outward and raise your sabrettes, then walk past the.... just walk," he corrected.
The woman turned. The man had lapsed into some kind of coma. Vallande stepped up to Mireille. "Watch out for him, Mireille. His life is in your hands now."
"No sweat, Pops."
"And be prepared to defend yourselves immediately you step through," said the recorder almost as an afterthought. "The scavengers will be waiting."
"Scavengers....?" Mireille's new-found euphoria suddenly fizzed out. She lowered the sabrette, eyed it suspiciously. "Let me recap where you're coming from. These swords - they're not just symbolic, are they? I mean, this sounds like the real thing. You know - heavy aggro."
Vallande nodded. "The scavengers will try to kill you. After them there will be others."
"Oh, hey.... just.... time out, here. Where'd all this talk of killing spring from? I thought we had some kind of deal!" Mireille was fidgeting around on the spot feeling decidedly uncomfortable. "We agreed we'd be into this respect-and-preserve-the-environment shit. But, I mean, like I thought we were talking re-cycling cans and bottles and newspapers and, you know, public-nuisance stuff like streaking the Super Bowl! Hell, we even came dressed for it."
"I don't understand your words," said the recorder solemnly, "Only your reluctance towards violence. I, myself, am basically a man of peace. Unfortunately, this is Lonfay. I am here and wear the habit. You are here and have taken up the sabrette. Wisely or not, we have both chosen our fates."
"I refuse to kill anyone," stated LaRoche woodenly.
"Then you will be killed," Vallande added with finality.
Something snapped in LaRoche and raw emotion boiled up through the self-pity. "Damn it, I will not kill!" He threw his sabrette down at the recorder's feet. An immediate hush fell over the draff.
"Pick it up!" hissed a stunned Vallande. LaRoche remained stiff, defiant. "For pity's sake, LaRoche! The draff!"
Mireille turned, saw the anger in the grimy faces, the animal slavering as the mob began to edge beyond the invisible barrier which had held them at bay. She scooped up LaRoche's sabrette, thrust it at him. He took it, but only because he wasn't thinking.
"Which way, man?" Mireille's voice was a hoarse rasp. Vallande pointed at the bushland. She extended him the briefest of nods. "We're outta here." She snatched at LaRoche's arm. Then she was trotting, dragging the bewildered man along behind her.
Vallande watched them stumbling towards the border. As she passed the sabrettes still sticking out of the sand, Mireille released the man to gather another into her left hand. Vallande felt a tug of anguish inside, was about to protest - highly irregular: a reborn was entitled to a single weapon only. Then he relaxed, remembering that Mireille wasn't a reborn. Neither of them were. So the rules didn't really apply.
As the two transients disappeared before his eyes, he realised he hadn't wished them luck. Remiss of him. Unpardonable under the circumstances, considering he had adopted the role of unofficial - very unofficial - guardian. But, then again, good fortune wasn't a thing one could bequeath to another. Not here. In Lonfay each man made his own and each woman needed twice as much as a man. As to how much was enough for Mireille and LaRoche, only God knew the answer.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Time dragged slowly in casualty. For the patients in agony who thought they'd been forgotten. For those accompanying them who were sure of it. Especially for the medical staff not yet half-way through a double-shift who were doing their best and were convinced everyone else reckoned it wasn't good enough.
For Doctor Glen Holder who had already used up his second wind and was working on his third, time was no longer an issue. The elliptical orbit he followed had become a rut worn between cubicles five and nine. His sense of perspective had gone. Sometimes he wasn't sure which patient he was treating, the symptoms were so similar.
Just moments after the girl had been resuscitated, Holder was called away again: now the man, Olsen, had gone into cardiac arrest. And who should have been passing his cubicle at the time? None other than Paulo Agostini! Deja-vu had never been this cruel before.
A divine conspiracy couldn't be ruled out. Maybe he'd been a bad lad in a former life, or walked on someone's grave. If Nurse O'Brien suddenly burst in and announced she'd missed her period he'd know his run of bad luck wasn't mere coincidence. When both patients went into convulsions within minutes of one another, he had to let his paranoia run riot because he was too busy catapulting between cubicles to argue logic.
It was during a break - unsweetened decaf and a blueberry Danish with a million calories - that he tried dropping a little closer to Earth. Among his reflections on this pig-of-a-day were three words which both the man and the girl had spoken. Void - they'd kept on about "the void". And the other words were as baffling: "nova" and something that sounded like "longfay". They'd said more, but it was either inaudible or garbage. These three words, however, had seemed clear enough and had been repeated too frequently to be misheard. As to meanings, they were as unknown to Holder as he had been led to believe the patients were to one another. Apart from being victims in the same accident, they apparently had nothing in common, were total strangers.
Before he could resolve the puzzle, Holder was back in the thick of it. Olsen had 'developed' a lesion. That was the message, anyway. He stormed out of the rec room, cursing under his breath. Sheer carelessness, he was thinking. Patients didn't develop lesions: someone inflicted them. And that someone's head was going to roll. As well as his, no doubt, when Agostini got to find out.
The problem was a fresh wound on the man's upper arm, a deep cut which had bled all over the sheet. In a low growl that couldn't be heard beyond the screens, Holder ripped shit out of the male nurse on duty at the time. Rightly so, he thought: only someone who came down in the last shower would believe the cut had 'just appeared'.
It wasn't until he was examining the wound and actually witnessed a graze forming on Olsen's elbow before his very eyes that he began to re-evaluate. He jerked back with a start and muttered: "Jesus!" After that his mind went temporarily off-line. Like it always did at the sight of a naked Nurse O'Brien advancing on him in his one-room dog kennel. Perhaps the cramped conditions tended to accentuate their enormity, but, apart from Mary's size eighteen breasts, this incredible appearing graze was the only other miracle he'd seen.
As the second wonder of his world, however, being able to watch the skin kind-of disappearing from Olsen's elbow and blood rising through the subcutaneous tissue, was far less appealing than having to fight for breath with his face buried between a pair of gorgeous knockers. One thing was for sure - he didn't fancy having to explain either to anyone. Least of all, a board of sceptical Agostinis.
"Very strange," said Jackovitz, the male nurse, condescendingly. He was due an apology which he was unlikely to get, so he proceeded to rub it in: "If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes...."
White noise filled Holder's head: the deafening roar of blood pounding in his ears. A female voice was calling to him beyond the cacophony. The faint words eventually crept through: "Doctor Holder! Quickly!"
Holder's brow was knit in a tight painful frown. "What now?" He gazed in the direction of the voice, noticed a head poking around the curtain, couldn't make the face.
"Cubicle five." Sister Emery was breathless and concerned.
"What
