Recoil (16 page)

“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 plague, 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?”