by Michael Ryan
We landed next to Spencer’s twisted remains. I carried Juliana to the armory bay and hoped she could hold on while I unsuited. There are many things you can do in armor, but micro-tasks like inserting an IV are damn near impossible.
As I worked on my chest plate, I realized I was craving the feel of her skin.
~~~
The following morning Juliana was still alive. Her fever was nearly gone; mine was just starting.
Juliana was fully human, so I wasn’t concerned about infecting her, but she wasn’t conscious yet, and if something else went wrong…
I wasn’t sure how long it would be until I started bleeding internally. What had Spencer said? Three weeks? A little more?
Juliana’s leg was broken, and while I’d set it the best I could, she needed a doctor. Antibiotics and a mild painkiller were all I added to her IV drip. I wanted her awake so I could explain our predicament, but I wasn’t desperate enough to introduce a stimulant. I decided to create a video clip to explain everything, and while I was setting up the computer, she called out in a faint voice.
“Avery?”
“You’re awake,” I said. I smiled at her. “I didn’t know if you were going to make it.”
“Where are we?”
“Inside a research lab buried in the ice.”
“What happened?”
I told her everything.
“What can we do?” she asked when I finished.
“Destroy anything that could be used to create a weaponized virus.”
“You’ll be violating…I guess that’s silly,” she said. “You’re already guilty of murdering a superior officer while disobeying a direct order.”
“I’m going to be dead soon enough. I’ll record a statement exonerating you.”
“It won’t help, Avery. I’ll be better off if…let’s face it. It’s a moot point. I’m going to die here with you. There’s not much we can do about it.”
“Maybe help will arrive.” The words sounded hollow even as I said them.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. If the Tedesconian Army’s started a new offensive, well…you know what that means.”
I nodded. “Another decade of war.”
“Or another twenty years,” she said, her tone bitter.
“You could survive and retire,” I said.
“Yes. And a leprechaun might give me a pot of gold.”
I shook my head. “The mortality rates are high, but you’re a good soldier. You’ll make it.”
“Avery, I have no way to get out of here.”
“You’ll get stronger and heal. There’s enough food to last a year.” I studied her face. “You managed to climb out of that other hole…how did you do that?”
“Crab-crawled through a series of tunnels and ended up outside.”
“I thought you were going to die,” I said, my voice hushed.
She nodded. “I thought I was going to die too.”
“Well, you’ll just have to find a tunnel out of here as well.”
“I’m not leaving you, Avery.”
“I’m already dead. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
She thought for a moment. “We have time before the symptoms start. You said maybe as long as three weeks. We can find a way–”
“No.”
“Why?”
I frowned. “Think about it. There are only two options besides freezing to death or being eaten by bears. One, I’m found by the Teds. Two, I’m found by the Gurts. In the first option, the Teds figure out really fast what I’m carrying. I’d become the delivery system of a superweapon…to the enemy. The second possibility is that my own side finds me and uses the virus to kill a billion purvasts. I’m all about winning the war, Juliana, but I can’t condone the death of a billion civilians on Purvas. There’s no containing this thing if it gets out. We’re talking about genocide.” I shook my head. “I won’t be responsible for that.”
“I’m…I have to disagree.”
“You’re human.”
“Okay, fair enough. But the purvasts who came to Earth wiped out your relatives too. Not just mine.”
“We’re all guilty if judged by that standard,” I said. “Our ancestors exterminated native populations on Earth for thousands of years. It’s what we do. We’re both the product of endless wars and genocides. We only tell ourselves we’d never do it now. But I have that choice. And for once, we aren’t going to. At least, I’m not.”
“Damn,” she said softly.
“It is what it is,” I said. “I don’t want to be part of something evil.”
“So…then what?”
“So we destroy anything that might contain the virus. Like you said, we have at least a couple of weeks before I’m eating my gun.”
“Avery!”
“You’ll have to destroy my body, too. Anything contaminated.”
“Then what? Live here for a year until the food runs out, and then starve to death?”
“Someone will come before a year goes by. We need a good cover story, and a lot of damage to the lab. Too bad we don’t have some dead Teds.”
“We have a dead bear.”
“Yeah, that’ll help.”
“We’re going to have to destroy the suit memory, Avery. They aren’t going to be fooled. I’m better off joining you.”
“I’ll think of something. In the meantime, let’s get your leg fixed up so you can move around. The lab’s got just about everything. We should be able to jury-rig a splint.”
~~~
It took twenty-two days before Juliana had to strap me to the bed to keep me from trying to grab her. I tried telling myself I wasn’t going to hurt her, but a powerful animalistic drive forced my muscles to disregard my internal logic.
“Hold still, Avery,” she said, sponging me with water. “I’m right here.”
She set up two IV drips with meds and pumped me full of sedatives and painkillers to ease the suffering. The oddest part about it was that I didn’t feel all that bad. Once the meds hit, though, I couldn’t feel anything, which was a kind of blessing.
On day twenty-five, she tried to communicate with me. I couldn’t understand most of what she said, but I understood that she’d been reading the researchers’ notes.
“Avery, I have an idea.”
I forced myself to full consciousness. “What?” I asked, my voice a croak.
“The notes discuss the effects of cold on the virus. That’s one of the reasons they built the labs here. If there was an accident, it couldn’t survive.”
I tried to understand, but in my confused state couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I managed a nod to indicate I was listening.
“What if we use one of the suits and lower the temperature to the point where the virus can’t live?”
“Does…do the notes say…how cold it has…to be?” I whispered.
“No. But…here’s what I’m thinking.”
She explained what she’d come up with, and I listened in silence. When she was done, I moaned and drifted off.
A slap brought me out of my fugue.
“Worth a try,” I muttered.
“I…I’m pretty sure I can get you back.”
“If you…don’t…better than…bleeding out.”
She wheeled a suit in from the armory and unstrapped me. I was so weak by this point, the ravages of the virus and the drug cocktail having worked their magic, that I could barely make it the four steps to the suit.
I lowered myself into it, and she heaved the chest plate into place.
A half hour later, I was fully enclosed, and I activated the computer assist. With the help of the motors and gyros, I was able to stand and stagger to where the lieutenant was frozen in place, his form now a white lump under multiple layers of fallen snow and a veneer of ice.
I lay down, and Juliana stood over me. “Activate the external display, Avery. And then program the temp to the coldest setting and turn the suit over to me. I’ll do the re
st.”
I did as instructed and gave her a halfhearted thumbs-up.
The funny thing about dying is that it’s a lot easier than I’d thought it would be. One minute you’re freezing cold, your lips chattering and your body numb, and the next…nothing. No bright light at the end of a tunnel, no angels singing, no accelerating at light speed through a glowing passageway toward peace and salvation.
Just…nothing at all.
~~~
I jolted back to consciousness with the world’s most epic headache. Juliana had injected me with epinephrine and used a field defibrillator on me to restart my heart – a proposition with a fifty-fifty chance of working once I’d technically died and my body temperature had dropped below the critical temperature the notes had indicated would result in the virus’s destruction.
I breathed in, and warm air felt like liquid fire in my lungs. I coughed and then blacked out again.
When I came to, I was back on the bed. Juliana was standing by my side, looking down at me with a worried expression on her face.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I…cold. Through and through. Even my bones.”
“I bet. I had the suit heater bring you back up to normal as slowly as it could. How’s your head?”
“Like someone used it for a soccer ball.”
She nodded. “Your cognitive function seems to be okay. The computer said the risk of brain damage was thirty percent. If I’d kept you out any longer, that jumped to seventy.”
I licked my lips. The effort drained me.
“I think I need to rest.” A thought flitted through my mind. “How will we know if it worked?”
“If you’re not swimming in your own blood in a couple of days, it did, according to the notes.”
“Really?”
“Kidding. I mean, somewhat. Your vital signs should start to stabilize, and your heart rate should drop to normal within twenty-four hours.”
“If they don’t?”
Her expression didn’t change. “I suppose we can always kill you again.”
I closed my eyes, and she reattached the IV and the pulse oximeter. The familiar beep from the monitor had never sounded more welcome.
It confirmed my heart was still beating.
Whether the drastic measure of freezing me to death had worked was another story.
I drifted off as the warmth from the sedative flooded my icy veins, with the image of Juliana looking into my eyes my last impression.
~~~
When I next regained consciousness, I was starving.
Not starving like most people say it when they’re hungry. Literally starving, as in my body had shut down and begun to digest muscle to provide my brain sufficient glucose to function.
I cracked my eyes open. Juliana rose from where she’d been sitting on a camp chair in a corner of the room and approached.
“You want some water?” she asked.
I nodded once. She held a plastic container to my mouth and slid the straw protruding from the lid through my lips.
I managed a few swallows, and she pulled the bottle away.
“Better?” she asked. “You should already be adequately hydrated from the IV.”
I cleared my throat. “How long?”
“Have you been out? It’s day thirty-six.” She smiled. “And your skin hasn’t melted off. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re recovering.”
I drew a long breath. “Then it worked.”
She nodded, but her expression darkened. “Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your vitals were all over the place. I thought we were going to have to do it all over again, but at day twenty-nine you started stabilizing.”
“Then…what do you think happened?”
“You’re three-quarters human,” she said.
“And?”
“The cold must have destroyed most of the virus, but didn’t get it all. My hunch is your genetics took care of the rest.”
“My human side?”
“That would be my guess. The virus was weakened enough so your body could do the rest. It probably wouldn’t have worked otherwise.”
Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Juliana leaned into me and kissed me on the lips. I tried to respond, but the moment passed and she straightened.
“So how does the mighty warrior feel?” she asked.
“I’m hungry.”
I tried to sit up, but didn’t have the strength.
She stroked my head and her gaze darted over my body before returning to my eyes. “You’ve lost a shit-ton of weight,” she said. “I’ll make you some soup.”
I watched as she limped away; the cast we’d fashioned was unwieldy, but serviceable. I blinked several times, and my eyelids felt like someone had glued broken glass to them.
Pain had never felt so welcome.
It meant I was alive.
~~~
I recovered.
Six months later, we ran out of food, including the last of our bear meat. I never thought I’d ever pine for it, but by day four without eating, even the thought of greasy slabs of bear blubber made my mouth water like one of Pavlov’s dogs. We spent all four days roaming the ice canyon in the hopes of encountering a bear, or even an Arctic tern, but fate has a sick sense of humor, and we didn’t see a single living thing.
We’d never considered cannibalizing the dead, and had buried their bodies in the ice months before. Even starving, we couldn’t bring ourselves to dig them out, assuming we could have found their graves – it had snowed for weeks between periods of deadly calm, and any trace of their final resting places had been obliterated by the elements.
Our power reserves were preserved by keeping the temperature in the lab just above freezing, but without food we began suffering from hypothermia. It didn’t matter how many blankets and coats we piled on top of ourselves, we weren’t taking in enough calories to keep warm.
And without calories, it was just a matter of time.
In the first few months, Juliana and I had searched and mapped the facility without finding another exit. We had, however, found a containment trash chute – a machine-made tunnel that stretched deep into the ice below the lab.
Anything we thought could be contaminated, we burned or detoxed with chemicals, and then dumped down the chute.
We dumped bear bones. Lab coats. Gloves.
When our suit power finally died, I removed the processor chips, fried them, and down the chute they went.
The last items to go were our suits. Without a means to repower them, they were worthless except as coffins. Juliana cried for hours after we watched them disappear down the tunnel, along with the last tentative connection to our old lives, and any hope of returning to them.
Juliana died in my arms during night number two hundred and forty-three.
~~~
When I finished telling the story, tears were streaming freely down my face.
Reliving and describing my last moments with Juliana had been an emotional shock treatment, and my heart was aching like it had been only yesterday I’d watched the light go out of her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Avery,” Callie said. She was crying with me and wiping the tears from my face.
“She was a good woman,” I said. “She saved my life, but in the end, I failed her. When it most counted, I couldn’t save her.”
Callie didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When she did, her voice was puzzled. “How…?”
“How did I survive?”
She nodded.
“Blind luck. A recon team found me several days later. I was delirious and couldn’t explain why I was there or what had happened. We were attacked on the trip back to whatever base they were taking me to. I think the Teds were watching as much of the DZ as they could. They obviously knew something about the project, and I’m sure stopping a pandemic was a high priority.”
“Makes sense,” Callie agreed.
“Eventually I made it back to my unit. By the time Command got to me, I’d filed a report filled with plausible explanations. I told them I’d destroyed my suit because it was in imminent danger of falling into enemy hands.”
“And the virus?”
“I played dumb about it. I claimed Dr. Spencer was killed by a bear before we entered the cavern. They were probably skeptical about my story, but it was cleaner for all parties to accept it as the official narrative.”
“No harm, no foul,” Callie said.
“Exactly. I mean, what could they do? Rebuild the lab? As far as anyone knew, the virus had been destroyed in a Ted offensive, so opening a political can of worms by talking about it wasn’t a good move for anyone. What would be the point? All they would have achieved by doing so would have been to admit they’d been violating the treaty and engaging in war crimes. So they let the subject die, commended me for the good work, and that was that.”
“I’m glad you made it,” Callie said.
She kissed me gently on the lips. When she whispered in my ear, her voice was as soft as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.
“You’re a good man, Avery. I’m lucky to have you.”
That night I slept the sleep of the dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
But purvasts, strong and weak, who endure until the very end, they shall be saved from the dark and cold despair found in Golvin.
~ Poems of Beelnt, Book of Truth, Index 7:59
Our first day on Purvas was quiet.
Nobody shot at us when we dropped into the jungle.
We marched for hours without any hungry beasts tracking us, which wasn’t surprising. To the senses of a predator, there’s a universe of difference between a soldier in TCI-Armor and a naked woman.
Fourth Platoon, twenty-six soldiers strong, with five squads of five and a platoon leader, had spent considerable time training in the avoidance of trips and triggers. Keeping everyone in their armor was essential to our survival.
Staying suited was not only a protection against becoming a meal for an alpha hunter, but a defense against whatever microscopic killers the Ted scientists might have planted in wait for us. There was a general consensus that we’d rather fight an animal we could kill with a gun than fight a germ that did its dirty work in a community of billions.
