Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling under the slightest weight.
If there’s a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in the surrounding rubble.
Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something glitters behind his eyecaps.
“Whoever’s behind this,” he says, “is smarter than me.”
His face isn’t really expressionless. It just looks that way to the uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a fashion, and Lubin doesn’t look worried or upset to her. He looks excited.
She nods, undeterred. “So you need all the help you can get.”
She follows him down.
Nightingale
It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it was only appearance. Taka Ouellette’s mobile infirmary would pull up at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left. They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn’t made it into a PMZ. They were the former skeptics who hadn’t realized until too late that this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had taken this long for the world to end.
They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her best. She was the person barely competent to save them.
Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned, stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an oozing gash.
Ouellette defocused on the gross ravages and zoomed down to the subtler ones: two melanomas visible on the left arm; tremors in the right; some dark tracery that looked like blood poisoning, creeping up the wrist from the injured palm. The usual symptoms of malnutrition. Half of the signs were consistent with ßehemoth; none were incontrovertible. Here was a woman suffering violence across several orders of magnitude.
Ouellette tried on a professional smile, although the fit had never been a good one. “Let’s see if we can’t get you fixed up.”
“That’s okay,” said the woman, stargazing. Ouellette tried to guide her towards the van with one gloved hand (not that she needed the gloves, of course, but these days it wasn’t wise to remind people of such things). The woman jerked away at her touch—
“That’s okay. That’s okay—”
—staggered against some invisible wall and stumbled off, locked on heaven, oblivious to earth.
“That’s okay…”
Ouellette let her go.
The next patient wasn’t conscious and wouldn’t have been able to move if he had been. He arrived on a makeshift stretcher, an oozing jigsaw of lesions and twitches, short-circuiting nerves and organs that hadn’t bothered waiting for the heart to give out before starting to rot. The sickly-sweet smell of fermented urine and feces hung around him like a shroud. His kidneys and his liver were in a race to kill him first. She couldn’t lay odds on the winner.
A man and two children of indeterminate sex had dragged this breathing corpse before her. Their own faces and hands were uncovered, in oblivion or defiance of the half-assed protective measures promoted by endless public-service announcements.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s end-stage.”
They stared back at her, eyes filled with a pleading desperate hope that verged on insanity.
“I can kill him for you,” she whispered. “I can cremate him. That’s all I can do.”
Still they didn’t move.
Oh, Dave. Thank God you died before it came to this...
“Do you understand?” she said. “I can’t save him.”
That was nothing new. When it came to ßehemoth, she wasn’t saving anybody.
She could have, of course. If she were suicidal.
Protection against ßehemoth came packaged in a painstaking and complex series of genetic retrofits, an assembly line that took days—but there was no technical reason why it couldn’t be crammed into a portable rig and taken on the road. A few people had done that very thing, not so long ago. They’d been torn limb from limb by hordes too desperate to wait in line, who didn’t trust that supply would exceed demand if they’d only be patient a little while longer.
By now, those places that offered a real cure were all fortresses built to withstand the desperation of mobs, built to enforce the necessary patience. Further from those epicenters Taka Ouellette and her kind could walk among the sick without fear of sickness; but it would have been be a death sentence to offer a cure so far from back-up. The most she could do here was bestow quick-and-dirty retrovirals, half-assed tweaks that might allow some to survive the wait for a real cure. All she could risk was to slow the process of dying.
She didn’t complain. In more complacent times, she knew, she might not have been trusted to do even that much. That hardly made her unique: fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in the bottom half of their class. It didn’t matter nearly as much as it once had.
Even now, though, there was a hierarchy. The ivy-leaguers, the Nobel laureates, the Meatzarts—those had long since ascended into heaven on CSIRA’s wings. There they worked in remote luxury, every cutting-edge resource within easy reach, intent on saving what remained of the world.
One tier down were the betas: the solid, reliable splice-and dicers, the gel-jocks, no award-winners here but no great backlog of malpractice suits either. They labored in the castles that had accreted around every source of front-line salvation. The assembly line wound through those fortifications like a perverse GI tract. The sick and the dying were swallowed at one end, passed through loops and coils of machinery that stabbed and sampled and doused them with the opposite of digestive enzymes: genes and chemicals that soaked the liquefying flesh to make it whole again.
The passage through salvation’s bowels was an arduous one, eight days from ingestion to defecation. The line was long but not wide: economies of scale were hard to come by in the post-corporate landscape. Only a fraction of the afflicted would ever be immunized. But those lucky few owed their lives to the solid, unremarkable worker bees of the second tier.
And then there was Taka Ouellette, who could barely remember a time when she’d been a member of the hive. If it hadn’t been for that one piece of decontamination protocol, carelessly applied, she might still be working the line in Boston. If not for that small slip Dave and Crys might still be alive. There was really no way of knowing for sure. There was only doubt, and what-if. And the fading memory of life as an endocrinologist, and a wife, and a mother.