‘What are you talking about?’ Taylor frowned. ‘I thought you wanted to do this test on Ingrams. Superoxide test, or whatever.’
Rimmer had the gun behind his back now, his thumb adjusting the bezel of the noise suppressor to ensure the shot would be a silent one. No point in disturbing the other guests, he thought. Especially if those guests included Dallas on the floor immediately above them. Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, and tens of thousands around thee perish, yet still it shall not come nigh thee. That didn’t include Taylor, obviously. But Rimmer was beginning to feel a bit like some Old Testament prophet of doom. It was a good feeling. He was just waiting on a sign from the Lord now. A green light to go. He hardly cared that some hidden camera might record his image. Not in a place like this. It was only in the Zone that such considerations really mattered. The police from a city sector like this one were never allowed to enter a CBH Zone.
The attendant’s eyes flicked momentarily above the door as the green light came on, and in the same instant, Rimmer placed the thick square muzzle of the gun against the back of Taylor’s head and squeezed the trigger, stepping neatly out of the way of the collapsing body and the great spout of blood that discharged itself in a red arc from the pressurized chamber that was the instantaneously dead man’s skull. Quite unprepared for what had happened, Ronica was not so smart on her elegantly shod feet, and these were quickly drenched in a shower of hot, steaming blood. Horrified at this sudden eruption of potential contamination, for you didn’t work in a hyperbaric hotel unless you too were infected with the virus, Ronica started back on her high heels until she felt the wall on the opposite side of the corridor against her back, whereupon she stared down at her incarnadined shoes.
‘You bloody idiot,’ she screamed.
‘Keep it down, will you? There are people trying to sleep, you know?’
‘Keep it down?’ Ronica gasped with outrage. ‘Keep it down? Rimmer, do you see what you’ve done to my fucking shoes? They’re ruined. They were by Federico Ingannevole. And they cost a bloody fortune. But now. Christ, I look like...’ Ronica shook her braided head.
Rimmer glanced down at her shoes and laughed.
‘His blood be upon us,’ he said. ‘And on our children. And on our shoes. You’re right.’
‘Yeah, well I don’t notice any of it on you,’ she replied bitterly, trying to wipe the worst of it off onto the carpet.
‘You’ve got to move quickly on this job.’ Rimmer kicked the attendant experimentally, drawing forth a sharp exhalation of air from the dead man, enough to make Rimmer step back and contemplate firing another shot. Then, looking up and seeing a green light, he perceived the real source of the noise. It was not Taylor gasping his last, but the door to the hyperbaric chamber, where a near naked man of indeterminate age stood, his whole skeletally thin body covered in the bright red lace that was the maculopapular rash characteristic of final phase P2. The dying man uttered a hoarse, parched cry and staggered forward into the bright light of the corridor, pointing an accusing finger at Rimmer in an almost spectral manner. Now that he was in the light Ronica and Rimmer could clearly see the cheeks of the man’s emaciated face, as red as if he had been slapped hard several times and flecked with tiny pinpricks of oxygen-starved blood.
Snatching the Pinback from his ear — for the sight looked a little too biblical even for him, like Samuel returned from the grave to haunt King Saul — Rimmer recoiled from this walking corpse and the putrid smell that preceded him. And with a shudder of distaste that quickly turned to panic as the figure reached out to touch him, Rimmer shot the man in the leg. This was not for mercy’s sake, so as not to have to shoot him dead, but only to allow Rimmer to step a little farther away from the now supine, groaning wretch — Rimmer had no wish to be spattered with any body fluids from this contaminated creature — before shooting him twice more, in the chest. But in truth, the old man, Ingrams, hardly bled at all. It was as if the blood that had become his every waking preoccupation was simply too exhausted to leave the etiolated cadaver.
Ronica removed the protective hand from her still gaping mouth and let out a gasp of horror.
‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘It sure looks like it,’ Rimmer said coolly.
‘Jesus Christ, Rimmer, what is it with you?’
He shrugged a half-apologetic little smile. ‘I didn’t want him touching me. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘I guess when you’ve got a gun everyone looks like a target, eh?’
‘Sweetheart?’ he said, collecting the attendant’s electronic pass key, and starting back along the corridor toward the stairs, ‘we’ve hardly started.’
V
For a moment, Lenina looked at the footprints on the corridor’s beige carpet and thought someone must have stepped in dog shit — until she remembered how a particularly virulent strain of canine parvovirus the previous year had left most of the city’s population of uneaten dogs dead of a combination of enteritis and myocarditis. As a child in California, there had been a dog. While she had lived in the country, anyway. Before the family had moved to Los Angeles, and she had started her life of crime. But these days the only dogs you saw were the Motion Parallax kind. Lenina no longer cared very much about dogs. It had been a police German shepherd that had apprehended her during the commission of the aggravated burglary that got her sent to Artemis Seven, and it had left her with a badly scarred calf that still caused her pain when she stretched the muscle. As it did now, kneeling down to investigate the woman’s footprints — that much was obvious from the shape of the shoe. This was not the kind of shoe that guests in the Clostridium were ever likely to wear, too expensive, designed not for comfort and practicality, but for style, and that meant a woman with credits to her name and good blood in her veins. The kind of woman Lenina would like to have been. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the carpet was good or bad, but blood it was, for the dark brown tracks were sticky and unmistakably salty to taste.
She stood up painfully and glanced along the bay-curved, beach-colored corridor, from where the footprints had originated. It took only a matter of seconds to walk around the bend and find the two bodies. The attendant, she recognized. She’d tried to get to know most of them by name. Just to remind herself that this was not a prison, and that the attendants were not warders. But the other man — the old, half-naked one — was a stranger to her.
As soon as she saw the two bodies, Lenina turned around and headed back to the hyperbaric chamber she shared with Rameses Gates. Only a few minutes before, she had abruptly walked out on an argument with him over this crazy guy, Dallas, whose harebrained scheme she had thought would surely result in Gates getting sent back to Artemis Seven. Or something worse. Robbing a blood bank probably counted as a major blood felony, for which the penalty would almost certainly be death. Not just any blood bank either, but the biggest and best of them all, the First National Blood Bank on the Moon. Lenina had thought that only served to underline how deluded Dallas really was. It was asking for trouble. Begging for it. Like slapping a grizzly bear on the nose. Not that there were any of those left either. An outbreak of ursine parvovirus had seen the extinction of pretty much the whole of the world’s bear population. Now that really was a pity, thought Lenina. She had liked bears. Perhaps that was the reason she liked Gates. And why she was prepared to humor him now. Maybe even ready to go along with him and his new scheme. After all, this Dallas guy he had told her about, the one who said he built the blood banks and who was hiding out in the hotel, well, maybe he was for real. It certainly looked as if someone had come after him, someone from the Zone who was not just dressed to kill, but seriously equipped for it as well. Perhaps Dallas had been telling the truth.