by Dan Wells
Skousen’s chest was heaving, his old frame out of breath and shaking from the tirade. Shon watched passively, moving only to grab Michelle’s arm when she advanced on the doctor angrily.
“Tell me again why we trust you at all,” Michelle said, her voice neutral but her emotions raging like wildfire on the link. “This is a weapon your people created—”
“We still don’t know that for sure,” said Shon.
“—and you’re the only one on this island with the medical expertise to create it,” Michelle continued, tugging against Shon’s grip on her arm. “You should be hanging from a traffic light being eaten by crows, not hiding down here laughing while we parade your victims past you like a highlight reel.”
“He didn’t create it,” said Shon.
Dr. Skousen sneered. “Why do you think you know me so well?”
“Because when my platoon arrived in East Meadow, you were treating our wounded outriders in your hospital. Because you continued to treat them even after we started Morgan’s daily executions.” Shon spoke simply and softly. “Because you’re a healer, and you hate us, and you heal us anyway. You remember RM too well. You couldn’t create a new disease even if you wanted to.”
Skousen looked back fiercely, but soon he began to sag. “I’ve dreamed of your deaths every night for thirteen years, but not like this. No one should die like this.”
Michelle stopped trying to reach the old human, and Shon relaxed his grip on her arm. The air recyclers hummed loudly in the background, filling the dark plastic room with an unfeeling hiss. Shon gestured at the dying Partial soldiers. “Do you know how to cure it?”
“I barely even know what’s causing it,” Skousen whispered.
“Michelle said something about it being a genetic disorder.”
“Two different ones, if I’m reading the data correctly,” said Skousen. “It might be a bioweapon, but at this point you have to consider the possibility that this is a . . . malfunction. A factory error in your DNA, possibly related to your expiration date.”
“Expiration doesn’t look like this,” said Shon.
“Nothing in your history looks like this,” said Skousen. “We have to base our theories on analysis, not precedent.”
“So what’s causing it?” asked Shon. “Why is it only appearing in East Meadow, and why only in specific quadrants? Every victim we’ve seen has come from one of two patrol assignments, overlapping in a very specific region of the city—that has to be environmental.”
“Every victim we’ve seen has appeared in the last four days,” said Skousen. “This disease is too new to make any assumptions about—something that looks like a trend might just be a quirk blown out of proportion by a small sample size.”
A muffled alarm sounded down through the insulated ceiling, just loud enough to hear. Michelle looked up sharply.
“New victims.”
“Damn.” Shon moved to the door, but Michelle blocked his path.
“The disinfection procedure to get out of this room takes ten minutes. We might as well just wait.” She sighed. “They’ll bring them right to us anyway.”
They waited, agonizingly helpless, listening to the shouts and footsteps above them. Finally the door opened, and two gas-masked soldiers dragged a stumbling, blistered Partial into the basement laboratory. Skousen helped them get the man onto a table, and Shon used the link to demand a report.
“Same patrol as the others,” said the first soldier, saluting as he spoke. “Symptoms are about two hours old; we grabbed him as soon as his unit reported them.”
“The others have been quarantined?”
“They’re in the yard,” said the soldier. “We knew you’d want to talk to them first.”
Shon nodded and walked to the sick man. “What’s your name, soldier?”
“Chas,” said the man, grunting the word through gritted teeth. “The pain, it’s—”
“We’ll do everything we can for you,” said Shon, and turned to Michelle. “Stay here; learn everything you can from him. I need to get upstairs and debrief the others.” He looked at Skousen. “Figure out why this is happening.”
The human’s voice was firm. “Bring me my notes.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Then give me what I want,” said Skousen.
Once again Shon felt the impossible weight of his assignment bearing down on his shoulders, threatening to grind his bones to dust against the ground. Invade the island, subdue the humans, find the girl Kira, kill the humans, control the humans . . . and now silence. Morgan’s orders had piled up like corpses, and then she had found the girl and closed herself off, with no new orders at all. Shon was undertrained, understaffed, and completely on his own, and now the situation on the island was breaking down faster, and more catastrophically, than he could possibly keep up with. He nodded curtly to Skousen, promising the old man his notes, and raced to the decontamination chamber, where he and Mattson and the two arriving soldiers scrubbed themselves and their boots and their plastic bodysuits with sharp, harsh chemicals. Shon threw away his face mask with disgust and grabbed a new one before racing outside to talk to the rest of Chas’s patrol.
What he found in the yard was not remotely what he had expected.
The soldiers in the yard were braced in a wide semicircle, the Dogwood guards and the visiting patrol mixed together almost haphazardly, their rifles up and their sights trained solidly on some . . . thing . . . in the middle of the open yard.
Shon drew his handgun as he approached, staring in shock at the thing before him. It was man-shaped, at least vaguely—two arms, two legs, a torso and a head—but it was at least eight feet tall, with a broad, solid chest and thick, powerful arms. Its skin was dark, a kind of purplish black, and plated like the hide of a rhinoceros. Its fingers and toes were clawed, and its thickset head was the most inhuman part of all—hairless, noseless, with a jagged mouth and two dark pits for eyes, which watched them all silently. Shon drew even with the soldiers in the semicircle, his gun level, his mind barely comprehending what he was seeing.
“What the hell is that?”
“No idea, sir,” the soldier next to him breathed. “It’s . . . waiting for you.”
“It talks?”
“If you want to call it that.”
Shon looked over his shoulder, seeing Mattson there with his own gun drawn. Shon looked back at the creature and swallowed, stepping forward. The thing watched him, never moving.
Shon took another step and spoke. “Who are you?”
“I am here to speak to your general.” The thing’s voice was deep, rumbling through Shon’s chest like an earthquake and reverberating in his mind with shocking clarity. It didn’t seem to have used its mouth at all.
Shon reeled in shock. “How are you using the link?”
“I am here to speak to your general.”
“I am the general.” Shon stepped forward again, lowering his gun slightly to display his uniform. “You can speak to me.”
Wide holes opened on the thing’s neck, sniffing like nostrils, or a blowhole. “You are not a general.”
“Battlefield promotion,” said Shon. “All our generals are dead.”
Shon felt a wave of confusion so crippling he nearly dropped his gun, and saw in his peripheral vision that the other soldiers were staggering under the same effect. He righted himself, trying again to project as much strength and confidence as he could.
“What do you want to say to us?”
“I am here to tell you that the Earth is changing,” the thing rumbled. It shifted its weight from one massive leg to the other, and still its mouth never opened as it spoke. “You must prepare yourselves.”
“For what?”
“For the snow.”
The giant turned and walked away.
“For snow?” Shon took a step to follow it, confused at the strange pronouncement, and even more so by the sudden departure. “Wait, what do you mean? Winter? What are you talking
about? What are you?”
“Prepare yourselves,” said the thing, and Shon saw the slits over its collarbones flare open again, and suddenly he was staggering from fatigue, his body going numb, his eyes struggling just to stay open. He tried to speak, but the world grew dark, and all around him the soldiers were sinking to their knees, collapsing in the dirt.
Shon managed one more “Wait” before the crippling need for sleep overpowered him, and his eyes forced themselves shut. His last view was the monster’s back as it plodded slowly away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You’re useless,” said Dr. Morgan. She was staring at the wall screens, filled to overflowing with data on Kira’s biology, Kira’s immune system, Kira’s DNA, Kira’s everything. They had spent weeks studying her from every possible angle, Morgan and Vale and Kira together, and they had found nothing. There was nothing in her genes that could stop or reverse or even slow expiration, no way to save the Partials from dying. For Kira it was a devastating loss, and she lay on the operating table with no energy left—not physically, not mentally, and certainly not emotionally. She felt like a raw nerve, exposed and despairing, every bit as useless as Morgan said she was. She looked across at her face on the wall screen, sideways to her perspective, gaunt and gray and checkered with scars and bandages from a dozen different invasive surgeries. Her face was a doppelgänger that had betrayed her—her own body an unsolvable riddle, and an implacable enemy.
For Morgan, the realization hit like a tidal wave. She screamed in frustration, finally giving up, and in a sudden fit of rage pulled out her sidearm and shot the screen, fracturing it into a jagged web of bright, vicious fangs. The image remained, split in serrated shards, and Kira saw her face abruptly cracked and refracted—an eye on this piece, a strand of hair on that one, the corner of a mouth made large and separate and meaningless.
“Useless!” Morgan screamed again. She stood up, spinning around with the gun extended, and Vale jumped in front of Kira, desperately trying to calm the raging scientist. Kira, for her part, was too despondent to move.
“Be reasonable, McKenna.”
“How much time did I waste on her?” Morgan demanded. “How many Partials have expired while I was in here wasting my time on a dead end!”
“That’s not her fault,” said Vale. “Put down the gun.”
“Then whose fault is it?” Morgan seethed, thrusting the gun in Vale’s face, then turning back to the damaged screen and firing three more rounds into it: bam bam bam, a therapy of destruction shattering the remnants of Kira’s projected face. “It’s our fault, if it’s anyone’s,” she said, more softly this time, though every bit as furious. “Even mine, though I only knew half the plan at the time. Armin’s fault, maybe, because he seems like the only one who knew the whole thing, but he’s gone.” She snarled and threw the gun on the floor. “I can’t shoot him.” She gripped the edge of a small rolling table, and Kira braced herself, waiting for the woman to throw it aside, scattering scalpels and syringes across the white tile floor, but Morgan’s rage seemed to be subsiding. Instead of throwing it, she was gripping it for support. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Morgan. “All we can do now is look for another lead.” She stared at her computers, or through them to something else beyond, but there was no hope in her eyes.
Kira clutched the thin operating blanket tighter around her shoulders, rolling sideways on the table and curling into a ball. She watched Vale, his mouth open, preparing to speak but holding back, looking at Morgan as if trying to build up the nerve. His hesitance made Kira angry—far more than the action merited, she knew, but her nerves were worn raw. She sneered and croaked at him.
“Just say it.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Whatever you keep trying to say. You’ve been on the verge of it all morning, just get it out.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s just that . . .” He grimaced, still staring at the back of Morgan’s head. “Look, I don’t want this to sound wrong; I’m not trying to say ‘I told you so’—”
“Don’t even start,” said Morgan.
“But I do think we need to consider the possibility that we’ve backed the wrong horse, so to speak,” said Vale, pushing forward despite her warning. “Both species are dying, and we know the cure for one of them—let’s just focus on that one, and save as many humans as we can—”
“And let the Partials die?” Morgan demanded. “Two hundred thousand people that we helped create—practically our children—and we should do nothing? Or worse yet, enslave them? Like your master plan? Lock them up in some basement dungeon as . . . what, feed stock? A temporary cure for the lucky species we deigned to save?”
“We’re past the point of options we can all agree on,” said Vale. “Everyone is dying. We’re running out of time, and this is a dead end, and I don’t think I’m being a monster to suggest that we need to use what little time we have left pursuing the only solution that any of us have managed to uncover.”
“The cure for RM is just as much of a dead end,” said Kira. “In another ten months every Partial will be gone, and the cure will be gone with them, and none of this will matter.” She thought again of Samm, and longed to see him again before he expired. But he was on the other side of the continent, with a toxic wasteland and a pair of solemn promises keeping them apart.
“That’s why we have to act now,” said Vale. “Extract as much of the cure as we can and store it for the future, to give us a buffer while we try to find another solution.”
“We have ten months left—” said Morgan.
Vale sighed, as if his argument was self-evident. “Ten months is nothing.”
“But we could still do it,” hissed Morgan, “and the humans will still be there when we’re done.”
“Both of you shut up,” said Kira, forcing herself to sit. She wanted nothing more than to lie down, to heal from her weeks of surgeries, to close her eyes and let this whole problem go away, but she couldn’t. She’d never been able to let go of anything, and no matter how much she cursed herself now, she pushed herself up, gritted her teeth, and stepped down to the floor. “Shut up,” she repeated. “You fight like my sisters, and I’m not in the mood.” She gathered the blanket around her, shivering in the cold room, and walked to one of the undamaged wall screens. “We’re doctors, dammit, let’s act like it.”
“We’ve been acting like it for weeks,” said Vale. “I think we’ve earned a little break for self-pity.”
“And only two of us are doctors,” said Morgan snidely. “Neither of them are you.”
“Only two of us figured out the cure for RM,” Kira countered, studying the monitors. “Go ahead and remind yourself which two.”
Morgan sneered, but after a moment she stalked to the door. “Have your little pity party,” she said to Vale. “I have work to do.” She stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind her.
“I delight in anyone who stands up to that harridan,” said Vale, “but she’s arguably the most powerful person in the world right now. You need to keep a civil tongue.”
“People have been telling me that my whole life,” said Kira, only barely paying attention to him. She stared at the vast screen, cataloguing the data in her mind, searching for some kind of order in the chaos—some final, perfect key that would pull it all together and make sense of it. “What do you see here?”
“Your entire life, reduced to numbers,” said Vale. “Cellular decay rates, gene sequences, pH levels, white cell counts and bone marrow samples—”
“The answer’s not here,” said Kira.
“Of course it’s not here.”
She felt a tiny spark of excitement, the familiar thrill of solving a riddle slowly coming back to her. “But this is the most exhaustive biological study I’ve ever seen. It’s not just my data, it’s years’ worth of studies about expiring Partials and healthy Partials and human test subjects and everything else. Whatever else you want to accuse her of, Dr. Morgan
is spectacularly thorough.”
“You’re acting like that’s good news,” said Vale, “but everything you’re saying only makes our situation worse. Morgan’s a brilliant scientist, and she’s been collecting this data for over a decade, and the answer’s still not here. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, your answer doesn’t exist. There is no cure for expiration.”
Kira spun around, her eyes alive with eagerness. “Do you know how I found the cure for RM?”
“By capturing a Partial and experimenting on him,” said Vale. “Kind of puts your current situation into an interesting karmic light.”
Kira ignored the jibe. “We did everything for RM that Morgan’s done for expiration, and we ran into this same wall—we’d tried everything, we’d failed at everything, and we thought we had nothing left. We found the cure because we looked in a Partial, and we looked in a Partial because he was literally the only thing we hadn’t looked in yet. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t follow from any data we’d previously collected, it was just a hunch—an absolute Hail Mary—but it worked, by pure process of elimination. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, you haven’t looked everywhere yet.”
Vale walked toward the screen, studying the glowing words and numbers as he did. “I know the Trust kept a lot of secrets from one another,” he said, engaging more actively in her brainstorm. “But I can assure you there are no more mysterious species out there we can gather up and poke around in.”
“Not strictly true,” said Kira. “On our trip to the Preserve we were attacked by talking dogs.”
“The Watchdogs aren’t a cure for expiration,” said Vale, tapping the screen to call up a file on the semi-intelligent animals. “Believe it or not, Morgan’s already studied them, trying to see if they had the same expiration date the Partials did. They don’t carry any more potential cures than you do.”
