The Nirvana Plague (22 page)

“He’s all right,” Benford said.

“He’s got it too.”

“He does?”

“Didn’t you see him?”

“No. They’ve got a stockade set up by the airfield. Everyone except the doctors and the dead are there.”

“He’s got it. It happened this morning. After Tennover was—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Well, shit,” she said. Then: “Sponge.”

He held out the pack.

“I saw it happen. I saw it when it happened to him.”

She deftly plucked one out with her clamp.

“I had no idea it was like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Sudden. Sudden enough that you could actually watch it happen.”

She glanced at their patient’s eyes again, and back at Marley.

“Ready for suture?” Marley said.

“Almost.”

“What about Delacourt?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t see her.”

“Anyone else?”

“About a dozen dead. Thirty or so wounded. Hard to say.”

“Anybody else from the team? Your people, I mean?”

He followed her look to the row of dead bodies laid out along the courtyard wall.

“I didn’t see any of them there,” she said.

An hour later, the soldiers standing guard around the courtyard suddenly started moving. One of them, who’d been acting as interpreter to the medics, strode into the middle of the treatment area and started yelling at them.

“Stop! We are going now! Finish what you are doing! We are going now!”

Uniform spattered with blood, Estrada stood up from the patient he was just finishing. “Going where?”

The interpreter backhanded him to the head. “Shut up!”

Estrada stumbled back, twisting to avoid stepping on his patient.

“You, you, you!” the interpreter yelled, pointing at Benford, Marley, and Estrada. “Doctors, officers, you come with us!”

“What about our wounded?” Estrada said.

The interpreter responded with the point of his rifle. “You fuck you say anything again and
you
are the wounded!”

Enemy troops were swarming through the courtyard now, and into the temple, getting everyone out who could travel, leaving the rest.

“Cavalry’s coming,” Benford said under her breath. “Time to go.”

They moved out on the run, dropping down the steep slope of the valley along narrow, winding cow paths. Any wounded who couldn’t keep up the pace were left behind.

As they got away from the camp, they started splitting up into a number of small squads, each taking no more than one of the prisoners or wounded in tow, each pursuing a different course into the depths of the valley. Marley, Benford, and Estrada were separated.

Marley’s group ran almost straight down the slope, sliding and leaping down the rough terrain. They plunged into the tangled jungle in the lower valley without pausing, driving toward the river.

At the bottom of the valley, they paused briefly. Marley heard the thudding of rotors high above the thick canopy. The cavalry had come too late for him.

They turned up river, and jogged along rutted cattle trails. The river, though not very wide, was already swollen with early spring melt-off — an impassable torrent. Thundering down through its rock channels, it filled the forest with its noise.

They kept on all day, pushing up the valley floor along the river. Marley was not nearly as fit as these young troops, but he knew if he didn’t keep up they’d shoot him. He forced himself forward, determined to run till he dropped. He invented mind games to keep himself going: imagined that he was going to run all the way home, that he was going to go back to Ally, back to the way things had been — that he had to keep running to get there.

More than once he stumbled and fell to his knees, and retched up what little was left in his stomach, fearing with each heave of his gut the next thing he’d feel would be a bullet.

But each time, after a few seconds, they’d yank him back to his feet, shove a bottle of water into his hand, and push him on up the trail again. He knew that they knew if he dehydrated, he’d die. They wanted him alive. Doctors were valuable.

Toward dark, much farther upstream, as the jungle was giving way to thinner alpine forest, they turned away from the river and headed up a broad slope, coming eventually to a steeper rock face cleft by cold and ice into long vertical seams. In the mouth of one of these rifts, a few guards sat in a group, drinking homebrew from canteens, rifles slung over their backs. They raised their arms when they saw them and the two groups greeted each other grandly.

Ducking through a narrow opening, they proceeded by touch into the darkness of the cave. Marley felt a hand seize on the back of his shirt, pulling him left and right as they went, keeping him from straying from the unseen path. After a couple of minutes, they saw a dim orange flare of light ahead — shifting shadows of movement and the hollow echoes of loud voices filled the cavern.

A minute later they arrived at their destination — a long open chamber filled with people dancing and singing, shouting and laughing, drinking and eating. Long strips of low-energy ribbon-lights lit the cavern, but the air was so thick with tobacco smoke that the air itself seemed to be smoldering with an amber glow. Recorded music blared from a player somewhere in the chamber — bouncing back and forth off the rock walls, the music smeared into a tuneless screech.

A shout went up as Marley’s group entered. The party surged toward them and engulfed them. They seized on Marley immediately. Stumbling from hand to hand, he was fondled and inspected — as if they were choosing a head of beef to have slaughtered. They spun him round, looked him in the eyes, pulled on his ears, grabbed his balls, and shouted in his face.

“Doctor? American doctor? OK! OK!”

One woman, drenched in sweat and sweet-smelling alcohol, squeezed his face in her hands and kissed him hungrily, earning roars of laughter.

And so by degrees he advanced up the whole length of the long gallery. At the back of the chamber he was shoved into a dark alcove.

Benford was there, barefoot, lying on her back on a thin mat on the wet floor.

He stumbled in and went to his knees beside her as she sat up.

“Carl! You made it! I’d about given you up.”

He collapsed onto the other mat. “We took the scenic route.”

Early Friday morning.

Ally came up the stairs slowly, looking pale.

Karen was waiting for her on the top step. “What is it?” she said, her heart sinking.

Ally held out the small tablet she carried.

We regret to inform you…

Ally sat down beside her, seeming to feel her way down to the floor. She wasn’t crying. But she had been.

Karen tried to read the words on the tablet, but they seemed to hide their meanings from her. “What’s it mean?”

“Carl is missing.”

“But. How can that be? That’s got to be wrong. It must be a mistake.”

“It says the camp he was at was attacked and several people were taken prisoner.”

“He’s been captured?”

“They don’t know.”

“But he’s a civilian.”

Ally shook her head. What difference did that make? She took the tablet back and stared at the message. “It’s from the commander of forces, Indian Ocean,” she said. “He must be in Pakistan or India or something like that.”

Karen put her arm over Ally’s shoulder. “There’s something going on everywhere.”

“Yes.” She nodded, still staring at the message at the tablet. “Yes,” she repeated. Finally, she hid it under her hand and said softly, “I could use a drink.”

“Sure.”

Ally called her assistant manager and told her to hold down the fort on her own today, and she and Karen spent the whole day sitting on the step getting drunk, the little tablet on the floor between them, waiting for the next message.

Ally started telling stories on her husband, making Karen laugh. Karen laughed till her throat hurt. It was obvious Ally was crazy about him.

Then Ally said, “Carl has affairs.”

Karen stopped laughing.

“He does?”

“Yes.” Ally was definite about it.

“Does he know that you know?” Karen said. “About his affairs, I mean?”

“No.” Ally smiled to herself. “It’s only happened a couple of times.”

“With who?”

“Once with one of the secretaries they had. They’ve had dozens.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, he’s an open book. It’s easy to read anybody who’s trying so hard to be inscrutable. For a while, I thought he was going to have one with you. Before I met you, of course.”

“With me!”

“Yes. He was at your place three or four nights a week.”

“He was talking to Roger.”

“Psychiatrists don’t make house calls.”

“He was working on his paper. He doesn’t even like me.”

“Yes, he does. Very much. He’s likes anybody that calls him on his shit. And you excel at that.”

Karen looked away, intensely uncomfortable.

“Anyway,” Ally said, “it wasn’t that. No offense, but the reason you got the special treatment was so Carl could make a name for himself.”

“I know that.”

“He’s ambitious, you know. Though he tries not to show it. He wants to do more than adjust dosages all his life. Funny thing is, I don’t think he knows what he’d rather do. He’s always been ambitious, but he didn’t know what he was ambitious
for
. We used to be ambitious for the same things — we thought.”