IT STARTED WITH A TOOTHACHE.
The Arkle had it, in one of the great hollow fangs at the front of his mouth, that would have been simple canines before the Overlords changed him, in the process of turning him into a Ferret. Not that The Arkle was entirely a Ferret. He’d escaped from the dorms when he was eleven, so he still looked mostly human. A very thin, elongated human, with his face and jaw pushed out so that it wasn’t quite a snout but you could tell it would have been one if he hadn’t gotten away.
The Arkle also had a taste for blood. Not the full-on blood-lust the Ferrets had, because he could control it. But when the Family killed a chicken to roast, he would cut its throat over a bowl and drink the blood down like a kind of pre-dinner cocktail. Sometimes he put parsley in the cup, as a garnish. Or, as he said, for those extra vitamins. The Arkle didn’t eat a lot of greens.
He was one of the younger members of the Family. He’d come out of the city four years before, more dead than alive, his body covered with sores and his gums receding from malnutrition. He’d lasted almost six months on his own after escaping from the dorms, which was no mean feat, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been found by Gwyn, on one of the latter’s last foraging expeditions into the city fringe.
Gwyn was the first to notice The Arkle behaving strangely. They were working together, moving one of the portable henhouses to its new location, when The Arkle stopped pushing and pressed his fingers into his jaw, using the middle knuckle so he didn’t slice himself with his talons.
“What are you doing?” asked Gwyn, annoyed. As always, he was providing most of the muscle, and though The Arkle’s participation was mainly for show, the henhouse wheels were stuck in the mud, and even a slight amount of assistance would make it easier for Gwyn to free them.
“Toothache,” muttered The Arkle. He stretched out his jaw and ground it from side to side. “Annoying me.”
“Doc had better look at it right away,” said Gwyn. He’d had a toothache himself a few years back, and there was still a hole at the back of his mouth where Doc had pulled out a big molar. But that was better than what could happen if it was left to rot. Gwyn had seen that too, in other survivors. And Ferret teeth were certain to be trickier than more nearly human ones.
“It’s not too bad,” muttered The Arkle. He winced as he closed his mouth, though, and tears started in his eyes.
Gwyn set down the chicken house and lumbered around, towering over The Arkle. Gwyn was the big brother of the Family, and the second oldest. He’d been thirteen when the Change swept through, disappearing everyone over the age of fourteen. Like most of the surviving children, he’d then been caught up by the suited figures driving their centipede trains, and taken to the Dormitories. Big for his age and well-muscled, he’d gone straight into the Myrmidon track, fed alien steroids and exercised to the limits of torture, but like The Arkle, he’d managed to escape before the final conversion in the Meat Factory.
Even so, he was seven feet tall, measured four feet across the shoulders, and had arms roughly the same diameter as the massive logs he split for the winter fire, wielding a woodchopper that most of the others couldn’t even lift.
“Go and see Doc now,” ordered Gwyn. Like the few other almost-Myrmidons who got away from the dorms, his voice was high and reedy, a byproduct of the chemical infusions that had built his muscle, while also effectively making him a eunuch.
But high voice or not, The Arkle knew that when Gwyn spoke, he meant what he said.
“All right, all right, I’m…ow…going,” he said. “You sure you can move this by yourself?”
“I guess I’ll manage somehow,” replied Gwyn.
The Arkle nodded sheepishly and trudged back through the sparse forest where the five henhouses were arranged. At the edge of the trees, he climbed over the old rusted fence with the sinuous grace of a true Ferret, pausing to tip a finger at Ken-Lad, who was on sentry halfway up the ancient tree that served as the western lookout post. Ken-Lad made a ruder gesture back, before resuming his steady, regulated gaze, staring up at each quadrant of the sky.
The Farm lay in a deep valley, more than a hundred kilometers from the city. The creatures had never come to fight their battles there, and even the Wingers never flew overhead. But very occasionally, one of the Overlord’s flying machines did, and that was why the sentries watched. The Family could not afford to have a curious Overlord sweep down and see free humans, for the creatures would surely come then, correcting whatever oversight had kept the valley secret for the eight years since the Change.
The Farm had been a giant dope plantation before the Change, and the camouflage nets were still in place over a good thirty acres of land. The Family had poked a few holes in the nets, here and there, to let in a little more light for the much smaller portion they had under cultivation. That provided vegetables, and the chickens provided meat and eggs, and there was hunting for wild game as well. There had been a lot of tinned and dried food earlier on, but it was mostly saved for special occasions now, since it was too risky to venture toward the city and the riches that still awaited there.
Doc Carol had found the Farm almost five years before. She’d never told the others whether she’d known it was there, or had simply stumbled upon it and then worked out that it was safe from the creatures.
She never told anyone how she knew so much about medicine and healing, either. Gwyn probably knew, and some of the older ones, but they never talked about anything the Doc said or did. All the others knew was that she had been a day short of her fifteenth birthday when the Change came, a day short of being old enough to go wherever it was that most of humanity went. If they went anywhere, as opposed to simply ceasing to exist.
The Arkle spat as he remembered the caterpillar train that he had willingly climbed aboard. He’d been seven years old at the time, and his mother had vanished in front of his eyes, and he’d been desperately afraid. The train had looked a bit like the one at the fairground, and it was already loaded with children. He even knew some of them from school.
So he’d got on, and it had taken him to one of the first established dorms. A tracking and ID device had been injected beneath the skin of his wrist, and he’d been subjected to a series of tests at the hands of those silvor-visored, faceless, suited humanoids. The tests had said “Ferret,” and from then on, everything he did or that was done to him was designed to make him both less and more than human.
The Arkle looked at the strange purple welt on his wrist as he loped through the high grass that surrounded the main house. They cut the grass occasionally, using scythes, just to reduce the risk of fire, but never enough that it would look new-mown.
The tracking device in his wrist had been removed by Tira, a girl in the dorm, though The Arkle didn’t know exactly how she’d done it. She simply touched her finger to the lump that showed where the tracker lay under the skin, and there had been a moment of pain so terrible that The Arkle had blacked out. When he’d come to, there was no lump. Just the purple welt.
Of course he knew that Tira had used a Change Talent of some kind. He had one too, only it wasn’t as useful. Or at least it was only useful for one thing. The Arkle grinned as he thought of that, then grimaced and almost sobbed as the pain in his tooth came back, darting from his mouth up into his head, savaging him right behind the eyes.
The pain in his tooth was even worse than that remembered pain in his wrist.
Tira had taken her device out too, and they had run together. Only, she never made it over the perimeter wire. Tira was the one who had first called him “The Arkle.” He didn’t know why, but he’d kept the name just to remember her, his truest friend from the dorms.
Greenie was on the verandah of the house, carefully potting up seedlings of some plant or other that The Arkle didn’t recognize. She looked at him with her head to one side, and he could tell she was wondering why he had come in early. But even then, most of her mind was probably on the plants. Greenie had a Change Talent too, and though like all Change Talents, hers was very weak down in the valley, she still had a special empathy for vegetable life. Greenie could always tell when a plant needed water, or more shade, or sun, or was being strangled by its neighbors.
“Got to see Doc,” said The Arkle. He tried to smile, but it hurt too much, so he waved instead and hurried on inside.
The Arkle could see Doc Carol through the small square window that was set high in the inner door to her lab, even though the thick glass was smeared all around with sealant. Doc was clearly cooking up something fairly toxic, since she was wearing a gas mask and an ex-Army NBC suit.
The Arkle hesitated, then knocked on the window. He didn’t want to disturb Doc, but his tooth was getting worse, a lot worse. The pain had been around for weeks, coming and going, and hadn’t ever got too bad. Then a few days before it had suddenly escalated, ebbing occasionally but never going away, and when it hit full force he could hardly think or see, and he just wanted to smash his face into something hard and destroy the bastard tooth. Only, he didn’t because he knew it wouldn’t work.
Doc looked over, her eyes just visible through the round lenses of the gas mask. Doc had weird eyes. They were kind of violet, and bigger than normal. The Arkle had heard that up out of the valley they shone in the dark, and the Doc had to wear sunglasses all the time. He’d never seen it, but he believed it.
“That you, The Arkle?”
Her voice was muffled through the mask and the heavy door, but clear enough.
“Yeah. Can I come in?”
Doc was almost the only person in the Family who called The Arkle by his chosen name. Most of the others called him Arkle, or Ark, or Arkie, which he hated.
“Wait a minute,” called out Doc. “This stuff won’t do you any good. I’ll be out in a minute. Go into my office.”
The Arkle retreated through the outer door. Doc’s office was the biggest room in the old house. She slept there, as well as worked. Her bed was behind the desk. The Arkle looked at it and wondered what it would be like to share it with her. He’d slept with nearly all of the women and at least half of the men on the Farm, because his Change Talent was for seduction, and even the pale version of it that worked down in the valley was enough to help out his natural charm. And since everyone had pretty much grown up in the dorms, there was no such thing as a normal human body anymore. So his snouty face and fangs and slimmest of waists was not a bar to relationships.
The Doc was the one closest to old human, and even then, she had those eyes. The Arkle had never dared try his Talent on her, had never even had a few minutes alone with her to see if it might be worthwhile adding that into the natural equation of liking and desire.
But he couldn’t even begin to daydream about sex with Doc, not with the pain in his tooth. He lay down in the patient’s chair, the old banana lounge that sat in front of the desk, and shut his eyes, hoping that this would somehow lessen the pain.
It didn’t, and the sudden waft of a harsh chemical smell alerted him to Doc’s presence. She was leaning over him, the gas mask off, her short brown hair pressed down in an unnatural way, showing the marks of the straps. Her violet eyes were fixed on his jaw.
“Your jaw is swollen,” remarked Doc. She went behind the desk, put down her mask, and stripped off the suit. It gave off more chemical smells as she opened the window and hung it on the hook outside, ready to be hosed down later.
She was only wearing a pair of toweling shorts and a singlet underneath. The Arkle’s eyes watered as he looked at her ruefully. The tearing up wasn’t from the remnant chemical smell, but from the pain. A pain so intense he couldn’t even appreciate his first real look at Doc without the white lab coat she nearly always wore inside—and there it was, slipping over her shoulders and getting done up at the front, far too swiftly for his liking.
“Is it a tooth pain?” asked Doc.
“Yeah,” whispered The Arkle. He raised one hand and gestured toward the left-hand fang. “It’s got…pretty…bad. Just today.”
“That never got this bad in a day. You should have seen me when it first started,” said Doc. She dragged a box over next to the banana lounge and sat on it. “Open wide.”
The Arkle opened wide in a series of small movements because he couldn’t do it all in one go, it hurt too much. Doc leaned over him, looking close but not touching. Some distant memory made The Arkle shut his eyes. For a moment, he was six again and in the dentist’s chair, and his mother was holding his hand….
“Keep your hands still,” ordered Doc. “Stay there. Just lie quiet.”
The Arkle heard the box slide back and Doc move. He opened his eyes and saw her go over to the door to the cellar. It had two big padlocks on it, and only Doc and Gwyn had the keys. The Family’s hard-won pharmacopeia was stored in the cellar. All the drugs that had been found in scavenging expeditions in the small towns nearby, and in the outer suburbs of the city, plus the things that Doc had been able to make.
The Arkle shut his eyes again. It didn’t really help with the pain, but it did seem to make it easier to bear. He didn’t want to sob in front of Doc. He hadn’t cried since Tira was killed, and he’d sworn he’d never cry again. It was hard not to now. This pain just went on and on, and it wasn’t only in the tooth. It was all up the side of his face, and reaching deep inside his nose and into his brain.
“Ah, it’s getting worse, it’s getting worse,” muttered The Arkle. He couldn’t help himself. The pain was starting to make him panic, fear growing inside him. He’d been afraid before, plenty of times, felt certain he was going to die. But this was worse than that because the pain was worse than dying. He’d rather die than have this incredible pain keep going—
There was a sensation in his arm, not a pain, exactly, more like a pressure inside the skin. Something flowed through his arm and shoulder, and with it came a blessed darkness that pushed the pain away and carried it off somewhere far away, along with his conscious self.
Doc put the syringe back in the sterile dish and placed it on the table. Then she put a blood pressure cuff on The Arkle’s arm, pumped it up and released it, noting the result. A check of his pulse followed, and a look at his eyes, gently raising each eyelid in turn.
Finally she opened his mouth, being careful to place her hands so that some involuntary reflex wouldn’t put a fang through her fingers. Even more gently, she touched the top left tooth. Despite the sedation, The Arkle flinched. Doc curled back the young man’s lip and looked at the gum around the base of the tooth. She looked for quite a while, then let the lip slide back, and stood up.
“Pal! You there?”
Pal came in a minute later. He was another of the oldsters, though unlike Doc, he’d spent time in the dorms. He had been destined to become a Winger, and was hunchbacked a little, and there were stubs on his shoulders where his wings had either failed to grow or been surgically removed.
“You called?”
Pal was the chief cook of the Family, and liked to pretend he was a particular butler, in some reference to the old time that only Doc and Gwyn understood. He always wore the same black coat, with long tails that hung down at the back.
“Go get Gwyn, will you? He’s moving the chicken houses.”
Pal looked down at The Arkle.
“Problem?”
Doc sighed.
“Big problem. Why don’t they ever tell me when they first hurt themselves, Pal? A week ago this could have been sorted out with antibiotics. I mean, I’ve got enough broad spectrum stuff downstairs to treat a thousand patients, but it’s got to be done early! Now…”
“Now what?”
“I’m going to have to cut out the tooth, and he’s practically all Ferret in the jaw. Those teeth have roots four inches long, and nerve clusters around the blood-sucking channels…which I only know about in theory, since I never—”
She stopped talking suddenly.
“Since you never dissected a Ferret?” asked Pal.
“No,” replied Doc. “Never a Ferret. At least a dozen Myrmidons and quite a few Wingers…”
“Which was just as well for me,” said Pal. “All things considered. I suppose you want Gwyn to carry the boy up to the ridge?”
Doc looked at the floor.
“Yeah, I guess I was thinking that. It’s the only way I can do it.”
“Risky,” said Pal. “For everyone. I thought we agreed no more trips out of the valley.”
“What am I supposed to do?” asked Doc. “Arkle will die if I don’t take out the tooth, and he’ll die if I do it wrong. I have to be able to see inside!”
“You could try halfway up,” said Pal. “Some of the Talents seem to work okay there. Gwyn’s does.”
“And mine doesn’t,” snapped Doc. “It kicks in at the ridgeline, never lower down. So can you go and get Gwyn now, please? I can’t keep Arkle under forever. There’s a big enough risk with what I’ve given him already.”
“All right, all right, I’m going,” said Pal. “I suppose you want to go alone, just you and Gwyn?”
“Yes,” said Doc. “Better to lose two than any more.”
“On that logic, better to lose just one in the first place,” said Pal, inclining his head toward The Arkle. “That’s what Shade would do.”
“I’m not Shade,” said Doc. “That’s why I left Shade. You sorry you left, Pal?”
“Nope,” replied Pal somberly. “I was just checking to see if you were. You had a mighty fine surgery back there, and those spider-robots of his to-be nurses and all. Yanking out a Ferret tooth there would be as easy as taking a piss.”
“Maybe,” said Doc. “But I reckon the Overlords have probably tracked down Shade by now, and whoever was dumb enough to stick with him, and the computers he lives in and the whole submarine and everything in it has probably been rusting away at the bottom of the bay for years.”
“Could be,” said Pal. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if Shade is still going, even still looking for us. Another reason to be careful. Shade always did have his true believers, and he sends them far and wide. They could easily be more dangerous than the creatures.”
“Just go get Gwyn,” said Doc wearily. “While I get my kit together.”
The Arkle came back to the world in total incomprehension. There was a terrible pain in his face, everything was on a strange angle, and he could see the sun in a very odd position. He groaned, and the angle shifted and the sun righted itself and moved away, to be replaced by Gwyn’s broad face, up unreasonably close. It took The Arkle a few moments more to work out that it was so close because Gwyn was carrying him like a baby, across his chest.
“What’s happening?” he croaked. It was hard to talk because his mouth felt puffy and strange. His lips were swollen and too close together, his jaw wouldn’t open properly, and there was this pain there, jabbing at him with every step Gwyn took.
“Stop for a moment,” Doc said to Gwyn.
The Arkle blinked and tried to shift his head. Why was the Doc here? He vaguely remembered going to see her about something.
“Keep still, please, The Arkle,” said Doc.
He obeyed, and something stung him in the arm.
“What is…”
The Arkle’s words trailed off and he subsided back down in Gwyn’s arms.
“He’s not staying under as well as I thought he would,” said Doc. “And I can’t give him much more. We’d better hurry.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Gwyn. “You only got that case.”
“You carried me a lot farther a lot faster once,” said Doc. She could see the top of the ridge up ahead—the real top, not the false one that had famously fooled so many walkers in the old times, when there had been a popular trail that went along the ridge, weaving up and down on either side.
“Long time ago,” said Gwyn. “You were lighter then.”
Doc hit him on the arm, very lightly.
Gwyn laughed, a kind of giggling chuckle that sounded weird coming out of his barrel chest. Then he suddenly stopped, and his head snapped to the right, and he immediately crouched down, balancing The Arkle with his left arm as he drew his sword with his right. It was short but broad-bladed, and streaked with gold. Gold was good at disrupting creature circuitry, the augmentation stuff they put in at the Meat Factory, completing the transformation from child to monster.
Doc had ducked down too. Gwyn’s Change Talent was an extra sense. He could feel other life-forms and track them, though he couldn’t tell them apart. She drew her sword. Like Gwyn’s, it was gold-plated, another relic of their service with Shade, the enigmatic computer personality who’d led what he liked to call the Resistance against the Overlords and their creatures.
“Where?” whispered Doc.
Gwyn pointed with his sword, across to a point below the ridge where the trees opened out and the undergrowth was not so thick.
Doc slid her sword back into its scabbard and reached inside her coat to take out a pistol instead. Since it was below the ridge-line, it was unlikely to be a creature.
Creatures were hard to kill with gunfire; the gold-plated swords worked better. But for a human, a gun worked fine.
And as Pal had said, Shade always did have plenty of true believers, escapees from the dorms who did whatever Shade told them to do without question…even if that might include tracking down and killing humans who Shade would undoubtedly have labeled traitors.
Particularly Doc, who Shade had labored over for so many years, tailoring educational programs and simulations to train her as a doctor. But not to help save human life. Shade had only wanted her trained up to help him with his research into the creatures, to dissect captured prisoners, to try to discover exactly how they worked, and how they were augmented by the strange energy that could be detected in the city after the Change….
A low branch quivered and whipped back, and something loped down the slope. It came toward them for a moment, till it caught their scent and suddenly changed direction, even before Doc recognized it and decided not to shoot.
“A dog,” whispered Gwyn. “Better make sure it’s gone.”
Dogs and cats were rare because the creatures killed them, as they killed anything that was not part of the complicated battles the Overlords played in the city—endless battles that soaked up the continuous production of the Meat Factory, and the dorms that fed it with their human raw material.
They waited for a few minutes, but the dog did not circle back.
“It’s gone,” said Gwyn. “Beyond my range, anyway. Let’s go.”
At the top of the ridge there was an old picnic station, an open structure with a galvanized iron roof and a single long pine table underneath. Gwyn set The Arkle down on the table while Doc laid out her instruments and drugs.
“Tie him down,” she said, handing over a package of bandages. “I can’t put him down deep enough he won’t react.”
Gwyn took the bandages. When he was done with the tying down, he looked over at Doc.
“Your eyes are bright,” he said. “You seeing?”
“Yes,” said Doc. She blinked and bent low over The Arkle’s open mouth. Her violet eyes grew brighter still, and she stared down, looking through the tooth, through the bone, seeing it all. Her eyes moved, following the blood from the roots up along the altered circulatory channels. She saw the infection flowing with the blood, swirling across the boy’s face, flooding into his brain, to join the pool of bacteria where it already dwelled and prospered.
Doc straightened up and looked across at Gwyn. Her eyes were shining still, but it was not with the light of her Change Talent.
“Too late,” she said. “Just too late. It must have been hurting for weeks and he never said a thing; he never asked for help.”
“They don’t know how, the young ones,” said Gwyn, who was all of twenty-one. “They just don’t know how to ask.”
The Arkle groaned, and one taloned hand fluttered under its restraint.
“Mom?” he whispered. “Mom?”
Doc picked up a hypodermic and plunged it deep, followed quickly by another. Then she took The Arkle’s hand and held it tight, despite the talons that scored her flesh.
“It’s all right, love,” whispered Doc. “It’s all right.
“You won’t feel a thing. You won’t feel a thing. You won’t feel a…”
This story is set in the same world as my 1997 novel, Shade’s Children, though it takes place about ten years before the events of that book.