Wild Cards [08] One-Eyed Jacks Read Online Free PDF

ranch-not really much as spreads go, nowhere near big enough to support itself, but heaven to live on-so I based myself there and hung out my shingle. Small-town GP, doing emergency surgery on the side. Figured there'd be the end of things. Until the fires."
    "They're still burning. Last spring, hardly anyone knew what we were in for. Forest Service followed policy and let the lightning strikes burn uncontested. But the weather turned vicious-no rain, sun baking the woods tinder dry, winds whipping the flame front into firestorms. Alarm went out to damn near every fire-fighting outfit in the country. Indians handled the brunt of the work, about the best there are at this business."
    "You ever wonder, Doc, if your virus affects the inanimate substance of the earth itself? Some of those Indians do. You value your hide, steer well clear of Apaches and the Cheyenne. They view the world as a living being, as much so as humanity itself. They see what the wild card does to people, they wonder if it can twist-even murder-the planet the same way."
    "That's preposterous." He was genuinely shocked. She barely noticed. She was in the center of a broad mountain meadow with a beaten crew-most so tired they couldn't stand, much less run for their lives-staring in horror at a wall of flame two hundred meters away, where five minutes before there'd been a stand of magnificent timber.
    "Maybe. Fires sure seemed alive to us. Sneaky and intelligent, and vicious as a bear trap. Forest Service brought in some joker crews to handle the scutwork cleanup in the low-intensity areas. They should have been fine. Probably, in any other fire, any other summer, they would have. I'm sure you can guess the rest."
    "How bad was it?"
    She met Tachyon's gaze. "Backfire caught a joker team, tore 'em up pretty badly. I was running the aid station inside Yellowstone. Seven came in still alive. All critical, badly burned, but they had a chance. We bundled 'em all into a Huey and sent it to our main receiving hospital. They turned 'em away. Said they had no bed space. Bullshit, of course, we'd transferred half their patients precisely so there would be room for our casualties. But they were adamant, no admittance. Three other hospitals on our list, got the same response from each. Pilot had to bring 'em back. I was running an aid station-the whole point of our existence was to get our injured into the air and out to a proper full-care facility as fast as humanly possible. I didn't have the staff, I didn't have the equipment, to cope with anything more. Took 'em two days to die. For one, in the end, drugs didn't help. He was screaming, like a baby-this high-pitched shriek, somehow he made himself heard even over the roar of the fire-I found myself once looking around for an ax or shovel, cursing myself for not having my gun handy. I wanted to smash that poor creature's head in, just to shut him up. I lost it, totally, I think by then I was more than a little crazy myself. I found a network crew, gave 'em a live interview on morning television."
    "I saw that. You were quite impassioned."
    "Lot of good it did me. Hospitals had covered themselves perfectly. They hit back with loads of righteous indignation. By the time they were through, they'd made a plausible case it was my fault. All things considered, it wasn't the best of times to take a stand for joker rights. I'd grown up there." A softness had crept into her voice, an eerie echo of what she'd heard earlier in Tachyon's, as though neither could still quite believe what had happened to them. "I'd made that place my home, it was where I raised my son-and five minutes on the Today show burned it up as completely as the North Fork fire did the Gallatin Range. Forest Service"-she made a face-"shipped me out on the next chopper. Got home, discovered my attending privileges at the local hospitals had been revoked. Within a week, I started losing patients. Within a month ..."
    "Sent out job applications, word got passed