But she’s making her voice strong, trying to make it carry across the flaring lightning field that’s bearing me off: “Carter? Can you hear me? What can I do for you? Are you on any medications? Is there a doctor you’re seeing?”
Pop’s guy. I remember the slip of paper.
“In my pocket,” I manage to say. “Friend.” It’s not exactly what I mean, but it’s all I’ve got.
As I’m fading into gray and then black I feel her patting me down.
F. QUINN
RISE 8, UNIT 7 LAKE
NEW CHICAGO 06060601
NEW STATES
PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766
MCC 167 1ST MAW
FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309
October 2, 5:38 p.m.
Hi, CQ,
Note the address change. I moved in with the father’s family.
I’d never been in one of the towers until I moved in here, but it’s as unbelievable as you’d think. We’re waiting to see how things go—it was a little dodgy for a while, but it seems like we’re pulling through. If everything works out, and the pregnancy stays healthy, we’ll get a place together. For now, his parents’ is a good option.
I’m very well taken care of. You actually kind of can’t even imagine. It’s different up here.
Now that I’m through the first trimester and halfway into the second, I’m learning more about what you’re supposed to do. I don’t know any other mothers. I’m sure you don’t, either. But Gard’s been a Completionist for years and never mentioned any of this to me, so I feel a little tricked. Like for instance? It turns out it’s not just a rumor, I do have to give up my consulting practice and all my clients by the end of the year, because mothers aren’t supposed to have businesses in their own names. And my Care Circle sessions are five times a week now, even on the weekends, and some women are traveling three hours round-trip to get to them. You would not believe some of the shit they’re telling us. Mandatory nursing until the child is five. Weekly growth progress checks till age eight. Mandatory enrichment classes starting at six months. That’s just Care Standard; that’s considered the bare minimum. My Care Hours quota is already through the goddamn roof, and it just goes higher once the baby is born. So I guess it’s a good thing I have to give up my business that I spent my whole fucking career building because there’s no way I’ll have time for it now.
But as Gard loves reminding me, I’m lucky: The father and his family, they’re basically supporting me, partly because it’s easy for them and partly, I think, because they appreciate their own heroics. Gard also loves reminding me that there are mothers out there who need to work and somehow balance it with the Care Hours they have to keep, and the math doesn’t work for them any better than it does for me. Anyway. Gard’s helping me with it. Thank God for her.
I get it, I do—fertility crisis, survival of the species, “the most important job on earth has never been more important”—I get it I get it I get it. Still. I think about Mom sometimes.
Not that I’m going to do anything drastic, obviously, but I just mean, I think about what’s changed and I understand a little better, now, why she wanted a way out. A lot of people did, you know. It wasn’t just her.
Anyway. Sorry for rambling. I just got back from a Care Circle meeting and I’m in this crazy styley lake-view apartment complex for billionaires and I’m pregnant and lonely and about to lose everything I ever built for myself out of fucking nothing. But fuck, little brother, you’re in an actual fucking war.
Sorry-not-sorry, you still have to read my pity-party messages because I got naturally pregnant and I am therefore the center of the universe. Or so I keep being told.
I bet you say this a lot, over there, but I really can’t wait for this to be over. Except I’m not sure it’ll ever be over. I think it’s just starting. I bet you say that a lot, too.
BE GOOD.
F.
IN THE FIRST PLACE
He’s in the dust, and the dust is in him: in his nostrils, in his eyelashes, in his ears, packed into every scrape and scratch, sifting down his ass crack. With his eyes closed, behind his helmet’s screen, the sun filtering through the particles and the metal and the smoke in the air barely registers, a faint disk, years away. Much closer and brighter than the sun is the firefight, still happening all around him, trails of flame shoelacing above his head. But he’s been overcome, overpowered, as has been happening to him more and more, and all he can do is lie here and try to breathe and fight off the thick horrible smell of flowers, flowers blooming in heat, flowers on fire.
His squad has been trying for three days to take a raider entrenchment, hidden but lethal, bristling with snipers’ bullets. The raiders want to blow everything up, mow everything down, him included. Back home, New Cities people have started calling them terrorists. But to units like his—tasked with protecting the H2.0, and the railways that take it out and away—they’re just raiders. The ones left behind when the western states collapsed, or the ones who stayed, for reasons of their own. Even twenty-plus years into the Wars, no one seems to know how many there are. They just keep coming back and coming back, and all there is to do is breathe the dust and fight them, keep the train moving, keep the engineered water flowing, up the coast and then across the plains to the New Cities in the Midwest. If the raiders want the water, they have to step through a firestorm to get at it.
His friend Wash is screaming into his face. “Don’t you die, goddammit!” In a few short weeks he’ll find himself screaming the same thing at Wash, but Wash won’t hear him, any more than he hears Wash now.
Because bizarrely, absurdly, horribly, this is when he gets a message from his sister. Right here, in the middle of a firefight.
They must have bandwidth of some kind—they found a way to hack a satellite or an abandoned tower and transmit a wearable signal for communications within the bunker. He wishes he had the wherewithal to tell Wash as much, but his mouth is full of dust and flames and flowers and he cannot speak.
The signal is weak, so only part of the message comes through and he’ll have to redownload it later, but there it is, swimming across his retina, the message from his sister, and by flicking his focal point to the filament-thin control menu hovering at the edge of his vision he can turn on the audio stream and hear her voice in his cochlear implant, too.
I guess it’s time I told you. Gard told me to tell you.
“Don’t you die on me! Don’t you do it! Get up! Get up!”
Miracles.
“Hey, Wash. They’re right underneath us.”
FIVE
There are a lot of bad things about swimming back through a blackout into consciousness for the second time in one day. Here’s the worst thing: This time it’s not just Pop’s cat watching me find the floor with my face.
There’s a yelp of profanity—not mine—and a clatter of delicate silver tools. Part of me has landed on someone’s shoe, and the foot is yanked swiftly away. I hear people shuffling over my head and around me. Then a tense silence.
Now that I’ve fallen, I don’t plan to move ever again. My best option, as I see it, is to remain motionless facedown on the floor, onto which I seem to have rolled from the height of the reclining examination chair, some thirty inches. My head throbs freshly, and the painted concrete floor is cool under my brow. I have never wanted a drink more. That is saying something.
“Is he awake?”
“I don’t think so. Jesus, what the hell is wrong with him?”
“We should find out soon enough. That VA doctor said he’d be here within thirty minutes. He’s not far.”
“I don’t like this.”
“I don’t, either.”
The nurse pauses delicately, then whispers, “Natalie. Did you know this Rafiq was military?”
Natalie’s voice is all sharp edges. “Do you think I would have contacted him if I knew?”
They’re quiet for a moment, but not long enough for me to figure out what that means.
�
��We shouldn’t risk it. We have to move him.”
“Are you suggesting we somehow cart this guy out through the waiting room and up the stairs? You and me?”
“Obviously that is the best possible solution for everyone involved, especially a room full of terrified pregnant women and new mothers,” the nurse from reception deadpans. I hear Natalie snort. Then the two voices are quiet again, hushed into stillness by some involuntary movement I must have made, although I’m not aware of having done anything. I’m just trying to breathe as normally as a person can when he’s got blood in his mouth and up his nose and can’t turn his head because he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s conscious.
“What about the back offices,” the nurse finally whispers.
“I don’t know this Rafiq. And I don’t know this one here, either. I don’t really want either of them seeing any more of the facility than they need to,” Natalie murmurs. But then, as if she’s considering it: “How would we even get him there?”
“On a gurney.”
“Wait.” There’s a tinny-sounding beep. Someone slides a screen off a countertop.
The door whishes open and footsteps pad out. The door shuts. Natalie clears her throat. We’re alone in the small room.
“Mr. Quinn. Can you hear me?”
While I’m debating whether or how to respond, she continues in a brisk tone. “We’ve messaged Dr. Rafiq at the VA for you, and he’s on his way in now. Do you hear me?” What I hear is her kneeling down near me, the soft creaks and clicks of her joints. She’s a person who spends a lot of time on her feet. “It’s going to be all right,” she says quietly.
Behind us the door to the examination room is opened again and a lot of whishing happens at once: Natalie standing, someone entering, too many bodies in the room for its size, then the nurse saying “All right?” and Natalie saying “Thank you,” and then dry hands that are sani-ed many, many times a day (Pop and Gard, at holidays, comparing hand lotions and unguents and cracked-skin relief for hours, days) sliding together to meet, shake, slip apart. Will I get to touch Natalie’s hand again, ever? Would she be bothered? How much? I roll over halfway, prop myself up on an elbow, groan.
“This is our patient, I assume,” an amused voice says. I crack one eye open to get a look at the guy. Pop’s friend. Major Rafiq of the New Chicago Veteran’s Administration Hospital, decorated combat veteran of the First Wars, total unknown quantity.
Bushy dark hair, dark skin, smooth face. Gold-rimmed glasses. A bit of a tubber. A smile to melt butter. In a better world this guy would have been in pediatrics instead of in war zones. He squats, rests elbows on meaty thighs. I am obliged to recall that I am lying on the floor in the presence of a superior officer, but I can’t see what I can do about it at the moment.
“Major Rafiq, sir. Thanks for . . . seeing me. Sorry I dragged you away from your office.”
“That’s just what our friend here said when she called. I had to agree with her that the situation seemed to merit a house call, of a kind. And I have to agree with her that you seem”—he’s laughing, and it’s not a joy to see Natalie, over his shoulder, fixing her face with a tight, polite smile of agreement—“like you’ve wandered into the wrong office, Private.”
I nod gamely, try to shift my weight so my ass is under me instead of wedged up against the examination chair. For a moment I have the luxury of thinking there’s no way I can be more humiliated by myself, but then Rafiq swoops in and somehow gets his shoulder under my armpit and his arm around my back, and hauls me to a seated position in the patient’s chair like I’m so much dead weight, which I suppose I am, and while I have to acknowledge what is obviously the training of a man who’s lifted men off the ground in the field, it’s still embarrassing.
“Thank you,” I manage to say. Looking down at myself, I’m a nightmare. Blood down the front of my shirt, on my pants and hands. Blood must be smeared all over my face. “Would you mind if I clean up a bit?”
“Of course. Of course. Please.” He steps back. We both look at Natalie helplessly, and without a word she produces a pump dispenser of sanifoam and a wad of paper towels from the exam room cupboard and passes them to me. Her expression is carefully neutral, but again, I’ve got two older sisters, and I understand the magnitude of the effort it’s costing her to keep from rolling her eyes.
I also notice that she’s buttoned a white lab coat over her bloody scrubs. Where the coat’s buttons meet in a V, just above the lapels, is a smear of darkening red. I left that there, somehow.
As I’m sitting in the chair ineffectively swabbing at myself, Rafiq says, “You know, son, I was going to call you myself today, at the risk of jumping the trigger. Your father is an old friend, as you know. He is concerned about you. He says you have been presenting some symptoms that are giving him cause to worry, although you haven’t discussed them with him.”
A wave of fatigue crashes into me and suddenly I’m so weary I can hardly keep my head up. “That’s funny,” I reply. “I was going to come visit you today.”
“Isn’t that good,” Rafiq says gently. He glances at Natalie. “Nurse—”
“I’m not a nurse. I’m a Nurse Completionist.” She corrects him politely, but she’s clearly still on edge. “I’m afraid that as long as you’re seeing patients in my clinic, Dr. Rafiq, someone on my staff will need to be present. I’m sure you understand.”
He frowns just a bit but doesn’t press. “Of course. I’m your guest.” He turns back to me, and the Syrian Santa Claus has been replaced by a standard-issue VA doc. “Private Quinn. We’re both guests here. Our time is short; someone out there may be waiting for this very room. Let’s get down to the business of my visit. I’d like to examine you for signs of neurological and nerve damage.”
“For a nosebleed?”
Rafiq levels a calm stare at me but doesn’t dignify this with a response.
I swallow. “Sure. Fire away.”
“Do you need a—” Natalie begins to ask.
“No need. I’ve brought my own tools.” Rafiq produces a scanner and a reader from his breast pocket. His scanner’s a black scope attached to a short, thick-handled stainless steel wand, about the size of a chubby, extended forefinger, with a two-inch square display panel that flips neatly out from the top of the metal handle. The reader’s an older model—the ones we had in the military were about the size of a pack of playing cards, but Rafiq’s is bigger, about five inches by four across, and half an inch thick. “I’m a little old school,” he says apologetically. He smooths his reader over my wearable so that its surface can adhere to the wearable’s panel in my skin, much as charged iron filings will clump together. It’s the same unpleasant but essentially painless sensation that’s familiar from every med reading I’ve ever had, but the larger surface area means more electromagnets, and I can feel my skin pulling a bit more than I really like. Meanwhile, Rafiq passes the scanner’s scope over both my eyes, past both ears, under my nose, and behind my neck, at the base of my skull. The reader’s tiny needles have taken their blood sample and directly downstreamed my med-status data by the time he’s finished.
“Your nose and ears were bleeding. Do your tear ducts ever express blood or other fluids, not tears?”
I shift on the seat. “I think it’s happened once or twice.”
“From your hairline?”
“Maybe.”
“Ears ringing?”
“More or less nonstop.”
“Headaches?”
“Every day. Every hour.”
“Appetite?”
“Pretty good. I haven’t eaten yet today but usually—”
“Difficulty sleeping?”
“No,” I say honestly.
“Hm.” Rafiq nods, watching data points scroll across his display panel. “Your father tells me most nights you’re drinking until you pass out.”
It’s impossible not to glance at Natalie. When I do I find she’s watching me over Rafiq’s shoulder. She gives me a small nod.
“Well. Engineered beer is cheaper than engineered water.”
Rafiq chuckles, still reading. “You might be surprised how often I’ve heard that line, Private.” He exhales through his nose, long and slow and luxurious, so you can hear all the little hairs inside each cavernous nostril whistling. It’s a weirdly comforting sound. “Or you might not. Rashes?”
“No.”
“No?” Rafiq looks up at me. “No redness or chapping on your hands, like between the fingers? How about around the eyes, the ears, the nose? Especially after they’ve been expressing? Beneath the testes? Roof of the mouth?”
Over his shoulder, Natalie is doing a good impersonation of someone who’s not alarmed.
“Jesus, Doc. No. Thank God.”
He smiles. “Glad we can rule that out.” He leans forward, eyes glinting behind his glasses. “Any sensory issues? Trouble seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling?”
“That’s— Yes.”
“Unusual or overpowering sensations, sounds, smells?”
“Um.”
“Why don’t you describe it for me. What it’s like.” He points to my forehead. “In there.”
I look to Natalie again, but she’s busying herself with something on her handheld portal screen, frowning down at it in absorption as if she’s not listening to every word. I’m not sure yet what to make of Pop’s friend. I’m not sure how much to tell him.
“I often feel . . .” I say slowly, “as if my head is being squeezed off. Pressure, ringing, static, stuff like that. I smell—the same flower scent I used to smell in the Wars, when the H2.0 tankers would get breached. I can’t see. Often. Like right now, all day, I can’t really see—it’s like looking through a porthole, gray fog to about here.” I make a circle with my fingers, hold them over my left eye.
The Completionist Page 8
