She was thirty feet from us now and I could already smell her, the heavy, putrid stink of gangrene. I wondered what part of her she was about to lose.
Fifteen feet and I knew the answer. There was a cavity where her ovaries should have been – just two deep holes, black in the centre and yellow-green around the edges. I gagged, holding the nausea in with a fierce effort of will. That wasn't a random, neglected injury. That had been done to her.
No time to worry about it now. Five feet and Soren was on her. The net caught in her grey hair, dragging it against her face as he pulled it down over her shoulders, down to her waist. Instantly she was struggling and screaming, a high sound like the distant cries of the seabirds. I could see that she was strong though, stronger than a woman her age should have been. Soren had clamped his fists around her arms, but her leg lashed out and caught him squarely between his. He bent over in pain, bringing his head closer to hers. Instantly, her mouth snapped at him through the netting, missing his cheek by millimetres.
'Now would be good!' he shouted at me, eyes glaring, angry and afraid.
I squirted a needle of liquid from the syringe in my hand. No point putting an air bubble in her veins and killing her before we could talk to her. Soren had both arms clamped around hers now. Her mouth continued snapping, uselessly, at the empty air in front of her. The animal rage radiated from her like a physical force. She kicked him again between the legs, and again. Soren's face, covered with sweat, grimaced in pain. Another kick and I saw his arms loosen a little, his body jerking involuntarily away.
He gritted his teeth and tightened his arms again, spinning round so that the old woman was facing me. Her eyes blazed into mine, bright with madness. One of her shoulders was twisted at an unnatural angle and I realised that she must have dislocated it as she struggled. She writhed and I heard a crack that might have been a bone breaking.
The needle slipped easily into the loose flesh of her bicep. But she twisted at the last minute and I felt a jar as the point bottomed out against bone. She pushed further forward and I realised what she was trying to do, to snap the point before the syringe could deliver its load. It was too dangerously easy to think of the Infected as mindless animals. But it was their feelings which were numbed, not their intellects.
I pulled back, just enough to move the needle away from bone, and depressed the plunger, shooting the anaesthetic straight into muscle.
Now I just had to hope that her circulatory system was still functioning in something like a normal way – that her brain and body would respond to drugs the way a normal person's would. I was so intent on watching her eyes, waiting for them to glaze over into sleep, that I didn't see the movement coming until it was too late. Her head jerked violently towards me and her teeth clamped over my nose with a vicious strength.
Soren made a sound that was halfway between a grunt and a laugh. Yeah, I might have found time to think it was funny too, if I hadn't been in sudden agony. He made an attempt to pull her back and I grabbed desperately at his arms as her teeth tugged at my nose. I knew that she wouldn't let go, no matter how hard he pulled. The only thing that could give was my nose.
Somewhere on the periphery of my attention I was aware that Kelis was running towards us. I saw Soren looking over my head helplessly, hoping his partner would know what to do.
'Pull her jaw apart!' I gritted out through a throat that only really wanted to scream.
'I can't!' he said. 'If I let her go…'
Then Kelis was there, and she had her hands round the woman's mouth, circling me from behind. I could see blood slicking down over her wrists and I knew that it was coming from me. The word Infected was ringing in my head like a mantra. Infected. Infectious. Her saliva in my blood. My mouth was filling with a coppery taste as the blood from my nose dripped into it and I thought that I was probably swallowing her saliva too. I'd already had the Cure, but did that mean I was immune to this twisted new strain of it?
Kelis' fingers were white with strain on the other woman's face, digging in to her skin so hard each nail had torn the flesh, leaving a perfect semi-circle of red in the wrinkled old skin. Other than that, she was achieving nothing.
I could feel the teeth sinking further into me. I felt the rasp of enamel against cartilage and the pain intensified. Her legs kicked and kicked, forward into my shins and backwards into the junction of Soren's legs. The discomfort of that was lost in the larger pain, like a whisper drowned out by shouting.
The syringe was still in my hand, braced between my body and the old woman's. Use it! my mind was screaming at me. Straight in her heart. That will stop the pain. Or maybe it was the Voice, released by the rush of adrenaline through my body. But using the syringe that way would kill her, and then this would have been for nothing. So we stayed there: her teeth in my nose; Kelis' hands on her face; Soren's arms around her. Stalemate.
The pain was almost unbearable. I realised that my hand was creeping up despite myself, the needle a glitter of silver pointed straight at the old woman's heart. That instinct to survive was stronger than anything, even my own conscious will. I watched, mesmerised as inch by inch my hand moved towards her. I wanted to stop it but I wanted to live, damn it. I wanted the agony to end. A few seconds now and the needle would be in her chest and this would all be over.
My nose was still a burn of agony, but the pressure had let up. Her jaws had relaxed. In front of me, her eyelids were flickering, the muscles in her face slackening. Blood rushed back red into Kelis' fingers as they relaxed too. Soren's arms loosened, supporting the old woman rather than restraining her.
A second more and she was entirely off me. Her jaw flapped open, strings of bloody red saliva hanging from her teeth and dribbling down her chin. I staggered back, the syringe dropping from my hand as I clasped it over my nose. 'Jesus fucking Christ!'
Kelis rested a hand against my shoulder. My eyes caught hers and I saw that she was uncertain how to help me. I managed a shrug. Nothing she could do. Then both our heads snapped round as we heard the rumbling sound of Soren laughing. 'Well,' he said, 'you sure have a strange idea of fun.'
We secured her to the heavy wooden table in the kitchen before I let her come out of the anaesthesia. We'd put strong wire bindings at her wrist, elbow, ankle and thigh, wound over strips of cloth to stop her tearing her own flesh if she struggled. Not that we were worried about hurting her. I wanted to hurt her after I'd caught sight of my nose in the apartment's one cracked mirror. Her teeth had scored deep marks on either side, marks that would leave permanent scars. The nose itself was swollen and bulbous. I wanted to hurt her but I didn't want her to get loose and I was afraid that, given the chance, she'd happily saw off her own limbs to escape. She was struggling even before her eyes had opened, letting out soft little moans of complaint when she found that she couldn't move.
'Give her the anti-psychotics now, before she wakes up,' Haru said nervously. Even with the woman securely bound he refused to come within five feet of her. I'd noticed that he was leaving five foot of clear space around me too, and he wasn't the only one. Soren hadn't come within spitting distance of me since he'd seen the old woman's blood mingling with mine.
I'd swabbed the wound on my nose with antiseptic when I got back, injected myself with antibiotics and anti-virals and told the others that that would take care of anything. They didn't look convinced, and why should they? The truth was if there was something to catch I'd got it, and the only defence I could count on was that my bloodstream was overloaded with the same infection already.
'I don't want to give her anything till she's conscious,' I told Haru now. 'Seeing what effect it has on her will tell me something about what's wrong. Besides, there's no saying how long it will have an effect. Supply's limited and I can't afford to waste any on a sleeping subject.'
A moot point anyway. Her eyes were wide open now and flicking round, sizing us up.
'Habla Ingles?' I asked her when her gaze caught mine. Something in the set of her face told me she'd understood, but she didn't reply.
'We need you to answer some questions,' Kelis said in Spanish. 'We won't hurt you if you cooperate.' But she looked at me as she said it and I shrugged. We both knew it was an empty threat and sure enough the old woman didn't bother to respond. Up close, I had a grandstand view of the gaping wounds in her abdomen where her reproductive organs had once been. What could we possibly threaten her with that was worse than that?
'OK,' I said, as Kelis translated into Spanish for me. 'I'm going to give you an injection that might clear your head a little. It's just a standard anti-psychotic – there won't be any long-term effects.' I didn't know why I was bothering to explain it to her, but it seemed very important to me to keep up the pretence of being a doctor now that I had so much blood on my hands.
