The paratroopers barely glanced in, a ripple of silhouettes across the window and then nothing more.
“The vaccine,” Young said. He looked at Cam but turned to Ruth as he continued. “Is that even possible? I thought you needed a lot more time.”
All of them sat on the firm carpet, scattered unevenly behind two freestanding counters and a desk. Overhead the walls held posters of beaming young white people, close-ups that might have been more appropriate in a hairstylist’s except for the inhuman sapphire blue of their contact lenses.
A genuine strangeness walked inside Cam, measured and intent. He was too calm, and the mood had grown as they waited. He felt the shape of it on his numb face and he saw it in Ruth as well — in her steady, solemn gaze.
She was uncharacteristically mute.
Todd said, “It’s just a first-gen. We’d be better off running for the goddamn hospitals while they’re out there hunting us down.”
“No, you were right about that,” Young said. “The nearest hospital is five blocks and they gotta be everywhere now. But it’s good odds we won’t see another sweep through here. They’ve got too much ground to cover.”
Outside, the F-15s grumbled southward.
“We’re probably safe to hole up in this place,” Young added, and Ruth stirred at last.
“It might work,” she said. “If it doesn’t it’s harmless.”
“If it doesn’t he’ll be infected!” Todd’s glove bumped at the lower half of his faceplate restlessly, obsessively. “How do you even expect to deliver it into his system — is he going to eat the wafer?”
“It can be breathed in.”
“He’ll get a lungful of plague at the same time.”
“Yes,” Ruth said.
“Then what?” Young asked, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, what about the rest of us?”
“If it works, he’ll incubate.”
Young said, “But what does that mean?”
“We—” She dropped her eyes. “It could be passed from one person to another via body fluids. Blood.”
“Let me try.” Cam pulled the sample case from his chest pocket and held it out, meaning for her to identify which vacuum wafer contained the prototype.
“We should draw straws,” she said.
He pulled it back from her. “No.”
“No way, Doc,” Young agreed.
Cam pressed the case against his chest. “It has to be me.”
“That’s wrong,” Ruth told him. “We’re all in this, we should all—”
“I’m your best bet. I know better than anybody what an infection feels like.” It would collect first in his oldest and worst wounds, his ear, his hands. “I’ll know if the vaccine is working or not before you’re out of air.”
She shook her head. “Yes. Okay. I’m sorry.”
He was glad she said the last. He shrugged for her benefit and said, “I’ve got the least to lose.”
* * * *
He had the most to gain. Ultimately, his decision was the same choice he’d made after Hollywood had struggled up to their barren rock peak.
It was what he wanted to be remembered for. Succeed or fail, this was who he wanted to be.
* * * *
His collar locks were loud and the air sighed out of his suit up over his face as he lifted his helmet, suddenly and unbelievably rank in comparison to the atmosphere inside the shop. Musty and stale, the shop was still far sweeter than the baking stink of himself. Ruth had instructed him not to breathe but Cam tasted the change even with his mouth shut, the brush of wind at his nostrils like a promise.
“Ready?” she asked, and Todd brought the vacuum wafer up to Cam’s lips. Ruth hadn’t wanted to chance the operation herself, having just one hand, and Cam had needed both of his to remove his helmet. “One, two, now,” she said.
Todd pushed his finger and thumb between Cam’s open teeth and broke the wafer, pinching it, as Cam inhaled sharply. They’d agreed that he might as well swish it around his tongue and actually swallow it too.
“Okay, hold your breath as long as you can.” Ruth offered him a strip of sturdy white fabric, cut from a jacket exactly like medical doctors wore on TV. Newcombe had found it hanging in back after Ruth suggested that they’d better try anything to minimize Cam’s initial exposure.
He wrapped the dusty fabric over his nose and mouth with practiced movements, then slipped free from his air pack, feeling soreness and bruises all through his shoulders and back, and along his hips and stomach where the waist belt had sawed against him. He would have liked to lose the suit completely. His body itched and hurt in a hundred places, and the smell was like wearing a toilet. Unfortunately he was dressed only in a T-shirt, to reduce chafing from his pack, along with the damp adult diaper and socks and boots, and there didn’t seem to be any more clothing available in the shop.
They were long past modesty but he couldn’t afford to reveal his many abrasions to the machine plague, though it was likely that some of the archos nano had already wafted inside his suit.
They arranged another bundle of fabric around his collar, a bunchy scarf. Young took Cam’s pack, triple-checked that the spigots were off and then studied its gauge. He inspected Todd and Ruth before trading exams with Newcombe.
Then there was nothing else to do.
“Forty-six minutes,” Young said. After that, Todd would be out of air and Ruth would be well into the red.
Cam pushed his broken teeth out of his gums, mashing his glove-thick finger against his mask. The eyetooth peeled free easily but he winced at the pain that the molar caused as one of its roots clung to him. His stomach reacted wildly to the warm new trickles of blood he swallowed, and he burped and burped again. Absurd.
Young turned on his radio and switched repetitively through the few channels, trying to intercept enemy communications, but there was only an open broadcast meant for them: surrender. He clicked off but was soon listening again, his map spread beside him, obviously planning the quickest route back to the planes and the Leadville troops.
Newcombe prowled the shop, searching through drawers and cabinets for anything useful. The receptionist’s desk held a can of Pepsi and two cheese-and-cracker packets. In back he found a tray of snorkeling goggles with plastic insets that could be replaced with prescription lenses, and brought one to Cam.
Ruth and Todd sat on either side of him protectively, resting, trying to make their air last. There was so much to say but at the same time nothing at all.
None of them wanted to act like last words were necessary.
Inside Cam’s bloodstream and throughout his body now, either archos was beginning to multiply uninhibited, devouring his tissues to form more and ever more of itself — or the vaccine nano was disassembling the invaders and remaking this material into more defenders, a war of tides.
At first archos would replicate freely even if the vaccine prototype worked, just by sheer force of numbers, yet without this machine cancer the vaccine would have nothing upon which to grow itself.
He thought of Sawyer and the long year behind them. He thought too much.
For the vaccine to fail totally would not be the worst scenario, Cam knew. If it was somewhat effective, slowing the spread of the plague but eventually, inevitably allowing lethal damage, they might wait and hope and understand too late that he’d committed himself to a lost battle…
“Okay,” Ruth said.
“What?” Cam had forgotten them, absorbed with the pace of his own heart and the rhythm of his breathing. Could it really have been most of an hour?