by Jeff Long
“Can you feel his heart?”
Veins stand out on the man’s throat and forehead. The disciple goes slowly, his knuckles brushing the ribs. This is terrible. It is glorious. A man’s life in his hand!
“Wrap your hand around his heart. Be careful not to sever anything. This is important. Thread your fingers between the tubes leading in and out. Do you have it?”
“Yes.”
“Now close your grip on it. Squeeze slowly. Don’t puncture the walls or collapse its chambers. Keep the blood contained.”
The heart beats like a wild animal in there, slippery and desperate, something amphibious. The stranger shakes his head in horror. He doesn’t understand this awful invasion. Everything happening inside his chest wall, he feels everything.
The disciple wants this to be over. He would seize that engine and tear it out, or crush the man’s throat and be finished with it, but the angel’s voice keeps insisting on precision and pace and care.
The disciple strains to hold the heart tight. At last it begins to surrender. The muscle weakens in his grip. The man’s hands melt from his arm.
“Watch his eyes,” says the angel.
The eyes stutter. The mouth forms a word. The disciple releases his grip on the bearded throat. He lowers his head to hear the man’s last testament.
“Ike,” the man whispers.
The disciple freezes.
The heart slows. It stops. Suddenly the disciple wants to force it back to life.
The disciple becomes aware of rocks being piled up behind him, closing off the front of the burrow. The angel is sealing him inside.
“Over the coming days, I want you to listen to him,” says the angel. “I want you to learn his name, memorize his voice, gather his tales. I want to know everywhere he goes on his journeys.”
“But he’s dead, Lord.”
“You must learn how to listen. True hearing is like true seeing. It takes time. Be patient. Fast. Meditate. Listen.”
Except for a small hole, the entrance is completely blocked with rocks now.
“This is your tomb,” says the angel. “You are dead to the world. When I take the rocks away, you will be alive again.”
“You’re leaving me in here?”
“Death is your teacher now. This pilgrim’s voice will guide you upon the river of sentience. His body will teach you impermanence. Its corruption is a gift to you. See through the illusion of flesh.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“I will visit occasionally. Now give me the heart,” says the angel. “I have a need for it.”
The disciple tears the heart from its mooring of vessels and pulls it out. The heart is surprisingly light for such a workhorse. He hands it through the opening in the rocks. In return, he receives several containers of water.
“Make them last,” says the angel.
A moment later, the opening seals shut.
The disciple cries out.
“Patience,” says the angel. “You are conquering death.”
“Lord, please…” The disciple pushes at the rocks, but they weigh many tons. Now he has become like the angel, a prisoner inside the stone, unable to free himself. That is the lesson, or at least one of them.
“Don’t forget your fast.” The angel’s voice filters in to him. “No snacking in there. Keep yourself pure. Eat wisdom, nothing more.”
ARTIFACTS
SUICIDE EPIDEMIC ALERT
U.S. HOTLINES ASSOCIATION
Abduction Survivors at Extreme Risk
To all professionals and law enforcement agencies: be alert to severe depression among survivors of the Halloween abduction incident. We have now logged the seventeenth suicide by a survivor within nine weeks.
An epidemic rate of suicide is considered anything over 20 per 100,000 in a normal population. The survivor population—comprised of family and friends of the abduction victims—is around 1,000, making the suicide rate more than 100 times higher.
Several demographic factors may be occurring within individuals. Grief is the most obvious, but the survivor population is reportedly no more depressed than normal for post-death populations. The western states of the U.S. have the highest rates of suicide nationally, and most of the abductions occurred within the west. But again, comparing to the larger western states’ populations, the survivor self-destruction rate is off the charts. Seasonal affective disorders (SAD), medications, mimicry, and other factors may also help explain this epidemic of suicides.
An unusually high incidence of delirium and hallucinations has been reported among the survivor population. There is no plausible explanation for this at present.
23
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Rebecca watched through the thick glass of her railroad car as they pulled out of Travis Station. Entering the frontier was like leaving history. The lights of the settlements dimmed. Things got poorer in a hurry. The land turned meaner, at an average speed of forty-five miles per hour.
As the railroad coursed deeper, the towns they passed dwindled into slums, caves, and two- and three-man camps. Rebecca asked the engineer to stop the train at the next station so that her men could stretch their legs, but he refused. “Up and down the line,” he said, “no one wants your bunch of thugs and strongmen. No offense.”
“But we’re the cavalry,” Rebecca said, trying out the argument. “We’re the guys in the white hats.”
“Not when you breathe their air and shit in their water and steal the food off their tables.”
It was refreshing to have someone without an agenda speak so plainly to her. She had come up front to ask for the rest stop, but also to escape Clemens and Hunter, and the rock and country music, the smell of armpits and gun oil, the cigar and doobie smoke, the beeps of Game Boys, the Promise Keeper meetings, the flexing, the trash talk, the ball stats, all of it. The engineer welcomed her company.
“I admit we breathe the air and shit in the water,” she said, “but we haven’t stolen a thing that I’m aware of. Every step of the way, we’ve paid top price with U.S. dollars.”
“The catch is, they like your money too much,” said the engineer. “These folks out here would sell every last grain of rice to you, and they know it. Then they’d end up with a pocketful of cash and a bellyful of nothing. They don’t trust themselves; how can they trust you?”
“We have our own food,” she said. “And I’ll tell the men to mind the local sanitation.”
“That’s only the beginning. You’re carrying diseases from the surface. You’re a whisker away from starting World War Three with China, which is ten times closer to where we live than to America. And now you’re about to bust open the hornet’s nest with the aboriginals.”
Aboriginals, Rebecca noted. Not maggots, not demons, mushroom people, or bullet bait. Aboriginals. As if they were part of the local order. “We’re here only to save our children,” she said.
“These people have children, too,” said the engineer. “They don’t want to lose them to outsiders. Their sons would join you. Their daughters would tempt you. You’re trying to save your children. They’re trying to save theirs. From you.”
“Once this is over, we’re leaving,” she said.
“But that’s the worst thing of all for them,” he said. “You can leave. Most of them can’t. This is where they live now, for better or for worse.”
“How can we bridge the gap then?”
“Are you sure you want to?” he said.
“Why not?”
“The dark has its own terms.”
“How do you mean?”
“Folks change,” he said. “Necessarily.”
At the end of twenty-seven hours, the train pulled to a halt in a shantytown built on ledges. “Electric City,” a sign grandly announced. But all Rebecca saw were a few kerosene lanterns. Then she spied what looked like the Eiffel Tower looming above the settlement. It was a drill rig.
“Is this the end of the line?” she asked.
The engineer said, “For
me.”
Angling for a better sense of their chances, Rebecca tried a bit of bravado. “You might as well stick around,” she said. “We’re going to need a ride home before you know it.”
The engineer looked at her. He started to reply, but suddenly busied himself with his levers and dials. That bad, she thought.
Big, armed brutes with shaggy heads milled around outside, scratching at lice, prowling the tracks, slinging guns: total barbarians. Then she recognized some of the faces. These were her men.
While her army unloaded its mountain of supplies from the train, Rebecca climbed up to the shacks and caves to introduce herself. The citizens of Electric City were wildcatters. They were drilling for HDR, or hot dry rock, “the mother of all mother lodes,” as one man put it. “We’re going to save mankind from itself.”
The idea was to tap a bed of dry heat, pump water down, catch the superheated steam that came back up, and generate electricity. One day soon, according to several gentlemen, Electric City was going to light not only the Pacific Interior, but the whole world. Oil, coal, nuclear: all were about to become obsolete. “You’re looking at the richest men in history,” another driller told her.
Until they struck HDR, however, they were some of the poorest. Three years of hard labor had not generated a single penny. Determined not to go into hock to the railroad, the drilling suppliers, the banks, or anyone else, they had tightened their belts, literally, until they looked almost like prisoners of war.
Rebecca decided on the spot to invite the whole population of Electric City—a grand total of twenty-three men, three women, and five children—to share a meal with them that night. It seemed the prudent thing. There was no telling what she and her army were going to encounter down lower. By sowing a little goodwill here and now, she could start to build a safe haven for their eventual return.
She returned to the rail just in time to see the train pulling out. As it slowly departed, dozens of lights started flashing from the windows of the cars. Rebecca was startled to see men inside—her men—taking pictures. The moment each man spotted her, his face fell or he turned away his eyes. They pulled back from the windows or ducked down.
For an instant she tried to believe it was the engineer’s fault. He simply hadn’t given the men time to get off. But the truth was plain.
A voice spoke. “Be happy.”
Rebecca turned. It was Beckwith, the sniper. “That must be half of us,” she said.
“More than half,” he said.
Didn’t he understand? “Those are our soldiers,” she said.
“Those are tourists, ma’am. A few days from now, they’ll wake up in their beds and this will all be a dream. Except they’ll have snapshots to prove they were here.”
“But we’ve barely begun.”
“Sub warfare isn’t about the numbers, Ms. Coltrane. You’ll see.”
He didn’t understand. “I trusted them.”
“There was nothing to trust, ma’am. You can’t lose what you never had. Those men didn’t really exist.”
The train’s lights wormed off into darkness. The sound of steel pipe gonging and the grinding drill took over. Down on the tracks, a fistfight broke out. Rebecca tried to be philosophical. At least her fighters liked to fight.
For lack of a better spot, they made their first camp right on the rail bed. Those with no experience pitched tents. Hunter and the other Drop Zone veterans didn’t even bother with sleeping bags. Off by themselves as usual, they simply unrolled ground pads and set to cleaning their guns.
The locals arrived for dinner in clean clothes. Their white shirts and shaved faces made a sharp contrast to the desperado look that many of Rebecca’s rangers were cultivating. For all their poverty, their guests did not come empty-handed. Some brought pretty fossils they had unearthed. Some brought food.
“Now did I say this was a potluck?” Rebecca chided one father as his boy handed her a platter. It had various meats, all laid out in neat rows. The boy looked like a cherub, but without the rosy cheeks or baby fat. Two of his fingers were splinted with tape and a pencil.
With a smile, Rebecca tousled his curly hair. Secretly she was feeling for any lumps or horns or other symptoms of the deep. His skull was smooth, though, which put her at ease. Because if the boy was whole and healthy and undefiled, then her daughter might be, too.
“What do you say to the lady, Neil?” said the father.
“Thank you, miss, for the party,” said Neil.
“And what do we have here?” Rebecca asked, lowering the platter.
“Bush meat,” Neil said.
“A few of the local specialties,” said his father. “Lots of protein. Plus it boosts your night vision. That or the water does. Or something in the air. No one knows. You take what you can get.”
“Which one should I try, Neil?” Rebecca said, steeling herself. When in Rome…
“This one’s crawdad,” Neil said. “This one’s red tapioca. This is fish.”
Rebecca tried a bit of everything, even the things with antennae and feelers. She politely asked their recipe for the tapioca, which turned out to be fermented tadpoles.
“Where did you get all this?” she asked.
“The cave provides,” the father said, as if it were a cornucopia pouring fruits into open hands. Rebecca looked at Joe’s gaunt cheeks and the blue veins on his forehead, and decided there must not be any pioneer blood running in her, because she would never have put her Sam through such deprivation.
“You live entirely off the land?”
“We do now. It’s root, hog, or die down here,” he said. “We have a foraging team out right now, sweeping the upper tunnels. When it’s not your shift on the rig, you’re out hunting and gathering.”
“You work hard,” Rebecca said.
“We are bringing light to the world,” the man replied.
Such conviction. The platter of food was a declaration of their self-reliance, she realized. “Did your mother prepare this, Neil?”
“She’s not here,” said Neil.
“Would you bring her over when she gets here? I’d like to meet her.”
“She ran off,” Neil solemnly told her. “She was a coward.”
Rebecca’s smile froze. She tried to think what to say. The woman had run off? To where? Why? And that ugly word, “coward,” it wasn’t something a child should use for his mother, not ever.
“I’m sure she loved you, Neil,” she lamely offered.
“Not anymore,” said Neil. His father slowly patted him with one scarred hand, a picture of exhausted perseverance.
But Rebecca had a sense about this. Something was off. “Every mother loves her child, Neil. They don’t ever quit. That’s why I’m here, for my daughter, to find her.”
“I know. Daddy told me,” said Neil. “She ran off, too. Just like Mama.”
Rebecca started. She stared over Neil’s head at his father, and there was no apology on his face. “You’re wrong, Neil,” she said. “My child was stolen. A lot of children were. The hadals came and took them from their homes.”
“Then how come they didn’t steal me? I’m right here, not a zillion miles away.”
“I don’t know,” said Rebecca. “Maybe you can tell me.” She had wondered the same thing many times. How was it that the colonies had escaped scot-free?
Something was going on down here. The settlers were not unaware of the hadal presence, and that went back well before the abduction. She couldn’t put her finger on it. They seemed almost to coexist. So far no one seemed willing to talk about it. But if it was true, if the settlers and hadals were quietly avoiding or ignoring one another, if they were going along to get along, then these villagers had severed their ties to the surface. Rebecca saw no gain in making accusations, though. She and her army might yet need the colonists’ help.
She changed the subject. “How did you break your fingers, Neil?”
“Hunting.”
Kids hunted in Texas all the time. B
ut down here, in this blackness, and with the hadals lurking? “You were hunting?”
“The young ones have a talent for it,” said the father. “They hear and see things the adults don’t.”
“So you go with them?”
“They’re keener without us mucking it up.”
“But it must be dangerous.” She was playing mother hen. Old habits.
“They know what they’re doing. They only go after the lame and the strays.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked Neil.
His father answered. “Everyone pulls his weight here.” He gestured at the towering drill rig. It went on gnashing at the earth. “Someday it will be theirs.”
She looked at the splints made out of pencils. “The doctor did that?”
“We doctor ourselves,” the father said.
Their search for hot rock had become a religion. The rig was their idol. “This is a child,” she said.
“He’ll mend.”
“But what if he mends crookedly?”
The father understood her meaning. “You are so certain about your way,” he said. “Well, hang on to that faith of yours. Hang hard. Because down here, without that, you are nothing but an animal. Break faith, and you are lost forever.”
A chill ran through Rebecca. It came together in her mind. Neil’s mother had not run away without her son. She had been driven out.
Rebecca said nothing to him. She couldn’t fight all the world’s fights. There was evil all around. The best she could do was push it away long enough to snatch Sam from its clutches and get back to the sun.
“How long has it been since you had apple cobbler?” she said to Neil. “See that table over there? You tell them I said to give you seconds with your firsts.” She handed the platter of delicacies back to the boy. “Make sure you take your daddy with you.”
Rebecca avoided the locals after that. The evening stretched on. Out came the booze. Before long, the men were howling at the moon and getting brave. No one would miss her. With a few steps, she left her own party.
With her light off so that no would follow, she felt along the railroad tracks with her feet. Beckwith had taught her a trick for seeing in the night. It involved looking around objects instead of at them, using your peripheral vision. It took practice, he said, which was clear from her stumbling.