Free Subterrene War 02: Exogene by T.C. McCarthy

pierced Megan’s right hand and now it gave more trouble than it should have. When a fresh drop of blood fell from a tiny hole in her gauntlet, I worried—that maybe she had been infected.
    “What do you think?” she asked. “Should we go in?”
    I shrugged, fingering the zoom control outward to get a better view. “I don’t know.”
    Prefab ceramic slabs and domes formed the farmhouse’s main structure, lending it an Arabic appearance. Its roof glinted white in the sun. Around the building,tufts of tan grass swayed, and I realized as we stood there that it had already gotten warm, that for a moment spring had arrived so the grass reached a height of almost one and a half meters, rising to our chests and forcing us to stand for an unobstructed view.
    Megan kept her attention on the sky while I focused on the farmhouse again, a gray trail of smoke rising from its chimney.
    “It’s been days since we’ve seen any sign of our forces or theirs,” she said.
    “I know.”
    Megan cleared her throat. “You are worried. Why?”
    “It’s not right. Everything else in the area is destroyed, why not this?” The static from my headset clicked off and on as my computer scanned the frequencies. “And who’s jamming us?”
    “Shut it off and conserve power. Communications aren’t necessary anyway, not for us.”
    We watched the house for another ten minutes and saw nothing.
    “Let’s go,” said Megan.
    It took five minutes to crawl to the farmhouse, and I looked around before Megan rose to approach the door. She cocked her head when it opened. Two Uzbek farmers—a man and his wife—hung from the ceiling by the neck, their tongues blue from suffocation, strings of mucous swaying in a breeze that we had let in through the doorway. Behind the farmers, the house had been ransacked. Tables and chairs lay smashed and it looked as if several waste pouches had been emptied over the wreckage, along with pieces of Russian armor and empty ration packs.
    “Russian genetics?” Megan asked.
    I popped my helmet to get a better view, and saw that boot prints had smeared a patch of dirt at the front door; I knelt to examine it. “We did this. Those are from our Special Forces.”
    “Then they are looking.” Megan removed her gauntlet and I saw the red skin of her hand, streaked with white.
    “You are infected?” I asked. “With the organism?”
    Megan nodded, and threw her gauntlet to the floor.
    The view from the windows showed nothing, except that desert and square plots of switchgrass surrounded us on all sides, and for the moment I felt exposed.
Obvious
. We shouldn’t have been there—anyone searching for us would naturally focus on the farmhouse—but I saw in Megan’s face that the infection had gotten worse and she needed rest indoors, out of the elements and without having to wear a helmet.
    We didn’t bother to cut down the corpses.
    “I thought a lot about what you asked me once,” said Megan, pointing at the swinging bodies. “About death.”
    “What about it?”
    Megan said nothing and began taking off her armor. When she had finished, she slid her combat knife from its sheath, handed it to me, and rolled up the sleeve of her undersuit. “That this is no way to find out what waits on the other side. Take care of my infection.”
    The knife handle felt cold at first. Megan lay on the floor and shut her eyes, extending her arm toward me. The infection had begun to spread to her wrist, and I saw that portions of her fingertips had gone black, a whiff of rot making the threat more real.
    There was no reason to hesitate. I chopped and she whimpered for only a moment before gaining control of the pain reflex, her blood clotting instantly.
    Megan tied off the undersuit’s sleeve below the elbow. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so tired.”
    I picked up my carbine and headed for a small ladder that led to a hatch near the ceiling. “Lay down, you need rest. I will watch from above.”
    I pushed through the