Alice had been right all along. Sociopath was far too small a word to contain whatever it was he had become.
Perhaps he’d go and tell her, once he’d laid beloved Mandelbrot to rest.
DisArmor
It was a three-walled enclosure, open to the sky, south of the 184 just outside Ellsworth. The sign had been sprayed onto the inside of the rear wall; the smart paint cycled through a half dozen languages, holding on each for a few seconds in turn. Clarke and Ouellette stood at the open side, looking in.
The grated floor was crusted with old lime, cracked and scaling like a dried-up desert lake bed. It was obviously years since it had been replenished. Four bodies lay on that substrate. One had been carefully set to rest with its arms folded across its chest; it was bloated and black, squirming with maggots beneath a nimbus of flies. The other three were desiccated and disarrayed, like clumps of leaves strewn about and abandoned by a strong wind. Limbs and one head were missing.
Ouellette gestured at the sign. “They actually gave a damn back in the old days. People would end up in jail for burying their loved ones in the back rose garden. Endangering the public health.” She grunted, remembering. “They couldn’t stop ßehemoth. They couldn’t stop the coattail plagues. But at least they could lock up some poor old woman who hadn’t wanted to see her dead husband go up in flames.”
Clarke smiled faintly. “People like to feel, what’s the word...”
“Proactive,” Ouellette suggested.
“That’s it.”
Ouellette nodded. “To give them their due, though, it was a problem back then. There were a lot more bodies lying around—they were stacked up to your shoulder, even out here. For a while, cholera was killing more people than ßehemoth.”
Clarke eyed the structure. “Why stick it way out here?”
Ouellette shrugged. “They had them everywhere.”
Clarke stepped into the enclosure. Ouellette put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “You better stick with the older ones. There’s no end to the things you could catch off that fresh one.”
Clarke shrugged off the hand. “What about you?”
“I’m broad-spectrumed up to here. There’s not much that can get me.”
The doctor approached the cadaver from upwind, for all the good it did; the light breeze wasn’t nearly enough to dispel the stench. Clarke, keeping the greater distance, fought the urge to gag and closed on her own assignment of body parts. She held out her can of steriwrap like a crucifix and pressed the stud; the wizened, one-legged body at her feet glistened as the aerosol laminate hardened on its surface.
“These are actually in pretty good shape,” Ouellette remarked, spraying down her own corpse. “Not so long ago you had to check twice a week if you wanted to find a leg bone connected to a knee bone. Scavengers had a field day.” She was spraying it on thick, Clarke noted without surprise. She might be immune to whatever diseases festered in that body, but it still wasn’t going to be any treat to carry it around.
“So what changed?” Clarke asked.
“No more scavengers.”
Clarke rolled the mummified remains with her foot and sprayed down the other side. The wrap hardened in seconds. She scooped the shrouded body into her arms. It was like carrying a loose bundle of firewood. The steriwrap squeaked faintly against her diveskin.
“Just feed it into Miri,” Ouellette told her, still spraying. “I’ve already changed the settings.”
The MI’s tongue stuck out to starboard. Crinkly silver foil lined its throat. Clarke set the remains on the pallet; the tongue began to retract as soon as the weight had settled. Miri swallowed and closed her mouth.
“Do I have to do anything?” Clarke called.
“Nope. She knows the difference between a live body and a dead one.”
A deep, almost subsonic hum sounded briefly from within the MI.
Ouellette dragged a humanoid cocoon from the compound. Its bloated features had vanished entirely under layers of fibrous plastic, as though Ouellette were some monstrous spider given to gift-wrapping prey. The surface of the shroud was peppered with the bodies of trapped insects, half-embedded. They twitched, dying, against their constraints.
Clarke reached out to give Ouellette a hand. Something sloshed faintly as the weight shifted between them. Miri opened her mouth—empty again—and belched hot, dusty breath into Clarke’s face. The tongue extended as though from some enormous, insatiable baby bird.
“Can your skin breathe in that thing?” Ouellette asked over Miri’s second helping.
“What, my diveskin?”
“Your real skin. Can it breathe under all that copolymer?”
“Copolymer’s pretty much what I’ve worn for the past five years. Hasn’t killed me yet.”
“It can’t be good for you, though. It was designed to keep you alive in the deep sea; I can’t imagine it’s healthy to wear it in an atmosphere all the time.”
“Don’t see why not.” Clarke shrugged. “It breathes, it thermoregulates. Keeps me nice and homeostatic.”
“In water, Laurie. Air has completely different properties. If nothing else, I bet you’ve got a Vitamin K deficiency.”
“I’m fine,” Clarke said neutrally..
The MI hummed contentedly.
“If you say so,” Ouellette said at last.
Miri gaped for more.
They plotted their course by derelict road signs and inboard maps. Ouellette steadfastly refused to go online. Clarke had to wonder at the stops marked along their route. Belfast? Camden? Freeport? They’d barely been dots on a map even before the world ended: why not go to Bangor, just a few klicks to the north? That was where the people would be.
“Not any more,” Ouellette said, raising her voice above a frenetic orchestral seesaw she’d attributed to some Russian maniac called Prokofiev.
“Why not?”
“Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.” It had the ring of a quote. “There was this threshold, I don’t remember what it was exactly. Some magic number of people per hectare. Any urban center was way up on the wrong side of it. Something like ßehemoth, set loose in a high-density urban area—not to mention all the ancillary pathogens that hitched a ride in its wake—it takes off like a brush fire. One person sneezes, a hundred get sick. Germs love crowds.”
“But small towns were okay?”
“Well, not okay, obviously. But things didn’t spread as fast—the spread’s still going on, actually. The towns were small and seasonal, and the areas in between were pretty much owned by the whitecaps.” Ouellette gestured at the withering foliage scrolling past the windshield. “This was all privately owned. Rich old rs and Ks who didn’t mingle, had good medical. They’re gone now too, of course.”
Gone to Atlantis, Clarke surmised. Some of them, anyway.
“So the big cities had exactly two choices when Firewitch came calling,” Ouellette continued. “They could either throw up the barricades and the static-field generators, or they could implode. A lot of them couldn’t afford generators, so they imploded by default. I haven’t been to Bangor since fifty-three. For all I know they never even cleaned up the bodies.”