The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) (6 page)

“Where are they?” I ask, with little hope that he’ll be able to convey anything detailed like that, but asking anyway.

He jerks, his jaws working in the way I’m more familiar with when it comes to in-betweeners. The concentration of before leaves his face and an eager sort of searching replaces it. My heart sinks at that, but then he surprises me again by banging his head against the fence hard enough to make it clang.

Fresh, new blood mars his forehead when he pulls back. That’s a good sign in a way. It means his nanites restarted his heart quickly enough that his blood is still flowing well and circulating, becoming oxygenated and then providing that oxygen to his body. Given his actions, I’m thinking he’s more like a brain-damaged human with decent functioning and some obvious measure of control.

He’s back on task again, the momentary lapse into in-betweener-ness over. His hand is jerky and uncoordinated and he misses the first time he tries to jam it into his pocket, but on the second try he manages to extract a piece of paper. He pushes it through the bars, holds it for a few seconds, and then lets it go. It flutters in the light breeze, the folds coming undone so that it flaps like a bird or a poorly made paper airplane. As it moves along the grass away from me, I see panic in his face.

The last thing I want is to come out of my hiding place and into plain view of either the in-betweener or the group of deaders. The deaders can’t climb over a fence, but they can get agitated and that draws others. The in-betweener is more than capable of climbing a fence. This whole situation has been one long risk and I’m pushing things.

“Dammit,” I grumble to my friend, the truck bumper. Before I can think any more about it, I drop everything except my rifle, get to my feet, and sprint across the road and into the big grassy area that fronts the complex.

The paper flutters with more energy as the breeze picks up momentarily and I lose it behind the big sign that tells visitors the name of the complex. I pass by the in-betweener without giving him a direct look, but out of the corner of my eye I see him lose focus and snap his jaws in in-betweener mode again.

That makes me put my head down and push my legs harder. I’m not used to this sort of full-on effort anymore. I spend my time being quiet and careful, which generally also means slow. This kind of running is almost alien to my body after all this time. It feels good, even though I’m terrified.

I catch sight of the paper again as it scoots along the overgrown grass and veer so I’ll intersect its path. The grass is taller farther into the green space, coming up to my knees and matted with last year’s dead stems. I almost take a header into it when I risk a glance backward just to make sure the in-betweener is still on his side of the fence. He is, but he’s agitated and I can tell it won’t be long until he makes a move. My running is just exciting him.

Then I’ll have to stop and kill him again. I just hope the paper has all the information I need if it comes to that.

The paper almost gets away from me one more time, but I finally grab it when it dips into some tall grass. As soon as I’m sure I have it, I drop down and use that same tall grass as cover. The in-betweener seems to be battling himself at the moment, walking in circles and hitting himself in the head. Some of the deaders sense the disturbance and pause in their fence licking, while the rest continue on as before, oblivious.

Slinging the rifle onto my lap so that it’s in just the right position to pick up and fire, I greedily open the note. It’s spattered with brown drops of dried blood, and some that seem fresher, but the writing is legible. Some part of me is filled with excitement at the very idea of opening a paper written by another hand, even while the rest of me fears what I’ll read, and how that might change the trajectory of my career in professional caution.

The handwriting is young, busy with big looping letters and circles instead of dots over the letters that need such. I run my hand over it before I can even read it, the indirect touch of another person almost overwhelming me for a second or two. One more look at the in-betweener and I read:

Hello! The man with this note is Sam and he won’t hurt you if you are careful. He was a teacher and he takes care of us, but then he got shot by accident. I timed it and he was gone for three minutes so he’s not as bad as most. But he is not doing well and we sent him to find you before something bad happens. He watched you but we didn’t get a chance to come to where you are. There are five of us but Penny and Jon are little and I can only carry one of them. Please come and find us. He can bring you but if not, here is our address. Love, Veronica

P.S. If you feed him animals he isn’t as dangerous.

Below that, the girl had drawn a row of hearts and noted their address. An address I don’t know at all. An address I
know
I will find.

Four Years Ago - A Life Saved Is a Future Saved

“Death from sudden heart attack may be a thing of the past!” the newscaster announces with a wide grin that speaks to me of a love of cheeseburgers. So I say that out loud.

My mother snorts and taps at her tablet, immersed in some bit of work that’s followed her home. Her fingernail makes a series of rapid clicks against the glass of the tablet, and then she makes a little noise of satisfaction. Another problem solved.

What my mother does in the military has nothing to do with fighting—at least I don’t think so—and everything to do with computer programming. That just means she’s always busy. For her, the fight is twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. She works at home every night and every weekend. She loves her job, though, so there’s that.

I turn up the TV a little to cover the sound of her taps. This is one bit of news I want to listen to.

This new nanite is a doozy and probably deserves a little excitement. Finding the cure-all nanite isn’t likely, but more and different kinds of nanites are now available to mix and match as the need arises. This particular type can be administered by emergency responders. It can restart the heart and fix heart tissue, rendering the heart normal again after the worst has happened. They’re calling them First Responders. I wonder how the real first responders of the world—namely, the firefighters and paramedics—feel about a bunch of nanites being given their name.

It’s true that most people won’t get that far down the road of heart failure. Anyone with clogged arteries is receiving injections of the plaque-eating nanites, but sometimes things just happen. I’ll bet there are a million sighs of relief coming from a million chests right about now.

After a moment of listening to the news anchor gushing on about these new nanites, my mother says, “Well, this is good news for the transfat people.”

I laugh and answer, “Well, there’s no transfat in ice cream but it’s got loads of saturated fat. Can I have some?”

She looks up from her tablet and winks. “Only if you get me some, too.”

We eat ice cream and watch the extended coverage of this new advance. Nanites are great, but they aren’t computationally complex enough to do many different things. They are purpose built.

Artery-clearing nanites travel the bloodstream, using pincers and jaws to remove plaque from cholesterol buildup. Others are engineered to digest other compounds or grab onto cells much larger than themselves and simply burst them, rendering them unable to carry out their biological imperatives. It’s complicated, but exciting.

A new segment comes on, this one very different from the upbeat tenor of the previous program, the tone this time far more serious. Gushing, cheeseburger-loving anchors are replaced by the serious faces of the typical older anchor and an expert guest.

“But, and this is a big issue, Troy, we’d be remiss if we didn’t examine the potential dangers,” the newscaster says.

To me, it looks like the expert is about ready to jump out of his chair and start waving his hands like those crazy people on the street corners always warning us about the end of the world. The newscaster barely finishes speaking before he jumps in.

“This is new technology, one in which the long-term impacts to health are entirely unknown,” he begins. He sounds reasonable, but excited in the way people who have bad news they can’t wait to share are. I can almost hear the movie music signaling impending doom in the background. “New nanites are coming out too fast for anything like the extensive testing we really need. And people are loading up on every kind of nanite, with no thought to how many different types they've got inside them and what might happen as a result.”

“Hey, Mom. Listen to this for a minute,” I say, putting my empty bowl of ice cream on the coffee table.

She looks up, then back down at her tablet, then at me. I know she’s trying to decide if work can wait, so I smile and point at the screen. That does the trick, because she puts her work aside and tucks her feet up under my blanket on the couch, all her attention now on the screen.

The newscaster is one I’m not particularly fond of. When he’s trying to be serious he always draws his face down in a frown so severe that it makes his facelift look weird, like it’s too tight or something.

He nods sagely at the expert’s words, then asks, “Even if that were true, don’t the nanites simply do their work, go inactive, and then get flushed out of the system? Should people be afraid and then pass up the chance for a longer and healthier life? Isn’t that overly cautious, even alarmist?”

The expert shakes his head. “You make it sound like it’s an either-or situation when it isn’t,” the fellow shoots back, his irritation showing. “What I’m saying is that the current trend is to have nanites injected even when there’s no viable medical need. In particular, there’s a huge underground trade in cheap knock-off plaque nanites. Millions of people around the world, some as young as their twenties, are getting pumped full of nanites without a diagnosis or prescription. Young people whose arteries are almost certainly clean as a whistle are loading up on these things—all for no better reason than ‘just in case.’ Using a radically new and only minimally tested technology in this way is downright foolhardy.”

The newscaster nods again, giving the old wise-man imitation he’s known for. He says, “I don’t think anyone is encouraging irresponsible medical treatments, whether nanite-based or not. But you have to admit…”

I tune them out at that point, a thought coming to me.

“Mom, do you have nanites?” I ask.

She starts at that, then picks at the fringe at the edge of the blanket. I know my answer already.

“I do, but not like what that man is talking about,” she says, waving toward the TV and the talking heads.

I think that’s sort of funny, because she was very insistent about ensuring all my nanites left my system once my tumor was gone. I figured she was creeped out by the idea of me having machines inside me and here she is, adding them to her own bloodstream.

“What kind?”

She laughs. “Oh, well, the same ones everyone’s got now, I’d guess.”

“Which ones? The artery ones?”

She nods and smiles, but she’s examining my face for my reaction.

I’m not sure what I think of that. Mostly, I wonder if that means she had something wrong with her. There’s no denying that my associations with nanites lead me to think of them as the things that bring us back from the brink of death.

My mom must see something of this in my face, because she reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and says, “I’m not sick, sweetie. I had a little build-up in my arteries from all that ship food and a lifetime of ice cream, but the nanites went in and did their stuff. I’m sure they’re probably gone by now. It was just a shot at the doctor’s office. Nothing more.”

I take that in and look back at the muted screen, the talking heads still in full debate. The remote lies on the arm of the couch, so I pick it up and click off the program.

My mom is still looking at me, waiting for me to say whatever it is I’d like to say.

“That’s cool, Mom. I want you to stick around forever. We can be all nanited up together.”

She laughs and picks my ice cream bowl up off the coffee table, holding it out for me.

“Then more ice cream is definitely called for. My pipes are all clean now,” she says.

I take our bowls and go into the kitchen, scooping rocky road from the carton and listening to my mother tap away on her tablet, her break over.

The expert’s words still twist about in my mind. We were so careful with my nanites. Granted, they were primitive compared to those being manufactured now, just two years later, but still. It does seem odd that people would just buy cheap knock-offs from who knows where and put them inside their bodies. They could be hacked, or carry malicious code or something. Everyone knows the country that provides most of our cheaper electronics always plants code in everything they make. Even toasters!

I suppose people risk it because the fear of death is so strong, probably the strongest fear humans have. With good reason. We’ll do almost anything to avoid dying. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. I, of all people, should know how far someone will go to live.

Shrugging off the expert’s words, I make a point of looking at the positive side of this. Advances are being made every single day in the new wonderland that is medical nanite technology. By the time I’m old enough to worry about things like heart attacks, I won’t have to worry about them at all.

I like that idea. Another bowl of ice cream sounds like a perfect way to celebrate.

Today - In Between You and Me

In typical in-betweener fashion, the recently deceased guy at the fence seems to have lost interest in finding me, perhaps forgetting that I’m here at all. I study him with a new perspective from my hidden spot in the tall grass. I now know his name and at least a little of his past.

He’s a revived dead person—meaning his nanites restarted his heart and closed up major wounds—but he
was
dead. And dead for three minutes means massive brain damage. That’s what makes him an in-betweener. Not dead and not alive, merely functioning.