It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it was only appearance. Taka Ouellette's mobile infirmary would pull up at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left. They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn't made it into a PMZ. They were the former skeptics who hadn't realized until too late that this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had taken this long for the world to end.

They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her best. She was the person barely competent to save them.

Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned, stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an oozing gash.

Ouellette defocused on the gross ravages and zoomed down to the subtler ones: two melanomas visible on the left arm; tremors in the right; some dark tracery that looked like blood poisoning, creeping up the wrist from the injured palm. The usual symptoms of malnutrition. Half of the signs were consistent with ßehemoth; none were incontrovertible. Here was a woman suffering violence across several orders of magnitude.

Ouellette tried on a professional smile, although the fit had never been a good one. "Let's see if we can't get you fixed up."

"That's okay," said the woman, stargazing. Ouellette tried to guide her towards the van with one gloved hand (not that she needed the gloves, of course, but these days it wasn't wise to remind people of such things). The woman jerked away at her touch—

"That's okay. That's okay—"

—staggered against some invisible wall and stumbled off, locked on heaven, oblivious to earth.

"That's okay…"

Ouellette let her go.