Now she was just a foot soldier, patrolling the outlands with her hand-me-down mobile clinic and her cut-rate, stale-dated miracles. She hadn’t been paid in months, but that was okay. The room and board was free, at least, and anyway she wouldn’t be welcome back in Boston any time soon: she might be immune to ßehemoth but she could still carry it. That was okay too. This was enough to keep her busy. It was enough to keep her alive.
Finally, silently, the breathing corpse had been withdrawn from competition. Subsequent contenders hadn’t rubbed her nose quite so deeply in her own ineffectuality. For the past few hours she’d been treating more tumors than plague victims. That was unusual, this far from a PMZ. Still, cancers could be excised. It was simple work, drone work. The kind of work she was good for.
So here she was, handing out raf-1 angiogenesis blockers and retrovirii in a blighted, wilting landscape where DNA itself was on the way out. There was some green out there, if you looked hard enough. It was springtime, after all. ßehemoth always died back a bit during the winter, gave the old tenants a chance to sprout and bloom each new year before coming back to throttle the competition. And Maine was about as far as you could get from the initial Pacific incursion without getting your feet wet. Go any further and you’d need a boat and a really good scrambler to keep the missiles off your back.
These days, of course, keeping to land was no longer any guarantee that the EurAfricans wouldn’t be shooting at you. There’d been a time when they’d only shot at targets trying to cross the pond; but given a half-dozen landside missile attacks since Easter they were obviously itching for more effective containment. It was a wonder that the whole seaboard hadn’t been slagged to glass by now. If the dispatches could be believed, N’Am’s defenses were still keeping the worst of it back. Still. The defenses wouldn’t hold forever.
Rossini surrendered to Handel. Ouellette’s line-up was growing. Perhaps three people accumulated for every two she processed. Nothing to worry about, yet; there was a critical mass, some threshold of personal responsibility below which crowds almost never got ugly. These ones didn’t look like they had the strength to go bad even if they’d been motivated to.
At least the pharms had stopped charging for the meds she dispensed. They hadn’t wanted to, of course: hey, did anyone think the R&D for all these magic potions had been free? In the end, though, there hadn’t been much choice. Even small crowds got really ugly when you demanded payment up front.
A forearm the size of a tree trunk, disfigured by the usual maladies: the leprous, silver tinge of stage-one ßehemoth, a smattering of melanomas, and—
Wait a second. That’s odd. The swelling and redness was consistent with an infected insect bite, but the puncture marks...
She looked up at the face above the arm. A leather-skinned man in his fifties looked back through eyes blotchy with burst capillaries. For a moment it seemed as though his very bulk was blotting out the light, but no—it was only dusk, creeping in overhead while she’d been otherwise occupied.
“What did this?” she asked.
“Bug.” He shook his head. “Last week sometime. Itches like a bugger.”
“But there’s four holes.” Two bites? Two sets of mandibles on a single bug?
“Had about ten legs, too. Weird little bugger. Seen ’em around once or twice. Never got bit before, though.” His red eyes squinted with sudden concern. “It poisonous?”
“Probably not.” Taka probed the swelling. Her patient grimaced, but whatever had bitten him didn’t seem to have left anything embedded. “Not seriously, not if it happened last week. I can give you something for the infection. It’s pretty minor, next to…”
“Yeah,” her patient said.
She smeared a bit of antibiotic onto the swelling. “I can give you a shot of antihistamines,” she said apologetically, “but the effects won’t last, I’m afraid. If the itching gets too bad afterward you could always piss on it.”
“Piss on it?”
“Topical urea’s good for itching,” Taka told him. She held up a loaded cuvette; he made the requisite blood offering. “Now if you just—”
“I know the drill.”
A tunnel, a slightly squashed cylinder big enough for a body, pierced the MI from one side to the other—a pair of opposed oval mouths, connected by a sensor-lined throat. A pallet extended from the floor of the nearer mouth like a padded rectangular tongue. Taka’s patient lay back on it; the van listed slightly under his weight. The pallet retracted with an electrical hum. Slowly, smoothly, the man disappeared into one mouth and extruded from the other. He was luckier than some. Some went in and never came out. The tunnel doubled as a crematorium.
Taka kept one eye on the NMR readouts, the other on the blood work. From time to time, both eyes flickered uneasily to the growing line of patients.
“Well?” came the man’s voice from the other side of the van.
He’d been here before, she saw. Her sideshow tweaks had already taken hold in his cells.
And his Stage-One was still advancing.
“Well, you know about your melanomas, obviously,” she remarked as he came around the corner. She drew a time-release raf-1 from the dispensary and loaded it up. “This’ll starve the tumors on your skin, and a few others cooking inside you probably didn’t know about. I take it you’ve been in a clave recently, or a PMZ?”
He grunted. “Came here a month back. Maybe two.”
“Uh huh.” The static-field generators installed in such places were a mixed blessing at best. Bathing in that kind of field for any length of time was guaranteed to set tumors blooming in the flesh like mushrooms in shit. Most people considered it the lesser evil, even though the fields didn’t so much repel ßehemoth as merely impede it.
Taka didn’t ask what had inspired this man to abandon that leaky protection for enemy territory. Such decisions were seldom voluntary.
He offered his arm: she shot the capsule sub-q, just over the bicep. “There are a couple of other tumors, I’m afraid. Not so vascularised. I can burn them out, but you’ll have to wait until I’m a little less busy. There’s no real hurry.”
“What about the witch?” he said.
Firewitch, he meant. ßehemoth.
“Um, according to your blood work you’ve already taken the cocktail,” Taka said, pretending to recheck the results.
“I know. Last fall.” He coughed. “I’m still getting sick.”
“Well if you were infected last fall, it’s doing its job. You’d have been dead by winter without it.”
“But I’m still getting sick.” He took a step towards her, a big, big man, his bloody eyes narrowed down to red slits. Behind him, others waited with limited patience.
“You should go to Bangor,” she began. “That’s the closest—”
“They won’t even tell you the wait at Bangor,” he spat.
“What I can do here, what I—it’s not a cure,” she explained carefully. “It’s only supposed to buy you some time.”
“It did. So buy me more.”
She took a cautious, placating step backwards. One step closer to the voice-command pickup for Miri’s defense systems. One step away from trouble.
Trouble stepped after her.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Taka said softly. “The resistance is already in your cells. Putting it in again won’t do anything. I guarantee it.”