The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (12 page)

A sound off to his right, footsteps crunching through the crust of calcined sand. And beyond that—William now heard—the hum of a rover’s engine.

“Oh hell,” William mumbled through broken lips. “I thought it was over.”

*   *   *

“The Lord have mercy,” Old Jim breathed softly as he crouched down beside William Potts. “Unpack the kit, Stel, I figure he’s taken more than seventy MRs for every day he’s been out here, never mind the dehydration, sun- and windburns and, hell, starvation.”

Stel handed Old Jim the medikit. Her gaze remained on William as she tried remembering what he’d looked like, that night in his room. Gaunt even then, but this. She barely recognized him.

“He’ll need plasma,” Old Jim said as he prepared a syringe. “Fluids.”

“He needs clean marrow,” Stel said.

“Better call the university. Tell ’em we’re taking him back to Val Marie, and they’d better get someone over, fast.”

Old Jim’s weathered hands worked over William, stripping back the ragged bootsuit. He knew there were questions that Stel wanted answered. Questions about how he’d driven all over the damn place, about how he’d found the boy. The Hole was a big place, after all. The chances of finding him were damn near hopeless.

He injected William with E-67 flushant, the latest available in rad treatment.

How the hell can I tell her I had help? How can I tell her that I followed an old Indian ghost?

“Let’s get him in the buggy.”

Some goddamned ghost leading me across the prairie, an Indian ghost carrying a goddamn rifle slung with red-hawk feathers.

“Jim,” Stel said.

He looked up and cursed the shadows that hid her face.

“Jim,” Stel said again.

“What?”

She continued staring down on him a moment longer. Then she turned away. “I need a cigarette.”

*   *   *

Jim drove steadily, his antiquated patrol buggy bouncing and jolting on its stiff shocks. It’d been years since the Palliser Triangle Survey, when he’d played chauffeur to a bunch of scientists. He remembered all the weather readings they took, and the soil and plant samples. Insect nets strung out between the tents at night; animal traps, bird snares, bat nets that looked like giant lobster traps. When it was all over, they rushed off to the university with all their goodies. Old Jim had gotten a six-month bonus to his credit line, arthritis in his misaligned hip, and the solar-powered patrol buggy. Even with the crotchety hip, Jim figured he came out ahead in the deal.

Stel smoked in the seat beside him. William lay unconscious along the length of the back bench. The silence was as thick as the smoke.

Dusk had arrived, the sun spreading out on the west horizon like a copper lake. Helishuttles had been coming and going through the Hole for a week now. Jack Tree and his cronies were cooking something big along with that corporation. Somewhere out there on the dead lands. Old Jim’s expression soured as he thought of Jack Tree. Too damn clever by far. One day he’ll hear about my artifact collection, and come calling. He’ll take it all. The law backs him. He’ll take it all from me. All eight generations, swept away. Too goddamn clever by far.

“What’re his chances?” Stel asked suddenly.

Jim shrugged. “Short term, he’ll make it fine. Long term…” Jim shrugged again. He licked his lips, kept his eyes on the rolling plain in front of them. “Figure he’s burned blind, though.”

“Blind,” Stel said. “Well, hell, what’s to see these days anyway? Damned TV stations all losing it every ten bloody minutes, for Christ’s sake. Al says it’s those helishuttles. Remote-guided, he says, with a flight path right over town screwing up transmissions or something.”

“Oh yeah,” Jim said, not really listening. Goddamned TVs—who buys the shit they’re saying anyway. World’s gone to hell, ain’t it just. He’d seen the latest shots of Iraq in the
National Geographic
. Robot camera teams rolling through ancient ruins. Caption talked about it being the first city ever built. Talked about some king named Gilgamesh. The shots were eerie as hell. Red sky, all those cobbled roads and things exposed by the blown sands. And here and there the rusting hulks of tanks and trucks. Eerie because it all looked so normal, like the pictures were just waiting for someone to walk through, some kid herding goats or something. But nothing. Nuclear fallout still at lethal levels.

The first city was dead, would always be dead.

More shots, modern echoes in Iran. Black, burned-up bodies covering the streets, the squares, covering the steps leading up to slagged mosques. Not a bird, probably not even a bug. Even the Indian Ocean was half-dead, all the surface plankton incinerated in the multiple blasts, a yard of water stripped off the whole damn ocean.

Maybe the boy’s on to something, after all. He’s wearing the scars we keep running from. He knows we’re running out of room. He knows we fucked it up, we’re fucking it all up even now. Bloody wars, ninety million dead of starvation in Africa, Armageddon in Jerusalem, plague in China, Bombay carpet bombed. Here I am trying to save a boy from rad posioning. What the hell for?

“Heard the weather’s coming back,” Stel said, lighting a last cigarette as the old motel on the edge of town came into view.

“We’re in a loop,” Jim said. “Goes round and round.”

Stel took a deep drag, released the smoke in an even stream. “Must be sunspots or something.”

Old Jim swung the buggy up onto the motel’s cracked parking lot pavement. “Must be,” he said.

*   *   *

They took William to his old room in the hotel. Stel washed him down, so gently, it stung Jim’s eyes to watch. When they had the boy laid out on the bed, Jim set up the plasma kit. Saline, electrolytes, anti-leukemic compounds, lithium, and more E-67. The standard rad treatment setup, available in every peripheral town. With some old fart like me trained like a monkey. Mix this, drip that. Tap the vein, insert with a steady probing motion—you’ll feel the venal wall when you puncture it. Bathe all solar burns in weak saline and E-67. Run the flush as soon as possible, and that means the catheter. If the victim’s male …

Stel watched him for a few minutes, then headed to the door. “I’ll buzz that woman who keeps calling for him. Guess she’ll come and pick him up.”

Jim nodded. After a moment he heard Stel leave.

“Oh, son,” Jim said softly, sponging solution into William’s swollen eyes. “Just like a sun dance, huh? Push past the pain, find that cool, peaceful place. Too bad you couldn’t take your body with you.”

*   *   *

He’d first shown up three years ago. Even then, as he started knocking on doors, slicking the locals at the pool table, and just being damn good at listening, Old Jim knew the boy had arrived with wide-open eyes.

He’d cared about their lives. At first, it was some kind of philosophical caring. William bled for the idea of them. He came as a chronicler, but that first season changed him. The idea found faces, a score of faces. The caring changed, and when he looked in your eyes the glaze was gone. You could see him in his eyes, and he saw you, and it was a clear thing both ways.

One night, late at the hotel bar, William sat with a half-dozen locals for hours on end. Old Jim had watched the layers crumble in the boy, watched as William was pushed deep into himself by the stories the old-timers threw around. They’d been talking about the changes.

“North of here,” Aimes was saying, “where they grew canola and didn’t do much ranching, well, I remember the fields just falling dead, toppling in waves. Next thing you know, the sky’s gray with locusts, come to eat the poisoned canola, right down to the ground.” Aimes squinted down at the glass of beer in his rope-veined hands. “A hundred million, they said. A hundred million rotting locusts, the sky empty as the dawn of time.…”

“We’d get the traffic coming down from Swift Current,” Browning said. “On their way to those ski resorts in Montana. I saw one accident, shit—”

William cut in, his voice dull, “I know what’s missing.” He looked up, scanned the faces around him. Old Jim remembered the loss in the boy’s eyes, remembered the way that look made his chest tighten. “I know what’s missing here. There’s no dogs.”

“They died fast,” Aimes said, nodding. “Cats just hid during the day, did the usual at night. But the dogs died for a long while there.”

“I saw some litters make you upchuck your granma’s meat loaf,” Browning said.

“I hear they’re doing fine in the shielded cities,” Old Jim said, trying to ease the anguish in William’s face. Hell, he remembered thinking, They’re just damn dogs. Don’t compare to the skin cancers, the babies poisoned by breast milk and living the rest of their days inside plastic-bag rooms. Don’t compare at all, dammit. Just dogs.

“There should be dogs,” William said. “Barking like hell every time I walk into the yard. Challenging the stranger, doing their job for you people. Nobody’s taken their place. You don’t challenge anymore. You don’t raise shit just to see what the stranger’s made of. No stranger ever fooled a dog. Ever.”

“That’s a damn fact, that is,” Browning said, nodding.

Old Jim stared at the boy. What you spill up tells a lot, but reaching the place where you’ll do it in the company of old men, that tells a whole lot more.

William’s outburst slipped away, into that timeless stream of gripes and bitches that filled the hours before dawn. He’d joined the town, that night. He’d shifted the place he looked at things from. He’d lined up with the peripherals, the subjects of his study, and saw the world in a new way that was in truth an old way. Maybe the oldest way of all.

A hell of a way to step out of being young. Probably the night that Stel decided she’d get him in her bed sooner or later. She wouldn’t do that for a stranger. But she’d help a local boy get a bit older.

Help was something he drew to him. Halo’d Mary and an old Indian ghost.

Net

FREE WHIZZY:
So NOAC’s on its own. What do you make of the threats to invade? Anyone?

PACEMAKER:
Highly unlikely. They really banked on NUN approval, and it looked for a time there like they had it, but now it’s all fallen apart.

LUNKER:
All the rats have scurried to the stern, eyes tilting up, way up. Salvation beckons.

CORBIE TWA:
Ladon’s not selling. The Lakota are staying belligerent. Assembly is on schedule, the orbiting chute is in position, geosynchronous perfection. Fifth Floor, men’s underwear …

LUNKER:
Can’t get off what you can’t get onto first, so the rats won’t get a ride, no matter how much they squeal. It’s kind of sweet, in a pathetic, pan-suicidal way.

PACEMAKER:
I’ve reviewed the population projection data and it seems William Potts is playing Pandora. This is highly alarming information.

BOGQUEEN:
Details, please.

PACEMAKER:
Very well, and bear in mind the data is no longer secured, it’s riding a very accessible crest. I won’t bore you with technical details, but the conclusions the top-dog geneticists have reached can be stated as follows.
    One: Pressured populations possess a greater likelihood of mutation that selects for successful adaptation to changing environments. Dynamics remain typically tautological, but the result is speciation—the emergence of a new species of hominid.
Homo sapiens neosapien,
whatever you want to call it. This speciation is rapid-fire, the so-called punctuated equilibrium hypothesis. Very fast in its definition process. It’s happening now among certain peripheral populations—those groups who for whatever reason are outside civilized intervention in environmental management. The traits are highly variable among these groups, but they meet the definitive requirements: increased phenotype viability.
    Two: Central populations, defined as those that are insulated from the global environmental denigration by civilized intervention, for example, NOAC citizens, Eurocom, SINJO urban populations—these populations are not experiencing the rate of mutation or the selective perquisites found in the peripheral populations.
    Three: Furthermore, these Central populations are on a trend toward extinction. Negative birthrates, increased infertility, chronic toxemic disorders and related dysfunctions.
    Tip your hats, ladies and gentlemen, the show’s closing. It was a short run, sure, but fun while it lasted.

BOGQUEEN:
I wish I could cry, but the irony’s got me laughing one of those devil-laughs.

CORBIE TWA:
Pray, tell.

BOGQUEEN:
Goes back to the official line on mass extinction. We rewrote Nature’s laws to suit our own inevitable fouling of the nest. We holed up in our shielded cities and kept on poisoning the outside world. We figured we’d killed Nature, and good riddance.

CORBIE TWA:
But she moves on, she moves on.

BOGQUEEN:
We thought we could leave it behind, but it’s left us behind. Life’s out there, gentlemen. We’re in here, and we’re dead. Ha ha ha.

PACEMAKER:
I can guess at the ramifications all this has to Ladon’s Medicine Wheel Project. Escape. Unfortunately, the data goes on to other projections, and these are dreadful indeed. You see, those new traits being expressed by the peripheral populations are also deemed positive selections to long-term survival in nongravitational environments with high-rad doses. These new people or whatever you want to call them are not only smaller, they’re also radiation resistant. They’re off to the stars, friends. The dream is in their reach, not ours.

BOGQUEEN:
“Share the blood…” I grasp the nature of William’s treaty mime in the last transmission.

CORBIE TWA:
I don’t like this at all. Ladon and the Lakota are playing a helluva dangerous game here. If they keep saying no, then desperation will incite desperate measures: NOAC will launch military invasions, their science teams will roll in on their heels and sweep, sample, retrieve, stabilize, and secure enough tissue and blood samples to once again cheat Nature.

LUNKER:
Everyone’s waiting. After all, if NOAC can self-justify annexing a sovereign nation, then every other peripheral population with the Right Stuff is fair game. You’re right, Corbie, we’ll cheat Nature. We’ll cheat death.