Now, to be very strict about it, he wasn't called to the bridge. Actually, no one paged him at all, which he found a crying shame. The last time they approached a planet and he hadn't been on the bridge, the Captain had gotten himself duplicated again.
Perhaps there isn't a direct correlation, but forgive him for being a bit spooked about the whole thing. So he takes himself up there (lack of invitation be damned), taking a place at the rail as the new planet edges closer and closer in their viewscreen.
For a moment, his heart lurches. Earth. Home. Then common sense returns, and of course it's not the Earth, space doesn't bend in half like a cheap piece of paper and let you waltz half-way across the galaxy in the time between breakfast and lunch. There's a distress signal coming from what looks to be the spitting image of the North American Continent... and of course the Captain wants to beam down.
At least he's taking company this time. McCoy invites himself along, just to be extra-sure. Someone has to be the voice of reason here, and it doesn't look like Spock is going to fill that role today. The Captain takes a bit of convincing, but a good few solid minutes of rambling on about medical response times and the vagaries of transporter technology, and the man finally sees the light.
It's only then he realizes that he just volunteered to use that thrice-damned transporter beam. Well, hell.
________________________________________________
The air is arid, dusty with a dank taste to it, like decay gone mad. McCoy takes an instant dislike to this world, with it's ghost-town look and it's graveyard ambiance. There's a sizable group of them down here - the Captain looking curious, Spock hunched over his tricorder like some elfish vulture, Yeoman Rand looking honestly bewildered and frightened... remind him again how she was rated high enough to earn a berth on a starship? Command Central must be mad. There are two security crewmen as well, which is two to few in McCoy's estimation. He had brought that up, of course, but was immediately shot down, the Captain and Spock's weapons and martial arts training brought up as examples. McCoy wasn't impressed, but he was outranked.
They stroll down one of the dusty streets like a gang of gunslingers wandering into town. The setting is right for it - there are even tumbleweeds. What there isn't is a living soul to greet them. 1960's-era surroundings, Spock estimates, which is just about the most depressing thing he's run across lately.
"Well, this is marvelous." He drawls at the Vulcan, incredulity and dislike of his surroundings strengthening his accent. "The most horrible conglomeration of antique architecture I've ever seen." He notes that neither the Vulcan or the Yeoman disagree with him.
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Frankly, the mission is beginning to look like a bit of a wash - after an hour wandering the place, there still aren't any signs of recent life, and McCoy's mood is descending into the decidedly depressed. Objects were left in random, bizarre places, like whoever had them at the time had simply abandoned them and fled. In the center of one of the streets, a small drift of abandoned objects had formed, probably decades (if not centuries) ago - part of a chair, an old baby buggy, an old-style tricycle. Kirk picks up the child's toy and examines it, like it could explain where all of the missing people have gone. It is passed to Spock, who gives it a somewhat unimpressed glance, and then he ends up with it. Gently, thinking of the child who once played with this now-rusted toy, he places it back in the heap it came from, idly spinning one if its back wheels. Something horrible happened here - you don't have to be as smart as Spock, or as sensitive as Olya (damn, but he's glad she isn't here) to figure that one out.
"Mine!" The cry is agonized, and barely recognizable as speech... and it is very nearby, McCoy realizes in a rush. He spins on his heels to face this new threat but too late, the breath in his lungs knocked clean out when he is tackled broadsides. He had the brief impression of a raggedy form, a furious face, but now the world has closed down to a weight pinning hims down, lank greasy hair in his face, and a lack of oxygen. There are strong, desperate hands around his throat, preventing him from drawing a decent breath to call out for help. The best he can do is try and push his attacker away, but the world is greying out ominously as the seconds tick by without oxygen. Then, suddenly, miraculously, his attacker is hauled off him. He manages to almost drunkenly scramble out of the way when the melee swings back in his direction, and hands catch him from behind. He almost fights off this new person as well, before he realizes it's the Yeoman, somewhat ineffectually attempting to help.
There is the sound of a fist connecting with flesh, and he focuses to see his Captain and Spock beating his attacker between them. Finally the... man? Creature? Goes down, upon the drift of abandoned objects. McCoy edges closer, the Yeoman staying close... too close, the girl must be frightened out of her wits, and he realizes that it's a human. Or at least heavily humanoid, being of the right build but with wildly distorted features. Bizarrely, he is speaking what sounds like English.
"It's.... broke." The man wails, sounding so forlorn McCoy can't help but pity him. "Somebody... broke it! Fix?" He looks up at them imploringly, like a lost child. "Somebody... please fix?"
McCoy reaches out a hand to soothe, unable to hold a grudge against his attacker. "Of course somebody will fix it." He assures the man-child, as the Captain and Spock state the obvious about this being a humanoid with only very basic emotional responses. But the sobbing is... wrong. Gasping, almost, pained... Shit. He delves into his emergency kit while the Captain demands an explanation. The creature's responses become more and more erratic, and in just seconds, he suddenly stops, and relaxes into the dirt.
Too relaxed.
McCoy scans him, but he already knows what a dead body looks like. The readings don't make sense though - not even hummingbirds have a metabolic rate this high. This creature would have needed to eat constantly, and then some, just to stay level. Something this complex should not have the projected life span of a mayfly.
The Captain hears something, starting like a deer, and damn if the man doesn't run like one too... just towards the source of danger instead of away. McCoy hates to leave the dead creature alone in the street like that, but if his Captain is going to run head-long in to danger, someone has to tag along and patch the idiot back together after the inevitable injury.
________________________________________________
They've one into one of the abandoned houses, which is just as ruined as the streets outside, the Captain chasing whatever it is he heard.
There's a thump from the closet, and McCoy briefly wonders if was such a bright idea, inviting himself along on this rollercoaster ride. He keeps the Yeoman back, far enough away from the closet and the armed men descending on it that if a fight breaks out, he can get her back to the street and relative safety.
They storm the closet.
Inside is one lonely, terrified teenaged girl. A decidedly healthy, human-appearing girl. He lets the Yeoman sweep by him, listens as she tries to talk the girl down, ignores the Captain and his orders about perimeters and sweeps.
The girl is on the ragged edge, staring at them all like they might decide to kill her without a second's warning. For the second time today, he is moved to pity.
"I wonder what happened to her." He muses to Kirk, keeping his voice low to keep from scaring the poor mite, "That she'd be so terrified of us."
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Eventually she calms down enough to talk, but she seems to think it's some sort of game - a very dangerous game if her nervousness means anything. She uses odd language interspersed with normal English - Grubs (or Grups - their diction, he finds, is somewhat lacking at times) for grownups, Onlies for children, Fooly for game. She seems bewildered when they don't know the right words, or when they don't know the history of this place. He was right, something horrible did happen here - sounds like a plague, but something that got only the adults, and left the children. Children, plural - there are more, it seems... all that are left. Kirk gives them a look, and he and the Yeoman retreat a bit. He's seen that man charm creatures more horrible than one teenaged girl, and while it's a bit unfair to use a weapon of that strength against her, they need more information. It is frankly amazing how fast the girl falls under his spell, but at least she's calm. He checks her out briefly, but there's apparently nothing medically wrong with her.
Spock returns then, with a story about children running wild, attacking and then disappearing into the shadows. He wonders if that man-child they left in the street was one of the plague's victims... but it would have to be a horrifically virulent virus to still be in effect centuries after the first outbreak. Then again... if this thing wiped out the population centuries ago, how does a young girl know about it, remember it? None if it makes sense.
None of it keeps him from hissing a curse word he shouldn't say around a child when he spots the oddly crusted lesion on Kirk's hand. Horribly virulent, and still in effect. Just once today, he'd like to be wrong.
________________________________________________
The hospital the girl Miri leads them to is so antiquated it makes his head hurt - they're still using glass lenses in the microscopes, for God's sake. Then the other shoe falls, landing with a thud.
They're all contaminated. He finds one of the lesions on his inner wrist while trying to examine Kirk's hand, the Yeoman has one on her neck, both of the security boys have palm-sized lesions on their legs. The only one who has escaped unmarked thus far, damn his luck, is Spock. He supposes he ought to be grateful that someone isn't falling under his purview, but right now he's doing his best to keep his own panic on a short leash. He does what he was trained to do - get samples, run diagnostics, try to figure what the hell is going on.
And do his damnedest to ignore the creeping idea that his old enemy, death, just might win this round.
"Bones?" How Kirk still sounds so damn light-hearted, he'll never know. He hums an inquisitive response, still hunched over the antiquated microscope.
"Why do you think the symptoms haven't appeared on Mister Spock?" Purposeful baiting (with horrible mis-use of medical terminology) - the Captain is trying to up the morale of his crew. It's obvious, and McCoy falls in line with it obligingly. He knows full well that some amongst the crew think he actually hates Spock, which is somewhat laughable. He finds the man bewildering, downright annoying at times, but he honestly enjoys sparring with him. So despite rising panic and dismay, he sits back on the lab stool and eyes the Vulcan speculatively.
"I don't know." He musters up a crooked grin for Kirk. "Must be the little bugs or whatever they are have no appetite for green blood." First move made, he returns to his microscope work, only not cursing because of Miri standing not two feet away.
"Being a red-blooded human obviously has it's... disadvantages." Spock returns, but McCoy ignores it. It's a weak attempt - the Vulcan will have to do better than that. He peripherally senses Spock prowling around behind him, peering over his shoulder.
And then Spock starts in on just how anciently horrible this thrice-damned microscope is. That he deems fully worthy of a response, and turns to retaliate in kind.
"Spare me the analysis, Mister Spock. It's enough that it works." There must have been something in his voice - something beyond the usual grumble of a riled country doctor, because Spock backs off without another word.
There's another lesion, over the knuckles of his right hand. It wasn't there a second ago.
________________________________________________
They discover what the geniuses of this planet did to themselves - they wanted to live forever, so they created a new series of superviruses to re-shape and re-engineer their own cells. Well. That just worked brilliantly, didn't it? Turns out the only ones living forever are the ones who haven't yet become adults - enter puberty, and your life can be measured in weeks, if not days. The older you are, the faster it works, which isn't good news for him. And they can't use Spock as a courier between here and the ship - turns out he's a carrier, just as contagious as the rest of them. Still, they have the ship's computers and labs, if not directly, and with Spock's estimated time until this thing kills them being seven days, he's not terribly worried now that he's got a handle on it. It won't be fun, but it's doable.
Then a sound that raises all the hairs on the back of his neck - children's voices, singing a nonsense taunting song, somewhere nearby, as if in the walls, or the room next door. They all bolt into the hallway, trying to catch a glimpse of the elusive children, but they've disappeared again, like smoke.
And the communicators have gone with them.
That takes a moment to sink in - the full horror of it. Without communicators, they can't reach the Enterprise. Kirk has already left standing orders that the ship's crew is not to follow them down, and rightly too... but that also means there won't be a rescue.
No ship. No labs, no computers, no way of quickly processing data other than the simple machines already sent down. It's only long training that a doctor does not panic in front of his patients that keeps him from breaking down entirely. This has suddenly gone from doable to well-nigh impossible, all within a matter of minutes.
________________________________________________
Just once on this damned mission, he wants to be wrong. He wasn't wrong about the initial symptoms of the virus - his temper is short, his vision keeps blurring out, and his fingers burn like he just stuck them in the the Enterprise's engine core. He checks doors before stepping through them now - while he would desperately take the help afforded at that magical bar he's come to think of as a home away from home, the damage he could do by spreading this virus there is immeasurable. He thinks about asking Kirk and Spock if they know and visit that bar as well, to warn them against trying to go there... but he decides against it. He doesn't want them thinking he's already gone mad.
They make progress. Slow, agonizing, frustrating progress that makes him wonder if whoever created this damn thing wasn't mad to begin with, to create something so convoluted. They manage to isolate the virus, but each successive step goes by agonizingly slow. Their seven days dwindles to three, then two, then... only hours, maybe minutes remain. They've managed to keep from starving thanks to the supplies they already had beamed down, but it's becoming harder and harder to think rationally, or at all. They manage to get together something that could very well be the treatment they need, but it could also very well be too hot to use as therapy, instead just being a double dose of the disease already ravaging their systems. They need those computers! Shy of that, one of them needs to try the vaccine - what is the point of waiting now? The end isn't that far away, hastening it by a few minutes sure as hell isn't that scary when the option is death within the hour or within the half-hour. The options for who takes it are fairly limited - basically, only three people are eligable. The security team is ruled out, because they need protection if nothing else. Spock won't work, he isn't visibly showing signs, and with the equipment he has, visual measurable signs are his most reliable bit of data. So it is down to the Captain, Rand, or himself. None of those are pleasant options.
Then Rand disappears, along with the girl-child Miri. The Captain goes after them, but minutes stretch away and neither of them return. He knows death is coming, he's seen what it will look like already, and he truly, deeply does not want to see it again.
And he's now alone. In the lab, with the vaccine. Spock's gone outside, to check to see if the Captain has come back, and to check on the security crewmen. He won't be back for at least a few minutes.
If they're wrong, Spock will have time to modify the mixture and try again.
If they're right, there's no point waiting.
He rips his sleeve to expose the ulnar vein, casting a quick glance at the door of the lab as he does so. The coast is clear.
This is, most likely, the most idiotic thing he's done in his life. But it has to be done, and he sends up a prayer to whoever it is who looks after poor benighted dying doctors before centering the hypospray over his vein and shooting the ruby-red liquid into his body.
For a moment, all is well.
Pain! Like all of his nerves screaming at once, and he bites back a cry. It eases off, and he manages to put the hypospray down without damaging it or changing the settings.
And again! Worse this time, if anything, and the world is fading out. Oh God, they were wrong. But he can do one last bit of good for his friends before this damned virus gets him. The more time Spock has to re-calibrate the medication, the better chance the remaining away team will survive.
"SPOCK!" He howls, at the top of his lungs, and that effort undoes him. He can feel himself slide off of the laboratory bench he'd fallen onto, but he can't do anything to stop his fall.
He never feels himself hit the floor.
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