The Terminals

by Royce Scott Buckingham

  “South.”

  They’d gone south to find the Harsh Mistress in the next cove, Cam recalled. But they’d cruised half a day beyond that in a big, speedy yacht before hitting the pirate outpost. It might be a long trip.

  The blankets were in the utility closet. Cam opened the doors and pulled out two. There were new toothbrushes and paste. He hesitated, and then selected soap and shampoo. He handed them to Siena.

  “You miss this stuff, right?” he said.

  “I’d love some shampoo,” she admitted. She took them while Cam pulled a first aid kit and pretended to see if there was anything else they needed.

  “Want one of these?” he said as casually as possible, pointing to a toothbrush.

  Siena’s hand shot up to cover her mouth.

  “Was it that bad?”

  Cam bit his tongue. For all the care he’d taken, he’d still failed to approach it delicately enough. He shrugged and shook his head in a last-ditch effort to make it not a big deal.

  “You’re the one worried about it. I didn’t even notice.”

  She went to the nearby sink. A small round mirror hung over it. She hadn’t seemed to care about her appearance, until she saw herself in the cheap plastic-rimmed mirror under the dim fluorescent light of the bunker with Cam standing by. She touched her hair and tentatively opened her mouth. Tears welled in her green eyes. They dripped into the sink as though from a leaky faucet. Red-faced, she took the brush, paste, and some floss, and she scrubbed her mouth so hard that her teeth bled.

  They gathered as much as they could in backpacks they took from the equipment room.

  “How are we doing on time?” Cam asked.

  “I wasted too much of it being a baby. Now that the water is calm, they’ll be on their way here. Every minute we’re in this building doubles our risk.”

  “Time to go then?”

  “One last thing.”

  She hurried to the training room and threw open a cabinet that Cam knew well. Inside were ten live darts, enough for one mission.

  “Five each,” she said, and they packed them away.

  It was still predawn, but the clouds were lifting, and the tan sand of the beach was now visible at the dim level of an old sepia tone photograph. The sea was as black on one side as the bluff’s wall of foliage on the other, and the background music of surf provided a loud and steady swish-thump rhythm, punctuated by occasional sharp animal sounds from the jungle.

  They wouldn’t hear the boat engine until it was close, Cam thought, or see it until it pulled up on the sand. “Where do we hide?”

  “There.” Siena led him down the beach.

  His condo was gone. The note he’d left for her, gone. Three condos had survived. Two were livable. The third was still anchored, but was bent so severely that the floor was nearly diagonal.

  Four snapped posts jutted up from the sand where Jules and Calliope had lived, like the legs of a flipped table. The remains of Zara’s place were heaped against the bluff—it had been flattened, and its pieces were piled up so that it looked as though someone had just emptied an assembly-required do-it-yourself hut from its box.

  Cam’s and Owen’s condo had simply been erased. No posts. Even the dip in the sand where Siena had hidden was scoured away clean. Cam stared at the empty beach. He had to concentrate to even remember what it looked like with the hut on it. Siena pulled him to the bluff, where she lifted the foliage away. There was a depression in the raw dirt, and Cam saw that it had been dug away. With no pile of sand on the beach, it was clear that she had carted the dirt away a few full pockets at a time. The hiding place was near the southern rope, the same rope Owen had pulled him up onto to save him from the hungry sea, the same hungry sea that would have claimed him had Donnie not swum after him in the riptide during scuba training.

  “I can’t go without them,” Cam said.

  “What?”

  “I have to give the rest of my team the chance to come with us.”

  “You mean tell them we’re going? No chance. They’ll know good and well within an hour of our departure, okay? Two if we’re lucky.”

  “If you have questions about why I need to do this, you have every right to ask.”

  “Yeah, I have a question. Are you out of your damned mind?!”

  Cam sighed. “That’s not a question about why.” He wasn’t surprised at her reaction. He’d realized she wouldn’t agree at the same moment he’d realized he had to do it.

  “These people hunted me, Cam. H-u-n-t-e-d.”

  “They’ve saved my life more than once, even Donnie.”

  “Cam, you can go to them. I can’t physically stop you—I’m not enhanced anymore. But now that I have supplies, I also won’t need to wait for you. As soon as Ward and Pilot go up the ropes to the jungle camp to find all of you, I’m leaving.”

  Cam grabbed the rope and began to climb as Siena swore loudly and slid behind her curtain of foliage.

  The sky was growing light in the east, out over the ocean, and Cam’s hands were raw from the rope. He made it to camp to find Zara hunched by the morning fire. She grinned.

  “Morning, stranger. I wondered where you’d gotten off to.”

  “We need to wake up the guys.”

  Zara looked around. “Wow. I am the only girl left.”

  No, you’re not, Cam thought.

  She smirked. “Don’t tell anyone I slept with five guys last night.”

  Cam didn’t wait for her to help. He shook Wally and Owen until they stirred. He didn’t brave laying hands on Donnie, but instead went to a metal pole and began to bang it with the butcher knife.

  They rose, grumpy and complaining. Wally’s red hair stuck up as though he had a Mohawk. Tegan sat holding his head and wincing at the light of the fire.

  “Wingman?” Donnie glared. A biting fly landed on his bare chest. He snapped his hand up to catch it by one wing between his fingers without looking. He crushed the wing and tossed the maimed creature toward the fire, where it spiraled downward into the flame and popped. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I have something to tell all of you,” he said gravely, sheathing the knife.

  Donnie shrugged. The others waited, blurry-eyed with sleep and equally unmoved.

  “What?” Wally said when he hesitated. “You had a spooky nightmare? Dreamed you were dying?”

  “I dreamed I wasn’t.”

  “That’s a nice dream, Cam,” Owen said sleepily. “But not worth rousting everyone for.”

  “You slacks should be getting up anyway,” Zara said. “The storm has passed. We should go check the damage.”

  “Listen,” Cam said. “I’m not dying. Maybe none of us are.”

  There was silence for a moment, then Donnie spoke. “Tell me this isn’t what you woke us up for.”

  Cam took a deep breath. He couldn’t tell them about Siena—he owed them, but he owed her too.

  “During my last visit to the lab, the doc said I wasn’t deteriorating,” he said.

  His announcement was greeted with what he considered an appropriate period of silent surprise. I have their attention, he thought.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Donnie seemed both intensely interested and annoyed. “Don’t screw with us.”

  “Did they use the ‘r’ word?” Zara asked.

  “Remission” was a word they’d been taught to forget. There was too much false hope in it, Ward said. Even the mention of it had them holding their breath. It was what they wanted to hear, and it would be a simpler explanation than what he believed was happening, but it wasn’t the truth.

  “Not exactly,” Cam said.

  They let out a collective groan.

  Donnie rolled his eyes. “So you’ll last longer than some of us. Congratulations.”

  “I don’t think I was ever sick,” Cam tried. “And I think it’s the TS that’s killing you.”

  Zara’s face was hard, the way she steeled it when she felt vulnerable. “This isn’t new info, Cam.
It’s the TS or the glio. If you’re trying to make yourself feel better because you’re struggling along unenhanced, fine. But don’t expect us to cheer just because your tumor took a month off from killing you. We’d rather go out rock stars.”

  “I don’t feel like a rock star,” Tegan said. His eyes were mashed shut, wincing against pain, and Cam realized he was having one of his TS headaches.

  “Maybe you’re not sick either. At least maybe you weren’t until they gave you the TS. Maybe they’re lying.”

  Zara screwed up her face. Wally shook his head. Donnie stood up and pointed right at Cam’s chest.

  “Listen, we’ve got an entire team of doctors with their own private lab—not to mention helicopters and million-dollar yachts—giving us complex medical diagnoses on a biweekly basis. While, on the other hand, we’ve got one desperate former athlete in denial feeding us a wild-ass conspiracy theory. You’ll pardon us if we don’t believe you.”

  A figure threw open the entrance to the shelter, and morning light streamed in. They all turned, surprised.

  “Believe me then,” Siena said.

  CAM’S PLAYLIST

  30. ’SPLOSIONS

  by WTF

  31. NO WAY!

  by Go Fish

  32. TREADING WATER

  by The Blind Leading the Blind

  “Boom-boom goes the drum.”

  Donnie looked as though he’d seen a ghost.

  “You know me,” Siena said. It was more statement than question. She watched Donnie, Owen, and Tegan carefully, with her hand on the machete, poised to flee or defend herself.

  Still holding his head, Tegan said nothing, while Owen grimaced like he’d just swallowed a spider. But Cam had to give Donnie credit. He suppressed his shock enough to at least respond.

  “You’re the runner who went over the bluff with Peter,” he said carefully.

  She nodded.

  “But you’re alive.”

  “The fact that I survived the fall isn’t what’s important,” she said. “I survived their diagnosis.”

  “Who are you?” It was Zara.

  “She’s from last year’s class,” Cam said.

  “Last year’s class?”

  “TS-8.”

  Cam hurriedly explained, cobbling together Siena’s information with his own and some from Ari’s notebook. It was difficult. Much of what he said was speculation, and some of it didn’t fit when he tried to put it into words. But they all listened—a girl appearing out of the Amazon jungle like magic had earned their attention. However, they began to look confused as Cam rushed and stumbled through his theory.

  Tegan looked more ill than before, while Donnie and Owen gritted their teeth. They’d hunted her—their first test when they arrived—and Siena kept a wary eye on them, honoring Cam’s plea that she give them a chance, but clearly not trusting them.

  Finally, Zara interrupted. “If they’re experimenting on us, why aren’t you on TS?”

  Cam was surprised when Siena answered for him.

  “He’s the rat they don’t inject. Every experiment has one. We had someone like that. He escaped with me, only he didn’t get away. I was enhanced. He wasn’t.” Her eyes flitted elsewhere, blinking against tears, and Cam could see that she’d been friends with him, whoever he was. Maybe more than friends.

  “We don’t have all of the answers,” Cam said. “But I know they’re lying to us.”

  “Maybe for our own good,” Donnie argued. “You ever think of that?”

  Siena fidgeted. “Cam, we don’t have time for this. I’m leaving. Ask them the question.”

  Cam drew himself up. He’d made his best case. He’d summoned all of the authority he possessed and spent the entirety of his credibility appealing to the team with which he’d sweated and bled for months. It had to count for something.

  “Will you go with us?” he said.

  No one moved.

  “Step forward now if you will,” he added.

  Donnie didn’t budge. Taking his cue from Donnie, Owen didn’t either. Wally and Zara looked at each other and shook their heads. Tegan just hugged his knees, nonresponsive as well.

  “None of you is concerned about what we’ve discovered?”

  “Concern isn’t enough, Cam,” Zara said. She sounded torn, but not ready to commit.

  Donnie crossed his arms. “I’m not going to throw away the opportunity to be a superhero for the last year of my life just because some freaked-out girl isolated herself in the woods for a few months and thinks the organization is out to get her. Ward told us she was trying to compromise the mission when he sent us to find her. And from what I’m hearing now, he’s right.”

  Cam groaned. “I know something’s wrong. Come on, we’re in this together. We’re teammates. We’re friends.”

  “Last I checked, you were fresh out of friends.”

  Cam looked around. Donnie was right. Ari was gone. Calliope, gone. Jules, gone. He was isolated, unenhanced, the weak link at best. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  It was Owen who finally spoke. “I think Cam’s got a point,” he said tentatively.

  Cam was shocked. So was Donnie, who glared at his minion for breaking solidarity, as though Owen had betrayed him by speaking at all.

  “Some of this stuff doesn’t make sense,” Owen continued.

  Donnie interrupted. “Dude, we’re supposed to be a united front. You spend one night with this guy and now you’re in bed with him, or what?”

  “I just have concerns too. And as soon as Ward gets back I’m going to ask him a few choice questions.” Owen glanced at Cam for support.

  But talking to Ward wasn’t what Cam had in mind, and it was Cam’s turn to fail to respond. His own silence hung in the air as heavily as the group’s had when he’d asked for their allegiance.

  “We’re done here, Cam,” Siena whispered.

  She was right, he saw. He backed out of the shelter beside her, leaving Owen with a hurt look, and they dove into the thick foliage, headed for the southern rope.

  Siena reached the cliff edge first and urged Cam to hurry so that they could climb down and slip into her hiding place before the others came. But they were too late.

  “Boat!” She pointed to a Zodiac skipping across the waves, toward the beach. Two occupants. Ward and Pilot, no doubt. “We’re too late. Let’s go back and…”

  “Oh no…” Cam directed her attention to the bluff’s short rope on the north side of the compound. Donnie and Owen were already descending to meet Ward.

  Siena stared. “They’ll tell him about you. And about me.”

  Cam could see Siena recalculating, her expression slumping as she realized that her escape was ruined.

  “I’m sorry,” Cam said. It sounded lame—mere words were such an insignificant gesture in the face of shattered hope.

  “I could have done this without you,” she said, as much to herself as to Cam. “The supplies were unguarded. You were all up on the bluff. Ward and Pilot would have left the boat on the beach to come up and find you. I’m so stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid. You care.”

  “About you? I don’t even know you.”

  “You believed I was a good person. And I believe my teammates are. They joined because they wanted to do good. We all did.”

  “I just want to go home now. If I’m not dying, I want to live.”

  “Maybe they’ll let us go, give us a new home and fake identity.”

  Siena gave him a sharp look that accused him of naïveté. “You really believe that?”

  “My teammates who died took the risks voluntarily. I’ve never seen them kill anyone.”

  Donnie and Owen were on the beach. Cam marveled at how quickly they’d shimmied down the rope. Their strides were long and powerful. The extra TS was pumping through their veins, amplifying their systems beyond what nature intended. He imagined it blowing their brains like cheap speakers.

  They met Ward at the surf as he and Pilot pulled the Zod
iac ashore. They yelled over the crash of the waves, and Cam found himself leaning out over the precipice, straining to hear. Their voices were maddeningly near audible.

  If Ward and Pilot were surprised when they saw the storm’s devastation, they didn’t show it. They afforded the condos no more than a glance. They consider them replaceable, he thought. The bunker was intact, an ugly square brick dropped in the sand against the otherwise beautiful russet and green bluff. Cam watched carefully as Ward addressed Donnie, the presumptive spokesman of the two recruits, asking him quick questions. He saw Donnie point at the south rope. They were discussing him, and probably Siena too. Cam ducked, crouching in the brush. Finally, Ward turned to Owen.

  Owen spoke, and Cam could see Ward’s expression grow sad and resigned, even from a distance. Owen was asking questions, the difficult ones, Cam’s questions, accusing questions—not at all in line with the team philosophy. Pilot looked on, grim-faced. Finally, he motioned Ward aside. Ward hesitated, and then debated with him for a moment, but, in the end, he stepped out of the way.

  Cam heard a muffled pop, and Owen’s questions ended abruptly. Owen looked down, confused, and then collapsed.

  With impressive and unexpected quickness, Donnie caught Owen before he fell. Enhanced reaction time, Cam thought. From the distance, he couldn’t tell exactly what had happened, but when Pilot turned to Donnie, Owen’s limp form hung between them like a five-foot shield. In the moment that Pilot hesitated, Donnie threw Owen at him, his augmented strength allowing him to fling the heavy body as though it was no more than an inflatable dummy. Pilot lurched backward, his heel striking the Zodiac’s pontoon. Owen’s body hit him in the chest. Pilot tilted, overbalanced. His arms pinwheeled for a moment, and then he flopped back into the boat.

  Owen wasn’t moving. He lay in the surf, flopping over as a wave pushed him up onto the sand.

  “They darted him!” Cam exclaimed.

  Donnie was running. Ward ran after him, but Donnie flew across the sand at inhuman speed. Enhanced speed, Cam thought. Ward broke off the pursuit, while Pilot clambered out of the boat and pulled out his hand radio.

  “South rope!” Cam yelled to Donnie. “Here! Up here!”

  “More boats,” Siena said.