Chapter 2

He woke up when the bus stopped at the New York terminal. He had made a long trip from Los Angeles and felt extremely exhausted. He took his backpack and got off the bus with the other passengers. Outside, he barely recognized where he was, after four years of being there at his friend’s house. He sighed deeply.

“We’re here, brother”, he said to himself in a low voice. “We’re already in your house.”

At the age of twelve David Cranston lost his family in a tragic car accident. Whiskey fan, his father had drunk a lot in a family reunion on a Sunday, and on the way home he fell asleep at the wheel. His father, mother and five-year-old sister died that day, and David began a long journey through adoptive homes in which he never felt comfortable, since he had no other relatives to whom the authorities could leave him in custody. His father had been the only child of a failed marriage which abruptly separated and they never met again. His mother, the only child of Irish immigrants, had come to the United States as a very young girl, and when her parents died she was also left alone, without close relatives. When he came of age, David chose to enlist in military service and try to make a career to stabilize himself a bit, since he didn’t had a job, only his family’s house, but it brought back memories of his childhood that in the end turned painful because of the lack of their loved ones. But that stability never came, since he had to serve in Afghanistan in the war against Al-Qaeda after September 11, 2001. The horrors of war hardened his soul to the point of blocking feelings, and not feel nearly no empathy for others. Only at night, when sometimes he dreamed of everything he had lived, was when he felt real pain in his soul, and the images of men, women and children mutilated or mangled everywhere by the effect of some bomb, attack or incursion against the group of Osama Bin Laden tormented him to the point of thinking about committing suicide so as not to feel that again. During his military service and before the armed conflict in Afghanistan, he had befriended a boy named Robert Moses, who, like him, has chosen to serve in one of the toughest branches of the US military: the Marines Corps. Robert was a somewhat withdrawn boy and seemed at first sight weak and sickly, and more than once David thought that he wasn’t going to finish the service given the hard training, but to his surprise the boy managed to adapt to the harsh regime and when they had established a true and strong friendship, arose the conflict in the middle East with Al Qaeda. David had achieved the rank of Sergeant. Both saw action on many occasions and were part of the search and elimination team for Osama Bin Laden, but in one of those searches they were ambushed in a network of intricate mountains where their target was supposedly located, and Robert was injured by bullet. The severity of the wound cost him his life, and David felt that an important part of him was gone with that boy, whom he loved as a brother and with whom he had shared a small but important part of his life. Before arriving in Afghanistan, Robert wrote a letter to his parents as a kind of farewell in case he couldn’t to return to his country, and made David promise that he would deliver it if he was the one who returned. He swore to himself that if he survived to that hell, he would be responsible for his family received that letter, and now he was there, almost two years later, about to fulfill his promise.

Robert’s family lived in Brooklyn and welcomed him very warmly. His friend’s mother threw her arms over his shoulder and wept inconsolably for a few minutes. The father was silent sitting on a sofa in a corner of the living room. Although David had chosen a long time ago not to feel pain again, contact with that woman barely penetrated his shell, and for the first time in more than a decade he felt desire to mourn, and two furtive tears rolled down his cheeks. After dinner, they talked at length about the military service anecdotes and the things that the apparently weak Robert had accomplished. David intentionally omitted the experience in Afghanistan because of how strong it had been, especially because it was there that his friend died. He could see in the faces of those two people the deep sadness they were living, especially because Robert was an only child, and had no opportunity given his youth to marry and have children, so loneliness was the only company left to those two beings who were his parents. Robert's mother was a retired teacher, and his father a retired scientist, who had tried through his many investigations to open some doors towards the cure of some genetic diseases such as Down syndrome or Tourette’s. David found it interesting that someone delved deep into the human being in search for cures for diseases, and so he let Robert’s father know. He was about to answer him when there was a knock on the door. The man sat up surprised that someone knocked at that time of night, and when he opened the door the figure of his friend greeted him nervously. He was accompanied by a boy of about five years old.

“Julius! What a surprise!” He said when he recognized him. “What do you do here at this time? Come in, man! Come in..!”

Dr. Julius Hansen rushed into the house with the boy.

“Sorry to showing up like this at this time, John, but I need your help.”

In the living room the woman went out to meet newcomers and greeted Dr. Hansen effusively.

“Hello, Margaret”, Hansen told her. “I apologize for coming like this unexpectedly, but I need your help with something very delicate.”

Margaret and John Moses invited them to sit down.

“Sure, man!” John said. “What we can do. Tell us what happens.”

Dr. Hansen looked at David suspiciously.

“Don’t worry”, John said again. “He is David Cranston, he is trustworthy. He is a friend of our son Robert and came to visit us.”

“I heard about Robert”, Hansen said. “I'm sorry.”

The doctor looked at Margaret, and then at the boy who accompanied him. She understood and sat up, addressing the boy.

“Hello, sweetheart”, she said. “What is your name?”

“Joseph”, the boy told her.

“He’s my son”, said Hansen.

Margaret and John looked at each other quickly. They knew his friend had never had a child.

“Why did this man call you Julius, Dad?” Joseph asked.

Hansen looked at his friend and then at Joseph.

“It’s a game, son”, he replied. “My friend is always calling me by all the names he knows.”

Hansen laughed nervously.

“You must be hungry, Joseph”, Margaret told him. “Do you want a glass of milk and cookies?”

The boy nodded. Margaret invited him to come into the kitchen, and he went after her. Once they were alone, Dr. Hansen turned to his friend.

“He doesn’t know my name is Julius. For him, I’m Andrew Farnsworth; it’s an identity that I bought years ago when I decided to leave the country.

“Oh!” John exclaimed, understanding.

“Do you remember the ‘assignment’ that I told you about what it had done to me, and I was going to carry out some years ago after achieving the cloning of human organs?”

John blinked a few seconds, remembering. Then he looked at his friend in amazement.

“Don’t tell me that…!”

“Yes, John. I managed to do it.”

“But, how...? It's not possible. You needed to have the DNA to carry it out.”

“Well, I did it, John…” Dr. Hansen’s face lit up for a few seconds. “I did it!”

He squeezed the hands of his friend, who was still undaunted by the revelation he was making to him at the time.

“And how did you get the DNA?”

“Those of the brotherhood, who call themselves The Second Coming, made it easy for me; I think it’s from a sudarium or something.”

“And the boy is ...?” John asked slowly.

“Yes!” Hansen replied. “It’s him! I have raised him all these years as my son, hiding him from everyone. I even moved to London. I decided to run away with him and with new identities when I realized that I couldn’t hand him over to those who commissioned him so I don’t know what they are going to do with him. But now they have managed to find me and I had no choice but to return here from England fleeing from them, to the wolf’s mouth. I really had nowhere to go. Even a kind of sect called "Brothers of the Averno", which I don’t know where it came from, found us, and gave me a very clear message.”

John leaned back in the old chair where he was sitting and looked at his friend, worried.

“If they really were able to locate you, the most sensible thing was that you had gone to another country than this one. Here they must be waiting for you.”

“Yes. I made that mistake in the middle of despair. You must help me hide him, John. If that brotherhood finds him, who knows what they will do with him. And the Brothers of the Averno told me through a phone call that they want to kill him.”

Having heard all of that, David sat up and said he was going to sleep to let them talk quietly. He left the living room and went to the kitchen to ask Margaret where he could sleep. He was amazed by everything he had heard but decided not to give it any importance. In the kitchen the woman was sitting at the table next to the boy, who ate cookies with milk. David looked at him and he could see his eyes despite the artificial lighting of the room. They were large and beautiful light brown eyes, which matched a round face, lips that without being big were fleshy, and a profiled nose. The hair was light brown in color; a bit long and fell in small waves on his forehead. David thought he was one of the many children he had seen in his life, but it must be very special for those two men that talk about him almost secretly. Margaret told him to go upstairs to Robert's room, and there he would get some clothes to change once he had bathed. So he did, he went up to the room, took a shower, changed his clothes and lay on the bed that once belonged to his dear friend. Thinking of him, he felt sadness again and fell asleep a few minutes later. It had been a long day.