Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

The Arkle shut his eyes again. It didn’t really help with the pain, but it did seem to make it easier to bear. He didn’t want to sob in front of Doc. He hadn’t cried since Tira was killed, and he’d sworn he’d never cry again. It was hard not to now. This pain just went on and on, and it wasn’t only in the tooth. It was all up the side of his face, and reaching deep inside his nose and into his brain.

“Ah, it’s getting worse, it’s getting worse,” muttered The Arkle. He couldn’t help himself. The pain was starting to make him panic, fear growing inside him. He’d been afraid before, plenty of times, felt certain he was going to die. But this was worse than that because the pain was worse than dying. He’d rather die than have this incredible pain keep going—

There was a sensation in his arm, not a pain, exactly, more like a pressure inside the skin. Something flowed through his arm and shoulder, and with it came a blessed darkness that pushed the pain away and carried it off somewhere far away, along with his conscious self.

Doc put the syringe back in the sterile dish and placed it on the table. Then she put a blood pressure cuff on The Arkle’s arm, pumped it up and released it, noting the result. A check of his pulse followed, and a look at his eyes, gently raising each eyelid in turn.

Finally she opened his mouth, being careful to place her hands so that some involuntary reflex wouldn’t put a fang through her fingers. Even more gently, she touched the top left tooth. Despite the sedation, The Arkle flinched. Doc curled back the young man’s lip and looked at the gum around the base of the tooth. She looked for quite a while, then let the lip slide back, and stood up.

“Pal! You there?”

Pal came in a minute later. He was another of the oldsters, though unlike Doc, he’d spent time in the dorms. He had been destined to become a Winger, and was hunchbacked a little, and there were stubs on his shoulders where his wings had either failed to grow or been surgically removed.

“You called?”

Pal was the chief cook of the Family, and liked to pretend he was a particular butler, in some reference to the old time that only Doc and Gwyn understood. He always wore the same black coat, with long tails that hung down at the back.

“Go get Gwyn, will you? He’s moving the chicken houses.”

Pal looked down at The Arkle.

“Problem?”

Doc sighed.

“Big problem. Why don’t they ever tell me when they first hurt themselves, Pal? A week ago this could have been sorted out with antibiotics. I mean, I’ve got enough broad spectrum stuff downstairs to treat a thousand patients, but it’s got to be done early! Now…”

“Now what?”

“I’m going to have to cut out the tooth, and he’s practically all Ferret in the jaw. Those teeth have roots four inches long, and nerve clusters around the blood-sucking channels…which I only know about in theory, since I never—”

She stopped talking suddenly.

“Since you never dissected a Ferret?” asked Pal.

“No,” replied Doc. “Never a Ferret. At least a dozen Myrmidons and quite a few Wingers…”

“Which was just as well for me,” said Pal. “All things considered. I suppose you want Gwyn to carry the boy up to the ridge?”

Doc looked at the floor.

“Yeah, I guess I was thinking that. It’s the only way I can do it.”

“Risky,” said Pal. “For everyone. I thought we agreed no more trips out of the valley.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Doc. “Arkle will die if I don’t take out the tooth, and he’ll die if I do it wrong. I have to be able to see inside!”

“You could try halfway up,” said Pal. “Some of the Talents seem to work okay there. Gwyn’s does.”

“And mine doesn’t,” snapped Doc. “It kicks in at the ridgeline, never lower down. So can you go and get Gwyn now, please? I can’t keep Arkle under forever. There’s a big enough risk with what I’ve given him already.”

“All right, all right, I’m going,” said Pal. “I suppose you want to go alone, just you and Gwyn?”

“Yes,” said Doc. “Better to lose two than any more.”

“On that logic, better to lose just one in the first place,” said Pal, inclining his head toward The Arkle. “That’s what Shade would do.”

“I’m not Shade,” said Doc. “That’s why I left Shade. You sorry you left, Pal?”

“Nope,” replied Pal somberly. “I was just checking to see if you were. You had a mighty fine surgery back there, and those spider-robots of his to-be nurses and all. Yanking out a Ferret tooth there would be as easy as taking a piss.”

“Maybe,” said Doc. “But I reckon the Overlords have probably tracked down Shade by now, and whoever was dumb enough to stick with him, and the computers he lives in and the whole submarine and everything in it has probably been rusting away at the bottom of the bay for years.”

“Could be,” said Pal. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if Shade is still going, even still looking for us. Another reason to be careful. Shade always did have his true believers, and he sends them far and wide. They could easily be more dangerous than the creatures.”

“Just go get Gwyn,” said Doc wearily. “While I get my kit together.”

The Arkle came back to the world in total incomprehension. There was a terrible pain in his face, everything was on a strange angle, and he could see the sun in a very odd position. He groaned, and the angle shifted and the sun righted itself and moved away, to be replaced by Gwyn’s broad face, up unreasonably close. It took The Arkle a few moments more to work out that it was so close because Gwyn was carrying him like a baby, across his chest.

“What’s happening?” he croaked. It was hard to talk because his mouth felt puffy and strange. His lips were swollen and too close together, his jaw wouldn’t open properly, and there was this pain there, jabbing at him with every step Gwyn took.

“Stop for a moment,” Doc said to Gwyn.

The Arkle blinked and tried to shift his head. Why was the Doc here? He vaguely remembered going to see her about something.

“Keep still, please, The Arkle,” said Doc.

He obeyed, and something stung him in the arm.

“What is…”

The Arkle’s words trailed off and he subsided back down in Gwyn’s arms.

“He’s not staying under as well as I thought he would,” said Doc. “And I can’t give him much more. We’d better hurry.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Gwyn. “You only got that case.”

“You carried me a lot farther a lot faster once,” said Doc. She could see the top of the ridge up ahead—the real top, not the false one that had famously fooled so many walkers in the old times, when there had been a popular trail that went along the ridge, weaving up and down on either side.

“Long time ago,” said Gwyn. “You were lighter then.”

Doc hit him on the arm, very lightly.

Gwyn laughed, a kind of giggling chuckle that sounded weird coming out of his barrel chest. Then he suddenly stopped, and his head snapped to the right, and he immediately crouched down, balancing The Arkle with his left arm as he drew his sword with his right. It was short but broad-bladed, and streaked with gold. Gold was good at disrupting creature circuitry, the augmentation stuff they put in at the Meat Factory, completing the transformation from child to monster.

Doc had ducked down too. Gwyn’s Change Talent was an extra sense. He could feel other life-forms and track them, though he couldn’t tell them apart. She drew her sword. Like Gwyn’s, it was gold-plated, another relic of their service with Shade, the enigmatic computer personality who’d led what he liked to call the Resistance against the Overlords and their creatures.