This Dark Earth (4 page)

“You’re talking biological warfare.” She looked around for a moment, helpless, and stuck her hands into her pockets. “How could this have happened? There’s got to be a more rational explanation for this.”

“You’re right. It’s too much. It’s science fiction. And the government wouldn’t ever be that careless—”

Lucy snorted. “I never would’ve pegged you for a romantic, but sure as shit . . .” She felt horrible about saying it the second it came out of her mouth. In a constant state of abrasion, chapping asses, and rubbing people the wrong way. For a moment, Lucy recalled her exit interview at Baptist Hospital in Little Rock. The head pathologist, neatly ensconced behind his massive desk, had raised his meaty hands like a priest at benediction, looked at her sadly, and simply stated,
We’d like you to start pursuing other opportunities. You’re just not a good fit here, Lucy. We need someone who plays well with others
. She had stood and kicked away her chair, slamming a fist down onto his desk. He had jumped and leaned away from her.
I’m a scientist, Jerry. Not a goddamned kindergartener. You can fuck right off
. She regretted the last bit, for truth, but very little else about her stint there.

She sighed, at her past failures or for the looming mystery
of whatever this disease was, she couldn’t say. “We can’t know its origin. The fact we’re right next to a chemical stockpile just clouds the issue. It could be from anywhere and already moving into pandemic stage. No way to tell. But what does it matter? It’s happening. And we have to find out what it is and how to treat it.”

“Lucy. Luce. Hold on a second. Listen to what you’ve just said. There’s a biological agent loose. We’ve got to go. This place is going to get very ugly, very soon.”

“Leave? We have to treat these people. We have to solve this—”

“Shoot ’em full of sedatives. Then we run. The children with Lesch-Nyhan need restraints all their life. Most of these folks are adults. It’s quiet now, but it’s about to be a psychopath’s wet dream out there.” He moved to the door. She was actually startled when he put his ear to the glass to listen. “And I need to get home to Rachel. To my girls.”

From the corner of her eye, Lucy noticed a motion on the table. She turned and gaped. The infant moved sluggishly.

“Robby. The baby.”

The mother pushed herself into a standing position, using the wall as a brace.

“Deb!” She lunged forward and huddled over the infant, tears falling on blue skin.

“Mrs. . . .” Lucy realized she didn’t know the woman’s name. “Please let me examine your baby.”

The baby waved her arms, opening and closing her mouth. In death, or what had seemed to be death, her eyes had glazed over, but they focused on the woman now.

“My baby isn’t dead. But so cold—”

“Ma’am, please.”

Robby whispered, “You witnessed the tachycardia. Her heart gave out. I watched it happen. This child was dead.”

The infant squirmed and the mother gave her her hand in comfort. The baby grabbed the proffered finger and stuffed it into her mouth.

The mother said, “She’s teething. It’s really been hurting her lately. Rubbing her gums helps.”

“What’s your name, honey?” Lucy asked, remembering Cathy with the mother this morning.

For a moment she looked as if she didn’t know herself. “Martha.”

“Martha, make room. Please. I need to examine Deb.”

Lucy turned, began to snatch for Robbins’s stethoscope, then stopped herself and pointed at the device hanging from his neck. He blinked, then gave it to her. Lucy pressed it to the infant’s chest and listened for a heartbeat. Nothing. She pulled back the blankets covering the infant’s legs, grabbed the thermometer, and took the child’s temperature anally. The baby didn’t flinch.

Eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. And dropping. Like a cooling corpse.

Yet the infant moved.

Martha winced and pulled her hand from the child’s mouth. Blood crowned the tip of her finger and beaded down the side in a long rivulet. It made a soft
pat-pat
sound as it dripped to paper on the table. The baby half screamed, half moaned.

Lucy turned to Robbins. “What is going on here, Robby? This goes way beyond biological warfare.”

He shook his head. “I have no fucking clue.”

“This child is dead.”

Martha frowned at Lucy but remained silent. She glanced at the blood-smeared mouth of her child.

A thump sounded as something heavy hit the door. The frosted-glass window cracked.

Robby said, “It’s time to get out of here, Luce.”

“Hold on a moment. I want to take some blood and another crystal sample. See here? She’s got it in her ears as well as her diaper, which means—”

Something slammed into the door again, and the window went white with small fractures. Another blow and it would be gone.

Lucy removed a Vacutainer for drawing blood from its wrapper and moved to the examination room’s cabinets to get alcohol and a swab.

“Luce. This is absurd.”

She ignored him.
It’s an infant, so I should use a finger stick, but . . . Christ, the thing has no pulse! I have to use the Vacutainer
.

“Lucy.”

The child seemed even cooler when she swabbed the crook of her arm with the alcohol-soaked cotton. As she placed the needle close to the child’s skin, Robby said, “Goddamn it, Lucy. Wake up!”

He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around.

“Martha, get your child,” Robby said, shifting his gaze
away from Lucy for just an instant and then turning back to her. “Enough, Luce. It’s time to start thinking bigger.”

Martha moved to the table and gently reswaddled her girl. Hands trembling, she kissed the baby’s gray head.

“Bigger?”

“It’s contagious, that much is certain, whatever this is. We’ve got to think about our families.”

“Call Rachel.”

Robby dug a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Lucy watched him as he listened. Eventually, he shook his head and his expression grew even more grim. “‘Network busy,’” he said.

“So we still don’t know anything.”

A scream came from outside the door, a scream beyond anything she’d ever heard. The sound was half rage, half pain, like some pig sent to the slaughter, still alive before having the skin stripped from it. It was a sound that defied education, went beyond learning, and affected her on a physiological level. Her skin prickled, her muscles tensed. She was watching Robby when the sound came. Lucy noted his pupils dilating, marked his increase in breathing and the flushed quality of his skin. Heart rate up, increased blood flow. His body was preparing to fight. Or flee. Once again, it struck her as strange how her mind could still switch to the analytical, even in the worst situations.

She looked down at her hands, the Vacutainer and cotton-swab now looking so helpless and feeble against the mounting tide of mysteries, of questions she’d never be able answer, puzzles she’d never be able to solve.

“Okay.” She shook her head, half to clear it, half to come to grips with what was going to come next. She took a deep breath and said, “You’re right. We have to go.”

Robby gave a little manic laugh. The stress was visible in his posture, his expression. “I realize how hard that is for you to admit, Luce. So I won’t rub it in. How do you want to do this?”

Lucy grabbed her needle gun. She raised an eyebrow at Robby. “I say we go out the back way near the employee parking lot.”

Robbins checked his pockets. He pulled out his keys.

From the waiting room, a sound of shattering glass reverberated through the building. The door rattled in its frame. Martha whimpered and pressed Deb close to her chest.

“Okay.” Lucy held up the big needle for aspirating tissue and looked at her companions. “Quickly, right? You ready?” At Robby’s nod and Martha’s terrified blinking, Lucy jerked open the door and stepped into the waiting room.

The contortionist stood, swaying, in front of her. Blood dripped from his lower lip, and he turned dull, milky eyes toward Lucy. He took a step forward, raising his arms.

“Go! Go!” she yelled. Robbins and Martha dashed behind her, moving toward the automatic doors.

Attention fixed on Lucy, the contortionist let the others pass. Lurching forward, he grabbed her arms, opened his mouth, and tilted his head as if to bite her face.

This is
not
happening
.

She twisted in his grasp, but the man drew her closer with astonishingly strong hands. His mouth gaped.

Oh no, you don’t
.

She was surprised at her own strength. She wrenched herself away and stepped back to get more space. Then, as if she was throwing a punch, she dipped her knees, flexed, and shot her fist outward, toward his face. He didn’t flinch or dodge.

It’s as if he’s lost all reflex . . . All his autonomic functions are suppressed. Nonexistent, maybe
.

The needle went through his eye, into the brain, more easily than she thought possible. The haft popped the sclera and crushed the vitreous fluid from the eyeball. The needle jutted from the ocular cavity. The contortionist fell backward, pawing at the handle of the needle. He flopped to the floor, squirmed, then stilled.

How horrible, to die twice in a single day
.

Looking beyond him, Lucy saw the waiting room had turned bloody during her palaver with Robbins and Martha. The foul-mouthed old lady with the religious bent shuffled slowly past the fake ficus and turned toward Lucy. Again, milky eyes glared at her. Lucy couldn’t pin it down exactly, but there didn’t seem to be any awareness in those eyes. It was as if some deep-sea creature felt eddies and currents spun off a passing fish and moved to attack, working on pure instinct.

She can smell, maybe. Hear sound or feel the vibrations of air. The eyes don’t move in the sockets, they don’t track. But she knows I’m here. The glassiness would occlude sight somewhat. If she can see me, I’m very blurry
.

The woman lurched forward. Her legs and arms seemed to tremor still.

For a moment, Lucy stood paralyzed. The sight of the woman, half of her face missing and the entirety of her front covered in blood, locked her in place.

“Lucy!” Robbins’s voice came from her left. “The doors are open. Come on.”

Everything happened at once. The clinic’s front door exploded inward, billowing smoke. The explosion knocked Lucy sideways, toward Robbins and Martha. Her head smacked against the wall and the world went white and then tilted horribly as she fell.

When she sat up, men in black military garb poured through the husk of doorway, wearing masks that obscured their faces, their weapons raised. Lucy made herself move. Pushing at the floor with her hands, she scrambled to her feet, head spinning, and threw herself after Robbins. The back doors began to close just as she passed through.

Behind her, a cacophony of gunfire ripped through the smoke, and she felt more than sensed the hard motes of bullets filling the air around her. Something spun off Lucy’s skull, and she pitched forward onto the tile floor.

The doors behind her closed seconds after she saw the soldiers begin shooting people in the waiting room, but not before she saw one of the patients lurch toward a figure in black, knock his gun aside, and drag him to the floor. Bullets ripped through the bloody old woman, yet she didn’t fall. She lurched and turned toward her attacker.

It wasn’t until bullets began ripping through the door that Lucy forced herself up again. The screams grew louder, the gunfire wilder and more frantic.

Tracers swam in the corners of her vision, and she found her body responding sluggishly to her own commands.

Robbins and Martha had already disappeared down the hall, and Lucy nearly bowled over Martha as she rounded the corner. The woman, shell-shocked and stunned, stared down at the floor. Robbins lay on his side, clutching his calf with both hands, trying to stem the flow of blood.

“They shot me.” He looked at Lucy, eyes wide and bulging, and then laughed. “They shot me! I’m a doctor, for chrissake!”

Lucy knelt and looked at him closer, puzzled by the crimson that spotted his shirt.

“Are you hit in the chest?”

“No.” He nodded at her hair. “Looks like they got you too.”

She touched her scalp. A long, wet furrow traced the left side of her skull. It throbbed, and suddenly, Lucy became aware of the pain.

She reached for his belt.

“Hey!”

She laughed, maybe a little too wildly.

“Robby, I’m not gonna rape you right here.” She unbuckled the belt and ripped it from his pants. “I’ll wait till later.”

After tying off his calf, she helped him up. Down the hall, the gunfire continued in spurts.

“We’ve got to get out of here. There’s an emergency exit at the end of this hall. We’ll have to cross the picnic area to get to our cars. You still have your keys, Robby?”

He nodded, wide-eyed. Martha cradled the infant, cooing
softly. Lucy noticed the bundle jerked and shifted in the woman’s grip.

Lucy wiped her hands on her skirt, suddenly glad of her running shoes.

“Good. Remote key ring. Keep pressing the unlock button. You still drive the Suburban? Big monster?”

He nodded.

“Great. Let’s go.”

The gunfire died and the clinic was silent except for the bright sound of falling glass. In the distance, beyond the walls, a high-pitched scream sounded, rising and falling. Sirens.

“Shit. Whatever has gone wrong, it’s not just here.” Lucy’s mouth felt dry and she shivered. “I’ve got to get home. Gus, Fred. They’ll need me.”

Martha sobbed and shifted the bundle on her chest. Robbins tottered, and Lucy grabbed him and threw his arm over her shoulder.

They moved down the hall, Robbins’s leg trailing a thin ribbon of blood, until they reached the emergency door. Looking through the window, Lucy couldn’t see anybody—military or otherwise—so she pushed it open and waved them out.

They moved haltingly across the lawn, toward the parking lot. Air sirens shrieked, and Lucy heard the deep rumble of vehicles, though she couldn’t determine their directions.