The companions fanned out on the empty beach with weapons drawn. Nothing moved along the shore; nothing moved upslope, from the direction of the huts, either. Mildred and the others advanced on Ryan’s signal toward a long, low berm of recently turned sand about seventy-five feet above the waterline. The odor of death was coming from that direction, as was the droning of flies.
Neither boded well.
Four shovels lay discarded on the berm.
Covering her nose and mouth with a hand, Mildred looked over the verge of the excavated pit. The open grave was five feet deep and about eight feet across. It held corpses of all ages: men, women, children, babies, piled on top of each other in a tangle. All with bloodied faces and clothes. Some of the dead were horribly bloated.
Mildred saw scurrying movement in the pit: black shadows, long-tailed blurs scattering, darting among the bodies.
Rats.
Krysty groaned through her cupped hand. “There’s got to be more than thirty people in there,” she said. The prehensile tendrils of her red mutie hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm.
“Massacred.” J.B. spit.
Mildred watched the captain’s face as he took in the victims. The youthful light went out of his eyes for a second. It just winked out. He looked suddenly as old as the creases in his face.
“What the hell happened?” he exclaimed.
“It doesn’t appear they were gunshot,” Mildred told him.
“Then what killed them?” Tom said.
There was no way of telling without taking a closer look.
Mildred quickly tied a kerchief over her nose and mouth and then leaned over the edge of the mass grave. She could see petechia on exposed skin everywhere. The red spots stood out against fish-white bellies and backs, every place the sun hadn’t browned in life. Although Mildred was a medical doctor she wasn’t a diagnostician; she had been a researcher in a specific field—biochemistry related to resuscitation problems in cryogenesis. Med school and residency were more than a century in her past. She wasn’t exactly sure what the markings signified, or whether they were connected to the cause of death. Petechia and high fever often went hand in hand.
“Could be any number of things,” Mildred said, pulling back. “Some kind of influenza. Bird flu. It could also be a mass poisoning. Red tide. Cigatura. Paralytic shellfish poisoning. Or a predark chemical that somehow ended up in their water or food supply. There’s no way to tell for sure without drawing blood and tissues samples from the deceased and putting them through a toxicology lab. And we all know that isn’t gonna happen.”
“How long have they been dead?” Ryan asked her.
“In this heat? Your guess is as good as mine. Ten hours. Five hours.”
“Why did the grave diggers not complete the interment?” Doc said, glancing over at the dropped shovels. “Why did they not cover the bodies?”
“Mebbe they took sick, too,” J.B. suggested.
“Could they all be chilled?” Krysty said, looking up at the rows of shanties. “Could the whole ville be wiped out?”
“Perhaps we should take this for a sign,” Doc said. “A Biblical visitation of plague is by definition random and puts wayfarers such as ourselves at grave risk. I hasten to remind everyone that the ship awaits…”
Then the sound of moaning wafted down to them from the ville, high-pitched, desperate.
“Not all croaked,” Jak said.
Nobody made a move.
“There were a couple hundred people living here,” Tom told the companions. “I did a lot of business with them. I liked them. Some were my friends. If anyone’s still alive on the island and can be saved, we need to find out. And get them out of here. Mebbe they can tell us what happened.”
None of the companions said anything in response.
The moaning continued. Whomever it was, he or she was in terrible agony.
“You can wait here,” the skipper told them, “or go back to the
Tempest
if you want, but I’m going ahead.”
“I’ll come along,” Mildred said.
“We’ll all come along,” Ryan told him.
With Tom on point and weapons up, they moved cautiously toward the first of the shacks. When they looked up the narrow lane that led deeper into the ville, they could see bodies on the ground, left where they fell.
“Biblical,” Doc muttered.
Mildred and Tom followed the moans to a one-room shack on the right with delaminating plywood walls and a sheet-metal roof. Beside the doorless doorway, in the shade of the rusting eaves was a black-enameled, knock-off Weber kettle and a pair of white plastic lawn chairs.
Mildred entered first with her ZKR 551 blaster in a two-handed grip. The skipper backed her up with his .45-caliber Smith. There were no windows in the hut. The only light and air came from the doorway and the cracks in the wall seams. The heat and the stench—the coppery smell of blood mixed with fleshy decay and expelled bodily fluids—in the enclosed space was paralyzing. The sauna from hell. The concentrated stink burned Mildred’s eyes and the lining of her nose and throat.
The moaner was a woman in her late twenties in a gauzy, badly stained, Hawaiian print dress. She lay on her back on a pallet on the floor. Her dirty blond hair was matted to her skull with sweat and oil.
Mildred knelt beside her, taking in the deathly pale cheeks and chin crusted with dried gore and vomit. She was bleeding from her nose and blood oozed from the corners of her mouth. Every time she exhaled, a rattling sound came from deep in her chest. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t seem to be aware of Mildred’s presence.
Tom leaned over Mildred’s shoulder, his blaster lowered to his side. “Oh shit,” he said.
“Stay back,” she warned him, beads of perspiration rolling down her face.
Glancing around the hut, Mildred counted four supine bodies on the floor. One adult and three children. Only the young woman was still alive; from the distention of their bellies and the ghastly swelling of their limbs, the others were long gone. Was the woman the children’s mother? Had she looked on helplessly as all her babies died? Mildred’s brain automatically made those tragic connections, although there was no way to tell if they were accurate.
“I can’t examine her in here,” Mildred said. “It’s too dark and the smell’s too awful.”
“Is it safe to move her?” Ryan said from the outside the hut’s doorway.
“Safe for her, or safe for us?” Mildred asked.
“Both,” Ryan said.
“I doubt it’s going to matter as far as she’s concerned,” Mildred told him. “It’s safe for us if we don’t get her blood or other fluids on bare, broken skin. Be very careful picking her up.”
Using her clothing, the hem of her skirt and the back of her dress collar, Ryan and Tom hoisted the sick woman up like a sack of grain and lugged her limp form toward the doorway. As they stepped into the wedge of hot sunlight, she jolted awake, then went berserk in their grasp, kicking and thrashing, fighting to get away. Maintaining control with difficulty, Ryan and Tom rushed her into the lane; as they did, blood trailed out from under her skirt in a thick, crimson ribbon. They set her down on the hard-packed sand and stepped well back.
She lay there, eyes open, hands trembling, breathing shallow and fast. The brief, violent struggle seemed to have taken everything out of her.
Doc took in the pale, tortured face, the smeared gore and vomit, and murmured, “Dear sweet Lord.”
Holstering her weapon, Mildred knelt again. She backhanded the sweat from her brow to keep it from stinging into her eyes. She noted the petechia on the woman’s exposed upper chest and throat, and the facial pallor and cyanosis—blueness—around the mouth. She gently touched the woman’s extremities and found them cool and clammy. With difficulty, she found a pulse at the wrist. It was rapid and thready.
Mildred summarized the symptoms in her head: agitation followed by prostration and collapse; evidence of high fever, vomiting and diarrhea; facial pallor and cyanosis of the lips; profuse sweating; bleeding from mouth, nose and gastrointestinal tract. Her pulse was dangerously weak.
“Based on the symptoms she’s presenting,” she said, “I think it could be some variety of hemorrhagic fever. Yellow or dengue. There’s no evidence of redness of the tongue or jaundice to the skin, so that eliminates yellow fever. As I recall, there were four serotypes of the dengue virus, none of which was fatal. But any of the four varieties can escalate into Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever or Dengue Shock Syndrome, which are both very bad news. Without oral and intravenous fluid replacement and supplemental oxygen, the predark mortality rate for DHF and DSS was close to fifty percent.”
“You sound somewhat less than confident, my dear,” Doc said. “Is there a remaining question regarding the diagnosis?”
“Afraid so,” Mildred said. “A real big question. Back in the day only one out of a hundred infected with the virus advanced to the hemorrhagic form of the disease. Based on the body count I’m seeing, it looks like everybody here caught it and most of them have died.”
“Can you help her?” Krysty said.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Mildred said. “Not even with a plasma drip, if I had one. Her platelet count is probably so low at this point, she’d bleed out at the intravenous site. She’s in the final stages of circulatory collapse.” When Krysty gave her a blank look, she explained further, “Her heart isn’t pumping hard enough to move the blood through her body. She’s dying.”
“Can we catch whatever she’s got?” J.B. asked.
“Dengue is a blood-borne virus,” she told him. “Infection requires blood-to-blood transmission.”
“What means?” Jak asked.
“Mosquitos are the primary vectors of dengue fever, that’s how it’s spread from person to person,” Mildred said. “Look around this place, there’s puddles of standing water everywhere. We need to be long gone from here before the skeeters come out.”
“Can you hear that?” Tom said. “Can you hear that?”
From around the bend in the lane, from deeper in the ville, came the sounds of feeble groaning.
Multiple groaners.
The skipper didn’t wait for the others this time. This time he forged ahead, full speed up the path.
As Harmonica Tom disappeared around the winding turn J.B. grumbled, “He knows we can’t sail the radblasted ship without him.”
“Then we’d better hurry up and get this over with,” Ryan said, urging the companions onward.
Mildred didn’t immediately follow her friends deeper into the ville. She remained by the stricken woman’s side. She couldn’t do anything to help the poor woman, but she was unable to walk away and desert her in her final moments. She had lost everything—everything except her pain. Mildred reached down and put a hand to the clammy forehead. There was no way of telling whether the woman could hear her, but hearing was one of the last senses to fail.
The doctor leaned closer and gently, slowly, stroked the crown of the woman’s head. Softly she said, “It’s okay for you to give in to it now, honey. It’s okay. It’s over. It’s okay to stop fighting. It’s time for you to let go. To float away and be with your darling babies again. It’s okay. It’s okay…”
As Mildred stroked and reassured, the woman’s body relaxed, head to foot. Then the trembling of her hands stopped, as did the shallow, frantic rise and fall of her chest. And she was gone. Gone like a shot to wherever she was bound. Mildred carefully brushed closed the lids of her blankly staring eyes.
Mildred had seen hundreds of people on the verge of death since her reanimation. Despite her extensive medical training, she’d been able to help few if any of them. That experience had not inured her to the death or suffering of others. Death and suffering had always touched her heart before, and she was touched now. The first time Mildred had “died” she’d skated on the experience: she had been unconscious and on an operating table. When the next time came she knew there would be no anesthesia, no oblivion; there probably would be intense pain; and she hoped that someone, even a complete stranger, would be kind enough to tell her goodbye.
Mildred scooped up a handful of sand and as she hurried to join the others, used it to clean her fingers. After wiping off her hand on the leg of her BDU pants, she unholstered her Czech wheelgun.
Around the bend, she could see more dead people. They were collapsed across the thresholds of the wall-to-wall huts and facedown in the lane, which was no more than fifteen feet wide.
The others had fanned out to either side of the path, and were leapfrogging, checking bodies and looking into the shacks for the source of the continuing moans.
“Hold it! Everybody freeze!” J.B. suddenly shouted. “Don’t take another step!”
Everyone stopped and looked at J.B. for an explanation. Standing in the middle of the lane, he reached out with the barrel of his scattergun and pointed to a thin black metal wire running just along the surface of the sand. It was stretched perpendicularly across the path between a pair of ramshackle structures.
“Trip wire,” he announced. “This place is mined.”
“More wire, over here,” Jak said from twenty feet farther up the slope.
“And here, too,” Ryan said, staring at the ground in front of him.
Mildred watched Ryan as he looked from trip wire to trip wire, following them to their respective end points.