Ruins

“Two hours a day,” Skousen snarled, “with no access to my notes or my team from the hospital.”

“I can give you some of that,” said Shon. “If Michelle vouches for your work, I can bring some of your notes from East Meadow.”

“And my team.”

“I can’t take the risk that you’ll collude against us.”

“I thought you said that’s not who I am.”

Shon shook his head. “I trust you, Doctor, not your colleagues.”

“More time, then,” said Skousen. “Two hours a day is nothing—my people are dying, and I might be the only man alive who can help them.”

“He only sleeps four hours as it is,” said Michelle. “We expect him to collapse in exhaustion any day now.”

“I can do the work if you’ll give me the time!” Skousen growled.

“Your priority is to cure these Partials,” Shon ordered.

Dr. Skousen laughed coldly. “That’s not even close to my priority.”

“You can’t cure anyone if you’re dead.”

“You already tried to kill me,” said Skousen. “Thirteen years ago when I cared for an entire hospital full of RM victims. You think this is bad?” He gestured wildly at the dying Partials, his hands shaking with age and anger. “When the bodies pile so high in this room that you have to step on the dead just to reach the dying, then you can tell me how serious this is. Then you can tell me I’m working too hard and I need some rest. Then you can see what it’s like to watch an invisible monster kill everyone you’ve ever loved, assuming you love anything at all.”

Skousen’s chest was heaving, his old frame out of breath and shaking from the tirade. Shon watched passively, moving only to grab Michelle’s arm when she advanced on the doctor angrily.

“Tell me again why we trust you at all,” Michelle said, her voice neutral but her emotions raging like wildfire on the link. “This is a weapon your people created—”

“We still don’t know that for sure,” said Shon.

“—and you’re the only one on this island with the medical expertise to create it,” Michelle continued, tugging against Shon’s grip on her arm. “You should be hanging from a traffic light being eaten by crows, not hiding down here laughing while we parade your victims past you like a highlight reel.”

“He didn’t create it,” said Shon.

Dr. Skousen sneered. “Why do you think you know me so well?”

“Because when my platoon arrived in East Meadow, you were treating our wounded outriders in your hospital. Because you continued to treat them even after we started Morgan’s daily executions.” Shon spoke simply and softly. “Because you’re a healer, and you hate us, and you heal us anyway. You remember RM too well. You couldn’t create a new disease even if you wanted to.”

Skousen looked back fiercely, but soon he began to sag. “I’ve dreamed of your deaths every night for thirteen years, but not like this. No one should die like this.”

Michelle stopped trying to reach the old human, and Shon relaxed his grip on her arm. The air recyclers hummed loudly in the background, filling the dark plastic room with an unfeeling hiss. Shon gestured at the dying Partial soldiers. “Do you know how to cure it?”

“I barely even know what’s causing it,” Skousen whispered.

“Michelle said something about it being a genetic disorder.”

“Two different ones, if I’m reading the data correctly,” said Skousen. “It might be a bioweapon, but at this point you have to consider the possibility that this is a … malfunction. A factory error in your DNA, possibly related to your expiration date.”

“Expiration doesn’t look like this,” said Shon.

“Nothing in your history looks like this,” said Skousen. “We have to base our theories on analysis, not precedent.”

“So what’s causing it?” asked Shon. “Why is it only appearing in East Meadow, and why only in specific quadrants? Every victim we’ve seen has come from one of two patrol assignments, overlapping in a very specific region of the city—that has to be environmental.”

“Every victim we’ve seen has appeared in the last four days,” said Skousen. “This disease is too new to make any assumptions about—something that looks like a trend might just be a quirk blown out of proportion by a small sample size.”

A muffled alarm sounded down through the insulated ceiling, just loud enough to hear. Michelle looked up sharply.

“New victims.”

“Damn.” Shon moved to the door, but Michelle blocked his path.

“The disinfection procedure to get out of this room takes ten minutes. We might as well just wait.” She sighed. “They’ll bring them right to us anyway.”

They waited, agonizingly helpless, listening to the shouts and footsteps above them. Finally the door opened, and two gas-masked soldiers dragged a stumbling, blistered Partial into the basement laboratory. Skousen helped them get the man onto a table, and Shon used the link to demand a report.

“Same patrol as the others,” said the first soldier, saluting as he spoke. “Symptoms are about two hours old; we grabbed him as soon as his unit reported them.”

“The others have been quarantined?”

“They’re in the yard,” said the soldier. “We knew you’d want to talk to them first.”

Shon nodded and walked to the sick man. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“Chas,” said the man, grunting the word through gritted teeth. “The pain, it’s—”

“We’ll do everything we can for you,” said Shon, and turned to Michelle. “Stay here; learn everything you can from him. I need to get upstairs and debrief the others.” He looked at Skousen. “Figure out why this is happening.”

The human’s voice was firm. “Bring me my notes.”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Then give me what I want,” said Skousen.

Once again Shon felt the impossible weight of his assignment bearing down on his shoulders, threatening to grind his bones to dust against the ground. Invade the island, subdue the humans, find the girl Kira, kill the humans, control the humans … and now silence. Morgan’s orders had piled up like corpses, and then she had found the girl and closed herself off, with no new orders at all. Shon was undertrained, understaffed, and completely on his own, and now the situation on the island was breaking down faster, and more catastrophically, than he could possibly keep up with. He nodded curtly to Skousen, promising the old man his notes, and raced to the decontamination chamber, where he and Mattson and the two arriving soldiers scrubbed themselves and their boots and their plastic bodysuits with sharp, harsh chemicals. Shon threw away his face mask with disgust and grabbed a new one before racing outside to talk to the rest of Chas’s patrol.

What he found in the yard was not remotely what he had expected.

The soldiers in the yard were braced in a wide semicircle, the Dogwood guards and the visiting patrol mixed together almost haphazardly, their rifles up and their sights trained solidly on some … thing … in the middle of the open yard.

Shon drew his handgun as he approached, staring in shock at the thing before him. It was man-shaped, at least vaguely—two arms, two legs, a torso and a head—but it was at least eight feet tall, with a broad, solid chest and thick, powerful arms. Its skin was dark, a kind of purplish black, and plated like the hide of a rhinoceros. Its fingers and toes were clawed, and its thickset head was the most inhuman part of all—hairless, noseless, with a jagged mouth and two dark pits for eyes, which watched them all silently. Shon drew even with the soldiers in the semicircle, his gun level, his mind barely comprehending what he was seeing.

“What the hell is that?”

“No idea, sir,” the soldier next to him breathed. “It’s … waiting for you.”

“It talks?”