Vienna’s mother asked, again, what they were all talking about.
Revelers, the tens of thousands of revelers, took no note of the worry in this particular retinue, this extended family, and this was the way of the revelers. The finest revelry precedes destruction; it was always thus, as when it preceded the shortest day of the year, or the eclipse, or the ritual sacrifice of teenagers. That was when people really let their hair down and committed a few indiscretions. How many of them were already sick? Noelle wondered, and she even said something about it to Koo, as they rushed against the tide back toward the van. How many of them do you think are sick? He had no answer for that and didn’t seem much to care. If he seemed to have put aside the concerns about his dead wife, the one in the freezer, he had replaced that particular family madness with a need to protect the group around him now, Vienna, Jean-Paul, Morton, and Noelle. He was the shepherd who couldn’t relax while any lamb strayed.
At last, they found themselves beside the van, the one Noelle had driven in, watching, from that vantage point, the undulations of the crowd on the desert floor. It was an image from the Northern Renaissance, what she saw, from Bosch or Brueghel, the incessant activity of the night, the modified vehicles with their cannons and neon and sound systems, doing figure eights around the cacti, the costumes, the leafleting political groups. But they didn’t stay long to look, though it was now only fifteen or twenty minutes until the reputed firing-into-space of the arm, and Koo was adamant that they leave while they could. He’d abandoned his own van on the shoulder of the road, back up over the pass, but there was no time to bother about that. And they all piled in. Inside, in the confines of the vehicle, Noelle could hear how badly Jean-Paul was wheezing. That was about all he was doing. He seemed to stop breathing for long periods of time, but no one said anything about it. Maybe there was just nothing to say anymore. Maybe this was your neighbor now. Your neighbor was bleeding from every part of him, was unable to talk in any way, and the best that was to be expected of him was that he (or she) had just to stay alive a little bit longer before breaking into bloody sections. And your challenge, the challenge you faced with your neighbor, was to try to find a way to love him when he collapsed in front of his house and lay there until the turkey vultures came by to pick clean his bones. His estate would be raided by the federal government and dispersed to the military-industrial complex. Noelle believed that she could thrive in this future because she was not squeamish. It was something of a shocker, therefore, when Koo, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, called to her: “Noelle, isn’t it a wonderful thing that we believe we have found a treatment protocol for the M. thanatobacillus infection?”
“You have? And what is the treatment?”
“Radiation therapy,” Koo said. “And we’ve already given Jean-Paul his first round of treatments, which is why he’s a little sluggish. The bacterium, we believe, acted more slowly on Mars in part because of the thinness of the atmosphere and the extreme cold, and though it had, to some degree, adapted to the radiation there, large doses seem to slow the course of the infection.”
“Just wonderful.”
“All the more reason why we need to remove ourselves from this… area… as quickly as possible.”
“Because?”
But Koo took up with bickering at the driver, one of the residents from the medical program at URB whom Noelle had seen around the hospital campus a couple times but hadn’t met. The van wasn’t going anywhere. The van was parked in a line of vehicles inching up and down the mountain pass, and there were more cars waiting to leave, and it looked like it was going to be a good long time.
“What’s the rush?” Noelle asked again.
“It’s a rather unfortunate situation,” Koo said, “but I have reason to believe that there will be some kind of police or federal military intervention at this festival tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“As I have already told the others,” Koo said, “I am not certain what it means, but the CDC seems to feel that in order to control a larger possible outbreak of the disease, something needs to be done about the Rio Blanco area. What with people flying around in their jet packs, and the border-jumping, there is a real danger that the infected can move about too easily. The CDC wishes to try to contain the illness in this area.” And to the driver: “Can you please hurry?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that they could try to quarantine or even eliminate people at the festival who are infected or already at risk.”
She thought of Larry, she thought of the Wheelers, she thought of that guy from last week who got turned into a paloverde tree, she thought of all the many people she knew out there, in the expanses of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, and she thought of the families of those people, and their coworkers, and their friends. And then she remembered about Morton.
Noelle said, “Well, then, it might be that this is the moment to speak to the issue of Morton, who has had some contact with the—”
“What about Morton? Morton, are you all right?”
Morton was sitting in the back of the van, and he had his face pressed to the window, watching as the van began its steep ascent into the switchbacks, as if there were something that he was leaving behind in escaping from the omnium gatherum. Noelle reached across the backseat and set a hand on his shoulder. His coat was matted and sweaty, and she could tell that if there were a chimpanzee equivalent for weeping, then Morton had begun to cry.
“We still have the arm,” he said quietly.
“What’s that?” Koo called from the front seat. “Can you speak up?”
“We still have the arm,” he said.
“Which arm?”
“I believe,” Morton said, “that we have both arms. Because we brought along the second arm.”
From the back of the van, Vienna Roberts’s dad called, with a certain exasperation, “Just how many arms are we trafficking in, anyway?”
Morton reached down and touched the rucksack into which, it was true, they had somehow by now stuffed both arms. The bag was trembling and thrumming against the floor of the van, because the infected arm had now waked from its last dose of high voltage.