It was Doctor France who finally said it.
“What if we just start,” he said quietly.
“We can’t.”
“We have to do something, what we can’t do is just let them die.” He shot me a sullen look. “I can’t, anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m tired. I know it’s not good, but we have to start some kind of tests. They’re not going to last much longer.”
“Just one then,” Jamison interjected.
“What?”
“You know what those damn machines are like. TESTS could mean a completely different thing for everyone here. Maybe only some of them are at risk from the tests we might do. God, we do tests all the time.”
“And people die from them. Even people without cards. If we start,” I spoke slowly and calmly, “we know what will happen.”
The three of us stood silent, watching the six patients and listening to the muted sounds of bustle and activity coming from the corridor outside the ward. A strange sensation came over me, as though the world were receding—as though I were looking at it through a long tunnel. My hands were hard to move, as though I had slept in the cold, my muscles stiff and unresponsive. With an effort, I walked to the foot of Patient One and read out the details at the top of his chart.
“Brian Felton, 47.” I turned it sideways. In the margins of the chart, Nurse Kealing had written in pencil. “Wife and two children,” I read aloud.
Replacing the chart, I moved to the next bed.
“Simon Lines, 23. Girlfriend brought him in.”
“Janice Greg,” said France without looking at the chart. “She’s 31, unmarried, a schoolteacher.” He turned to the fourth bed, the old woman transferred from Kettering. “Maud Carver, 63. You’d guess from the name, wouldn’t you—who calls anyone Maud anymore?” He looked down at the chart again. “Widowed.”
Doctor Jamison picked up the fifth and sixth charts, one in each hand. From the left: “Louise Burdon, 28. One kid.” From the right: “Emilia Strabbioli, 51. Married, two daughters, one son, one grandson.” He put the charts back on their hooks, and we stood back and looked at the six bodies laid out before us.
“Are we really considering this?” Jamison asked.
“No, we can’t consider it,” I said. The others looked at me. “We have to just do it.”
“It can’t be Brian or…” France pointed to the fifth one.
“Louise,” Jamison supplied. “Or Emilia. No one with children.”
“Janice is young,” France said. “Simon, too.”
They looked at me.
“So we’re going to kill Maud because she’s the oldest?” I asked.
“She hasn’t got any…” France began, but Jamison interrupted him.
“We’re not going to kill her at all. We’re going to test her.”
“And the tests are going to kill her,” I nodded. “Have the balls to admit it.”
He sighed, shrugged, and walked over to pick up the chart. “Says here she had a stroke two years ago.”
“So? Look, she made it two years, who’s to say she won’t make it another thirty?”
“Plus,” said France carefully, “that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes me nervous. Given her stroke, I’d be a bit careful what tests I did on her anyway.” He walked over and took the chart away from Jamison, scanned it, then put it back on the hook. Then he turned back to the third patient. I could tell he was thinking something that he didn’t like, and I realised what it was going to be. She was his patient, of course, he had been charged with making her well again. “Perhaps we should consider Janice.”
Jamison picked up the schoolteacher’s chart.
“She’s healthy,” France continued. “Least likely to have any trouble with the tests, I’d say.” He smiled. “Hey, I’ve just thought of something. She’s a teacher, right? Perhaps the stress of grading is what’s going to get her! It could be nothing to do with this at all. Of all of them, she’s the most likely to survive, right?” He nodded at Jamison and me, trying to convince himself by convincing us.
I ignored his pleading and pointed to my own patient. “Why save Felton?” I asked.
“He has kids.”
“He’s a shit,” I spat. “He beats them. He screws around, and he’s given his wife the clap.”
“Jesus, Marianne!” France slapped my hand down. “He might be able to hear you! That’s not funny!”
I saw Jamison’s eyes flick down to my balled fists.
“No, wait.” He pulled France back by the shoulder.
“She’s…” France protested.
“I see what she means,” Jamison said, staring past France directly at me. France had believed he was talking to him, of course. “We can’t make this decision. We can’t just do this based on our prejudices. That’s how the cards beat us. They use us against ourselves.”
He was wrong, of course, but we had to tell France something to make him listen to sense.
“There’s only one thing to do,” I told them.
I found the box in the waiting room—there’s a little pile of books and toys to keep kids occupied while we talk with the parents. Most of it was for the smaller children, but there was a wooden box of classic games that had a backgammon board. I don’t suppose it had ever been used. Half of the white counters were missing, but I found most of the red ones and one of the dice, which I scooped up into my pocket and carried back to our ward.
“We make up something to tell the families, of course,” I told France and Jamison, then rolled the die on top of the defibrillator cart. I saw two come face up for a moment, two black sockets in a white face, then it was past and the cube came to a rest.
“Five,” said France.
“Louise,” Jamison corrected him.
They died anyway. Of course they did, that’s what those little cards are good for. The first round of tests showed nothing, so we took more blood from Louise. That’s when she began to bleed under the skin around where we’d put the needle in. Pretty soon she was convulsing, and then her vitals began to deteriorate and her heart stopped.
While the tests were coming back, Maud stopped breathing. We revived her, but her brain had been without oxygen for too long. When she stopped breathing again, we couldn’t bring her back. Nurse Kealing brought the test results back: some viral activity, but sadly not characteristic enough for us to work out what we were dealing with.
The die rolled five again, then two. So we took blood from Simon.
He survived, but we got the same inconclusive results, during which time Brian and Emilia had both gone. We gave the young man antivirals, but his condition deteriorated faster, and he died two hours after Emilia. Finally we watched Janice Greg’s heart rate get slower and slower until finally she, too, left us.
We had been watching the six of them for close to a day on and off. France and Jamison looked like corpses themselves, grey-faced and without a hint of emotion. It had drained everything from them—not just the deaths, but what those cards had forced us to do. I left them to it, slipping off quietly to find Joe.
The causes of death were hemorrhagic fever with renal failure, or so the pathologists determined. I didn’t feel like anyone was to blame—who could have suspected a hantavirus outbreak in the midlands? No other cases were reported, and the investigators were unable to trace any more connections than we had.
I have Brian’s card in my wallet. I keep it next to mine, because that night its prediction came a little bit closer. I take Brian’s out when I am alone, and stare at the word. I am still unable to understand what it meant. Was it the tests, I wonder, or the lack of tests? Did the word mean the same thing for all of those six? Did it mean hospital tests, exams, what?
The thoughts run through me like water, ever changing. But there is one I come back to: Who was being tested?
Story by K. M. Lawrence
Illustration by Dean Trippe
THE CLERK SET THE GUN ON THE COUNTER. “There’s a seven-day waiting period.” Tommy peeled off an extra couple hundreds and slid them across the counter. The clerk hesitated, then pocketed the bills and loaded the weapon into a brown paper bag. “Some weeks are shorter than others.” He added a box of bullets to the bag, then rang up the total. “You need any extra ammo?”
“No,” replied Tommy. “One box will be plenty.”
It was pissing rain on the walk back to his apartment, the first time it had rained in the city for months. The water cut greasy rivers down his cheeks, tasting faintly of gasoline and ash. At least the city’s consistent, he thought, even the rain’s corrupt. He ducked into a familiar coffee shop to douse the chill. He ordered what he always ordered and dug in his pockets for exact change.
“Can you believe those freaks?”
Tommy followed the kid’s gaze out the front window, across the street. A pack of No-Faters gathered on the corner, their placards bleeding ink as they fought to keep a fire alive in a trash bin. One of them, a chubby white kid with unconvincing dreadlocks, pulled out a white card, the size of the index cards Tommy’s students used to cram notes onto before exams, and tossed it into the fire. He stepped back, arms out, relishing the cheers of approval the protesters poured out at him.
“Yeah, you’re home free now, asshole,” said the kid behind the counter. He finished with Tommy’s order and passed the steaming cardboard cup to him. “What’s that shit supposed to accomplish?”
Tommy shrugged. “It’s a symbol. Rage against the dying of the light, that sort of thing. Just human nature.”
“More like rage against getting a job, the stupid hippies.” The kid flipped a rag off his apron string and wiped down the counter where Tommy’s cup had spilled a few drops. “You wanna know what my card says? Burned to death. Bad news, right? Not exactly the finest hand in the deck, right? But I still smoke. ’Cause what’s the point? Way I see it, the way we’re gonna die is the way we’re gonna die. That’s the way it’s always been, motherfucking death machine or no motherfucking death machine.”
Tommy didn’t say anything, just slugged back half the cup of coffee, letting it burn his throat, not caring. Outside, the rain had stopped as the No-Faters tossed another card onto the altar of inevitability.
He dropped the envelope into the mailbox. He’d written it all out, the whole thing, the night before in his motel room. As he watched Mel’s address—her new address—swallowed by the box’s maw, he marveled at how much life could change with the rearranging of a few letters and numbers. She should get it by the end of the week, but she’d already know by then. She would have heard about it on the news, or someone would have told her. He’d be the name on a thousand pundits’ lips before rush hour. Lots of people asking why, but she’d be the only one with the answer. It felt right that way.
As he waited for the crosswalk light to change, he noticed the bar across the street. There was always a bar within walking distance of these places, without fail, or a liquor store. They were like remoras, feeding from the belly of the Death Machine wherever it sprang up. He could see a few of them in there now, heads down, that uniquely blank look on their faces. Some of them had their death cards laid out on the bar, staring as if waiting for the ink to shift, for the universe to hiccup, for destiny to laugh and admit, “Just kidding.” Others laughed and caroused, to all appearances celebrating a promotion at work rather than a glimpse at their own end.
Tommy waited in line, smiled at the girl behind the glass partition, and forked over $11.50 for his ticket. The Death Machines were everywhere now—doctor’s offices, mall kiosks. They were both wholly remarkable and thoroughly mundane. Not this one, though. This one was the first. The first Death Machine ever, entombed in a glass-and-chrome building that was half museum and half theme park. If you turned Auschwitz into a theme park.
Tommy ignored the huge plasma screens somberly reciting the history of this holy temple, the narrator’s voice smooth and comforting as the screens displayed the most famous photograph in the world. The first Death Machine, its creators lined up behind it, grinning with the pride of those who know they’ve changed the world. He’d heard the rumors, of course, that the whole thing had been an accident, that they’d been trying to create something else and only stumbled ass-over-teacups backward into their discovery. Either way, they were all rich as sin now, at least the ones that were still alive. Not so the older man with a smile like Norman Rockwell’s grandpa, who had eaten a shotgun barrel six months after that photo was taken. Tommy wondered if he’d bothered to look at his death card first. Was it the knowing that drove him to that end, or the not knowing? Did it even really matter?
Tommy joined the queue that snaked its way up to the Machine. It was a weekday, so the crowds were light. It only took a minute or so until he reached the front of the line. The Machine’s words greeted him, the same as they always greeted everyone. “Please insert your finger.” It was a sentence that had become the punchline to a thousand jokes and monologues and headlines over the past few years, but Tommy didn’t think any of them were funny. The least they could have done was polish up the death sentence a little. Maybe hire some New York Times bestseller to do a pass, come up with something really snappy, something to bring a smile to your face on the bus ride home.
He winced as the needle pierced his fingertip, sucked at the tiny pearl of blood that peered out. The Machine buzzed, flashed “Thank you,” and spit out the card. He took it and moved aside to let the redheaded woman behind him have her turn. She was young, maybe nineteen, and from the way she was shaking, she’d never done this before. He wasn’t sure whether to envy her that.
He read the card, just one word. Seven letters, no substitutions. So final, and yet, in a way, so freeing. Tommy had never worried about car accidents or plane crashes or cancer. The same word that doomed him had also rendered him, in a way, untouchable. Was he only here because of the word? Would he have had the courage to do what needed to be done if the word were different? He smeared blood across the card, tossed it into a nearby trash can along with his doubts. He reached in his pocket, felt the shape of the gun, solid and comforting.
The red-haired woman stepped over, her eyes glued to the card, welling up. She was pale as her legs gave out and she lowered herself to the floor. He crouched next to her.
“First time?”
She looked at him, but didn’t seem to see him at first. Then her eyes focused, and she brushed at the tears with the back of her hand. “Yeah. I guess I wasn’t really ready for it.”
Her other hand white-knuckled the card. Tommy could read part of her word, “Explo—”, the rest eclipsed by her fingers.
“I haven’t met anybody yet who is.” He pulled a tissue out of the pocket without the gun and offered it to her.
“It could be wrong.”
Tommy smiled. “It could be. They say it’s infallible, but it only has to be wrong once, right?”
She smiled back at him, weakly, then looked sick to her stomach. She shook her head. “My mom told me not to get checked. She said it was better not to know. Now there’s no taking it back, you know? It’s like…now nothing else I do matters.”
He stood up, one hand sliding back to his pocket, wrapping around the gun. He offered her his other hand, and she took it, her knees barely finding the strength to stand. For a moment, the curve of her face reminded him of Mel, and he felt his commitment wavering. Did he have the right? But then his eyes turned to the screen above, to the photograph, to the smiling faces. Did he have the right? Did they? They’d killed the whole world. She would die to—just maybe—restore it to life.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Alice.”
His thumb caressed the back of her hand. “Alice, I want you to close your eyes.”
On any other day, she might have been suspicious, but today he was human contact, he was comfort, and that was enough. She closed her eyes.
It only had to be wrong once, he told himself. Just once.
He lifted the gun, aiming at the center of her forehead.
Except…
His stomach wrenched as a terrible realization hit him. He envisioned the hammer falling, the spark, the bullet driven forward by the explosion. By the explosion. The Machine, the damned Machine, would still win by technicality.
He staggered back away from her, and she opened her eyes, confused. She gasped as she saw the gun in his hand. He spun, back toward the front of the line, toward the sound of the Machine vomiting up a new proclamation of doom. It wasn’t too late. He could still beat it. He leveled the gun at the man at the front of the line, trenchcoat and wild hair.
“You!”
He heard screams from the crowd, the squawk of walkie-talkies and the clatter of security guards’ booted feet. He only had seconds. He closed the distance, jammed the gun barrel against the man’s head.
“What does your card say?”
The man’s card lay in the machine’s tray, face down, future unwritten. The man was calm—why was he so calm?
Tommy screamed: “Pick it up and tell me what it says!”
The man smiled at him.
Furious, frantic, Tommy grabbed the card, flipped it over, reeled from déjà vu. The card read: “Suicide.”
The man shrugged. His trenchcoat hit the floor. Tommy saw the wires circling the man’s chest, through the gray claylike bricks, leading up to what looked like a TV remote in the man’s hand. Tommy thought it was odd; it looked just like it always did in the movies.
“No fate,” said the man, an edge of madness in his eyes.
Tommy wanted to laugh as the man pressed the button. The Machine never said it was his suicide.
Machine of Death Page 5
