by Ann Christy
Yeah, I don’t want to see it and I’m getting real tired of listening to it.
Plus, I’ve got my hands full with my own work. Gregory took Karen and one of the delightfully-full-of-gas military trucks to go let Gloria’s group—and the kids—know that we’re fine. It’s good he went. He doesn’t need to see Matt like he is.
We’re here at their compound and can’t leave until we get everything sorted. There’s a whole suite of communications gear inside their control room truck, but no alarm seems to have been sent. We’re listening and sooner or later, someone will call because this group missed a scheduled check-in or something, but so far, there’s nothing. I think we’re safe for the moment.
That aside, we’ve got a lot of gathering to do before we can even think about leaving. There is food here, a lot of food. There’s also medical gear, equipment, testing materials, and a whole slew of other stuff. Everything that isn’t nailed down is going into the trucks for transport. We’ll have to come back in short order to tear up the fence and remove any and all evidence of the camp, but right now, we need to gather everything and get ready to go.
The hardest part was finding the keys for the trucks, particularly the one that the in-betweeners are inside. I had to practically wade through body parts to find the key box. Cleaning this up is not going to be fun.
No one is hurrying, but there is a sense of urgency all the same. Emily and the in-betweeners are trapped inside a truck that is almost certainly getting very stuffy. Charlie got up on top and drilled some holes to be sure air could get inside, but still. We never intended on putting them all into a truck. Our plan called for Emily to gather them up, one a time, so they could be examined. Each one still a good candidate for a cure would be tethered for a proper caging. Each one not likely to survive the cure would be killed.
That may seem hard, but we have to be logical about this. I even had to agree to let Emily be checked over and the same rules applied to her. No one wants to leave anyone a hopeless in-betweener, with deader-hood a certain fate and all the hell that would entail.
Once we get out of the fence, we’re going to set up shooter spots. The truck is already parked near the fence and a rope is rigged up to the lever that opens it. We’ll set them loose inside the fence. We’ll watch, but there should be plenty for them to eat for a while. And I still hope Emily can control them.
Of course, that’s a bit like expecting her to herd cats for who knows how long. She’s done it so far, though.
“Alright people, let’s pick it up! Dark is coming soon!” Tom yells from over by the trucks. Like all of us, he’s dirty, tired, and ready for this to be over.
As if in answer to his words, the fat colonel in the tent screams bloody murder. I wince at it and see Tom do the same. I lug a box of MREs that I’ve wiped clean of blood to the back of the truck, and Charlie lifts it from my hands as if it didn’t weigh enough to bow my back. I stretch, groaning as my back protests. He jumps down from the truck and hugs me to him. My arms come down from my stretch to land on his shoulders.
It’s been a full day since I got near a toothbrush. On top of that, fear and adrenaline do nothing to sweeten the breath, but he kisses me as if none of that mattered. All my weariness disappears in that kiss. The way his arms pull me to him makes me feel far away from this field of blood and death.
When he releases me, he smiles, his face only inches from mine. I see the scratches on his face from the trees and a bruise rising on his cheek, but he’s beautiful. Whole, alive, and beautifully mine.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you,” I say back.
He hugs me to him again, my head resting under his chin. I love the way his voice sounds in his chest when he says, “It will all be over soon. I just know it. Everything will start to be put right again.”
He sounds so hopeful, so sure. I wish I was that confident. But I can’t bear to stifle his optimism, so I hug him tighter and whisper, “I know it will.”
*****
It’s pretty much what we expected. As soon as Charlie tugs at the rope that holds the lever on the door in place and I call out for Emily to lift it, the door rolls up and a pack of very angry in-betweeners pours out. It’s like a clown car. They just keep coming.
We do another head count and there are twenty-two of them left, including Emily and Matt. Out of more than fifty. I feel terrible about it, but there really wasn’t anything else to do other than what we did. I can’t help but wonder how many of those now lying dead might have been cured. Some, surely.
Most of them take off toward the rising stench of the dead near the place where the tents were. We have all but two of the tents. Those two are lying in heaps on the ground, so covered in grossness that they aren’t worth saving. One of the in-betweeners that runs that direction is Matt. He’s not as fast as the others, and he’s favoring his side, but he’s moving.
A few of the in-betweeners head toward the fence where we are, they’re screams feral and so very frustrated sounding. We still have our pee rags in our pockets, but some of that effect must have worn off with time, because they slam into the fences, mouths wide open. Emily comes out last, takes in the scene around her and then walks over to the fence.
As she nears, I hear her strange humming. Her stomach is still protruding grotesquely and she’s a fright to look at, but she still seems coherent enough. She snarls at us once, then starts humming again. The in-betweeners peel themselves off the fence and follow her toward the tents when she turns and walks away. She does nothing to acknowledge me or anyone else.
“We have to hurry,” I say.
Charlie understands me, because he squeezes my hand and says, “We will.”
Tom clears his throat and says, “Okay people, let’s move.”
Today – To the Victor Goes the French Toast
Colonel What’s-His-Face finally broke some time during the night. What I hear at breakfast is both encouraging and discouraging in equal measure. Lizzy looks like she hasn’t slept in years and she’s holding her hands out in her lap like they pain her. I have no idea what she did to him, only that it was effective.
He’s not military, though that’s a distinction without a difference, since everyone up there is now military. Originally a politician—I nailed that guess—he’s no more the architect of this disaster than I am. He, like a good many like-minded individuals, simply decided to take advantage of the situation. If humanity was the disease, then they decided to let in-betweeners be the cure. That seems to be the general theme of what he told Lizzy.
And a real cure wasn’t in their plans. Humans must start fresh and only after enough time has passed that we can’t be what we once were, apparently. And, of course, their people keep themselves clean of the nanite infection, waiting to be the ones who will accept this great inheritance.
I’m not liking them even a little bit.
They’re stationed at Dover and that’s a great place for them. It won’t hold them forever though. And, well, now we know where they are. And we have a truck full of explosives. So, yeah, Dover. On the other hand, this was one of only three fighting units and the others aren’t likely to stray far from their base if this one is lost. They wanted the hard drives, but not enough to destroy themselves to get it.
But that’s for some other day, some other year even. For right now, I’m eating this delicious breakfast of French toast that has an expiration date a decade from now. It actually tastes good. I haven’t had flour in I don’t know how long, so MRE French toast is pretty awesome.
After that first rush of disappointment at not finding out who caused our nanite-driven downfall, I look around me at everyone eating, their faces bruised and bloodied, their clothes dirty, and I realize that it doesn’t matter who started this. It doesn’t matter if it was a single stupid hacker who thought it would be funny to mess with the nanites of a bunch of hospitalized vegetables and unleashed this by accident. It doesn’t matter if it was a terrorist group or if it was something else altogeth
er. It doesn’t even matter if it happened entirely by accident.
It happened. That’s all. We’ve survived it so far and have the means to fix what parts of it we can reach. And we have the means to make more nanites and extend that reach, sending ripples of hope ever outward from where we are right now. That’s all that matters.
And I have Emily. And soon, I’ll see if she can be cured.
*****
The people on watch are exhausted. Taking turns watching a fence this long is almost futile work since there’s no way to watch it all, and falling asleep with all that screaming so close by has got to be hard. As they trudge up in pairs toward our truck, Charlie and I press bowls of hot food into their hands and lead them to the little pallets we’ve laid out in the back of one of the trucks. We could really use them, but they’ve been awake for two days and need rest or they won’t be reliable.
Gregory is back from taking his message to Gloria, and he drives the truck loaded with tired watch-standers back down the road a ways, so that they can rest without the sounds of in-betweener screams to interfere. He’ll stay there and watch over them.
It takes all day, but Emily comes through for us. She brings the in-betweeners to the fence one at a time, while keeping the others away. From there we maneuver each one with a dog catcher to the fence, open the gate and bring them through. Given Emily’s declaration that these in-betweeners are hers, we can’t simply follow our original plan to off any that isn’t a good candidate for the cure. But we can’t bring them back to human status as they are either. Some of them are clearly not functioning inside, their bellies swollen almost to bursting and their pants suspiciously unfilled. Others are missing limbs or parts of limbs, but that isn’t a deal breaker. You can live without an arm or hand. As long as their nanites are healing over the stumps, we’re considering those without limbs good to go.
One of them has a depressed skull fracture so severe I can’t believe he’s walking. His eyes are looking in such drastically different directions it looks like he’s peering to the side—with each eye look in the opposite direction. He’s definitely not a candidate.
Those we chain to the back of one truck. The ones that are good candidates, we chain into another. She doesn’t need to know and if we wait until her truck leaves for the warehouse before we do it, how will she ever know?
Of all those she brings, I finally notice that our remaining in-betweener from the gang hasn’t come. Well, I guess he got his justice after all, just not from us.
Then, there’s only one left. Emily.
“It’s time to come home, Emily,” I say through the fence.
She just stands there and looks at me for a long moment. Then she turns and looks around the fenced compound. It’s been her first taste of freedom, really. Her first chance to run and do all the things that in-betweeners do. It’s horrifying, but I can almost understand.
“Just one more time and you’ll be free,” I say.
She eyes me a minute longer, perhaps deciding if she believes me or not. Melody walks up to the fence to stand next to me and says, “Your people are waiting for you.”
It’s just the right thing to say. I’m surprised Melody thought of it, but even after seeing the remains of her father again, she’s been holding up well today. And I suppose she understands Emily in a way I still can’t. After all, she was an in-betweener.
Emily allows herself to be bound with the dog catcher, though she cranes her neck and curls back her lips at the restriction. No one would dare suggest she go into the reject truck, no matter what might have happened to her, but I look her over all the same. There’s a dark hole in her arm visible under the blood by its wetter look, but when I check the back of her arm, I see another to match it and the bone feels intact beneath. She grabs at me when I touch it, so I know it must hurt. Unlike the others, I don’t want her draped in chains after she’s done so much for us. But her grabbing at me is simply proof that she must be bound.
Melody brings the chains for her ankles and wrists and we get her secured in the bed of the truck with her fellows. They’re all a bit quieter now. They’re well fed and entering that state of semi-somnolence we saw in the caged in-betweeners. It’s as if once they’re bound, some part of them knows that fighting won’t do much, and if they’ve recently fed, they focus on rebuilding themselves.
I look back in the side view mirror as we leave. Charlie, Tom, and Roger are standing beside their truck, waiting for us to be gone so they can do what they have to do. I feel terrible that Charlie—or anyone—has to do this. I wish I could make the in-betweeners inside that truck understand how grateful we are to them. All we can do is let them rest.
Maybe that’s enough.
Today – Storm Clouds and Syringes
Apparently, no one thought about syringes. I shouldn’t be annoyed, considering they carried all those vials of nanites and a matching vial of charging medium for each one, but I am. We’ve got something like fifty syringes and I’m not eager to re-use needles on people when nanites are involved.
“It will be fine!” Savannah exclaims, finally having just about enough of my fretting.
“But germs! And nanites!” I shoot right back.
“These guys have been eating freaking intestines. I don’t think a germ or two is going to bother them overly much,” she says, waving me away from her.
I almost lose my perfectly good lunch when she says that, and I have to swallow a few times to keep it inside. She’s so graphic. It’s so unnecessary.
All the in-betweeners are laid out in the two cages. It’s tight in both cages now, with only a walk-way between the rows of desktops. We had to tear open more crates of them and drag them from the furniture warehouse, which was exhausting work.
They look like we’re doing medieval torture on them.
Only Emily isn’t on a desktop, but she doesn’t have nearly the room she once had, and is confined to a mere corner’s worth of her former space. At the moment, she’s yanking at her chains and impatient with her lesser reach. Charlie is talking to her from outside of the cage, trying to engage her while Savannah and I get ready to do what we have to do.
There’s no point in dragging this out. We’re going to give all of them their doses and hope for the best. The only exceptions are those that are substantially wounded, like Matt. There are a half dozen of those, so we know we can handle caring for that many. It’s no more than we had before. We’d rather wait and give the nanites a chance to repair their hosts before we eradicate the little machines. We might as well use what benefits they offer.
But while Matt will not get them yet, Emily is getting hers today. If she follows the pattern of everyone else, she’ll fall into that strange sleep-like state and then we’ll strap her down. That way, she never has to know it happened until afterwards, when it’s my hope she’ll understand far better.
We settle for letting Lizzy run hot water and then vodka through the syringes between shots. Savannah gave me a hard limit of only five syringes that we can use, so the trading back and forth makes for slow going. As Savannah gives each injection, I prepare the next dose and Lizzy cleans the one just used.
Emily watches everything we do, eyeing each in-betweener as we finish as if suspicious we’ve done something bad to them. When it’s her turn, I insist on a new needle. Savannah gives in when I point out that she’ll be getting a clean needle, so why shouldn’t Emily?
When I hand the dose to Savannah, Emily backs up on her chains till she hits the wall.
“Emily, remember we talked about this? This is going to make you better.”
She shakes her head and says, “Mehme fahn.”
Emily fine.
Great. We’re doing this again. “Emily, this will help you speak better. It will help you so you can see Jon. Remember?” I ask her, using the coaxing tone that worked so often during her initial rehabilitation.
She groans at his name and says, “Don. Mehme luf Don.”
“I know you love Jon. Th
is will let you see him again. I promise,” I say.
I can tell that she’s uncertain, but she pushes herself away from the wall and steps to the end of her chains. As much as I’d like to think that I’m safe with her after all that’s happened, I’m not stupid and she’s not stuffed to the gills with dead people anymore. She’ll have to come to me.
Once she’s close, I nod for Savannah to come forward with the dose. I stretch Emily’s arm out so that she can reach the vein. She jerks a little when Savannah touches her, but calms when I ask her if she wants to hear about Jon. As I talk, her eyes dart away once when Savannah inserts the needle, but she remains still and listens. Then it’s done. All that’s happened in the last months is now truly over. All that we’ve done has been paid for.
We both back away. Now, we have the other cage to do. Then, we wait.
*****
It takes four hours for her to fall. She fights it for a long time, her knees buckling as her eyes close, only for her to jerk herself upright again, shaking the fog out of her mind. Eventually, the head shakes and standing stop working, and she sinks to the ground, her mouth a little open and her face at peace.
She looks almost dead. Except, well, she’s snoring…really loudly snoring.
“Wow,” Charlie murmurs.
“Yeah,” I whisper back.
Almost all of the in-betweeners are out. A few are fighting it like Emily did, letting out something that sounds like a cross between a yawn and a scream once in a while. But once they’re out, they’re entirely out, just like the others before them. It’s a good sign, I think.
Charlie turns toward the cage door and calls, “Bring it in.”
Gregory and Tom wrestle in the desktop while Charlie and I unchain Emily. Even like this, we gag her first, just in case she wakes. No one wants their face bitten off. Once we have her secured, the others retreat and Charlie brings in a big bucket of warm water and a handful of rags. The smell of lavender wafts up from the suds inside the bucket and I smile at him for his thoughtfulness.
