by Mac Rogers
Still. I was counting the seconds ’til you wouldn’t be looking at her anymore.
Before that time came, though, I had to watch a few minutes later, after your eyes had adjusted to the glaring desert sun, as you unsealed her from her Lloyd Suit. She sighed with deep relief to be free of it. Meanwhile, I was trying not to think, That’s one more thing of mine I don’t own anymore.
“Can you find this spot again? For your buddy?” I asked. She looked around, shading her eyes with her hand, for any sort of recognizable landmark nearby. There was, decisively, nothing.
“I’m sure I can,” she shrugged. We swapped keys and then she said, “Hey. Can I hug you now?”
Fuck it. In the light of day it didn’t seem like a thing. I held out my arms and we embraced. Then she came over to you.
“I love you like crazy.” She kissed your cheek.
“Thank you for everything.” You smiled back. “Seriously.”
She gave you a short, quick raise of her eyebrows, as if to say, “I know,” and then got into her car. She gave us one final appraising look from her seat.
“I mean: look at you guys!” she cooed. Then closed the door, started the car, and drove away, kicking up gravel and dust that soon settled back down to the desert floor anonymously.
Watching her go was like … Well, that’s the last piece of normal for a long, long time.
Neither of us moved for a small eternity.
“Let’s set up camp,” one of us finally said.
* * *
THE BACK of the truck was spectacularly spacious compared to any of the vans, but it got hot as hell inside fast. We waited with the roll-down door open.
It was maybe two hours from sunset. Then another hour after that for the contact, assuming they were on time. But here we were, undisturbed and quiet.
We didn’t talk much; something about the expanse around us, the lack of enemies, the growing dread not only of failure but of now-possible success … how could either one of us have possibly known what to say? But at one point you took my hand and that was enough.
I looked at Moss, sitting in the back near his Harp. When we’d given him one final once-over, you had said, “Huh. Never seen that before.” I came over to see what you were looking at and you pointed. “On his chest. You can see the moss swaying in the breeze.”
It was true. His tiny skeins of moss were flitting about in the soft desert wind—little prisoners finally given some time to play outside. I’d had a moment of panic thinking maybe they might blow away, but the breeze was gentle and they seemed anchored enough for now.
It was noticeably less since the morning. The moss was almost gone.
There had been something hypnotic to it. Like kelp swaying on the ocean floor.
How far away the Marine Lab, the ocean, felt. How strange and varied this world was.
Did Moss ever get to appreciate it? Did he ever get a sense of it before he crashed, either willingly or not?
What sights would he want to see? What could he compare them to? What, even, was his mission?
What would his moss think?
Huh.
There was something I’d never considered before.
Did his moss feel? Was it sensate? Sensitive? Did it recognize this breeze and understand how well it meant—to cool, to comfort, to spread seeds and whip up the very weathers that made life possible? Was the moss as dumb and dead as hair, or was it alive like exposed nerves?
I thought of my own skin, of how it commingled with yours, together in motel beds, on kitchen counters. I thought of how I’d wished, wished so hard, that one day my skin could just spiral with yours into its own knot, its own intractable unit, undulating, as unstoppable as its own ocean. Perhaps we could even begin to grow and expand, you and me, pulsing out with tidal intent, until we covered the surface of the world. Nothing to fear, nothing to run from again, because we were everything, we were—
I woke with a gasp and a jolt.
There’s nothing worse than realizing you nodded off mid-operation. That sense of waking up to every single factor left unattended for … how long?
Then I noticed you were gone. I was sitting in the back alone. And the sky was red. The sun hung low. The tops of the mountains had pierced it and dying sunlight flooded the sky like yolk from a soft-boiled egg.
I called your name, trying not to panic, and heard you shushing me, just outside. I climbed out cautiously and found you crouched low by the side of the truck.
“There’s a car,” you whispered. “Straight ahead. See?”
I did. Shit. About a hundred yards away. Barely more than a silhouette against the harsh, setting sun.
“If it was them it’d be like twenty vehicles with lights and megaphones, right?”
“At least,” I nodded, squinting.
“What the hell is one car?”
“Is there even anyone in it?”
“I can’t tell. But it wasn’t there before.”
I prepared myself to go investigate, red flags snapping curtly in the breeze once again.
“Stay here.” I ordered. “Stay with Moss.”
“You don’t want me to—”
“Stay with Moss. Do not leave Moss. Close the back. Don’t open for anyone but me. If I just knock, that’ll mean I’m in trouble. If I’m fine, I’ll say…”
“‘Open the goddamn door’?”
“Exactly.”
You nodded.
“Look sharp, okay?”
“Fuck outta here.” I kissed you. Both hands on the side of your face. I smiled at you. You smiled at me. You hopped back into the truck and slid the door down. I wished we’d thought to bring guns.
* * *
MY STEPS crunched like teeth grinding as I inched my way torturously toward the parked car. There was no way to sneak up on it. We were in wide-open desert. All I could do was approach, brazen as can be. If there was a sniper, I was done for—but also, that had been true since the moment this car had gotten here.
The sun continued its descent behind the mountains. The sky was awash in reds and golds, but a twilight blackness was close at hand, seeping into everything. Soon it would be dark. Piteously dark. Vulnerably dark.
Could this just be coincidence? Someone dumped their car near our spot and just … what? Where did they go?
But the people after us don’t set traps. They send tanks.
I reached for the driver’s side door, touched the handle, tested it, pulled the door open all the way.
It’s empty … I think it’s empty …
It was. Completely. Except for one thing. One thing I noticed after it was too late, after I was awkwardly inside the car, kneeling on the seat, craning to look into the back. One thing, crumpled and discarded in the footwell. Probably thrown there by the driver as they sped to this destination. They might have not even noticed as they did so.
It was the wrapper to some beef jerky.
That’s when the trunk flew open and someone sprinted to the side of the car. I spun around, trying to scramble away, but then a blast of fire hit me in the face, obliterating the darkening world and leaving me blind and howling. Even under the confusion and madness, there was no mistaking her voice.
“Hold fucking still,” Patty growled.
26
IT WAS military-grade pepper spray. The pain was so intense, so world-obliterating, that realizing even that much was a major cognitive victory.
I was distantly aware of Patty slapping a pair of cuffs on my wrists, then throwing me in the backseat like I was a child. As soon as I hit the seat, face first, she closed a second pair of cuffs around my ankles. I could hear her coughing. The spray was hanging inside the air of the car—it was affecting her, too—but it didn’t sound like she was slowing down even a heartbeat.
Doors slammed: the back door, then the driver’s side as she settled in behind the wheel. The engine turned over, the windows all lowered. Meanwhile, I’d been moaning, impotent and wounded. My eyes felt doused in napa
lm, my nose ran with lava. Finally I formed some words.
“Patty … what…?”
“What am I doing?” she snarled back at me. “I’m saving your goddam stupid ass.”
“Wuh?”
She turned around in her seat, looking at me. “They have you. Somebody called it in. Exact location. You got sold out, Dak.” She spat my name.
Sold out.
But only one other person knew—
Jesus fucking Christ. Saint Teresa. No wonder she’d been so chipper. No wonder she’d been so helpful.
I wanted to punch myself in the face until I didn’t exist anymore. I wanted to shovel handfuls of dirt into my throat until I choked. Except I couldn’t. I could barely move.
The car kicked into motion and we began to speed away.
“Patty…,” I whined.
She shouted at me over the engine. “I saw the roll-out orders! Coordinates and everything! I left while they were still mobilizing, got the best head start I could, but they can’t be that far behind. So we gotta fly.”
“Stop … stop…” I tried to flip over, to sit up, to see where we were going in relation to the truck.
“If whoever you’re meeting doesn’t get here fast Sierra’s gonna get to him first. And they’re coming with everything.”
“Stop the car!”
“No.” From the sound of the engine we were going even faster.
I tried to call your name. I was choking on snot.
“They’ll get him,” Patty replied. “They’ll get Moss, they’ll get the Harp, maybe they’ll be satisfied.”
I tried harder, screaming as if there was even the slightest chance you could hear me. “Matt! MATT! GET OUT OF THERE!”
“We’re too far away now,” Patty muttered. And she was right. I managed to pull myself up into a sitting position and the truck was almost a speck through the back window, sitting like an offering under the purple-and-black sky.
“Patty, I’m begging you, I’m begging you, we have to go back, we have to get him!”
“Shut the fuck up!” she snarled back at me.
“I’m begging you!”
“Just lie the fuck down and let me save your goddamn life!”
We continued picking up speed. I watched as the truck disappeared completely from view.
“Patty,” I babbled, “I’m begging you, please, please, please Patty, Patty I’ll do anything, Patty please I’LL KILL YOU! PATTY! I’LL KILL YOU IF YOU DON’T STOP THIS CAR!”
I beat the back of the front seats. I kicked at the doors. I squirmed like an undignified wretch. Patty wasn’t impressed.
“Lie down and shut up, Dak, Jesus!” she barked back at me. “We should be at the main road soon. This no-other-cars crap is screwing with me.”
“He’s defenseless! They’ll have him in a chem-zone by tomorrow!”
“Better than both of you.”
“Patty, please,” I moaned, I keened. “Pleeeeease!”
“Jesus, I didn’t know you could sound like that.” I didn’t either. The pepper spray boiled inside my sinuses, it raked the back of my mouth. But I didn’t know where the irritant ended and my own tears began. “I mean, you really … like you really…?”
“Yes!” I cried. “Yes.” And then, in a flash, the fight drained out of my voice as quickly as it had erupted.
Patty sighed in the front seat. Disappointed. Shocked. Probably a little horrified. It was quiet for a moment. She looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You done?”
I was done. For the moment. I’d suddenly realized two things.
The first thing was that I knew what cuffs these were. The second was that my hands could rotate inside them.
* * *
“I THOUGHT Haydon had you in a hole somewhere.” I tried to sound casual, curious.
I saw her shoulders shrug. “I was confined to base. It wasn’t pleasant.”
“What happened?”
“I un-confined myself.”
Outside the sky grew darker.
“So you’re deserting,” I said. Not a question.
“Yeah, Dak. I’m a real rule-breaker, huh?”
“They’ll find out why you ran,” I said. “They’ll know.”
“‘Will’? They already do; what do you think this is?!”
Understanding thudded into my gut. Patty didn’t just think she was rescuing me. She wanted to run away with me.
“But we know how to lay low, both of us,” she was continuing. “We’ll stick it out ’til they stop caring.”
Jesus. Patty. No.
“They’ll never stop.”
“Then that’s how long we’ll stick it out.”
I was trying to be calm, but the indignity burst out of me like an assassin’s bullet. “Fuck you, you can’t choose that for me!”
“Like how you checked with me before ending my goddamn career?”
“I handed you Quill Marine on a plate!”
“You handed me an empty spaceship! You think these people give a solitary fuck for a spaceship that can’t fly? You ended me! And I’m still here!” I could hear the implicit end of her thought, too: I’m still here … would he be?
Fuck that. Calm down. Combat ready. Go numb.
Go numb
Go—
I rotated my hands within the cuffs. Then I bent down to see if I could reach the pair around my ankles. I could. The restraints clattered together as I got to work.
“Jesus, Dak,” Patty said from the front seat, “you know you can’t break them; what’re you doing?
“These are … these are Sierra cuffs,” I said, bending forward. The pain was leaving my body. “The new series, the 2027s.”
“Grabbed ’em on my way out the door,” she said, suspicious. She was probably looking back and forth between the road and the rearview mirror, trying to see what the fuck I was doing. Good. Let her sweat.
“These are the kind we put on that prisoner when we Harp-nuked her.” I remembered the sound they made as they clattered to the floor inside the amplified, N5-coated clear cube. The way the woman, X, rubbed at her wrists before pulling her hood off to see she was alone in the enclosure. No one was there to remove her manacles—they’d been released remotely.
“And before you get any ideas, Dak, I don’t have the remote. I turned off the signal on the cuffs.”
“Of course you did.” Turning the signal off was easy, after all. It was just a switch near the base of one of the cuffs that you pressed down and slid forward. It wasn’t the most convenient thing to try to access, but … my wrists could rotate inside the cuffs. First I found the switch on the ankle cuffs.
“We’re on the run now, right?” Patty was saying. “No sense giving them a signal they can trace and hanging a goddamn ‘Capture Us’ sign on the car. Once you’re ready, I’ll take ’em off the old-fashioned way.”
“What’s the old-fashioned way?” I asked, painfully maneuvering my wrists down in the footwell, out of her line of sight. “A key?”
“No, with my dick.”
“Well,” I snorted back phlegm as I sat back up, “you better do it soon.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“’Cause I turned them back on.” And then I braced myself against the back of her seat.
* * *
SHE STOMPED on the brakes. The tires ground to a halt, skidding and sliding across the sand until we came to a stop.
“What?!” she roared.
“Both sets, wrists and ankles, I turned ’em back on. Sierra knows exactly where we are; we’re singing out like a choir.” I think I might have even been smiling.
“Why would you do that?!”
“One downside to keys: you have to get really close to use them.” Yes, I was definitely smiling.
She didn’t turn around. Even in the intensifying dark I could see she had the steering wheel in a death grip.
“Turn them off,” she said flatly.
“No.”
“You know what they’ll do i
f they see cuff transponders going off?”
I sure did. Troop carriers were speeding down the interstate right now. Maybe even gunships. Helicopters. All headed straight for us.
“Throw me out and drive away,” I sneered. “Or you could uncuff me. I’ll take either one.”
“Turn them off,” she tried again.
“Come back here and do it yourself.”
Her gun came out with almost unbelievable speed. The safety clicked off. The barrel hovered in front of my eyes as she twisted around in her seat.
“Turn. Them. Off.”
Now I shrugged. “Shoot me.”
“You’re not gonna end up in some tropical paradise with your boyfriend, Dak—that literally never happens!”
“Uncuff me or shoot me.” Honestly, at this point, I didn’t care which.
“TURN ’EM OFF!”
“SHOOT ME!”
“I WOULD’VE FOLLOWED YOU ANYWHERE! I WOULD’VE FOLLOWED YOU INTO THE FUCKING SEA!”
Neither of us moved. We sat there, staring at each other, breathing, as the sky turned itself completely over to darkness. I knew what she was thinking. She could maybe turn the switches back off. It’d be a hell of a risk—she’d have to get between my hands, my legs, and she knew what I was—but maybe not if she somehow got me further incapacitated or even unconscious. The question was: would she try it?
She launched herself over the seat at me with a roar.
God, but she could put up a hell of a fight. She was younger than me. Stronger than me. Faster than me. I was wounded, exhausted, hobbled. But her objective was complicated and mine was simple. All I had to do in this struggle was get myself behind her. Once I managed that …
I threw my arms over her head and then jammed the cuff-chain up and into her windpipe.
I pulled tight—not so tight as to kill her, but the barest hair’s breadth shy of that. I would do it if I needed to. She flailed and wheezed, rasping out protest and trying to swat me away.
“Keys,” I said.
She made a noise that might have been my name.
“Keys.”
I pulled tighter. Her eyes, her tongue, bulged out. Her skin began to turn the color of the black-and-purple sky. “I’m either bluffing or I’m not, Patty. It’s your call.”