The redheaded woman had moved back toward the half-open door of the bedroom. “I’ve had this feeling, you know, since they first appeared on the horizon. Bad feeling, Mildred.”
“Yeah. Be right with you. Throw on some clothes.”
RAELENE LAY ON THE BED, a crumpled sheet rucked around her bare feet. She wore a thin cotton shift, soaked with sweat across her wrinkled breasts, stained with yellow bile down over her scrawny belly. Her face was filmed with perspiration, and as pale as wind-washed bone.
Her husband sat on the floor by her, holding her hand. He wore a patched shirt that barely covered his shrunken shanks. As Mildred entered the room, she couldn’t help noticing that his genitals were exposed, and that there were livid sores on his scrotum and a festering chancre on his penis. He was crying.
“Come on, hon,” he said. “Be fine. Just hang on. When we sell the big one it’ll be fine. Milk, silk, honey and jack all the way.”
“When did she start being sick, Ronny?” Mildred???
“Don’t know.”
“This morning? Last night?”
“No. About three days, I guess. Mebbe two days. Been gettin’ worse. I feel real bad. Got an ache across my head like someone’s tightening a band of red-hot steel. And I feel like throwing up here and now.”
“Should I get a bowl and cloth?”
Mildred turned, seeing that Dean was peering in through the doorway. “Yeah. Do that.” She called after the boy. “Where’s Jak?”
“Gone out the fields, someplace. Milking the cows, mebbe. Don’t know, Mildred.”
“Okay. Cloth and bowl and some fresh water.” Gradually she was lurching back to full consciousness. “And put a kettle on for hot water, Dean.” Mildred leased over ths moaning woman, peering at her eyes, seeing how bloodshot they were.
Raelene raised a shaky hand and touched her own mouth. “Hurts,” she whispered. She reached between the sore, cracked lips and felt around, grabbing something and giving it a gentle tug. She pulled out one of her own front incisors, the roots of the pointed tooth bright crimson.
Krysty turned away. “Oh, Gaia!” she breathed.
Mildred felt a physical shock as all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle slotted into place at once. “Yeah,” she said. “Rad cancer.”
THE DOCTOR WASHED her hands in the kitchen, while Krysty buttered some toast. The kettle was whistling quietly to itself on the stove, and some coffee sub was brewing.
Ronny and Raelene Warren had both gotten into their bed, and the rumpled sheets had been straightened and tucked in around them. Both of them had fallen almost instantly into a fevered, exhausted sleep.
Dean had gone out to look for Jak and hadn’t yet returned.
“How long?” Krysty asked.
“Hours at the shortest. For her. Maybe four or five days for him. Can’t tell. Shit. I don’t know. Cryonics was my specialty. Freezing people. Not diagnosing rad cancer and giving a probable time of death.”
“How did they catch it?” Krysty was staring out the window, across the kitchen garden.
“Enough hot spots around the plateau to chill everyone left alive in Deathlands.”
“Nothing you can do for them?”
Mildred’s face was bleak, her mouth set in a tight line. “If I had access to my drugs I could probably make their passing a little easier.”
“Nothing else?”
“Truth, Krysty, is that the best and kindest thing to do would be to simply put a bullet through each of their heads while they’re asleep.”
RAELENE HAD BEEN sick again, her whole body contorted, her eyes staring as she fought for breath. Blood-specked froth trickled from the corner of her mouth.
Krysty and Mildred did what they could for her, washing her again after the spasm had passed, talking quietly, holding her hand when she wept in terror.
There was still no sign of Dean and Jak.
THE TWO YOUTHS REAPPEARED about half an hour later, walking together in silence from the corrals, across the yard and up onto the porch.
Krysty met them at the door into the kitchen. “You been milking and taking care of the animals?”
“Yeah. That and other stuff.”
Dean was more voluble. “How’re the Warrens, Krysty? They still sick? We found something. That is, Jak found something and he wants you all to”