Grand Junction (31 page)

It would explain the utter desolation of the place.

“You come back here often, Balthazar, don’t you?”

The dog flashes its amusing half-human, half-canine smile. “Yes, very often. More often than you. But the same amount as a third person. A third regular visitor.”

“A third visitor?”

“Yes, Gabriel. Another visitor. Another man interested in the Hotel Laika.”

“But—but why? There’s nothing left here to loot!”

“Exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘exactly’?”

“If there’s nothing left to loot, you won’t be bothered by looters.”

“So why would anyone come here regularly?”

“Well, Gabriel, what makes you come here?”

“Twice, Balthazar. I’ve come twice. Three times, if you count the very first time, in the summer of ’69, when I met you here. And last time I just went around the outside of the place on my way back up the strip.”

“What kept you from going inside?”

Link feels as if he has been caught in a trap. The cyberdog maintains a trace of his ironic smile at the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t know. What is the third man looking for?”

The canine smile widens. The microdiode moves visibly between the pointed ears. “That’s exactly what we’re going to find out tonight,” he says, his bionic soldier dog’s face suddenly illuminated with the primitive desire of the hunt.

“He’s coming?” asks Link, his voice filled with anxious curiosity.

“Not exactly, Gabriel. He’s already here.”

The little girl is dead. Her brother isn’t doing much better. He is going through an amphibolic phase, in which the continuing variations of his symptoms make a firm diagnosis impossible, but at least they can conduct their series of biological analyses on him.

We are the Camp Doctors
, says Yuri to himself, observing his companion’s detached attitude and knowing that it very nearly matches his own.

The little girl is dead; they can do nothing for her now—and she can do nothing for them.

And the worst part, thinks Yuri, is that we can’t do anything else for her brother, either, who will probably die like her in a few days, if his current phase is any indication.

We are the Camp Doctors. For now, we observe and analyze death at work. For now, we are medical men without medicine; doctors who do not heal, who can barely soothe the mildest of sufferings.

We are number collectors, agents of the Number; we seek to decrypt this invisible code, to understand the workings of this machine that is not a machine, the makeup of this World that is not a world, the emerging of this Camp in which we all live, and where Chrysler and I have a role to play about which we know almost nothing.

The little girl is dead. She is pretty, even in the pallor of death. Her glassy blue-green eyes are open; Chrysler closes them. Before he does so, Yuri imagines that he can glimpse a vivid intelligence, petrified like crystal. She probably deserved to live. Chrysler motions to him discreetly, and Yuri arranges the necroscanners around the head of the young corpse.

The parents, white and still, eyes swimming with tears, are mired in mutual stony silence. They answer with hand signals, or vague murmurs at best.

Chrysler asks their permission to conduct biopsies and neuroanalyses on the boy. The father nods his head; the mother seems not to have even heard. With a rapid, sure motion, Chrysler injects a powerful anxiolytic into the boy, whose verbal outflow immediately tapers off. Then he attaches a number of nanomachines to the youth’s skull and attentively reads the bands of numbers that scroll across the various control screens.

Yuri watches Chrysler, sees him hesitate for an instant. Will he do it? Does he dare? Have we come to that point?

“We’ll come back tomorrow and do some more detailed analysis,” says Chrysler. “But I need you to answer a few questions; it’s important.”

The father motions him to go ahead.

“How long ago did the symptoms appear?”

“Fifteen days for Jessica. Eleven for Jeremy.”

“When did your daughter shift into the … numeric phase—I mean, you understand, when there was nothing more but digital noise …?”

“Two days ago. In the morning, two days ago.”

Chrysler takes down each detail carefully on the micropad Link de Nova restored for him.

Little Jessica died just after dawn.

The Driscolls were on their list of new cases, but their name didn’t come up until this morning. They are part of the first rotation of the day.

But even eight o’clock in the morning is two hours too late for Jessica Driscoll.

It is sixty years too early for Jessica Driscoll.

Jessica Driscoll barely lived a scant ten years.

During the first two Falls, a marginal but constant phenomenon was noticed: children who had not yet reached the age of puberty had survived in greater numbers than the rest of the population. There have been myriad theories on the subject since then, but interest has gradually dwindled and rival doctrines can no longer find any grounds for experimentation of any kind. So, practicality has taken priority.

Or, rather, survival has.

But the statistical data in their possession for the last few weeks shows that in this area as well, the Thing is changing its strategy, its modus operandi—maybe even its objective, thinks Yuri.

“Necro Triads will probably come to see you today. If you sell her to them, ask for a high price. Don’t let those vultures screw you over, especially the ones from Vortex Townships. You would do better to deal with
the guys from Clockwork Orange. Their position is less secure; they’ll negotiate.”

The mother dissolves into wracking sobs, her face buried in her hands.

Yuri tells himself that Chrysler has done everything possible to help this shattered family. He had wondered, a few minutes earlier, if he should ask for permission to take the dead little girl with them, to sell her himself to some Triad, but he remained silent.

The advice Chrysler has given to the family concerning the Triads should be taken as authentic counsel from a professional Territory expert. He is sincerely offering all he can, as proof of his compassion for this family that no longer exists.

But the only information he can give them is a choice of several organ-recycling companies.

We are the Camp Doctors
, Yuri repeats to himself over and over.

We are the Camp Doctors
.

We are priceless, and yet we are worthless
.

We are the ones who should bring hope, and we can’t even slow things down for one minute
.

We are the ones who should have healing words, but it is precisely words that the disease attacks now
.

We are doomed to the same silence as the Driscolls and all the other families we are seeing in Deadlink, Omega Blocks, Junkville, X-15, Surveyor Plateau, and here in Dreadnought, the only township, though a little-developed one, in the county of Champlain Banks
.

There are already ten cases reported in this tiny community of fewer than five thousand souls.

And one of the ten has already died.

The process is following its course.

Lake Champlain sparkles in the sun, gold light glinting off its surface like golden whirling dervishes on a lapis lazuli background. It is so beautiful, this morning sky, its blue as pure as the gaze of a little girl who has just died.

He doesn’t know why, but he feels tears sliding slowly down his cheeks.

Sitting in the pickup’s passenger seat, he turns his head to the east, pressing his face against the window glass.

*   *   *

Later, in the early afternoon, the sky turns a threatening purplish gray. A cold wind rises. Toward the east, far above the Atlantic, a black bar can be seen, shuddering with bloodred tremblings.

An oceanic storm coming from south of Greenland will soon strike the coastlines of Maine, Nova Scotia, and New England.

They arrive in view of Electra Glide in Blue, a township located just south of Grand Junction, at the very edge of their inspection zone. The particular combination of wind forces in the territory creates small armies of tumbleweeds blowing just above the ground and sometimes concatenating in giant rhizomes, studded with thorns, that often end up piled against some natural or artificial obstacle. Electra Glide is a township of Canadian motorcyclists, originally Hells Angels from Quebec, but after the two Falls the microcity was emptied of three-quarters of its population. Those that remained in their makeshift huts sold their Harley-Davidson bikes long ago to buy the necessities of life. Yuri and Chrysler know well that Sheriff Langlois wasted no time in buying up a lot of legendary Electra Glides and several lowriders from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as V-Rods from the beginning of the century, in return for electric-battery or gasoline-powered generators along with the necessary fuel, construction materials, and even rented building vehicles. A whore from Deadlink has provided Chrysler with some descriptions of typical cases originating from this township. At the city’s southern entry, an old Hells Angel from Quebec, more than sixty years old, has been uttering unintelligible phrases for days. When they see him, with his colors still emblazoned on the back of his leather jacket, paralyzed with shame in the face of the deterioration that is growing worse and worse every hour in him, Chrysler makes a gesture of commiseration, flashes an ultracalm doctor’s smile, and injects him immediately. Hells Angels can be difficult men to deal with, he explains. He talks frankly to the man about what is happening.

“We are going to try to cure the linguistic contamination you are suffering from, but we cannot promise anything. On the other hand, we can repair all of your electric and electronic devices. I should also tell you that we have an interest in some of your machines, and they would serve as an exchange if we are able to decontaminate you.”

Yuri doesn’t have to wait long before the answer—positive, of course—bursts from the man’s larynx, an incomprehensible babble that both of them understand perfectly, as always.

Two other cases live west of the township. An old “biker chick” in
phase four, who emits binary numbers with a New Brunswick accent in her sidecar. A young man, a recent refugee originally from Kentucky, in the final part of phase two, who must be forcefully held down before Chrysler can inject the narcoleptic. Biopsies, scans, nanomodules, neuroscans, analyses, samples. Tiny pieces of bodies deposited into test tubes.

Other reported cases prove impossible to find. The old hooker from Deadlink isn’t a first-class informant according to Chrysler’s strict hierarchy, but in a few days the phenomenon has grown even more intense. Everything is there for the taking.

Yuri knows that events are completely outstripping them.

But there is nothing else to do. Compile data and share it often with Professor Zarkovsky and Milan Djordjevic.

Continue to take inoperative electric machines to Link de Nova. And, periodically, present the alphanumeric mutation to him, hoping that the expected phenomenon will finally happen.

If everything goes well, thinks Yuri, we’ll all be dead before the rest of the world’s working coffeemakers give out.

The rain, concentrated in a violent squall, lashes against the pickup. The heavy Ford Super Duty can barely move, slipping and skidding on the surface of the sloppy mud serving as a road. Its back end fitted with two pairs of tires on each side, it rears up at each acceleration like a wild mechanical horse, just barely controllable. The windshield is literally covered with a vibrating pond that the wipers can never quite clear. As if contained within a globe of water, they can no longer even see the outline of the peak of Surveyor Plateau, which they have just left behind them.

The Atlantic storm currently striking the Northeast seems like nothing less than an oceanic cyclone.

The rain has rapidly transformed paths, trails, rows, and even the main road into muddy expanses they would never be able to navigate without the pickup and its Triton V8 engine. The snow that piled up during the huge three-day blizzard hasn’t yet had the time to melt. With the help of this new deluge from the sky, it is saturating the already-spongy ground until all the road will end liquid, lumpy, muddy, and totally impassable.

The day is ending. They finished their planned route perfectly; the
storm didn’t come early enough to ruin their agenda. They will even be home on time.

They skimmed all the small townships in the south of the Territory and to the limits of Grand Junction in a large circular arc spanning from the Vermont border to the low Ontarian plains. Now their “map” includes almost the whole “territory.” Their central storage units are filled with databases, statistics, diagrams, long lists of figures, codes, and equations.

Our storage units are like small-scale versions of what the Thing does to humans after they die
, thinks Yuri, only a little troubled by the revelation.

They arrive in view of Aircrash Circle just after nine o’clock. The bulk of the storm is now over Quebec and the state of New York, but moving rapidly toward the Territory. The rain transforms abruptly into a driving downpour a few seconds before Campbell pulls the pickup into his garage. A giant fork of lightning splits the sky horizontally in a colossal electric-blue filament, followed by the thundering detonation of an entire celestial artillery. The rain falls in roaring sheets. It will probably last the whole night. Now there is nothing left to do but wait, wait for the elements to finish with this part of the terrestrial globe. Wait for the night-ocean to end, as they waited for the end of the night-desert, and then the end of the night-blizzard.

There will surely be flooding and mud slides in every county, every township. After the sand, snow. After the snow, rain. And after all that, mud.

It is coming from everywhere, in every possible form. Deserts, blizzard, ocean. Every day the Territory is more and more like a guard tower under siege from all directions.

“Did you notice?” Yuri asks Chrysler later, during the night, over the incessant noise of the rain hammering against the roof of their cabin.