“I don’t have the oozies,” Ryan told the pilot.
“That’s what you call the disease?”
“Right. I don’t have the oozies because I don’t eat human flesh. Never have, never will.”
“You might think that would make a difference,” the pilot said, “but you’d be wrong. Turns out you can get infected from eating an animal that fed on another infected animal. Or by eating a plant that was fertilized with composted flesh from an infected animal. The provirus that causes the infection is almost indestructible because it isn’t really alive. It’s a kind of chemical. We need a tissue sample in order to test you for it.”
“You’re not taking off my hand,” Ryan said, retreating a giant step backward, ready to fight.
“No, no, that’s not necessary. We used your friend’s because it was, well, already available. A tiny snip of your skin will do nicely for our purposes. Or if you’d prefer, we could just forget about the test and carniphage you as a precaution.”
Ryan looked at the yellow curds floating on top of the thin puddle of brown, which was all that was left of the cannie. If the test came back wrong, he was going to be slime in a hurry, too. Ryan thought about making a grab for one of their weapons, but he knew that would draw fire from the others. And even if he got his hands on one of the strange blasters, he didn’t know how to operate it. Somehow, he didn’t think they’d be willing to give him the time to get up to speed. There was the Steyr, of course, and perhaps it was still loaded, but he’d already seen how ineffective it was. Given his predicament, he decided the best course was to go along with their program, hope his body was disease free, and, if it wasn’t, to fight to the death.
The woman gently took his hand, turned it palm up and expertly nicked him with a gleaming silver tool. “Big, brave boy,” she said, when he didn’t flinch.
A trickle of blood ran down his wrist.
She carried the sample to the cube, deposited it into a clear vial, then inserted the vial into a slot in the side of the machine.
Meanwhile, the others gave ground as Ockerman squared off in front of him, hose in hand. The no-nonsense look in his eyes told Ryan there wasn’t going to be time for a discussion if the news came back bad.
“Mind telling me what a carniphage is?” Ryan asked him.
“Flesh-eating, single-celled life-form,” Ockerman said. “The carniphage eats, reproduces geometrically, eats some more, then, after a preset number of generations, the whole colony burns out and dies. About the same time as the food supply is gone. Been genetically tailored to have a short life span. We’re talking a matter of seconds. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be safe to release it into the environment. We use it as a field sterilizer.”
“Not on this one, though,” the woman said, turning from the cube’s LED readout. “He’s prion-free. His DNA looks in good shape, too. No sign of radiation-induced mutation in his chromosomes.”
“Okay,” the pilot said, “the fun’s over, Ockerman. Put it away.”
“Right, Colonel,” the man in the skullcap said. He reclipped the nozzle to his hip.
“You dodged the proverbial bullet, my friend,” the pilot-colonel said to Ryan. “If you’d been infected with Ice Nine, or had inheritable damage to your chromosomes, we’d have been forced to destroy you.”
“The way you destroyed every person in this ville?”
“That was regrettable, but we had no choice in the matter. Sterilization is part of our mission protocol, to prevent any possible genetic or infectious agent contamination. Everyone living in this settlement was in some way radiation damaged. Either riddled with cancerous tumors or neural-system impaired.”
So, Ryan thought, Moonboy ville hadn’t been so fireblasted pure after all.
Not until now.
When it was pure dead.
“If I’m not infected or rad-damaged, then I’m free to go?” he said.
Again came the steel laughter, but this time he could see their faces. They were really enjoying themselves.
The one with the longish hair said, “You’re good to go, all right, but you’re not free.”