by Forbes West
You wish the Counters an awkward goodbye as they leave your new home. You and Jaime watch from the front door as they walk down the hallway to the elevators.
Jaime nudges you. “Want to get something to eat? There’s an observation area on the roof. And grills.” He checks the refrigerator. “They’ve left us Network Beer. Alcohol, Sarah. Take a look. Oh and they left personal liquor license forms to fill out in the refrigerator…” Jaime shakes his head. “I don’t know why they left them in the fridge.”
Your mood picks up a bit at that news, and you take a closer look. “You’re the man now, dog,” you reply.
* * *
Jaime hands you a white fluffy towel with the crest of Solomon’s House University imprinted on it, and you take a shower in the second bedroom’s bathroom. You stand in the shower for a long time¸ maybe thirty minutes, running that hot water all over, scrubbing away the memories of the train trip and the day in the dungeon, cleaning underneath your fingernails, and washing and rewashing your hair with little hotel-style shampoo bottles.
As you dry yourself off, you look in the mirror. You don't know if this is possible but you look like you’ve lost more than a few pounds, like a skeleton with two red coals for eyes.
Wearing an oversized Solomon’s House University sweater and sweatpants that smell of mothballs and were part of your move-in gifts, you walk out of the bedroom and look for Jaime. You see a note on Network stationery—he is at the observation lounge at the top of Mission Friendship.
After a long elevator ride to the top, you emerge on the rooftop to encounter not a single resident. There’s an incredible view—the mountains, the stars, Star in the Mountain, the walled village, and the train station far off. Clouds drift across the night sky with all those different stars looking back down on you and the seven ethereal moons orbiting above. There are little, round, neon-green birds sitting on the railing. Behind you is a fire pit that burns steadily in a giant brass centerpiece, the fire crackling and puffing as the logs split from the heat. The air is tinged with fragrant smoke. A strange robot, skeletal and ancient-looking, beeps away, watching the fire and stoking it constantly.
Jaime has found an old, portable transistor radio, and is grooving to yet another rock and roll classic. His eyes are closed as he sways along with the music.
You watch him awkwardly wiggle his knees back and forth for a good few minutes before you touch him on the shoulder. He jumps a few feet straight up into the air.
After turning down the radio, he leads you to where a couple of wicker chairs are set up with a tray table next to each. “Found all this stuff up here.” Each tray table is complete with a sourdough sandwich, empty glass, and small bag of Doritos. It feels like no one else is here at the Mission.
“Quite the view here, hmmm?” You nod in response, looking at the dinner intently. “Glass of milk, uh, Earth cattle, perhaps? Water? Pre-mixed virgin pina colada?” Jaime opens a large plastic red and white cooler that he’s brought from downstairs. It has the Network symbol on it. It’s full of ice and beer bottles strangely covered with the hammer and sickle symbol and the words COMECON BEER, plus a few other beverages. The Network is not stingy when it comes to welcoming you to its Mission.
“Milk,” you say. “Still feeling a little loose from the whole train thing...”
He pulls out a bottle and pours you a glass. You down half of it in a single gulp.
He sits down in his own chair after grabbing a dripping bottle of the Hammer and Sickle. He takes a bottle opener from his pocket and pops off the bottle cap, which he then throws over the railing. You’re too high up to hear the clink of it falling against the road. “This is fun; this is what couples do,” he says, looking very content. “Boy, I hope no one was down there...”
You eat with relief. Jaime takes out an old Casio digital wristwatch, a cheap silver thing that would have looked dandy on any frugal gentlemen from the 1980s, and tosses it to you. You look confused.
“Not really my style...” You toss it back, and he immediately tosses it right back to you with a grin. “Keep it on, Sarah, and watch the clock. When the digital screen goes out, that’s because of the EMP blast. When you see a blank face on the watch, that’s when it happens.”
“When what happens?” you ask, looking over the watch.
“When it happens, you’ll know it.”
You nod, still looking at the watch, feeling weird. There seems to be a charge in the air, a sort of static heaviness over everything.
The sandwich is great. It has meat inside that tastes like lobster and is buttery, somewhat hot, with a spicy mayo sauce all over it. The sourdough, interestingly, is fresh. “What’s in this sandwich? It’s so freakin’ good,” you say.
Jaime shrugs. “Wish I knew. Something alien, I guess. Maybe like those trilobite meat things we saw back at Solomon’s? I got it from this little deli shop on fifteen.”
That stops you from eating any more of it. You pop open the Doritos bag and are about to plop a chip into your mouth when Jaime abruptly stands up and walks away. When he comes back, he has that large, boxy transistor radio he had earlier. Moving the tray table to the side with a scraping sound, he puts the boxy radio on his lap with a groan, turns it on, and starts to fiddle with the dials. There is this funky popping sound, then a repeated buzzing noise. A warbling of static comes in and out of the transmission. You eat in silence for the next few minutes, listening to the noise, munching on chips as Jaime fiddles with the radio.
Finally, an old Led Zeppelin song with a steady, thumping beat blasts out of the radio. “Got it,” Jaime says. “Now we got music again.”
“Old man rock ‘n roll? Still? Good god, it’s like being on your dad’s boat back that one day last summer. You remember that? Shit, he put Jimi Hendrix’s greatest effing hits on loop for two hours. It was soooo annoying. I actually became happy after a while that Jimi choked on his own puke, and that’s a mean thought. ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand’. ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand’. Oh man.”
Jaime laughs hard. You eye him, realizing something but not letting the thought hit the conscious surface of your brain at first.
“Yep, I thought that too. Not the Jimi choking to death part, that’s really, really mean Sarah, but, you know...”
As you laugh, the watch face goes suddenly blank. “It just went dead, Jaime,” you say.
“Storm’s a coming,” he says, rubbing his hands together.
The Led Zeppelin song is interrupted as the radio cuts out into an eerie emergency band drone. The announcer, a woman with a crisp English-sounding accent, comes on. “We interrupt this radio broadcast to update you on the special flash storm warning for the Super Sargasso Sea region. Any and all persons within five kilometers of the center of Sargasso-3 Antediluvian city must take immediate shelter. We repeat, this is a flash storm warning...”
And then the storm starts. The black sky, once pockmarked with white stars and several moons, is covered in a fast movement of clouds. The wind becomes stronger and there is a rich, droning sound. The roof shakes so much that it rattles the glass of milk off your tray table and knocks it to the floor, shattering it. Neither you nor Jaime actually hear the glass break over the discordant warning sirens going off and the roar of the wind. The sky lights up, red, then blue, then red again, and then it turns into an almost fiery orange.
You walk to the edge of the observation deck and watch the fantastic display. A ring of white circles spreads out from some distant location, swirling in and out of the clouds, making at first a chain of circles and then shooting from the sky to the ground.
You lose your footing for a moment due to the wind and stumble to the side. Green lightning sporadically shoots out in all directions. The entire world seems to light up in white flashes as bright as millions of flashbulbs popping at the same time.
The sky turns a deep bluish-green and becomes incredibly thick with clouds. A sound like a thousand angry screa
ms comes forth from the sky.
“You’re not who you say you are, are you?” you cry out to Jaime. He doesn’t hear you.
The wind becomes its strongest now, rattling the multi-paned windows in Mission Friendship with flashes of white that become more and more frequent. It seems that the whole world is being bashed into whiteness.
Jaime gives you a funny look, his mouth moving soundlessly. “I am Jaime Van Zandt,” he finally says.
The storm stops. There is now utter stillness. The clouds disperse. Stars once hidden begin to shine again. A dog barks in the distance and a crow caws back.
You wonder about Jaime but let it go.
“I’ll get myself outfitted in the Funeral Breaks in the morning, and then I’ll be off to go check out my little modded bike,” he tells you. “You remember me talking about that, right? I’ll be off doing what I want to do—sketch and salvage. God, can you believe we are standing on another planet?” Jaime shivers in excitement. “In the morning, I’ll be off to grab the bike and go. And the road leads ever on and on.” He looks so happy. “You’ll be okay here, right? I mean, it looks like the Network don’t even know about our little, ah, excitement back in Solomon’s Bay. The Counters never mentioned it once.” He crosses his arms. “Lord, we just started an adventure.”
“Must you leave so soon, Jaime?” You notice once again how exactly he looks like Tyler.
“This is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life, Sarah.” He smiles. “Be myself, in a strange land. Thank you, Sarah. You helped make this happen.” He kisses you on the cheek. “I’m living my dream.”
You stand on the deck, listening to the music coming from the radio and looking at the sky.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay. You go out there, and do your dream—and I’ll start mine here.” You manage a smile.
Later, you lie awake in your basement apartment with the lights off, trying to sleep but unable to. There is a note on your welcome basket about meeting for work tomorrow at 9:00 am. Jaime can’t stand it any longer. You watch quietly as he gets dressed in the middle of the night, throwing on a leather jacket and a backpack. He walks to the kitchen and comes back with a water bottle from the refrigerator. You get out of bed, studying what he is doing.
“You’re leaving now? It’s three in the morning.”
Jaime shrugs. “Night-time is the right time. Can’t sleep, gotta walk.”
“But it could be dangerous out there,” you squeak. “Really, come on. Go to bed and leave at daylight.”
Jaime shrugs again. “Why? There are all-night inns in the Funeral Breaks. It’s a twenty- minute walk to that walled village. I’m up, I’m ready, and I’m going to go. I want to see that Triumph waiting for me in the Free Zone. Besides,” Jaime takes a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip out of his backpack and stuffs it into his belt. “Counters had an extra shotgun just lying in the trunk, loaded.” He breaks the gun open, takes out two red shotgun shells, and reloads it. “Loaded, right. If they come and ask, play dumb. But they won’t. My personal intellectual assessment of people like that, based on what I have read, is that they will be too embarrassed about having lost the gun to either report it or try to track it down. I’ll be fine. It’s time for the adventure to begin.”
Jaime opens the apartment door slowly, peeking out. “Look, Sarah,” he whispers. “I think you came off-world with not the clearest and most rational reasons. I really do. So can I give you some advice?”
“Give me advice? Call me irrational? Says the guy who makes a really big assumption and steals a gun?”
Jaime smirks. “Look, what I’m saying is this. We are here on another planet. Don’t end up doing the same thing you did back on Earth. This is such a cool situation.”
“Jaime?”
He looks you over and shrugs his shoulders. “You should come with me. Just leave. What are they going to do? This isn’t Earth. All the old rules of life just went out the window.” When you shake your head, he steps out the door, leaving you to spend the next five hours awake and alone in your new basement apartment home. Your phone, which you didn't even know you had, rings and wakes you up just as you start to doze a little. It’s one of those old style rotary telephones, older than you, and the noise scares you to full consciousness. A woman on the other end yawns into the phone as you pick it up. “Dee Ricco, Mission Manager, how can I help you?”
You state she called you, not the other way around. “I’m Sarah Orange, the new Settler Service Rep.”
“Oh, my God. I’m so tired from last night. My apologies. Oh jeez, I just wanted to call you to check in. Did you and your husband have a good night’s rest?”
“Yes, we did.”
“And you got our goodie basket and our note about today? Did you get all of that?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Oh joy! Great! We will see you at nine sharp!”
You get slowly out of bed, bleary-eyed, and shower and dress. Your stomach rumbles, and your legs and arms ache from all the tension of the last few days.
Bored and over-tired, you start to sing that Led Zeppelin song you heard last night. “Cryin’ won’t help, prayin’ will do you no good... Mama, you got to move...”
Chapter Nine:
First Day
In the lobby, you can smell the hot coffee brewing automatically in one of those glass-walled offices off to the side. A strong-looking woman, mid-thirties, blonde, is brewing it and it smells wonderful, the fragrance filling the large lobby. She wears the Network flight suit tightly, her breasts about to pop out, with a white scarf around her neck to show some individuality. The front glass doors are still locked—it isn’t officially start time. Ni-Perchta and human workers are starting up at McDonald’s, switching on fryers and grilling whatever needs to be grilled.
The woman welcomes you into her office with a wave. She introduces herself as Dee Ricco, Mission Manager. Still attractive in some ways, although the wrinkles and over-tanning have caught up to her. She isn’t as thin as she perhaps once was; she mentions to you twice that she needs to get back into “fighting shape”. You are wearing your own blue wannabe NASA flight suit with the American flag on your right shoulder. She gives you a once over, seemingly sizing up the competition.
“It’s really good to meet you. I understand, just loosely, you had some issues with immigration?” She sips her coffee, half-lidded eyes watching you closely.
You sip on your own mug, nodding. “A little misunderstanding. Just a small delay. Thank you for understanding.”
“Of course!” Dee tosses her long blonde hair casually to the side. “This isn’t America or even Europe. We have to operate on their time, not our own.” Dee glances out the window of her office. “Well, I’ll have you shadow me today, helping you with touring Mission Friendship, how to sell one of our places, how to do work orders for our maintenance team. Our maintenance is good—we have Ernesto, who has been here since the Morgan discovery, believe it or not, and Te-La-Calles, the Ni-Perchta foreman. All of our…Buenos Dias, Ernesto!”
A slightly paunchy Mexican in his mid-forties passes by. He walks over, eyes on the ground, and opens the glass door of the office. “Buenos Dias, Dee! Hello, hello.” He puts out one of his big hands and shakes with you. “The new SSR, eh? You had a good train trip all the way?”
You nod. “Fantastic. It’s beautiful out here. Very nice. I even got to see the comet ritual.” Ernesto’s eyes meet Dee’s, as if they’re sharing a little joke.
“Oh, yes, yes, you know that’s a rare one,” Dee says.
Ernesto leaves. He waves to someone you don’t see as he goes, and in a moment you meet him for the first time. Shorter than you, slicked back hair, he comes into the office with a gleaming, white-toothed smile. He has a briefcase in hand and over his black flight suit he’s got a holster, just like a police detective back home. A pistol sits there comfortably.
“Our new SSR. Great to have you on board. Jake Alexandros. I’m the Bureau of Off-World Affairs agent here a
t Mission Friendship. I’m, sort of, your friendly representative and advisor from the US Government. I help work with the Network people and locals.” He chuckles and so does Dee, again at some inside joke.
“Good to meet you. I heard you and your husband were delayed a little, but got in safe and sound. Good, good. Well, I know that our Dee here is set to help you out through the day but I’ll be here, too. Oh, jeez, what time is it?” Jake swings his gaze to his watch. “Nine oh five. Oh well, let’s get these doors open and start touring today, shall we? We want our tower up and running for the day!”
You see a tall Aryan superman walk over and open the glass doors of the lobby. He wears the same motorcycle cop-like uniform as the rest of the Counters. Armed with a submachine gun and carrying an ori-baton heavily studded with different types of orichalcum on his utility belt, he introduces himself in a heavy Afrikaner accent. “Oscar Botha, Chief of Mission Security, Madame. I am the ori-man around here, just in case the Winkies get out of line.”
Jake nods and pats him on the arm. “Botha keeps us safe at night. There’s been so many—misunderstandings—between us and the indigenous population.”
Botha gives you a once over and nods. “Quite right, sir. Quite right. The Winkies need to know we are not afraid to live here in the colony.” He winks at you. “How’s your husband doing?” he asks intently.
“Oscar, Oscar, remember about the word “colony”. We don’t use that word here. “Settlement” is more appropriate,” Jake reminds him. You and Botha ignore him.
“Left me for another woman. Rat bastard,” you say perfectly, true acting behind every word.
Botha takes out some gum from his pocket, offers you a piece. You politely refuse. He stuffs his mouth and starts smacking away at it. “Your husband is an interesting fella, yeah? Just takes off on you the first day you are here.”
You frown. “He’s, he’s, unfortunately, he used to beat me as well.”
Dee looks shocked and sad and puts out a hand, rubbing the top of your own. “Well, sweetie, no more of that. If he’s gone, Botha won’t let him in.”