it cost?"

"It's free."

Now she sneered. "Nothin's free in this town."

Jaime said, "Dr. Gruber's always treated the Burnies for free." And that was the truth, although in the midst of all the lies, it felt strange spilling from his mouth.

She stared at him, and the baby grabbed a hank of her hair and shoved it in his toothless mouth, and out on the wet street, the neon glowed, old cars honked out tunes without melodies, and a block down Old Gringo shouted about the invigorating effects of the dildo. Jaime waited through it all, his heart tripping into an excruciatingly painful pound, and the girl finally stood up.

"Here." She handed William over. "You know how to hold a baby?"

"Sure." He knew how to carry them in his messenger bag, but he didn't think that would be appropriate this time; instead settling the baby on his hip. William was surprisingly agreeable at being handled by a sopping wet stranger, and his chubby finger crept out to touch Jaime's scar.

"Bye, Baby," the girl said, but she didn't kiss William goodbye, instead caressing his cheek with the back of her hand. But she leveled a stern, angry look at Jaime. "You better bring him back."

"I will. I promise. See you in three days." Jaime headed back into the rain, the baby joggling on his hip. He turned left into the next alley up, leaving the lights behind. Best not to let anyone see him carrying a live one, especially the Guards. They'd turned a blind eye to his parcels before, but he doubted they would this time.

William was screaming by the time he got back to the old Colonial: soaking wet and screaming. For his part, Jaime's arms felt ready to drop off. He'd had no idea babies weighed so much. He slammed shut the door, awkwardly locked it, and headed for the rectangle of light emanating from the study doorway. As usual nowadays, as Jaime had expected, Dr. Gruber was sitting at his desk.

Jaime staggered in and sat the baby on the silver blotter, the wetness from the rain and William's diaper making a squelching sound. When he was sure that the baby wasn't going to topple over, he stepped back, breathing hard, brown rainwater streaming down his face.

William hiccupped, quieting as he turned to stare at the old man leaning toward him. The doctor lifted a finger, and after a moment of contemplation, the baby grabbed it, tried to stick it in his mouth. Dr. Gruber smiled.

"Ringworm," he murmured, and Jaime nodded. "That's easily remedied." His gaze remained on the baby. "Does the mother expect him returned, or is this one a foundling?"

"She wants him back."

"You can tell her we took him out for fresh air and he was stung by a bee. The reaction was fatal."

Jaime inhaled and said, "Okay."

Dr. Gruber's smile widened. "He is perfect." He looked up, and all the panic, all the anger was gone from the doctor's old eyes.

"Jaime, you are a treasure."

He felt like he would fall. As Dr. Gruber's gaze returned to the baby before him, Jaime beamed, relieved.

Athena Workman is a married mother of two living in Tennessee. As a writer, her stories and poetry have appeared in publications such as Corpse Blossoms, Apex Digest, AlienSkin, Neverary, GUD, and Nocturnal Ooze. The other half of her life is consumed by art, and she runs the site Miss Millificent's World, a showcase for her drawings and photography.