Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  That morning shift, there was a man walking along the third floor corridor. With wavy hair the color of storm clouds and a thin goatee, Loup Martinique looked exactly like an aging man trying to recapture his younger decades. But he wore a sneer like many wear their smiles, creasing the wrinkles around his eyes. He always walked alone down a hallway, which was never by accident. Whenever a poor soul saw him approach, they turned and walked away with shaking knees. After all, Martinique was the compliance inspector for the colony – heaven save the worker who couldn’t live up to his expectations, because nothing else was able to rescue them.

  He had tucked under one arm the weekly compliance report of every worker in the colony. In the other hand he had a cup of his morning coffee. Martinique loved all of his routines, but he enjoyed this one the most of all: reviewing reports with the security chief over a cup of coffee. At the moment, he was dancing in his mind over the revelation that Arturo Solis had not been to work for the past few days. Martinique couldn’t wait to see the look on the chief’s face when he mentioned this. The last time a worker missed a day at the job, they spent a week in the basement prison. The architect built them a prison, and Martinique reasoned that they might as well use it – it would be rude not to.

  Martinique reached the chief’s office at the end of the hallway. Taking a sip of his coffee, he was about to knock on the door with his other hand when he noticed that it was opened just an inch. A bit confused – the chief had kept the door to his office closed at all times – Martinique pushed the door opened and peered inside. There wasn’t anyone in the office, baffling Martinique even more and he didn’t like not having an answer. Stepping into the office, Martinique called out, “Sir?”

  At first, there was nothing. But then someone suddenly stepped inside from the office’s balcony, causing Martinique to nearly drop his coffee in surprise.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t know you were out on the balcony,” Martinique said, gathering his self. He didn’t like showing weakness, especially in front of a lady, because he thought that was what men were not supposed to do.

  “That’s quite alright, Inspector,” Diamond Latch said with a smile. With Atlantic blue eyes and long, golden hair that fell to the side, she looked as peaceful as the sun rising over the ocean. When she was first hired as the deputy chief of the colonial security force, there were those who thought she was too motherly for such a rough position. But, there were some who thought she was the perfect actress for the role. While the other security personnel were lazy and just broke down the colonists, Latch found the time and care to build them up into good people. It was because of this that Martinique hated her, much more than an employee is supposed to resent their superiors.

  “Do you know where Chief Armfelt is, ma’am?”

  Latch shook her head. “I was just about to ask you’re the same. I wanted to talk with him this morning, but I haven’t seen him at all. Isn’t that strange, Inspector? He’s usually the first one in the building every morning.”

  Martinique shrugged. “He might be sick.”

  “Well, if you’re up to it, Inspector, I say we stop by his house to see if he’s okay.” She stopped, and then she added, “Hopefully you aren’t going to throw him in jail for missing a day’s work. It wouldn’t be his fault for catching the flu, you know.”

  “I can’t picture myself arresting the chief today,” Martinique said curtly, clenching his fist inside of his pants pocket. He knew Latch was mocking him for doing his job and doing it well. The way Martinique saw it was he couldn’t be nice and efficient at the same time. He managed to force a smile out and said, “Let’s go pay the Chief a visit then.”

  The walk to Armfelt’s cliffhanger home was a short one. The cliffhangers, built specifically for the colony’s powerful, were located near the Sanctions and its guards for protection. Still, the walk felt much longer than it was. Along the way, Latch tried her best to be friendly and ask Martinique questions. But his answers were cold and clipped – he was determined not to be buried by her famous charm. The last thing he wanted was to be loved.

  Finally, they reached the chief’s home. The ladder to his door was not lowered, but this didn’t stop them. Latch took out her universal magnetic card – one of only a handful that could open any door in the colony – and swiped it in a slot etched in the rock wall. There was a clanking sound, and they stepped out of the way to let the ladder descend to the ground. They then climbed up the ladder until they reached the landing for the front door. The door was locked, but that had never stopped anyone before.

  The moment Latch opened the door and stepped inside, she felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. In her long career in law enforcement – from the time she was a guard back on Earth to her current role as deputy chief – she had smelled death so many times it almost smelled like perfume to her now. But this smell was new and brutal, smelling like clouds of gunpowder, raining sulfur against the lips of a thirsty world. As she walked through the curtains of death, she shuddered as the fabric of the smell clung to her, tighter than any dress she had ever worn.

  Holding the back of her hand to her nose and mouth, trying to dam the pour of the scent, Latch looked back to see Martinique shaking his head, looking dizzy. He said weakly, “What’s that smell?”

  Latch didn’t respond, at least not right away. She was too busy stepping down on the tiles that carpeted the floor like fall leaves. She should have been able to turn on the cliffhanger’s lights by walking across the pressure plates. But the pressure plates weren’t activating the electrical circuits, and the amber lights that crowned the ceiling wouldn’t dawn.

  “Ma’am, did you hear me?”

  “Do you have your flashlight?”

  Martinique pulled the flashlight from his belt and handed it off to Latch like a baton. She flipped it on and tossed the beam around the room. But wherever the light fell, there was only darkness. The walls were painted with coats of charcoal, and the furniture was heaps of ashes on the floor. The entire cliffhanger had been scrubbed clean of color by the hellfire.

  “Oh my,” Martinique breathed, having never seen anything like it. He called out, “Sir, are you here? Can you hear us?”

  “Shush, listen,” Latch said. “You hear that?”

  It was a hollow ringing, like coins falling into a dry wishing well. Martinique followed Latch into the next room, which was the bathroom for the dwelling. It was in that room that they found the voice for the strange sound: the charred sink was running water. The worms of water made their way through the broken sink, jumping into a puddle on the floor below. Latch tried turning off the sink, but it was no use – the sink was made of some of the toughest rock that could be found, and the fire had cracked it open like a nutshell.

  “Is it me,” Martinique asked, his voice muffled by the cloth he had pressed to his face, “or does it smell even worse in here?”

  “It might have been where it started,” Latch mused, shining the light around the bathroom, “but it still doesn’t tell us what happened to…”

  The flashlight beam suddenly stopped at a spot on the floor just a few feet away. Latch didn’t react at first, but when Martinique saw it, he swore in a language that had died out decades before, and that his grandfather had taught him, but only the swear words.

  After a long moment, Latch said with a tight jaw, “Oh my…well then.”

  What they saw was a pair of legs, standing upright on the floor. The sight looked like a statue that had crumbled down to the knees, but this was very real. There was what looked like tattered fabric – either from pants or a robe – that had melted to the legs. What skin showed through the cloth was burnt until it was darker than the ocean deep. The legs looked like they were wearing shoes, but it was impossible to tell. Where the legs once connected with their knees, there was only bone. Where the tibia bone was exposed to the light, it was as black and hot as coffee – even from where she stood, Latch could see the curls of smoke unraveling from it.

&
nbsp; The two guards stood there for a long count. Finally, Martinique took a deep breath through the cloth that masked his face and said, “He died standing.”

  “He did,” Latch nodded. “That’s more than anyone else could ever say.”

  ***

  In the wake of the chief’s sleep – as the tsunami of fire pulled back from the shores of coal – the colony learned how Armfelt was their soul. Armfelt’s blood washed over their hands, his tears trickled down their cheeks, and his last cry shook their throats like branches. In time, the chief’s blood would fertilize a new egg from the colony. That egg would break and a new people would climb out of that cocoon of shell, having finally forgotten his death, the paper cut having finally healed.

  But that day would not come for a while – now, the colonists were gathered in the hollowed heart of their stone temple to remember a life. As was the case for any funeral, attendance was mandatory for the colonists, and the security chief’s death was not a time to break tradition. And so, by the end of the day, the beat of the colony found itself gathered in the Connections, the church to the charter’s religion.

  Hundreds of people sat down on the cold floor, cushioned only by their thin mats. As they wriggled on the weak mats, their faces flushed from the heat of hundreds of colonists, the mourners realized that they had gone to too many funerals lately. But the only way to stop the funerals was to stop going to them, and the charter wasn’t going to allow that. No, the charter wanted them to be plagued by death every day of their lives, until they finally realized that their lives no longer mattered.

  As the colony sat in the melt of silence, a few brave souls stood up to preach the chief’s life to the congregation. As they did so, the gray fabric that blanketed Armfelt’s remains sat just behind the podium. As the colony grieved, many thought that Armfelt had been found dead of a heart attack. Few knew that they were mourning a pair of legs, which was all that remained after the chief had burned away. If the colony knew how he died, there was no telling the panic that would inspire.

  After a handful of speakers had spoken – even Solis reminisced about the time the chief had arrested him for pretending to be sick to get out of work – Latch stood up. She could feel the oven of stares as she walked through the kneeling crowd and towards the waiting podium. As she stood over the podium, rubbing her hands slowly over the steel frame, Latch looked at the notes that she had prepared. She didn’t dare look up. Latch knew if she did, she would be looking into the eyes of her unbelievers.

  The guards – her guards – who were sitting in the first row were glaring at her with a ripe doubt. After all, there was a reason why Latch often found herself working behind a desk at the Sanctions, instead of being out in the colony. To the old man, the guards were there to make enemies and not friends. And he had seen Latch smile too many times before – his philosophy was that a smile was weakness, the twitch of a nervous mouth. This idea was contagious and infected the rest of the guards – whenever Latch smiled her good morning to them now, they sneered back. Her soft hands had forged them into granite. She knew this was how they felt, but she was too nice to confront the guards over it.

  Latch cleared her throat. Then, still looking down at the podium, she began talking.

  “We’re many people, each of us with different eyes that look at the world differently, each of us with different voices that shout our names differently. And yet, we’re all here today to honor one man, one who’s our flag in death just as he was in life. Chief Armfelt was the consistent breed. He believed that order was the one constant in our lives, and that it would outlive him. And he was right – order will live on because I will be assuming his rank as security chief to our people. I will be his legacy of making this world a safer home, a more secure home. I will be the same unshaken foundation he was to you. And I will be the same promise of justice, first by uprooting the monster that killed Chief Armfelt.”

  For the first time ever, the funeral crowd at the Connections spoke. The colonists murmured amongst themselves – they were under the impression that the chief’s death had been natural. And now, now they were being told his death was murder. Who among them was sharp enough to cut away their anchor? They glanced around, realizing that with practically the entire colony in the cavernous hall, that there was a killer sitting with them, a demon in their temple. Martinique and a few of his fellow guards stood up and turned to face the crowd. They stared the whispering eyes back into silence, as the colonists remembered their place.

  Latch motioned to the guards and ordered, “Carry our dear Armfelt to his new home.”

  As the pallbearers carried away their chief’s remains, towards the waiting launch that would lower them into the sarcophagus of the pit, no one stopped to consider just how alive Armfelt really was. It was true that Armfelt was gone, wiped clean from one plane of existence. But there is more than one way to live.

  ***

  “Stop, thief!” Guard Haas gasped, as he chased the shadow through the cavern.

  It was just a minute before that Haas had been patrolling the stretch of ground near the leadership’s cliffhangers. While there, he noticed a lean shadow climbing down the rocky wall from Vicar Nathanial Johns’ apartment. When he tried shining his flashlight at the climber’s silhouette, the shadow vanished in the blade of his light. Whoever the bandit was, Haas had to catch him. If the vicar returned from his work at the Connections to find his cliffhanger ransacked, it would be on Haas’ head.

  But whoever the thief was, whatever it was that they stole, all Haas knew for sure was that they were impossible. Haas wasn’t much, but he was the fastest runner in the colony. And yet, even with his rubber tendons stretching to the edge of the snap, he wasn’t closing in on his prey.

  It was evening colonial time, and with it came the change in shifts. The arteries of sidewalk opened up and workers streamed between home and work. The shadow slipped into the crowd, but not before Haas saw the thief had long, straight hair that shined like stars in poetry. It’s a woman, Haas thought, but who? He thought he knew every one of the colonists, but he didn’t remember someone with hair that long and blonde.

  Haas found himself on one of the sidewalks that stabbed like a knife at the heart of the colony. The sidewalk was squeezed between Canal Christina and one of the many longhouses. And even from where he stood, through the rumble of the crowd of feet, Haas could hear the growl of the Dives, the massive waterfalls at the center of the colony that irrigated the underground granary.

  He jostled his way through the crowd of workers, ignoring their surprised yelps and demands. Haas almost knocked one of the workers into the canal as he ran. As he pushed through, Haas burst with a raspy voice into his radio, “Stop her – she’s at…she’s at the Dives!”

  And it was at the mouth of the Dives – where the canals poured through the massive, circular grate in the ground – that the chase suddenly ended. Guard Mayr had leapt out from behind a corner and tackled the thief. Both the officer and the criminal tumbled to the ground as one, their fall echoing against the grate of the Dives. The thief recovered, but Mayr put himself together faster. He pushed the thief’s face into the grate, one of his meaty hands around her neck, the other hand pulling a pair of plastic cuffs from his pocket.

  As Mayr roughly clasped the thief’s hands together, Haas finally caught up to the scene. His hands on his knees, gasping for air, Haas said, “Thank…thank you…for catching…her.”

  “Well, kid, you have to catch your breath before you can catch the criminal,” Mayr said gruffly.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  Mayr snorted. “Of course – it’s Jordan Pinto.”

  “She’s not related to Ram Pinto, is she?”

  Mayr looked at Haas as if he was an idiot. “Well, what would be the odds otherwise? They’re father and daughter.”

  “Let me go!” Pinto shouted, her face muffled as it was still pressed against the ground. “I want to see my father!”

  “You’ll see him
soon enough,” Haas said, kneeling down next to Pinto. “Now, tell us, what were you doing in Vicar Johns’ cliffhanger? What were you after?”

  By then, a crowd of colonists had begun to gather at the scene. They were not so much there because of the arrest itself but who the guards were arresting. Although they had seen plenty of Pinto’s father since his arrival five years before to maintain the oxygen recycling circuit for the colony, it was a rare sight to see the daughter. The last time anyone had seen her was almost a year beforehand. Rumor had it that she was agoraphobic, terrified to leave her cramped apartment for any reason.

  Just then, Latch cut her way through the crowd with the knives of her hands. She inhaled the sight before her and said to Haas, “Did I hear right over the radio, guard? That Ms. Pinto here had robbed our Vicar Johns?”

  Haas snapped to attention under Latch’s stare. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Does she have anything that belongs to the vicar?”

  “Um, well…” Haas said, his voice trailing off. He looked down at Mayr, who took the hint and began searching Pinto for anything stolen. After a few moments of searching, Mayr sighed and said, “She doesn’t have anything of the vicar’s, no.”

  “Then why are you arresting her?”

  A surprised Haas opened his mouth as if to speak, and then promptly closed it. Realizing that he had a whole crowd of eyes staring at him, Haas motioned for Latch to come closer. He whispered to her, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t mean to challenge you, I really don’t…”

  Latch smiled. “That’s okay, guard.”

  “It’s just that – well, I saw her climbing down from the vicar’s cliffhanger. I chased her from there to here. Why would she run that whole way if she had nothing to hide?”