by Gary Glass
“Do you have any cars here that don’t have one of those transponder things in them?”
Jim Dandy’s eyes narrowed. He pointed his fat chin at her, and his voice came down an octave. “You own the papers on that Mercedes, ma’am?”
“It’s my husband’s car,” she said.
Jim Dandy became dubious. “Well, now, I don’t know,” he said. “Is this a divorce matter, ma’am?”
“No.”
“Well, now, I don’t know.”
“I’ll trade you that car for any car on this lot. Straight up. As long as it doesn’t have one of those transponder things in it.”
Jim Dandy tapped his lower lip with the edge of one knuckle while he thought about it. His eyes twinkled under the pressure.
“Now ma’am,” he said, in a professional way, “the law has required every motor vehicle manufactured or imported into this country in the past thirteen years to be equipped with a functional IFF device. And I’m afraid I just don’t have anything quite as old as that on the lot at this particular time.”
Ally pointed at a beat-up old pickup truck near the sales office. “What about that one?”
Jim Dandy’s smile returned with a sly curl. “That old truck, ma’am? Well, that’s my truck, you see. I drive that truck, ma’am, cause I can’t sell it.”
“Well, Mr. Dandy, you just did.”
There wasn’t much juice in the old truck. Ally stopped at the next chargepark they came to, just the other side of town, near the interstate.
She took Karen’s money from her, and leaving her in the truck, she went inside and used all the money they had to buy a cashcard. She came back out, plugged the truck in, and pulled Karen out of the cab.
“From now on, it’s cash only,” she said. “We better get rid of our electronics too. Anything that might be trackable. Give me your tablet.”
She took Karen’s tablet and threw it, along with her own tablet and her phone, into a dumpster behind the building.
They needed to kill time while the truck charged, so they went inside and sat down at a booth for lunch.
The waitress brought coffee. They ordered sandwiches.
“We shouldn’t do anything that requires us to identify ourselves,” Ally said. “No credit cards. No staying in hotels. We can sleep in the back of the truck. We’ll stop somewhere and get some sleeping bags.”
“What about when it rains?” Karen said.
“Sleep sitting up in the cab, I guess.”
“You’re really having fun, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?”
Karen looked out through the sheet of polarized plastic tint at the truck sitting nose on to the charge meter. “That truck is even a worse piece of junk than my car. Carl is going to kill you.”
“Well, we’re on the lam now. Can’t be too careful.”
“What makes you think they’ll be looking for us? With everything else that is going on, we’re nobody.”
“The highway patrol,” Ally said. “Did you see the camera on the dash? You know, they make a recording every traffic of stop. Besides the officer had plenty of time to run our plates.”
Karen said nothing, looked out the window. Thinking about what had happened between Ally and the police officer made her feel strange.
“There’s no need to be concerned,” Ally said.
She looked back at Ally, her eyes bright with fear and sorrow. “Roger used to say that. After.”
After IDD.
Marley went into Roger’s room without gowning and gloving.
Roger had his clothes back on, though the bed sheets still lay in a heap in a corner of the room. Roger was back in the chair beside the bed, not straddling it, sitting very upright, hands folded in his lap, feet flat on the floor, eyes closed. Very still. He didn’t stir when Marley entered.
Marley sat down in the opposite chair. “Afternoon, Roger.”
Roger did not reply or move.
Marley checked his vital signs on his tablet. He was awake. All biometrics nominal. Had been eating and defecating and passing fluids within acceptable ranges. Though all the IDD’s seemed to eat less than average normals with similar body mass, none of them had insufficient caloric intakes, leaving aside those whose appetites were suppressed due to medication effects.
“Roger?” he said a little louder.
No response.
“Are you ignoring me, Roger?”
No response.
Marley flipped to the next biometric screen. Brainwave activity nominal, but interesting. Both alpha and beta waves showed more regularity than normal for waking states. But other indicators clearly indicated that Roger was wide awake.
“I’m going to touch your arm, Roger. Since you aren’t responding to me, I have to assess you for catatonia.”
Marley leaned forward and took hold of Roger’s left elbow with his right hand and lifted it away from his body.
Roger offered no resistance, nor any assistance.
Marley released his arm. It fell back into place under its own weight.
He took his hand. Flexed and rotated his wrists. No resistance, no waxiness. Reflexes normal.
Marley sat back and scribbled some notes. Awake but unresponsive. No indications of catatonia.
He sat a while longer, watching to see whether Roger would give any sign he was awake. He brought up his surveillance record and ran it backwards. Roger had been sitting like this for six minutes. Before that he’d used the toilet. Before that he’d been sitting in his bed. Before that he’d eaten some of the lunch that had been put through the zero-barrier chute by an orderly.
Marley gave him five long minutes to drop the act, then he stood up, and, carefully controlling his tone, said goodbye and went out.
He wanted to know what Delacourt thought about that, so instead of moving on to Peters, he went straight up to the video room. Benford was there too. The three of them retired to the little glass meeting room as soon as he arrived.
“What do you mean going into an isolation room without gowning?” Benford said.
“Come on, colonel. What’s the point?”
“The point is protocol, doctor. By rights I should slap you into isolation now.”
“In fact, per protocol, you shouldn’t have let me exit the room at all. But you did because you know as well as I do that there is no microbial vector for IDD.”
“Until we find some other vector we’re going to assume—”
He turned to Delacourt: “What did you make of it? Talk about not playing the game. And he’s wide awake too.”
Delacourt nodded. “Yes. Interesting. If I didn’t know better I’d say he didn’t want to talk to you.”
“If you didn’t know better.”
“So how are you feeling now? What is your emotional state?”
“Pissed off.”
“What about?”
“Because he’s wasting my time. We don’t have time for this bullshit.”
“No,” Benford said, “we certainly don’t.”
Delacourt grinned. “I bet Roger feels the same way.”
“I think we need to get back on track here,” Benford said.
Marley tapped the tabletop irritably. “You said I could have ten days.”
“Do you really want to spend the next week talking to the wall? The man is dysfunctional, Carl. Peters and Reynolds are even worse.”
“Are you sure about that? I mean we’ve got them locked up in empty plastic rooms with nothing to do. What would be functional in that situation? It’s a wonder they’re not all screaming and hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.”
“A week from now,” Benford said, “there are going to be twice as many cases in the wild as there are now. Ten-thousand more cases.”
“We’ve got a hundred other cases to experiment on in the meantime.”
“I need to start seeing some progress. The time you’re spending on this experiment, you could be spending on something that actually has some likelihood of making
a difference.”
Karen and Ally idled away three hours in the coffee shop while the pickup charged. They didn’t talk much. Karen felt disoriented, and slightly fearful. Ally again offered to let her take the truck and continue without her. In response, Karen just shook her head.
They hit the road again once the truck was charged and drove on the rest of the day and into the night.
Toward nightfall, they stopped at an anonymous strip mall in an anonymous town, and Ally, leaving Karen in the truck, paid cash at an outfitters for a couple of cheap sleeping bags.
They finally stopped around midnight at an overnight chargepark outside Minneapolis, plugged in the truck, and climbed into the back to get some sleep.
It was good to lie down. Karen had continued to feel queasy and panicked all day long — ever since the traffic stop. She hadn’t taken another turn at the wheel the whole day. Ally hadn’t asked her to, and she wouldn’t have been able to drive. She couldn’t get the images out of her mind: the officer’s handgun pointed at her, the way that his face contorted as he screamed at her, the way that Ally’s face, pinned against the hood of the car, had not looked contorted.
She lay there in the cold truck bed, shoulder to shoulder with Ally staring up at the minute stars and listening to the sounds of other travelers and haul drivers coming and going — door slams, mumbled chatter, engines whining up and down. Now, at last, the flashing images began to fade. Her racing heart began to slow.
Then she heard Ally say, quietly: “It will be all right, Karen.”
For a long time Karen didn’t reply, and didn’t plan to, but then, rather suddenly, she wanted to. “When did you get it?” she said.
Ally answered as if the question was of little significance. “I don’t know.”
“Was it today?”
“No.”
“Yesterday?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But definitely not last week?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it have been last week?”
“It could have been.”
“Could it have been last month?”
“I don’t think so.”
Aside from everything else that happened today, it frightened Karen that Ally had it. She told herself that it was no different than Roger having it — but it was different. In Roger’s case, IDD had begun to bring him back to her. It had given her hope that they could be together again. In Roger’s case, it offered her a way out of her loneliness. But Ally was normal. Or she had been. And Ally had done it to someone else. So IDD was not how you recovered from a psychotic disease. It was something else. Something that could happen to anyone.
After a moment she said: “What is it like?”
It took a while for Ally to answer, and Karen wondered if she’d gone to sleep, but then she said, in her deep voice in the darkness: “It’s not like anything, Karen.”
The conversation continued slowly — each question, each answer, coming after a thoughtful pause.
“How did you get it?” Karen said.
“You don’t get it.”
“What is it then?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say.”
“Why?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
Karen’s heart flipped. “No,” she said.
“OK.”
“I’m not ready.”
“OK,” Ally said. Then: “That’s what it’s like.”
“What?”
“This. That’s what it’s like. It’s like being ready. All the time.”
“Ready for what?”
“Ready for now.”
“Ready for now?”
“Ready for now. All the time.”
“You can’t be ready for now. Now is already happening.”
“Yes, that’s it,” Ally said cheerfully.
Karen could hear the smile in her voice.
“It’s like I’m already happening all the time.”
“I don’t get it,” Karen said. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“I suppose so.”
“But it’s not what you think.”
“How do you know what I think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what I think?”
“No, I don’t know how I do know.”
Chapter 32
Marley was on his way to the commissary early Thursday morning for coffee before getting started on the day’s work. Benford called him on comm and summoned him to the video room.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“You better get up here stat.”
“All right.”
The little room was full of people when he arrived two minutes later. Standing room only. They had one video window opened large in the middle of the wallscreen. The commandant of security was standing next to Benford at the front of the room. He started the playback as soon as Marley walked in.
It was Roger’s room. Roger was sitting on the bed. The timestamp on the playback said 0113. Five hours ago.
In a smaller window, next to the one showing Roger’s room, the corridor outside his room stretched away from the camera. Same timestamp. At that hour the corridor was empty — except for an orderly making his way from room to room with bedding changes.
Per protocol, the orderly had to gown, glove, and goggle in the anteroom outside each patient’s quarters before entering, and had to dispose into the contaminated waste chute everything he brought out of the room, including his gown, gloves, and goggles. And he had to scrub before he left the anteroom and made his way to the next room to start the whole process over again. Bedchange duty made for a long and tedious night. Nobody knew why it was done at night when people were supposed to be sleeping. Everyone shrugged it off as just another incomprehensible military routine. Likewise, patients were expected to make their own beds and keep their soiled sheets stacked by the door. Nobody expected the rules to change just because the patient was a civilian. These civilians, however, were not being cooperative. So bedchange duty was more involved.
Everyone watched the scene play out on the wall. The orderly entered the antechamber of Roger’s room, and started gowning up.
“That’s Corporal Partridge,” Benford said.
Roger stood up and watched Partridge through the glass door.
Per protocol, no one was to enter any room if a patient was behaving in any way threatening or even simply noncompliant. But Partridge showed no hesitation; nodded and smiled to Roger through the glass, then pressed his hand to the security pad. The inner door slid open. Partridge stepped through, the door slid shut behind him. Roger stood aside, and Partridge started stripping the bed.
Roger nodded his head twice, smiling slightly, like he approved of the job Partridge was doing.
Then Partridge stopped stripping the bed.
He staggered against the side of the bed. They heard him grunt slightly, more like a cough. It looked like he’d slipped. Easy enough to do in those disposable paper gowns — the booties had no grips.
But he hadn’t slipped. He seemed to carom off the bed in slow motion, stumble slowly away from it, and come up against the wall. Roger watched dispassionately as Partridge slid down the wall, too weak to stand.
“Who was on surveillance?” Benford said.
The commandant produced a nervous young non-comm standing beside him.
“Sergeant Sydney was on duty until 0400.”
“Did you see this?” Benford said to Sydney.
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You were asleep.”
“I don’t think I was, sir.”
“Well?”
“There are over two-hundred cams in this facility, sir.”
Roger crossed the ro
om to Partridge and knelt down in front of him. He put his hand on Partridge’s shoulder, then on his head. It looked like he meant to pull his hood off, but he didn’t, just kept his hand there on top of his head.
Partridge shook his head like he was trying to shake off dizziness.
Roger held on and leaned forward, bringing his face closer to Partridge’s face.
Partridge started to wag his head, slowly and rhythmically, like he was listening to slow music.
After a minute, Roger stood up again and helped Partridge back to his feet. Partridge looked unsteady. Roger braced him and turned him around to the door.
Partridge raised his hand without Roger’s aid and touched his fob to the security pad.
The door slid open. Roger walked Partridge through into the anteroom.
The door slid shut behind them.
“Roger’s helping him out,” Marley said.
“The hell he is,” Benford said.
“What about the biometrics? Is Partridge having a cardiac—”
“Watch.”
Roger continued to support Partridge as they stepped across the anteroom and Partridge lifted his fob again and pressed it to the other pad.
The outer door slid open. Roger gently pushed Partridge through. They were outside in the corridor.
Partridge was getting a little steadier by now. He reached up and pulled off his hood.
They turned and started walking down the corridor. They moved slowly, but Partridge looked stronger with each step. Soon, Roger was no longer assisting him.
They walked side by side the length of the corridor. At the far end they turned a corner.
The security officer now on duty pointed at another screen with the remote and dragged it to the center of the wall. It showed a view from outside Patient Unit A. The slick metallic wall of the building gleamed under the outdoor flood lights.
A windowless door opened and Roger and Partridge stepped outside.
Roger left Partridge there in his sterile paper jumpsuit, sitting on the sidewalk against the door.
Switching through a series of recorded external views, the security officer tracked Roger’s progress across the compound as he made his way determinedly toward the front gate. As he reached it, an armed guard came out of the security booth and challenged him. Roger didn’t even break stride.