Shockball (21 page)

He had never seen a lot of other things, either. The trouble I was in abruptly quadrupled. I felt like slugging him, but I suspected one shout from Rico and I’d find myself nailed to the nearest hogan door.

I’d try to be diplomatic. “That’s getting a little too personal.”

He moved closer, until his mouth hovered just above my ear. “When I get personal with you, patcher, you will know it.” Then he grabbed my braid and started unraveling it himself.

The hell with diplomacy. “Please don’t.”

He ignored that, and put his other hand on my arm to keep me from moving away. I thought frantically, and recalled what Hok had said about attending the wedding ceremony.

“Wait. I just started my menstrual cycle; it’s what woke me up.”

He took his arm away as if I’d scalded him. “You’re unclean.”

“Yes.” Thank you, Hok, for your ridiculous taboos.

Rico got up and turned his back on me. “Return to your hogan.”

I did, and nearly broke the speed of light.

After I fastened the door covering and curled back up beside Reever, I listened. If the chief left the fire, I didn’t hear him go.

Finally I fell asleep, and dreamed of the Night Horse ceremony. This time I was the bride bearing the basket of corn mush. I set it down in front of my dark groom, and took my place at his side. When he turned to me, he was smiling.

He was also Rico.

A lifetime of using synthesizer units had spoiled me, and as a result I’d never given much thought to the alternative methods of food preparation. Not until I woke up the next morning, went out to the central fire, and got to see some of the Night Horse women preparing one of their communal stews.

A long tray of vegetables sat on a flat boulder that doubled as a kind of worktable. One woman deftly plucked potatoes, onions, and carrots from the tray and sliced them up for the pot.

Her companion was chopping something else— something that lay in a small, bloody pile next to her. It took a moment for me to realize she’d skinned and was dicing up a dozen or so small animals. Rabbits. Birds. Squirrels. And last but not least, what appeared to be several large, plump rats.

“Good morning,” I said, when they looked at me. I pointed to one small corpse. “Are those rats?”

They looked at each other, then giggled. Of course, they were rats. Was I blind?

I thought of the few times I’d sampled one of their stews, and shuddered. Better to find out late than never. “Did I mention I’m a vegetarian?”

That just made them giggle harder.

A small, furtive shadow crept up to the pile of bodies, and the woman preparing them went still. A moment later, she seized and held up a small, clawing animal. “Look, sister. This will add spice to the broth.”

“Wait!” I grabbed her hand before she could slice its throat open. “You can’t eat that. That’s a cat.”

“Yes, patcher, we know what it is.”

“It was just hungry. You can’t kill it for being hungry.”

“I will kill it so our
tribe
does not go hungry,” she told me, the way she would a not-too-bright child.

“It’s awfully scrawny. Would you mind giving it to me instead?”

The two women eyed each other. The younger said, “Whiteskins keep useless animals as pets and waste food on them. That is not the way of the People.”

I thought desperately of how I could convince them. “A cat is not a useless animal. They hunt rats, and will bring them as offerings to the humans who care for them. Think of all the stew you’ll be able to make.”

“
Ayi
, is this true?” Both women seemed intrigued by the idea, and I realized that rat must figure prominently on their menu.

I didn’t think throwing up was going to support my case, so I nodded and held out my hands. “Please.”

“Very well, you may have it.”

I took the cat from the woman’s impersonal grip, and hugged it against my chest. The small feline curled up against me, yowling and shivering. “Thank you.”

It was filthy and full of fleas and in need of some immediate medical attention, so I took it to my medical alcove. Jenner followed me, griping for me to notice him, until he saw what I put down on the exam table. He jumped up to have a sniff, and nearly got his face clawed.

I’d never had Jenner neutered, so his interest was only natural. “Back off, Romeo. She doesn’t want to make friends right now.”

I scanned her thoroughly. She was female, domestic shorthair, and fully developed. She was also full of parasites inside and out, malnourished, and had a dozen infected bites in her scraggly black fur. Apparently the rats fought back.

“Well, Miss Juliet, you look like you’ve been through a couple of catastrophes.”

Juliet bit my thumb to let me know what she thought of my opinion. Jenner cried plaintively at my feet.

I hated sedating her, but it would make the worming and wound treatment easier on both of us. Once I rid her small body of all the pests, I carefully cleaned out and sutured the gashes. She’d lost part of an ear some time ago, and it had healed raggedly, so I fixed that, too.

Then I sat and held her until she came out of the sedation. She was already used to my stroking hands when she opened her wary green eyes, and sniffed at me.

“Hi, there.” Jenner was pacing around my ankles.

“Want to say hello to your new boyfriend now?” Juliet peered over my lap at her anxious suitor, sneezed once, and curled up against my chest. “Well, pal, it looks like this one is going to take some convincing.”

“I know how he feels.” Reever stood in the entrance, arms folded, watching me.

“Nothing worth having comes along easily,” I pointed out, miffed. Then I noticed how pale he was. “You okay?”

“I feel somewhat tired.”

“Don’t eat the stew they make here anymore, okay?”

“Why?”

Reever probably wouldn’t object to rabbit, bird, and rat with vegetables, given his weird food preferences. However, I had to kiss him, and I did. “Trust me. Just don’t.”

Juliet had fallen asleep again, so I carried her over to the makeshift cat bed I’d improvised out of the supply container, and carefully set her down in it. Then I grabbed my scanner and waved Reever over to the table. “You’re next.”

I told him about how I’d saved Juliet as I went through the renal series, and saw my repair work was still holding up. We might even have as long as a month before things got critical. I thought of what would happen if his kidney failed, and what had nearly happened with Rico the night before.

“Reever, we have to get out of here.”

“I’ve done some discreet exploring.”

“What? As weak as you are?”

“I did not go far. The outlet tunnels are rigged with proximity beacons and trip sensors. It’s possible I can disable them, but without a map, I doubt we can negotiate our way out once we’re past them.”

“I don’t think they use maps.” I saw a hulking form hovering outside the entrance, and lifted a finger to my lips. “Come in, Kegide.”

Kegide went immediately over to Juliet’s container, and peered down at her. Jenner joined him, and he cautiously stroked my pet. For once, His Majesty let him without making a fuss, and Kegide grinned at me like a kid who’d been given a treat.

“How many pets do you plan to acquire while we’re here?” Reever asked me.

“Don’t look so peeved.” I patted his cheek. “Just be glad I’m not a rodent lover.”

“Why did you leave me last night?”

I went over to the table and started cleaning up the mess I’d made from treating Juliet. It was the only way to keep Reever from seeing the guilt on my face. “No reason. I couldn’t sleep.”

“What did he do to you?”

My hands stilled. “He talked to me. I told him about the Jorenians. That’s all.”

“Is it?”

I tried to think of a way to reassure him. Then I turned, and saw Reever was gone.

Juliet gradually healed, but she never completely lost her scraggly appearance. Jenner didn’t care. He fell, and fell hard. Wherever she went, he followed. And wherever they went, Kegide wasn’t far behind. I often found the three of them playing a game of chase-the-suture-silk in the tunnel outside Medical. Once Juliet was back to her old self, she and her two boyfriends began going out regularly and hunting rats in the tunnels.

How did I know that? From the pile of fresh kills laid at the door of our hogan every morning.

The Night Horse women were impressed by the contributions Juliet and Jenner brought for the cooking pot, and praised both animals frequently. They graciously ignored the fact that Kegide constantly stole from their stores to feed his small companions.

Reever and I never discussed what had happened that night after the wedding ceremony. I tried a few times to talk to him about it, but he always changed the subject. By unspoken agreement we never brought it up again. He became distant, and it started eating at me, like a wound that wouldn’t heal.

I kept hearing rumors of men searching the surface regions above the tunnels. Hok informed me they’d even inspected the Night Horse village, looking for us.

Joseph wasn’t giving up. I suspected he never would.

Kegide showed up one morning after I’d treated Spotted Dog (now called Handsome Runner) with his weekly allergen suppressant, and gestured for me to come with him and the cats. Puzzled, I grabbed the impromptu medical case I’d thrown together, and followed him into one of the outlet tunnels.

I stopped just short of the proximity beacon. I liked Kegide, but there was no way I was getting a bunch of spikes punched through me for him. “Kegide, we can’t go any farther here.”

Kegide did something on the wall, and the lights winked out. Then he showed me it was safe by walking through the trip sensor. With a sigh, I trailed after him.

The tunnel he took me into from there was part of the old sewer system Rico had originally brought us through. I recognized it from the smell.

I suppressed my excitement and trudged along, pretending to be miffed, and memorized our path. Was he taking me to the subway? Another access hatch to the surface? Why?

We didn’t go to the subway or the surface. Instead, we entered a cross-section that had once held some kind of equipment, long ago rusted away. Salvaged panels and other junk had been used to make a small, dilapidated shack. I smelled a fire, and heard someone coughing inside it.

“Hello?”

Kegide stuck his head inside the shack, then stepped back as an emaciated figure trudged out. The man was one of the Night Horse hybrids, judging by his coloring and dress, but he looked awful.

“What do you want, whiteskin?” he asked me.

“I’m a patcher. Are you ill? Do you need help?” He just shook his head and went back in the shack. The salvaged panel that served as a door slammed shut.

“Okay.” I turned to Kegide. “Now what do I do?” Kegide gave me a beseeching look and gestured for me to go inside.

“He didn’t exactly put out a welcome mat,” I said, then sighed as Kegide kept waving his big hands at the shack. “Yes, I’ll go in. But you’re coming with me.” I tightened my grip on my bag and went in.

CHAPTER NINE

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Many Mistakes

I
t was hard to see at first, what with the smoke and the gloom. When my eyes adjusted, I saw the sick man and a dozen more hybrids lying on the floor of the shack, curled up on filthy sleeping mats. They were all asleep or unconscious, and from the condition of their bodies, they hadn’t been interested in or capable of keeping up with their personal hygiene. A shallow hole dug in one corner of the shack had been used as a cesspit. The stench from that alone made my eyes water.

“How long have they been like this?” I asked Kegide, before I remembered he couldn’t answer me. I walked around and performed a brief visual exam of each of the shack’s occupants.

Some of the hybrids were coughing, others were in a sludgy, semicomatose state. Once I’d made sure they were all still alive, I knelt beside the man who had come out of the shack.

His hair had fallen out in patches and his skin looked almost gray in tone. Both eyelids and the lymph nodes under his jaw were swollen. Thick, gray patches of tissue surrounded his mouth. Two open chancre sores glistened, raw and red, on his lips. The other exposed areas of his body were covered with a crop of pale red rash spots.

Whatever he had, it was potentially contagious. “Kegide, go outside.”

I scanned my patient, and found an odd, spiral-shaped bacterium rampant in his bloodstream. I didn’t recognize it, but a weird sense of déjà vu came over me.

Where have I seen this bug before?

The scanner was unable to identify the spirochete as well, which was really bad.

I went to the door of the shack and stuck my head out. The Man Mountain was sitting a few feet away playing with some stones. “Kegide. Don’t go anywhere.”

He nodded.

I went back to my patient, who opened his eyes and said something nasty.

“I’m here to help,” I said, hoping I could. “Tell me what’s happened to you and the others here. How long have you been like this?”

“Weeks. Maybe months.”

“And the others?”

“The same. It is why we’re here.”

Not good. “How is the sickness affecting you?”

“I have aches in my head and my bones all the time. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep or eat much. Fever gets bad at night.”

I looked at the other hybrids, spotted more hair loss and open sores. “Do they have the same symptoms?”

“Yeah.” The man rolled over and covered his face with one arm. “Now go away.”

I took the opportunity to extract a blood sample instead, and left the shack to analyze it with my scanner. Being away from the smell cleared my head, and I took several slow, deep breaths as I watched the results of the analysis scroll onto the scanner’s display.

“Barbiturates?” That made absolutely no sense.

The amount of barbiturate in his bloodstream was almost as potentially fatal as the infection he was suffering from. “How did he get hold of drugs like that?”