“Okay, Farm Boy, and how is that?”
“Just follow my lead,” Bunny said, and an idea formed as he remembered the old man they dragged off. If the others started to question, if they worried about their fate — people could be all sorts of unpredictable under such circumstances. They might even get riled up enough to alarm the guards. “We’re all gonna die!” he suddenly shouted.
“What are you talking about?” Top asked, raising his voice to be heard.
“The red bands!” Bunny said. “We don’t get chairs, Blu-rays, games, books — it’s obvious. They don’t give those to red banders because we’re gonna die!”
“Stop saying that!” a guard outside their holding pen said, shaking his head. “Everyone just remain calm. The colors are for sorting treatment.” A couple other guards muttered and glared in Bunny’s direction.
“But that old man — when he complained about his back, they beat him and dragged him off,” Top said. “What kind of medical treatment facility is this?”
“The kind where you wait your turn and don’t ask questions,” Major Diamond said, appearing before them with a cold stare. “One more word out of you two, and you’ll find out all about that old man.”
“You just threatened us!” Bunny shouted.
“Hey! They’re right!” someone else said.
“Why are you threatening us if we’re here for treatment?” another called.
Then chaos erupted in the red cells as people began chattering, calling out questions, pounding at the doors, shuffling nervously.
More guards moved in, some whispering calm words, others waving guns and ordering people back from the barred walls.
Bunny grinned at Top as he called out, “We’re all gonna die! I know it!”
—17—
The Soldier and the Samurai
When it was his turn to bare his arm for Dr Pisani, Joe Ledger did a quick but thorough read on the syringe. It was clean and the barrel of it contained a completely colorless liquid. Before the End, Ledger had spent a lot of years taking Echo Team into conflict with terrorists, many of whom used bioweapons. He’d been in every major biological and chemical development lab in the United States, and dozens around the world. He was a frequent visitor to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. As a result he knew what viral transport media looked like, just as he knew what vaccines looked like, including the various versions of Lucifer 113 and the counter-agents developed to try and stop it, notably Reaper. As the doctor raised the syringe, Ledger looked from it to the doctor, meeting her eyes again.
“This is a cure?” he asked quietly.
Pisani twitched. “Yes, yes, it won’t hurt. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried, Doc. I admire you for what you’re doing. But I have a question,” said Ledger, pitching his voice so that only she could hear him, “what kind of vaccine is this? Is it an antibiotic of some kind?”
“No,” she said, “it’s a broad-spectrum antiviral vaccine.”
“Ah,” he said, taking time to remove his jacket. “But I’m confused about something. They said that Lucifer 113 was unstoppable. They said that the addition of Reaper to the bioweapon strain was what caused it to jump to an airborne pathogen. I’m really impressed that you’ve been able to counteract something that was designed to be unstoppable.”
“N-no,” she said quickly. “We broke the pathogen down and this is the cure. It’s the real cure, a perfect cure.”
Her words tumbled out way too quickly. Ledger nodded, still smiling warmly at her. He draped his jacket over one arm. She swabbed his arm with alcohol.
“But what confuses me,” he said, “is how an antiviral will work against Lucifer 113. I mean… it’s not actually a virus.”
She froze, the needle a quarter inch from his flesh. Her eyes were huge and filled with strange lights. “What…?”
“As I understand it,” Ledger said, “Lucifer was built using select combinations of disease pathogens and parasites and then underwent extensive transgenic modification with Toxoplasma gondii as a key element, along with the larva of the green jewel wasp. It has genetic elements of the Dicrocoelium dendriticum and Euhaplorchis californiensis flukes that combine to regulate that aggressive response behavior into a predictable pattern. None of that is a virus, so how does this work? I mean, not even an antibiotic would work because this isn’t really predominantly bacteriological, so how can an antiviral do any good?”
Dr Pisani stood there, the tip of the needle trembling near his shoulder. “No, I… I mean I… what you don’t…” Her words tumbled and tumbled and fell off a cliff, leaving her blank-faced except for those wild eyes. Ledger saw tears there on her lower lashes, and the doctor’s lips trembled almost in time to the needlepoint.
The two lab assistants realized something was wrong and stepped forward. So did one of the guards.
“Doc,” asked one of the assistants. “Is something wrong?”
The other assistant gave Ledger a suspicious look. “What did you say to her?”
Ledger’s smile was bolted into place. “I just told her how much I admire what you’re all doing here.”
Everyone looked at Pisani. Tears broke and fell down her cheeks. “It’s a perfect cure.”
The second assistant jabbed Ledger in the chest with a stiffened forefinger. “That’s not what you said. Tell me what you—”
“What’s holding up the line?” demanded the hawk-faced general as he pushed his way toward Ledger. Tom shifted a half step away, but Ledger knew it was to get some room for movement if this turned weird.
Ledger had been expecting it to turn weird since the checkpoint but he was glad to see the young man read the moment this well. Just how weird was to be determined. No one was pulling guns yet, which was good, but everything in the cavern had come to an abrupt stop.
The first assistant pointed at Ledger. “This guy said something to the doc and it’s got her all upset.”
The general walked right up to Ledger and kept approaching in the way some hard-asses do when they want to force someone to back away. It was a bully’s trick that usually triggered a response based on the natural tendency to maintain a bubble of personal distance. Ledger knew the trick, and for a moment, he almost chose to step back to let this man own the moment. But then something changed that, and Ledger knew that it was going to change the trajectory of the entire day.
He recognized the man. When they’d met before, he’d been wearing the same black leather jacket and similar black pants to what he now wore.
Ledger knew his name.
So he stood his ground and let the general invade his space and get all the way up to a chest-to-chest contact. Ledger was a big man, but he was in his fifties and he’d been slouching to make himself look older and smaller than he was. This army officer was about not quite six feet tall, which made him a couple of inches shorter than Ledger. When it was clear Ledger wasn’t going to step back, the general placed a hand on his chest and pushed. Ledger allowed it, and for a moment they stood there, studying each other with professional thoroughness.
“Well fuck me blind,” murmured the general. “I know you.”
“Been a long time, Ike,” said Ledger.
General Ike Black shook his head. “We all thought you were dead.”
Ledger said nothing.
General Black turned to his men. “You know who we have here? This is Captain Joe Ledger. America’s number one covert gunslinger.” His eyes clicked back to Ledger. “Jesus on a stick, Ledger, if even half the stories about you are true you’ve killed more people than God. Everyone used to say that if they send you in the shit’s already hit the fan. You took down the Jakobys, the Seven Kings, that crazy anarchist bitch Mother Night. All that stuff.”