by Drew Magary
The man looked older, perhaps in his fifties. He lay on his back, head turned to me as they wheeled him by. I could see mottling on his skin, particularly on his face. Dark violet spiderwebs had spread over his cheek and down his neck to the opening of his shirt. Copper-colored fluid drizzled out the side of his mouth, like tainted maple syrup. He hacked and wheezed violently, a disturbing half retch. It was enough for everyone lining the hall to sit up and take notice. They hurried him into one of the side rooms. One of the nurses in the battalion tailed off and let the rest go in without her. She grabbed an IV bag and a needle kit from a cart left out in the hall. She took off her latex gloves and began approaching me. She went for my arm. I saw some of the copper fluid dotted along her wrist. I reared back.
“I have directions to give you some fluids,” she said.
“Could you wash your hands before you do that?”
She was either mortified or pissed—I couldn’t tell which. “Of course.” She went back to a hand-sanitizer dispenser, squirted once, and rubbed her hands together. Again, she approached.
Again, I recoiled. “With soap and water?”
Now she was annoyed. She went to the bathroom and came back out, wiping her hands dry on her scrubs. She stuck me with the saline bag and disappeared. Two hours later I was sent for an MRI. Another two hours later, well into the next day, the molded plastic of the chair and my backside now fused together, a doctor casually appeared before me. He wasted no time. I could tell he was already thinking ten patients ahead of me.
“Your EKG looks steady, Mr. Farrell,” he said. “But the MRI shows a 95 percent blockage of one of your arteries. I think it’s clear that you suffered a mild heart attack. As long as the artery is blocked, you’re going to occasionally feel that tight discomfort.”
“Can you clear the artery?” I asked.
“No insurance will cover the cost of that. Not at your age. Can you afford to pay for this yourself? I can probably book you for something in December.”
“December? Jesus. I don’t know.”
“Well, you don’t have to decide now. Go home and talk it over with your wife.”
“That’s my sister.”
“Talk it over with your family. But don’t wait too long. You don’t want this spilling into 2060.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“Just don’t do things that will make your heart uncomfortable.”
“Can you be more specific than that?”
“Not really. Just try to take it as easy as possible. And take this.” He gave me a prescription for meds and left. Polly walked me out of the hospital to her plug-in. Thirty-six hours at the hospital, and nothing in my body had been fixed. Polly took out her bag of chips and started eating. I reached for the bag, then remembered the withered muscle beating meekly in my chest and drew back. A small pleasure, now surgically removed. Polly stopped eating out of sympathy. She studied me, not bothering to press the ignition. She didn’t want to start it up until she saw in my eyes that I was ready to go on.
I dropped my veneer of patience and began to seethe. The hospital seemed more like a mirage than a resource for medical treatment. They didn’t give a shit. They just let everyone loll around suffering. I thought back to Julia and saw her dying in ecstasy. I treated her better than any doctor would have. I helped. I went out of my way to give her what she needed.
I let the constraints of my conscience go for a moment and basked in the fulfillment of having given her a proper send-off. I embraced the memory. And suddenly everything shifted. I didn’t feel hopeless or helpless anymore. I felt charged. I felt eager to go back to work now, this very instant. Matt was right. I didn’t know this job the way the others did. But I do now. I get it.
Polly patted my shoulder and gave me a fresh bottle of water. “It’s gonna be okay, John.” She still thought I was afraid and despondent.
I sat up and addressed her, as if in perfect health. “I know that. I know precisely how I’m gonna deal with this.”
“You do?”
“You can turn on the car. I’m ready.”
DATE MODIFIED:
6/30/2059, 12:02 P.M.
“You’re a real end specialist now”
I got back home to the apartment and stripped the sheets. I called Matt. He was busy eating an Italian sub.
“Where the hell have you been?” he said. “The suspense has been making me eat.”
“I had a heart attack after finishing the ES.”
“Holy shit.” He finished his sandwich, then picked up a second one that was just like the first and began eating it. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because I was having a fucking heart attack. I went to the hospital.”
“A hospital? Oh Jesus. Those things are roach motels. You know that. You should have called me.”
“There’s a huge blockage in my arteries, and I need it fixed, and I want you to pay for it.”
“Fine. Fine. We have a guy. No hospitals. It’s our own network with the government. You won’t have to deal with that crap again.”
“Good,” I said. “Put it in writing. I want to be covered, I want to do what Ernie does, and I want more pay.”
“Well, look at you! Little puppy wants his own bone now. This is good, Johnny Boy. I’m glad you found the ES part to your satisfaction. You are officially broken in. You’re a real end specialist now, kid. Now we can start the real work. I’m telling you, John—you’ll be glad you didn’t croak from that heart attack. Business is about to boom. I can feel it. You made the right decision. You’re good at this. You’re good at death.”
DATE MODIFIED:
6/30/2059, 5:03 P.M.
That Was My Hospital
This just came up on the DC8 feed:
Thirty-Five Dead in Hospital Outbreak
By Ken Weary
Officials at Inova Fairfax Hospital confirmed that thirty-five people—including seven hospital employees—have died here since yesterday as the result of an outbreak of an unknown illness in the building.
“We do not know what this illness is or how it is spreading,” said hospital spokesperson Mary Cartwright. “But we are doing all we can to keep it contained.”
The Centers for Disease Control has sealed off the building at all points of entry. Patients and employees inside the hospital are said to be undergoing rigorous testing before being allowed back outside. Anyone with symptoms of the illness will remain sequestered at Inova Fairfax until further notice. Cartwright asked all people needing immediate medical care to go to the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington in the interim.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/1/2059, 3:10 P.M.
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
I spent the day preparing to go back to work and looking at more footage from China. Aerial shots showed entire sections of land blasted clear and clean. It all seemed so futile—empty swaths just waiting to be restocked by the fresh, burgeoning masses of humanity immediately surrounding the blast areas. They zoomed in on sections of Harbin, showing terraced palaces that had collapsed down flat, as if they had been made of cardboard. They showed the remains of recently built glass towers that had been crushed and scattered about the rest of the city like shards of ice. You could click an option alongside the KBNR feed to see some of the casualties. I never took a look.
On the WEPS I watched a story—another one—about a postmortal ambushed and killed by an involuntary organic, one of those poor old folks who somehow couldn’t access or afford the cure. I watched a story about the U.S. destroyer that got sunk in the Arctic Ocean by a Russian sub. I clicked over to music and sat around, taking up space. I longed to put my new purpose to good use.
The doorbell rang. No one ever comes to our door, but I suspected it was a hospital or police official looking to finish the paperwork for Julia’s ES. I opened up the door and saw Ken, the nice collectivist David sent to help me at the hospital. Denim shirt. Khakis. All that.
He had a look of deep concern
on his face. “I wanted to check on you, to see how you were coping.”
“Oh, it’s a blocked artery,” I said. “But I’m working on getting it fixed. It’s terribly nice of you to stop by like this.”
“I wasn’t talking about your heart.”
I paused. “Is this a sales call?”
He cocked his head and opened his eyes in surprise. “You don’t know what’s happened.”
“I guess I don’t. Why?” I grew alarmed. “What’s happened?”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.” I let Ken in. He walked past me and stopped, with his back to me for a brief moment. He turned around.
“Something happened with David,” he said.
“What’s happened? What the fuck is going on?”
Ken took out his WEPS and enlarged the screen. I saw a picture taken of the outside of a church. I could tell from the little symbol of a man with outstretched arms in a circle that it was a COM congregation. Half of the church was on fire, shrouded by a mountainous plume of thick, oily, black smoke. Ambulances and fire trucks were crisscrossed haphazardly in front, as if they had been parked there by the blind. Paramedics and congregants in casual clothing were running out of the church carrying stretchers. I made out a pregnant female victim on one of the stretchers. She had blotches of blood all over her white shirt, like red sunspots. She held her hand to her head. I couldn’t tell if she was dead or unconscious or just in a state of shock so severe that she couldn’t stand to open her eyes, to be reminded that what was happening wasn’t a fabrication. It was Sonia. To the left of the photo was a reverend wearing pleated chinos and a white shirt, trying to go back into the church but unable to because a firefighter was restraining him. People were still in that church. People he desperately had to find. But the picture told me nothing of his fate, or the fate of whatever people inside he was trying to rescue. He was frozen, agonized. Below the picture was a link to a feed report with this headline, posted thirty minutes earlier:
SEVENTY PRESUMED DEAD IN MANHATTAN CHURCH OF MAN BOMBING
I looked to Ken. “David?”
“Yes.”
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
I pointed to the woman in the picture. I knew the answer before I asked the question. “Sonia? Ella? The baby?”
“They’re all gone,” he said.
My blood cooled and my skin turned to a thick, coarse armor. “Who? Who did this?”
“We don’t know. Could be Terminal Earth. Could be any number of insurgent groups. We get threats every day. I want to assure you that we will get to the bottom of it.”
“Who the hell are you to get to the bottom of it? My son is dead. What the fuck did you people do to protect him? You just let anyone walk into that church because you think every person on earth is so fucking perfect and beautiful. And now David is gone and Sonia is gone and Nate is gone, and they’re all dead forever. Because of you.”
“You’re lashing out, John. You’re taking out your grief on—”
“Fuck you,” I hissed. “What will you do if you catch the people who did this? Huh? Stick them in a room until they’re ready to take my son’s place in your congregation?”
“Just because we don’t believe in violence doesn’t mean we don’t believe in justice.”
“Bullshit. You don’t have a fucking clue. You don’t have anything that resembles a useful solution for this. These people are a fucking mold. Not every goddamn person you come across is so precious. Some of them aren’t worth the stink off my shit. And they need to be destroyed.”
“I understand your grief. We have groups that can—”
“Get out.”
“John, this is not the right way to deal with—”
“OUT.”
He left. I stood and tried in vain to remember all I could about David and Sonia and Nate. Their hair and eyes and hands and ears. Sonia speaking low and calmly during arguments. Nate holding my hand during David’s birth. David as an infant, chewing on his own lower lip. I tried to gather it all up, like a spilled drink racing to the edge of a table. I tried to paint their commemorative portraits in my mind, but I found their memories etched in sand, quickly wiped away. All I could see was a red, spiked flame—a righteous hate that gave me the life force of both the living and the dead. At last, clarity.
The WEPS buzzed. I picked up the call. On the other end was Matt. He was holding a glass of champagne. He paused when he saw my face. “You don’t look yourself,” he said.
“I never have.”
“I have good news if you want to hear it.”
“Okay.”
“We’re cleared for hard ES’s. We can get started with paramilitary training right away. Bad. Ass.”
“Good. Good. That’s just in time. Almost divine in its timing. I’ll be right over.”
“Would you like to see the first person the tracking agency is trying to locate for us? I can send it to you.”
“Do it.”
I ended the call. Two seconds later, a ping came in. I opened the message to find a picture of a remarkably attractive blonde woman with an impossible body. Unmistakable in her ravishing beauty. I saw her name listed in the header: Solara Beck. That’s the one. That’s the blonde I’ve been looking for all this time. The girl on the corner. The girl from Dr. X’s office. The one I see in crowds even though she’s never there. The red flame burned hotter. I grabbed my gun and walked out the door. I’m ready to work. I’m ready to work right now. I have my purpose. I am the correction.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/1/2059, 9:47 P.M.
IV
CORRECTION: JUNE 2079
(TWENTY YEARS LATER)
“We weren’t afraid to love her like our own”
From Bruce’s feed:
Mrs. O’Neill’s Sheep
By Dara Hughes, iWire
Frederica was thirty-five years old when Abby O’Neill began to notice something was wrong.
“She didn’t look like herself,” says O’Neill. “You know a sheep for that long and you can tell when they aren’t right.”
O’Neill bought Freddie from a neighboring farm back in 2023, when she was just a lamb. After she grew to full adulthood, O’Neill sent her to a livestock biochemist near her family’s farm in Goshen, Connecticut, so that she could receive the cure for aging.
“This was the original vector,” says O’Neill. “Pre-Vectril days. So they had to strap Freddie down on a table and give her the three big injections. Being in there with her was a more emotional experience than I had anticipated. That’s the paradox about us farmers. I spend all day around these animals. I milk the cows. I feed the chickens. I soothe the horses when they whinny. I’ve killed my share of livestock, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for me. I care about all the animals we raise here. When you touch them and look them in the eyes, you feel like you have an understanding with them. They’re not just a tray of meat you buy at a market.”
Abby took Freddie home that night, and soon Freddie became a mainstay of the O’Neill household, providing an average of thirteen pounds of fresh wool every May, in shearing season—a good five pounds more than the average American sheep.
“We used it for everything—clothes, oven mitts, butterdish cozies,” says O’Neill. “I used to open my kid’s closets and joke that these were the closets Freddie built. We used to let Freddie into the house. We never did that with any other sheep.”
Together with her “husband,” Wally, Freddie also gave the O’Neill family a continuous supply of fresh lambs, giving birth to a new one at least once a year, sometimes twice. Two years after buying Freddie, the O’Neill family purchased two more ewes and had them injected with the vector. The family also paid to have three “master” cows and a dozen chickens given the cure, to provide the household with a seemingly endless stock of fresh veal, milk, chicken, and eggs all year long.
In addition to receiving the vector, every animal on the O’Neill farm was given vaccinations
for a range of potential illnesses, including tetanus, enterotoxemia types C and D, rabies, and foot rot. Two of the vaccines given to Freddie and the rest of the flock were influenza vaccines.
“We thought nothing of it,” says O’Neill. “It was just standard operating procedure to get the vaccinations.”
For the next three decades and beyond, Freddie and the animals on the O’Neill farm lived, by outward appearances, healthy lives. The farm continued to thrive, even as the surrounding area grew more crowded with urban transplants. But as the years progressed, unforeseen consequences of the vaccinations were preparing to manifest themselves.
“It’s impossible to know exactly how long the sheep flu strain incubated in Freddie’s body,” says biochemist Arlen Maxwell in a ping exchange. “My theory is that the strain took years to develop. The flu virus probably attacked Freddie’s body multiple times, only to be rebuffed by her immune system. But nature has an unlimited power to adapt to its environs to suit its needs—to sustain itself. It’s not unlike a group of robbers trying to get into a bank vault. They may fail the first dozen times they attempt to break in. But they’re constantly scheming, constantly trying to find a way in. As long as they go unnoticed, it’s only a matter of time before they succeed.”
And succeed they did. In early 2059 O’Neill let Freddie into the house and noticed a deep yellowing in the sheep’s eyes. She drove Freddie to a Goshen veterinarian named David Millet, who had worked with the family’s animals for years. Unable to properly diagnose Freddie, Millet suggested that O’Neill leave the sheep with him for further observation.