“Okay, okay — wait a second, I’ll show you.” He grabbed the loose tube and turned the valve to stop the contents of the drip bag from emptying onto the floor. “Just let me sort out that shunt so you don’t end up bleeding all over the place.”
Daylight blinded Liv as she stepped through the door into the transport hangar, so bright she had to turn her head away for a few seconds and let her eyes adjust.
The bodies were lying on the far side, against the wall, their arms and legs twisted and frozen in the agonized moment of their death. She drifted over, drawn by the horrible tableau. The sickly smell of death was already hanging over them like a cloud. She moved along the line, checking the faces of the dead. Malik was there, his face covered in filth, his eyes staring and sightless and ringed by hungry flies.
“Where are the horses?”
“We didn’t find any.”
She frowned. The horses had drunk the water too, but that was before she had left — before it had turned bitter. Maybe the animals had known there was something wrong with it, their superior sense of smell saving them from the same fate as their riders and they had run away when the water turned and their masters died. She reached the end of the line. Twenty-two bodies in total. Azra’iel was not among them. “Where are the others?”
“There’s a couple still alive. They’re in the canteen. When we arrived it had been set up as a ward, I guess because they needed more room for all the sick.” Liv nodded. That explained the bare cupboards in the sick bay. “They’re the only two left, though, and to be honest — I reckon they’ll soon be out here too. There’s not a whole heap we can do for them.”
The first thing that hit Liv when she walked into the canteen was the smell. Sweet and putrid and so strong it made her head swim and she had to reach out to steady herself against the wall.
“You should really go and lie down again,” Kyle said. “You’re still too dehydrated to be off the drip.”
“I’ll go in a second,” she said. It felt hot in the room and unbearably stuffy. A long line of refectory tables had been pushed against one wall and haphazardly stacked up to make more room on the floor. It looked like it had been done in a hurry. She imagined the panic that had played out as people started falling sick. The floor was covered with mattresses and sheets, dragged in from the dorms. Some of them had been stripped, though the dark stains of death were soaked into the fabric of the covers. Only two of the beds were still occupied. A man was stooped down by one of them, gently washing brown filth from around the mouth of one of the riders.
“That’s Eric,” Kyle said. “He’s a qualified medic, so he’s been playing nursemaid.” The man turned and nodded a greeting. He was another version of Kyle: tan, lithe, colored string bracelets and leather thongs around his wrist. “Mike’s around here someplace too, but I think he’s outside the fence with your lot.”
Liv turned to him. “Is everyone okay?”
“Oh yeah, they’re all fine. Your man Tariq went out with Mike in the truck and brought them all back. They just needed food and rest — and water of course. They’re all on grave-digging duties now. Can’t have that bunch lying out in the heat much longer.”
A sudden movement brought their attention back to the man on the floor. His whole body had started to shake and heave. He bucked on the bed, struggling to breathe then coughed and more of the brown stuff spluttered from his mouth. Eric held the man’s head as he vomited into a bowl, talking calmly to him the whole time, trying to soothe him. Liv marveled at his dedication.
“You’re right about the water, by the way,” Kyle said, quiet enough that even she could hardly hear him. “When we first arrived and found all the bodies and a few still alive we thought it might be a virus, or maybe even a chemical weapon — related accident — you know, all those WMDs they didn’t find. But the ones who were still alive all said the same thing — they got sick after drinking the water. So I tested it. It’s been part of my job out here, so I had all the right stuff with me. When we first got here there were massive traces of arsenic trioxide in it. Groundwater often contains high levels of this compound but these were off the scale. Probably got washed out of some underground deposit by the pressure of the water. Basically it makes your organs fail, which results in vomiting, diarrhea and fits — just like this poor bastard.”
The man on the floor calmed a little and his lips pulled back in pain, revealing a jagged line of teeth. It was Azra’iel, the angel of death, very close to meeting his namesake. “The land does not belong to anyone,” Liv whispered, “we belong to the land.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She turned away. “Where did you come from, Kyle?”
“Melbourne originally.”
“No, I mean how did you come to be here?”
Kyle stared at a spot on the wall, his forehead wrinkled in thought. “That’s a good question.” Fresh movement drew his attention as Azra’iel began to fit again. He leaped forward, grabbing one of his arms and holding him down while Eric tried to get a sedative into him. Liv watched as they fought with him, then — as quickly as it had started — it was over. Azra’iel arched one last time, let out a long rattling sigh and was still.
Kyle looked up at her. “I need to help Eric clean up here. Why don’t you go into the kitchen, get yourself something to eat — if you can stomach it after all this. I’ll come find you when we’re done and try and tell you how we ended up here.”
51
The laptop pinged and Shepherd sat up, his stomach hollow with dread.
It was too soon.
The search had only been running for about a minute, two at the most. It would still be deep in the death registers. He sat perfectly still in the bolted-down chair, not daring to move, as if remaining motionless might stop the world turning and keep her forever alive.
A single search result was showing in a pop-up, just a string of numbers and a suffix locator, BPD — Baltimore Police Department. As far as he knew Melisa had never been to Baltimore, she had no connections there; but then there were lots of things he didn’t know about her, like where she’d been for the last eight years.
He stared at the result.
Could this be it — the end of the road? The end of hope?
It felt hot in the room all of a sudden and sweat trickled down the ridge of his spine. He clicked on the single result and held his breath as it opened in a new window. His eyes scanned the dense text, raw information gleaned from the police report, his mind too wired to take in more than fragments:
…DOD: August 12, 2011…
She had been dead for over a year
…thirty-six years old…
Right age
…gunshot wound… black female…
Black?
Melisa wasn’t black — olive skinned, yes, but not black. She looked more Italian than African. But some cops were pretty binary about these things: anyone who wasn’t white was automatically black — it could still be her. At the bottom of the file there were other case-file numbers, each with a different date, stretching back ten years from the date of death. This person had a rap sheet, which didn’t sound like his Melisa.