Burn (14 page)

“Yeah,” he said, “it comes and goes. But it’s more come than go right now. I just want to get out there and see them cap that zoo tomorrow.”

“You looked God in the face just yesterday, Colonel,” Scholz said. “However, if you’re a good boy, I might help you out to the ViraVax pour. If they let you out of here by tomorrow, that is. I want to see the place covered in concrete myself. But save your plans until the doc checks you out.”

“Now, what exactly is this clotting factor?”

“It’s a chain of events in the body that leads to clotting. Some people don’t clot at all, and a small cut can kill them. Some people form clots spontaneously, without an injury, and these can lead to stroke, heart attack, kidney failure. . . .”

Rico waved a hand to stop her.

“What are they doing about it?”

“The clotting? After all your lacerations, you should have bled out in minutes. But your body mounted an exceptional clotting reaction and stopped it. Some of that pain in your legs is from clots that lodged in your major veins. They’ve given you a couple of drugs that stop the clotting, but with all your lacerations they don’t want to give you any of the thrombolytics that dissolve clots already formed. You refused their Artificial Viral Agent designed for that purpose, no surprise there.”

“Now, what about the glucose?” he asked.

“Nothing, yet,” she said. “You got plenty in your original IV, but your body doesn’t always metabolize it. They tried insulin, but for some reason it didn’t work and, besides, there’s nothing wrong with your insulin production so they don’t want to suppress that by giving you more.”

“So,” he mused, “if I don’t have a stroke I’m going to starve to death?”

Scholz couldn’t hide the shadow of concern behind her professional mask.

“Marte Chang will have a handle on things by then. She and Harry are making excellent progress. . . .”

A heavy-handed knock at the door interrupted Scholz. The door
swooshed
open and a large, red-faced man with long, dark hair snatched the reader out of her hand.

“McCarron’s the name,” he said,
“Doctor
McCarron. I see you’ve found the chart that the nurses’ station
lost
.” His northern Ireland accent stretched “lost” into two syllables.
 

He leaned past Scholz and shook Rico’s hand.

“Not much of a grip for a colonel, Colonel. Excuse me, ma’am.” He tugged at Scholz’s sleeve and, when she stood, he sat heavily on her spot at the side of the bed. “Now, tell me what happened.”

Doctor McCarron focused an intense, blue-eyed gaze completely on Rico. Rico shrugged and glanced at the door. Scholz took the hint, winked at him and left the two men alone.

“It’s a very long story,” Rico croaked.

“Well, then you’d better begin. You’ve already given me an excuse to miss a medical staff meeting, but I’ll be damned if you’ll cheat me out of an afternoon of fishing.”

“The story involves some national security matters. . . .”

“So? I keep my mouth shut. I always do, and I’m sure your investigators can verify that. Tell me just what pertains to your own body and mind. I have all the drama in my personal life that I require, thank you. I do not go looking for more.”

Rico liked this brusque, no-nonsense manner and, after a couple of deep breaths, he began to pick his most delicate path through the immense story of ViraVax.

Chapter 18

The Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

—Miyamoto Musashi

The medic Bert Frank tightened the side-panel straps of his flak vest, lowered his entry visor to the tip of his long nose and took up his position directly behind the Powell. The three-story building in front of them was painted “Gardener Green,” and the techs reported no movement inside. Bert Frank was nervous. Deploying in the nation’s capital was serious shit.

“Rapid Entry Tactical Display A-211” flashed in red against his visor. Sergeant Frank turned the brightness down so he had to squint at the ghost of a map that hovered before his eyes. He’d rather squint than sacrifice what little night vision he could muster out of broad daylight. The techs would cut the building’s power on entry, so no telling what visibility would be like.

It’ll be bright enough when that Powell cuts loose,
he thought.

This raid made Bert Frank very nervous. This complex in northwest D.C. was home to more than a hundred Down’s syndrome people, children and young adults, and he feared more for them than for himself. If the Gardeners started shooting, Frank would have his hands full, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

Not “if,”
he corrected himself.
When. These are some mighty trigger-happy Christians.

The army contracted a unit of Jesus Rangers to work with Frank’s unit in South Africa. Their enthusiasm for killing the heathen included the knifing of a Catholic lieutenant, a woman, in his own unit. They were arguing over the translation of a biblical phrase, Frank never found out what.

He rocked up on the balls of his feet a few times to warm up his calves. This entry reminded him of a situation just last year, with a hundred soft targets jammed into a tight space. Everyone had come out of that one alive, even the five Dancing Devils who called the party.

But those were college students,
Frank reminded himself.
They learned fast and took direction well once we got inside. But these are
. . .
?

Sergeant Frank sought for some word other than “retards.” The Captain called them “retards,” but Sergeant Frank preferred the Gardener term, “Innocents,” even if he didn’t think much of the Gardeners. Especially after today’s briefing. Even now, afterimages of a man melting from his bones played at the edges of his vision.

Ramiskey’s sign, a parachute, blinked him to open a channel. Frank glanced at the parachute and it turned green. He glanced at the number “3” on his visor’s pad, and the channel opened.

“Ramiskey?”

“Don’t worry, Doc. I’m on your clumsy butt like a diaper.”

“Just don’t shoot me, Ramiskey, that’s all I ask.”

A sudden hand slapped Sergeant Frank’s shoulder, startling him more than he cared to admit.

“Ramiskey, goddammit!”

“Dummy-up, Doc. They give you that expensive gear, you could at least switch it on.”

Frank activated the flank-and-rear scanners that he hated so much. Typical military overkill. More information, but more distraction, too. Besides, the close-fitting, constantly moving images made him seasick.

“Makes me sick,” he mumbled.

“Sick?” Ramiskey barked a laugh. “You can
live
with sick. Now,
dead!
Naw, man. Can’t live with that.”

“Cut the chatter, two-three. Two, dig into your pack and solve your problem.”

Samuels the Snake, squad leader for a day.

What a prick!

“My pack’s for my men, Snake.”

“That’s right, Doc. Now you keep quiet, keep your men alive and don’t puke in your visor. Three, that goes for you, too. Ready up.”

Sergeant Bert Frank breathed deep and tried to orient himself inside the wide-angle holo of his helmet. He hadn’t felt well since this morning, when the CO had made them watch the helmet record of some nurse major in Costa Brava. The constant scanning and rolling of the 360-degree pickups unseated his scrambled eggs, but what they recorded would have unseated a vulture’s breakfast; he knew that.

A few years ago Bert Frank would have been shocked at today’s general briefing. This one made him numb. They were going in, supposedly to liberate a hundred Down syndrome kids from a handful of missionary mercenaries that called themselves “Jesus Rangers.” Bert had that bad feeling. They were going in to die, and to die on-camera, and to stay alive as long as possible before they died.

Sergeant Frank closed his eyes against the dance of his visor’s displays. His traitor cortex immediately flipped him inside a rerun of last night’s briefing.

The nurse, a Major Scholz, had lived through her encounter. Her patient and her entry team lived. The record from that Watchdog unit, and Major Scholz’s helmet records, verified that this dead guy’s body melted from its bones and burned to a few fragments under a light blue flame.

Bert Frank’s brain replayed that scene for him again: Major Scholz, who had removed her biohazard suit to treat her patient, hurries into it now. Her heavy breathing punctuates her verbal report, and camera tracking intensifies Frank’s seasickness.

The colonel says it’s some kind of artificial virus.

ViraVax made the virus. And tested it on their own Innocents. And something got away from them. And now medic Sergeant Bert Frank was headed into the middle of them, his bio suit conspicuously absent. That meant that he, Ramiskey and the rest of them were guinea pigs and he’d bet a year’s pay that they were all going to wind up in quarantine by nightfall. Someplace fireproof, like this building they were about to enter.

This church, the Children of Eden, bred retarded people for their organs and their labor. That was the next big news at the briefing. These Gardeners had some Artificial Viral Agent that kept organs from being rejected. Their “Innocents” were universal donors, and the Gardeners claimed that it was okay because these Down’s syndrome people weren’t human and didn’t have souls.

Bert Frank didn’t care. They bled when cut and screamed when shot and they would rely on him to keep them alive. He was saddened by the briefing, but not surprised. He’d been a medic now for twelve years, and nothing surprised him anymore. And, anymore, he didn’t
want
to be surprised.

A red strobe at the lower left-hand edge of his visor alerted the sergeant to the one-minute warning. He checked his watch out of reflex, even though he could read the digital display at the top of his visor. The Powell hummed, its electrics at full power, and it surged against its tread, prickling the air with ozone. Everything was still, no challenge or sign of life from the target. Broad daylight and Bert Frank had a bad feeling. He rubbed the Powell’s rubberized armor for luck.

A quick wave from Gray at point beside the wall, a few deep, slow breaths and his visor flashed green for “go.”

The Powell dug in; then the wall in front of it snapped, twisted and shrieked as the narrow little vehicle nosed right through to an interior courtyard of cement and rock.

There, and in other simultaneous raids of Gardener buildings throughout the world, all similarity to known forcible entries ended.

Sergeant Frank found himself slipping on a foul, thick muck that churned up hair, teeth, charred bits of bone and clothing with every step.

A glimpse of something blue in and out of a doorway across the courtyard.

He heard bitter curses and the sounds of vomiting around him, but Sergeant Frank focused on that quick, blue movement.

No shots fired yet. He was medic, not point.

Ramiskey had seen it, too, because he duck-walked in his fast crouch along the wall and came up tight against the doorframe. Frank tuned channel three and worked his way to the doorway without looking down at his soggy boots. He heard Ramiskey take deep, gulping breaths to calm himself, but Frank sucked as little of the fetid air as possible. It lay like a sour blanket across his tongue.

“Ramiskey, Frank, do you have contact?”

Snake’s voice sounded raw, and Frank guessed that he’d been the first to toss his breakfast.

“We have movement,” Ramiskey said.

He hand-signaled for Frank to cover the left as they entered.

Sergeant Frank didn’t like to put himself in a shooting position. As a seasoned medic, he’d carried his weight in many a firefight when the action came down to himself and his patients. He liked doing the impossible—putting together blown-up bodies. Shooting people was entirely too possible for his tastes. He acknowledged Ramiskey’s signal, checked his load and took the deep breath that he’d been avoiding.

And he heard someone crying on the other side of the doorway.

Ramiskey jumped inside and swept right, and Frank was a half-step behind him to the left. Several shapes huddled in the far left-hand corner of the bare room; small, frightened shapes without weapons. Frank flooded the corner with his spotlight and paralyzed a half-dozen very young, very filthy children. He remained still while Ramiskey checked another doorway to the right.

“Clear,” he said, and closed the door.

“Check,” Frank answered. “Now let’s see what we can do with these little guys.”

Frank sensed movement behind him and spun on his heel, Snake squarely in his sights as he stepped through the doorway.

“Too late, Frank, you’re dead,” Snake said. “What have we here?”

“Kids,” Frank said.

“Scared and hungry kids,” Ramiskey added. “We’ll have to . . .”

“Halt right there, Ramiskey,” Snake ordered. “Don’t touch them.”

“They’re just kids, Snake,” Ramiskey said, “and they’re hungry, for Chrissake.”

“Orders,” Snake said. “We’re to isolate and quarantine any survivors for study. . . .”

“Well, they won’t survive long without food and water,” Sergeant Frank interrupted. “Look how sunken their eyes are, and their cracked lips. They’re dehydrated. They need attention, and they need it now. If Operations wants these kids alive, then you’d better let me take a look.”

“Yeah, Snake,” Ramiskey chimed in, “whatever it was that we waded through back there will kill us long before these kids do. They lived through it, maybe the bright boys can find out how
we
can live through it. Because even an ignorant shithead like yourself must know that we are all dead men here.”

“My orders say . . .”

“What do they say, Snake?” Ramiskey demanded, his visor clacking against Snake’s. “Do they say you’ll shoot me if I feed these kids? You know you’re not fast enough, and you know how much I’d love for you to try . . .”

“Can it, gentlemen,” the captain interrupted. “Ramiskey’s right, we need these kids alive and well. Frank . . . ?”

Sergeant Frank was already in the corner, tilting his canteen for the first of six very thirsty, very frightened children. Sergeant Frank tried hard to control the tremble in his hand, and there was no way that he could control the hair that stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. These six kids weren’t Innocents, after all. At least, they displayed none of the physical characteristics of Innocents. Brown-skinned, with wide brown eyes, they looked like the Muslim kids in his old neighborhood back home. He was a little nervous that they didn’t speak or even whimper; they just looked at him with those huge, brown eyes. What
really
scared him was that they were identical.

All six of them identical,
he thought.
And they lived through whatever happened out there.

Sergeant Frank dictated what he saw and his conclusions as quickly as he could. He was afraid that he wouldn’t live to report in person, and he was sure that these children harbored the key to surviving the virus or viruses that killed everyone else in the building. He only lived long enough to know he was right on the first count.