Jokes. Fools. Gullible but harmless to everyone but themselves.
Harlan Maas said, opening the door to leave, “Just so you know, we have twenty more minutes. Good-bye, Colonel Rush. Do you pray to anything or anybody? You should. Now.”
I needed a lie. I needed a really great lie. I needed a stopper, this second, something so good that it would make him hesitate, delay, stop the count, have my cuffs taken off. Not that I knew what to do if that happened. Just that it was the best place to try to start.
I called out, “Do you know why I really came? I’m sick.”
“Oh, Dr. Rush. Up until now you’ve been honest.”
I held out my hands stubbornly and Harlan Maas hesitated and turned back toward my cage. He stopped at the chair again, a safe distance. He leaned forward, ever the researcher interested in manifestations of his disease.
I pushed my hands out between a bar. I rotated my palms as much as possible. It was clear where the dead spot lay on my fingers. It was now a white patch.
“When did you get this?” he asked, like a doctor with a patient. As if he had not just checked a timer on a ticking fertilizer bomb, fifteen feet away.
“When did it become visible, Harlan? Or when did the dead feeling start?” I asked.
“Either one.”
He was turning away, seeking something in the lab. And then he saw it. He retreated and came back with one of those long, probing needles, used usually for pinning some sample down. Thin as a sewing needle, it was three times as long.
“Go ahead,” I said, as if he needed permission to stick me.
The needle went into my finger and I felt no pain at all.
He tried again, watching my face. I didn’t wince. He stuck all the discolored patches. I felt nothing.
“When?” he asked again.
Hide the lie. Bury the lie. Bury it in the middle of an explanation. It’s the only chance.
“The numbness? Actually, back in Africa. I didn’t tell anyone, though. Kept it to myself.”
He started. And stared at me. Then his eyes narrowed. I knew his thought process. He was thinking that if I’d caught this in Africa, then blood tests should have shown me infected before I even got back to the United States, whether I hid symptoms or not.
I said, “I know! I figured when the tests showed nothing that I was imagining it. And the tests never came back positive. Even now. So I hid it when it got worse. I didn’t want to be locked up.”
He asked in a smaller voice, “The blood tests didn’t work?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? Anyway, I tried to figure out how come they didn’t show infection in me but did on everyone else? I went back and tested samples from Africa and confirmed it, see? Most sick people there tested positive. But a few, three or four, again, negative. Even people in bad shape. Like the two guys you sent, the ones singing your song in their tent. So I figured—”
Harlan broke in, anxious, “What do you mean, my people were sick?”
“Well, almost everyone was sick, so I—”
He interrupted again. “They couldn’t have been sick,” he said stubbornly. “They got the cure.”
“Those two were in as bad a shape as the others… look… Maybe your strain mutated. It happens. The point is—”
He stepped closer, but not close enough. He was breathing hard. His eyes had gone small. He barked out, “They took the cure so they weren’t sick!”
I backed up a step. “Well! You know this thing better than I do. But the rashes on their inside thighs and scrotum… those triangular purple marks, they’re the same on me.”
“On your scrotum? What rashes?”
“They cleared up now but the skin’s all tough, and under the microscope that scaly purple pattern looks exactly the same as what we saw on them.”
He said nothing, but he was breathing more audibly.
Come on. Don’t you want to take a look at a symptom you’ve not seen before? Don’t you want to check whether your strain has morphed into something else?
I said, “Maybe the cure doesn’t work all the time. Maybe it just works on some people, not others.”
His face twisted. His head jerked up. He stared at the red telephone on the lab table as if frightened of it. I’d heard nothing, but he tilted his head as if he did. And then he went over to the phone, and picked up the receiver, and listened, and his hand began to shake.
“No,” he said into the phone. “I can’t understand it. No, it’s impossible. Yes, yes, find out! Yes, I will.”
Harlan ran to the barrel and did something to the switch. Then he ran to the door and cried out for help in a wavery voice. After a moment the guards were back.
I’d stopped the countdown. At least for the moment.
He told them to unlock the cage door and strap me onto the table and peel my clothes off. Now.
TWENTY-ONE
There was only one way for them to get those manacles on the exam table on me, and that was to take off my cuffs. The two guards ordered me out of the cell, telling me to stand still, arms out, eyes forward. Harlan waited across the room as the tall man aimed his carbine at me and the Asian moved close with a key. Harlan turned away to select sharp-looking instruments from a table.
“I won’t hurt you, Colonel. I just want to run some tests,” Harlan said. “It’s better that you don’t move.”
In the brief moment when they’d opened the lab door, before they’d shut it, I’d heard hymns coming from above, over their sound system. The same song as in Africa. Now the key, moving toward my handcuffs, seemed to shake slightly.
The guard was not so confident as he wanted me to think.
“Hold your hands straighter!”
I kept my face blank. I could not show intent in my eyes. The Asian man lay his pistol on a table before approaching, and the man with the carbine watched my face, stepping to the side to let the Asian get close. But he didn’t move far enough to the side. It was possible that if I hit the small man at the right angle, I’d spin him into the other man’s line of fire.
“Don’t move, Colonel!”
I kept my wrists easy. Rigid would be a signal. The Asian man’s eyes flinched to his key, off my face. Otherwise he’d never get the key in the slot. The key glinted. His nails were clean and evenly cut. I heard the smallest scrape of metal touching metal and moved fast at the exact second that the click sounded. Both men had been looking at my wrists, not at my knees, which I used to launch myself sideways, still keeping my face straight.
The shot seemed thunderous and I felt the air pressure when the bullet skimmed my ear. I felt my shoulder drive into the Asian man, driving him back, spinning him around.
With the loudspeakers going up top and the singing, maybe no one had heard the shot. The Asian man’s skull was spraying blood on the left side. He toppled like a truncated statue. The gunman was stunned and that slowed him, and by the time he swung the carbine, I’d reached the pistol on the table. I had the gun in my right hand, the one in which I had full sensation in the fingers.
Something hard punched into my left side, spinning me back against the wall. Shot. But I kept moving, dropping, as wood shavings and glass splinters flew off tables and beakers shattered and animals screamed. I half fell, half ducked behind one of those blocky lab tables. There was no pain yet. There was adrenaline. M4 carbines fire .223 bullets. They tumble and chew up tissue inside. I’d been hit in the lower left chest, away from the midline but in the rib cage.
The area under my shoulder was pulsing and sticky and there was a feeling like wasps crawling under the skin. The whole left arm didn’t seem to be working.
I heard a great rush of loud hymn singing. Someone must have opened the steel door. But when I glanced up, I saw it was Harlan leaving, not someone coming in. Harlan was running. I fired at him and missed and ducked down as more bullets came my way. I crawled behind the side of a freezer as the metal side thudded with pings and whines. I kept away from the oil drum. I didn’t think a fertilizer bomb could be set off by bullets, but what if I was wrong?