A BACK-PACK TURNED GRAY

© Dana W. Paxson 2005

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A BACK-PACK TURNED GRAY

1563 4D

“Nah,” Ezzar said. “I’m loaded with orphins. It’s only bad if I try to stand on it.”

“No damn wonder.” The man, his head of curly dark hair glistening with gray here and there, bent closer. He slid the forceps into a cut and extracted a long, jagged sliver of metal. “Not just stone in here. Morons, woman, where’ve you been spending your time, not that it’s my business?” He inspected the sliver closely, dropped it carefully where the floor met the wall, and bent close to her leg again to fish with his forceps in another laceration. “You know, we’re from Salvo. Nice area until RhoCorp started buying it up two years ago. That’s when we should have figured this out, but we hung on, thought we could get something, maybe a land stake, if we had to leave. And then just a month or two ago, the sickness started, and right after that, bam! the relocation order.”

Another shard fell by the first.

“I was helping treat these superhigh fevers. They were bad: visions, hallucinations, weird delusions, people trying to pull andro tricks. The medics didn’t have much to offer except generic viral piggybackers, and they take months to get going. This crowd’s lost about fifteen so far. Died.” He held up a ragged bloody disk of stone, smirked, and flipped it over his shoulder. “Probably two or three hundred with fevers here right now.”

Ezzar groped for Rion‘s words at the ore station. This had to be the andro virus he and Cortevail had been talking about. She winced as the man twisted the forceps slightly and withdrew a smooth pebble. As he went in again, she looked up at Rennie, raising her eyebrows. He nodded, trying to play the dumb andro helper. He wasn’t very good at looking humble. She asked the man, “Have you seen any of these people do anything unusual?”

“Well, uh…" The man stopped working his forceps and looked up at the nearest guard a few strides away. In a soft tone, his head down again, he said, “Yes. One guy, no bigger than you, had the fever and got well again. So a few days later he got mad and ripped a corpo‘s head off with his bare hands. They vaporized his heart. And they told us not to talk to anybody about it, or they’d shoot us. They wouldn’t touch his body; made us wrap it in a sealer and send it off to the burner. These guards have been really nervous since this started.”

“Anything else, any humans talking anjive or stuff like that?”

The man glanced up again and then at Ezzar. “He’s watching us now. No more.” He bent to his task again, still finding and pulling out large and small stone fragments from Ezzar‘s leg. “This is a nasty fracture. You shouldn’t go, carried or not. You need a hospital or a medshop. Look, I’ll explain it to the guards. I know some of these people.”

“Wait—" Ezzar began. A scream, then more of them, from Aswar Nagrasai. Explosions again.

Guards bellowed, “Down, down!” and everyone flattened themselves in the street as beamlights stabbed back and forth, bouncing, pitting, melting, detonating, incinerating, writing streaks of destruction across the shop arches in the crossing. The impromptu surgeon dived face down alongside Ezzar, his thin, tiny body shivering against her.

Food signs roasted; dark-green vines caught fire, crisping to red, brown, then ash; a backpack sticking up from the floor turned gray and sent up a death-puff of smoke; small children ran and wailed; one wobbled into a beam flash and disappeared.

A corpo guard, heavy-set and dark, flopped on his belly next to Rennie and Ezzar, gasping, muttering to himself, “Damn them! Why didn’t they tell us about this? They’re slugging full-tech with the rebels and I’m out here half-naked with this bunch of sheep.” He fumbled for his hand beamer.

A roar split the air. One of the shops at the crossing, evidently selling fuels, had taken a beam charge in the interior. Most of the fuel modules had detonated, rolling out a vast orange ball that engulfed the whole crossing in fire. Air, sucked in after the blast, rushed up the sloping way past Ezzar, blowing her hair into her face along with a cloud of grit. She spat.

The guard leaped to his feet, aimed his beamer with both hands and fired. A volley of shots, some ballistic now, some streaks of energy, answered him. As Ezzar ducked away, trying to roll and drag her leg out of the line of fire, the guard abruptly turned as white and bright as the summer sun, and his heat rained on her upturned face. Her mind stopped and studied his radiance; what an amazing smile he had, so wide, or maybe his jawbone glowed through his cheeks? The sides of her nostrils itched but she couldn’t stop looking at the man’s gaping smile and the huge hot star of light blazing at her from the side of his gun. The itching spread across her face and into her eyes and down her neck and up through her hair, and she tried to ignore it and watch this incredible smile wrap itself around the man’s head, but the itching wouldn’t stop, and the man exploded; and then she pawed at her face and screamed.

She had burned.

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