Mercy 6

Mendenhall pressed her lips together, put the corner of her fist there. She envied Covey’s — what? — coldness, compression, precision. Her perception, the scatter and gather of it, the way she looked certain while on the run, on the loose. The peridot in the V of her blouse rested in the top dimple between her breasts, neat against pale skin, pure.

“South parking,” replied Mendenhall. “Kill the lights and slide the car into the back corner. By the scrub.”

“What do you have? A rabbit hole?”

“Something like that,” said Kae, before Mendenhall could. “But don’t drive on the roads. Use the running trail. We come up that canyon.”

When they reached the trailhead at the canyon bottom, Mendenhall became disoriented. The near hill obscured Mercy. She saw two sunsets — one to the west, where the canyon opened into housing tracts; one to the east, where it folded into hills. The one in the east had more glow and color. It spread along the horizon, lifted into thicker clouds. She almost told the others to go on without her, to go wherever they wanted to go. Covey got out of the car first. She stood and arched her back as she watched the eastern sky behind the near hills. Her skirt lifted and made her look very young. She let her bare waist and stomach show, cool. Kae climbed out next, tugging the woman along with him.

“Snow,” said the woman. She held her palm up.

Mendenhall watched from the passenger side, thought about shooting up some Trapanal and waiting for DC to come get her, claim her. If she got herself back in, they might not claim her. They would at least have to think about it. If they got her outside, she was theirs.

She saw the snow. It caught in the woman’s brown hair, dusted her palm, clung, stuck, smeared into powder where she rubbed it.

The horizon reddened; the overhead sky grew dark except where clouds caught edges of light. Distant sirens made whale sounds over the city. They could have been in Reykjavik.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” someone sang as they climbed the trail.

58

Returning was a matter of physical effort, pulling. Mendenhall led. In the vent she used her penlight sparingly, blindness giving them all a single goal. In the bomb shelter she found a note from Ben-Curtis: This place is nuts.

“Does he mean this?” asked Covey when given the paper. She motioned to the shelter. “Or the whole hospital?”

“You chose to come.” Mendenhall took back the note. Had he left? Was this warning or resignation?

She noticed something about Kae. He was still holding hands with the woman. The K-cuff was gone.

He winked, raised hands with Patient X. “You need me. To get her up there.”

At the base of the dumbwaiter shaft, he cleared the broken vent and crumpled cubicle, then fashioned himself as a human climbing base, planting his hands against the shaft wall, flexing his knees and spreading his legs.

“Climb,” he told them. He appeared fragile, a boy.

“Don’t step on his left shoulder,” said Mendenhall.

The three women left him alone down there after hoisting themselves into the subbasement.

“Go home,” Mendenhall whispered into the shaft. No sound returned. She waited, and nothing rose, not one breath or shuffle.

She wished she had thought of something to say that wasn’t a placebo, something with no prescription to it.

They set up Mendenhall’s patient in the room Silva had used for napping. Covey made a good nurse. She found an old stand and helped run the IV. Mendenhall fetched a broken EMT cart from subbasement storage, from near the cold cases that held expired saline and glucose kits. The cart still had air function. She recognized the thing from the ER, a heavy roller Pao Pao had named the Beast. Mullich must have decommissioned it. Covey held the patient’s hand, folded fingers together, spoke in a plain voice: “What’s your name?”

“Julia.”

When Covey started to press for more, Mendenhall put a hand to her shoulder. Then she started her chart. Julia Doe, thirty-five.

“What are you — we — doing?” Covey held Julia’s hand, curl to curl, thumb stroking her knuckles.

Mendenhall continued making chart entries. It felt good to be working. “Treating her for shock. Oxygen and glucose. We won’t really know how she’s doing until the Trapanal wears off some. It wasn’t the best thing to hit her with.”

“That and the cuffs.” Covey stroked Julia’s wrist.

“Let’s forget about those.” Mendenhall waited for Covey to look at her. “Okay?”

Covey considered the green exit sign, its glow exaggerating her pale complexion. The only other lights were those of the Beast, tiny yellows, reds, and blues. “What’s a virus?” she asked.

“Not this.”

“Why not this? That colleague I have who defines these particles — my particles — as a-life. He argues that they have destiny, that they’re acting out synapses, that they have molecular structures adapted to carry out both. That they infect solar systems.”

“That’s just metaphor. Weak, easy metaphor. Following even reasonably accurate metaphors is a fallacy.”