of disinfectants. Jonny followed Ice up a short flight of particle board stairs to the flat expanse of a subway platform. A group of Croakers, techs, by the look of them, were lounging, smoking and talking, on a stack of brushed aluminum packing cases. A couple of the women waved to Ice from their perch.
'Recognize the place? It's the old financial district metro line,' Ice said.
'I've seen photos. But I thought the Committee dynamited these tunnels during the Protein Rebellion.'
'They closed off the ends and a lot of the service tunnels, but squatters were living down here for years.'
Jonny followed Ice through a maze of maintenance shops sectioned off with ruined vending machines and lozenges of graffiti-covered fiberglass. Croaker techs bent over fiber optic bundles and circuit boards in a jumble of disassembled diagnostic devices (Haag-Streit electron microscopes, magnetic resonance imagers, a video micrographer) nodding and shouting polyglot advice. Further on, Ice lead him through a workshop where rusting M-16's and AK-47's were retooled and fit with computer-aided sighting mechanisms.
There was a surgery, cool lights glinting off delicate instruments.
Silent children stood to the side of one table, studying a man's open abdomen through an enormous Fresnel lens. A legless woman surgeon, suspended in a harness from a webwork of runners attached to the ceiling, described the tying off of an artery in rapid-fire Spanish. Older children translated into English and Japanese for the younger ones. 'We're also a teaching hospital,' said Ice. She nodded gravely toward the children. 'If things don't work out, they'll be the next generation of Croakers.'
Jonny leaned against a wall covered in stylized biomorphic landscapes of L.A., done in watery browns and grays.
'This is really-impressive,' he said. Someone had painted the Capital Records building to resemble the bleached skeleton of some prehistoric whale. The HOLLYWOOD sign, all driftwood and jellyfish. He shook his head numbly.
'The place is quiet now,' said Ice. 'Rumor has it that the Committee's gearing up for a big push. We've been getting almost double our usual patient-load.'
'How do you get them down here?'
'Same way you got here: through the sewers. Most people make a less spectacular entrance, though.'
'I sure hope so,' said Jonny. He rubbed his sore shoulder, wondering if he could score some endorphins. 'Tell me, you getting many leprosy cases down here? I'm moving Dapsone and Rifampin like cotton candy at the circus.'
Ice crooked a finger at Jonny and lead him through a poured concrete arch studded with vacuum tubes and plastic children's toys.
At the end of a short service corridor they entered a lab. Inside, Ice keyed in a number sequence on a Zijin Chinese PC hooked to a bank of video monitors. Three screens lit up with multi-colored snow, which gradually dissipated when Ice punched the monitor housing with the side of her fist. On one screen, a couple of Croakers in moonsuits were taking blood from a woman's arm. Fingering the PC's joystick, Jonny moved the picture in tighter on the woman's face.
There were marks there. Seamless and discolored lepromatous lesions. Another screen showed the same room from a different angle. There were about a dozen other people, smoking and reading on cots. All had lesions similar to the first woman.
Jonny let out a long breath. 'What's with the quarantine?' he asked.
Ice entered another code on the Zijin and more monitors lit up.
'It seemed like a good idea. Most of the lepers we've seen have been carrying a weird new strain of the disease. It seems to be viral.'
Jonny squinted slightly at the monitors. On one screen, a Croaker was moving from cot to cot, using a scalpel to scrape tissue samples from each leper's arm, while a second Croaker took the samples and sealed them in a plastic case marked with an orange biohazard trefoil. 'Viral leprosy? Never heard of it,' Jonny said.
'Neither had we,' said Ice. She pointed to a monitor where amber alphanumerics scrolled up a line at a time. 'We cross-checked all our exam data with the Merck software and came up empty. The symptoms match all the known strains of leprosy- skin macules, epidermal tumors, lesions of the peripheral nerves, loss of feeling in the limbs- but the little bugger that causes it is some kind of mutant-voodoo-patch job. It's also killing people.'
'How?' asked Jonny.
'Secondary infection. In the latter stages, patients tend to develop high fevers and brain lesions. The pathology could be meningitis. There it is,' said Ice. She nodded to a screen at the upper right.
Jonny looked up. The monitor displayed a time-lapse video micrograph of the leprosy virus, surrounded by numbers and biodata graphs. As he watched, the virus inserted its genetic material into the nucleus of a cell. Within seconds, the virus was cloning itself, filling the cell with ghostly larvae until the walls burst, scattering parasites into the blood stream. The virus's shape, the polyhedral head, cylindrical sheath and jointed fibers that attached it to the cell wall, reminded Jonny of pictures he had seen of twentieth century lunar landing modules. But the proportions of this module were all wrong.
'Jesus, the head on that thing's huge,' he said. 'But it's just a bacteriophage. Nothing weird about that.'
'That's what everybody says,' replied a different voice. Jonny turned and saw a boy wearing the body portion of a moon suit. In one hand, the boy carried the suit's head covering; in the other, a small case marked with a biohazard sticker. 'Ice, you teasing the guests, again?' he asked. The boy's face was luminously white, his head, hairless and smooth. Jonny recognized the look. He was a Zombie Analytic.
As the Zombie shed the rest of his protective gear, depositing it in a gray metal hamper, Ice went to him and kissed him lightly on the lips. She looked back and said, 'Jonny, meet Skid the Kid.'
The Kid held out one thin, white hand to Jonny and they shook.
Closer now, Jonny could see that the boy was no more than sixteen, and thin to the point of anorexia. He wore a tight see-through shirt and black drawstring pants. The archetypal Zombie, Jonny thought.
However, there were dark patches on the boy's scalp and hands where the subcutaneous pixels had burned out or been destroyed. He obviously had not had any serious maintenance in months.
'Actually, we've met already,' Skid said. 'I was in the stomping party that found you in the greenhouse.'
'Yeah? Those must be your footprints on the back of my skull.'
Skid laughed. 'Wouldn't be at all surprised.' Over his features, he flashed a boxer's face, sweaty and bruised. 'Croakers rule, okay! Eat the dead! Totally badass.' A second later, his own face was back.
'Course, I also helped carry you up to the clinic, so maybe it all balances out, right?'
Jonny smiled. 'Sure. Someday if I have to beat on you, I'll drive you to the farmacia. No problem.' He was put-off by the Kid. It was almost a cellular thing. Most Zombie Analytics Jonny had known had worked too hard at being ingratiating, going straight for the hard-sell. No doubt it was some habit left over from their early days in the flesh trade. And it was not helped by the fact it cost each Zombie a small fortune to maintain their electronics. Still, knowing the time and expense they took to have their skin dermatoned off and underlayed with pixel strips, Jonny found it difficult to work up much sympathy.
But Skid the Kid kept on smiling. 'Ice tells me you used to be a cop.'
'No,' said Jonny. 'I was in the Committee for Public Health. Completely different organization.'
'What's the difference?'
'The Committee knows what they're doing. And cops can't call in an air strike.'
Skid the Kid laughed again, and clapped his hands in delight.
'What's a Zombie doing working with the Croakers? You moonlighting or something?' asked Jonny.
'There's lots of Zombies down here,' Ice cut-in. 'We've got Naginata Sisters on security and the Bosozukos help with vehicle maintenance. The Funky Gurus pretty much run the armory on their own. We're a mongrel group. Everybody's welcome.'
Jonny nodded curtly. He sensed a set-up. 'Sounds like a great set-up. Think I'll pass, though.'
'We weren't trying to recruit you,' said Ice quickly. But she frowned so fiercely, Jonny could tell she was lying. And probably disappointed.
Hoping to steer things back to neutral ground, he said, 'So tell me more about this virus.'
Ice sighed. 'Not much more to tell. We don't know what the hell it is or where it came from. It looks like a phage, but it only attacks cells, like a virus. If we catch the infection early, we can slow it down with interferon or interlukin IV. But the virus mutates in a few days, and we're back where we started.'
