Free Aberrations by ed. Jeremy C. Shipp

makes it worse.”
    He nodded.
    A helicopter passed overhead, its blades a padded staccato rhythm.  Soon they would start hearing more gunfire, he realized.  He’d need to be ready to signal the rescue squads before they gunned him down like one of the dead.
    She started to cough, and to Canavan it sounded like her insides were being shredded by knives.  The coughing went on for a long time, and when it subsided and she could once again lift her head to look at him, the deep valley between her breasts was flecked with black, clotted blood.
    “Can’t you do it?  Please, Jim.  I don’t want to be one of them.  I can’t…”
    Canavan forced himself to swallow, as though there was an almond was stuck in his throat.  His chest hurt when he breathed.  The shame of his own impotence in the face of this woman’s pathos at first left him speechless; but gradually, his feelings of sympathy gave way to a vague, unfocused anger.  He resented her for making him remember how lost and helpless he could feel.
    He turned to leave.
    “Wait!” she said.  “Please, don’t go.  Please.  God it hurts so bad.”
    He knew it did, and he wasn’t without pity.  During their training, Canavan and his fellow Marines had been given the skinny on the necrosis filovirus and how it worked its way through the body, how it waged war in the bloodstream and gradually took complete control of the host body, leaving only a staggering train wreck of a virus bomb.
    This woman was pretty far along.  Infection had probably happened as much as an hour ago.  Her temperature was spiking, leaving her face flushed in sweat.  Already the blood in her veins was coagulating.  A blueberry stain of cyanosis was forming around her mouth as her cells starved for want of oxygen.  Her eyes were milking over.  The coughing and the fluid in her lungs had affected her ability to speak, her voice taking on a whiskey-edged roughness that was becoming less and less human with each passing moment.
    He wanted very much to leave her.
    She began to cough again, the hacking shaking her like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth.  She seemed unable to control her movements.  A sudden sour odor of defecation reached him, and he knew she voided her bowels.  She didn’t have long to go.  Complete depersonalization would no doubt happen within the next ten minutes, probably less.
    “Please, I need you to do this,” she said, barely able to lift her head now.  “One bullet.  Don’t you even have one bullet?  That’s all it would take.  Please, I hurt so bad.  I can feel it inside me.”
    He shifted uneasily and the glass crunching beneath his boots sounded very loud in the sepulchral stillness of that ruined lobby.
    She watched his feet.  She lifted her milky eyes and webs of wrinkles spread from the corners of her mouth.  Within the few minutes he’d been with her she seemed to age horribly, as though she was a peach left on the sidewalk and puckering in the sun.
    And then her face cracked with rage as she screamed at him.
    “Why won’t you fucking help me?  You bastard.  All I want is a bullet.”
    Canavan had to force himself not to look away.  The look on her face, the baffled anger and desperation, brought images of his daughter into his head.  Once again he saw her slipping under the waves.  Heard her screaming, “Daddy!  Dad-dy!”
    He realized he was crying and swiped the tears away angrily.  But the dying woman didn’t notice.  She had started to cough again.  When it subsided, she seemed detached and blunted, as though her mind had been scrambled and left her little more than a babbling idiot.
    But he would not have told her about the depth of his self-loathing and shame, even if she had been capable of comprehending it.  Perhaps she had her own issues, her own regrets, and perhaps she too had failed someone who had depended on her for their very life; but there were some things that cut so deeply into a man’s conscience that they