by Coy, David
Joan snatched the key from his hand. She went inside and got her bearings. Eddie’s room would be the nicer one in the back. She headed straight for it. The bed was unmade. She got down on her knees and flapped back the covers hanging over the cheap metal frame.
Nothing.
She went down the hall and into Peter’s room. She looked under his neatly made bed.
There they were. A cluster of brown bottles in a thick plastic bag.
“Christ . . .”
She stomped back to the truck and tossed the bag onto the seat. Eddie ignored it.
“Look what I found—and in Peter’s room. Nice trick.”
“So? They’re not mine.”
Joan shut her eyes and sighed. She had no idea Eddie could be so incorrigible, such a liar, denying the truth when it was right in front of him. She suddenly felt sorry for him. He was lost. It was hard enough to live and work in the Commonwealth without the stigma of Thief hanging over your head. He’d made his life all the more difficult, maybe impossible. She could see him now on Earth’s streets a year from now, just one of the nameless mass of homeless scavengers—all because of this.
“No. They’re not yours. They belong to the clinic.”
She fixed him with her gaze. Maybe she could give him another chance. “Eddie, do you know what you’ve done?”
“I haven’t done anything,” he said stiffly.
“Don’t you really know?”
“No. I said I haven’t done anything.”
Well, there was only so much she could do. She had her own welfare to consider, too. There were strict and fast rules to be followed in such cases. If she failed to make the report, she could be held partially responsible. She didn’t have a choice in the matter. She would have to file the report, annotate his records and have it notarized. She’d fire him of course, cancel his contract legally, and send him home. He’d be lucky ever to get another deal. That was the price of thievery in the Commonwealth. That was all the punishment there would ever be.
Speaking calmly, she explained all this to him. While she did, Eddie just stared ahead, tight mouthed, blood drying on his upper lip.
Eddie finally turned toward her. She thought for a second he was going to cry, his eyes just starting to fill with tears. Those tears brought her very close to taking it all back.
Without warning, he opened the door, dashed out of the truck and ran toward the jungle at full speed.
“Eddie!”
Joan dashed out after him. Her legs pumped as hard as they would go but were no match for the wiry springs of a fourteen-year-old boy.
“Eddie, come back!”
He ran until he reached the perimeter, then vanished into the green as if he’d never existed. Fifty yards behind him, Joan stopped short at the jungle’s edge, knowing better than to try to follow him into that viney wilderness.
“Eddie! Come back, goddamnit! Eddie!”
She called and waited for a quarter hour, walking up and back, yelling for him at the top of her lungs until she was hoarse. Finally, she went back to the truck, swearing at herself for not grabbing him before he got away, for hitting him, for being so hard on him.
Christ, he’s just a kid. What was I doing?
* * *
When Joan got back to the clinic, Rachel was busy at the controls of the scanner. Mike was lying as still as death on the examination table, waiting and worrying. Joan rested a hand on his arm briefly as she passed by. He brightened.
She put her thoughts about Eddie to rest for the moment.
Mike needed her.
“Do you have it figured out?” Joan asked.
“Well, I think so. It doesn’t seem as dangerous as I thought, but there're still some risks. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” she said flatly.
Rachel took a deep breath.
“Well, get on the table, then. I’m just about ready.”
Joan reached in her pocket and took out a vial of Xercodan and popped the lid.
“What’s that?” Rachel asked.
“The pain killer, like you said.”
“Uh, you can’t use it after all.”
“How come?”
“Because you have to tell me when the heat gets too hot. If you use that stuff, you may not be able to tell, and I could hurt you.”
“Great . . .”
“Sorry.”
Joan climbed onto the table and Rachel pushed it into the tube.
“All set?” Rachel asked loudly.
Her voice had a slight echo to it from inside the hard white tube. “Yes.”
“I have to actually do a scan to get it set up, so wait a second.”
There was a hum inside the tube, and Joan felt a slight tingle in her left foot that got wider and smaller and shifted from foot to foot as Rachel changed the focus.
“Well, that’s easy enough,” Rachel’s voice echoed.
There was a pause when nothing at all seemed to happen. “OH, so that’s what that is . . . hang on. Sorry.”
Another pause. Joan coughed nervously. The sound rang hollow in the tube.
Rachel stuck her head in the tube.
“I think I’ve got it. You let me know the second it starts to feel too strange or hot.”
“You bet.”
Rachel’s head vanished.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
There was a deep hum and Joan’s feet felt as if they’d been dunked in hot water. As the seconds passed, the scanner’s heat built up and up, making her finally wince, then grimace. “That’s pretty hot!”
“Is it too hot?”
“Pretty much!”
“Okay. I’ll turn it down a little.”
Joan was expecting the feeling to subside, to cool, but it didn’t. It didn’t get any hotter, either.
“How’s that?”
“Hot.”
“Can you stand it?”
“For how long?”
“A minute longer. You’re almost done.”
“You didn’t just say that.”
“C’mon. It was funny.”
“Not on this side of the fucking machine.”
Joan winced and grimaced and puffed and sweated.
Finally, the hum inside the tube stopped and, with it, the heat. By the time Rachel rolled her out of the tube, there was no sensation of heat whatsoever.
“How’d I do?”
“Great. Now all we have to do is see if the temperature you just endured will kill the larvae.”
“That wasn’t fun.”
“Sorry,” Rachel said, helping her to her feet.
“And good job. Give some of the painkiller to Mike. I know where the upper temperature limit is now.”
The Xercodan put Mike right to sleep. They put him in the scanner, and Rachel irradiated him, keeping a close eye on the thermometer as she stepped up the energy. A few minutes later, Rachel scanned Mike’s tissues and couldn’t find a single larva that was moving. They left him right in the tube and checked him again an hour later to be sure. There was still no movement.
“His body will absorb the dead organisms in time, and I think the swelling will go down fairly soon. All we can do now is keep an eye on him and let him rest.”
“So he’s cured, do you think?”
“Well, the things are dead.”
Joan carried him all the way to her shelter and put him in the bed in the spare bedroom. When she tucked him in, he was still sound asleep.
She left the shelter and headed back to her office. On the way, she stopped and told security about Eddie Silk—but only that he was upset and had run into the jungle. The guard looked at her as if she were nuts, but she finally convinced him Eddie was stressed over the death of his mother—stressed enough to run into the green. She didn’t say a word about the drugs; she’d worry about that later. She hated to lie, but if he didn’t make it out, it wouldn’t matter much anyway.
16
She’d gone over it in her head a thousand times. Lo
oking down from the shuttle, she’d seen the installation and the clean-cut edge of the jungle’s perimeter. She let the thought, the evil thought, that perhaps she’d missed the installation, somehow walked past it, exist just long enough to shove it back down into the dark pit from whence it came.
She had to be on course, she just had to be. It couldn’t be that far.
Please let me be on course.
She checked the time. It would be dark in another three hours. She would continue for one more hour, then stop for the night. That would be enough for one day.
The sleeves to her coveralls were frayed and tattered from the constant abrasion of vines and rough limbs on cotton. Her face stung in a dozen places, and she had a patch on her leg that burned like fire. She wanted to take a look at it, but not yet. Just a few more steps then she’d take a little rest.
She finally stopped and sat on a moss-covered limb a full meter thick. She untied the vine from around her ankle and pulled up her pants leg. The rash was right along her shin in a narrow, raised and angry line. It burned when she touched it. She had no idea what had caused it. Her best guess was that some crawler had left a noxious trail on her leg during the night; but, for all she knew, something "hazardous" in a blowing leaf had come into contact with her skin.
She lowered the pants leg and retied the vine around her ankle, promising herself she’d bathe the spot when and if she came across clean water again.
She stared out into the formless mass and wished she could see something else, anything else for only a moment. A wide ocean vista with cool, blowing wind and clean, blue air would be nice.
She snorted at the absurdity of it.
She rose heavily off the limb and continued on. With one stumbling, awkward step after another, she fought her way through the tangle.
The ground under her feet began to get softer and mushier as she walked. When the mud got half-way over her boots, she began to get concerned. She forged ahead a few hundred more meters before she pulled back a wide, heavy frond and saw it.
“Yes!”
There before her was the swamp she’d seen from the shuttle, its still, glass-like water pierced by thousands of plants and trees. The installation couldn’t be more than a few kilometers away. Once she got past the swamp, she’d be home free. She would have her vista, her light and air. The swamp was her last obstacle.
All she had to do was get across it.
* * *
That could be tough. She remembered how long and serpentine the swamp had seemed from the air. It had stretched to the horizon in both directions. There would be no going around it.
She decided to back track to drier ground before she set up camp. She didn’t like the idea of camping too close to a swamp with nightfall approaching. The jungle was bad enough without a million acres of nearby water from which things could crawl.
She found a slightly higher piece of ground well back from the mush and pronounced it good. Building the yurt went slightly faster than it had the night before; she’d learned some things about making it tighter and more bug-resistant. She used more vine and laid the leaves in a heavily overlapped pattern that left fewer spaces. It fell far short of having flow-through ventilation, but she didn’t think she’d suffocate.
With nightfall approaching, she slipped into the yurt and sealed the door behind her. By the pale light of dusk, she ate her last bundle of grapes, dreading with each measured bite, the coming darkness and its promise of frenetic buzzing, whirring and crawling activity.
Munching a grape with one hand, she lightly tested the strength of a leaf with the index finger of the other.
When the first insects started bumping and fluttering against the tent, she lay on her side, curled up and tried to sleep. What seemed like hours later, she managed to doze a little.
Sometime during the night something passed by the yurt with a sound of leaves shaking, up high. It seemed to jump from limb to limb with incredible speed, and she could hear the trees shake, far into the distance, as it hit them, one by one.
In shallow twilight sleep, she imagined and dreamed about the raft she would build that would carry her across the swamp. It was made of neat, clean logs lashed together just right and had an oscillating paddle attached to the back. She worked the paddle back and forth easily and within minutes propelled herself to the dry, raised bank on the far side.
The vision was still with her in the morning when she woke up and crawled out of the yurt. But the pale monotony of the jungle’s fallen and rotted trees and branches literally twisted the spirit from the dream, wrung it out and left it juiceless and dead. There was no way she could make a raft like the one she envisioned. She had no logs, no rope, no paddle, and no tools. All she had was a dream; a stupid dream turning into a lie before her eyes.
She wolfed down a bundle of grapes and headed for the swamp.
She slogged across the mud flats, walking on logs and branches when she could. She’d just climbed up on a thick, fallen tree trunk when something bolted from the other side of it and dashed toward the water. It took her a second to recognize it as one of the horse-things she’d seen the night before last. The creature had probably come to drink, and she’d surprised it. The creature galloped right into the swamp, splashing loudly; and when the water got so deep it could no longer leap, it started to swim, its head held high. The encounter left her unnerved all the way down to her feet.
“Chicken,” she said, smiling at it.
She watched as the creature turned to parallel the bank for a short distance, then turn toward shore.
Suddenly, with a single yelp of distress, the animal vanished beneath the surface without a trace. There was a massive swirl and swell at the spot suggesting something huge under the water—then nothing.
“So much for swimming across. Sorry horse.”
The fallen tree she was standing on lay all the way out into the water where its thick, broken branches stuck up and out, dead and rotting. She walked carefully out along its rot-slickened surface, watching as the trunk slowly sank in the black water, and the swamp bottom faded, then finally dropped off into blackness. She was still twenty or thirty steps from the tree’s branches.
“That’s far enough, Donna,” she whispered.
The water under the trunk wasn’t opaque, but it was deep, black and shadowy. The idea of being down in it made her shudder. Looking into its dark and menacing depths filled her with an apprehension greater than any the jungle itself could spawn. She could imagine the little evil things down in there bumping against her skin, biting her, attaching to her, squirming into her orifices.
She wanted to run away. She wanted to beat something with her fists. This was impossible. The big monster was nothing. There was no way she could bring herself to submerge herself in that evil, squirming stew. She opened her mouth to swear a stream, but sighed a deep and loose-jawed sigh instead. If she was going to live, she had to find a way across, even if it meant bathing in that scary water—big horrible thing and little scary things be damned.
She stood there, as still as one of the branches, and studied the situation. The swamp was peaceful and primordial on the surface. A thin layer of mist hung like a veil over it. The swamp was too wide and too overgrown to see the far side, but she guessed it was less than a kilometer away. There were wide spaces to navigate through where no plants grew above the water line. She guessed those were the deeper channels. The horse-like creature had been grabbed in just such a channel. As appealing as the channels were at first glance, she decided not to use them under any circumstances.
It made sense that activity like splashing attracted the big bastard. Maybe it took a lot of splashing to get its attention. If she knew what its attack threshold was, she might be able to sneak past it.
That was it. Float quietly past the big monster and keep the small ones from wriggling up my ass. Sure . . .
She turned around, being careful of her footing and walked back toward shore. When she was clear of the water, she h
opped down into the mud and slogged back to dry ground.
I’m dead.
* * *
She found a tree limb and sat on it. From where she was she could see a patch of swamp water through the foliage. The thin layer of mist, level with her line of sight, looked like a white line drawn across the scene.
As she stared, her anger grew. She’d come this far and now this last barrier stood in her way, mocking her. She hated it. She hated the length and breadth of it. She hated everything in it.
Think.
Stilts were out. If she tried to swim, the thing would catch her and eat her. She couldn’t fly or climb over it.
Raft. Somehow. Somehow, build a raft and paddle with my hands as gently as I can. Stick to the shallows where the plants grow. Become a piece of floating debris moving slowly across. It might take me days to get to the other side. But I might make it.
She yanked a big leaf from the branch above her head and looked at it. It was heavily veined and tough. She tore it in half. The leaf itself was thick, leathery and porous. It would float like a sonofabitch.
She tore a couple more leaves off and wadded them up into a ball about the size of her head. Then, using her knees to help hold it, she tied the ball up with a piece of vine. She hefted it. It was light and tough.
She carried the ball back along the fallen tree until she was over water and dropped it in. It splashed quietly and bobbed once then rolled over. It floated high in the water.
“Excellent.”
She lay down on the trunk and retrieved it, then picked a likely looking spot in the closest channel and heaved the ball over the branches into it. The ball smacked loudly, splashed and bobbed. A moment later a familiar swell and heave of the water under it gave the monster away. There was a quick, loud sucking sound, and the ball disappeared, only to float up a moment later in pieces.
“That answers that question.”
She went back and started to visualize what she had to do, what she’d need and what the raft had to look like.
Vines and leaves are a jungle girl’s best friends.
When the raft was done, she wouldn’t want to haul it any farther than she had to, so she picked a dry spot as close to the mud flat as she could get to build it. She stomped the area flat and uprooted what she could until she had a good place to work.