"Sorry.
"Guys like you, though ... you new kids, you hopeless little chickenshits... People will get used to anything, yeah, if they're young enough! People used to scream their heads off at the thought of dying of stupid slit like Th or cholera, now you don't even raise your voice, you just make it your own little secret, and you keep watching TV until you drop dead discreetly on the couch. People just put up with living in hell! They just ignore it all, and they're sure the world is always, always gonna get worse, and they don't ever wanna hear about it, and they're just grateful they're not in the relocation camp."
"I'm not giving up, Carol. I'm asking you to help me. Please help me."
"Look, I'm not a medic. I can't do anything like that. It's too awful, it's too much like it was in the camps."
"Carol," he grated, "I don't care about the weather camps. I don't care about your crazy Luddite friends. I know it was heavy then, and I know it was horrible then, hut I was only five years old then, and it's all history to me, it's dead history. I'm living in a cam p right now', this camp right now, and if I die in a camp I'll think that Cm lucky! I'm not gonna have any history. I'm not even gonna make it through another year! I just want to see this thing that's coming, that's all that I'm asking of you!" He leaned against the table, heavily. "Frankly, I kinda hope that the F-6 is gonna kill me. I kinda like that idea, it's worthwhile and it saves a lot of trouble all around. So now, if you'll just help me out here, I think I'm gonna be able to see it while I'm standing up on my own feet, that maybe I can pass for a human being while I'm busy getting killed. Will you help me please, Carol? Please!"
"All right. Stop crying."
"You started it."
"Yeah, I'm stupid." She stood up. "I cry. I have a big mouth, I have no operational discretion at all, and that's why I hang out here in the ass end of nowhere, instead of with a real life in some real city, where some good-looking male cop can wheedle it all out of me, and yank a bunch of former friends out of their condos and bust them all on a terror-and-sabotage rap. I'm a born sucker, I'm a real moron." She sighed. "Look, if we're gonna do this at all, let's get it over with quick before anybody sees us, because it's a really sick and twisted thing for me to do to you, and Greg has got a big jealous bone."
"Okay. Right. I get it. Thanks a lot." Alex wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
"And I want you to promise me something, Medicine Boy. I want you to promise to stop picking on your sister. She doesn't need any trouble out of a damned fool like you, she's a good person, she's an innocent person, she means well."
"Maybe," Alex said. "But she used to beat the shit out of me when we were kids. I have tapes of her trying to smother me to death with a pillow."
"What?"
"I was three, she was eight. I'd been coughing a lot, at the time. I think it got on her nerves."
Carol stared at him a long time, then rubbed her reddened eyes with her thumbs. "Well, you're just going to have to forgive her that."
"I forgive her, Carol. Sure. For your sake." Alex climbed up onto the workbench and lay down flat on his back. He pulled a narrow translucent hose from his jeans pocket and a flat packet of anesthetic paste. "Here, take this and screw it on that threading on the end of the jug."
"Wow, this jug is hot."
"Yeah, I kept it out in direct sun today, it's pretty damn close to blood heat."
"I can't believe we're actually doing this."
"My whole life is just like this." Alex tilted his head back and practiced relaxing his throat. "Do you have any idea how deep Jerry is into her? I mean, financially?"
"I think he's pretty much wiped her out, Alex. Not that he wants to do that, but he just doesn't care about anything except hacking storms."
"Well, don't tell anybody. But I've made Juanita my sole heir. I think that'll probably help the Troupe some. A lot, really."
Carol hesitated. "That was a pretty dumb thing to tell me. I'm a Trouper, too, y'know."
"It's all right. I want you to know."
"You really do trust me, don't you?"
"Carol, I think you're the only actually good person here. One of the few truly good people I've ever met. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for looking after me. You deserve to know what's going on, so I told you, that's all. I'm probably gonna pass out during this. Try not to worry too much."
He opened the packet of anesthetic paste, smeared it with his smart-gloved fingers over the nozzle of the tubing, and then, with a single gesture that took all the courage he had, deliberately shoved it down his own throat. He successfully avoided the back of his tongue, felt it fficker down his sore and swollen larynx, down through the beating center of his chest. He'd nerved himself to do this, maybe even to talk, but as the anesthetic kicked in. all the strength flew out of him like an exploding covey of quail, and left him empty and cold and sick.
Then the fluid came. Are you a good swimmer, Alex? It was cold. It was too cold, it was cold as death, cold as the red Laredo clay. A great rippling belch burst out of his lungs. He heaved for air, eyes bulging in panic, and felt a great interior tide of the stuff slide through his tubercles, a deadly, crazy, cold amoeba. His teeth clamped on the hose, he panicked, he sat upright. Liquid shifted inside him like a strong kick to a half-empty beer keg, and he began coughing convulsively.
Carol stood there with the jug still clutched in her arms, the picture of disgust and terror. Alex pulled the hose, pulled the hose, pulled the hose, like a hateful battle with some deadly tapeworm, and finally it came free, in a frothy spew. Carol jumped back as the jug kept siphoning, the hose trailing and spewing, and Alex kept coughing. His lungs felt like bloody foam rubber.
He stood up. He was extremely weak. But he was still conscious. He was half-full of lung-enema fluid, and he was still conscious. He was carrying the weight of it around inside him like some kind of obscene gestation.
He tried to talk, then. He faced Carol and moved his mouth and a sound came out of him like a drowning raccoon and his mouth filled with great crackling sour bubbles.
Something inside him broke, then, and it really started to hurt. He fell to his knees, doubled over, and started venting the stuff across the bubblepak floor. Great deadly vomitous gouts of it, a huge insupportable fizzing bolus. His ears rang. I-Iis hands were spattered with it. It was all over his clothes. And he still wouldn't, couldn't pass out.
It was starting to feel good.
Carol stared at him in disbelief. All the fluid was draining from the jug, trickling relentlessly from the hose. Shut it off, shut it off, he gestured, making a drowned gobbling noise, and then another fit of the coughing seized him, and he made another long, blackening, agonized swoop toward collapse.
Some moments later he felt Carol's arms locked around him. She sat him up, propping him against the leg of the table. She looked into his face, checked his eyelid with her thumb, her broad-cheeked face pale and grim. "Alex, can you hear me?"
He nodded.
"Alex, that's arterial blood. I've seen it before. You're hemorrhaging."