Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “You drive,” Simon said when we reached the car. “There’s gas in the tank and extra gas in jericans in the trunk. And a little food and more bottled water. You drive and I’ll sit in back and keep her steady.”

  I started the car and drove slowly uphill, past the split-rail fence and the moonlit ocotillo toward the highway.

  Spin

  A few miles up the road and a safe distance from the Condon farm I pulled over and told Simon to get out.

  “What,” he said, “here?”

  “I need to examine Diane. I need you to get the flashlight out of the trunk and hold it for me. Okay?”

  He nodded, wide-eyed.

  Diane hadn’t said a word since we’d left the ranch. She had simply lain across the backseat with her head in Simon’s lap, drawing breath. Her breathing had been the loudest sound in the car.

  While Simon stood by, flashlight in hand, I stripped off my blood-soaked clothing and washed myself as thoroughly as I could—a bottle of mineral water with a little gasoline to strip away the filth, a second bottle to rinse. Then I put on clean Levi’s and a sweatshirt from my luggage and a pair of latex gloves from the medical kit. I drank a third bottle of water straight down. Then I had Simon angle the light on Diane while I looked at her.

  She was more or less conscious but too groggy to put together a fully coherent sentence. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, almost anorexically thin, and dangerously feverish. Her BP and pulse were elevated, and when I listened to her chest her lungs sounded like a child sucking a milk shake through a narrow straw.

  I managed to get her to swallow a little water and an aspirin on top of it. Then I ripped the seal on a sterile hypodermic.

  “What’s that?” Simon asked.

  “General-purpose antibiotic.” I swabbed her arm and with some difficulty located a vein. “You’ll need one, too.” And me. The heifer’s blood had undoubtedly been loaded with live CVWS bacteria.

  “Will that cure her?”

  “No, Simon, I’m afraid it won’t. A month ago it might have. Not anymore. She needs medical attention.”

  “You’re a doctor.”

  “I may be a doctor, but I’m not a hospital.”

  “Then maybe we can take her into Phoenix.”

  I thought about that. Everything I’d learned during the flickers suggested that an urban hospital would be swamped at best, a smoldering ruin at worst. But maybe not.

  I took out my phone and scrolled through its memory for a half-forgotten number.

  Simon said, “Who’re you calling?”

  “Someone I used to know.”

  His name was Colin Hinz, and we had roomed together back at Stony Brook. We kept in touch a little. Last I’d heard from him he was working management at St. Joseph’s in Phoenix. It was worth a try—now, before the sun came up and scrubbed telecommunications for another day.

  I entered his personal number. The phone rang a long while but eventually he picked up and said, “This better be good.”

  I identified myself and told him I was maybe an hour out of town with a casualty in need of immediate attention—someone close to me.

  Colin sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, Tyler. St. Joe’s is working, and I hear the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale is open, but we both have minimal staff. There are conflicting reports from other hospitals. But you won’t get quick attention anywhere, sure as hell not here. We’ve got people stacked up outside the doors—gunshot wounds, attempted suicides, auto accidents, heart attacks, you name it. And cops on the doors to keep them from mobbing Emerg. What’s your patient’s condition?”

  I told him Diane was late-stage CVWS and would probably need airway support soon.

  “Where the fuck did she pick up CVWS? No, never mind—doesn’t matter. Honestly, I’d help you if I could, but our nurses have been doing parking-lot all night and I can’t promise they’d give your patient any priority, even with a word from me. In fact it’s pretty much a sure thing she wouldn’t even be assessed by a physician for another twenty-four hours. If any of us live that long.”

  “I’m a physician, remember? All I need is a little gear to support her. Ringer’s, an airway kit, oxygen—”

  “I don’t want to sound callous, but we’re wading through blood here…you might ask yourself whether it’s really worthwhile supporting a terminal CVWS case, given what’s happening. If you’ve got what you need to keep her comfortable—”

  “I don’t want to keep her comfortable. I want to save her life.”

  “Okay…but what you described is a terminal situation, unless I misunderstood.” In the background I could hear other voices demanding his attention, a generalized rattle of human misery.

  “I need to take her somewhere,” I said, “and I need to get her there alive. I need the supplies more than I need a bed.”

  “We’ve got nothing to spare. Tell me if there’s anything else I can do for you. Otherwise, I’m sorry, I have work to do.”

  I thought frantically. Then I said, “Okay, but the supplies—anywhere I can pick up Ringer’s, Colin, that’s all I ask.”

  “Well—”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well…I shouldn’t be telling you this, but St. Joe’s has a deal with the city under the civil emergency plan. There’s a medical distributor called Novaprod north of town.” He gave me an address and simple directions. “The authorities put a National Guard unit up there to protect it. That’s our primary source for drugs and hardware.”

  “They’ll let me in?”

  “If I call up and tell them you’re coming, and if you have some ID to show.”

  “Do that for me, Colin. Please.”

  “I will if I can get a line out. The phones are unreliable.”

  “If there’s a favor I can do in return…”

  “Maybe there is. You used to work in aerospace, right? Perihelion?”

  “Not recently, but yes.”

  “Can you tell me how much longer all this is going to last?” He half whispered the question, and suddenly I could hear the fatigue in his voice, the unadmitted fear. “I mean, one way or the other?”

  I apologized and told him I simply didn’t know—and I doubted anyone at Perihelion knew more than I did.

  He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “It’s just galling, the idea that we could go through all this and burn out in a couple of days and never know what it was all about.”

  “I wish I could give you an answer.”

  Someone on the other end of the line began calling his name. “I wish a lot of things,” he said. “Gotta go, Tyler.”

  I thanked him again and clicked off.

  Dawn was still a few hours away.

  Simon had been standing a few yards from the car, staring up at the starry sky and pretending not to listen. I waved him back and said, “We have to get going.”

  He nodded meekly. “Did you find help for Diane?”

  “Sort of.”

  He accepted the answer without asking for details. But before he bent to get in the car he tugged at my sleeve and said, “There…what do you suppose that is, Tyler?”

  He was pointing at the western horizon, where a gently curving silver line arced through five degrees of the night sky. It looked as if someone had scratched an enormous, shallow letter C out of the blackness.

  “Maybe a condensation trail,” I said. “A military jet.”

  “At night? Not at night.”

  “Then I don’t know what it is, Simon. Come on, get in—we don’t have time to waste.”

  We made better time than I expected. We reached the medical supply warehouse, a numbered unit in a dreary industrial park, with time to spare before sunrise. I presented my ID to the nervous National Guardsman posted at the entrance; he handed me over to another Guardsman and a civilian employee who walked me through the aisles of shelving. I found what I needed and a third Guardsman helped me carry it to the car, though he backed off quickly when he saw Diane gasping in the backseat. “Lu
ck to you,” he said, his voice shaking a little.

  I took the time to set up an IV drip, the bag jury-rigged to the jacket hanger in the car, and showed Simon how to monitor the flow and make sure she didn’t snag the line in her sleep. (She didn’t wake even when I put the needle in her arm.)

  Simon waited until we were back on the road before he asked, “Is she dying?”

  I gripped the wheel a little tighter. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Where are we taking her?”

  “We’re taking her home.”

  “What, all the way across country? To Carol and E.D.’s house?”

  “Right.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because I can help her there.”

  “That’s a long drive. I mean, the way things are.”

  “Yes. It might be a long drive.”

  I glanced into the backseat. He stroked her head, gently. Her hair was limp and matted with perspiration. His hands were pale where he had washed off the blood.

  “I don’t deserve to be with her,” he said. “I know this is my fault. I could have left the ranch when Teddy did. I could have gotten help.”

  Yes, I thought. You could have.

  “But I believed in what we were doing. Probably you don’t understand that. But it wasn’t just the red calf, Tyler. I was certain we’d be raised up imperishable. That in the end we’d be rewarded.”

  “Rewarded for what?”

  “Faith. Perseverance. Because from the very first time I set eyes on Diane I had a powerful feeling we’d be part of something spectacular, even if I didn’t wholly comprehend it. That one day we’d stand together before the throne of God—no less than that. ‘This generation shall not pass away till all be ful filled.’ Our generation, even if we took a wrong turn at first. I admit, things happened at those New Kingdom rallies that seem shameful to me now. Drunkenness, lechery, lies. We turned our backs on that, which was good; but it seemed like the world got a little smaller when we weren’t among people who were trying to build the chiliasm, however imperfectly. As if we’d lost a family. And I thought, well, if you look for the cleanest and simplest path, that should take you in the right direction. ‘In your patience possess ye your souls.’”

  “Jordan Tabernacle,” I said.

  “It’s easy to set prophecy against the Spin. Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, it says in Luke. Well, here we are. The powers of heaven shaken. But it isn’t—it isn’t—”

  He seemed to lose the thought.

  “How’s her breathing back there?” But I didn’t really need to ask. I could hear every breath she took, labored but regular. I just wanted to distract him.

  “She’s not in distress,” Simon said. Then he said, “Please, Tyler. Stop and let me out.”

  We were traveling east. There was surprisingly little traffic on the interstate. Colin Hinz had warned me about congestion around Sky Harbor airport, but we’d bypassed that. Out here we’d encountered only a few passenger cars, though there were a good many vehicles abandoned on the shoulder. “That’s not a good idea,” I said.

  I looked in the mirror and saw Simon knuckling tears out of his eyes. At that moment he looked as vulnerable and bewildered as a ten-year-old at a funeral.

  “I only ever had two signposts in my life,” he said. “God and Diane. And I betrayed them both. I waited too long. You’re kind to deny it, but she’s dying.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I don’t want to be with her and know I could have prevented this. I would as soon die in the desert. I mean it, Tyler. I want to get out.”

  The sky was growing light again, an ugly violet glow more like the arc in a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp than anything wholesome or natural.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  Simon gave me a startled look. “What?”

  “I don’t care how you feel. The reason you should stay with Diane is that we have a difficult drive ahead of us and I can’t take care of her and steer at the same time. And I’m going to have to sleep sooner or later. If you take the wheel once in a while we won’t have to stop except for food and fuel.” If we could find any. “If you drop out it’ll double the travel time.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “She may not be dying, Simon, but she’s exactly as sick as you think she is, and she will die if she doesn’t get help. And the only help I know about is a couple of thousand miles from here.”

  “Heaven and earth are passing away. We’re all going to die.”

  “I can’t speak for heaven and earth. I refuse to let her die as long as I have a choice.”

  “I envy you that,” Simon said quietly.

  “What? What could you possibly envy?”

  “Your faith,” he said.

  A certain kind of optimism was still possible, but only at night. It wilted by daylight.

  I drove into the Hiroshima of the rising sun. I had stopped worrying that the light itself would kill me, though it probably wasn’t doing me any good. That any of us had survived the first day was a mystery—a miracle, Simon might have said. It encouraged a certain rough practicality: I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and tried to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the hemisphere of orange fire levitating out of the horizon.

  The day grew hotter. So did the interior of the car, despite the overworked air-conditioning. (I was running it hard in an effort to keep Diane’s body temperature under control.) Somewhere between Albuquerque and Tucumcari a great wave of fatigue washed over me. My eyelids drifted closed and I nearly ran the car into a mile marker. At which point I pulled over and turned off the engine. I told Simon to fill the tank from the jericans and get ready to take the wheel. He nodded reluctantly.

  We were making better time than I’d anticipated. Traffic had been light to nearly nonexistent, maybe because people were afraid of being on the road by themselves. While Simon put gas in the car I said, “What did you bring for food?”

  “Only what I could grab from the kitchen. I had to hurry. See for yourself.”

  I found a cardboard box among the dented jericans and packaged medical supplies and loose bottles of mineral water in the trunk. It contained three boxes of Cheerios, two cans of corned beef, and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. “Jesus, Simon.”

  He winced at what I had to remind myself he considered a blasphemy. “That was all I could find.”

  And no bowls or spoons. But I was as hungry as I was sleep deprived. I told Simon we ought to let the engine cool off, and while it did we sat in the shade of the car, windows rolled down, a gritty breeze coming off the desert, the sun suspended in the sky like high noon on the surface of Mercury. We used the torn-off bottoms of empty plastic bottles as makeshift cups and ate Cheerios moistened with tepid water. It looked and tasted like mucilage.

  I briefed Simon on the next leg of the trip, reminded him to turn on the air-conditioning once we were underway, told him to wake me if there seemed to be trouble on the road ahead.

  Then I tended to Diane. The IV drip and the antibiotics seemed to have bolstered her strength, but only marginally. She opened her eyes and said, “Tyler,” after I helped her drink a little water. She accepted a few spoonfuls of Cheerios but turned her head away after that. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes listless and inattentive.

  “Bear with me,” I said. “Just a little longer, Diane.” I adjusted her drip. I helped her sit up, legs splayed out of the car, while she passed a little brownish urine. Then I sponged her off and switched her soiled panties for a pair of clean cotton briefs from my own suitcase.

  When she was comfortable again I stuffed a blanket into the narrow gap between the front and back seats to make a space where I could stretch out without displacing her. Simon had napped only briefly during the first leg of the trip and must have been as exhausted as I was…but he hadn’t been beaten with a rifle butt. The place where Brother Aaron had clubbed me was swollen and rang like a bell when I put my fingers anywhere near
it.

  Simon watched all this from a couple of yards away, his expression sullen or possibly jealous. When I called him he hesitated and looked longingly across the salt-pan desert, deep into the heart of nothing at all.

  Then he loped back to the car, downcast, and slid behind the wheel.

  I compressed myself into my niche behind the front seat. Diane seemed to be unconscious, but before I slept I felt her press her hand against mine.

  When I woke it was night again, and Simon had pulled over to trade places.

  I climbed out of the car and stretched. My head still throbbed, my spine felt as if it had cramped into a permanent geriatric gnarl, but I was more alert than Simon, who crawled into the back and was instantly asleep.

  I didn’t know where we were except that we were on I-40 heading east and the land was less arid here, irrigated fields stretching out on either side of the road under crimson moonlight. I made sure Diane was comfortable and breathing without distress and I left the front and rear doors open for a couple of minutes to air out the stink, a sickroom smell overlaid with hints of blood and gasoline. Then I took the driver’s seat.

  The stars above the road were distressingly few and impossible to recognize. I wondered about Mars. Was it still under a Spin membrane or had it been cut loose like the Earth? But I didn’t know where in the sky to look and I doubted I’d know it if I saw it. I did see—couldn’t help seeing—the enigmatic silvery line Simon had pointed out back in Arizona, the one I had mistaken for a contrail. It was even more prominent tonight. It had moved from the western horizon almost to the zenith, and the gentle curve had become an oval, a flattened letter O.

  The sky I was looking at was three billion years older than the one I had last seen from the lawn of the Big House. I supposed it could harbor all kinds of mysteries.

  Once we were in motion I tried the dashboard radio, which had been silent the night before. Nothing digital was coming in, but I did eventually locate a local station on the FM band—the kind of small-town station usually devoted to country music and Christianity, but tonight it was all talk. I learned a lot before the signal finally faded into noise.