She checked off an item on one of the pages, removed her reading glasses, and looked up at him with worried eyes.
“I just wanted to know how you were doing,” she said.
“Good,” Marshal said, poking at the pasta with a fork. “Good,” he added with slightly less enthusiasm. “I just… I mean we’re practically ready to go. New crisis, new solution… if we cut corners we can launch in the morning. All we need…”
He trailed off into silence.
“Go on,” Valerie said. “Let’s get it over with.”
“All we need,” he sighed, “is to decide who has to go.”
Valerie nodded. “Not you,” she said firmly.
“Val… it has to be me.”
“No!” she said, pointing at him with an index finger. “No, it doesn’t! You’re staying here! We have a little girl on the way, and I’ll be damned if I’m raising her without her father! Do you understand?”
“If I don’t go,” Marshal said, “then she may not have a life at all, Val. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one in the community who could fix any problem on board if something goes wrong.”
“Really? You got to work on nuclear bombs to get your engineering degree, did you?”
“Come on, Val. You know what I mean.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” they both said at the same time.
Professor Nicholas Scratchard popped his head into the room.
“Yes professor?” Marshal asked.
Sensing the tension in the room, Scratchard hesitated.
“What is it?” Valerie demanded.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” Scratchard said, looking uncharacteristically sincere. “I suppose this isn’t really the time, but… well, there was just something that I needed to say to you. To both of you.”
They looked at him expectantly.
“I… I wanted to apologize,” Scratchard said, looking at the floor and unable to meet their gaze. “I know I’ve made life rather difficult, for you... and for others. Today, I received a full-on indictment of just how disliked I’ve come to be and-”
“That’s not true,” Valerie interrupted.
“Professor,” Marshal said. “You’re one of this community’s most valuable assets. Aside from the fact that you are personally responsible for saving lives, your insight and analytic contributions are off the chart.”
But Scratchard was waving him off.
“I know all this,” he said, “and I’m not here fishing for affirmation. I know what I am, and I don’t believe I’d change, even if I could. But! The two of you, and others I have met during my time here… you restore my belief that humanity deserves to be saved, and in light of this fact, I’ve come to realize that you deserved better from me. That I am clearly incapable of giving it neither abrogates my responsibility, nor atones for my guilt. I am… sorry for that.”
For a moment, neither one spoke.
“That’s all I had to say,” Scratchard said. “Sorry to interrupt. Goodbye.”
The door closed behind him with a hurried slam.
“What the hell’s happened to him?” Valerie asked.
“That coffee cup must have hit him harder than I thought,” Marshal said, a hint of concern in his eyes. “Maybe I should call Dr. Burke, and have him take a look at him.”
“Anyway,” Valerie said, “he helped to make my point for me. You can’t go to Bangor. You’re too important here, and that’s final.”
“Valerie-”
“No!” she shouted, turning on him with an unexpected rage. “You listen to me, Marshal! You listen to your wife! You once said that everything you did, you did because you didn’t want to be the last man on Earth. Well, here we are! You’re the leader of a blossoming community with hope for the future and a real chance of survival. You’re universally admired, respected, and in some cases, feared. If I do say so myself, you have a wife who’s way out of your league, but who loves you and is carrying your unborn baby daughter inside her. You can literally write your own destiny at this point, and yet you’re running around, needlessly risking your life like a man with some kind of death wish! Why?”
“I don’t have a death wish.”
“Are you sure, Marshal?” she asked. “Are you really sure? You confronted the Americans with hardly any back up. What if they hadn’t been honorable? What if they had shot you, just to make a point? Did you even stop to think about the consequences?”
“It wasn’t-”
“And then,” she went on, “when you came up with a plan to help the Americans escape, you just had to go with them personally to try and outsmart this horde. Why? General Williams had heard your plan. He knew what he had to do. You were nothing more than a spectator, but you just had to be there, didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t expect-”
“Yes you could!” Valerie half-shrieked. “You’re the man in charge! Look, I’m all for this ‘I’m-a-leader-but-I-work-harder-than-anyone-else’ shtick you’ve got going on. Even though it means I hardly ever see you, even though it means our bed is usually cold, I get it, and it’s part of what I love about you. But Marshal, the self-sacrificing stops here! Your life doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to us! It belongs to your wife and daughter and the people you saved. And so help me God, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you just throw it away!”
Marshal’s eyes went cold.
“Don’t you dare look at me like that!” Valerie shouted. “Don’t you dare give me psycho-eyes! I’m talking with Marshal! Not the cold-blooded bastard who kills people when he doesn’t get what he wants! You’re going to deal with me, or… or I’ll…”
Tears of hurt and betrayal flooded her eyes.
He blinked, and with a kind of shudder, his eyes sought the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It kind of… just happens, you know? It’s not who I am, I swear. It’s not who my father was… he never was… that way with me or mom. I just…”
He licked his lips, and then raised frightened eyes to look at her.
“Am I crazy, Val?” he asked.
“What do you mean?’
“What if… what if I wake up,” he said, “and I’m alone in my apartment, and it’s all just been… some kind of fever dream? It’s all been so… lucky. What if I’m just hallucinating all of this?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No. I mean… of course not, but…” Marshal shook his head. “There’s a part of me that’s still… somewhere else. Back in my apartment, back with my parents in their car, back with a world full of strangers who… It’s like there’s an emotional, primal impulse deep inside of me that’s convinced that this, the here and now, is all too good to be true.”
The emotion in his voice cooled. “And then it’s like I’m standing in the spotlight of fear and terror, and everything changes. Everything all becomes so focused, so clear, so... real.”
He hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t be-”
“Yes,” Valerie said, jumping to her feet and holding him before he could turn away. “Yes, you should. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here, and I need you to be here with me. Please, Marshal. Be here with me, and I will keep you real. I promise.”
For a long time, they just stood there in each other’s arms, feeling each other’s warmth and drifting in the silence. And deep in his heart, Marshal imagined another similar conversation between his mother and his father long ago.
He pushed it aside. He wouldn’t make the same mistake.
“All right,” he said at last, not letting her go. “I’ll stay behind. Tomorrow morning, I’ll start asking for volunteers. And I’ll also… you know. The other thing.”
“Say it,” she chided, smiling at him with wet eyes.
“I’ll stop running around acting like I have a death wish,” he said.
She kissed him, long and passionately. Then, she leaned back with a mischievous smile.
“You want to
feel her kicking?” she said. “Something in our kiss just woke her up. She’s going nuts in there.”
Marshal put his hand on her stomach feeling for movement.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed.
“I know, right? Soccer player?”
“Nonsense. My girl will play hockey. I’m going to rebuild the Air Canada Centre for her, and she’ll be the next Hayley Wickenheiser-”
“You’ve got it backwards, sweetheart,” Valerie said. “Daddy’s little girl is going to have you wrapped so tightly around her little finger that you’ll be learning ballet.”
Marshal was about to answer when his communicator beeped.
He put it on. “Marshal here. This had better be important.”
There was a brief silence as Marshal listened.
“What, all of them?”
“What is it?” Valerie asked. “What’s going on?”
He held up a forestalling hand to her. “Calm down, calm down. Do we know who it was? Who? But… he was just here.”
Another silence.
“You’re kidding. What? Yes, we’ll be right there.”
He lowered his hand and the communicator turned off.
“We have to dress and get back upstairs,” he said.
“Why?” Valerie demanded. “What is it?”
“Professor Scratchard,” Marshal said, “just stole our blimp. Apparently, he’s flying it solo, and if the tracking beacon in the blimp is correct, he’s taking it to Bangor.
Chapter Forty-One: Day 267: Floating in the Sea of No Cares
He re-christened the blimp, The Vaccine.
With the Sun low in the sky behind him and the engines pushing full throttle, Scratchard leaned back in the Captain’s chair with a sigh of relief and lit up a cigarette.
It really was a mystery, he thought, that the world had never returned to blimp travel in a big way. It was so graceful. Serene. Flying was physics imposing its mastery over the pull of gravity, but blimp travel was more like escape. It was the bubble of a dreamer’s notion that slipped up into the air and away.
He exhaled a cloud of smoke. But that’s just how it was. All it required was one imprinted, historically-bad moment of PR, and people took their dreams elsewhere.
“Scratchard!”
He frowned, looking for the source of the voice, and saw that it was coming from a headset that currently sat on the co-pilot’s chair. He ignored it. It wasn’t likely to be saying anything that he wanted to listen to anyway.
So instead, he retrieved a leather satchel from the floor beside his chair and began rooting through its contents. There were a few necessities: Tupperware containers holding some cold chicken, leftover pasta, and some chocolate cake. There was an extremely rare bottle of sixty-four year old Glenfidditch Scotch that would have cost him a year’s salary before the outbreak. And of course, there were plenty of cigarettes.
There was also a music CD, which he pulled from the satchel and popped into the cockpit’s dashboard player, adjusting the volume to keep it from being too loud.
These kids and their wide screen televisions and computer games. Whatever happened to music? Whatever happened to the simple elegance of drifting into a quiet psychological journey played out by the miracle of music? It sometimes seemed as if music was lost on this generation, save as an accompaniment to some monstrous game or movie. Perhaps music had finally become too commercialized, with the dark conjuring of such creatures as boy bands and American idol and Internet appropriation. So it goes with culture.
He’d debated a little over just what sort of music he wanted to hear as he drifted into Bangor. Classical, of course, was most appropriate, but a bit cliché, not to mention cold and distant. Hard rock would have felt right, but not introspective enough for a slow trip to eternity, and far, far too angry. Country and Western was too mundane, soft rock, too syrupy, and too likely to depress him. Grunge was too messy, Goth too moody, Punk too flippant, Hip Hop too hostile, and Techno, too weird.
In the end, he’d settled on a band out of Newfoundland called Great Big Sea, who were a unique combination of folk rock and salty, sea shanties. Like all groups, they sang songs about love and life and freedom and hard work and interesting people they’d met and old sailor tales. On the surface, they were a band like every other.
In truth, however, they sang about none of these things. The distinctive feature of their music - and what Scratchard loved most - was that what the band was really singing about was the joy and wonder of being alive. Whatever the subject, whatever the mood, it was in every note they played. And it was exactly what Scratchard needed to hear as he sailed his barge of death into Hell.
The song Consequence Free started up, and Scratchard poured himself a small glass of expensive scotch and leaned back with a drag from his cigarette.
But the headset continued to squawk, getting louder and more angry by the second. Finally, with a regretful sigh, he picked it up and put it on.
“I’m not bringing it back, Marshal,” he said without waiting, “so you can stop asking. You just get on with the job of saving humanity, being a husband and father, and creating your perfect society.”
He took a sip and gasped in pleasure.
“It’ll all fall apart soon enough anyway,” he added. “It happened to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, and Genghis Khan, and it’ll happen to you. For the time being, however, go on dream-spinning.”
“Bring it back, professor,” Marshal said. “We’re launching the helicopters to fly out and force you anyway. Why not spare us the trouble?”
“Really? Firing up the helicopters, are you?” He took another long drag from his cigarette and adjusted the steering wheel with his foot. “How’s that working out for you?”
A long silence greeted this.
“Oh no!” Scratchard said in falsetto. “You’re out of fuel? How’d that happen?”
“God damn it, Scratchard,” Marshal shouted. “Did you sabotage the helicopters? Why are you doing this? I thought you wanted us to switch over to the Tesla engines.”
“Took me thirty minutes,” Scratchard said, examining his near-finished cigarette, “to hook up the engines. The Bastards guarding everything hauled them on board for me. All I had to offer them in exchange was a case of lightly drugged beer and a story that you wanted the engines installed. You should be flattered. Speaking to you and Valerie was the last thing I did before I hijacked this thing. As to why I’m doing this... I have my reasons.”
“That’s not good en-”
“Besides,” he continued, taking one last puff then butting out, “there really isn’t a need for anybody else to go, is there? I can fly this thing. It really isn’t all that difficult, given that I have no intention of landing. If there are any electronic problems, I’m more than capable of fixing them. That frees you up from going. And as for the nukes, that is my specialty. So I think we can agree that all contingencies are covered.”
“You can’t be serious,” Marshal said. “How are you supposed to come back? It’ll take at least until morning to get there. Then you have to drop the bombs while somebody steers… who’s going to do all that?”
Scratchard nodded all through Marshal’s speech, until the end, when he shook his head dismissively.
“Come now, Marshal,” he said, taking another sip of scotch and then pulling out another cigarette. “Let’s not be children. We both know I’m not coming back, and that this was a one-way trip from the beginning.”
A silence greeted this assertion.
“I mean, seriously,” Scratchard said, half-laughing as he lit up another smoke. “Delivering a thermo-nuclear device… by blimp? And you think we’re going to be able to just chug our way back out unscathed? Why not? And next we’ll try petting a tornado, or maybe strap on a scuba suit and teach dental hygiene to a Great White Shark.”
He chuckled as he watched the smoke curl away in the static air.
“No, Marshal,” he said. “This is the best solution.�
��
“Nicholas? Nicholas, please!”
Scratchard’s resolve faltered. “Eva?”
“Nicholas, I want you to turn around and come back this instant,” Eva ordered angrily. “Please, Nicholas. Please come back.”
“Eva, you have to realize the logic-”
“All I realize is that you’re an ass!” she shouted. “A blind, stupid, stubborn idiot! Are you so arrogant in your own narrative that you haven’t noticed how much this community needs you?”
There was a pause.
“Or… that maybe, I might need you?”
Scratchard almost dropped his cigarette in sheer amazement.
“Eva, I… I didn’t…”
“Of course, you didn’t,” she snapped. “Why should you? Why should I? To be honest, I don’t know if I want to kiss you or hit you, or even if I want to be with you, but Nicholas… please… come back.”
The trickle of desperation that leaked through in those last three words hit Scratchard harder than a dozen punches from Luca.
“I… I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I wish…”
He sagged in his chair, placing the thumb of his smoking hand against his forehead.
“I can’t turn back, Eva,” he said. “And you shouldn’t want me to. I’ll just… I’d never be able to… I thought you knew that. I thought you could see the masterpiece of dysfunction that I was, and I was happy with that. It meant you were safe from me. You need to be safe now, Eva. I break everyone I touch, and I couldn’t live with myself if I broke you.”
He took another painful sip of scotch.
“Besides,” he choked, as the burn took his throat, “What’s done is done. We’re on the cusp of losing everything if I don’t deliver this nuke in time. If I turn back now, we could all die. No, Eva. You’d do better with someone else. In fact, you’d do better with anyone else.”
In the silence, he thought he heard her crying.
“Screw you, Scratchard,” she said, “and damn you to hell.”
And she was gone.
For a long time, no one spoke, and Great Big Sea started up with Boston and St. John. As the soft mourning of the music filled the room, Scratchard thought for a moment that they had broken contact.
From Oblivion's Ashes Page 97