The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death Book 1) Page 4

  Once the deader gets within reach of him, it stops, perhaps sensing that this potential new host is already hosting his own complement of nanites and not in need of more. But it still stands there, weaving back and forth.

  The in-betweener takes a few, remarkably human-looking, steps toward the deader. Very abruptly, he reaches out and twists the deader’s head. I can hear the bones crunch and grind all the way from behind the truck where I watch events unfold.

  Almost immediately, the jerky nanite overdrive starts in the deader. While it flounders, the in-betweener drags it over to a car lying half in the ditch outside the gate and tosses it in, slamming the door behind it. All the action and the loud sound of the car door causes another ripple of interest from the deaders at the gate, but it passes quickly.

  All I can do is squat there, gape at the in-betweener, and clutch at my rifle like it’s a security blanket. Am I wrong about him being an in-betweener? I’ve never seen one doing this much in a purposeful way before. I’ve certainly never seen them speak. New ones do make noise, unlike the deaders, but nothing organized that I’ve ever seen. Then again, I don’t see them much because I hole up here. I don’t go looking for them.

  Maybe they are all like that. Maybe they have card games and movie nights and organize weird raves where the party drugs are humans instead of pills. I don’t frigging know. But I do know what I just saw and, even though he wasn’t as coordinated as I might have been, what he just did was an entirely human set of actions.

  He comes back to the fence and seems more like an in-betweener for a moment. He touches the rails and his mouth opens like he’s going to start licking at it again, but then he stops, shakes his head, and surprises me by hitting himself. Not a tap or a slap or anything like that. He slugs himself in the head with his fist, hard, like maybe he’s angry that he’s strayed from his purpose.

  “Garah,” he yells again, but this time there’s a heartbreaking note of pleading in it.

  I peek out quickly to see what the deaders are doing. Now, they seem agitated by what’s going on, so there’s no way I’m going to give them a target to fixate on. And I’m not stupid enough to trust an in-betweener. They are dangerous because of what they are and they eat people.

  Before I can stop myself, I pull myself fully behind the truck and call out, “What do you want?”

  “Garah kahm. Kads! Kads!” he yells out immediately.

  “I can’t understand you,” I return, telling myself that I’m an idiot that is about to get herself killed by falling for some new form of in-betweener party trick.

  He doesn’t answer right away so I peek out, fully expecting to see him climbing the fence and ready to have himself a little Emily-flavored snack. Instead, I see him holding his head in both hands and bending over a little. He straightens after a moment, grips the fence with one fist and pokes the other hand through the rails. He extends a finger in my direction—I can see that his hand is shaking violently with the strain of it—and says, “Garah. Ya garah.”

  I still don’t get it, but he doesn’t wait for confirmation because his hand twists into the universal sign that means “come here” and he says, “Kahm.”

  Okay, that one I get. He wants me to come, something which is so not going to happen.

  Again, he doesn’t wait. His face is screwed up in intense concentration and he lowers his hand, turning it so that it faces palm down, until it is as low as he can get it given the brick base of the wall, and says, “Kads.”

  That seems to be it for his message, because his hand moves back toward his side of the fence and the pleading look is on his face again. He can’t really see me well since I’m peeking from behind the bumper of a truck, but he’s waiting. There is hope all over his pale face.

  I lean back and think. Come, I get. He wants me to come. What about the pointing finger and the Ya garah. I turn the words around in my head, changing the inflections and trying to think of the way that deaf schoolmate of mine said her words. The pointing finger was toward me. Then I realize what it means. He’s saying, “You girl.” He kept repeating the garah word over and over, girl, girl, girl.

  Figuring that word out helps me to understand his final sign almost immediately. Kads means kids. The hand set about waist height, the desperate face. This in-betweener wants me to come and help some kids. But, why? Wouldn’t he rather just eat them?

  I look back from around the truck with a new understanding and a whole slew of new fears. First, there’s the uncharacteristic behavior to fear. Second is the idea that an in-betweener is trying to get help for someone else, and third is the very real possibility that if he can do that much complex thinking, he could also be lying in order to get a fresh meal.

  He’s just standing there, both fists tight around the fence and his arms locked straight, like he’s trying to force himself not to start licking the tempting metal in front of him. And it is very tempting. There’s metal everywhere, but good old iron is a favorite of theirs. Maybe they feel about iron the way I feel about cheese curls. They haunt my dreams sometimes. Bags and bags of them just out of reach. I could tear up some cheese curls right about now, two years past the expiration date or not.

  Enough dreaming about the cheese curls. Thinking about that is just torture and I’m avoiding the fact that I know what he’s trying so hard to communicate to me. I do that sometimes, avoid thinking about hard stuff by dreaming of something else. It’s a bad habit. I take a deep breath and grip my rifle tightly in my suddenly sweaty fists.

  “You have kids somewhere that need help. Is that what you’re saying?” I call out and hear a relieved groan in response.

  “Are they human?” I ask, then cringe when I realize what I’m asking and to whom I’m asking the question.

  He doesn’t react to that in a negative way at all, but rather he bounces on his knees, as if excited by my question. “Yah!”

  “Bring them here,” I call out. I’m not leaving this compound, but kids, especially waist-high ones, make it impossible for me to simply walk away.

  He shakes his head violently and mumbles something I can’t understand.

  “Are there more of you? Is that why you can’t?” I ask.

  The bouncing knees commence again and I understand suddenly that this is his way of nodding. And I understand what the problem is. If there is some part of him that wants to save those kids, then that part also knows he can’t herd kids in his state. Perhaps he realizes that he can’t be trusted with them.

  I have to think about this. My only goals for today were to walk the perimeter and clear off any deaders, grab some food from the distribution warehouse inside the complex, and get a little sunshine to stave off depression. That’s it.

  I don’t leave the complex except to dispatch my fence deaders, and even then I rarely go more than a hundred feet from the fence. The last time I truly left was more than a year ago, before my mom died and was reborn, the fever that killed her leaving her red-faced and puffy, the nanites that restarted her heart leaving her brain-damaged and dangerous. Then, I’d left seeking medicine and hadn’t found anything useful. There’s no reason to leave now.

  Except, maybe there is.

  “Shit,” I say softly to the bumper of the truck.

  Five Years Ago - Magic Beans for Everyone

  On the screen, a man is wheeled out in a wheelchair. At his appearance, flashbulbs pop from somewhere off camera in a rapid, dizzying fire. He sends a nervous glance toward the camera, but seems to collect himself as the woman pushing his chair brings it to a stop and locks its wheels.

  He must be getting cues from someone off screen, because he nods at somebody, grits his teeth, and then awkwardly stands up from his wheelchair. Under normal circumstances, a man rising from a chair wouldn’t be significant, but when he does it, a round of applause greets him. It’s so intense that the TV has to adjust the sound down to avoid exceeding our maximum comfortable set point.

  The row of doctors sitting at the press conference table st
and as well, their applause for the man who is standing rather than for themselves, but it is they who have created the miracle. The man is unsteady and his smiling attendant holds his elbow firmly to keep him from losing his balance.

  One of those doctors is Blue Cami. His name is Doctor Reed, but he lets me call him by the name I used when I had trouble remembering names at all, sometimes even my own. He calls me Rat in return. I earned that name. I used to accuse him of using me as a lab rat when he was working to cure me with his brand-new nanites. And he did cure me.

  Now he’s working on yet another set of neurological nanomachines. That’s his specialty and it looks like he’s got another winner.

  The standing man turns his head and gives his attendant a look, a cue for her to help him back into his chair. As he sits and the fabric of the cotton pants he wears tightens around his legs, I can see how thin his legs are. They’re wasted from lack of mobility and trembling a little from the effort of standing.

  Behind the doctors, a large video screen showing only the hospital logo suddenly flares into more colorful life and displays an image of the man in the wheelchair as he was. The contrast between the image and the man as he is now is startling. In the image, he has a tube coming out of his throat and a band across his forehead. The chair he sits in is more support structure than actual chair, and he appears to be entirely helpless.

  Because he was entirely helpless. Paralyzed from the neck down to such catastrophic extent that he couldn’t even breathe on his own or hold his own head up. And he’d been like that for over a year.

  I watch the rest of the press conference in rapt attention. My hair has grown back but my fingers still follow the path of the scar beneath the hair that hides it from view. Or, rather, hides it most of the time. Like me, the man in the wheelchair has been cured by very specialized nanites.

  His nanites were different, of course, but the effect is the same. A cure. A repair. A recovery of something that had been lost. In my case, I recovered my hope for a long life. In his case, he recovered his ability to feel his own body. His spinal nerve has been repaired and, while he shyly acknowledges that he has a long road to recovery, he is equally confident that it will happen, as are the doctors.

  His is not the first press conference. Because of our ages, I and most of the other children who benefited from the same procedure I underwent were not paraded in front of cameras like this man. But one girl, so radiantly happy that she almost glowed, had spoken for all of us on an earlier occasion.

  I’d watched that conference too, that time holding my mother’s hand with a patch over my right eye. This time, I watch the man, his excited family, and the doctors, but now I can see them with both of my eyes. My right eye isn’t perfect—too much nerve damage—but I can now see well enough with it that I’m grateful. And if it wanders off kilter now and then, well, that’s not such a high price to pay.

  Besides, Blue Cami says that nanites specializing in the repair of optic nerves are a few years away at most. I say it will be before then. The senses are too important for those to fall low on the priority list. I’d be willing to bet on that. I can wait for them. I’m alive and I can wait a few years. It still feels unreal to think that sometimes. I have time.

  Since my cure, the thousands of children who once felt life slipping away from their grasp as medulloblastoma grew inside their skulls have regained their hope for life. Very few suffer complications and almost none of them die.

  As one of the first to receive this treatment, my biggest problem was how much gunk built up in my cerebrospinal fluid as my tumor got digested away. They do it more slowly now. For my second treatment, they fed the nanites in over a period of hours, right into my spinal fluid rather than through my skull. I watched TV during it and didn’t feel a thing. My mother says that my kind of cancer is very close to being almost entirely curable.

  And now this man joins our nanite-cured throngs. And we’re not alone. Along with us for this miracle ride are those who once suffered from several other types of tumor, a few kinds of liver disease, and a host of bacterial infections. They’ve even got a nanite for sickle-cell anemia.

  There is no single cure-all, but it seems that every day a new form of tiny machine is created that will resolve some other vexing or dangerously life-threatening problem. Everyone, everywhere is making them. That’s where the research money flows to now. And it is flowing hard and fast.

  I call them my magic beans. Soon there will be magic beans for everyone.

  Today - The Loneliness of Being Alive

  I should be thinking about the danger of a talking in-betweener or the danger of any trip outside my complex. I should be recommitting myself to avoiding any creature that isn’t a deader in need of meeting its maker. Let’s face it, even entertaining such an idea is how people lose their PhDs in Caution. Instead, all I can think of is companionship in the form of these unknown children.

  Survival is a desperately lonely business. Trust is not achievable in any real way once a catastrophe of this magnitude happens. You can only trust those you already know and, even then, maybe not always, maybe not entirely. Unless they’re your mom, that is. The bonds of love—like those between my mother and me—were what I could trust, but not anyone or anything else. It can make a person start talking to themselves in a way that’s not entirely healthy.

  I’m not even really thinking of the kids as people in need of saving in the altruistic way I might have before all this happened. That’s there, of course, but it is threaded through with the wondrous idea of someone to talk to, to interact with, to hear breathing during the long nights so that I know I’m not alone. My heartbeat kicks up a notch as the idea catches hold inside me. I push a breath out through my puffed-up cheeks.

  Keep it together, I think. Excitement can make you lose your focus just as quickly as fear.

  It works. The little thrill in my chest eases back a bit as I run through a mental list of everything that can go wrong. Always have a plan and form that plan based on the best information you can get. That’s my motto and I’m going with it.

  First things, first. There is an in-betweener with a bullet hole in his chest who is speaking to me. And I have no idea where he came from and how long he’ll be able to maintain this level of coherent behavior. Like I said before, they are notoriously unpredictable. Easily distracted, but no less dangerous.

  Peeking back out from around the bumper, I see him still standing at the fence, his fists tight around the rails and his eyes steadily on the truck. The strain on his face is obvious. He’s really trying.

  “Where are they?” I ask, with little hope that he’ll be able to convey anything detailed like that, but asking anyway.

  He jerks, his jaws working in the way I’m more familiar with when it comes to in-betweeners. The concentration of before leaves his face and an eager sort of searching replaces it. My heart sinks at that, but then he surprises me again by banging his head against the fence hard enough to make it clang.

  Fresh, new blood mars his forehead when he pulls back. That’s a good sign in a way. It means his nanites restarted his heart quickly enough that his blood is still flowing well and circulating, becoming oxygenated and then providing that oxygen to his body. Given his actions, I’m thinking he’s more like a brain-damaged human with decent functioning and some obvious measure of control.

  He’s back on task again, the momentary lapse into in-betweener-ness over. His hand is jerky and uncoordinated and he misses the first time he tries to jam it into his pocket, but on the second try he manages to extract a piece of paper. He pushes it through the bars, holds it for a few seconds, and then lets it go. It flutters in the light breeze, the folds coming undone so that it flaps like a bird or a poorly made paper airplane. As it moves along the grass away from me, I see panic in his face.

  The last thing I want is to come out of my hiding place and into plain view of either the in-betweener or the group of deaders. The deaders can’t climb over a fence, but t
hey can get agitated and that draws others. The in-betweener is more than capable of climbing a fence. This whole situation has been one long risk and I’m pushing things.

  “Dammit,” I grumble to my friend, the truck bumper. Before I can think any more about it, I drop everything except my rifle, get to my feet, and sprint across the road and into the big grassy area that fronts the complex.

  The paper flutters with more energy as the breeze picks up momentarily and I lose it behind the big sign that tells visitors the name of the complex. I pass by the in-betweener without giving him a direct look, but out of the corner of my eye I see him lose focus and snap his jaws in in-betweener mode again.

  That makes me put my head down and push my legs harder. I’m not used to this sort of full-on effort anymore. I spend my time being quiet and careful, which generally also means slow. This kind of running is almost alien to my body after all this time. It feels good, even though I’m terrified.

  I catch sight of the paper again as it scoots along the overgrown grass and veer so I’ll intersect its path. The grass is taller farther into the green space, coming up to my knees and matted with last year’s dead stems. I almost take a header into it when I risk a glance backward just to make sure the in-betweener is still on his side of the fence. He is, but he’s agitated and I can tell it won’t be long until he makes a move. My running is just exciting him.

  Then I’ll have to stop and kill him again. I just hope the paper has all the information I need if it comes to that.

  The paper almost gets away from me one more time, but I finally grab it when it dips into some tall grass. As soon as I’m sure I have it, I drop down and use that same tall grass as cover. The in-betweener seems to be battling himself at the moment, walking in circles and hitting himself in the head. Some of the deaders sense the disturbance and pause in their fence licking, while the rest continue on as before, oblivious.