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Scott sat on a box next to the bed, got the saline lead and slapped George’s arm until he saw the vein coming up. When he had it, he plugged in the catheter, and the drip began flowing. Not hard, for an experienced doctor. Catton had no experience except what he’d given her, a sixty-year-old trust-funder working as a nurse in what was almost a charnel house.
They had three people on beds, in two bedrooms. Catton and two others were back on their feet. They’d had one death, and Scott thought that was all they’d have. The three still on beds, including Smithe, had made it over the hump; although they all smelled as if something inside them was rotting. He had vaccinated them with an attenuated Marburg virus, run through mouse models until the virus weakened enough that it might no longer kill a well-cared-for human.
They’d been wrong with Morton Carey. But Carey had been a drug user and had weakened himself. Carey had died five days after the injection, and they’d carried his body up the mountainside after midnight and buried him there, marking his grave with a heavy red stone.
Of the three still bedridden, Smithe was in the most danger. The others could talk again, though they were still too weak to sit up. Scott had seen so much death in his forty years that he’d become inured to it—and when he thought about the prospect of Smithe dying, and though he actually liked the man, he tended to think most about the problem of hauling his dead-weight corpse outside and burying him, what a pain in the ass that would be. How would they even get him through the back door?
So he was pulling for Smithe…
When he was sure the saline line was working, he stood and went out to the kitchen where Catton and the two recovered…patients?What were they, exactly? Gaia patriots, maybe? How about criminally insane accomplices?
Danielle Callister was an almost pretty, heavily tattooed blonde who’d been the first to come back, after Catton. She had an engaging smile, and direct eyes, but sometimes said shockingly sincere things about her parents, her siblings, and ex-lovers. She had a reputation as an earth-radical, a tree-sitter, who’d punched more than one cop.
Randall Foss was a short man with a bullet head, but quick, intelligent, good with computers and numbers. Of all of them, Scott himself excepted, Foss saw most clearly what was about to happen with Gaia. Foss was also their designated cook, and tonight, they were having fish sticks with French fries and copious catsup: fish and chips, more or less, accompanied by a fine Mosel Riesling, chosen to enhance the flavor of the fish sticks.
As for Catton, as Scott stood at the kitchen door, looking at her and at Callister and Foss…Scott slipped into a flashback.
—
They were atCatton’s house in Santa Fe with her lifelong companion, Jane Shepard, in the library. The library contained books on art, on literature—Catton had published a novel with a small Minnesota press—on Native American culture, on weaving and photography and mustang rescues, and, lately, on Gaia. Catton had a lot of enthusiasms, burning bright with each of them, but after a while, moving on.
Gaia was the latest, and she’d met Scott at a gathering of environmental activists in Santa Fe, which had numerous gatherings of environmental activists, usually for the purpose of fund-raising. She had instantly caught on to Scott’s radicalism, his disdain for the usualremedies, which he dismissed as “nice ideas, but practically unachievable,” and the fund-raisers as “collecting cash to provide jobs for hapless do-gooders.”
At this particular moment, the moment of the flashback, Catton had told Shepard about the plan to rescue Gaia. Shepard had not just disagreed, she’d freaked out, screaming at Catton, weeping, staggering around the library like a drunk.
Catton was screaming back, no tears there: she was the one with the money, she was the one who could get along without the other. Then Shepard, eluding Scott’s efforts to separate the two women, had slapped Catton, hard, knocking the other woman off her feet.
Catton had crawled across the floor, to steps leading down to a basement area that contained a television room, a bathroom and a storage area. She’d gotten back to her feet, and she’d said to Shepard, in a calm, muted voice, “I’m so sorry you did that, Jane. Give me a minute, please.”
She’d disappeared down the stairs, presumably to the bathroom, and Shepard had turned to Scott, pleading with him to give up any idea of injecting Catton and others with his makeshift vaccine…
And Catton appeared at the stairs, saying again, “I’m so sorry, Jane.”
Shepard turned to her. Catton was holding a short black rifle. Shepard said, “Don’t be ridiculous…”
Catton shot her twice in the chest, the spent shells flipping out of the gun like popcorn out of a hot pot. Shepard died quickly, on the black brick floor, her blank gray eyes open, staring up at a crystal chandelier.
Catton had turned to Scott and said, “So you see, I’m that committed. We should get up to the ski valley and start the injections. I had the things you wanted delivered, the futons…”
And Scott had thought:This is real, now.
He thought it again, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking at the three survivors. They’d left Shepard in the basement of the Santa Fe house, wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. Catton had said, “I’d be amazed if she were found in six months. By then, one way or another, it won’t matter.”
And it wouldn’t.
Vaccines or no, they were all dead, when the world found out what they’d done.
—
Foss had gottenup to pull the fish sticks, which were on an aluminum cookie sheet, out of the oven. He turned around with the sheet in his hand and saw Scott standing in the doorway, and asked, “What do you think, boss? George gonna make it?”
“If his weight doesn’t kill him,” Scott said. “He’s a leading candidate for diabetes.”
“Gotta die sometime,” Foss said. “So, shit and chips?”
Almost made Scott smile: “That’s about right. Fish sticks should be universally condemned as a crime against humanity.”
Catton turned her head to him: “I wish you hadn’t said that; the crime against humanity thing.”
