“Oh, what the hell.” West reached behind him, took down a bottle of Remy-Martin champagne cognac. “Classy stuff for a beer-town like Diablo.” With some resignation he saw a tap behind the bar for the beer of his youth, Killian’s Irish Red. How tragic that electricity had rendered the kegs of beer below the bar useless flat piss-water weeks ago. He pulled a dusty glass from under the top of the bar, wiped it off with his rough drab sleeve. He filled the glass partway with the syrupy amber liquid. He reached under the bar again and pulled out an unexpected surprise for Patra: a warm glass bottle of Pepsi. There was a case of the drink underneath the bar, looking strangely out of place.
He swirled the cognac around the inside of the glass, admired its color. He held it up before Patra, who had opened her Pepsi. “Here’s to…” West frowned, not really knowing what to toast to anymore.
“Here’s to fellow travelers.” Patra smiled widely, her glimmering eyes searching West for approval. He smiled in return. “To fellow travelers.” The clink of glass and the sweet fire of cognac filled the cool evening air.
West sighed, content for the moment, leaned back on his stool. “What this place needs is a mean old bartender with a shotgun behind the bar, some crazy leather-clad Hell’s Angels playing pool, and a jukebox that only plays country unless you want to get yourself beaten with a pool cue in the parking lot.” He squinted, leaned over and reached for something out of Patra’s line of sight. Patra was not surprised when he pulled a sawed-off shotgun from underneath the bar. West laughed, eyebrows raised, placed it back. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad. Where’s the Kenny Rogers albums?”
Patra grinned, took another drink from the Pepsi bottle, swallowed slowly. “This really is pretty bad stuff. Must have been sitting here forever.”
“Not much call for soda pop in a working man’s town.” Patra noted how the cognac glass rested gently in West’s upturned palm, stem nestled between middle and ring fingers. Very civilized. “Trust me on that one.”
“Where are they? The miners, the soldiers, anyone?”
West sipped slowly, contemplative. He cleared his throat and looked into his glass. “Well, I’d suspect that they’re in places very much like the place you were.”
“The tower? All those ships—”
“I saw hundreds of those vessels dropping off human payloads at that one tower. I doubt it was the only one. The planet’s probably covered with them.”
“What are they for?”
“You know as much as I do, if not more. As far as I can tell, the humans are gathered in those towers, where the light changes them into—,” West looked over Patra’s silver body, “—metal. Some kind of liquid metal that becomes part of the ship. That metal came out of the walls and turned into more of those black things. I saw them come out of the walls. The vessel must use the human body as an energy source to create the… monsters. Aliens. Whatever the hell they are.” He looked out at nothing, beyond Patra to the darkness in the far corners of the room. He took a slow sip of his drink, blinked and roused himself from his reverie.
Patra pushed her drink away, wrung her hands in her lap. “I would’ve become one of those monsters if you hadn’t saved me. I would’ve melted into the walls of that tower and turned into one of those monsters.” Her voice had gotten considerably quieter, as if she were talking only to herself. “What am I now?”
West reached out, took her cold metal-laced hand. “You’re safe, Patra. You aren’t one of those things. You’re alive, you’re human, you’re—”
“Am I?” She looked up into West’s eyes with a gaze like a machine. Her voice, her eyes… West did not know what she was. He just knew that she needed someone to hold her hand, no matter how inhuman it felt.
“You are to me.” He tightened his hold on her hand, and they sat in the dead bar for a while longer, listening to the sound of nothing and feeling the endless cold of the night.
An inhalation. A pause. An exhalation.
He felt her breath on the small of his neck. Her eyelashes, closed, were small brushes on his cheek. Her eyes danced to the music of an unknown dream as she slept. He held her tightly, and she moved in her sleep instinctively to get closer to him in the cool night air. He watched her, the wordless beauty of sleep, the carefree face of an angel. His lips explored the landscape of her face, and found themselves lightly pressed to her forehead. The scar of her eye was obscured in the night. Her shallow breathing both warmed him and gave rise to a stippled field of gooseflesh on his forearms. He pulled the blanket over them, locking out the night and holding in the warmth their bodies radiated together.
In the darkness, the veiled moonlight bathed him. The intimate scent of woman, the magical feel of her pressed against him in the night. He had completed his cartographic mission of exploring every inch of her face and he had moved on to more remote climes. He stared into her closed eyes. She moved in her sleep and he rolled onto his back. She followed, Simon feeling the sweep of her cold-erect nipples, until chest to chest they lay, naked bodies entwining, her head nestling snugly into the hollow beneath his chin. Her hair was the intoxicating and improbable scent of lilacs, and he inhaled deeply, letting a chill go through him. It was getting colder, but they basked in each other’s warmth in the dead night air. He was more content than he’d been in…
So, so long.
He did not know what the next few days would bring. It was obvious that the planet was dying, growing colder each day. The sunshine was impossibly dim; the sky above them had begun to re-grow the hideous silver black violet web. They had to get off this dead planet. They had to get to Diablo.
Oh Maggie, do you know what you do to me?
He kissed her in the night and let sleep take him under its suffocating black wings.
“Do you dance?”
Patra looked up from her empty Pepsi bottle. She had been attempting to blow a note over the top of the bottle, like her father had taught her before he had become President, back when he was simply her Daddy. Before he had lost her. She had not been successful; her lips were of course not as human as once they had been. She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes, noted to herself how remarkably like pressing her face against a screen door these actions made her face feel. West was standing by the old jukebox. The initial cognac was long gone, but it had been supplemented by another. West had a silly not-quite-drunk-but-wanting-to-be grin on his face.
“Dance?”
“Yes, dance. You know, two people standing close to each other moving their legs around and trying not to step on each other’s toes? Do you dance?”
“I, well, I haven’t danced in a long time. I think the last time was grade school, when they made us.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think I can dance.”
West raised his right eyebrow in suspicion. He reached out with a shifted left hand, swatted open the jukebox coin slot. A shower of quarters spilled onto the floor. He reached out with his mind, and one of the quarters danced up to his thumb and index finger. He promptly placed it back into the jukebox, which of course did nothing. The electricity had been out for weeks.
“Well, hell. That’s too bad.” West looked downtrodden. He scooped the quarters from the floor and piled them on the bar. “I miss music.”
Patra couldn’t help but laugh at the both pathetic and somehow touching display. West joined her in laughter, shaking his head. When they had quieted, West pulled another Pepsi from beneath the bar. “So, Ms. Jennings, how did you disappear?” He popped off the cap of the bottle for her.
“You mean ‘The Kidnapping of the Century’?”
“You had the whole country looking for you, Patra.”
“No. Not the whole country. My father wasn’t looking for me.”
“We were at war. I’m sure if—”
“He was at war. He didn’t need me after my mother died. I was an inconvenience.”
West poured himself another glass of cognac and pushed the soda bottle towards Patra. “Tell me.”
Sh
e did.
Sand. Everywhere.
A childhood spent with primary-colored Legos and plastic dinosaurs and a stuffed monkey puppet nonsensically referred to as Popo Magicmonkey who had one eye and a ratty coat of brown fleece and a mean old cat named Fred who had in his possession a collar made of woven hemp rope and two too many toes on each paw and afternoons of sunlight dripping in the side window where a storm-shattered tree trunk had playacted nightmare monsters by moonlight and ancient analog television images flickering with B.A. and Murdoch and Hannibal and the Face Man as they fought for justice and peanut butter sandwiches cut diagonally in suburb style with suburb butter-knifes and a pile of dirt sandy dirt where bloody battles were fought and sometimes yellow plastic construction equipment built pyramids and tunnel systems where Evil Franks played by little green army men killed our Sons and Daughters played by more little green army men in the War and where he had been playing when the black car pulled into the driveway and Mommy started screaming as she fell faintly to the floor of the front porch and a little boy innocently asked questions of when and why and where Daddy had gone off to die for his country our country in the war to end all wars—
Richter sat up in the wash of freezing morning light, shaking from memories of parents and a cat and a monkey puppet now long dead. A sheen of sweat covered his brow, a somehow defiant gesture in this frigid landscape. Where had he lost his happiness? Perhaps somewhere along the straight and narrow Milicom command path he had walked for three decades he had dropped it in the gritty sandy dirty gravel ground.
He had found it once, he thought. In the light. The heaven in the orb of stars.
Richter closed his eyes, and when they opened, a ring of silver fire swept out in a circle from where he sat. It illuminated the stark landscape in a growing ellipse. He stood but did not stand, rather, he rose into the air, suspended by the power of his will. He thrust his arms at the black sky above him, threatening to tear down the heavens. A great white sphere of energy formed around him, and his eyes blazed with an unearthly fire. He screamed with all his might at no one and nothing.
Richter returned to the ground, and the sphere of energy around his body faded. A dull ache formed behind his eyes, and his fists shook with his fury.
He would destroy that which had destroyed his reality.
He would destroy the Enemy.
Richter walked north.
West rested his face in his hand, the elbow propped upon the top of the bar, his pinky finger bracing his teeth apart as he gnawed at the nail. Bad habit.
Patra had told him about her past: her childhood, her escape from the Rodham School and disappearance, her life as a waitress and sculptor in Roanoke. Her words trailed off as she began to describe the invasion of the aliens, her capture in the church, the transport to the black tower, and she fell silent.
West cleared his throat, but sat on the other side of the bar, saying nothing. After a prolonged awkward silence, he looked up, smiled sheepishly, looked back down at his empty glass. He put it under the bar. “I think I’ve had enough for tonight… today… whatever the hell it is.”
Patra grinned. “Enough to drink or enough of my past?” Her fingers tapped out a metallic tattoo on the top of the bar.
“Patra,” he reached out, held her hand in his, “Please don’t think that I—It’s just… I had no idea. No one did. You disappeared, and we all assumed you were dead. Just the fact that you’re sitting here, it’s like finally seeing the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or…” She frowned, but he could see a glimmer in her silver eyes. “Well, it’s amazing that you’re here, talking to me. It’s unreal.”
“That’s very flattering. You’re acting like I’m a celebrity or something, and you don’t have to. I’m not the President’s daughter anymore. I’m just Patty Jennings, and he’s dead just like everyone else.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Was he a Styx, too? That would explain a lot of things.”
“No… No, he wasn’t one of us. But I bet you never knew that he had us look for you everywhere. He thought that the Quebs had gotten you. I don’t know how many of those bastards we questioned. I don’t know how many died from our questioning, either.”
Patra’s eyes teared up as best they could, and she sobbed. She stood, walked over to the door, looked out onto the murky gray expanse of dawn, or twilight, or whatever it was. She stood in the open doorway, arms crossed over her chest, head leaned against the side of the door. “I never meant to hurt him like that. I never wanted to…” She trailed off to silence. “I saw the broadcasts; I saw how much I’d hurt him. I saw how old he looked, how gray and wasted and… Have you ever seen someone hurt like that, West?” She waited, and when she received no answer she turned around to find West sitting behind the bar, eyes covered with the palms of his hands. In the faded light, he was cast into shadow. His tired hands withdrew from shielding his face from her sight, and she saw eyes that were red from their own inner turmoil. He began to speak from the dark, and his voice broke her heart. Patra knew then that she was not the only person who had loved and lost and survived.
Lips. Parched.
Richter pursed his ragged lips and blew air through the opening they created, and a pathetic sound that in no way resembled whistling emerged. He frowned, tried again. His efforts to entertain himself with music had been thwarted once again.
Thirsty.
Day or night? He walked into the black landscape, guided only by his instinctual sense of direction. What did he expect to find hundreds of miles to the north?
He would find Diablo.
Then what? What are you doing, James?
Father, do not speak to me. Give me back the stars and the sun and the lost lost children of the night and then you may speak to me. Then and only then.
Sky blended into horizon. Day blended into night blended into days blended into nights.
He walked. North, north, north. Walk, walk, walk.
She joined West in the shadows of the Diablo Tavern. They could no longer tell day from night; each was a bloody gray haze created by the healing Enemy web just miles above the planet surface. At least the vessels no longer hovered overhead. There was no wind, no clouds in the sky. No movement. Existence seemed somehow paused.
She cleared her throat, spoke with a voice like unintended trauma, knowing full well the agony that her inquiry had caused within the man before her.
“What was her name?”
West inhaled atmosphere and tears, whispered more than spoke into the night.
“Abigail.”
The name hung in the air, seeming to enjoy the freedom from years of hiding in the deepest and darkest part’s of a young soldier’s broken heart.
“We married young and lived dangerously, but we were happy. She died while giving birth to our son. He was stillborn. It shouldn’t have happened, it was one of those things… The doctors tried their best to save her, but she had lost too much—I mean, they tried everything, but it was too late, and… The blood was—When she was taken from me, I lost everything I’d ever loved. She rescued me from living the life of a corn farmer in Nebraska; she showed me the world and became my world. How she could ever love someone like me, I never—”
“West, don’t—”
“After Abby died, I joined Milicom. I had nothing left but a house filled with baby toys and clothing and diapers… and her. She was everywhere I looked in that house. I could see her face in the mirror, I could smell her on my pillow, I could feel her everywhere. Oh, Abigail… I had to escape, and Milicom helped me to escape. It was years before the Quebec War, and years after War Three. I figured I could travel the world with the Reconstruct Fleet and try to forget my prior life. I served some time in Africa and South America, helped rebuild some cities, but it wasn’t working out. I still had eight years on my Milicom contract, but I wanted to come home. They really didn’t need the homefront personnel at the time, and they said the only way they’d let me come home was if I was enrolled in
to a special program that Milicom had established, a covert program to develop advanced weapons systems from a technology that couldn’t be explained—”
“The Styx program.”
“Yeah. They brought us here, a fine crop of bright young patriots. They sent us into the light, and those of us who came out again had become something not human.”
“How many of your group survived?”
“There were fifty of us in my test group, Level K. Two of us came out alive, me and an ex-Irish Blood Army soldier called Ember. After us, there would be only one more group sent in before the Quebec War interrupted the program. Level L was made up of two men, both pretty high-ranking Milicom officers, Richter and Michael.”
“How many of you were kept off that island after the war?”
“Santa Fosca? After the Chicago.. incident, supposedly the lower levels of Styx were exiled to that island. In reality, most of them had to be killed. And I was among the lucky few who had to do most of the killing. The only Styx left here on the mainland after the purge were Levels K and L, well, only Richter was left at that point. What happened in Chicago started in Montreal years before.”
“What happened in Chicago, West? Were the reports true?”
“A lot happened in Chicago. I think that that’s a story best left for another time.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry. I just need to get some fresh air for a while. This place is depressing me. I think we should move on.”
They rose, West blowing out the flame of the oil lantern. Outside was a confusing murky gray. Day blended into night blended into day.
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