Max had disappeared. He came back inside the fighting suit. “Max,” I said, “be real. We can’t fight them that way.”
“We don’t know,” he said softly. “We don’t know anything.”
“We still don’t know if you’re telling the truth,” Sara said. “The nameless stuff might be so much sand. You did it–you killed everybody off and now you’re playing with us. You can’t prove otherwise, can you?”
“One of us just died,” the priest said.
“No, he changed state and disappeared,” I said.
The priest smiled. “Exactly. Isn’t that what you do when you die?”
“Drop it,” Marygay said. “If it is the Omni, and an elaborate ghastly joke, we’re doomed no matter what we do. So we might as well take them at face value.” Sara opened her mouth to say something and closed it.
“Oh, shit,” Max said, and the fighting suit rocked and stood rigid.
“Again,” the priest said.
“Max!” I shouted. “Are you there?” Nothing.
Marygay moved behind the suit, where the emergency release was. “Should I do this?”
“Have to, sooner or later,” I said. “Sara…”
“I can take it. I saw Anita,” she said, her pale face going to chalk.
Marygay popped the suit, and it was about as bad as I had imagined. There was nothing you could identify as Max. Gallons of blood and other fluids sloshed out on the ground. Chunks of muscle and organs and bone filled the lower part of the suit.
Sara crouched and vomited. I almost did the same, but an old combat reflex made me clench my teeth and swallow, hard, three times.
Max was the kind of guy you liked in spite of what he did; in spite of who he was. And they just took him out like removing a piece from a game.
“Can we be part of this?” I yelled. “Is there any way we can make a case for ourselves?”
Cat exploded like a bomb. Not even organs and bones, this time; just a fine mist blowing away from where she had been standing. Marygay moaned and fainted. Sara, I think, didn’t even notice. She was on her knees, sobbing, her arms wrapped around herself while her body spasmed, trying to empty an empty stomach.
There were two explosions inside Molly Malone’s, and hysterical screaming.
Antres 906 looked at me. “I am ready,” he said in slow English. “I do not want to be here anymore. Let the nameless take me.”
I nodded numbly and went to Marygay. Kneeled and lifted her head and tried with a tissue to wipe her face clean, clean of what remained of the woman she loved. She half woke, her eyes still closed, and put an arm around my waist. She rocked silently, breathing hard.
It was a closeness not many people could have, the way we’d felt sometimes in battle, or just before: We’re going to die now, but we’re going to die together.
“Forget the nameless,” I said. “We’ve been on borrowed time since the day we were drafted…and we’ve–”
“Stolen time,” she said, her eyes still closed. “And we made a good life out of it.”
“I love you,” we said at the same time.
There was a loud thump; the fighting suit had fallen over. The breeze reversed itself and became a wind, blowing toward the suit. Something stung the back of my neck–a bone or a piece of one, again–and it tumbled on into the suit.
With a sound like dry sticks rattling, an incomplete skeleton heaved itself upright from the open casket of the suit. A forearm, ulna and radius, attached itself to the right elbow; metacarpals grew out of the wrist, and finger bones grew out of the metacarpals.
Then a long coil of blue intestines settled onto the pelvic girdle, and a stomach on top, a bladder, faster and faster; liver, lungs, heart, nerves, and muscles. The skull fell forward with the weight of a brain, and it rose slowly to look at me with Max’s blue eyes. For a moment, the face was red and white, like a flayed specimen. But then skin appeared, and hair; and then skin and hair all over the body.
He stepped out of the suit, gingerly, and clothing grew on him, a loose white robe. He walked toward us with a fixed, intense expression. He, or it.