already.”
“All right, all right, I’m going,” said Pal. “I suppose you want to go alone, just you and Gwyn?”
“Yes,” said Doc. “Better to lose two than any more.”
“On that logic, better to lose just
“I’m not Shade,” said Doc. “That’s why I left Shade. You sorry you left, Pal?”
“Nope,” replied Pal somberly. “I was just checking to see if you were. You had a mighty fine surgery back there, and those spider-robots of his to-be nurses and all. Yanking out a Ferret tooth there would be as easy as taking a piss.”
“Maybe,” said Doc. “But I reckon the Overlords have probably tracked down Shade by now, and whoever was dumb enough to stick with him, and the computers he lives in and the whole submarine and everything in it has probably been rusting away at the bottom of the bay for years.”
“Could be,” said Pal. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if Shade is still going, even still looking for us. Another reason to be careful. Shade always did have his true believers, and he sends them far and wide. They could easily be more dangerous than the creatures.”
“Just go get Gwyn,” said Doc wearily. “While I get my kit together.”
The Arkle came back to the world in total incomprehension. There was a terrible pain in his face, everything was on a strange angle, and he could see the sun in a very odd position. He groaned, and the angle shifted and the sun righted itself and moved away, to be replaced by Gwyn’s broad face, up unreasonably close. It took The Arkle a few moments more to work out that it was so close because Gwyn was carrying him like a baby, across his chest.
“What’s happening?” he croaked. It was hard to talk because his mouth felt puffy and strange. His lips were swollen and too close together, his jaw wouldn’t open properly, and there was this pain there, jabbing at him with every step Gwyn took.
“Stop for a moment,” Doc said to Gwyn.
The Arkle blinked and tried to shift his head. Why was the Doc here? He vaguely remembered going to see her about something.
“Keep still, please, The Arkle,” said Doc.
He obeyed, and something stung him in the arm.
“What is…”
The Arkle’s words trailed off and he subsided back down in Gwyn’s arms.
“He’s not staying under as well as I thought he would,” said Doc. “And I can’t give him much more. We’d better hurry.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Gwyn. “You only got that case.”
“You carried me a lot farther a lot faster once,” said Doc. She could see the top of the ridge up ahead—the real top, not the false one that had famously fooled so many walkers in the old times, when there had been a popular trail that went along the ridge, weaving up and down on either side.
“Long time ago,” said Gwyn. “You were lighter then.”
Doc hit him on the arm, very lightly.
Gwyn laughed, a kind of giggling chuckle that sounded weird coming out of his barrel chest. Then he suddenly stopped, and his head snapped to the right, and he immediately crouched down, balancing The Arkle with his left arm as he drew his sword with his right. It was short but broad-bladed, and streaked with gold. Gold was good at disrupting creature circuitry, the augmentation stuff they put in at the Meat Factory, completing the transformation from child to monster.
Doc had ducked down too. Gwyn’s Change Talent was an extra sense. He could feel other life-forms and track them, though he couldn’t tell them apart. She drew her sword. Like Gwyn’s, it was gold-plated, another relic of their service with Shade, the enigmatic computer personality who’d led what he liked to call the Resistance against the Overlords and their creatures.
“Where?” whispered Doc.
Gwyn pointed with his sword, across to a point below the ridge where the trees opened out and the undergrowth was not so thick.
Doc slid her sword back into its scabbard and reached inside her coat to take out a pistol instead. Since it was below the ridge-line, it was unlikely to be a creature.
Creatures were hard to kill with gunfire; the gold-plated swords worked better. But for a human, a gun worked fine.
And as Pal had said, Shade always did have plenty of true believers, escapees from the dorms who did whatever Shade told them to do without question…even if that might include tracking down and killing humans who Shade would undoubtedly have labeled traitors.
Particularly Doc, who Shade had labored over for so many years, tailoring educational programs and simulations to train her as a doctor. But not to help save human life. Shade had only wanted her trained up to help him with his research into the creatures, to dissect captured prisoners, to try to discover exactly how they worked, and how they were augmented by the strange energy that could be detected in the city after the Change….
A low branch quivered and whipped back, and something loped down the slope. It came toward them for a moment, till it caught their scent and suddenly changed direction, even before Doc recognized it and decided not to shoot.
“A dog,” whispered Gwyn. “Better make sure it’s gone.”
Dogs and cats were rare because the creatures killed them, as they killed anything that was not part of the complicated battles the Overlords played in the city—endless battles that soaked up the continuous production of the Meat Factory, and the dorms that fed it with their human raw material.
They waited for a few minutes, but the dog did not circle back.
“It’s gone,” said Gwyn. “Beyond my range, anyway. Let’s go.”
At the top of the ridge there was an old picnic station, an open structure with a galvanized iron roof and a single long pine table underneath. Gwyn set The Arkle down on the table while Doc laid out her instruments and drugs.
“Tie him down,” she said, handing over a package of bandages. “I can’t put him down deep enough he won’t react.”
Gwyn took the bandages. When he was done with the tying down, he looked over at Doc.
“Your eyes are bright,” he said. “You seeing?”
“Yes,” said Doc. She blinked and bent low over The Arkle’s open mouth. Her violet eyes grew brighter still, and she stared down, looking through the tooth, through the bone, seeing it all. Her eyes moved, following the blood from the roots up along the altered circulatory channels. She saw the infection flowing with the blood, swirling across the boy’s face, flooding into his brain, to join the pool of bacteria where it already dwelled and prospered.
Doc straightened up and looked across at Gwyn. Her eyes were shining still, but it was not with the light of her Change Talent.
“Too late,” she said. “Just
“They don’t know how, the young ones,” said Gwyn, who was all of twenty-one. “They just don’t know how to ask.”
The Arkle groaned, and one taloned hand fluttered under its restraint.
“Mom?” he whispered. “Mom?”
Doc picked up a hypodermic and plunged it deep, followed quickly by another. Then she took The Arkle’s hand and held it tight, despite the talons that scored her flesh.
“It’s all right, love,” whispered Doc. “It’s all right.
“You won’t feel a thing. You won’t feel a thing. You won’t feel a…”
This story is set in the same world as my 1997 novel,
