Back at the compound that afternoon, everyone from our unit was still discussing the morning’s mission as we jogged in a group around the track in the gymnasium. Bruce, who always ran directly behind me — so he could check out my ass, I suspected — made a frustrated noise.
“Can’t he stay away? I thought you guys were over.”
Quinn was striding across the AstroTurf center of the track toward us. As we came to a halt, Bruce moved to stand next to me and took my hand in his. Annoyed I tried to tug free, but he just held tighter. Quinn’s hard glance flicked from our hands to the new addition to my neck thong.
“Congratulations.”
I wish I could say that sneering made him unattractive. But it didn’t. The words, “You’re so cute when you’re angry” bubbled up in my mind, but I managed to stop them spilling over my lips. Unfortunately, I couldn’t completely suppress the hysterical giggle which accompanied the thought.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed even further. What must he think I was laughing at — killing rats? Or at how he felt about my work? He moved his attention off me and spoke softly to Leya.
“I don’t think it’s wise to criticize your Unit Commander in communications which might be intercepted. And if you text anyone information about where and what your missions are, you’ll be bounced out of here for sure.”
“What? You saw that?” Leya said.
“Someone always sees everything, you should know that.”
“Did anyone else see it? Will I —”
“I deleted the content and the trace, but I won’t always be the one to intercept it. Just watch what you say, and especially what you text or mail.”
“Thank you, Quinn. You saved my ass.” Leya’s gratitude was obvious on her face.
I wanted to thank him too. He’d helped my friend, though I couldn’t think why.
“Quinn,” I said softly, touching his arm and drawing his gaze back onto myself. “Thanks so much. I really —”
“I didn’t do it for you!” he said, shaking off my arm.
“Then why?”
“This may be news to you and your little kill-squad, but some people do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”
And those were pretty much the last words Quinn spoke to me for the next month.
Chapter 17
Casualties
Sarge’s office was empty when I reported for my one-on-one review session with him. I sat down on a straight-backed chair to wait. The cactus on the windowsill now had two neon-yellow blooms nestled between its thorns, and through the window behind it I could see the heat-haze of the summer’s day shimmering over the front lot. I’d been ratting for a month.
Restless, I stood up and walked over to study the massive spreadsheet which covered much of one wall of the office. The names of our six unit members were listed in the far left column, and then each member’s missions, confirmed kills (broken down into categories for rats, cats, dogs and “other”) and kill ratios were recorded. The red star next to my name indicated that I was heading the pack in confirmed kills — though I had fewer cat and dog kills than the others — with Bruce, Mitch, Tae-Hyun and Cameron clustered tightly behind me, and Leya trailing behind. The blue star next to Bruce’s name indicated that he currently held the record for the longest-distance shot.
My eyes tracked the entries to the right-hand side of the spreadsheet and came to rest on something I hadn’t noticed on my previous visits to Sarge’s office. On top of the filing cabinet in the back corner were a couple of small framed photographs. I moved over to study them. The first was of two soldiers in army fatigues and helmets, their arms slung around each other, smiling into the camera. The grime-smudged face on the left belonged to Sarge. It was much younger, but I’d recognize that frenzied grin anywhere. In the second photo, a platoon of young men stood or knelt on one knee in front of a dusty Humvee. In the background, a flat, beige, desert-like terrain stretched out under a high blue sky. Iraq? Afghanistan? On top of the glass, someone had drawn red crosses over several of the figures in marker pen. I shivered. The plague might be deadly, but our war against it was safer for “soldiers” like me. A bronze medal lay beside the photos. I traced its red, white, green and black ribbon, studded with a silver and two bronze service stars, then returned to studying the shot of the platoon, trying to identify which figure might have been Sarge.
“They were closer to me than my real family.”
I jumped at the sound of Sarge’s voice. He was standing in the doorway, watching me.
“I hope you don’t mind me looking?” I felt like I’d been caught snooping.
“If I didn’t want anyone to see it, then that would be a dumb place to store it,” said Sarge.
He took his seat behind the desk and indicated that I should sit opposite him, then opened a folder and sifted through the papers inside. I fiddled with the hog’s tooth around my neck and tried not to stare at the way the sunlight coming through the window gleamed on his head.
“Over a hundred confirmed kills. My, my, Blue, you sure have been a busy girl.”
I had. It was no surprise that I’d been on the most missions and taken out the most targets, since I had volunteered for every assignment possible in the last month. When I was busy out in the field, all my attention was focused on tracking and taking out my targets. When off-duty, I spent my downtime on the target range or in the gym, completing my final school examination for the year, and generally doing anything that would keep me busy. Because when I wasn’t busy, when I had time on my hands and my mind was free to wander, it inevitably wandered back to Quinn. Then the memories — funny and tender and exciting — would fill my heart with anger and my eyes with tears. Bedtime was feeble-time. But I’d found that if I kept busy exercising as hard as I had in boot camp, then exhaustion cut even this time short. So busy was good. Busy was much better than feeble.
I cast a glance at the spreadsheet, at the black-dot missions which had kept me out of the cafeteria and hallways, minimizing the number of times I could bump into Quinn. I missed him fiercely. I was lonelier than I could ever remember feeling. Looking back, it amazed me how quickly Quinn had gone from being a complete stranger to becoming my best friend. On graduation day, I had not only lost my boyfriend, but I’d also lost the best buddy who could have comforted me through the breakup. Every night I threaded his earring back through my ear, so that I could sleep close to something of his, and every morning I took it out again and clasped it around my bra strap. Pathetic.
I’d once read a book where the hero, a World War I soldier, had been hit in the thigh by a piece of shrapnel. Lodged too deeply near the bone, the shard had never been removed, and afterwards his leg would ache whenever it was due to rain. I felt like that poor soldier now, only the shard Quinn had left me with was stuck in the region of my chest, and it gave me a sharp squeeze of pain every time I saw him, or even thought of him. Like now.
“We’re very pleased with your progress, soldier,” Sarge continued. “You’ve been performing excellently on your missions, and I think we can safely say that you are now our top specialist.”
“Thank you, Sarge.”
Again, the old mixed feelings twisted inside me. Was it wrong to be proud about being efficient at killing things? Or was it plain stupid to feel guilty at taking out diseased mutants?
“We’re so pleased, in fact, that we want to promote you.”
That was a surprise. I hadn’t known that there was anything to be promoted to. Did they want me to help run the operations, or plan them from the command center rather than doing the shooting myself? I hoped not. For one thing, I figured that would be a waste of my abilities. For another, it would mean that I’d spend much more time based at the compound — the same compound where Quinn was based.
“I’m going to give it to you straight, Goldilocks. You may be the best little ratter in the whole of the Southern Sector, but the war isn’t against rats. You were prepared, recruited and trained to fight the plagu
e, to target plague-spreaders.”
Where was he going with this? He rested his folded arms on his desk and studied me as if assessing me. Come to think of it, he always looked at me as if he was assessing me.
“Sir?”
“Rats and pets are not the only plague-spreaders out there. They are not even the most important or the most deadly mooks.”
I couldn’t figure out what he meant. What else was there that could transmit the virus? And then it clicked.
“You’re talking about … people?” I said, horrified. “You want me to take out people?”
“Not take out, soldier, take down. Tranquilize and bring in for treatment. M&Ms and rabids are out there spreading the plague when they should be in hospitals being taken care of and being quarantined. And you can help make that happen.”
I stared at him. M&Ms and rabids. People. Quinn had asked me if I’d known what I was being trained to do, if I was okay with taking down live targets. Had he known, before I had, what they planned for me?
“And not just them, Blue.”
“I don’t follow.” My voice sounded faint.
“We have to get to the real heart of the pandemic. We have to treat the cause, not merely contain the symptoms. The real plague-spreaders in this war are the terrs. They are the ones we need to bring in.”
“I couldn’t shoot a human, Sarge. I just don’t think I ever could.” I recoiled from the very idea.
“A tango is a tango, Blue.” He thumped the folder down onto the desk and stood up abruptly. “Wait for me outside. I have a call to make, and then you and I are going to take a little drive into the city. I want to show you something.”
I had never before been to Community General Hospital, so I couldn’t be sure, but I was guessing that the Biocontainment Wing was newly built. It had its own separate entrance, its own intensive decon procedures and super-high security measures. Judging from the uniformed staff who manned the entrance and patrolled the corridors, the army was at least as much in charge of this facility as the medics.
The hospital room in front of me had its own decon unit with the red, triple-petaled biohazard blossom emblazoned on both of its two sets of auto-locking glass doors. A printed warning stated that only medical personnel in full hazmat suits were allowed inside, and a sign on the wall beside the door read BSL 4, Negative-pressure biocontainment room.
The room was situated on a corner, and the two walls bordering the hallway were dominated by large, sealed, heavy glass windows. Sarge and I stood outside one of these. Across the corner of the room, outside the other window, stood a small group of people I assumed were the patient’s family. Two women of about forty stared silently into the room. One of them pushed limp hair out of her face and then returned her hands to the shoulders of a small boy and girl standing in front of her. Was the man on the bed inside the room their father?
He lay perfectly still under the clean sheets and pale-blue blanket of the neatly made bed. He must have been heavily sedated, because he displayed none of the twitching, thrashing, muttering agitation typical of rat fever patients. Tubes from drips and machines ran into his nose and mouth and tattooed arms, and drained his body from somewhere under the bedclothes into bags hanging on the rails at the side of the bed. At first glance, all that suggested this patient was not merely recovering from an appendectomy or a bad bout of pneumonia was the color of the fluid in those bags, brown and purple and red-streaked, like liquefied bruises. Well, that and the rash of petechial spots spattering the skin on what I could see of his face and arms. When I looked closer, I saw the rash spots were oozing blood, red froth bubbled at his nostrils and a tear of blood trickled from his left eye down his temple into his hair.
“He hasn’t got long to go now,” said Sarge, his voice unusually gentle. “Ah, here she is now.”
I looked across the glass panels and was surprised to see Roberta Roth had joined the little family. She gave each of the women a brief, consoling embrace and then crouched down to talk to the children. I was impressed — I hadn’t pegged her as the sympathetic type — but confused as to why she was here. Maybe she was related to the dying man. She patted the little girl on the top of her head and walked around the corner to come stand with Sarge and me, tugging the jacket of her business suit straight.
“Wayne. Jinx.” She greeted me with a nod which set the underside of her hair shimmering like ripe pokeweed berries under the bright fluorescent lights.
“Ms. Roth.”
“Please, call me Roberta.”
That was so not ever going to happen.
“So sad, isn’t it?” she said, sighing at the man in the bed. “So sad the toll this disease takes on all of us.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And yet, how fortunate that this poor man’s family are able to visit him and see him lying so peacefully, so well cared for. That must be a comfort, don’t you agree? That they have this opportunity to bid him farewell, to make their peace and say their goodbyes. It is an opportunity they would not have if this poor man was running wild on the street, ill, uncontained, infectious.
“The infected persons whom we are able to identify and tranquilize are brought here,” continued Roth, “where the doctors can treat them, manage their pain and restore some measure of dignity to their final days. They do what they can to keep the patients comfortable and to give their families a chance to achieve some small sense of closure. Isn’t this a better final image for their families to carry in their memories than one of the demented and suffering person out there?”
I had to admit that it was. I was irresistibly reminded of the infected man we’d encountered on our trip into the sniper simulation — the crazed eyes; the split, bloody face; the blotched and naked body. The contrast between the two men could not have been more vivid.
“And while the medical teams treat them, they also learn from their patients. We advance our knowledge of this pestilence, which so far has been adapting and mutating faster than our virologists can develop a treatment or vaccine. And of course, there’s also always the possibility of a miracle; someone might survive in a better state and give us a medical lead to pursue. And who knows? Any day now we might find a cure, and those in the hospital at that time could be helped.”
The man’s family moved back from the window and walked slowly away down the hallway. There was no change and nothing really to be seen — which was a lot better than the alternative.
“ASTA plays such an important role in supporting our government. But we need our top specialists to help us fulfil this duty.” She took one of my hands in both of hers and squeezed, as if she could press a sense of urgency and obligation into me. “So, will you help these people? Will you help us bring them in, Jinx?”
Chapter 18
Revelations
It was obvious that Roth and Sarge had brought me to the hospital and shown me the rat fever patient to convince me that taking down and bringing in infected people was a good option. And seeing it for myself, I had to admit that it was more humane — both for the patient and their family — than leaving them to suffer untreated. I couldn’t argue, either, with their point that M&Ms should not be out in the world spreading the disease. Hell, if I was ever infected, I wouldn’t want to be allowed to infect others.
“How do you get them in?” I asked.
I’d seen on T.V. news how difficult it could be to take plague victims in for treatment. There had been outraged protests from the Civil Libs at the measures police and disease control officers sometimes used. I’d seen T.V. footage of one case where police had tazed a rabid over and over again, but the man had kept coming at them.
“Until now, we’ve had to rely on the traditional method of injecting a tranquilizing drug, but to get close enough to inject the sedative means you have to get close enough to be injured or infected. M&Ms are unpredictable and aggressive — a sudden charge, a scratch or bite and we’d lose a valuable asset. Our Research and Development department has come up with a
n elegant solution that allows us to connect with the target from a safe distance.”
“What is it — a dart gun? Like I’ve seen on T.V. wildlife shows?” I said, thinking of wildlife veterinarians and toppling elephants.
“It’s a little more sophisticated than that,” said Roth. “A dissipating bullet fired from a modified sniper’s rifle. The hollow round implodes as it penetrates the body, releasing a major tranquilizer which downs the target instantly, and because it has low penetrating power, the slug is easily removed from the body, leaving minimal damage.”
“Why do you need snipers — surely the police could do it?” I asked Sarge. “Come to that, don’t the police already have snipers?”
“We need perfect marksmanship if we’re operating amongst civilians in the cities and suburbs out there. But we also really want a low-key, small, maneuverable team that we can insert and extract with the least possible red tape, and a minimum of fuss and attention from the public. It’s fine for the public to see patients being taken off by ambulance — that they’ll understand. But I’m not sure everyone will like the idea of us darting people and having them hauled off by the cops against their will.”
“If,” interjected Roth, “if they can even be said to have a will. Legally speaking, they are not in their right mind, and so their personal liberties are constrained by society’s right to safety.”
“Point is, Blue, this is part of what your unit has been established to do, with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of negative attention. Will you do it?”
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