The Peripheral

91

With Burton on the middle bed, blood on the sheets, under a drone surgical unit like the carapace of a giant pill bug, made of that same color plastic as Clovis’s pistol, the back room of Coldiron looked like a field hospital. The drone, controlled by a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was sucked down tight around him, navel to just above his knees, and making a surprising amount of noise, as it did whatever they were making it do. Clunks and clicks as it worked on him. Extracting the shapeless bullet fragment, which it extruded on a little tray, patching the artery, closing up the hole in his leg. That was the plan, anyway. Hydrostatic shock hadn’t been that bad, Griff had told her, the ricochet off concrete having spilled a lot of energy. Otherwise, at that range, the impact itself might have killed him, in spite of the armor stopping the bullet.

The drone was somewhere else peripherals might come from, she thought, reminding her she had the Wheelie Boy on her lap, on the edge of the bed furthest from Conner. When she couldn’t look at Burton anymore, because he was unconscious, with a clear tube up his nose, sticky monitor-dots on his forehead and bare chest, and a couple of different tubes in his arm, she’d look over at Conner, face smooth and quiet, running something seventy years in the future, or at Griff, phone to his ear, nodding, talking but too low for her to hear. Then, when she could again, she’d look back at Burton.

The drone kept clunking. A pill bug was an isopod, not an insect. The biggest ones lived in the ocean. Was that high school or National Geographic? She couldn’t remember.

Clovis had gone to take a shower. Cold to start, she’d said, and fully dressed, because that would probably get most of Burton’s blood out of her clothes. Flynne hadn’t even known there was a shower. Clovis said it was on a hose, in a janitorial closet, with a drain in the floor, and right then it didn’t seem particularly strange, Clovis explaining that, standing there with Burton’s blood all over her. He’d needed a transfusion, but they’d had plenty of blood, his type. Which meant they had Flynne’s type too, because they were the same. And they’d had this drone, that Clovis said was what the Secret Service kept handy in case the president got shot, and was maybe even being run by the same surgeons.

If Conner hadn’t been under the crown, she’d have had to explain it all to him. Not that she knew anything about it, other than what she’d seen. Tommy had phoned for some deputies to clean things up in the alley, after, get whoever had been waiting in those squidsuits out of there, and there hadn’t been one single siren. Shooters hadn’t been local, or the deputies would’ve let Tommy know who they were by now. And it was like nobody in town had heard the shooting.

There was something wrong with her now, she decided, looking over at her brother’s face while the drone clicked and whirred, all those little pill-bug legs doing whatever they were doing. She’d seen them glittering, as Carlos and Griff lifted it and put it down over him, Clovis kneeling by the bed with her bloody bright blue finger still stuck in his thigh, pressing on the artery, and then she’d pulled her finger out as the drone came to life, making its noises.

The thing that was wrong was that she’d gone to where she’d been that time in Operation Northwind, but now she couldn’t scream on the couch, or walk out on Janice’s porch to puke on the grass. Just sit here, on the edge of the bed she guessed would be hers, with the ringing in her ears, and beyond it the edges of Griff’s accent, talking softly on his phone. She felt like Burton would be okay, but it worried her that she couldn’t feel more about it.

“You don’t look so good,” Tommy said, sitting down beside her and taking her hand, just like that was natural.

And she remembered Wilf’s hand, in that Oxford Street greenway, and the thing with floppy red wings, high up in the wet gray branches. “My ears are ringing,” she said.

“Be lucky if you don’t get any permanent loss,” he said. “Part of what you’re feeling now’s just decibel level. Affects your nervous system.”

“They were like the first four in that car,” she said. “Then those two down below the trailer. Dozen people dead, because of us.”

“You aren’t making them come after you.”

“I can’t tell anymore.”

“Not a good time to try to figure it out. But I’ve got something I have to run by you, while our man here’s on the phone. Not a good time for that either, but I have to do it.” He was looking at Griff.

“What?”

“I don’t want them using that shit on Luke 4:5. Not on anybody.”

“Party time?”

“You wouldn’t call it that, if you had any better idea what it does.”

“Burton said it’s a war crime.”

“It is,” he said, “and good reason. It’s an aerosol. They’d have a single little bird go down the line, painted black, tonight, spray ’em all.”

“What’s it do?”

“Stimulant, aphrodisiac, and, I have trouble pronouncing this, psychotomimetic.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It duplicates the condition of being totally serial-killer sadist bugfuck.”

“Fuck. .”

“You wouldn’t want it on your conscience. Don’t want it on mine.” He looked over at Burton. “Now I feel like shit for riding his ass, for what they did at Pickett’s.”

“He told me you were unhappy. Didn’t seem to hold it against you.”

“They didn’t know they’d set off those tanks of precursor. What they put on Conner’s gobot might’ve been fine just for Pickett and a few of his posse, which is frankly something I couldn’t hold against anybody. But they did blow up some poor assholes with no better way to make a living, on my watch, some of whom I knew to say hello to.” He gave her hand a squeeze, then let go of it.

She wondered who it was, up the line, had given Ash those crazy eyes, and whether they could do the same to somebody here, with the isopodal drone? Or if they might know how to fix whatever it was about Burton’s haptics that glitched him? Crazy things to wonder, but she felt a little better now. She reached over for Tommy’s hand again, because holding it and hearing his voice was making that Operation Northwind thing go away.