The Terminals (12 page)

“You seem apprehensive.”

She didn't look up. “I am. I won't lie. This is
not
my kind of mission.”

“We're going to save doctors, and they're going to save others. We're saving lives exponentially.”

“I always get killed first in training. Dying second today was a huge improvement. I know I'm going to die this year. I accept that. But I'm not ready to go this week. I haven't accomplished anything yet.”

“That's why we're here. We're accomplishing something.”

“I mean my music. No offense, but I didn't want you to be my only audience. Music was something I could leave behind, a way to live on, a sort of immortality. But now nobody will ever hear me.”

She still hadn't looked at him. Cam could understand her anxiety. They were only days away. His instincts told him to drop it for now and talk to her another time, but the fact that there might not be another time was impossible to ignore.

“Did you leave me a note?” he asked.

“A note?”

“A secret note.”

“You mean like a high school girl with a crush?” She snickered. She didn't mean to be cruel, but it stung a little. “No. But if it said ‘meet me out back for a good time,' it's probably Zara.”

“It didn't say ‘meet me out back,'” Cam said defensively.

“Then what did it say?”

“Something mature and intelligent,” he lied.

“That sounds like Gwen,” she said.

“I doubt it. Never mind. And please don't tell anyone.”

“Don't worry,” Calliope said. “I'm a vault. I keep it all in.” She glanced up at him for the first time since he'd sat down and gave him a sad smile.

“Hey, you two,” Ari called from across the room. “The scuba crew and Wally are back.”

Across the room, Gwen leaped up so fast to run out and meet Donnie that she whacked her knee on the table. She limped through the door. Calliope rose and took her tray to the sink, seemingly grateful for an excuse to leave their conversation. Soon everyone was out in front of the bunker.

The scuba team and Wally sauntered up, toting small plastic pistols that looked like toys. Wally spun his gun around his finger, then gripped it and aimed above Cam's head, his brow furrowed and extended arm still as a metal pole for a split second.

Thwip-thwip!
Two darts sprang from the barrel. Cam winced as they flew over his head.

“Watch it, dipwad,” Ari snapped.

Just as Cam began to relax, an orange monkey dropped beside him, and he jumped again.

Wally shrieked with laughter. “Bull's-eye! Monkey's-eyes!”

One dart had indeed pierced each of the monkey's eyes.
Incredible
, Cam thought. Wally's unnatural focus and steady hand had delivered the needle-tipped ordnance with absurd accuracy, and the two doses killed the monkey almost instantly.
Maybe even just one, for a small animal.
It seized and spasmed and then stiffened, its little lips curling back in a toothy grimace.

“You jerk,” Calliope said.

“That was a needless death,” Ward agreed. “We only kill one if it saves others. This is a waste. Inefficient and cruel.”

“Not if we eat it,” Wally said.

“Yeah, if you're fond of paralysis, genius,” Ari said. “Eat that, and you ingest what you injected.”

“Give me your weapon, Wally,” Donnie said. “You're a loose cannon.”

“Piss off,” Wally said. “You don't own me.”

“I'm scuba leader,” Donnie said.

“I'm not scuba,” Wally pointed out. “I'm aerial. I'm on my own.”

Ward watched the exchange, but didn't intervene.

Ari put his hands up in a “calm down” gesture. “Wally, I'm just gonna ask you to please not randomly kill any more cute or cuddly wildlife. Okay?”

The entire group fell silent. Ari was team leader, and the sudden quiet moment between him and Wally was a test of their system, Cam thought, an example of authority problems that could arise during the real action. If there was to be order, Wally would have to relent. Otherwise, the chain of command would be weakened before the mission even began.

Wally frowned and then handed Ari his pistol. “Okay,” he said. Then he grinned. “What else we got for lunch besides monkey?”

 

CAM'S PLAYLIST

12. BOY FEVER
  

by Wind Chimes and Grace

13. SEXT ME

by Jackie Z

14. MEET AND GREET

by Melody Who-Who

“You make me feel hot, weak,

and a bit like throwing up,

in a good way, in a good way, in a good way.

Yup!”

Three more days of heavy training followed, each more specific than the last. Ward and Pilot became constant dart targets, and the team's jungle survival runs improved steadily. In the final run, six of them survived, with Donnie selflessly lying in wait to tackle Pilot and take his paintball gun. He was then quickly killed by Ward, but the delay allowed the rest of the party to escape. More briefings were held with satellite views of the pirate compound and careful analyses of the likely interior layout of the buildings. The final day was a day of relative rest entirely devoted to live scenarios with no runs or swimming. Instead, they were bound, blindfolded, and dragged from place to place in the bunker and condos, while the scuba team moved in to free them.

“The one constant is variability,” Ward quipped at them.

Zara pierced Calliope's tongue with a hot nail to help fit it with a tongue stud transmitter, through which she could report her position and give directions to the team. Cam was amazed that she could talk with her mouth closed and that Wally and the entire scuba team could understand her.

Cam fell into a supporting role, but due to his proficiency throwing darts he was selected to have extra needles and flights sewn into his clothing. He was also given a beaten strap-on water bottle full of poison in the hope they wouldn't think it important enough to take from him.

“Don't accidentally drink it,” Ward warned him quite seriously. An athlete's habit of sucking on water bottles almost without thinking would be deadly for the next forty-eight hours.

And, suddenly, the training was done.

*   *   *

The doctor visit was off-campus. Pilot flew them to the facility blindfolded, where they crunched down a gravel path. Once inside, they were unmasked and waited together in a windowless room with Ping-Pong and pool tables and all the soda they could drink. Ari called it “the gli club,” named after the malignant glioblastomas they all carried in their heads.

Cam was good at both table games. He'd had a pool table with a removable Ping-Pong top in his house growing up, and Western Washington University supplied several of each in its dormitory common area. In fact, he'd been dorm champ sophomore year. Yet he struggled to keep up with Zara and Owen in Ping-Pong. They returned his slams with razor-sharp reflexes. And Donnie beat him outright. Ari then schooled him in pool, playing the angles with concentration and precision the likes of which Cam had never seen.

A doctor met with them individually in a room full of equipment. Shelves with bottles and beakers lined the walls. It looked less like a doctor's office than a laboratory. Cam's doc was older, maybe fifty, and wore khakis with boots. Her hair was pulled back so tight it stretched her face into a taut mask. She and a male doc had come into the game room and pointed at them one by one, not using their names. Tegan first. Each took over an hour. Cam and Jules were last.

When it was his turn, she marched him down a short hallway into another room. Before Cam could even say hello, she shoved a pencil and some forms at him. The forms didn't have his name at the top. Instead, there was a number and letter—9K.
Anonymity
, Cam thought.

He spent the first ten minutes filling out a survey while the doc took his heart rate, checked his blood pressure, and drew blood into a tube. The survey began with questions about symptoms not associated with his disease. Were there aches in his head? Was there blood in his stool? The questions segued into performance inquiries. Did he feel stronger, faster, more agile? “None of the above” was his answer du jour. He wasn't taking enhancers and, now that he thought about it, his cancer symptoms were not acting up at all. He felt pretty much the same as when he'd arrived, only now he had a better tan. One of the most curious questions asked him whether he felt more “compliant” or more “rebellious.” He puzzled over it for a moment and then finally wrote “both” in the margin and moved on. The whole thing seemed like a waste of ten minutes of his short life.

The doctor sat watching him fill out the form, studying him so that he felt like he was taking a proctored college entrance exam. He supposed it was her job. He handed her the finished papers.

“All right. Turn around and drop your trousers.”

“For what?”

“There are a dozen diseases in this geographic region that you don't want to catch,” she said completely without humor, hoisting the biggest syringe Cam had ever seen. “Now drop them.”

“So when would you advise me to start taking TS-9, doc?” he said while he stuck his bare butt in the air. He copped a smile and tried to sound conversational.

“All questions should be directed to your personal trainer,” she said. Then the injection came.

“Holy…!” Cam couldn't help wincing. It was the most pain he'd experienced by way of his butt since he'd pulled a glute freshman year. It wasn't the “quick pinch” his doctor at home used to tell him was coming when he was a boy getting flu shots. She worked it back and forth for what seemed an eternity before sliding it out and slapping a patch over the hole.

She ran her eyes down his survey answers while he pulled his pants up. “You may go.”

Cam stood, confused. “But you didn't examine me.”

“You responded here that there was no change in your condition.” She pointed at the survey.

“Yeah, but I'm dying of a brain tumor.”

“That's not a change, is it?”

He looked around. Among the medical equipment was a treadmill, a weight bench, a tube thing with a mouthpiece to blow into. She'd not had him use any of them. “Everyone else took over an hour.”

“You may go,” she repeated.

Cam exited and closed the door behind him.
This checkup wasn't for me
, he thought. Suddenly, he was angry. He didn't know where it came from, but he felt it boiling up and decided not to stop it.
I'm dying! And they don't bother to examine me? And they won't even offer me the wonder drug they're handing out to everyone else like candy?
He started down the hall toward the game room, and then stopped. He realized he had wanted some answers, and they hadn't even let him ask questions. He turned and walked back down the hall to the examination room. He reached for the handle, but paused. Beyond the examination room was another door.
Screw it
, Cam thought. He walked past the exam room and shoved the next door open.

Three startled men whirled and stared at him. They were dressed in lab coats. Before them on the table were nine vials of red fluid.
My teammates' blood
, Cam thought. Behind them was a gurney. One of the men quickly pulled a sheet over it.

“Oops,” Cam said cheerfully. “Wrong room.”

The men glanced at each other.

“Down the hall,” one of them finally said through gritted teeth. “The other way.”

The second man nudged the first, and he hurried across the room to escort Cam out.

“Sorry,” Cam said. “The doors look the same.”

“No problem,” the man said thinly, turning Cam around and walking him toward the game room. “Right down here.”

“Got it,” Cam said, and he smiled at the man. “Thanks.”

*   *   *

The last beach fire before the mission was quiet and short. No booze. Cam pulled Ari aside and asked him about the exam. He was surprised when his roommate grew testy.

“It's impolite to ask for people's private medical information, Cam,” Ari said.

Cam rolled his eyes and went to ask Jules, who blabbed every detail. As he suspected, the doc had done a number of physical tests on her that she hadn't bothered to administer to Cam. Jules said their prior exams had taken several hours each, and they'd poked and prodded them much more extensively. Cam didn't tell her about the other room. He wasn't sure what he'd seen, and she didn't seem the right person in whom to confide.

Cam hit his bunk exhausted and sore from the week. His feet ached from running over the uneven ground and debris in the forest. His legs were as tired as they had been for the first week of fall soccer practice after every summer. He had bruises where Zara had worked him over with the padded poles during a melee workout, and the tattoo she'd inflicted on him hurt and itched. His teammates were sore too. Even Donnie had complained a little, though only under his breath when he thought no one could hear. But Ward assured them all they'd be well rested after their day of light work and a good night's sleep, and they all went to sleep early. Cam wondered if he'd dream of pirates.