Wally West's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Wally stood in the hut's doorway with forty faces turned toward him. The air inside baked thick and still. Scott held up the vial, half full, the crack sealed under his thumb. A sick woman coughed on a mat. A child pressed against his mother's side. Every one of them watched the drop of cure as if it were water in a drought. "We pick one," Scott said low, "and the rest wait for the next carrier. There is no next carrier." His glowing white eyes stayed level. He had crossed the storm to bring this. Now he handed Wally the weight of it. "You carried it the farthest. You choose." Wally looked at the vial, then at the room. He couldn't tell who was closest to death. The woman on the mat breathed hard. An old man leaned on a post, gray and shaking. Pick one, and he killed the rest. His hands curled into fists. "No," he said. "I won't name one person and bury the others." His son tugged his sleeve. The boy held up the little fan, its blades still crusted with sand. "Dad. The fan." Wally stared at him. "We spread the cure thin," the boy said. "Not drink it. Breathe it. You said one drop cracked out and spread in the dust. What if it spreads in the air?" Scott's head snapped around. "A mist," he said. He crouched and studied the fan's rounded frame. "The dose is too small to drink and split. But as a vapor, shared air, maybe it reaches every lung in this room." He looked at Wally. "It's a guess. If we're wrong, we lose it all." Wally's chest tightened. One guess for forty lives, or one life chosen for certain. He looked at his son's steady face. The boy had carved them out of the sand twice with those same blades. "Do it," Wally said. They sealed the hut's door with a blanket. Scott tipped the half dose into a shallow bowl. He shrank small and dragged a thread of cloth across the surface, wicking the liquid thin. Wally set the fan behind the bowl and spun the blades by hand. Slow at first. The cure lifted off the cloth in a fine gray haze. The breeze pushed it across the room, over the mats, over the coughing woman and the old man and the child. "Breathe," Wally told them. "Deep. All of you." He kept turning the blades. His arm burned. The haze drifted into forty pairs of lungs. The sick woman pulled in a long breath and held it. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the fan's soft whir and the rasp of breathing. They waited. An hour passed in the heat. Wally's son sat cross-legged, watching the woman on the mat. Her breathing changed first. The hard rattle softened. She opened her eyes. The old man straightened against his post and wiped his face. Across the room, the child sat up and asked for water in a clear voice. Scott grew back to full size. He pressed a hand to the woman's forehead, then checked the old man's pulse. His shoulders dropped. "Fever's breaking," he said. "All of them." He turned to Wally, and for the first time the hard set of his face cracked into something near a smile. "You didn't choose one. You saved them all." Wally sank to the floor beside his son. His arm shook from turning the blades. The boy leaned into him, grinning under his mask. Outside, the sandstorm had passed, and thin light came through the gaps in the walls. Wally looked at the room full of people sitting up, talking, alive. He had carried the vial through heat and burial and loss, and in the end a boy's idea and a small fan had stretched half a dose into enough. He pulled his son close and held him in the quiet, and for the first time in days, there was nowhere left to run.