Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Karen_Ortiz

  * * *

  AdminMark

  It was a little after nine when we finally reached Heinz Field in Pittsburgh. I chose this spot for the next pickup because there isn’t a game tonight, which means minimal security, no traffic, plenty of room for the bus, and lots of ways to get out in case there’s trouble. I told the next two scheduled riders to wait around the corner on North Shore Drive near the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. Lots of joggers out even this late at night, so if anybody asks I can always say I’m out for a walk.

  I hate being this paranoid, but Rick’s email kind of got to me. If nobody stops us in the next few days, I can relax and feel confident that we’re clear of trouble. Until then, best to be careful.

  * * *

  Update: Before I could head out, Dylan switched up the plan.

  “It’s probably safe,” he said, “but maybe I should go, just in case. Nobody knows I’m involved with this or what I look like, so they won’t be watching for me.”

  “I thought you just wanted to drive the bus and not get involved.”

  “It makes sense, that’s all. You don’t want me to go, totally great, I’ll stay on the bus.”

  I let him go, checking my watch as he stepped off the bus. I figured it wouldn’t take more than about ten minutes for him to get to the rendezvous point, pick up the newbies, and come back.

  Twenty minutes passed.

  I was sitting in the driver’s seat sweating bullets when out of nowhere someone banged on the side of the bus and a woman yelled, “Open up, police!”

  I was about to shit myself when Dylan came in with this embarrassed grin on his face. “Wasn’t my idea, Mark—swear to God I didn’t know she was gonna do that.”

  The next one up the stairs—in her emails, she said her name was Lisa Rousseau—couldn’t stop laughing. “Your face! Dude, your face! Best! Thing! Ever!” She threw her arms up and spun around in front of me. “Woooooooo! Party!”

  She came out of the spin and opened her bag to let me peek inside. There were bottles of Molly and salvia, two baggies of shrooms, and enough weed to stock a dispensary. Then she snapped it closed and put her face right up to mine, all green eyes, olive skin, and freckles beneath a waterfall of curly red hair. She reminded me of a girl I dated in college whose family came from Spain. Basque, I thought, gotta be.

  “Still mad?” she said, her voice low and sexy. “Because you can’t have any treats if you’re still mad.”

  Before I could answer, I noticed the guy standing behind her at the top of the steps.

  He was blue.

  Seriously. Blue. Blue skin with round blue fingernails, like an alien. Not a deep Smurf blue, but lighter, more like a robin’s-egg blue, particularly around his lips, but his hair was wheat-blond and cut short.

  “Eisenmenger syndrome,” he said in the tone of someone who says it all the time, as in Let me explain this before things get awkward so you don’t have to ask. “I have a hole in my heart between the left and right ventricles, which makes some of my blood flow the wrong way, away from the lungs, so it gets deoxygenated, causing cyanosis, meaning my skin doesn’t get much oxygen, which is why it’s kind of blue. It also causes pulmonary congestion, arrhythmia, and fatigue, so I walk slow, which is why we’re late, and sometimes I faint.”

  Then he grinned at me, but I could see in his eyes that he was tired, that this was a guy who was always tired. “Tyler Weston,” he said, and held out his hand.

  I shook it. It was cold. I didn’t react. He seemed to appreciate that.

  “Ohmygod, you’re right,” Lisa said, as though there had been some debate about the subject, “you are blue! I couldn’t tell outside. That’s so amazing! Blue is a god color, because there’s blue sky and blue water and blue eyes and blue gems like sapphire, turquoise, and aquamarine but no blue people, because God keeps that color for herself unless you count the people in that movie, what’s the name, the one with the blue people, everybody saw it, you must’ve seen it but what was the naaaame—”

  “Avatar?” Karen said, and glanced at me like Holy shit, does this one come with an off switch?

  “Avatar, right! That movie was such a spiritual experience! It makes you understand that everything has meaning, but meaning can also be a trap, you know? Sometimes we start with the story of us, the meaning of who we are and how we got here, like religion or spirituality, and we see everything that happens to us through the lens of that meaning. Other times it goes the other way, we start with all the things that happen to us and we make stories about it until meaning comes out the other side, so blue is meaning and story and that’s amazing!”

  Tyler had no more idea what the hell she was talking about than the rest of us, but she hugged him anyway. “From now on, you are my good luck charm!” she said, then turned and whooped! her way down the aisle.

  “I got to the pickup spot an hour early,” Tyler said, “because I didn’t want to risk missing the bus. She was early too.”

  “How early?” I asked.

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” he said, and the look on his face said everything we needed to know about that hour.

  “Is she high?” Karen asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Dylan said. “I think she’s just really hyper.”

  “Swell,” Karen said under her breath.

  “Whoooooooooooo!” Lisa yelled from the back of the bus. “Where’s the disco ball?! C’mon, this place needs a disco ball, let’s go buy one!”

  “We should probably take off,” Dylan said. “Stadium security might swing by soon.”

  I hesitated long enough to debate whether or not I should boot Lisa out the door before deciding she might make for some interesting dynamics. “Go for it.”

  Dylan climbed behind the wheel, coaxed the engine to life, and we lurched out of the parking lot.

  “Hey!” Lisa called, holding on to the back of one of the seats as the bus bounced onto the main road. “There’s a bar I know near here—we should go, last call, right?”

  “Not a good idea,” I said. “If they know you, we can’t risk being seen with you in case the police come around asking questions.”

  “Okay, then let’s go to another bar—we can pick one I’ve never been to before. Come onnnnnn, you promised us a party bus!”

  I looked to Dylan, who did his usual smile-and-shrug routine. “It’s been a long drive, it’s still early, and I could use a drink.”

  “May as well,” Karen said resignedly. “I was looking for an excuse to get drunk just once, knock down another item on my bucket list, and I guess she just walked in the door.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, agreeing to the stop not because Lisa’s little stunt had put me in need of getting hammered beyond the limits of human endurance, but because Karen wanted to do it. I made my decision entirely for her benefit.

  Officer.

  * * *

  Dylan picked a little no-frills sports bar on Noblestown called the Ugly Dog Saloon, and everybody piled out except Tyler.

  I poked my head back inside the bus. “You coming?”

  “Next time. I should probably fill out the passenger information while I’m still fresh.”

  Clearly, Tyler is a diligent kind of guy.

  As we crossed the parking lot, Karen leaned into me, nodded toward Lisa, and whispered, “If she pounds down enough tequilas, maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll pass out.”

  She didn’t. I’ve never seen anyone drink that much and not die. She even put Dylan under the table. We closed down the joint at two, and even then the owner had to chase down Lisa to get the microphone back because she was still singing karaoke half an hour after he’d turned off the machine.

  Bottom line: Lisa’s bugfuck, but she’s a shit-ton of fun, and it’s not like we’re going to have to live with her for very long.

  * * *

  Username: TylerW1998

  My name’s Tyler Weston. 22. 5'10," 175 pounds. B.S. in Computer Science from University of Pennsy
lvania, not far from where I grew up in Glenside. Diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome when I was four. Like every other kid, I liked to run and jump and climb on things, except half the time I’d pass out. At first the doctors thought there might be something wrong with my brain that was causing seizures, but the tests came back fine. Then the blue started to come onto my skin, and they realized what they were dealing with.

  You know when you’ve been sitting for a long time, and you stand up too fast, and everything kind of goes sideways for a second? That’s how it is for me 24/7. When I was a kid, the hole between the left and right sides of my heart was smaller, and the doctors might’ve been able to repair it but the procedure was way expensive and my folks were independent contractors so they didn’t have the cash or health insurance, and even if they did, it would’ve been considered a pre-existing condition, so yeah good luck with that. They weren’t sure I’d even make it past junior high, because with ES just about anything can kill you.

  I survived by teaching myself how to breathe deep and hold it hard to push oxygen into my system. I started carrying a small oxygen bottle in my backpack, and any time I felt that sideways thing coming on, I’d sit down and breathe pure O2 until it passed. Instead of panicking, I learned how to be really clinical in my thinking at a very early age, and that saved my life more than once.

  That’s how I got into computer science. Coding, information technology, programming logic, discrete structures… it’s all about sitting at a keyboard and being really still and quiet while you try to figure out how to solve the problem. There’s not a lot of excitement in computer science, but that was fine by me, and I got good at it. Designed several algorithms to assist in code security for the university’s IT system. Even got paid for some of it.

  I didn’t have many friends growing up because hello, blue, so I didn’t date much. Only reason I made it to prom with a girl from social studies class was because she was afraid I’d fall over dead if she said no. Had another date in my freshman year at UPenn. I think she was trying to show how open-minded she was, but when she took my hand and it was cold, she shrieked. Literally. She didn’t mean to. Spontaneous reaction. So yeah, no second date on that one.

  Never thought I’d get laid, but a year later I met this girl who seemed to like me and said she wasn’t bothered by the blue or the cool skin, and we had sex on our second date. Later, when she didn’t call or return my texts, I found out that the only reason we got together in the first place was that her friends dared her to fuck me because they wanted to find out if my dick was blue. And no, I’m not telling you.

  I started looking for full-time work after graduation, which was also when the ES got a lot worse. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and couldn’t breathe, like I’d been hit in the chest by a steel fist. My folks got me an appointment with a specialist who said the hole in my heart had gotten bigger, too big to operate on even if we had the money, and that the techniques I’d used to stay alive had only added to the problem. By forcing O2 through my lungs into my bloodstream, I’d increased the congestion in my right ventricle and now it was like a lot of people in a big room all trying to fit through the same tiny door at the same time and everything gets jammed up. No blood in, no blood out… next thing you know, boom and you’re on the floor. The only way we might be able to fix the problem is with a heart and lung transplant, but even if we could find donors with the right blood type at the same time for both organs, I can’t even imagine what that would cost.

  The last time we went in for a follow-up exam two years ago, I overheard the doctor talking to my folks and he used the two words I’ve been dreading ever since I knew they existed: palliative care. There’s nothing more we can do… Our best guess is he has six to twelve months left… All anyone can do now is try to make whatever time he has left as comfortable as possible.

  Hoping to extend that window, I took everything as slowly as possible, slower than I’d ever gone before. I watched each step as I took it and applied for small, low-stress consulting jobs that let me work from home. Some days I didn’t go much farther than the front mailbox but it got me past the one-year mark.

  In my spare time I got really good at hacking.

  My first big one was the night I got into the scoreboard of a Steelers game during a live broadcast and dropped in five minutes of footage from Night of the Living Dead. You probably heard about it on the news. Yeah, that was me. And those roadside safety signs in Virginia that started showing warning messages that read WARNING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE IN PROGRESS? That was me, too.

  I like zombie movies. Zombies are the only ones who move slower than I do. Which is why I don’t like the idea of fast zombies. They’re not canonical with the George Romero movies and I can’t outrun them, and that’s just not fair.

  After a while, even going slow wasn’t enough. I was dizzy all the time, and every night that steel fist came back to pound the shit out of me. In theory I have maybe six months left, but I could literally fall over dead at any time. So when I saw the Homepage ad, I did what I always do: I ran the numbers. Six months imprisoned in a hospital or hospice, suffering until I die, versus one last chance to have some fun, even if it means cutting whatever time I have left down to almost nothing.

  It wasn’t much of a choice. So here I am. And here I’ll be. Until I’m not.

  I don’t know if this is the right place to put this—I didn’t see any other tabs for personal information, and to be honest the online interface Mark’s using wasn’t thought through very well—but if anyone should ask after I’m gone, I’d like my headstone to read:

  Here Lies

  TYLER WESTON

  Because Frankly, He’s Exhausted

  * * *

  AdminMark

  After we closed down the bar, I checked in on Tyler. He was already asleep in one of the bunks at the back of the bus, so Karen (who crossed getting drunk off her bucket list at the cost of spray-painting the bathroom with everything she’d ever eaten since the age of twelve), Lisa, and I got rooms in a skeezy-looking motel down the street while Dylan crashed in one of the other bunks. He was so drunk a real bed would’ve been wasted on him.

  I got to my room, fell flat on my face on the bed, and passed out.

  For an hour.

  Then Lisa began pounding on the door. “Maaaaaaaark! Open the dooooooooooor!”

  I didn’t want to get kicked out because of the noise, so I let her in. I couldn’t tell if she’d kept the party going in her room or if she was just really hyper, but she was pacing back and forth like she couldn’t stay in one place for more than a minute. She’d sit down, stand up, walk around the room, then sit down again, talking nonstop the whole time but none of it had anything to do with me, so as soon as I could fight my way into the word tornado I asked why the hell she woke me up.

  “Is your room hot?” she said. “My room’s hot. I can’t sleep it’s so hot.” Then she glanced in the bathroom. “You have a tub! I don’t have a tub, just a shower.”

  “Bigger room,” I said, desperate to go back to sleep.

  “I’m gonna take a cold bath,” she said, and before I could stop her she stepped out of her clothes in one move—and seriously, how the hell do women do that, one minute they’re dressed, then they pull something in the back and it’s all skin—and climbed into the tub.

  “Oh my God, that’s so much better,” she said as the water rose. Then she smiled up at me. “It’s a big tub. Might even be room for two.”

  Every male reading this knows there are two brains, the Guy Brain and the Smart Brain, and they’re always fighting it out. The Guy Brain wanted to get in there and fuck her brains out. The Smart Brain knew that if I got horizontal I’d probably fall dead asleep; that even if I managed to stay awake the water was so cold I’d never get it up; and that I’d made a vow before starting all this that any women on the bus were off-limits. If I met someone outside the bus, then yeah, fair game. But passengers? No.

  That decision didn’t come ou
t of virtue. I don’t have that gene in me, or at least I’ve never seen it. But I’m in charge of this expedition, and if I start screwing around it’ll flip the dynamics upside down and blow up my whole reason for doing this. Everybody else can do what they want, but I have to stay out of it so I can focus on the big picture.

  I also have a Philosophy of Phucking: never fuck anybody crazier than you are, and Lisa was one hundred percent batshit crazy.

  So I shook my head no and aimed the rest of me for bed.

  “What do you mean, no?” she yelled. “I’m naked! I’m wet! Fuck me!”

  She was still complaining as I collapsed onto the mattress and closed my eyes.

  I fell asleep to the sound of water splashing.

  When I got up a few hours later, she’d already gone back to her room. I went into the bathroom to piss and found that she’d thrown my toothbrush in the toilet and written STUPID FUCKING DICKFACE in red lipstick on the mirror.

  Yeah: batshit crazy.

  * * *

  From: Mark Antonelli MDAntonelli@gmail.com

  To: Tyler Weston BigBlue@BigBlueGuy.com

  Subject: Re: Server Info

  Hey, Tyler—

  I appreciate the offer re: security but the current version is already configured and working fine and I don’t want to mess with it. Besides, we won’t be in any one spot long enough for anyone to get a bead on us, so I think we’ll be okay. But I’ll definitely download the voice recognition app. Could be a good addition to everybody’s options.

  That said: please don’t muck around in the system. I got it just the way I want and don’t want to redo everything if you put your finger in the wrong socket.

  Tyler Weston BigBlue@BigBlueGuy.com wrote:

  Hi, Mark… I don’t want to be intrusive, but when I uploaded my price-of-admission story last night, I noticed that you’re using an old version of DeathCryption. The current version (4.2) is better and more secure. I can install it if you want, it’s real easy, takes about five minutes. Or I can give you the link and you can do the install if you’d rather not share admin.