Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  Then a shadow fell, and something cracked like a whip past his ear. Between blows with the knife, Rafa had a brief glimpse of snakelike tentacles curling around crabbies and flicking them skyward.

  More strikes hurtled down—dozens of tentacles moving too fast for the eye to follow. Chen’s hips and shoulders reappeared.

  The surging tide began to thin as rapidly as it had arrived. Rafa ripped a crabby off his chest by one prickly sandpaper leg and sank to his knees. Now he could see Abbott’s boots and one bloody brown hand curled slightly in the dust.

  He looked up.

  The sky was blotted out by a bloated blue medusa. As he watched, several tentacles lifted with crabbies jerking helplessly at their tips, and disappeared in a cone of pulsing mandibles at the center of the pufferbelly.

  There was a gratifying munch as the tentacles came out empty.

  Rafa wobbled over to his fallen companions, kicking at the remaining crabbies that were hungry and foolish enough to brave the aerial attack. One came away from Abbott with scraps of ear dangling from a reddened claw and promptly took to its heels. It hadn’t gone five meters before it disappeared with another lightning strike from above.

  Wearily Rafa tugged at Abbott’s outstretched arms. The pufferbelly was certainly saving their lives, and he seriously doubted the surviving crabbies—if there were any—would be back. At least not while there was danger from above. But now he had to get his comrades away before the monster was ready for a second course.

  Abbott looked like he’d had an encounter with a homicidal pack of scissors. His suit was in tatters and he was bleeding from gashes and cuts in a hundred places. But he was breathing, and his head looked intact. At least he’d been lying face-down.

  Chen was in better condition. She’d collapsed into the fetal position, leaving only the tough layers of biosuit across her back exposed. The crabbies had flayed, scraped, torn—but failed to do serious damage in the aborted feast. Her eyelids fluttered as Rafa dragged her into a stand of tall grass and let her flop beside Abbott.

  It wasn’t much of a blind, but it was all he could manage.

  Rafa crouched and studied the pufferbelly through perpendicular green. It was drifting away to the northeast, snapping up stragglers, the broad ribbed membrane around its circumference fanning in silent rhythm.

  “What happened?” Chen croaked.

  “Shhh.” Rafa motioned her down and pointed.

  Chen leaned back against Abbott and closed her eyes. “Not safe here.”

  “It’s not after us. At least for now.”

  “The crabbies.”

  “They’re busy saving their own skins.”

  Chen became conscious of the form behind her. She rolled to her knees with a groan and placed dirty fingers along the artery at Abbott’s throat.

  Rafa looked a question.

  “Still going strong,” Chen said, her voice sounding a bit more alive. “Looks pretty torn up, but I’d guess the main danger is infection.”

  They lapsed into a silence punctuated by occasional dry coughs from Abbott and the hoarseness of their breathing. Rafa had used his broken arm as a bludgeon in the battle, adrenaline masking the pain. Now it throbbed in excruciating reproach.

  Chen’s water bottle had somehow survived the attack. They drank greedily, their thirst sweetening the mildewed taste.

  A gust of wind rustled the meager camouflage, giving Rafa a peek at the pufferbelly. It was now floating toward them, its tentacles retracted and motionless.

  So much for distractions.

  “Think you can stand?”

  “Not a chance.” Chen was stretching out again, her eyes closed.

  “We’re about to have company.”

  “Then again, maybe I was wrong.” Chen swayed unsteadily to her feet, clutching Rafa’s arm for support. When she let go, Rafa bent over and lifted Abbott’s body onto his shoulders. His knees nearly gave out, but he forced legs to straighten by sheer will, the veins popping out on his forehead like an Olympic weightlifter.

  They headed toward a small stand of trees—barely more than bushes, actually—that seemed infinitely far but was probably only a couple hundred meters to the west. It required every ounce of stamina and determination for Rafa to go the distance. Twice he stumbled and nearly dropped his burden. He didn’t have the energy to look back; every step he expected a fleshy feeler to circle his waist.

  The low-ceilinged shade enfolded them a few seconds before the pufferbelly arrived. It reached through the greenery, its now-wine-colored tentacles curling with eerie ken toward the spot where they crouched.

  Rafa drew his knife again.

  But the battle never began. Just as Rafa was steeling himself, the tentacles pulled back through the branches, leaving the vikings wide-eyed and panting with relief.

  * * *

  They huddled around a small fire, their shoulders rounded to the velvet night, their faces animated by leaping hues of gold and scarlet. Smoke from alien branches rose in a noxious cloud through the leafy ceiling and up to a swath of unfamiliar stars.

  Abbott had revived at sunset, while Chen was applying butterfly bandages to his lacerations.

  They fed him a triple dose of pain relievers and broad spectrum antibiotics and divvied up what was left of the water. And they tried not to dwell on the dangers that descending darkness might bring.

  Dinner consisted of a ration bar broken into three tiny portions, plus a few vitamin capsules. Rafa’s hip pouch had been shredded by the crabbies, its contents strewn into the savannah; that left a handful of bars from Chen and Abbott to sustain them until they reached the module.

  The GPS showed that the vikings were scarcely four kilometers closer to their goal than they had been in the morning. The crabbies had indeed bent their headlong flight.

  Rafa had foregone painkillers in view of their short supply and Abbott’s injuries. His own lacerations were unpleasant but tolerable, but the broken arm screamed in protest with every knife stroke on the tip of his makeshift spear. He grimaced.

  Chen observed his steady whittling without expression. “Think it’ll do any good?” she asked softly.

  “What?”

  “Your spear.”

  Rafa looked at her across the flames.

  “Can’t hurt.”

  Abbott stopped humming Amazing Grace and shook his head. “Easier to let ‘em get us. Put us out of our misery.”

  Rafa kept whittling.

  Finally Chen stood up and walked stiffly behind Rafa’s back to the edge of the flickering light. There was the muted sound of a zipper and a rustling of leaves.

  When she returned, she sank to her knees next to Rafa and spread her hands to the warmth.

  “You’re a runner, aren’t you?”

  Rafa nodded. “Coached at UCLA.”

  “You could have left us today.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You could have.”

  “Believe me, that run was no picnic.”

  Chen shook her head insistently. “You stopped because we did.”

  Rafa stared straight ahead at the glowing coals.

  When she saw that he didn’t intend to respond, Chen cleared her throat. “Anyway, thank you. I used to think you were a first-class jerk.” Her voice sounded shaky.

  Rafa nodded, still not meeting her gaze.

  Abbott stirred awkwardly in the silence, the mahogany tint of his face and hands contrasting starkly with the white bandages. “Still can’t believe we’re alive. It’s a miracle.”

  Rafa stabbed the glowing ashes with his spear point. “I’m not sure I believe in miracles anymore.”

  Chen looked at him curiously. “Why? What have you got against God? You’re the one who’s always praying.”

  “Let’s just say life hasn’t been kind to me.”

  “Now there we’ve got something in common.”

  Abbot spoke in a tired gasp without opening his eyes. “All of us.”

  There was a pregnant pause.
/>   “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Chen. “Let’s have a pity party. You go first.”

  Abbott smiled thinly. “You want the short, dramatic version?”

  “No need to abridge. We’re a captive audience.”

  “Well, either way, it’s not much of a story. My family moved to Denver from Jamaica when I was a kid. I grew up on the streets in the worst part of the city. Made it through high school. Barely. Dad got killed by a drunk driver, and I had to work nights to support my mom and my little sisters. Couldn’t do it. So I started dealing crack, heroin, and ecstasy. Pays better than fast food, you know.”

  A breeze blew the rolling smoke into Abbott’s face. He choked and gagged until it gusted away.

  “Of course I got a habit myself. Broke my mom’s heart. I couldn’t stand to be around her. Moved out as soon as I graduated. Got married, had a couple kids. Split up, got married again. My ex died in childbirth and I ended up with all three little ones. The new missus didn’t like that at all. Started dipping into my merchandise. Pretty soon she was in even deeper than me. Got nailed for possession and robbery.

  “I was no kind of father, so I sent the kids to live with my mom. Then she got one of those TB strains that are impossible to kill. Didn’t look good at all. I was waiting for my wife to get parole. We were going to work the whole thing out, check into a treatment program together. But the TB kind of made everything more urgent.

  “I took the kids back and went straight. That lasted about four months—long enough to get a divorce and a job and get married again. Ruth. Amazing woman.”

  Abbott smiled bitterly. “Once the kids had a mother watching out for them, I was back like a dog to its vomit. Pretty soon I was doing ten years for assault and grand larceny and dealing. Ruth stuck by me the whole time. I got a good old-fashioned letter once a week, watched Simon’s handwriting grow up, saw Angel and James get taller in all the pictures she sent along.

  “I swore I would go straight when I got out. And I did. Ruth cried. The kids cried. I cried. It lasted about a week.

  “Then an old buddy looked me up and I was off the bandwagon again. Lived on the streets for almost a month. Ruth threw me out. Simon spit in my face. I tried to stay too high to notice. Ended up in a hospital. They would only keep me until the worst of the OD wore off, not for rehab. But I had a couple days to think. Wanted to kill myself. Came close a few times.

  “Only thing that stopped me was Ruth. I’d been awful to her, and maybe suicide would make it worse. Or maybe not. I argued back and forth, finally decided to flip a coin. Heads I jumped in front of traffic as soon as I walked out the hospital door, tails I signed up as a viking so they’d send me somewhere I’d have to stay straight. I figured either way I’d be dead, and I was rooting for heads all the way because it was quicker and easier. But it came up tails four times in a row.”

  Rafa studied him keenly. For the first time he could relate to a fellow viking as more than a despicable criminal. “So here you are.”

  “Here I am. And I’ve sworn off coin-flipping.” A lopsided hint of a smile played across Abbott’s torn and bloody lips.

  Chen sighed softly, her cheeks swelling as she puffed strands of hair out of her eyes. “You picked a pretty drastic way to kick the habit.”

  Abbott shrugged. “Always knew I’d pay the piper, one way or another. Never thought it’d end like this. But at least if I die, I die clean. Hopefully my kids will forgive me someday.”

  “And Ruth?”

  Abbott’s eyes silently filled with tears. He stared into the fire.

  The trio was silent for several minutes, each lost in private reflection. Temperatures were beginning to drop. From the fringes of the darkness, a low trilling floated, just different enough from an earthly cricket chorus to accentuate the alienness of the environment. Chen leaned hesitantly against Rafa’s shoulder and studied his granite-hard features for a response.

  After a moment, Rafa rose stiffly and limped into the darkness without a word, leaves and twigs crackling under the tread of heavy boots. He returned dragging some branches with his good arm and began to methodically snap them underfoot to feed the flames.

  “I’m cold,” he said shortly, as he slumped back to his knees near Abbott.

  Chen cocked her head sideways and smiled a frozen, melancholy little smile at her feet.

  Abbott grunted and gestured at her. “Your turn.”

  Without looking up, she pushed back some errant strands of hair with bandaged fingers. “I was in medical school. Wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, believe it or not.”

  “You finish?”

  Chen snickered derisively. “Not hardly. I barely squeaked out a PA.”

  Abbott looked confused.

  “Physician’s Assistant. It’s enough to do triage in an emergency room, stitches, broken bones, stuff like that.”

  Rafa spoke up. “It’s a good training.”

  “Oh, excellent. Wonderful! It got me this job, didn’t it?” Chen’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. When nobody responded, her tone softened. “Actually you’re right. I think I might have learned to like it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ebola-Janeiro.”

  Pity washed across Rafa’s face. “How long ago?” he asked quietly.

  “Two and a half years.” Chen stared at the glowing embers by her feet as if the conversation was ended.

  Abbott looked at Rafa questioningly.

  Rafa cleared his throat. “It’s a virus. Doesn’t kill you outright, like some of its relatives. Doesn’t completely destroy the immune system, like HIV. But it’s about as nasty as they get.”

  “Contagious?”

  “Not right now.”

  Chen nodded confirmation. “Only during an attack, when you bleed. Or when you’re first infected and still asymptomatic.”

  “Which is how it spreads,” Rafa supplemented.

  Again Chen nodded. “That’s how I got it. Same stupidity as everyone else. I was sleeping with one of my professors. To pad my test scores.” She shook her head angrily. “He had his first tremors during our final. Next week he was in the hospital.”

  When Chen lapsed into silence Rafa again explained. “It came from Ebola-Zaire back in the ‘30s. Some geneticists were looking for a cure, came up with RADP.”

  Still Abbott looked stumped.

  “Cycle mike. Joak. Wheel of fortune.”

  Now a mixture of understanding and disbelief dawned in Abbott’s eyes. “You a joak junkie?”

  Chen did not respond, so Rafa continued.

  “It was supposed to be a miracle cure. Triggered a massive immune response that killed 99.9% of the virus within seventy-two hours. Problem was the one-in-a-thousand survivors. Some mutated. Pretty soon there was a strain that didn’t quite match the original genetic fingerprint. An RADP treatment would still knock it down, but dormant populations could survive in a few infected cells, and come back for later waves of infection.

  Chen chimed in. “When RADP activates infected cells, they commit suicide to kill the virus. But in the process they excrete a neurotoxin that gives you a sustained high. And because the infection is never totally defeated, the high repeats itself with every treatment.”

  Abbott shook his head slowly. “Joak’s bad news. The worst. Never dealt it myself because it scared me half to death. But I knew a pimp once. Infected all his girls, kept them working when they were dangerous, and then made a fortune off their customers. Till one tracked him down and blew him away.”

  “It’s expensive,” Chen said in a flat voice. “Ten times as much as crack. And ten times as illegal.”

  Rafa added a couple branches to the fire. “It was ugly the way they stamped it out. I still remember watching soldiers march down the street in a line, going house to house. I was a kid. It scared me to death. But I guess the government had to do it or there’d be a guy like that pimp on every corner.”

  Chen shrugged. “The raids were just like joak; they eliminated almost all the add
icts and dealers. Almost all. The ones they left were more dangerous than ever. The official story got everybody feeling safe and cheerful again, but of course the virus was still out there. And anybody who had it was desperate to stay off the radar, so they passed along the disease in silence. Some of them even did it on purpose, I think. I used to wonder with my professor.”

  “How did you get money?”

  “Medical school’s an expensive proposition; I had enough from student loans to survive the first episode. Thought about suing. But the good doctor was going broke in a hurry on his own habit. It wouldn’t have done any good, and besides, I was a consenting adult. I wasn’t much of a burglar, and I didn’t have any rich relatives. Tried to take the second attack on my own and just about died of renal failure. So I became a licensed, bonded call girl.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she couldn’t hide a slight quaver.

  “They let you, you know. As long as you test clean of all the common diseases and sign an affidavit certifying that you’re not dangerous.”

  “But how could you pass the screening?”

  Chen snorted. “I had loads of my own blood and tissue samples from labs and what-not. Some of them were from my first semester at school, when I was still clean. The tech was careless, and I swapped samples. Pretty easy, actually.” Her lips twisted. “After my ‘job interview’ I was in business. I went to class all day, worked all night. Made just enough money to support my habit.

  “In a few months I was going nowhere and didn’t care anymore, so I nipped out of school as quick as I could and started working at a local hospital.

  “That didn’t last long. I got premium rates as a call girl, and it paid better than a real job. Pretty soon I was doing it full time and hitting the joak harder than ever.”

  “Didn’t you get busted?”

  Chen laughed bitterly. “Supervisors can only afford to hassle the cheap girls. My customers were movers and shakers that might have sued if they knew I was infected. Some of the regulars would have quit coming if I wasn’t available. Besides, they could hardly admit that they knew what I had, and stay out of jail themselves.”