by Robin Triggs
* * *
I think I screamed.
* * *
I am in an office. I am being interviewed. There are three people across the table from me. I know…I know them. The names well up in me, fill me for a moment before flooding into my mind. Hannah Robertson. George Francis. Demelza Augustine. One external HR consultant, two operations managers. I am standing. I am nervous. I hold my hands tightly behind my back, my suit heavy on my shoulders. They aren’t looking at me, but at the papers in front of them. It is warm. The air smells faintly of pine.
“Lacks experience.” That’s Robertson. She sounds bored.
“But never properly tested. The Psych shows a high ceiling. He has potential.” Francis. He sits in the middle. When he looks down, I can clearly see his bald patch.
Then the questions begin in earnest, the role-play, the barrage of scenarios, my responses instantly challenged, clarified, dissected…
There is nothing unusual in this.
Now I am waiting in a corridor. Tension is gripping my throat. There is something wrong – why is this memory coming now? Why have I not remembered—
Francis is talking to me. He is smiling. His jowls are heavy and I can smell breath-freshener on his words. He is telling me to follow. They want a new Psych test. I’ve had three already this year – why do they need another?
I don’t say anything. I nod, comply, conform. This man will decide my future.
Now I am lying on a gurney “Anders, can you hear me?” and I am being strapped in, head immobilized. “This is not a Pysch,” I say.
“No,” Francis agrees, “not the sort you’re used to. A new version. Doctor?”
He steps aside and there is a woman there – Fischer? – no, no, it’s not her, this one’s younger, fewer smiles, more detachment. She doesn’t look at me as she ties a strap across my forehead, holding me down. She injects me then – right between the eyes, before I can say anything. Now the smells are sharper – almonds? Almonds and antiseptic.
“You’re sure?” the doctor asks Francis.
“He’ll do,” he says, and then—
A bright light. Brighter than a thousand suns, it skips my optic nerve and burrows straight into my brain—
* * *
My scream was still echoing around the basement.
* * *
For a moment I felt peace. A kind of peace I’d not felt for months, maybe years, and I had an irresistible desire to hold it to me, to remain in a kind of half sleep in which I was warm and comfortable and nothing could ever, ever touch me. But I couldn’t. I was lifting irrevocably towards full consciousness, and soon I was back in the gloom of the basement. I was lying on my bed, surrounded by the rest of the crew. I opened my eyes – or maybe they were already open, and I was only regaining my awareness – and saw the others all watching me. I sat up slowly and scanned their faces. Fergie looked shocked, and maybe a little sick. So did Dmitri, and Keegan. Max and Greigor were staring at their feet. Abidene was wearing a grim expression. Weng was as dispassionate as ever.
“What happened?” I croaked.
“That’s what we were goin’ to ask you,” Fergie said.
“You—” Maggie stopped and swallowed. “When Max pried open the puzzle box, you collapsed. I—” She shook her head.
“Water,” I gasped. Dmitri forced a bottle into my hand, spilling lukewarm liquid over my blankets. I drank urgently. My face was bathed in sweat. The slight movement of air from Max’s ventilation system chilled it instantly. Hot and cold, as if again I had pneumonia.
“What happened, Anders?” Maggie asked.
“A…I think…a memory. I think it was a memory.”
“A memory of what?”
Riding out on a half-track…climbing up towards the minehead…. Taking off my rucksack and pulling out a bundle – a bundle of wires wrapped around three strips of explosive…burying it next to the comms building…
…stalking through the corridors, the empty, echoing corridors; reaching up to turn aside a tiny pinhead camera…
…outside again, warm and strong inside my suit, the base black box carried easily in two hands…. Heading for the smelter, setting the box onto the ore smasher and stepping clear…
It took some time before I could say these things to my colleagues.
* * *
Later, some unknown, unmeasured time later, I was sitting at the table, picking listlessly at some of the nutritious mush Abi had prepared. Weng and Fergie came downstairs, their twin clouds of breath merging and dissipating slowly.
“Fischer and Petrovic are fine,” Weng announced. She went over to sit on her bed. Fergie came to sit across from me. Between us the puzzle box lay in pieces. The wooden sides removed, neatly arranged. The electronic device that had lain inside had been carefully removed. It still made me sick to look at it.
“So is he safe?” Fergie asked the room. “Is he still gonna kill us all?”
All eyes now turned to me. I could only look back helplessly.
Keegan gestured at the collection of chips barely half an inch across. “Maggie…you think this thing—”
“It broadcast a high-frequency tone, beyond normal human hearing.” It was Max who answered. “That was the trigger. It was – I’m pretty sure there was a sensor made to detect the sounds of breathing, that would go off when Anders reached a specific point in his natural sleep. It’d happen every night, but the locked-off part of the mind would control whether he actually did anything or just went back to sleep.”
“So…?”
“I’ve deactivated it. He should be safe.”
“Willing to bet your life on that?” Fergie grinned humorlessly.
She hesitated, then nodded. I glanced round to the others – to Greigor, to Weng, to Dmitri and Abi. I saw nothing there. Just…just deadness. No emotions, no energy.
Fergie took up one of the wooden panels and turned it in his hands.
“So what now?” I asked.
“What d’you mean?”
“Is – this enough for you?” I could hardly bring myself to ask the question. “Do you believe me? Do you – do you trust me?”
There was silence. I’d – we’d both been speaking softly, but I suddenly realized that no one else was moving. Everyone was listening, waiting.
Then, almost infinitesimally, Fergie nodded.
I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath.
“But there’s a lot more we need to know,” Keegan said. “I mean, Anders has told us fragments – there’s still a whole account to give, a lot more that we need to find out.”
I shook my head. “I – I’ve tried…I just can’t remember – I mean, I know it must be in my head somewhere, but it still feels like I’m fractured, things still aren’t—”
“You’ll need specialist medical care,” said Weng. “Drugs we don’t have here. Knowledge we cannot access. It is possible that your memories will rebuild themselves in time. But there is nothing we can do to speed the process. Not here.”
Fergie stood abruptly, a look of grim determination on his face. With an odd kind of formality, he spoke. “Anders. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for blaming you for all this.” He reached out a stiff, unsteady hand to me.
I took it, and we shook. I gave him a weak smile. “You’ve nothing to apologize for. You were right all along.”
“Yeah. I was, wasn’t I?”
“So what do we do now?” Dmitri asked.
“We survive,” Max said. “We cooperate and we survive.”
“Four more months…”
“We either work together or we die,” I said, and I realized for the first time just how much, how very much I wanted to live. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to do everything I possibly can to see the sun come up again.”
Epilogue
Survi
val came at a cost. The changes occurred so gradually that we barely noticed them, but just occasionally I would catch sight of my reflection and see a stranger there. The flesh had melted away from us all: that was immediate and obvious. Abi and Maggie kept the worst effects of starvation at bay, and none of us suffered from diarrhea or dehydration. But I was bald now. All of us were, as our bodies stopped diverting precious energy to hair growth. Abi’s beard went first, then mine, then Fergie’s and Keegan’s. After a while I found it hard to remember Max and Weng as ever having hair. Our lips split and bled.
It was an oddly gender-free world we lived in. We were all walking skeletons, skin shrunk against our skulls, ribs protruding horribly. The saving grace was that it was happening to all equally. We didn’t need mirrors, the differences between us inconsequential. We all stank the same. Without privacy there was no shame. Nudity meant nothing; even shitting into a bucket in the corner did not bother us. Real equality.
A visitor, an outsider, would have found us truly disgusting, but there were pleasures to be found in this solidarity. This was a shared experience; no one person was any better than the other.
Fischer and Mikhail were the lucky ones. They didn’t feel the pain.
Max became distant as time passed. The stresses on her pushed us apart, and, never the most articulate man, I had neither the words nor the energy to make things right. As days turned to weeks, to months, I realized it was too late. If there’d ever been easiness in each other’s company it was certainly gone now.
Instead it was Weng I became closest to. Only she still refused to interact with Greigor, always unforgiving. Sometimes – in the oddest way – she’d creep over to my bed and silently insinuate herself against me, like a cat nuzzling for warmth. But we never had sex. No one did. No one had the strength. She and I would just lie together in silence. I never knew what she was thinking. No one asked questions like that anymore.
After the first month the crew ran out of words. We’d been through the arguments and the practicalities enough times, and even our personalities retreated as the cold slowly bit down on us. And as our differences diminished, so did my anger towards Greigor. Without his film-star looks and rugby-player physique, he was just pathetic, and I wasn’t human enough to feel anything but numbness for the things I’d lost. Although I knew I’d be haunted forever by the sight of the memcard on the brazier, I just couldn’t feel it. Later, if we ever felt warmth again, then I’d cry again.
We survived. We survived, and we lived, and we endured in a twilight world of browns, ambers and grays. Time ceased to exist. There was sleep and there was wakefulness. There were jobs and there was rest. That was all that mattered.
We weren’t aware of the bitter chill slowly easing as we passed midwinter. The changes were too small for us to detect. We just knew that the fire was warm and everywhere else was cold. But then one day I went out for more coal, Max by my side, and there was a low yellow arc on the horizon.
We stood, emaciated and exhausted, and stared at it for a long time. Then we went back inside and brought the rest of us out to see it too. The nine of us watched the sky. We thought of the dead and the maimed. We held hands, identical and anonymous in our warmsuits, and stood in silence.
The night shift was drawing to an end.
Finally, a long, long time later, we were rescued.
You know that story better than I do. You came by crawler: you, Dr. Gabriel; Technician Istevez and Operations Executive Baurus. You made the long journey from Tierra to find us. I still wonder what you made of us, whether you could tell us apart, whether you could bear to be near us.
We all knew that there’d be questions, an inquiry, that we’d be drugged and tested. We didn’t care. All that mattered was that the night shift was over. The night shift was over and we’d made it through alive.
Acknowledgements
This novel exists because of the efforts of more people than I can name, but here goes: thank you to all at Flame Tree Press for taking a chance on me, for producing a wonderful cover and for being a pleasure to work with. Thank you to Laura Williams of PFD for her expertise, and to the gallant members of Abingdon Writers’, and especially to the AB-FAGgers, for their tender eviscerations of early drafts.
Huge thanks to the lovely people of Twitter for keeping me company through long days of procrastination. But the biggest thanks go, of course, to my family, who have been forced to cope with my feckless, unproductive ways for far too long and really should have complained more than they did.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2018 Robin Triggs.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, Mike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-038-1, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-036-7, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-039-8 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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