David Nickle - Eutopia

Andrew reached down with his good hand and grabbed Mrs. Frost’s shoulder. She shifted her weight, and smashed his fingers between her arm and the bed next to it. Andrew gasped. She spared him a glance over her shoulder, catching his eye.

“Don’t interfere,” she whispered. Andrew tried to lay hold of her again, but it was impossible—the space between the beds allowed him no room to get in and stop it.

Soon—too soon—the feet stopped moving, and Germaine Frost was able to stand, and brush herself off, and turn to Andrew Waggoner and, as though nothing had transpired between them, say: “We have to go now.”

All Andrew could do was go . A small part of him wanted to strike Germaine Frost down, raise an alarm—shout murderer ! But if he did so… what would become of Jason? Germaine Frost was his only thread through this maze.

The girl was dead. Lips blue, no heartbeat, wide eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Germaine bent and rolled her beneath the bed, and took hold of Andrew and led him to the door. It wasn’t locked. Beyond was a hallway, and they followed it, and climbed down some steps, and finally came upon a bright room: a small surgery, with a skylight, which was badly cracked. Water rained down in a small torrent onto the bare wooden operating table, in turn dribbling down to the floor. Opposite them was another door, and when they went through this, they stepped outside.

They stood next to a stand of tamarack—not far off was the fallen log where Jason Thistledown had given Andrew Waggoner a pack of meagre supplies and sent him into the wilderness alone.

“What luck!” she exclaimed. “Not a single one! What luck!”

Not a single one. There was one, thought Andrew. “She was a child,” he said. He was shaking. “A silly child who they’d let in on her own. You—”

“She would have raised an alarm,” said Mrs. Frost.

“Perhaps,” said Andrew. “But there might have been another way. There must have been another way. And how did you know she was alone? That her guard wasn’t waiting for her outside?”

Mrs. Frost shrugged. “They are degenerates,” she said. “Inferior. They have not the wit. Now tell me, Doctor—do you want to meet my nephew or do you want to question good fortune until pneumonia sets in?”

Andrew didn’t answer that, but Mrs. Frost evidently took silence as its own response. “Then come along,” she said. “Come along.”

Andrew followed her around the corner of the building, and the hospital was in sight, rendered grey and deathly through the driving rain—a silhouette, almost, among… other shapes.

They both stopped and stared, at one of those shapes. It might have been a tree, but it would not stay still—it bent low and climbed higher than the eaves, as though it were in the clutches of some cyclonic wind. As they watched, it moved past the hospital, and then further along, toward the town. It moaned, a deep, bassoon-like sound, and accompanying it came a song, in clear and high voices. It might be that all of Eliada rose up in song, as the thing—as Mister Juke—roiled and crawled and strode toward the docks, and the town and those many, who had watched and prayed as the Feegers hauled Andrew Waggoner to the quarantine, now awaited their God, as the Feegers led Him to them.

And so it was that unmolested, unnoticed by God or Man, the two of them made their way to the shelter of the hospital’s unguarded back entrance and slipped inside.

“How do you know where he is?” asked Andrew as they skulked down the corridor that ran the spine of the hospital’s basement.

“I cannot be certain,” said Mrs. Frost. “But I do know this: against all my advice, the boy took more than a passing fancy to Mr. Harper’s daughter Ruth.”

Andrew waited for her to continue, then prompted: “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Miss Harper,” said Mrs. Frost, “was engaged in a test when Jason left me. If he is half as clever as we both know him to be, he will have joined her.”

“A test?”

“The test of her life,” she said. They hurried past the dispensary and two of the examination rooms, and rounded a corner. “Hush,” she said. “We are almost there.”

Andrew had a sick feeling, as it became obvious where they were heading: the autopsy. Mrs. Frost stopped short, and looked at Andrew significantly.

“Here we are,” she said, and beckoned him to open the door.

Andrew’s skin prickled at the base of his neck, and he shook his head. It was as though…

… as though something larger were guiding him, warning him.

Andrew shook off the feeling. It was a reasonable instinct.

Germaine Frost had murdered a little girl. She might argue the tactic was an effective one—here they were, after all, out of the quarantine that had been overrun with Feegers. The girl was one of them. But Mrs. Frost had murdered a little girl. And they were standing on the doorway of the autopsy, where a week ago, he and Jason Thistledown had examined the cut-up remains of Maryanne Leonard.

This, the place where another girl was undergoing what—a test? The test of her life?

Andrew Waggoner’s skin prickled, for good, worldly reason.

“I’m not going in there until you tell me about this test.”

“Oh,” she said, grinning, “it’s nothing you should worry about. If I’m half as right about you as I was about young Jason—I’m certain it won’t be even the tiniest problem for you.”

“For me?” Andrew stepped back. “What is this?”

Germaine Frost looked down, and smiling, shook her head. She looked up again. Her eyes sparkled in the dark. With madness, with inspiration.

Her hand pressed against the door to the autopsy. Andrew thought he saw a sliver of Nils Bergstrom in her then—he remembered seeing her, coming out of the quarantine with him that morning.

“It is the only way to see,” she said. “If you’re worthy. If you are a true hero—”

The door swung open then, and pushed her backwards, and a figure in white burst into the hall. Mrs. Frost came up against the far wall, and started to say something, but she couldn’t finish. The white-clad figure drove a fist into her face, and with the other hand grabbed her hair.

Then it turned to Andrew, and he recognized it:

“Jason!” he said.

“Dr. Waggoner.” The figure took a step forward, hauling Mrs. Frost as he peered at Waggoner. “You’re alive. And back. Keep your distance.”

His voice was absolutely flat—a tone that did not admit any argument. Waggoner stepped back.

It had been barely a week, but Jason Thistledown seemed like he’d aged a decade. With one hand, he pushed Germaine Frost to her knees. His face was in shadow, but Andrew saw the flat slit of his mouth, the stillness around his eye. It didn’t so much as twitch as Mrs. Frost tried to twist her hair from his fist.

“Jason,” said Waggoner. “I came to get you out of here—”

“Hush, Doctor,” he said. “You should have stayed away. You need to stay clear now. Remember that disease that slew my kin? Good. Well, it’s here—in that room. And this one is the one that brought it. In a little jar from Africa. She lied about being my aunt. She murdered all my kin. My town. With a germ in a jar. You understand that?”

Andrew nodded.

“I let her live once today. That was wrong. But things are makin’ more sense right now. I was fixing to find her—and that Bergstrom, and do the thing I should have done to both of them. Like Deborah said to her generals: ‘Surely the Lord will deliver them this day unto a woman.’ Well, the Lord delivered this woman unto me. And I know what to do.”