Chapter 31
A few hours past midnight, Darc dozed off over the table where he was sitting.
("Oh no! I fell asleep over my half-finished Kinkade painting!")
Shara lay asleep in the bed next to the table.
(She'll wake up with newsprint over her face. Heh-heh!)
Up-Mouth sat slumped in front of their door, half-slumbering. He fell asleep, snoring unhealthily as he breathed - his late mother had often remarked, that only a miracle prevented Up-Mouth from choking in his sleep.
(*ZZZZ*...*GACK!* *KOFF!*... *ZZZZ*...)
Then he started awake.
([Mumbles] "Baseball practice...!")
A dark figure was trying to sneak past him.
(Hey! Many of my best friends are dark!)
Up-Mouth grabbed his spear, and blocked the door to Darc's chamber. In the weak light of the grease-lamp, his tired eyes could barely discern the healthy face of Double-Mouth. She stepped back, her lips pinched.
"You," he grunted - she understood his short, forced speech from long habit.
(She was married to Alberto Gonzalez.)
"Quiet! Don't wake up the house," she whispered in a frightened voice.
(Let sleeping condos lie.)
Up-Mouth stood up, towering ominously over the shorter woman.
He said, with audible strain: "Claw."
(The CLAW had come back to haunt me!)
Double-Mouth clutched the lapel of his cloak, and pleaded: "No, please don't tell Claw! He..."
("He's stone deaf! Write him a note instead!")
Double-Mouth's second face came to her rescue, and suggested a suitable lie. She softened her voice, and continued: "He beats me, every day. Claw is so mean, not like you, Up-Mouth. You are always so kind to everyone..."
("...you only beat them on Sundays.")
She confused Up-Mouth, and his naive, twisted face showed it.
(You mean it got un-twisted?)
The chief's favorite wife suddenly showed other feelings than indifference toward him, and he was enchanted by her friendly attention. She smiled up at him, and her healthy hands stroked his chest.
(The hands may have been healthy, but the stroking wasn't!)
"That's why I'm concerned for you, Up-Mouth. You spend too much time with those two city-people -"
("... with their city ways, their book-reading and their broadband access...")
"Friends!" he retorted, and slapped his wide chest; he was getting angry.
("Show cancelled in 2004! Still angry about it!")
"But - haven't you seen? Haven't you heard? They laugh at us behind our backs! They think we are beasts - they would say anything to escape from here alive!"
([chorus] ANYTHING!)
He shook his head jerkily, refused to look into Double-Mouth's wide-open eyes.
(Tried to look into her closed eyes, failed.)
But he stood rigid, unable to stop her poisonous, soft-spoken words: "That woman... Shara... you like her, don't you?" They both knew it was true. The big man seemed to writhe in the smaller woman's grip, his feet paralyzed.
(And he fell over.)
"People have seen her watch you - talk about you, with Darc..."
Her voice trailed off; Up-Mouth craved to hear the rest. He grabbed her shoulders, and stared furiously at her with his slanted, upside-down eyes. Double-Mouth was frightened, but kept her calm.
(Which makes about as much sense as, "She was calm, but stayed frightened.")
"She said... that you are dumb, that she fooled you into believing she liked you! She's going to betray you - I wanted to warn you, my dear Up-Mouth."
("That when you smile, the world doesn't smile with you.")
Up-Mouth released her, feeling the bile rise in his throat together with a tidal wave of self-loathing.
(The levees of his self-esteem broke.)
Double-Mouth was on her way out of the hallway, but her second face egged her to say more, to cause as much damage as possible.
She approached the sad, angry man again, and half-whispered in his upside-down ear:
("Hey, Don Imus! Sucks to be you!")
"Don't stand there crying like a baby! Go inside, look at those strange things Darc is working with! They don't make sense, do they! Because it's a fake, all a trick! Go see for yourself!"
With those words, Double-Mouth hastily sneaked off into her own chamber. She left Up-Mouth alone with his confusion and terror, fighting the temptation to follow her advice. He lost.
(The War On Confusion and Terror.)
([Deep voice] "EBENEZER SCROOGE!")
"Welcome back to the living, Mr. Archibald! Your family is eager to see you."
(It's a romantic comedy about being undead!)
What joy and relief, to realize that it had all been a dream, a bad trip in his frozen sleep! No Ice Age - it was just a warped memory of the cold sarcophagus. No far future, no post-holocaust feudal society. No -
(- no Rudy Giuliani candidacy...)
The acrid smell of burning chemicals brought Darc back to real consciousness.
(The less said about his drug problem, the better.)
The "awakening" had been a dream; this was reality. He sat up, and saw the small flames next to him on the table. The grease-lamp oil had been spilled over the test papers, and they were burning up. Darc's hands reached out; he managed to rescue the delicate instruments, and reached for the water pot - when a firm hand clutched his arm. In the gloom, he couldn't make out the attacker's face.
"Let go of me... Up-Mouth? What are you doing -"
("- with that dildo?")
"Fake!" the big man whined - he sounded like a hurt, accusing boy.
(A horribly deformed, hurt, accusing boy.)
Darc tried to jerk away from Up-Mouth's firm hold, but it was pointless.
(In an earlier draft, it read "off" instead of "away.")
He groped for his notebook, and started to beat out the flames on the table. When Up-Mouth saw this, he abruptly dropped his hold.
("No! Not the precious notebook!")
Darc threw his chest onto the table, smothering the fire completely - and the room went black. Stumbling on a bedpost, Darc heard someone crash right through the rickety wooden door - and Shara's voice.
("Shara smash!")
Suddenly, the chamber was illuminated from the hallway - because Up-Mouth had run down the door. Darc hesitated for a moment, then chose to stay with Shara. He stepped over to the bed and urged her to get dressed.
("Put on this lacy underwear! Now!")
"What's going on?" she asked anxiously.
"Up-Mouth tried to destroy my work. Why?"
"No, not him!" she exclaimed. "He's like a child! He would never do such a thing."
(The President's childlike, but that doesn't rule out him doing such a thing.)
The din had awakened the household, and they could hear the heavy steps of Claw approaching.
("What's a 'din'?" - "It's when someone shouts 'Ah' din' do it!' real loud.")
"Well, he did. I saved most of my things, but be careful now. If something more happens..."
(In the next instant, something more happened!)
Then, Claw appeared in the doorway, dressed in a long rough nightshirt. The light from behind his head created a fearsome silhouette with a monstrous club-like claw hanging from his left side - Claw's hand.
(Don't you mean "Claw's claw"?)
"What's this?" he grumbled.
([Grumble] "A planet where apes evolved from men??")
Just next to him came Double-Mouth, pointing at Shara, and screamed: "It was her! She frightened poor Up-Mouth, so he ran away! I saw him run outside, and she screamed: 'Rape!'"
("Of the Lock!")
Darc blinked, and glowered at the furious Leper woman.
(You try blinking and glowering simultaneously.)
There was no sign of deformity in her face and arms. It was her twisted words that made him feel sick.
(Why oh why did she have to say "Mission Accomplished"...)
His pledge to protect Shara was about to be tested.
(On the higher levels of World Of Warcraft or Anarchy Online?)
They lit torches and scanned every dark corner and narrow pathway. No sign of him was found.
("We found this 'Used Car For Sale' sign, with his phone number on it...")
The villagers at the bottom of the canyon were soon alerted, and joined the search. It was they who, within minutes, found Up-Mouth. His body lay spread in a pool of blood at the foot of the cliff wall.
(He got better...)
Angry voices from the villagers echoed up the canyon and reached Darc's ears.
"He must have jumped off the cliff, Claw," he told the chief - whose healthy facial half became lined with sorrow.
(While the deformed half smiled with glee!)
"Up-Mouth was my oldest surviving son, Darc. He could never learn to hunt or do handiwork, with those eyes of his. His mother died very young. I promised her to take care of him."
("Until he got that schoolteacher job.")
Claw gazed down the chasm for a while, at the circle of torches and figures around Up-Mouth's body. He turned to glare at Darc and Shara, who clung to Darc behind his back.
(Whose back again?)
"I will not blame you for Up-Mouth's suicide," he slurred hoarsely. I will protect you from the tribe's anger. I gave you my word.
(With Stephen Colbert.)
"But," he hissed, "you will stay out of my people's sight! Or you die!"
("You die, Joe!")
He turned about and left them. In the yellow flicker of the torches, they could barely glimpse that Claw's healthy eye was weeping. Shara also began to cry.
(And her nose started to run uncontrollably, and there was mucus all over the place...)
"Why did he do it?" she sobbed, as Darc patted her shoulders. "He was so kind!"
("I thought it was safe to keep pushing him around!")
"We'll find out. Don't lose hope now, Shara."
They have a lot of hope, Darc recalled from his notes, but has it dried up already?
("There's hope in them thar hills!")
He took her inside again, and his restless mind returned to the research. A distant rumble rolled down from the clouded, blue-black sky - Darc thought it was thunder.
It was not.
(Thunder.)
(A chemical cheat-sheet?)
But just near the burnt edge, he discovered a difference.
("Gosh! A difference!")
A chill went through him - the wondrous chill of discovery and breakthrough.
(Or a slight fever.)
The heat from the fire had changed the colors of the test!
It dawned on him, that Mechao had mentioned something about correct temperature of the test chemicals - and Darc had been sitting outside, in the chilly evening air.
(Moron!)
The chemicals had not reacted properly due to the cold - which explained why he had spotted no effect the first time.
But now, when he scanned the column of spots that should show a reaction to abnormal control genes - now, one spot was colored a fierce blue.
("Aha! The test indicates blue-state DNA!")
He had located the genetic fault! It meant that a cure was within reach, at least for the as-yet-unborn children of the Lepers.
(But it was too late to save Macaulay Culkin.)
Darc checked the reaction with Mechao's handwritten color chart. The blue spot indicated damage on sections of the DNA, which controlled the growth of the entire body - hence, a fault which caused the inborn deformities might be located somewhere in that gene.
(In the "My Parents Ate Smithfield Ham" segment.)
However, there was still one possibility left, and Darc's worry grew. It might be too late.
He suppressed a shiver, scraped a skin sample from his own arm, and another sample from his tongue. If there was a second Leper virus, which spread by touch, water, or food, it could be infecting him right now - right where Up-Mouth had touched his wrist, or through a mug of water, or a bowl of soup.
(Or a toilet seat. Or a door-knob. Or any part of Paris Hilton.)
Darc placed the cell samples under his small but powerful microscope, and started looking for signs of his own doom.
(SIGNS! OF HIS OWN DOOM!!)
And he found them, after a quick search - swarms of oblong, spear-tipped viruses, encircling the bigger lumps that were his skin cells. They vaguely resembled the syphilis bacteria - yet, dissimilar to any virus he had ever known.
(So he "had known" syphilis? Say no more!)
This contagion was made by humans, for a war fought centuries ago, specifically targeted at humans.
(Back when Al-Qaida's suicide-rentboys descended on Washington D.C.!)
Darc clenched his teeth. Beaten at last, by a tiny virus - a puny, pseudo-living bunch of molecules! He grimaced, raised his fist to smash the microscope - and stayed his hand.
("No, I can't smash those little viruses - they're so cute!")
He took another look in the microscope, and made a puzzling discovery.
("Oh my God, it's a microscopic 500-piece puzzle!")
Something was happening to the viruses.
("Something" happens pretty much all the time in this crummy story.)
They weren't penetrating the membranes of his cells, but were just floating helplessly around them - something was aggregating around the viruses, some kind of whirling, blurred shapes that moved too fast for him to discern.
(Dervishes on eightballs?)
He increased the resolution to molecular level, but the sample had not yet crystallized - so Darc couldn't get a sharp image. Then he understood.
(Nothing.)
Antibodies. His own bodily defenses were working, and were fighting back the viruses with its own molecules, antibodies that were shaped to catch and paralyze these particular viruses...
("What's a 'particular' virus?" - "One that fusses over its host cell being the proper size and color.")
Now wait a minute, Darc thought. That's impossible. I'm from another era, when these viruses didn't even exist. How could my body have created these specific, unique antibodies right now?
(Artistic license?)
I must have been infected much earlier than I thought.
(INTENSE... THINKING... ACTION!!)
No, that wouldn't have made any difference. I should have gone sick first - then, when it would have been too late, my immune system would have identified the invaders and created an entirely new type of antibody molecules to trap them.
("New, improved antibodies with fruit essence, vegetable enzymes and herbs... because you deserve it!")
Or... the genetic dose that Mechao infused into my immune system while I was dying from the "one-year flush" saved me. Enough to immunize me... no, that's just too good to be true. If it had been that simple, the Plague would have been eradicated centuries ago.
Even with his ancient genetic cure, I still would have caught the Plague.
Unless...
(Unless GET ON WITH IT!!)
Unless the first Plague viruses I got were weakened and dead, already hit hard by antibodies from somewhere else... no, a cocktail of foreign antibodies and dying germs.
An inoculation!
The sickness plus the cure at the same time. Yes - that could be it. My immune system identified the shape of these alien virus molecules, and got the time to produce its own antibodies as fast as possible.
But where did this "vaccine" come from? The air, the water? The Lepers' food? Could be.
(Be what? What?? Stop toying with our feelings!)
And if the viruses were already dying when I got them... then there is a Leper, in this village, who is naturally immune! And who contaminated me with masses and masses of dead viruses and his own antibodies... he, or she, saved me without knowing it. I must find out who it was.
([Yoda voice] Doctor Who it was, find out I must!)
He stood up from his chair, and grinned at the waiting, restlessly shifting Shara. The thunder from the skies grew closer.
(What? I can't hear a thing over all this thunder!)
DARC AGES (c)A.R.Yngve 1995, 2000, 2004. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.
______________
A.R.Yngve
The MSTing Of
DARC AGES
Book 2 1/2: The Smell Of Fear
______________
(Don't let this happen to you. Don't use cell phones.)
Before him, Darc perceived the smiling, Oriental features of Dr. Percival Takenaka, and heard his smooth voice:
The villagers on the higher levels searched for Up-Mouth, calling out his name, promising that he would risk no punishment, if only he showed himself.
In the brighter light of several new grease-lamps, Darc was able to get a better look at the scorched test paper. Parts of the chemically prepared sheet had been lost.
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