by Leon, Mike
Sartorius gives the others a puzzled glance, then reaches slowly into the tank to lift up the somnambulist’s wrist so they can read the fading black lettering.
Drab 4 6 8 Grey.
“It’s not him,” Bruce says.
“It has to be somebody else in the facility then,” Helen mutters. “Dr. Sartorius, how many of your patients don’t stay here at the center?”
“Very few,” Sartorius answers, suddenly gaining a leery tone which Bruce would judge to be uncharacteristic from what he has seen of the man. “What exactly is this about? What are you two looking for?”
Helen gives pause before answering, but whatever she opens her mouth to say is interrupted by the raspy voice from within the deprivation tank beside them.
“You’ll find only anguish here,” the somnambulist says. “The thing you seek has not become.”
“The hell does that mean?” Bruce says.
“The divergent path circles back to its own crossroad.”
“What’s he talking about?”
Sartorius is without a guess. “I don’t know. He’s usually much more concise.”
“I see the evil thing in two of its places now, Bruce Freeman. Fear, horror. It knows I am watching. It does not care.”
“How do we stop it?” Helen says.
“Kill. No other way.”
“Kill it how? We need to know how.”
“You already know. It is unfortunate.”
“I don’t like that. What do you think that means?” Bruce says. Helen doesn’t spend much time brooding over an answer.
“Maybe nothing. We need to find Fleabag and see if he found anything. This is a waste of our time,” Helen says, heading for the door. Bruce sticks with her.
“What are you looking for?” Sartorius asks again, as he disposes of his needle in a plastic biohazardous waste bin with a big warning sticker on the side.
“I told you before, doc,” Bruce reiterates with some annoyance. “A remote viewer that shows up looking like a zombie and gets into people’s heads, flies, walks through walls, does whatever he wants.”
“That’s absurd. Not even Max can do those things.”
“Well, this thing can. Okay, doc?” Bruce snarks back at the doctor forcefully. “I’ve seen it. Been chasing it around since yesterday. People are dead now. And it has one of your medical code tattoos. You care to explain that?”
“I can’t.”
“You got to, because we got to find this guy and waste him before he kills again.”
“Waste him?”
“How many other patients have been administered the formula since you started?” Helen cuts in, before Bruce has to explicitly define that euphemism for a grown man who should know damn well what he means.
“Only six. What’s the code you’re looking for?”
“Aqua six one six green,” Helen informs the doctor slowly to avoid any mistake in the numbers.
“It’s not one I know,” Sartorius says. “I’ll have to look it up.”
“Let’s do that,” Bruce suggests. The doctor shuts the somnambulist back in his tank and then Bruce and Helen follow him back through the sets of security doors toward the front of the facility. They find Fleabag back in the rec room where they first split up and he offers them only disappointing news.
“We made the rounds of the whole place,” Fleabag says. “All three floors. None of the patients has that tattoo.”
“That isn’t possible,” Sartorius insists. “Not unless it’s one of the outpatients, but they manifest very minimally.”
“Somebody could’a been hiding under a bed or something, but I doubt it.” The werewolf pokes the tip of his nose. “You can’t hide from the old sniffer.”
Back in the waiting room at the front of the facility, Sartorius quietly asks Debbie the receptionist to help him look up the transient’s code in their computer system. Bruce and Helen are waiting at the reception desk when Sartorius looks at the computer screen and turns the color of paste. His difficulty in offering up an explanation for what he sees is palpable.
“What?” Helen goads, as she and Bruce both wait for the doctor to tell them anything at all. “Who is it?”
“It’s . . . uh. . .” Sartorius trails off. “It’s not in there.” He’s a terrible liar.
“What do you mean it’s not in there?” Helen rises up threateningly—something she doesn’t do often. “Does Fleabag need to help you put it back in there?” The werewolf closes in, walking behind the reception desk eagerly.
Bruce is watching Sartorius’s eyes. He has been for a minute now. He saw them move from the computer, to Helen, then somewhere across the room, then back down to settle on the keyboard as if the meaning of life was written across the space bar. This is a dead give-away. When people look at something and they don’t want others to think they looked at it, they always avert their eyes to something insignificant, something they pick at random upon the revelation they are being watched. That’s why Bruce doesn’t need the doctor to answer any more questions.
“Helen,” Bruce nudges the Graveyard director’s elbow as she relatively discreetly grumbles veiled and not-so-veiled threats at the doctor.
“I don’t think you want this guy beating answers out of you. . .”
“Helen,” Bruce repeats.
“What?”
“There.” Bruce points to the other side of the waiting room where little Harper plays with a color coded bead maze next to his worried mother and a much more lax Graveyard operator. The little code on the underside of the boy’s wrist is plainly visible.
Aqua 6 1 6 Green
INT. THE CATACOMBS - DAY
SUPER: The Distant Future
Harper climbs from the hulking stainless steel drum on the plastic rungs of a rope ladder Colonel Green hung into the salt solution. The tingling in his hands is the precursor to the burning he will feel when sensation returns to them. He already itches everywhere else, and when the painkillers wear off it will be far worse. He doesn’t care. He slams his clenched fist down on the lip of the container where Green stands on an iron riser waiting with a ragged beach towel to collect him. The faded markings Aqua 6 1 6 Green, put there at the Veidt institute decades ago, are beginning to flake from his wrist altogether.
“This can’t be!” he screams. “I did it! How is it this nightmare remains unchanged?!”
“Did it? Did what?” the colonel questions. “The files still read the same way. We probably wouldn’t know if they changed though. . .”
“The files say I killed Chan?”
“No. Sid Hansen stopped you. That’s what they said before you went back, right?”
“I have to go back again!” Harper bellows, ooze leaking across his right eye from the flesh sloughing above his brow. “I must have doubled up, gone back too far ahead. This is why Hansen was so confused in the park. Shoot me up and put me back in the tank.”
“You’re out of your mind!” the colonel barks as Harper brushes the towel aside. “You look like Hell! You won’t last another jump back!”
“It doesn’t matter, Allen! None of it matters unless I erase the whole list!”
“Your face is going to fall off before you do that!”
“You think I care about that?! If I can fix what happened, if there’s even a chance, then I’m going out fixing it!”
“Ryan says he’s not even sure Wyatt is one of the bloggers anymore!”
“That’s wrong! It has to be one of them!”
“There are pieces that don’t match up in Anderson’s reports. It never says anything about what happened to Chan after Chicago. If Chan was really Wyatt, don’t you think they would say something?”
“He could have gagged them somehow. You know how that freak does things!” Harper shouts, climbing from the tank as a char-grey husk of cracked flesh and wild white hair. The irony of him calling anyone a freak is not lost on him. “If nobody can kill him back then, they probably can’t talk about him either!”
&nb
sp; “We don’t know that.” Colonel Green follows Harper down the ladder from the riser, pacing himself to stay clear of Harper’s fingers in an overly cautious way that bothers Harper-makes him feel weak.
The nurse—Harper doesn’t know her name even though she is the only nurse who works with him—comes over to check his vitals as he rasps, struggling to stand on the cold concrete floor.
“I can’t believe you’re still moving,” she says. “Your blood pressure is shit. Colonel, his condition is critical.”
“I’m fine,” Harper insist.
“That’s the drugs talking.”
“They’re not loud enough. Give me more.”
“You’re already so full of steroids and painkillers it’s a miracle you can stand.”
“I don’t care! I already killed Chan! I saw it happen, but I have to go back again to make it come out right! It must be why this place is still . . . this place. I still have to go back and help myself.”
“You’re delirious.”
“No. It’s too complicated to explain right now. Once it’s done, the alteration of the timeline will be complete. I have to go back and stop Sid Hansen from stopping me.”
“We already know he stops you!” Colonel Green tries to reason, but his appeal is deeply flawed.
“Then send me back and make him stop me! If we sit here and do nothing we get the same result! We get that!” Harper points to a monitor bank far over the nurse’s shoulder, though she doesn’t follow his aim back to it. She never looks at it. Neither does the colonel. If they did, they would be angry like Harper—angry enough to do something. If they could see it the way he sees, they would be even angrier.
The monitor displays the top-down feed of the Las Vegas strip taken from the gargantuan spy satellite Vedrfolnir. The strip ceased to be a site of revelry long ago, at least in any conventional sense. The hordes had gathered there after most of the other cities were cleansed by nuclear fire after the Deconstruction. Most of those died out in time, unable to plan beyond immediate desires for shiny things and whatever food was convenient. Now the strip is a field of concrete and rotting skeletons that stretches for miles. Some starved, but most fell to violence spurred by hunger, sexual conquest, or just whimsy-the Frankies will happily kill each other for no other reason than they feel like it. A lone living figure hovers over a wilted corpse at the edge of the Bellagio’s sprawling fountain, probably having sex with it, because that’s the kind of thing they do. Harper has seen that and so much worse. The others can only look down on it all from above, but he can float freely through the disaster areas and corpse piles. The Frankies certainly don’t bother to bury the dead. Some wash themselves out of vanity, but none clean or maintain anything around them. The uncleansed areas have become stinking cesspools rife with horrors. Harper has seen entire piles of bodies that died mid-orgy, with putrefied mooshy centers, and an outer crust of late comers still not quite stiff with rigor mortis. He has seen a solid gold toilet piled with feces since the water stopped working. He has seen them eat each other and themselves. He has seen the smoking fusion of flesh and fiberglass left behind when a Bugatti Veyron slams into the Washington Monument at four-hundred miles per hour.
“If you two won’t help me, I’ll do it myself!”
“He’ll kill you!” the colonel says. “We already know that happens!”
“I’m dead anyway!” This is only a slight hyperbole. Sartorious died long before he could doing anything to lessen the toxicity of the chemical cocktail he used to treat the remote viewers in his care. The massive dosages Harper takes to permit manipulation of past events have taken their toll over the last forty-eight hours. Previously, the massive tumor in his brain was killing him slowly. Now the chemicals are killing him quickly. “What difference does it make?”
The nurse looks like she wants to say something, but she doesn’t. Neither does Green. Neither of them are moving fast enough for Harper’s taste.
“Where are the drugs?” he demands. “Just give me the bottle. I’ll shoot it up myself.” Harper shambles for the cabinet where he knows they keep the steroids, but more importantly, the cocktail that allows him to focus his remarkable sight-focus it with such intensity that he no longer simply sees a faraway place, but personifies himself there. He stumbles only a few feet into his trip. He’s falling apart fast, but not fast enough to keep him from one last daydream.
Defeated by his obstinance, the nurse steps ahead of him. “Here,” she offers, seemingly unable to look him in the eyes. She takes a bottle from the racks of pills, vials, and other medical appliances.
“Give me all of it!” Harper commands. Sid Hansen won’t stop him this time. No one will stop him this time.
INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY
SUPER: Present Day
Fleabag hauls Sartorius through the white hallway trailing Bruce and Helen. His eyes become wild bloodshot things, veiny and narrow as he whips the doctor through the doors into the rec room like nothing more than a child’s doll.
“You’re not really going to do this!” Sartorius shouts. “That’s a child for Christ’s sake!” Fleabag slaps a hairy hand over the doctor’s mouth to shut him up.
“This can’t really be happening,” Bruce says. He should probably not be surprised, all things considered, but this last development has exceeded even his stretched expectations. “How is it even possible?”
Helen doesn’t look any less shocked. “Mary Sue said the viewer isn’t from now,” she says. “We thought she was hysterical, but she was making perfect sense. He came here from the future.”
“No shit!” Bruce yells.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Fleabag wants to know. “Build a time machine and go shoot the fucker in twenty-ninety-two or whatever year he’s from?”
“We don’t need a time machine. I mean, he’s right here,” Bruce says.
“He’s not right here. That’s the baby transient,” Fleabag says. “We need to kill the grown-up transient.”
“It’s the same thing. You kill him now, in his past, you kill him in the future. You never seen Back to the Future?”
“Is that the one with the guy from Teen Wolf?”
“I should have known,” Bruce sighs. “Go do it, I guess.”
“Do what?”
“Kill the kid.”
“I’m not killing a kid! What the fuck!?”
“Nigga, you eat people!”
“Not kids.”
“Pretend it’s Little Red Riding Hood. Whatever you got to do.”
“Nope. I didn’t sign up for that.”
“Yeah you did. You’re in the number one official black helicopter black ops off the record deny everything outfit there is. That’s exactly what you signed up for.”
“No it’s not,” Helen says.
“See!” Bruce starts to reiterate. “That’s an orde—hold up. That’s not an order?”
“How are you so sure killing him now will even work?” Helen asks.
“It’s not that complicated. We kill him now, he won’t even exist later.”
“Then he’ll never come back here at all, so then we’ll never have a reason to kill him, so we won’t kill him. Grandfather paradox.”
“So just cause he’s back here is proof that we won’t kill the kid.”
“I guess. I don’t know what will happen if we try.”
“Why do we have to kill him?” Fleabag says. “What if you put him in protective custody? He’s just a kid. We can give him a bunch of stuffed animals and get some babysitters and whatnot and just make sure he doesn’t grow up to turn into that thing.”
Helen doesn’t respond. She already sees the same gap in that logic that Bruce sees.
“That could be exactly what we did to turn him into that thing,” Bruce says.
“He’s right,” Helen agrees.
“Oh.” Realization strikes the werewolf. “This is a serious mindfuck.”
INT. F4PL0RD’S APARTMENT - DAY
F4pl0rd sips
from a can of cold and electrifyingly awesome Mountain Dew before finishing a story. “So then he says ‘Maybe if you hit the treadmill a little more, you would be.’”
Sid cackles wildly. “That’s hilarious!”
“Oh yeah. It’s the best. You have to hear about the time some cuck tried to sue Dick for four hundred million dollars just because Dick banged his girlfriend.”
“Was she hot?”
“Oh yeah. Dick only bangs the hottest chicks.”
“I should find this Dick Masterson and learn from him.”
Jamie sighs in overstated discontent from a beanbag chair in the corner of the messy room. “Are you ever going to actually hack the thing we need hacked or are we just going to sit here all day sharing sexist jokes?”
Sid shrugs. “I’m fine with either.”
“Chill out, snowflake,” F4pl0rd says, nudging his 18-button mouse to dismiss the screensaver rotating on the monitor in front of him.
“Yes, snowflake,” says the transient. “Chill out.”
Sid slings an FNX from its holster toward the source of the voice with lightning quickness. The transient stands embedded in the drywall, halfway between this room and the hallway outside. Sid looks down the pistol slide at the wreath of black flame obtenebrating the creature’s head. The luminescent tritium night sights appear more like eyes than any feature of the transient’s real face.
Jamie rushes for the door, but it slams shut, seemingly of its own volition. Jamie wraps both hands around the knob and pulls wildly to no avail.
“What do you plan to do with that, Sid?” the creature questions, staring down the barrel of Sid’s gun. “Shoot me? You can’t hurt me. I’m not even really here.”
“I know that now. But I’m gonna find you where you really are, and I’m gonna turn your cranium into a glory hole.”