Here were more bones attired in ragged khaki; boxes and canisters; machines and equipment; autoclaves, syringes, and stethoscopes, all dust-caked and fading. He prowled around, looking for something he recognized. Outside, he could hear the driver-lady pleading, calling words he couldn’t make out.
He opened a case at random. The labels were in Hebrew, Arabic, and English; he knew that much.
He couldn’t read any of those languages.
He grunted, and the girl scrambled out to bring the driver-lady up to sec for herself. She was too weak to walk, and he and the child had to lift her and carry her inside. They laid her on the truck floor, taking care to avoid the broken glass bottles and vials spilled from cartons.
“Unh?” He held up a box, then another. “Unh?”
“Can’t see…,” she murmured. Her eyes were already ringed and sunken, her sharp cheekbones highlighted by grease, dirt, and sweat. He brought the box close to her face. “No, not that. Find an antibiotic, the strongest, ccotromycin, maybe… the new drug they developed for our soldiers “
He didn’t know ccotromycin from sarsaparilla, but he couldn’t tell her that. Where the hell was that bastard Memory when he needed him?
“That one… no, the other beside it. No. The metal case.” She grabbed her belly as the cramps caught her again.
He looked to the child for help. She could probably read, but the medical names on the labels would be beyond her.
The driver-lady gagged and crouched low, on her hands and knees in the middle of the cargo compartment. The ship’s doctor was going to crap his jeans when he saw this mess!
“Please,” she choked. “Hurry.”
He obliged, tossing packages and ampoules and vials and canisters and all manner of enigmatic devices down before her for identification. Memory put in an appearance to say that he knew what to look for, provided he could spot it in the chaos. Memory had experience, he said, of Delhi Belly, the Sultan’s Revenge, typhus, and a lot of others. The driver-lady looked like she had bacillic dysentery, perhaps made more virulent by mutation and the combining of strains, just as gonorrhea and AIDS had become worse and worse as they ravaged the world. Pestilence, the fourth of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was one son of a bitch! Knock him down, and he sprang up in a hundred new forms to fight you again! Wasn’t there some monster in Greek mythology who could do that? He’d seen that movie, too.
The child was laving the driver-lady’s face with water from the canteen— probably the same water that had infected her. He begged Memory for a name, a picture, a hint of the medicine that had cured him out in — wherever it was. Angola? Syria? Or was it India? Names and places were coming back. He snarled at Beverly to get out of the way. Let the medics through! Get the lady to a hospital!
The woman scrabbled among the wrack of dressings and bottles and surgical gear. The truck was only medical transport, not an ambulance. If they looked, they might find the Izzies’ field hospital van parked nearby, she said. Then, again, they might not.
There was no time. The driver-lady opened her eyes wide, retched, and curled up, face down, in her own awful mess. Her fingers kept flexing and clutching, but he guessed that she was losing consciousness. The child poured water into her slack mouth, but it sloshed back out again. Just as well; it looked brown and smelled bad.
“Unh!” he cried. “Unh!”
The girl turned to stare at him, the obelisk look of one who has seen death too often.
He fumbled with another metal canister. It came open, and tiny, white tablets showered over his palms. Were these the ones? Would they help? Or were they poison for her now?
He began to weep. The seas rose and obscured the helmsman’s view. He wiped at the porthole and cursed. Nothing helped. What a terrible storm! Worse, even, than he remembered from the first time he had seen this movie.
He sat there a long time.
Later that afternoon he woke to find Beverly shaking him. Had she seen him with Emily, then? God, if she had, the fit would hit the shan! When he got his wits back, he discovered it wasn’t either of them: an unfamiliar face looked down at him, a big-nosed, round-eyed, gamin-looking foreign kid. She tugged at his arm. She was crying too. Saddest goddamned movie he’d ever seen!
He touched the driver-lady’s bare shoulder. She didn’t move. Then she twisted and slowly toppled sideways, to sprawl against a heap of boxes. He knew she was dead.
He wept, and the child wept with him. He held the gaunt, little girl to him and let the tears flow. He didn’t remember exactly why they were crying, but it felt good. Something was radically wrong with the world, and this was the only way they could share their misery.
After a while he found that another movie had started, one he remembered seeing on Saturday Film Classics, before his father had splurged for the big holo-video his mother hated so much. This movie ended with Death himself towing a string of newly-dead plague victims across a blasted, barren heath, dancing, skipping, leaping, and whirling them all away to darkness and the eternity of the grave.
He hadn’t liked that movie. It scared the bejesus out of him.
But it was real. It was what was happening.
He rose, lifted the terribly light, dehydrated body of the driver-lady, cradled her in his arms, and clambered down out of the truck. The little girl followed. The setting sun turned the town and its mute inhabitants to blood and shadows.
He began to dance, while the skeletons made eldritch music and kept time. They sounded pretty good. Wondering, the child trudged after him.
“Where it stops, nobody knows!” His father quoted sententiously from some place. He and Beverly and Emily and Mavis and his parents and the child and all the people of his life joined hands with Death in Yellow and did an amateurish but enthusiastic saraband through the empty city of Khoi.
He never remembered when or where — or if — the music stopped.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Monday, July 13, 2048
“I still can’t believe it,” Wrench marveled.
“It’s him, all right. Been working for us for a year or more. Rose here, recognized him.” General Copley motioned the woman forward with a freckle-splotched hand. “Captain Rose Thurley, Cadre-Commander Wren.”
“How… where did Lessing…?” For once Wrench was at a loss.
“He must be an immune. One day he wandered in, out of Pacov territory,” the woman answered diffidently. “In an old Russian bakery van. Absolute bonkers.”
“Tell ’im ’bout the girl,“ the fourth person in the room suggested the seedy-looking mercenary named Kenow. He also wore officer’s pips, but in these jumped-up settler militias — actually mere armies of occupation— insignia meant whatever the wearer said it did.
“Uh, right. Well, in the back of this van, like, he had digs fixed up for himself: a cot, a kerosene stove, and supplies. Just like a caravan… urn, trailer, you Americans call it.”
“The girl, the girl,” Kenow persisted.
“Yes, all right, but first: I had charge of border patrols then. New Sverdlovsk has frontiers and customs now, and refugee resettlement camps, and what-all. One of my squads saw this big van comin’ in. They stopped it, and there was poor Lessing, all wild, hair and beard like a soddin’ cave-man, got up in an Azerbaijani vest, Israeli army pants, and Russian peasant boots. Guns and ammo enough to do the bleedin ‘ world.” She twisted at a strand of grey-streaked, red-blonde hair; the little man in the natty, black uniform of the Cadre of the American Party of Humankind unnerved her. “Well, in the comer of the cargo compartment we seen this girl, a child, like, sittin’ propped up against the wall.”