Outpost (14 page)

She
put on a mouth mask and goggles. She wriggled on a pair of surgical gloves.

'Okay.
You folks better get in the office and stay there.'

They
sat in Rye's office and watched through an observation window.

Rye
took scissors and forceps from a drawer. She snipped through the foil blanket
that sheathed Rawlins's arm and peeled it back. Blood dribbled on the floor.

'Treat
every drop of that shit like AIDS,' advised Ghost, via a wall-mounted intercom.
'Scrub it. Bleach it.'

Rye
scattered swabs on the floor to sop the blood.

'And
be careful with his arm,' said Ghost. 'Don't touch it, whatever you do.'

Rawlins's
hand had turned dark, skin mottled like a bad bruise.

'Frostbite?'
asked Jane.

'No.'

'Are
you sure? Looks like Simon's hand when we pulled him off the ice.'

'Look
closer.'

The
flesh bristled with needle-fine splinters of metal.

'My
God.'

Rye
sliced away Rawlins's clothes with trauma shears. She plucked dog-tags from his
neck.

'O
neg.'

She
wriggled on a double layer of gloves and canulated Rawlins's left hand. She
took a bag of O neg from the fridge and set it to feed.

'His
heart rate is high,' said Rye. 'His breathing seems unimpaired. So what
actually happened?'

'We
opened the capsule. Frank crawled inside. There was a body, an astronaut. Frank
tried to take off his helmet. Next minute he was screaming and bleeding.'

'An
astronaut?'

'Some
kind of cosmonaut. He was dead. Way dead. Then he woke up. He grabbed Rawlins.
They fought. I hauled Frank out of there and torched the whole thing.'

'His
fingers. That looks like a bite mark.'

'Yeah.
Frank said something about teeth, metal teeth. I don't know. Frank wasn't
making a lot of sense. Like I said, I didn't investigate. I didn't climb
inside. I hauled Frank out and threw a grenade.'

Rye
took tweezers and tugged at a metal spine.

'These
filaments seem to be anchored in bone.'

'It's
spreading. It started at his fingertips. Now it's reached his wrist.'

Rawlins
woke. He licked his lips.

'How
are you feeling, Frank?' asked Rye, leaning close.

'Don't
take my arm.'

'You'll
be okay,' she soothed. 'We'll fix you up.'

'It
tastes funny,' said Rawlins, and passed out.

'Right,'
said Rye. 'You three. Get your coats off and scrub up. I need you in here.'

They
lathered their hands and forearms in Bioguard scrub.

Rye
unlocked a cupboard. She took out a tray of surgical instruments and slit open
the vacuum-sealed plastic. She unwrapped a surgical saw and laid it on the
surgical trolley.

'What
do you have in mind?' asked Sian.

'You're
going to help me amputate his arm.'

'Don't
you have anything more high-tech than that?' asked Jane, pointing at the saw.

'I've
got an electric blade but I don't want to spray blood everywhere.'

They
gave Rawlins a shot of morphine and strapped him to the table. Rye intubated
his throat. She wheeled a heart monitor to the table. She pasted electrodes to
Rawlins's chest and set the machine beeping.

'Watch
the screen,' she told Sian. 'If that figure drops below thirty-five, yell.'

She
took saline from the refrigerator and hung it from the drip stand.

'Keep
an eye on the bags,' she told Jane. 'Let me know when he needs a refill.'

She
swabbed Rawlins's arm just below the elbow.

'Ghost.
Keep hold of his shoulders, okay? He could buck. Right. Everybody ready?'

Rye
sliced into Rawlins's arm with a scalpel and clamped his arteries. Yellow
globules of subcutaneous fat glistened like butter.

She
sawed his arm. She worked through bone in short rasps like she was sawing
through a table leg.

'Think
he will be okay?' asked Jane when they had finished.

'I'll
give him another shot when he wakes. After that, it's aspirin.'

'So
what about you, Doc? What if we need to fix you up?'

'Anything
happens, shoot me a spinal and I'll talk you through it.'

Rawlins's
face was pale and slack. Jane instinctively moved to wipe sweat from his
forehead. 'No,' warned Ghost.

Husky
exhalations through an airway tube. Steady beep of the cardiograph.

'Done
that before?' asked Ghost. 'Cut off an arm?'

'Snipped
plenty of fingers,' said Rye. 'Standard oil-field crush injury.'

'Reckon
he'll make it?'

'Normal
circumstances I would expect him to recover from the amputation, as long as the
wound doesn't become infected. This disease, though. Never seen anything like
it.' Ghost thumbed through Rawlins's medical notes. 'Stress. Depression.
Prostate trouble. Poor bastard. Should have cashed out of this game years ago.'

'Put
that down,' ordered Rye. 'That stuff is confidential.' They stuffed Rawlins's
shredded clothes into a red body-waste sack. They bagged bloody swabs and
dressings. They slopped bleach on the floor.

Ghost
picked up the sacks with gloved hands. He held them at arm's length.

'Throw
that shit over the side,' ordered Rye. She used forceps to pick up the severed
arm. She dropped it into a plastic box and sealed the lid. She handed the box
to Jane.

'And
get rid of that fucking thing, will you?'

Jane
called Punch on the intercom. She asked him to fetch a can of kerosene and meet
her on the ice.

They
walked from beneath the shadow of the refinery and stood at the water's edge.

'How
is he?'

'Out
for the count,' said Jane. 'He might live. He might not.'

'So
who is in charge now?'

'Fuck
knows.'

'This
isn't a democracy. If we vote on every little fucking thing it will be a
disaster.'

'Yeah.'

'Somebody
better step up. If Nail and his compadres start calling the shots we'll be dead
within a week.'

'Yeah.'

'You
actually cut off his arm?' asked Punch.

Jane
peeled the lid from the box.

'Christ,'
he said. 'How did it happen?'

'We
won't know for sure until he is awake and talking.'

'Swear
to God, I won't let that happen to me.'

They
put the box on the ice, doused it in kerosene and set it alight. It burned with
a blue flame. The hand slowly clenched as it cooked.

Medical.

Rye
checked on Rawlins. He lay on the examination table draped in a sheet. The
stump of his arm was bandaged. Steady beep from a monitor.

Rye
examined a drop of blood beneath a microscope. Red platelets. Black, barbed
organisms swarmed and replicated. Hard to see detail. She wished she had better
magnification.

Movement
in the periphery of her vision. Maybe Rawlins stirred in his drugged sleep. Maybe
she imagined it. She watched him for a while. She got spooked. She played music
to feel less alone. Charlie Parker.
Live at Storyville.
CD fed into the player. Cool
jazz echoed down empty corridors.

Jane
helped make dinner. Spaghetti greased with a crude pesto made from dried basil,
garlic paste and a squirt of tomato puree. She carried her bowl to the table.

'I
can't stop thinking about it,' said Punch. 'I'd rather my mother was dead than
walking round with that shit sprouting out of her skin.'

'Don't.
It'll drive you nuts.'

'We
should take the Skidoos and split for Alaska. Seriously. You, me, Sian. Ghost,
if you want. Anyone can see you dig the guy. A few more weeks and the sea will
be frozen. We'd have a shot. We'd have a straight run.'

'What
about everyone else?'

'Fuck
them. Sorry, but fuck them.'

'We're
not at that point yet. We've still got options.'

'Then
somebody better lay out the Big Plan. Look around you. Morale is down the
toilet.'

Rye's voice on the intercom:
'Jane. Punch. We need you
in Medical right away
.'

The
operating table was empty.

'Where's
he gone?' demanded Jane. 'He didn't leave a note,' said Rye. 'You left him
alone?'

'I
need to eat now and again. And the occasional shit.' 'How long were you gone?'
'Fifteen, twenty minutes.'

The
drip stand lay on the floor. The cardiograph was smashed. Jane kicked at a
scrap of surgical dressing with her boot. 'He tore the canula out of his arm,'
she said.

'He'll
be losing blood.'

'He
had his arm chopped off two hours ago. How is he able to walk around?'

'I've
no idea.'

Ghost
arrived.

'He's
gone walkabout?' said Ghost. 'You're kidding me.'

'We'd
better find him quickly,' said Jane. 'It's minus twenty in those corridors. The
cold will kill him in minutes.'

C
deck. Household stores. Sian scanned the shelves by flashlight. She loaded a
trolley with toilet roll, liquid soap and paper towels.

She
pushed the trolley down unlit passageways, Maglite clenched between her teeth
like a cigar. Movement in shadow up ahead. 'Hello?'

She
reached a junction. She shone her flashlight down a side tunnel. A figure. A
glimpse of bare flesh.

'Hello?'

Sian
stood in a doorway. A dark chamber. Stacked lengths of pipe.

A
naked man crouched in shadow. Rawlins. 'What's the deal, Frank?'

She
stepped closer. She saw the bloody, bandaged stump where an arm used to be. And
she saw the face. One eye was jet black. The other eye looked at her in cold
calculation. She felt herself appraised by a keen alien intelligence. She
backed away and ran.

They
searched rooms and passageways near Medical. They found the airway tube.
Rawlins had pulled it from his throat. It was lying on the deck plate. It was
glazed with frozen saliva.

'We
better split up,' said Ghost. 'Cover more ground.'

'Hold
on a moment,' said Jane. 'This has to be the same shit we saw on TV, right?
Drives you nuts like rabies. Maybe Frank is okay. But maybe not. We have to be
prepared.'

'What
do you have in mind?' asked Punch.

'I
think you should go back to the accommodation block. Warn the others and
barricade the door.'

'What
are you and Ghost going to do?'

'Head
to the island and fetch the shotguns.'

Ghost
hauled open the bunker door. His flashlight lit shelves and boxes, and the
snowmobiles shrouded in tarpaulin.

'Okay.
Better be quick.'

Jane
unboxed shotguns.

'Give
them to me.'

Ghost
checked the breech of each weapon and dry-fired to make sure they were safe. He
zipped the guns and their cleaning kits into a holdall.

'Get
the shells.'

Jane
snatched boxes of 12-gauge shells from a shelf and stuffed them into her
backpack.

'There's
a sell-by on these boxes. I didn't think ammunition expired.'

'Let's
get going.'

Rawlins
found he could see in the dark. Not clearly. Not well. But he could make out
shapes.

He
stood naked at the centre of the dive room. He wondered how he got there.
Self-awareness came and went. Sometimes he was Frank Rawlins. Sometimes he was
something else.

He
lit a Tilley lamp so he could see better. Benches. Racks of diving equipment.
The white, steel bubble of a hypobaric chamber.

He
opened a locker and examined his reflection in the door mirror. One eye was as
black as onyx.

Rawlins
took a dive belt from a wall hook. He unsheathed the knife and used the tip to
prise the eye from its socket. He did it left-handed. He sawed through the
optic nerve. The eyeball plopped at his feet.

He
stared at his reflection. The empty socket wept blood. He took a scuba tank
from a wall rack and pounded the mirror to glass-dust.

Rawlins's
office. A sign on the door: