Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  But when Bends reached the roof door to the longhouse, he found only more questions. There were a handful of colonial guards hauling up crates and canisters, creeks of sweat trickling down their faces. Realizing that it probably wasn’t the best time to be around the guards – especially when he was carrying a book full of whiskey – Bends turned and was about to dissolve back into the shadows where he belonged.

  Before he could, though, Bends heard a familiar bark. “Dr. Bends! I have a few questions for you.”

  Bends sighed and looked back to see Chief Armfelt. The security chief was short but bulky, with a fire in his eyes but his hair washed with snow. He pointed a meaty finger to Bends and curled it back, beckoning him closer.

  “But before I ask my questions, there is something I want to show you. Follow me.”

  For any other soul in the colony, Bends would have laughed and walked away, because nothing is worse than talking when no one’s listening. However, he knew better when it came to Armfelt. The people loved their chief out of fear and never turned their backs on him. But Bends didn’t love him so much as he found him an equal, like monsters passing each other in the dark woods.

  And so Bends followed him, just a few steps behind. The two creatures entered the longhouse, climbing down the ladder into the main hallway. One of the apartment doors was opened, its light spilling into the dark hallway like a lighthouse on the rocks of the night. The moment they stepped through the door, Bends knew that they were in the Khunrath apartment. On the countertop, he saw a computer hard drive cracked open, its electronics disemboweled. And along the edges of the room, there was a false wall of books, hundreds of them, stacked high until they swayed. Bends bent down and examined some of the book titles on the spines, each of them having something to do with computers. It seemed exactly like the sort of room a technology director would keep.

  “Those books were stacked even higher, you know,” Armfelt said, noticing Bends looking at the books. “I’ve had my men carrying out boxes of them out for some time now. They’re going to get a lot of overtime for this.”

  “What do you need these books for?” Bends asked, still looking at the books. “Are you looking to start a library?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Doctor,” Armfelt snarled suddenly. His face softened just a little. “It’s none of your damn business what we need the books for.”

  “So what’s the point of me being here if I can’t ask questions?”

  “You have it all wrong. You’re not here to ask me questions – I’m here to ask you questions.”

  Bends shrugged. “A question such as…?”

  Armfelt didn’t answer at first. Instead, he walked over to the far wall, where there were long strokes of ink on the wall. With a sweep of his arm, Armfelt knocked down a few dozen bricks of books off the wall, and the graffiti on the wall suddenly made sense. Bends found himself staring at a note written on the stone: Dr. Bends is the cancer that killed my wife. Dr. Bends is the darkness that every colonist sees when they close their eyes.

  “Can you shed some light on this?” Armfelt asked. As Bends sat down hard at the counter, Armfelt continued, “What did he mean, that you killed his wife?”

  “It was a bad reaction to the painkillers,” Bends breathed, not really believing his lie anymore. “Where is he? Where’s Jules?”

  “Jules is gone, been missing since before the funeral.”

  As Bends sat in silence, Armfelt walked over to the door and closed it. Armfelt looked at the door for a few moments, as if trying to think an escape. But then he turned around and slowly approached Bends. As he did, he said, “You aren’t as clever as you think you are, Doctor. You think that we weren’t onto you? You leave your fingerprints on every poor soul that you break. But even then, there was nothing we could do. And do you know why?”

  “Well, Ragnar, it’s because you need a doctor, a good one. If you kill me for all of my crimes, you’re going to kill every one of my patients who needs my help.”

  “I can get another doctor,” Armfelt rumbled.

  “You think they are going to go through the trouble of hiring another doctor, after all of the cuts made in their last budget?” Bends sneered, clearly back to his old self. “They’ll listen to their money before they ever listen to you. And besides, I have a cousin who has connections with the board. Kill me, and you’ll see how much hellfire I can bleed.”

  Bends laughed to himself. “I thought you were smarter than this, Ragnar. But you’re just an executioner, a man who thinks he can deal out justice with his axe. There is nothing you can do that can frighten me, and you know why?”

  Armfelt didn’t answer, and so Bends continued. “Because anything you do shows how frightened you are of me. So go ahead – shoot me like I’m a rabid dog. Isn’t that what I am to you, hmm? Am I a sickness? I think I am a sickness. Touch me, and you’ll see how much I can infect you. You’ll kill yourself when you kill me. You know it’s true.”

  By this moment, Armfelt was shaking with a rage that Bends had never seen before, but that he wouldn’t mind seeing again. It was the earthquake from the abyss of frustration, the rattling of the slave’s chains. There was nothing Armfelt wanted more in that second than to bash Bends’ head against the wall until there was nothing left.

  But instead of murdering the doctor, Armfelt told a story. “You know, when civilization fell in the last century, we lost most of our history with it. My great-grandfather did all he could by saving books and paintings and sheet music. And he passed the stories onto his son, who then passed them onto his son, who then passed them onto me. One of the stories I remember is one from the Greeks and their mythology, about a queen who kills her husband and would have murdered her son too. But the prince was away from the kingdom, and he exiled himself when he learned of his father’s murder. But years later, the prince was finally driven mad by revenge. He came back home to murder his mother.

  “After the prince killed his mother, he was chased throughout the land by three spirits. These spirits were goddesses from the deep earth, who were obsessed with justice, who wanted to restore balance to the world. They would have hunted and haunted the prince to the end of his days, chanting a song of terrible things and following him like his shadow until the prince would kill himself. And the prince would have done it, if not for a beautiful goddess who judged the prince to be innocent in his crime.”

  “Is there a moral to this story?” Bends asked, impatient.

  “Doctor, I think I know how you’re going to be punished, and it drives me mad. Because I want nothing more than to kill you, but I think you’re going to cheat me out of that by killing yourself. And your goddess isn’t going to save you, because you already murdered her.”

  ***

  2197 AD

  “Jules, I know that’s you,” Bends said, his laugh rattling. He peered into the darkness of his home, his drunken eyes stumbling over the shadows. “There’s no point in hiding anymore. Come on now, show yourself. This isn’t like you, you know. You’re just too kind and naïve. But how would I know the way a good soul thinks?”

  There was only silence, and Bends kept talking. “Your little fraud is over. You’ve been gone for so long, you actually got some people thinking you’re dead. They even have a memorial set up for you, planted next to your wife’s grave down in the hole. I’m told it’s nice. But I know the truth. I know that you can’t be dead.”

  Bends repeated himself, a bit more desperate than before. “You can’t be dead – I need you alive and suffering. You can’t be resting in peace. Tell me you’re alive!”

  The only answer Bends found was in his echo, which bounced off the stone walls of his hollow home. As the echo died, Bends took a step forward, his arm reaching out, his fingers dipping into the ink. He was going to find Khunrath, even if it meant walking through the one fear that every soul had: darkness. Bends took a few more steps, melting more into the night with every stride. The doctor felt such an urge to terrify someone that he h
imself would just have to do.

  Gemini

  2175 AD

  Almost seven million years before the play of man, the River Sedna began paving a road through an orchard of mountains. With nothing more than a shovel of water, the river carved a road out of the stone and smoothed it until it glistened like any other statue. Rock is hard, but water is harder. Within just a million years, there was a narrow but deep canyon – it was a hundred feet wide at its widest point but had a bottom of shadows. Its shores were two steep peaks, Poison Well Mountain and Cathedral Mountain, both of which rose well over a thousand feet. At the most, the River Sedna was bathed in sunlight for fifteen minutes a day, the rest of its time spent lost in its makeshift night.

  When the land became settled in the mid-1800s, prospectors walked along the thin strips of sand between river and mountain, panning for gold. But they didn’t find anything that shined – only fists of salt dredged from the water. The prospectors couldn’t understand how a mountain river could be so salty, but they moved on and quickly forgot the mystery. Another century passed before the prospectors returned, but this time for another treasure. The government draped a gigantic, concrete dam across the canyon, using the river’s current to provide electricity to thousands of homes. The road that the River Sedna had crafted was now a toll road.

  By 2048, as the last of the old governments fell, Sedna Dam was abandoned and left to rot. Without any engineers to maintain the structure, it did not take long for the dam to fail, and it gave a show when it did. The broken dam discharged hundreds of thousands of gallons a second, launching a tsunami down the narrow canyon. The reservoir that pooled behind the dam, which the locals had called Wine Lake, went from a depth of two hundred feet to less than twenty. Another dam failure a decade later washed away Wine Lake for good.

  But the River Sedna still rushed, beneath the bridge of the dam and through the deep valley. But the river’s origins, a lake tucked even higher up in the mountains, had mostly evaporated under the relentless sun. The river survived, although it was now thinner and saltier than ever. But even though drinking from the river was like drinking from death, the prospectors returned in the summer of 2085. In the years leading up to civilization’s fall, man had lost interest in salt. It got to the point where salt nearly went extinct, living in the captivity of the little shaker at the diner counter. But as man learned to live again, he suddenly thirsted for salt. And so this time, the prospectors returned, but this time they were far more interested in the salt pans that had formed in the spots where the river had dried up. The entire canyon was a beach into infinity of salt that blinded in the sunlight, and it was good.

  The salt prospectors grew a settlement on the banks of the dried Wine Lake. They called their town Acheron, after a word they saw in an abandoned book – they did not know that Acheron was one of the dead rivers in the Greek underworld. Even in spite of the word’s ancestry, the town lived and even prospered. The town became so drawn into the web of the salt trade that it nearly strangled itself, and it soon became incorporated into a company that rose from the ashes of Colorado.

  But like big fish eat the little, the Phoenix Charter from the east absorbed the company and its outpost at Acheron in the year 2107. The charter recognized the outpost’s potential and poured credit into it – soon, the town went from a population of 2,500 to over 50,000. The dry bathtub of the lost Wine Lake was only a square mile in total and never meant to hold that many people. And so Acheron packed itself together until it was no longer a city but a ball of twine of electricity. The light from the ugly apartments housing the workers rose above the crumbling Sedna Dam, like the morning sun pulling off the bedcovers of the horizon. While the last company had plans to tear down the dam, the growing charter had no intention of doing so. Rather, it incorporated the dam into a perimeter to safeguard the city. Acheron was not only a salt outpost but also one of the rare trade routes through the mountain range. It needed to be protected from the salt poachers and the highwaymen who were out to rob the travelers.

  And this was the way that Acheron survived for decades. And this was the stage that our actors walked onto in the boggy spring of 2175 AD. A convoy wormed its way through the thin canyon, with each segment of the worm being an armored van. The vans were a sight to see because there was nothing to see: each looked like a brick of steel on treads, with no windows at all. But windows weren’t needed because a driver wasn’t needed. Rather, they were driven by computer – the computer itself used satellite cartography to dance between the obstacles ahead. The new breed of satellites was so obsessed, that it could spot a single ant walking across the bottom of the valley. But that would have been showing off – the only sign of life spotted on the riverbed was the stray coyote, one of the few animals to survive the catastrophe a century before.

  That was not to say that there were not humans inside of the vans. They were there, huddled between the crates they were transporting, their rifles shaking. There had been bandit attacks in the valley before, but it was the only way to deliver the necessary parts to the salt prospectors. One of the vacuums they used for dredging the ancient riverbed had been sabotaged by bandits, and they needed the new part to stay on schedule. There was not to mention the containers of food, splashed with all of the colors, its smell wrapped airtight behind plastic.

  A fresh guard was thinking about this too, and he suddenly turned to his comrade and asked, “You think this is why the bandits broke that salt vacuum?”

  “What do you mean?” The old comrade sighed, drying the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

  The young guard pointed to the food that they were guarding. “What incentive do they have for breaking the dredging equipment? Unless they knew that we would have to deliver supplies?”

  “You’re thinking too hard – you’re going to break that brain of yours,” the old guard scoffed. The worried look on his face, though, showed that he was thinking the same thing. The walls of the canyon were tall and full of sniper positions. The old man had no choice but to put faith into the new model of armored van. The engineers claimed that the titanium hide was so thick that the passengers wouldn’t feel a missile strike the van, let alone hear it. But the guard was too old to have faith anymore, especially when it came to engineers.

  “Besides,” the old man said, “I’m more worried about drying out than I am about those thieves. We’re in the future here, but we still can’t make an air-conditioner that doesn’t break the first chance it gets.”

  “But this isn’t the future,” the young guard pointed out. “It’s the present.”

  “Wise ass,” the old man grumbled.

  Just then, the van shuddered to a halt, and the guards onboard stumbled forward, falling on the floor. The crates all around them swayed dangerously – but they held, strapped down by cables that were just strong enough. The guards scrambled to their feet, and there was a snap of shouts as they tried to figure out what had just happened.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know. Do the scanners show anything out in front of us?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “What’s the status of the other vans?”

  “I’ll check.”

  They were in the lead van of the convoy, and they were afraid at first, thinking the others would crash into them. But a satellite that was miles above them saw the first van stop, and it immediately halted the others. The guards in the other vans confirmed over the radio that they were okay, although just a bit rattled. For the moment, though, they were trapped – with their lead van disabled and the canyon too narrow, it was impossible for them to keep pushing forward.

  As the guards wondered what to do next, the old man sighed to himself. As he began putting on his bulletproof armor, the young man asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Outside – I want to know what’s holding us up.”

  “You’re going outside?” The young man asked, surprised. “But…well, you know, th
ey could be out there.”

  “Kid, you don’t have to be a coward for me. Come on out – a little sunlight never hurt no one,” the old man said as he fitted his helmet over his head, the visor cloaking his wrinkled face.

  A few minutes later, the rest of the guards in the van were suited up and ready. They opened up the door and climbed out, squinting from a sun they hadn’t seen in days. Through their glass visors, they scanned the steep walls around them. The guards weren’t really sure what it was they were looking for: perhaps the rustle of a cloak against the mountainside, or maybe the glint of a sniper scope in the sunlight

  As they rounded the edge of the van, the old man swore sharply, his visor fogging up as he did so. The satellites had driven their van into a quagmire of mud. The old man tossed his hands up in frustration as the young man knelt down to examine the quagmire. He pressed a gloved finger into the mud and struggled to pull it back out.

  “Where did all this mud come from?” The young man asked, trying to flick the stubborn mud off his hand without much luck.

  “I’ll bet that the Sedna flows underground around here,” the old man mused. “If not, then something is – enough to turn this into a patch of quicksand.”

  “How come no one’s hit this before?”

  “I don’t know, kid. I’m no geologist – don’t ask me questions if you know I don’t have answers.”