by David Coy
“Hey, if that’s the way he wants to die . . .”
“He was gone just like that,” Mahoney said, flashing open his hand.
“Well, it’s your lucky day,” the other said with a toothy grin.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it wasn’t Rachel Sanders that got away.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that there.”
They went back to the truck and Mahoney got in the rear, slammed the door closed and locked it. “No more stops!” he said before anyone could ask anything. Then he read the looks of concern on their faces and softened. “He got away. He ran into the green. I don’t think I hit him, but I might have. In either case he’s dead. Forget it. No more stops.”
Donna wasn’t sure the jungle could kill Eddie Silk quite so easily.
“The kid’s got nerve,” John remarked.
“Shut up,” Mahoney said.
They kept quiet for the remainder of the trip. There was little to talk about anyway. It was certain they’d get no more answers from Mahoney. Rachel was especially gloomy and leaned back against her arms and stared at the floor. John watched her, knowing full well that when she stared it wasn’t a good sign. He kept one eye on her the entire trip.
They arrived at the monolith with the sun at its highest. When Mahoney opened the doors, the air rushed in at them like something hot and alive. The oppressive heat hammered them. They marched across the open area toward the monolith’s enormous portal, Mahoney at the rear and the other one leading the way. “I can’t remember it ever being this hot,” John said.
“Me, neither,” Rachel said in a monotone. “It’s a real scorcher. Maybe summer has arrived.”
The entire clearing was now a mountain of containers, and the lifts worked at it like ants on something sweet, pulling off a bit of it with each visit and hauling it away to the nest. Huge trucks were queued up next to the pile, their beds stacked high with containers, waiting to be off-loaded. To the north were rows of shelters just going in, moved over from the settlement.
North of the machine was a power station. It looked like the one at the settlement, but this one was brand new. An elevated tray filled with a row of thick, silvery conduits ran from the power station and into the monolith through a meter-wide round hole bored in its side. Sunlight reflected from one of the panels in its metallic dome and hit John square in the face. He turned away from the assault.
“Christ, it’s hot.”
* * *
The clean, spacious chamber they had once occupied was now a jumble of boxes, containers and equipment of every conceivable kind. Heavy power cables crisscrossed the smooth floor. A mix of transportation workers, technicians and tradesmen kneaded the clutter. Stacking it here and moving it there, the space was a mass of activity. John saw a couple of faces he knew, and Rachel said, “Oh, hi” to a woman splicing two pieces of thick black cable together. The woman gave a half-hearted hi back and eyed their prisoner’s entourage with a long and somber gaze. Rachel could read something else in the woman’s face—a fear unspoken, perhaps. It was there, just beneath the worried look. Rachel could almost hear it trying to get out and craned her neck around as she went by, waiting for it. But it never came.
Donna slowed down and tried to get a look at the manifests on some of the new containers.
“Keep moving up there,” Mahoney said.
“Don’t push me,” Donna said right back. She turned around to face Rachel and spoke walking backwards. “It looks like half this shit is scientific equipment.”
“Yeah,” Rachel replied. “I saw a gas chromatograph back there and a portable SEM.” Then she nodded in a direction over Donna’s shoulder. “Wow. Look,” she said, oddly animated. “That’s a full-sized Barne’s MAD.”
“I’ve heard of them, but never seen one,” Donna said. “They use the same technology as my medical scanner, right?”
“Right, but they’re far more sophisticated,” Rachel said.
“What is it?” John asked, looking at the huge two-meter-tall cabinet standing on the floor. The glassed-in part was high enough for a man to stand in and wide enough to lie in. A table-like affair was mounted to the wall inside it. The remaining third of the machine was all control panels and displays. Except for the clear glass, it was clean, satin-finished gray and quite a work of art.
“Multiple Analytical Device,” Rachel said its name. “You can use it to tell almost anything about the physical and chemical properties of a sample. You can see right in it and tell precisely how it’s made and of what. You can weigh it, image it, test its density or molecular structure, plot processes inside it, almost anything—all at the same time. The best thing is that it’s nondestructive. The sample comes out just like it went in. We had an old one at school that cost a fortune. That one’s new. It might be a hundred times the cost of the one we had. I wonder what the heck they’re doing with it?”
“Cut the crap up there,” Mahoney said.
Donna said under her breath, “Blow me.”
John was beginning to fear for Rachel. Sometimes the signs were subtle and sometimes not, but he’d come to recognize nearly all of them—even the most subtle one of all—swift changes in mood. Sometimes the biggest, most violent ones were preceded by just such signs. Deep in her brain, patterns of thought and non-thought were shifting rapidly, changing places. Reason and emotion were playing musical chairs. He could sense it.
The way he figured it, she’d been damned lucky not to have killed or injured herself during her seizures so far. Prior to capture, the most dangerous object she’d been likely to collide with was the soft ground itself. During the long, motionless days of captivity, she would move slowly to the bedroom and lie down just before a seizure. “I have to lie down,” she’d say and Donna or John would sit at her side while the storm racked her. But now, she was walking through a literal maze of hard-edged equipment and cutting surfaces with a big one building steam. He wished he was closer to her. He wished his hands were free to catch her.
“So anyways, that’s what it is,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder and wiggled her butt. Donna, still walking backwards, must have sensed it, too. Her eyes opened wide at John as a signal. John mouthed the words “Watch her.”
“Where are you taking us?” Rachel asked loudly, happily. Then she stepped in a circle so everyone could hear and added in sing-song, “I hope you’re not taking us where I think you’re taking us. I wouldn’t want to go thaaaaay errrrr . . .”
That was it. John moved up a step and was prepared to throw his body in front of hers—anything—to protect her, but he didn’t have the chance.
Rachel turned and looked at John as if he were standing on a precipice from which she had just fallen. Her eyes rolled and before he could get to her, she was falling like a tree, sideways into a crooked stack of boxed labware, half of the boxes opened—the worst of all possible targets. There was a sound of smashing and crunching glass as her seizure-stiffened body crushed through the stack on the way to the floor.
“Rachel!”
John and Donna were at her side in seconds, but there was nothing they could do with their hands bound behind them except squat and look horrified. Lying face down, Rachel twitched and pounded against the shattered glass. They could hear the grinding sound.
“Help her!” Donna screamed.
“What’s wrong with her?” Mahoney asked, his brow tight.
“She’s having a seizure, you dumb bastard! Get her off the glass!”
Mahoney just stood there looking at her, unsure if he wanted to touch her. “What kind of seizure? From what?”
“Step back!” the younger said and slung his rifle. Moving quickly, he took up a gather of Rachel’s cottons at the shoulder and behind her knee. “Help me, Mahoney. We don’t want this one damaged.”
Together they lifted her off the glass by her clothes like a sack. Donna saw the trail of blood that rained down from her and worried that so much blood so fast could only mean a seri
ous wound, perhaps a severed artery. They deposited her face down a few meters away.
“Turn her over, you idiots!” Donna yelled.
Bothered by the order, Mahoney rolled her, still twitching, onto her back. A piece of glass the size of a finger was stuck in her cheek and she was bleeding from wounds to her chest, neck, and legs.
“Shit!” Donna said. “Untie my hands! I’m a nurse!”
Still gun-shy from the last experience of untying hands, Mahoney was unsure what to do. He stared at her. “No,” he said. “She ain’t hurt that bad.”
“Yes, she is! Untie me!”
“No.”
“It might be okay,” the younger said.
“Forget it,” Mahoney said, unwilling to bend.
“What’s going on here?” a strange voice said.
They turned to see a blue-robed Council member standing behind them. He looked tall and scholarly. A wisp of a blond mustache framed his thin upper lip. The mercenaries came to attention.
“This one’s having some kind of fit, sir,” Mahoney said.
Council Member Ryder took a step closer and looked down at Rachel’s face. “Is this the woman?” he asked Mahoney. His voice was smooth and confident. He gave Donna the willies.
“I believe so, sir. Yes,” Mahoney answered. “We were just taking her in when she fell over into those glass articles there.”
“I see.”
“Should I go for help?” the young soldier asked.
Donna said, “I’m all the goddamned help she needs if you’d just take these things off me.”
Ryder considered her. “Not just yet,” he said. Then to the soldier, “Go. And hurry.”
The soldier was gone like a shot, sprinting full speed through the jumble, dodging equipment and crates. Donna watched him go and thought to herself that here was the quintessential drone; a real soldier’s soldier, and shook her head. What a shame.
“Language like that could get you in very deep trouble around here,” Ryder said easily to Donna.
“So?”
“So I thought you might like to consider not using it. Especially in the presence of a Council Member.”
“I’ve been using it ever since I landed on this ball. Maybe it’s something in the water. I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s just your sinful nature. I don’t know, either.” Donna chuckled and shot Ryder her wry grin and let her eye flash. “Oh, I’m sinful all right. But that’s not news to you, now is it?”
“No. I know all about your little outlaw group. Tell me. How does it feel to be prisoners of the righteous?”
“Just about how it feels to have a big, unwelcome stick up my ass.”
Ryder drew a long breath through his nose. “You lack prudence in addition to being sinful.”
“Well, the way I figure it is, you’re going to do whatever you want to me. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I’ve got very little to lose.”
“You’re wrong there—quite wrong,” Ryder said.
“Really? The worst you can do is kill me.”
Ryder sniffed and let the word out through a slack mouth that barely moved. “Really?” he said.
The soldier ran back carrying a folding stretcher followed by a youngish doctor in a gray lab coat. Rachel had lapsed into her sleep state after the seizure and was now limp and motionless. The doctor cut her cottons with scissors where the bleeding was the most profuse and applied compresses to the cuts, taping the pads down or tying them. Donna could see that none of the wounds were life threatening and felt somewhat better. He left the glass piece that had penetrated her cheek in place, he said, until he could take it out in the clinic. They wasted no time getting her on the stretcher; then the soldier and the doctor carried her off.
“Take good care of her, doctor,” Ryder said after them.
“What about us?” Donna asked. “Don’t you want to take good care of us, too?”
Ryder smiled. When he did, his mouth formed a peculiar hole with teeth in it. “Take these two to the impound,” he ordered Mahoney.
“Get moving,” Mahoney said in a too-loud voice.
As John watched them carrying Rachel away, he had the overpowering urge to follow them. He let it go and started to move under the mean little nudge of Mahoney’s rifle.
* * *
The interior of the monolith had been transformed. Its smooth and sensual walls and floors were still there, but the beauty in them had been lost. The space had been transmuted into a strange blend of organic forms overlaid with manmade fixtures, and the natural beauty had been scratched and scribbled out by man’s idiosyncratic pencil. Angular steel doors had been installed over the gentle oval portals leading to the interior chambers. Cables stretched and sagged overhead. Some made raised black scars on undulating walls. Lifts that ran here and there over the smooth floor left dark rubber smudges in crazy quilt patterns throughout. The oddly pleasant scent they had come to love when they lived there—though no doubt still present—had been masked by the smell of plastic, rubber and human bodies. High capacity halogens hung from hundreds of fixtures casting harsh, irregular light over the entire interior.
“I hardly recognize the place,” John said to Donna’s back.
He desperately wanted to know where they’d taken Rachel. The grim thought occurred to him that he might not ever see her again. The weight of that horrid idea felt like a heavy stone on his chest. A step or two later he felt panic and fear beginning to twitch deep down inside. The panic part was starting to loosen his normally steadfast grip on reality.
He stopped cold and turned. “Where are you taking us?” he blurted at Mahoney. “I’ve got a right to know.”
“You’ve got shit,” Mahoney said. “Get moving!”
“No. I’m not moving. Where’s Rachel?”
Mahoney looked around. They had walked into a canyon of stacked crates and were virtually hidden from view.
“You know,” Mahoney said. “I could beat the shit out of you right here and call it an accident. In fact, I’ve been wanting to beat the shit out of somebody all goddamned day.”
“Why don’t you just beat your dick?” Donna said.
“Okay. That’s it,” Mahoney said angrily. “I’m gonna have a piece of you two right now. I don’t give a shit.”
He put his rifle down and pulled a thin black baton out of its holster. He skipped up at John, raising the stick as he came.
All John could think as Mahoney stepped closer was how thoughtless the attack was.
When Mahoney was close enough, John kicked out smartly with his right foot and connected with Mahoney’s groin. A dull thud echoed in the crate canyon. The baton stopped in mid-air. A long, deep, moan came from Mahoney’s diaphragm. He sank to his knees and fell over on his side. He lay there for a moment, then began to roll slowly from side to side, his eyes shut tight. “Nice one,” Donna said. “Now watch this.”
She stepped up next to the fallen man and looked over at John with her eye ablaze. Then she smiled down at Mahoney.
“This is for being such a dumb sonofabitch,” she said. “If you worked for me, I’d fire your ass.” Then she bit her lip in determination, jumped straight up in the air, bent her knees and stiffened her body. She came down like a solid stump with her knees together square in the middle of Mahoney’s chest. There was a sickening crack and a hoooof of escaping air. She fell over grinning, like a child playing a silly game.
“Christ!” John said.
Getting to her feet, Donna said with a smile, “That’ll teach him. That’ll teach him.”
John looked at Mahoney. The impact must have crushed his ribs and lungs and certainly damaged his heart. He wasn’t moving. She’d probably killed him with that vicious dead fall.
Donna was down on her butt, scratching at Mahoney’s pockets with her hands, trying to get to the key. John looked at her for a moment, dumbfounded. It wasn’t a matter of speculation whether or not Donna Applegate was a cold-blooded killer—it was now an established f
act.
“Got it!” she said, pulling the straight little key out of Mahoney’s shirt pocket. She got up and backed toward John with it. “Turn around,” she said.
They had the cuffs off in seconds. John tossed them between the containers.
“We can’t leave him here like this,” John said, gesturing at Mahoney’s body.
Donna looked around, thinking.
“Help me with this container,” she said.
They hauled one down off a stack, opened it and dumped the contents out on the floor. Then they hefted Mahoney’s body into the crate, closed the top and pushed it out of the way.
“There,” Donna said with another grin. “At least he’s out of sight. If he’s not dead, he soon will be. Grab the rifle.”
They crept back the way they’d come and peered around the last stack of containers toward the opening. It was easily a hundred meters away. The jungle was framed by the enormous arched portal like a scenic painting. Donna was suddenly filled with a desperate longing to be in that painting.
“I can live there,” she said solemnly. “I’ll find a way.”
“That’s some hope,” John said. His thoughts were focused on finding Rachel. The thought of leaving her in the hands of the Council angered him beyond reason. Putting words to the next thought that formed, he said, “The first thing is to get the hell out of here until we can plan something.”
“Getting out’s the easy part,” she said stepping out into plain view. “We just walk out. Come on.”
She was right. No one took notice of them. They were background noise, unrecognizable against the bustle. They weren’t broadly known to begin with; even the Council member had had to ask who Rachel was to be sure. There were other faces moving by on foot or on a lift that he’d seen before, and who had seen him, but those few sparks of recognition were without import and brief.
They walked briskly, but not too fast. Donna nattered meaninglessly and gestured at John the whole way, somehow synchronizing their level of activity with their surroundings and deepening the camouflage. When they walked by the woman Rachel had greeted, she looked up and smiled.