Nilla moved toward him. He had scars from a childhood illness all over his face and very long eyelashes. He had a gun holstered at his hip. If she didn't act fast enough, if she didn't strike hard enough he was going to kill her and even then, even if she took him down she had to worry about his two friends. This was it'the chainlink fence at the end of the dark alley. Endgame.
'Here,' he said, and shoved something at her. A mask and a pair of latex gloves. 'You're on Plague Patrol tonight. I don't care what you were doing before, I'm three men short and I've got a schedule to meet.'
Nilla had no idea what was going on but she pulled the mask over her mouth and nose. Maybe he wouldn't be able to see what she was through the thick paper. She fumbled with the gloves but managed to get them on somehow.
'Okay, up there, the balcony there. You take units B through G. It looks like it's going to be a bad one, tonight.' A feathery thin layer of sympathy in his voice startled her. 'St. Rose Dominican is already full up. We'll need to take this bunch all the way out to UMC.' Nilla looked up and saw a split-level apartment complex with a red tile roof. The doors looked close together, each separated from the next by a single rectangular window. Blue flickering light came from most of the windows'probably the wavering campfire glow of television sets.
'I'I've never'' Nilla stammered.
'Christ, you've never been on Plague Patrol before? Well, it's pretty simple. You go in there and you see somebody who's sick, you drag them back down here and they go in the truck. They give you any trouble and I'll shoot them for you. Think you can handle that?'
Nilla nodded, knowing she couldn't handle it at all but also knowing she wasn't being given an actual option. She turned away without further comment and started up the stairs to the complex's second level.
'Jesus Fuck. The Chamber will take anybody these days, won't they?'
He wasn't talking to her. Nilla approached a door markedB and knocked. There was no answer but she could hear the television set inside blaring away so she knocked again, much louder. Finally she tried the knob and found the door unlocked. She stepped inside onto seafoam green shag carpeting littered with twists of paper tissue. Blood flecked some of them a dark rose red.
The tv played an old cowboy movie. John Wayne or somebody shooting two-handed from the back of a horse. Its ghostly blue light was the only illumination in the room.
Nilla moved through a filthy kitchenette'dishes in the sink full of dried-up rice grains, refrigerator chugging unhappily'and down a short hallway toward a bedroom. 'Hello?' she called out. No answer, of course. The bedside table was covered in plastic bottles of over-the-counter medication.
Mael had mentioned 'poisoning the waters' with Dick. Was it really this bad, that armed thugs had to cart off the sick to avoid massive outbreaks of disease? Nilla could think of few things worse than the dead coming back to life to devour the living. A widespread pandemic of disease might fit the bill.
She turned back the sheets of the bed, half-expecting to find a dead man hidden there. Nothing. She turned around to head out of the apartment. Maybe the next one.
Someone sneezed right next to her left shoulder. Nilla wheeled around and threw open the door of a linen closet to find an enormously obese man wedged inside. He wore a white t-shirt and a pair of striped boxer shorts and a look of abject fear. He also had a ten-inch kitchen knife in his hand, raised over his head as if he was about to bring it down and slice her forehead open.
Nilla froze'no time to subtract herself from the equation, no time to hide, no time to think. Her hands were up, open, empty and he seemed to notice that fact.
'You,' she said, the words bubbling out of her like swamp gas, 'have got the drop on me, mister. Tell you what. I'll run away now. I can't go out the front, though. Is there another way?'