by Mac Rogers
Harrison and I exchanged glances and Lloyd let out another laugh.
* * *
IT WAS almost dark when Patty and I made our way out to the parking lot—that time where the night sky and the trees below it seem to swap palettes for a little while, rendering the sky brilliant colors and the trees pitch black silhouettes. The smell of a recent rain shower hung in the air as cleansing as bleach.
As per custom, I had hung back, purposefully finding diversions to take up my time finishing up, allowing Patty her privacy while she made her way through the checkpoints. Then she pretended to have a reason to hang around a little while upstairs to wait for me so we could walk to our cars together. All pretense. All ritual. All appreciated.
I told her what I could about the meeting with Harrison—mostly that Trip Haydon was ruining everything by coming personally, and Monday no less. She groaned.
“Well, shit, I’m definitely drinking tonight now.”
We exchanged a few verbal jibs and jabs before nonchalantly asking the other what bar she would be patronizing that evening. It was, of course, the opposite of an invitation—a clearing of information in order to avoid company (I was still staying away from the Heron after the Feetbreath incident and bequeathed it to Patty, who gave me the Celtic Yard).
Then, something occurred to Patty, right as I opened the door to my car.
“This is weird, right?”
“What’s weird?”
“I mean … we like each other, right? We shoot the shit, we work well together, we’ve got our little rapport down. We were just told we’re gonna have a shit week, so this would be when we go get plastered together. Except…”
The cool air felt blessedly refreshing—but the edge of frigidness was there, just waiting to take us when we got comfortable.
“Fraternizing,” I said.
“Fraternizing,” she echoed.
Patty stared off at the inky trees. Against the glowing sky the trees looked as if they’d been cut out of black construction paper. What a weird planet we lived on.
“’Night, Dak.”
“’Night.”
She walked to her car. I watched her go.
Did Patty want to hang out? Did Patty want to compromise the fraternization policy of Quill Marine?
Could Patty hear the static jamming my rational mind?
* * *
I’LL GIVE Trip Haydon this much, though: for a little while I’d actually stopped thinking about what I’d done the night before.
Unfortunately, that night, I did it again.
* * *
I HAD no reason to be on that road. It wasn’t at all between the Celtic Yard and home. Even a cab driver looking to rip me off wouldn’t have come this way.
I let myself drink too much. I definitely shouldn’t have been driving.
I made dangerous, insistent eye contact with a fisherman about three times my size hoping he’d puff up and start something. Hoping I’d win. Hoping I’d lose.
When I got back into my car, I turned over the engine and the radio was blaring pop music from another era. “You Might Think,” by the Cars. Too upbeat. I spun the volume dial to death. This needed to be done in silence.
I felt sick. That kind of sick where you’re too sick to get out of bed but also too sick to watch TV, so all you can do is lie there and think, “I’m so, so sick.”
The road was my sickbed.
It wasn’t a decision to memorize the address in your file. It just happened. I couldn’t unknow it.
I pulled to the side of the road, parked on the shoulder. The only sound was the idling of my engine, the occasional other car driving by. And the muffled sound of Practical Dak in my head—bound and gagged, but still shouting, What are you doing what are you doing
Your motel room was the second one from the right on the second level. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.
The thing is, I didn’t even know if I wanted you. That’s what made it so unbearable. If I could just say, I want to go up to that room, peel off his pants, and grind him into paste, something ugly and animal and purely physical, it’d be so much easier to deal with. It’d be disastrous, but a knowable disaster. It’d be an achievable goal.
But no. It was a compounded fear. It was also the sheer temptation of you, of escorting you past all my defenses. A big red button that says, “Push to Destroy Everything,” which for whatever reason I didn’t even know if I really itched to push.
But was I actually panicking or was I just panicking over the idea that I’m capable of panicking?
Those eyes
It’s nothing
Then the light came on in your room, behind the closed vertical blinds. I couldn’t see you, but … it was off, and now it was on.
You were awake. Probably getting ready for your shift.
I gunned the engine and drove away.
5
THE NEXT morning, my head thudding dully from another restless night, we cleared out the Hangar. It was just before noon; the Harp was predicted to start up in a little under twenty minutes and we wanted everyone gone.
It wasn’t so much that we were worried about introducing a new variable to our Power-Up routine—the plan was to seal Lloyd in the engine room and keep the rest of the base as, to borrow his term, insulated from the Harp’s effects as usual—it was more that, if this went wrong and the suit wasn’t as effective on humans as Lloyd was positing … well, we all remembered what happened with his predecessor. Lloyd was a well-known, well-liked figure in Quill Marine. It would not do for morale to have a lot of witnesses around for what we would have to do next.
Once we herded all the stragglers toward the elevators—something Patty did with relish—it was just her and me on the outside of the Tent.
“Okay, so you’re in Bird’s Eye?” I confirmed with her.
“Unless you wanna switch out. I’m happy to be on Lloyd detail.”
“Nah, I wanna close the seals myself. Who’s in there with me?”
“Chatty Andy.”
Oh, joy. Well, if this went south, Lloyd might as well go out with his favorite student hanging on his every word. Maybe they could get one last pop quiz in.
Patty and I split and headed to our positions.
* * *
ANDY HAD helped Lloyd into the suit and now they were in what, for them, passed as a heated argument. I headed straight to Lloyd.
“Ready for me to seal you up?”
“Please! Seal away.”
“But wait—” Andy protested while I worked the seals on Lloyd’s chest and wrists.
“Tell me the theory in plain simple language,” Lloyd indulged, “as straightforward as you can.”
“Okay,” Andy buzzed. “So, so, um, so some people think that Moss is warm because he’s actually still alive, and that he’s actually been dying for the whole time since he crashed, and, and the moss is like … like a…”
Patty crackled over the communicator. “How we doing, Chief?” Boy, this was a bad day to have a headache.
“Almost there.” I had one last seal to go: the one at the base of the neck. I plopped the fishbowl-shaped helmet onto Lloyd’s head. He kept talking, not missing a beat, and as soon as the helmet went over his face, a microphone inside sent his voice through the speaker on top.
“Like a dependent organism, Andy. Like the bacteria in any human body.”
“Right!” Andy exclaimed. “And so like as Moss dies, super slowly, the moss on his chest is shrinking too, because it’s dying too. And when it’s all gone, that means he’s finally dead.”
“Last seal, Patty,” I radioed as I activated the seal at the neck. It whooshed and buzzed. “Opening the engine room.”
“Copy.”
“But Andy!” Lloyd exclaimed. “That obviously, clearly, is a tremendous amount to rest on just two data points: a warm body and a receding skin-growth! Now, I understand why this theory captures the imagination, but that’s not the same thing as science!”
Opening the
door to the engine room was … an interesting process. You had to put your hand inside this kind of nook up to the elbow and squeeze this Play-Doh-feeling apparatus inside that was never quite where you thought it’d be. It was clearly—“obviously,” as Lloyd would say—made for Moss’s spindly arms. Once I found the mechanism, the door slid open with a sibilant sigh.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess, Lloyd,” Andy was conceding. “I just thought it’d be cool if the moss, like, I dunno. It’s stupid.”
“No! Andrew! That could not be further from the truth. Only the know-it-alls are truly stupid! I would love to hear your theories about the moss, please!”
“Aw, man. Thanks for that, Lloyd. I—whoa.” Andy was looking into the engine room. “I haven’t seen in there for a while!”
“Engine room is open,” I radioed to Patty. “I am placing Lloyd.”
“You guys still sure about this?”
“Three dogs come through fine!” Lloyd cried to the heavens.
“Copy.”
And Lloyd was probably right—probably—so I put a guiding hand on his back as he made his way over the threshold and into the engine room. There, in the center of the room, was the Harp.
A rusty golden, sloping apparatus with sinewy strands stretched from top to bottom. It stood about three feet high and it sat in a small brown-and-blue base directly off the floor. The edges of the base rose above the tapered bottom of the Harp, cupping it, and two pins passed through holes in both the base and the Harp itself. The pins gave it a sense of almost primitive construction, of something Indiana Jones would slip into a rucksack and kick-start a booby trap, yet the general aura of the thing was appropriately celestial. Unknowable. Dangerous. Thankfully, we weren’t in the business of pulling pins here at Quill Marine.
“I feel like an angel should be like—” Andy made a little strumming gesture and laughed to himself. I whipped my head toward him.
“Hit your mark, Andy. Like it’s a normal day.”
He complied, right away. He stood lateral to the engine-room door, looking in the direction of the cockpit.
“Power-Up in approximately nine minutes,” Patty radioed in.
“Want me to seal you in now, Lloyd?” I asked.
“And give up nine whole minutes of chatting with you guys?”
“Well, I’m closing the door in five, either way.” I wanted a healthy margin of safety. Looking at Lloyd standing directly next to the Harp—even with him in a suit, everything inside me insisted that this was wrong and needlessly reckless. I thought again of how Dr. Beritov went out, and shuddered. “You sure you want to stand that close to it?”
Lloyd laughed, delighted. “It doesn’t matter! The N5 removes distance as a factor, Dak!”
“You think.”
Lloyd held up three gloved fingers and started to bark. I rolled my eyes. In that split second of looking away, everything went to shit. I heard Andy laugh with us and then—
“Oh, hey, Lloyd! I almost forgot to tell you my theory about the moss!”
The idiot walked straight past me into the engine room.
Lloyd and I both reacted.
Andy was still talking: “Just real quick, before we close you up. Did you ever wonder if maybe the moss is the—”
And the Harp suddenly roared to life.
* * *
I COULDN’T tell if it was because the door was open or because the Harp was somehow aware of us and responding—outraged? hungry?—to our presence, but it sounded louder and faster than ever before.
Patty’s voice sprang over the speaker: “Shit, shit, Dak, it’s early, we’re live!”
Andy didn’t scream. He didn’t spasm. His body didn’t seize. But once the Harp began to thrum, he just … wilted.
Patty’s voice: “Dak, you gotta close up!”
“The kid’s in the engine room,” I reported. The world was slowing down, the way it does in combat situations, everything taking on feverish clarity. But I could also feel the Harp’s effect on me immediately. Like I was plummeting from a great height. The Harp sounded like a typhoon, the air became thicker. My mouth dried up and lost all taste. My eyes began to lose focus. My—Jesus, my will to do anything began to calcify and crack.
“Dak, it’ll eat the whole base for breakfast, you gotta close that fucking door!”
She was right. I had barely a spare few nanoseconds before whatever affected Andy really sank its teeth into me, too. And then, if the door was still open when it hit full blast, who knows how far its effects would reach?
Who cares who gives a—
From what seemed like another dimension I felt myself ramming my arm into the nook, squeezing the switch …
The last thing I saw before the engine-room door closed was Andy nestled in Lloyd’s space-suit arms.
The Harp continued its escalating roar and I dropped to the ground.
* * *
I WOKE up to your face staring down at me. Your beautiful face. Those eyelashes. God, how I’d longed to see you like this: intimate, loving, staring down at me. Except … Patty’s voice …
“Chief! Chief, come on, show me something!”
I blinked. Your face disappeared. Patty was leaning over me. I raised myself up onto my elbows—or tried to. Jesus, I felt like I’d just run twenty miles after ten sleepless nights.
“Lemme just…,” I managed.
“Oh, for chrissakes, thank God,” Patty gasped. “Don’t—you don’t have to sit up, dummy, lemme bring in a team.”
“No, no,” I slurred. “I don’t need … where’s—” I blinked again, hoping to find you.
“Everyone’s upstairs. I cleared the whole floor, remember? It’s just us.”
Things came into focus a bit better and I saw the engine-room door was still closed. I sprang to my feet and wobbled my way over to the switch. My muscles barely conceded to the impulses I was screaming in my brain. Patty was protesting beside me, telling me to sit back down—finally she pushed me gently aside and opened the door herself.
Lloyd was kneeling over Andy, who was sitting on the floor, hands folded over his belly, just … staring.
Lloyd saw me. “We need help, Jesus, Dak, get help!”
I could tell by the way Lloyd ran to me and grabbed my shirt: the suit did its job. Lloyd was fine. Freaked out, but physically unaffected. Hell, he had enough strength to almost topple me. Thankfully Patty was there behind me, helping me stay upright.
“Give me your sidearm and get Lloyd out of here,” I said to her. I was dimly aware of Lloyd begging us for help.
She looked at me sternly. “Chief, that’s crazy, you shouldn’t be the one to—”
“It’s an order,” I shot at her. She gave in and handed me her weapon.
“What are you doing?!” Lloyd gasped. “We need a medical team in here! Now!”
“Get him out, get him checked,” I mumbled to Patty. “Top to bottom.”
Lloyd was pleading into his bubble helmet, his voice compressed and powerless through its speaker. He knew what had to happen next. Andy had taken a full blast for an entire cycle. No one had ever taken that much. Not since—
“No, wait, wait, listen, we have to—”
“Turndown Service?” Patty asked. I nodded and she led Lloyd out of the ship, soothing him with low tones and platitudes.
“He’s just a kid!” he cried … and they were gone.
Then it was just me. And Andy.
I checked the sidearm. Loaded. Ready.
Andy just stared straight ahead. He wore the expression of someone who had just received a bit of expected bad news—nothing shocking, just powerfully unhappy. A long-sick loved one had died, perhaps. He blinked. He breathed.
“Can you walk with me, Andy?”
He let out a barely perceptible moan. I don’t even think it was in answer to my question.
I carefully negotiated (really, dragged) Andy out of the ship. He came willingly enough, though his motor skills were all but gone. His gaze never veered from its forward
, fixed position.
I set him down on the floor outside the ship. I should have brought him to the Slammer, but the trip was too far for me to make. Plus we had the entire Hangar to ourselves for the moment.
“How’re you doing, Andy?”
“… Nothing.”
“Say again?” I asked.
“There’s nothing,” Andy said. His voice was even and sure. Unrushed. Unworried. Unhappy. “There’s nothing.”
I could have let Patty take this. But it was my fuckup. I deserved it.
I disengaged the safety.
“Andy?” I asked.
“Just nothing.” He kept staring straight ahead.
“You understand what’s about to…?”
“I don’t care,” he replied. He didn’t look at me, but his head tilted toward me slightly.
I swallowed. My mouth was so dry I heard it click.
“They’ll get a letter. Your people. It’ll say combat. That this happened in the line of d—”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Not for my benefit. Not for posterity. Just a statement of fact. “There’s nothing.”
“Okay,” I whispered. And I shot Andy in the head.
Then a second time to be sure.
* * *
A GUNSHOT in the ship would probably sound very strange. A loud burst with no real reverberation, over as soon as it rang out, almost like a noise balloon in a comic book. Out here in the Hangar it sounded like the introduction of thunder to world. The noise just kept rolling … and rolling …
A few minutes later and Patty was by my side again. “You…?” she asked. She probably meant, “Are you okay,” or “Do you need a moment,” or something equally inane. She stopped herself because she knew the answers.
The spatter had extended far across the floor. The blood began a wide, dark pool, hungry and growing. I didn’t want to notice those things.
“I guess the suit works,” I said.
* * *
TURNDOWN WAS the very picture of efficiency. Within ten minutes the blood disappeared and Andy was put in a box. The boxes for these situations are deliberately oversized and colorful so they don’t in any way resonate as coffins. It really makes the whole process that much more disquieting.