“Give up?” Patrick said. “I don’t know the meaning of the words.”
She smiled. “If you’re half this tenacious on behalf of your clients, I don’t think the sims can lose.” The smile faded. “Still think all sims have it cushy?”
“Not those.”
“Ever hear of a globulin farm?”
“Never.”
Romy said, “When you get sick, when a virus or bacterium invades your body, you fight back through your immune system. It forms proteins, immune globulins known as antibodies, to kill the invaders. That’s called active immunity. But let’s say you jab yourself with a needle that’s infected with, say, hepatitis B or C. You could ward off infection by either of those viruses through passive immunity—by being injected with antibodies or immunoglobulins from someone already immune to them.”
Patrick was getting the picture. A few months ago he’d have to ask another half dozen questions to fill in the blanks, but after what he’d seen tonight, he felt up to doing some of the filling himself.
“Let me guess: Since sims are so close to humans, some slimeball gets the bright idea of kidnapping or hijacking a bunch and infecting them with viruses and selling off the immunity of whichever ones survive.”
“Exactly,” Romy said. “And sometimes if a sim survives one virus, they infect it with another, and then another, until they can harvest a multiimmune globulin. The more diseases covered, the higher the price per dose.”
“Ain’t science grand,” Patrick said.
“But it’s not a one-time thing. A sim will produce those antibodies for as long as it lives. All the farmers have to do is keep it alive and healthy and they’ve got themselves a cash cow they can literally milk for years.”
“Great,” he said in a sour tone.
“But even they don’t have it a tenth as bad as some of the cases I’ve seen. Try to imagine a sim tossed into a cage with three pit bulls.”
“Aw no.”
“Or two sims shoved into a pit, knives duct-taped into both hands, and bullwhipped until they fight to the death.”
“Stop!”
“And some are simply tied up in a basement and tortured for days, weeks.”
“Christ, Romy,please! ”
She’d seen too much, too damn much over the years. Tears welled in her eyes.
“I don’t know why…maybe it’s because they’re so unassertive, or because they have no franchise, but sims seem to bring out the very worst in the worst of us. The racists who’re so desperate to feel superior to something, anything, even if it’s not human; others who think God gave them the animal kingdom as their playground, to do absolutely anything with that they damn well please; and the sick souls who want to vent their psychoses on something weak and defenseless. Serial killers, teenage gangs, they’ve found a new target: Kill a sim for kicks. Damn them.” She heard her voice break. “Damn them all to hell.”
“Easy,” Patrick said, reaching across, finding her hand, squeezing it. “Easy.”
Romy couldn’t gauge the genuineness of the gesture, whether he really felt for her or was simply pressing his case to be roommates, but she didn’t pull away.
The interior of the car brightened. Romy glanced in her sideview mirror and saw that the car behind them was closer now, coming up fast. Patrick noticed it too.
“Looks like someone wants to pass,” he said.
She felt the BMW decelerate as Patrick eased up on the gas to allow the other car to go by. She looked out her window at the ravine beyond the guardrail and suddenly had a premonition.
“Don’t slow down!” she cried.
“Wha—?”
“Hit the gas! Don’t let it pass!”
Too late. The other car had gained too much momentum. It pulled alongside—Romy could see now that it was a big, heavy Chevy van—and then cut a hard right into the Beemer’s flank.
She screamed as the impact sent a shock of terror through her chest. Patrick cried out and the car swerved as he was knocked away from the steering wheel. Metal screeched, sparks flew as the steel guardrail ripped along the outside of her door, just inches away. Patrick grabbed the wheel, trying to regain control, but then the van hit them again, harder, and this time the Beemer climbed the guardrail, straddled it for an endless instant, then toppled over.
Romy’s window exploded inward, peppering her with safety glass as the car landed on its passenger side—she heard someone screaming and recognized the voice as her own. She hung upside down in her seatbelt as the Beemer rolled onto its roof, then over to the driver side where it slidbounced-rattled the rest of the way down a slope of softball-size chunks of granite. She felt as if she were trapped in some wild amusement park ride that had gone horribly wrong. Finally the car hit the bottom of the ravine and bounced back onto its wheels.
Battered, shaken, her heart pounding madly, she shook off the shock and looked at Patrick. He was a shadow slumped against the wheel—the airbag hadn’t deployed. She heard him groan and thought, We’re alive!
But this was no accident. Someone had tried to kill them!
And then she saw forms moving into the beam of the one remaining headlight, crouching shapes in dark jumpsuits, looking like commandos.
Realization stabbed into her brain: Already down here! Waiting for us! All planned! We were targeted to be knocked off the road at that point!
She found the door lock toggle, hit it. Locks wouldn’t do much good, but Patrick’s window, though cracked, was still intact. She leaned close to him.
“Don’t move!” she whispered in his ear.
He gave her a groggy look. “What?”
“Keep quiet and play dead!”
She pushed his head down so it was resting against the steering wheel, then slumped herself against him and watched through narrowed lids.
Three of them, moving quickly and cautiously, squinting in the light. Must have been waiting in the dark for a while. She thought she spotted a fourth figure hanging back at the edge of the glow.
She slipped her hand into her pocketbook, searching for something, anything she might use to protect herself. Her fingers closed around a metal cylinder, twice the length of a lipstick. Oh, yes. In the confusion she’d all but forgotten about that.
“Somebody kill those lights!” said the middle figure.
“Got it.”
One figure veered toward Patrick’s side of the car while the other two approached Romy’s. A hand snaked through her window. She steeled herself as fingers probed her throat.
“Got a pulse.”
“Great. Get her arm out here. I’ll shoot her up. Got that recorder ready?”
The third man was rattling Patrick’s door. “Hey, it’s locked. Find the switch over there.”
A hand fumbled along the inside of her door. Over the first man’s shoulder she saw the other lift an inoculator.
No!
She felt her fear nudging Raging Romy. Come on! she thought. Wake up! Where are you when I need you?
As soon as she heard the door locks trip open, she began spraying. Not a five- or ten-percent capsicum spray, but a concentrated stream of CS tear gas. The nearer of the two caught the full brunt of it. Clawing at his eyes, he cried out and lurched backward, knocking into his partner; Romy was moving too, pushing open her door and leaping out, arm extended, giving the inoculator man a faceful. He shouted and, arms across his face, turned and tried to run blind, but tripped and fell over the first guy.
Raging Romy was back.
“What the fuck?” she heard the third man say from Patrick’s side of the car. She turned and saw him start to move around toward her.
“Run, Patrick!” she screamed. “Run now!”
Before taking her own advice, she went to work on the two bastards on the ground, using her boots to hurt them where they lived, putting all the considerable strength of her legs and much of her body behind the kicks. Raging Romy wanted to give them more, take the time to do the job right so it would be a long, long while before they were able to try something like this again, but the third man had reached the front of the car and she had to run.