MoonFall

by A. G. Wyatt

  Remembering the importance of not upsetting his cellmate, he looked cautiously around for the bike magazine. It lay in the corner of the cell, shredded into tiny scraps. The sight of Blood Dog’s only comfort torn to pieces made Noah’s blood run cold. If someone had done that to piss the monster off, then it was bad news. If Blood Dog had done it himself then it was appalling.

  “Think they can put me on trial?” Blood Dog said, his fist hitting the wall again. Dust danced from the concrete. “Think they can kill me, the mother-fuckers? Well that ain’t how it works, is it?”

  When Noah stayed silent Blood Dog turned his eyes on him. The anger in those eyes made the blood pound in Noah’s ears.

  “I said is it?” Blood Dog said.

  “No sir,” Noah replied.

  “Sir?’ Blood Dog said, stepping away from the wall. “Who you sir’ing? You trying to be funny again?”

  “No,” Noah replied. “Nothing funny here.”

  Never had he spoken a truer word.

  “No one makes fun of me,” Blood Dog said. “No-one fucks with me. No-one kills me. You know why?”

  Noah shook his head, sank onto his bunk and tried to back out of sight as Blood Dog approached.

  “Cause I ain’t never found no-one I can’t fuck or kill,” Blood Dog replied. “Girls, guards, gangsters, funny motherfuckers in prison cells. Everyone gives it up to Blood Dog in the end, one way or another.”

  Blood Dog tugged at his crotch as he stared down at Noah.

  “Mother-fucking elders think they’re gonna kill me,” he continued. “Stand me up in front of some shitty-ass lawyer, spout some laws and charges, then string me up. But that ain’t gonna happen. They know it. I know it. This time tomorrow I’ll be back in my cell. And someday soon, when I get out of here, I’m gonna kill every last fucking elder.”

  The room was closing in around Noah. His heart felt like it was being squeezed in a fist, pressure building, blood racing. He was trapped, surrounded on every side, concrete behind and to left and right, Blood Dog looming like a wall of flesh in the front of his vision.

  “Won’t just be them though, wise guy.” Blood Dog looked down at him with an intensity Noah could only hope was hate. “Cause there ain’t nothing in the world I can’t kill or fuck.”

  Footsteps were approaching along the walkway, footsteps and the rattle of keys. Noah’s breath was getting fast and shallow, his head spinning as the ceiling loomed down upon him, shadows closing in from every part of the room.

  “Gonna kill those elders,” Blood Dog growled. “Gonna kill the guards. Gonna kill that bitch Burns who put me in this place. Question now is, what am I gonna do with you?”

  Blood Dog grabbed Noah by the throat, lifted him up against the bunks. His hand tightened and Noah choked, gasping desperately for air. He looked down at Blood Dog’s mad eyes, felt his own hands and feet twitching as he fought to stay still, not to struggle, to stay calm for the guards who were coming. Weren’t they coming, hadn’t he heard them coming?

  The moment stretched out like a shadow spreading across Noah’s world.

  Then a metal club clanged against the bars and a key rattled in the lock.

  “Put him down Blood Dog.” Burns stood in the doorway, club raised ready for trouble. She almost seemed to be smiling. “There’s a cell waiting for you down at the Council Chambers.”

  Blood Dog’s hand disappeared from around Noah’s throat and he fell sprawling on the floor, panting for breath.

  Burns slapped manacles shut around Blood Dog’s wrists and ankles, the chains cutting his strides to a slow shuffle. As he was led out the door he turned back to look at Noah.

  “Fuck or kill,” Blood Dog said. “Your choice.”

  As other guards led the prisoner away, Burns turned to lock the cell door. She looked down at Noah.

  “You alright there?” she asked. “Need the infirmary?”

  Noah shook his head.

  “Fine,” he gasped. “Just need a minute.”

  He tried to push himself manfully to his feet, failed, instead settled for what he hoped was a casual sprawl against the bottom bunk.

  He doubted he was fooling anybody.

  “He’ll be back for one more night,” Burns said. “Sure you don’t want to tell me something, get yourself a different cell?”

  “I ain’t a Dionite,” Noah rasped, gathering his thoughts ready to explain.

  She shook her head.

  “Whatever.” And then she too was off.

  Noah slid down to the floor, looking up at as much open space as the cell could hold, trying to get his breathing steady.

  One more night.

  Fuck or kill.

  His whole body trembled in fear. He felt like he might break down crying, or burst out screaming like Iver.

  He really, really needed to get out of this place.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SMALL WORLDS

  NOAH WASN’T SURE how long he lay on the cell floor, first trying to get some control over the whirl of panic in his mind, then—when that proved futile—giving in and letting it consume him. Sometimes you had to give in to the chaos to come out on the other side. Sometimes you had to live with the pain to heal.

  And sometimes you just had to lie on the floor, in the dried out remains of your own old vomit, letting the thoughts fly by. Because if you didn’t, then those thoughts would batter you down.

  Night had fallen by the time the thoughts settled and Noah once again found himself in control. The darkness probably helped – it was harder to feel oppressed by the close concrete walls when you couldn’t see them. That was one of the reasons he’d always liked the stars, they were so damn far away they became a sign of the vastness above him, an emptiness so broad he could never reach its limits. His Pa had bought him a star chart once, brought it back from one of his work trips, and talked excitedly about how certain he was that man would reach the stars someday. That dream was shot to shit now – mankind could barely wipe its own collective ass, never mind pull together the technology to get off of the ruined Earth. But that star chart had made Noah’s room feel bigger when he was a kid, just like the darkness made his cell feel bigger now.

  He got up, stumbled over to the corner and took a piss in the cracked and grubby john. That at least was one discomfort he could relieve.

  That done, it was time to come up with a plan. It didn’t need to be a good plan, not yet. Sometimes just having a plan and acting on it got you going, led towards working out the real plan. Sometimes those in between plans even worked out, though sometimes they just led to slightly scratched chains and no kind of progress.

  “What we gonna do then?” He reached down, patted the empty air in his holster. He’d never noticed how much comfort he took in Bourne, how much saner he felt talking to the pistol than muttering to himself. If that was crazy then at least being crazy was better than being Blood Dog’s bitch.

  Of course, the two might not be mutually exclusive if he didn’t work out some way clear of this mess.

  He figured he must have missed a good stretch of the evening because the cells around him had mostly fallen quiet. The one voice still muttering away was the one he wanted to hear, and that was Iver.

  In the absence of a good plan he was shifting back to the one he’d been working on, just at a faster pace. Learn as much as he could about the Dionites, get Burns to question him again, and prove to her that he wasn’t one of them. If Iver let slip something she wanted to hear about these people then, even better. Though Noah didn’t reckon folks told Iver much they weren’t happy for him to share with the sky, the walls, half the prison, and the pixies dancing inside his own head.

  “Phalanges, metacarpals, carpals...” Iver was muttering to himself, head pressed against the bars.

  “Hey, Iver,” Noah hissed, settling down on the floor by the door of his own cell, looking across the space between them.

  “Busy.” Iver held up a hand. “Temporal, zygomatic, maxilla…dammit, I missed so
me I missed some, it’s all gone I missed some...”

  He started rocking back and forth, knocking his forehead against the bars, dreadlocks flapping like tentacles on some sad sea monster.

  “It’s OK Iver,” Noah said. “That’s in the past. You’ve got the Dionites now, and they’re coming to save you, right?”

  “They’re coming for me?” Iver looked up with a big innocent smile, childlike, and radiant.

  “That’s right,” Noah said. “Least that’s what I heard. The chief or mayor or someone’s sending them to get you.”

  “Oh no,” Iver said. “No chiefs. No mayors. No presidents or kings or CEOs. Who needs rulers and lawyers and laws when you can be free in the forest, when you can live back with nature like Gaia intended, when you all live as one, one mind, one body, one heart, one intention and happiness, oh yes.”

  “So you folks live in the woods?” Noah said.

  “Oh yes.”

  Iver sighed and lay back on the concrete floor of his cell, up against the bars so that he was staring through the murky ceiling glass above them and at the stars beyond. He seemed to have almost drifted away, then just as Noah was wondering what to ask next he started up again.

  “I used to be like this place, all rules and regulations and order. I thought I had to put everything into a neatly structured box. My mind was one neatly structured pile of boxes, like a shopping aisle not a human brain. And I’ve seen inside brains. We try to pin them down, to order them and separate them and say ‘this is the frontal lobe, it does reasoning; this is the occipital lobe, it does vision.' But that’s not how we work, man. Not people and not brains. It’s all connected, all a tangled and beautiful collection of connections. There’s more to a mind than just a brain, there’s the soul as well. And each soul isn’t separate, it’s part of the whole world, living and loving together. The Tribe understands that. The Tribe has had their eyes opened to what it is to be truly human. No leaders, no commanders, all working together.”

  “The tribe being the Dionites?” Noah could see the sense in it all. Those people with their tattoos of nature, living out in the woods, thinking hippie thoughts like Iver here.

  “Oh yes,” Iver said. “We live the happy life, not the ordered life.”

  Noah tapped his fingers against the empty holster. He needed a way to turn this around, to lead Iver’s thoughts towards something more specific, more useful. An aim or a plan, the sort of stuff Burns had wanted to get out of him. He could hardly say ‘hey Iver, you guys planning to steal these people’s oracle? How’s that gonna go down?’ But Iver did like to talk, and maybe if he started big he could steer him around to the details.

  It was hard to be patient given what was on the line, but at least a little patience was going to be needed.

  “So you folks have got it worked out, huh?” he said. “You understand the answers?”

  “Can anyone really understand the answers?” Iver said, to Noah’s intense irritation. “We can only work towards them, for life is a journey. I thought I had the answers, laid bare with my scalpel and with my bank account. But I was wrong, so very wrong. We are only steps along the path. Even when we find Astra, that’ll only be one more step along the way.”

  “Astra?” Noah asked. “What’s Astra?”

  “Astra is the dream. Astra is the hope. Astra is what we seek to unshackle us from the ruins of the past and propel us into the future. Astra is not all that matters, but Astra is the goal, the great step forward, the hope for love and unity and a clearer world. If we are worthy, if we live freely and well, if we do not allow ourselves to be bound by laws and by walls, then maybe one day we will find it...”

  Iver’s voice trailed off. Noah lay in the silence, pondering this new detail, this new name. Astra. It could be anything. Could be a person or a place or an idea or just some broken down old car that Iver associated with his own hippie dreams of the future. But it seemed to matter to him, and maybe the rest of the Dionites. If it meant something to Burns then maybe knowing that the Dionites were after it could be his out. But if it meant nothing to her then he needed to know more.

  This whole business was like trying to get spares for an engine when he didn’t even know what sort of car it came from. He just had to keep collecting as many bits as he could and hope that some of them fitted into the spaces in the end.

  “Hey man, what’s your name?” Iver peered through the bars straight across at Noah. There was a clarity to his voice, a focus in his expression that Noah had never seen there before.

  “Noah. My name’s Noah.”

  “Does that make this your ark?” Iver asked. “You got two rabbits in there? Two snakes? Two doves?”

  Noah had heard the joke a thousand times and he’d grown to hate it. But here in jail, where he faced only horrors and hard labor, it was a relief to hear anything even close to funny. And coming from Iver it was hard to hear any malicious intent in the words or to react with resentment.

  To Noah’s surprise he found himself laughing. And as the sound rippled through his body, shaking loose all the tensions of the previous days, something broke within him. As if from nowhere laughter turned into tears and he trembled on the cold concrete, overcome by it all. A great bout of sobbing broke forth from him, and when it ended he was the most relaxed he’d felt in years.

  “Shit, but I needed that,” he said, sniffing and wiping the tears from his face. It felt childish and absurd for a grown man to break down like that, but it felt strangely satisfying too.

  “We all do, sometimes,” Iver said. “It’s OK to feel, man. I had to learn that too.”

  Iver poked his arm between the bars, splayed fingers reaching out across the space between them. Noah did the same, just wanting some human contact that didn’t come with menaces or a beating. He couldn’t quite reach, their fingertips straining, only inches apart. Noah felt himself knotting up again in frustration, but then he looked at the smile on Iver’s face and he realized that this was enough.

  “That’s it man,” Iver said. “Give in to the good as well as the bad.”

  Noah drew back his arm, settled down with a contented sigh. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that it felt good to be alive, but it sure didn’t feel half so hideous anymore.

  “You got a last name Noah?” Iver asked.

  “Brennan.” Noah said. “Noah Brennan.”

  Iver burst out laughing. There was a madness to the sound, his mind slipping back into itself again.

  “What’s so funny?” Noah asked.

  “I knew a Brennan,” Iver said. “Man who mattered. Man who made things different. More the outdoors type though. With the tracking and the trapping in between the other bits, not your fighting and smuggling and Blood Dog death dance crime dance city dance antics. Not an Apollo man. No no no.”

  “You’ve got me wrong, Iver,” Noah said, once again realizing too late where he should have started the whole mad conversation. “I ain’t one of these Apollo folks. I’m an outdoorsman, a Tennessee man, like my Pa before him and his Pa before him.”

  “Brennan I knew was a Tennessee man too,” Iver said. “Must be a Tennessee thing. Like mockingbirds and country songs and dead Indians. Poor Indians, all trailing off into tears, all because the white man couldn’t live right by others never mind by nature. We should have listened, should have lived, should have saved ourselves from our doom, our moon doom, doom moon, moon moon silvery moon two eyes a nose and a mouth...”

  “Guess so.”

  “Old silvery Tom Brennan,” Iver murmured.

  Noah jolted upright at the sound of his Pa’s name.

  “Tom Brennan?” he asked. “You knew an outdoors guy from Tennessee called Tom Brennan?”

  “Uhuh,” Iver murmured. “Looked a little like you too. All…moon eyed, doom eyed, you know? Like the weight of the world wearing down on him. Like he might just let it grind him into dust. Or moon fragments, scattered across the sky. One, two, three, four, five...”

  Iver raised a
finger, apparently counting the endless bright fragments in the haze of the meteor belt across the southern sky. But Noah didn’t care about moon rocks right now.

  “Iver, listen to me, look at me,” he said. “This Tom Brennan, might be that was my Pa. Did you meet him after everything fell apart? Do you know where he was when it all went down? Do you know where he went?”

  But Iver was gone, vanished into the sky and the numbers and whatever dreams went on in the back of his head. Noah tried to get more out of him, but it was no use.

  He lay back himself and looked up at the stars. Had his father really lived through the apocalypse? Did he have some connection to Iver and his Dionites? It was a crazy thought, but this was a crazy world, a baboon in Virginia sort of world, a world where damn near anything could happen.

  Whatever tomorrow held, tonight he didn’t want to retreat back into the confines of his cell. He dragged his mattress from the bed and put it down next to the door so that he could look up through the bars at the stars. He lay back, hands behind his head, and let the sound of Iver’s counting lull him to sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BLOOD

  IF THE NIGHT had been one of fear and then hope, the next morning was one of terrible disappointment. Any kind of plan to get out of his cell, and thus away from Blood Dog, relied on Noah getting ahold of Sergeant Burns, convincing her that he wasn’t a Dionite and maybe even sharing some knowledge he’d gained about them. She seemed like a woman who prized information – why else had she worked so hard to get it out of him? Maybe she’d be interested in Iver’s talk of Astra.

  It was a long shot, but it was the only one he had.

  Unfortunately, as the guards led him from his cell down towards the canteen for his breakfast and chains, there was no sign of Sergeant Burns.

  “Excuse me.” He took a chance on pausing by the guard room that looked onto the main hallway, addressing the back of the nearest guard. “Is Sergeant Burns here? I believe I’ve got some information that might interest her.”