Project U.L.F.

by Stuart Clark

  “Are you all right?” His voice was quiet.

  “I’m fine. Where’s Kit?”

  He took his hand off her arm and then brought it up to his face. Covering half of it he rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand before letting it slide down to pull at the skin of his cheek and temporarily distort his features. “Kit’s gone,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Gone? Where?”

  Wyatt was already past her. It seemed the matter was not up for discussion. “C’mon,” he said, rapidly regaining his composure. “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Not before we get you cleaned up.” Her voice was firm.

  Wyatt turned back to her, a pained expression on his face. “We don’t have time, Kate, we’ve lost enough as it is.”

  “So five more minutes won’t make a blind bit of difference, will it?” It was a challenge not a question and an argument would just waste even more time.

  “Five minutes,” he said, holding up a hand in submission and displaying his agreement in fingers.

  Five minutes turned out to be nearer ten. She cleaned off the caked blood with some of Chris’ med-wipes and then set to work on his nose. “This might hurt a little,” she said as she laid a small plastic splint along the bridge of his crumpled nose. Over this she laid some padding material and held that in place with porous tape. Not once as she went about her task did she look above the injured area and into the eyes above. Eyes which she felt burning into her. Eyes that were admiring her features and taking them all in. She feared that if she did she would simply collapse into his arms from the relief of getting him back.

  “There, finished,” she announced, pushing herself up from her knees, hoping those same knees would not buckle like her resolve threatened to. She stepped back to admire her handiwork.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  She thanked God that they didn’t have a mirror between them. Chris would die laughing at her efforts.

  * * * * *

  Chris turned off the welding arc and lifted the visor. “There. Finished.” The three of them exchanged glances and breathed a collective sigh of relief. They’d done it. They had survived their own little nightmare and now they could relax. Only now did the three of them realize the pressure they had been working under. The tension had been tangible, and now that it had lifted their muscles ached from the relinquishing of the invisible burden.

  Now they would simply wait in silence. Wait for the monster to leave for the last time and for the others to return.

  Bobby glanced up at the sky. Black was invading the deep blue like a relentless wave of ink. The first of the night’s stars were winking their arrival just above the horizon. They wouldn’t be back tonight, she told herself. They’d be mad to try and make it there and back in two days. She slid the door shut and locked out the fast-approaching night.

  * * * * *

  Wyatt winced.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” Kate said as she carefully tried to remove the rest of the bandage from his broken face. Her previous effort had been a disaster and had begun to fall off Wyatt’s nose within half an hour of it being taped in place.

  “I’ll re-bandage it for you,” she had said.

  “Kate, we don’t have time. I’ll do without.” he had replied.

  “No,” she had insisted. “I’ll bandage it for you again, and this time it will be better.”

  So now they had stopped again so Kate could work in the last of the day’s fading light. Wyatt watched her as she went about her task, her hands, delicate and nimble as they rummaged around the small medical kit, her eyes, compassionate yet focused underneath the frown of concentration.

  “I killed a man.” The admission spewed forth from his lips, almost involuntarily.

  Kate faltered in her work, then slumped back from her knees to sit on her calves. “I know,” she said. The color had drained from her face.

  “What?”

  “Kit.”

  “No!” he said, appalled that she could even think that of him. She frowned. “Last night. In the DSM. You wanted to know what it was I had done, what I’d been jailed for. I killed a man.”

  “Oh.” She seemed lost for words.

  “Look, I’m sorry for getting angry with you last night. I don’t know why I did,” and he really didn’t know why. The truth was that he had meant to tell her, he had wanted to tell her, but he’d wanted to tell her on his own terms. Kit’s disclosure of his past had caught him unawares. He’d not been ready for the sharing of his dark secret. He had felt exposed, like a nocturne caught in a trapper’s flashlight beam and only one instinct had come to him. Fear. That fear had then been replaced with anger and he’d lashed out at the closest thing to him. Closest in every sense of the word. Kate had taken the brunt of it and he’d never meant to hurt her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It was none of my business.”

  “No, no. It’s not okay.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault. It was a reasonable question to ask.”

  There was a minute of silence when neither of them knew what to say or to add and then Kate got back up on her knees and set about fixing his new bandage. “What happened?” she asked as she reached for some tape.

  Wyatt sighed. “My father was a brutal man. Not only was he brutal, he enjoyed his drink. The man and his bottle were a frightening combination. When I was young I would dread the nights that he came home late. His coming home late only meant one thing—that he was hitting the bottle. I used to hide in my room when he came home and I’d hear him shouting and screaming at my mother and then I’d hear her screaming too. That was when,” he faltered, “…That was when he started hitting her.”

  Kate put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Wyatt. That’s awful.”

  “That’s just the start of it. Most of the time he would just beat my mother, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. He’d beat her to within an inch of her life, but when that hadn’t vented all his anger, well, that’s when he’d start on me.”

  Kate’s other hand went to her mouth.

  “My mother tried to protect me, but she was weak and had taken enough battering as it was. The first few times it hurt. Really hurt. But after that I got used to it. I let him come and I learned to hate my father.

  “When I was twelve I took on some casual work, nights after school and weekends. I lied about my age to get the job and saved all the money I earned. It kept me out the house and out of his way. With the money I’d saved I got a membership for a high-G gym. It was nothing special, low weights, high gravity…it didn’t feel much like a workout but the muscles piled on fast. I’d decided that I’d make my father pay for what he’d done to us and this was the first stage of my plan.

  “He noticed the change in me almost immediately and started to leave me alone. Sometimes I’d step in and take the blows meant for my mother but often I’d come home and find her cowering in a corner of the house somewhere, bruised and bleeding, and my father nowhere to be seen.

  “When I was fifteen years old I got called into the principal’s office at school. He told me that he’d just been on the telelink to my mother, who had been upset. My father was dead, killed in a hover-vehicle accident. I didn’t feel sadness, only bitter disappointment, simply because all that I had been working towards for the last three years had just been snatched away from me. Most people regret that they’d never said ‘I love you,’ or said it with real meaning or enough times. I regretted never giving my father the beating he had meted out to my mother and me so many times, that was all.

  “I finished my schooling and then convinced my mother to sell the house. So we left it and all its bad memories, and that’s when we came to Chicago.

  “We found a small apartment in Evanston. To begin with, everything was fine. We had a new life. A life without fear. It was a fresh start for us, but then my mother began to miss San Francisco. She missed her friends, and for reasons I could never unde
rstand, she said she missed my father. Often she would just want to sit and talk about him, but I refused to indulge her and wouldn’t talk about a life that I had hated and had left behind. The memories brought nothing but pain for me. It was a source of constant conflict between us. I moved out a year later.

  “What happened to your mother?” Kate inquired.

  “She stayed a while but then sold the apartment and moved back to San Fran, where she thrives. That’s where her life had been. Chicago was where mine was just starting. I see her occasionally, but things are difficult between us because of what’s happened since…the imprisonment, and what I do now.”

  “Go on.”

  “I got an apartment downtown where I had a good job, nothing special, but it was roomy and comfortable and secure. My neighbors were an old couple. Howie was a heavy smoker and mean card player. I spent many enjoyable evenings around their place listening to their stories and then, when Grace, his wife, had gone to bed, I’d lose most of my week’s earnings on the turn of a card.” Wyatt laughed, then looked sad again. “But Howie was dying and he knew it. One night, after we had thrown down our hands for the last time he leaned across to me and asked me to promise to look after Grace when he had gone. Of course, I told him to stop talking like that, but he begged it of me and I said I’d do the best I could. It seemed to relieve him a great deal. He told me he had made provision for her, a small nest egg he had tucked away, but that wasn’t the same as looking after her. Six months later Howie passed away.

  “I missed him terribly but Grace was shattered. It seemed she was nothing without him. She lost her will to live, became incapable of looking after herself and died a couple of months later, of a broken heart, I guess.

  “The flat was empty for maybe a couple of months before a couple of thirty-somethings moved in. They seemed nice, respectable, but they kept themselves very much to themselves, which was fine. They never bothered me, I never bothered them. We simply nodded our hellos.

  “The first few months passed without incident, but then the shouting started, and the thumps and the screams. I’d see her with bruises on her arms and marks on her face, expertly touched up with make-up, of course, but when I asked her about them she’d lie to me. She’d fallen over or walked into a door, how silly of her. I knew she was lying to me, they were the same ridiculous lies my mother used. Crediting others with no sight or intelligence.”

  “So what happened?” Kate finished the dressing and rocked back onto her haunches again.

  Wyatt sighed again before continuing. “One night I got woken up about two or three in the morning. I don’t remember exactly, it all seems blurred to me now.

  “I could hear him shouting and it seemed to go on and on. The she started crying, which only seemed to make him more angry, which is when the fists started flying. That’s when I got up.

  “I got dressed, went outside and banged on the door. I wasn’t planning to do anything, just ask him to keep the noise down, and in doing so, maybe bring him to his senses, get him to lay off her a bit. He didn’t come to the door, just yelled out ‘What do you want?’ so I asked him to keep it down a bit. Other people had to sleep. ‘I’ll do what I goddamn like,’ he says, ‘Now piss off and mind your own business.’ That’s when I saw red.

  “I don’t really recall much of what happened next very well. It seemed that all the hate I’d stored ready to use against my father came awake inside of me. A terrible dormant force I’d harbored deep inside had been brought to the surface. It seemed to infuse me with amazing strength, I kicked the door in without a thought and was inside the flat before I realized what I was doing. I saw her, huddled on the corner of the sofa, lips trembling, eyes wet with tears. And then I saw him. He had his back to me, but when he turned to face me I didn’t even register his features. I just saw my father.” Wyatt shook his head. “To this day I couldn’t tell you what he looked like,” he said distantly. He had stopped, retrospective.

  “So what happened next?”

  Wyatt was brought around by her question. As he looked at her, his eyes and mind seemed to focus again. “The guy came at me fast. It was frightening! He was bigger than I was and already extremely aggressive. I was cornered, caught in the narrow hallway, too scared to fight, too angry and proud to run.

  “I looked around. Next to me was a large bronze ornament and I snatched it up. It seemed to weigh nothing; the rage infused me with a strength I had never possessed, nor ever will again. He came at me and I swung at him. I aimed to hit him in the mid-riff, torso or stomach, somewhere that would disable him but not do any lasting harm. He anticipated the swing and ducked but he wasn’t fast enough and we connected. One hit and he went down.

  “One hit,” he said again quietly.

  “You’d killed him?”

  Wyatt nodded slowly, a grim expression on his face. “I prayed it wasn’t so. Shock brought my perceived world of the last few minutes crashing back into reality. It was like I had been blind and could see again. I leaned over the body and felt for the pulse, but it wasn’t there. He was dead.

  “The woman went crazy, screaming hysterically, awful screams. I couldn’t understand it, I’d just saved her and there she was calling me murderer.”

  “What did you do?” Kate asked.

  “I ran. It was a stupid thing to do but I was young and scared. I had to get out of there. However you looked at it, I’d just killed a man. It was crazy. I mean, where was I going to go? I lived next door, for Christ’s sake. At best it was only a matter of days before the cops would find me, so I went back to the flat that night, where they were waiting for me and took me into custody.

  “It went to trial, of course. Another murder case in Chicago that didn’t even make headlines somewhere.”

  “Murder? But that’s ridiculous! It was self-defense, Wyatt!”

  “But it didn’t look like that. Forced entry. An unprovoked attack, and I didn’t have a bruise on me. How could I claim he attacked me? He didn’t touch a hair on my head.”

  “Surely the woman testified?”

  “She did, but she crumbled under cross-examination. Like every battered wife, she still loved her husband, even after all he’d done to her, and refused to say a word against him. Her testimony was practically useless. It did nothing to either help prosecute or acquit me. With no other witnesses it looked like an open-and-shut case.

  “My lawyer plea-bargained. They would drop the murder charge, which carried the death penalty, if I pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which I was really guilty of. So I saved my own life, but it was taken away from me again when they sentenced me to twenty years inside.

  “Sometimes I wonder if death would have been better.”

  “Wyatt, don’t say things like that!”

  His eyes widened, seeing things from his past, from that time, searching for some justification for what had happened to him back then. Then they glazed and hardened and returned to Kate’s. “No one can tell you what it’s like on the inside. Oh, they can tell you, and you’d be horrified, but until you’ve actually been there and experienced it, you can never know what it’s like. I saw and was subjected to things that I will never talk about, to anyone. It was a living hell-on-earth.” His eyes seemed to burn into her, two hot coals of black as the chill descended around them. “That’s why I came here. They gave me a choice. Stay inside or get out early and have a reasonable chance of starting over again. It would mean facing death, but I would have a fighting chance. Not much of a choice, really, was it?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to, believe me, I wanted to, but there seemed no good time. We were never…alone.” He stopped, realizing the implications of what he was saying. “And when we were, circumstances never allowed.”

  “Oh, Wyatt,” she said, rising to her knees and bringing her face close to his.

  “Mind!” he said, cautioning her to be careful of his nose.

  “Not at all,” she replied, misunderstanding him and placing
a kiss gently on his forehead. “Not now that you’ve told me. Not now that I can begin to understand you.”

  Gon-Thok stepped from the trees to their right, startling them both. It croaked and its breath plumed in the air in a misty cloud. For the first time Wyatt felt the cold despite a warm feeling deep inside. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand in his, “It’s getting late. We have to move.” She nodded and smiled at him and for the first time in a long time, he smiled back.

  * * * * *

  Chris drummed his fingers without thinking. Strategically placed glowsticks brought a faint light to the inside of the cabin, and were a point on which the eyes could focus. Apart from that, it was dark and cold. This was how it had been last night. How it would have to be if they were to survive. He was bored but he was not tired enough to sleep. Not yet, at least.

  “You’re a bloody sociable pair,” he said and saw the others smile weakly in the darkness at his attempt at humor. He sighed and let his head fall back against the bulkhead. He had to try. Had to say something. The silence and boredom was driving him insane.

  “How long shall we give them?” he asked.

  “The others?” Bobby asked.

  “Who else?”

  “Before we do what? It’s hardly like we’re just sitting here waiting for them before we leave is it? Without them we aren’t going anywhere. We give them as long as it takes.”

  He hadn’t thought about it like that. He’d thought that if Wyatt and the others hadn’t made it back then they’d go out again. Just keep trying. But they didn’t have the personnel or the means to do it. If Wyatt didn’t make it back, then it was unlikely that the alien would either. They would have lost their guide and would have no way of locating the DSM. This was it. Wyatt was their last hope.