"The important thing to remember," said Danielle, securing bandages around her undamaged fingers and staring directly into her phone camera, "is that scouring doesn't kill you. It helps other things kill you, but you can deal with all of those effects with adequate preparation and aftercare. That's what this is all about." She flexed her wrapped-up hands and resumed covering herself in gauze. She'd edit it into a sped-up montage later. Assuming scouring didn't kill her.
When she was all bandaged and earplugged and dressed and full of painkillers, she ran through her checklist of things to pack. Engine oil canister. Bottled water. Huge tub of petrolatum sealed in its package. Spares of everything she needed for the mission itself, especially net guns. Snacks like she was going to a blood drive. Climbing equipment in case she wound up in a crevasse. "It's not likely I'll have a bad fall," she told the camera. "Bucko has a scour radius of just eight and a half feet and usually travels at an altitude of four. But it's better to be overprepped for a stumble into a ditch shallower than I am tall, than to wind up in a canyon living on my juice and cookies till an emergency helicopter can come fetch me!"
She laid out her map for the camera. "Coming up on noon. Fun time to go into the desert, right? It'll take me about twenty minutes to make it to the intercept point," she said, pointing it out and tracing her fingers along Bucko's usual route and hers. "It's supposed to show up at my chosen site in about an hour at its usual speed, so I have a little time before I go set up my ambush. The good news is that if I have to pee by the time I get there, I won't anymore once I've gotten close enough to good old Bucko. These bandages are staying on for the duration."
Danielle folded the map and stuck it in her bag's outer pocket. She wasn't going to need it, she'd practiced, but again, better to overprep. She checked the weather forecast and the satellite tracking of Bucko's progress. She told her emergency contacts that everything was go. She tested the tow bar on the back of the dune buggy. She mentioned her sponsors, the concierge medicine startup that wanted Bucko for themselves and the net gun manufacturers and the Angel Research Foundation. And then she mounted her phone in the buggy, loaded the bags, and set out across the desert.
Throughout the drive she sipped water. "Is bottled water dirty?" she asked the camera rhetorically. "No, of course not, at least not around here! But a lot of things your body makes out of water are both icky and important, and if you have to replace them all of a sudden, you're gonna want to be sloshing." She took a swig and splashed herself as she went over a bump. "Whoops. Good thing it's hot as the dickens out here, I'll dry off in no time." She picked up a salt pill, waved it at the phone, and swallowed it. "Electrolytes!"
Danielle fell silent for a minute. Most people weren't going to want to watch a full uncut version with all the awkward pauses even if she did publish it, so she wasn't going to. She spoke again when she had something to say. "So, why Bucko? Bucko's small, center mass not much bigger than an exercise ball, and has a predictable route. It's not hurting anybody, it's just going back and forth between its two egress points every couple days like it has for fifteen years - fifty hours plus or minus three, with occasional skipped journeys we don't know the pattern for. If I caught a big car-size guy like Cosine or the Kentucky Furrower I could prevent a lot of very expensive ecological and property damage and sometimes medical bills when people don't evac in time. So why little Bucko?"
She crested over a dune and checked her heading. "Well, for one thing, big angels'd be harder to catch. I wouldn't need a dune buggy, I'd need a tank. Instead of a normal tow bar plus some doodads I'd need something much longer and sturdier. I'd probably need a whole team. And while it's very noble when people try to catch angels just to get them off people's backs, that's not what I'm about today. I want to catch Bucko and then keep it - in a town, in a building, not tethered in midair above a research institution crossed with a zoo. Because the thing is, scouring doesn't kill you."
She drank some more water. She really did have to pee, now, but Bucko would fix that soon. She scratched an itch under the bandage that stretched across the bridge of her nose. "People recover from getting scoured all the time. Even if they're not prepared like I am right now, it's less dangerous than plenty of other stuff that can happen to you. Like infections. Like poisoning. Like plaque in your veins and built-up toxins your organs can't handle. That's why my sponsors include the Oyster Group, pioneering new ways to treat some of the most intractable medical problems out there. If everything works out the way we hope, you'll soon be able to go visit Bucko yourself, and get rolled in all bandaged up and full of water into its radius, and then out again to recover from scouring. It'll be overkill for a cold. But if you get gangrene? If your liver is wrecked? If you come home from vacation with ebola? If your kid didn't tell you about a raccoon bite till it was too late? Bucko'll be right there to help you out. And with scourings occurring under controlled conditions the recovery process can probably be streamlined, so you'll have an easier time than I'm expecting to have this afternoon."
Another sip. She was going to be really glad she'd gotten through this bottle in a few minutes but at the moment drinking felt onerous. "I'm almost there," she told the camera. "I can see Sinner's Rock. I don't know why it's called that and neither does Google, but I'll be there in a few minutes, before Bucko arrives. I don't see it yet."
Danielle parked the dune buggy in the shade of the tall rock and disembarked, bringing her phone with her. "I'm gonna unzip my bags, so I don't have to try to handle the little zipper pulls with scoured fingers," she explained. "And over here you can see Bucko's usual route. It goes almost the same way every time, but sometimes there are deviations - over there you can see the ditch it creates diverge and then come together again. Maybe it saw something shiny. Maybe it was flying drunk, though I guess by recorded appearances it's not old enough for drinking to be legal! And I'm going to wait right here, and when it comes by, out come the net guns."
She finished off the bottle and then sipped more water out of her CamelBak. "I won't be able to talk very well after I've encountered Bucko face to not-a-face," she told the camera. "But I'll go back and do some voiceovers, okay? - Here it comes!"
She turned the camera around. In the distance, Bucko was bobbing placidly along its route, four feet above the average ground level in unaffected areas (but of course more than eight feet away from any actual dirt). Bigger angels would carve canyons beneath them, annihilating humus and subsoil and everything else in their radius until they hit bedrock and polished it clean. A lot of ancient rivers looked like they'd been paths for the angels long ago, but Bucko crossed a desert, appearing a few klicks northwest of Sinner's Rock and trundling down to disappear again a ways south, and no water filled in its tracks of vanished sand. Which was among the reasons Danielle had picked this target. There were other small angels but this one wouldn't drown her trying to escape and also didn't require her to travel to Russia or anything.
Bucko was white, blindingly bleachy bone white, reflecting the afternoon sun with such enthusiasm that no features could be made out besides a shifting silhouette. Angels varied considerably in form, but they usually approximated spherical symmetries; you didn't see ones shaped like snakes or squares. They had protrusions, sometimes something like a wing or a tentacle or even a hand, scattered all over themselves. Closer examination of some captives had revealed that they had divots in their central bodies, colloquially "eyes", though it was impossible to tell if they could see with them or for that matter without them. Bucko was a pretty normal looking angel apart from being small. "I count six wings, but some photos of Bucko show ten or eleven," she remarked. "It must have some folded or held in front of or behind itself. I think it looks brighter in person, wow, Bucko, do you tile yourself with whitening strips..." She'd edit that out later if she decided it was babbling.
The phone went into her shirt pocket with the hole for the camrea, which she buttoned shut so it wouldn't slip out. The net gun went propped up on her shoulder. "Almost showtime," she muttered.
Bucko didn't seem afraid of her. Angels usually took little to no notice of people, or animals, or anything else in their paths. It went along its route, rustling and folding and stretching and unfurling its wings. When it got close enough that Danielle could hear its high-pitched hum and taste the odorless, sterile, particle-free air that wafted past it, she fired.
She had several loaded net guns and she needed them all. In theory some of them were there to give her safety margin if she missed, but also, angels levitated; tangling up their wings would certainly bother one but it wouldn't keep it from zooming away. So she needed weights on the nets, and several such nets, to drag Bucko down. It was stronger than she'd expected, but not stronger than she'd made contingency preparations for. The last net saw it - well, not land. It destroyed the sand beneath it and there wasn't bedrock close to the surface. It was still floating. But the last net made it stop being able to travel.
"Now for the hard part," Danielle told her phone, and she advanced on the angel.
The bandages made themselves useful immediately. All the dead skin on her body, every cell of it, starting with her outstretched hands, was gone: not killed, not shed, but vanished altogether. Like a peeled sunburn or an oddly precise road rash, it left her tender head to toe, and the tight constricting gauze reassuringly snug. Her raw living skin would be producing exudate, but Bucko destroyed that too. She'd start soaking her bandages once she was out of range.
She didn't have to pee anymore. Her intestines cramped like she was coming off the worst stomach bug of all time and had spent the last twenty-four hours on the can. Her eyes were painfully dry, though at least there was no dust that could land in them here at Bucko's side. Her nose started bleeding, which she felt mostly as a twinge up in her sinuses; the leaking blood itself disappeared before it could appear on her upper lip. Danielle started counting seconds: none of those things were going to be the end of her, but being unable to sweat, in the desert, could be. Desperately, she resisted the urge to cough: if she did she'd tear up her throat and to no avail. She'd just have to drink more water as soon as Bucko was secure.
She got the end of the tow rope around the angel, knotted it with smarting stinging fingers. If it got too close during the trip back to town, not only would a second scouring damage Danielle further, it'd clear all the lubricant out of the engine; that was why she had spare oil, safely in a container so it didn't "count". Angels usually left things alone if they were packaged, but oil sloshing around to keep the motor from seizing wouldn't enjoy that protection.
Except for her hands screaming at her that she was badly injured, there weren't any hiccups in getting the angel tethered a safe distance and angle from the buggy. Since she was driving on sand, that distance was much more than Bucko's radius - when it destroyed the sand behind her wheels, she needed a buffer to avoid sliding backward with the subsidence.
At long last she got the whole setup clipped into place, double-checked it, and moved more than eight and a half feet away. Her bandages clung wetly once the exudate wasn't constantly vanished. Her nosebleed - nosebleeds plural, it seemed to be both sides now - drizzled freely into her mouth. She succumbed to her coughing fit for a moment, then desperately gnawed the bite valve. Her teeth were unharmed and frictionlessly clean, like she'd gone to a wizard dentist, and she chomped water down her parched throat. Saliva wasn't clean enough for an angel. The air shifting around her was pulling moisture from the gauze, blessedly cooling.
She took a few minutes, sitting in the driver's seat of her buggy, to re-equilibriate herself. She'd never been scoured before. It was a little worse than she'd expected. She was no longer really confident in the business model of the medical people, though admittedly she wasn't dead, and some possible patients would just be going to stick a foot or an arm in for a toenail fungus or a blood cleanse that could stand to take a few heartbeats. Their sinuses would be fine, and also they wouldn't be driving for twenty minutes through the desert afterwards.
The phone went back in its dashboard mount. She smiled at it a little shakily, though her lips twinged. Managed a thumbs-up. Tilted it so the camera could see Bucko, twitching in the nets and tethered behind the buggy and eroding bits of desert that slid into the pit beneath its bulk.
Then she took a few more deep breaths, drank more water, choked down more salt pills and a bottle of apple juice for her skin to turn into more ooze and sweat, and checked the oil. She was pretty sure Bucko hadn't gotten close enough, but no point in being stupid about it. The oil level was fine, the hood reassuringly grimy. Fuel gauge looked good too, though that was less likely to run afoul of an angel's overzealous cleansing.
She started up the buggy. It drowned out the angel's high whine. With a wide turn so she wouldn't accidentally slam her quarry into Sinner's Rock, Danielle began the drive back to town.
It wound up taking nearly forty minutes to pull Bucko onto the road and into the designated site where Oyster Group planned to build the holding area. The bumps were brutal on her sensitive not-quite-abrasions, so she went around anything treacherous-looking, and outside of Bucko's radius there was plenty of kicked-up sand to get in her eyes and work its way under her bandages so she kept stopping to blink and brush herself clean. She kept needing to drink more juice. The cookies proved to be too sharp and crisp for her tongue and cheeks, which felt like she'd inhaled scalding soup; she dissolved some in one of the bottles of water and drank the slurry, instead.
As soon as she got the buggy into the build site, medics popped out of their temporary trailer offices and swarmed her. Giving Bucko a wide berth, they got Danielle onto a stretcher, and started gradually unbandaging her. They'd known what to expect; they had lidocaine spray with antibacterial ointment in it, ready for every inch. Bucko had killed all her skin bacteria, but there were plenty more microbes where those came from excited to colonize her open dermis. Once she was sprayed in a given area they put fresh bandages on. Somebody gave her IV fluids; somebody gave her probiotics in the one direction; there was a fecal transplant ready for her razed guts. Someone was gingerly rubbing olive oil into her scalp. She'd cut her hair in advance, since being utterly deprived of all its oil was a good way for hair to go haywire, but she hadn't shaved her head.
The spray was a godsend. She took a few deep breaths at long last. Blinked in exhausted satisfaction at Bucko where it wriggled on the end of its tow bar. The Oyster folks had long poles with which to push it along, and four redundant hardpoints embedded in the clinic foundation to which it could be attached. The foundation was twelve feet deep of nothing but reinforced concrete. Nothing for Bucko to erode. And the walls would be built around it, well out of range, and everything else would follow.
Danielle let herself fall unconscious while the medics worked on patching her up. Human beings were not meant to be so clean.
When she came around, she was in the clinic-trailer. It reminded her of mobile blood drives. A nurse was sitting nearby, playing some game on her phone that had chirpy music and extravagant sound effects. Her nametag said HETTY.
"What time's it," mumbled Danielle. Her lips felt greasy; probably they'd put industrial amounts of chapstick on her.
"Almost six. You had a nice little nap there. How's your mouth, do you think you could eat something?"
"Somethin' soff," Danielle replied, repressing a yawn that might have cracked the corners of her mouth.
"Of course!" The trailer had Jello, naturally, but when Danielle managed to get that down Hetty followed it up with some overboiled macaroni that was melding with its cheese sauce, then a milkshake, that she sent someone to the nearest diner for. It turned out that in addition to making her dehydrated, getting scoured had rendered Danielle ravenous. Hetty went on to say, "Everything's going okay with the angel, it's tied down and the foundation seems to be fully intact. The contractors expect to get the walls and roof up around it in the next couple days. You did a great job."
Danielle smiled. In a few more days she'd have enough skin to feel halfway to normal and Oyster Group would have the angel forever to save people who really needed a good scrubbing-out, even one like this. Heck, long term her heart would probably thank her for it. "Phone?" she said.
"Right here." The nurse had even plugged it in.
Recording underway, Danielle smiled for the camera. "Here I am again, folks. The Oyster clinicians have patched me up good, I feel so much better. Sounds like Bucko's settling in well, we can go have a look at its new digs once I'm up and about. Boy, was that unfun! But it'll all be worth it when somebody with flesh-eating bacteria or something like that goes in and comes out again, nice and cleaned up." She slurped the last dregs of her milkshake, winking at the phone.
Then she turned the recording off and relaxed back into her bed. Super-soft sheets, just what the doctor ordered for a scouring patient.
"Do you hear that, or is it my tinnitus," said Hetty.
"Hear what?"
"That noise - it's probably someone listening to some awful music on the radio, only I don't hear a car -"
Danielle strained her ears. They were waxless and the earplugs had kept out the sand; they should be working fine. There was a thin whine...
"Isn't that Bucko?"
"No, Bucko's higher pitched, my old ears can't hear it at all."
They both listened, and then Danielle said -
"It's getting closer."
Hetty got to her feet and drew the curtain that covered the trailer window. Danielle pulled herself to a sitting position over her body's protests.
They remained like that, still and staring, until Danielle grabbed her phone to record: a shaky video, almost soundless, of an advancing angel the size of a house. It obliterated the dirt beneath it at such a radius that the trailer started to shake, though the angel was nearly a mile off. It sang, high and harsh.
It was the spitting image of Bucko, which was now more than three hours late to its egress.
Danielle overrode every pain signal in her body, and she ran.