Chapters (37)
‘Obviously,’ said McCormick, suppressing the nerves in his voice. ‘And that’s the result I’m aiming for. I don’t want to die, Lorraine. I want to go out on the nineteenth, run around and shoot clones, get out alive and make it home again. But that involves risk, as war always does.’
‘Has it occurred to you that you’ll be under the same roof as Nicholas Grant? Marshall and Pearce? Oliver Roth? And just days after an operation?’
‘It’s crossed my mind,’ McCormick answered, staring up to the ceiling to avoid Lorraine’s glare. ‘But have you read the AME report? It’s terrifying. I have to be there for this, Lorraine. I can’t just sit at comms while the young ones do the dying. That’s what cowards and presidents do.’
‘There’s no shame in recognising your limits.’
‘No, but there’s shame in accepting them.’
Lorraine did not reply, and McCormick breathed a sigh of relief. Tired of conversation, and fatigued from debating the issue, he stretched out his right arm and invited the needle towards his skin. The inside of his lower arm was still dotted with miniscule scars from forty years of blood donations. He was no stranger to needles.
‘Just… promise me you’re not looking for trouble,’ said Lorraine.
‘I promise I’m doing the right thing. That’s enough.’
‘No, it’s not. If I do this, you have a duty to keep yourself alive and uncaptured!’
McCormick gave a warm smile. Their two principled minds had done nothing but clash ever since his collapse, but beneath their differences they were the closest of friends.
‘I’ll do everything I can to stay out of trouble,’ he said. ‘And believe me, I won’t just be doing it for you. I’ve got my own vested interest in staying alive!’
Lorraine took a deep breath, and in the seconds it took to find a vein and insert the needle, McCormick tried to forget the enormity of the operation. His friend was using expired anaesthetics to send him to sleep, and then she was going to carve him open with a sharpened kitchen knife. All this without any surgical training, and a selection of memories that remained from her nursing years. And at the end of it all, there was the soldering iron that lay at the back of the room. The very sight of it made him shudder. When the time came…
A prick in his arm caught his attention, and he turned his head just in time to see the last of the colourless fluid vanishing into him. McCormick’s nervous system began to numb itself, and his last conscious sight was of Lorraine’s eyes as she began to cry.