by Ben Wolf
A thin, yellow beam carved into the rock, turning it to molten, violet ooze where the laser touched. Justin tried to increase the pressure on the trigger, but his hand ached and burned with fatigue.
When will that damn pill kick in? Had Pinch given him a dud? Or a fake? If he had, it wouldn’t have been intentional. Terrible way to earn repeat business.
Justin groaned and released his grip on the laser trigger, and the beam stopped. The lights along his arm had barely reached green, and they quickly reset to full blue.
He exhaled a long breath and closed his eyes, exhausted. He would’ve sat down if he could’ve, but that meant admitting defeat.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and clung to his temples, and his heart began to beat faster. He’d been working hard, but he didn’t think he’d exerted himself that much.
Justin inhaled a long breath to slow his heart rate, but it didn’t do much. His next breaths came quicker, and his heart rate only sped up.
What the hell?
Then he realized it.
The adrenalite. It must’ve kicked in. It explained his escalated heart rate and the perspiration, and it reminded him of how he’d felt when he’d fought Dirk.
Heat flooded his chest, his arms, his legs. It flowed into his hands and feet, to his fingers and toes, and strength accompanied it. Justin raised the laser, straightened his back with ease, and his aches and pains faded. His focus sharpened, and he smiled.
Awesome.
For the next sixty minutes, he tore through the rock with pinpoint accuracy. His own personal nook deepened by about three feet in every applicable direction, something that would’ve normally taken about a two or three hours if he’d been attentive to his work, or longer if he’d been casual about it.
He’d called for scooper units twice as much as anyone else near him had. The scoopers obliged and extracted the molten rock he’d melted from the walls so he could keep working, but the guys operating the scoopers eyed him.
Justin didn’t blame them. It made little sense to work hard and fast when he was getting paid by the hour, but he felt like he had to just to keep his heart from exploding. The sensation invigorated him, and he smiled as he worked.
Around seventy minutes in, the sensation began to fade. His body cooled along with his sweat, and his heart rate decelerated. Numbness tickled his lips, his fingertips, and his toes, and the aches and pains crept back into his muscles.
His productivity slowed, too. The laser wavered in his hands, and his legs shook and wobbled. His breathing slowed, then it sped up again as he worked harder and harder to function.
Justin’s vision blurred. He blinked hard, and it reset.
Within a few more minutes, the burning in his muscles returned full force—now even worse than before. He cursed. He never should’ve taken that damn pill in the first place.
Stecker’s warning rang in his memory. “…the crash afterward leaves you all but worthless, and to keep functioning you’ve got to take another one.”
Justin didn’t have another one.
His left leg buckled hard, and he staggered back, away from the wall, to regain his balance. The hand-laser’s shoulder straps dug into his flesh like dull knives.
He shook his head fast to try to wake himself up. It worked—for three seconds. Then he faded into the same malaise as before, only now the cavern around him rocked back and forth, threatening to spin around his head.
Maybe if he crouched down, he could recalibrate.
As he did, his legs gave out. He tried to brace himself, tried to keep the hand-laser from smacking on the floor. They were durable, but not unbreakable. Most importantly, they were ridiculously expensive, and he couldn’t afford to pay for one if he broke it. Three months’ pay, plus overtime, wouldn’t cover it.
But the laser’s business end smacked the cavern floor anyway, along with his knees. In his attempt to brace himself, he squeezed the trigger hard. Yellow light flared under the laser, and in less than a second, the lights on his arm ratcheted from bright blue to the most vibrant red at the end of the spectrum.
The laser stopped, and the apparatus hissed, venting emergency heat. He’d expelled the laser at maximum strength into a single spot on the cavern floor.
His knees hit hard, and he slumped onto his left side, next to the crater he’d carved into the floor. He lay there with the laser arm across his chest, his eyes open as the blue cavern ceiling danced overhead.
Justin sucked in greedy breaths, desperate to calm his rioting stomach and his trembling, throbbing muscles.
Then the ground began to shake beneath him, and a deafening crack sounded next to his head. Teal light glowed in his periphery.
16
Through the science office windows, Etya watched the man with the laser drop to the floor. His laser activated—whether on its own or because he’d activated it, she didn’t know—and it carved a hole into the ground that had to be at least ten feet deep, albeit narrow.
The way he’d slumped over, it had to be an accident. Something was wrong with him.
What little concern she harbored for him multiplied when teal light began to emanate from the hole in the floor. The miner rolled onto his back, giving her a clearer view of the light. She closed her human eye and used the augmented vision in her left eye to zoom in on the source.
It was Justin Barclay. She refocused on the teal light.
Then the floor split open only a foot from Justin’s body. Seismic alarms blared and red notifications popped up on the glass in front of her, but she looked through them, watching. Blue rocks plunged into the crevice from its edges, and the teal light flared from deep within the ground.
Just like it had when Mark died.
It was happening again.
The weight of the hand-laser reminded Justin of when Dirk had sat on his chest, ready to punch him in the face. But Justin’s depleted muscles failed to move it off of him. Even the thought of pushing it away left him exhausted.
The teal light next to him flared brighter, and he mustered the strength to turn his head for a look. He immediately wished he hadn’t.
A huge fissure had opened in the floor—that explained the loud crack—less than a foot from his position. He lay parallel with it. If he rolled to his right, he’d fall into it.
Even worse, the fissure glowed with teal light the color of copalion—valuable, volatile, and highly radioactive.
Justin lay only inches from certain death, but his depleted muscles couldn’t save him.
A cacophony of shouts and cries sounded around him, and the Geiger counter in his suit chattered with unending clicks. He managed to force his head away from the crevice and look toward the rest of his squad. Ralph stood there, in his mech, vacillating between barking orders and yelling at Justin to move away from the glowing hole in the ground.
Justin wanted to yell back, but his throat constricted, dry as a desert. All he managed was a pitiful, “Help.” No one could’ve possibly heard it.
The ground under Justin moved. Not much, but enough that he could feel it. He’d sunk about an inch closer to the fissure.
Connie’s mech showed up next, behind Ralph’s. She started toward Justin, but Ralph blocked her from moving any closer.
Alarm lights flashed within the cavern, and Justin’s heart rate thrummed faster, almost matching the Geiger counter clicking from his laser. Electronic warnings about avoiding radiation and clearing the area blared overhead.
The ground shifted beneath him again, and this time he sank at least three inches. The floor around him must’ve been breaking away.
He was going to die, and everyone around him would stand by, watching and wondering why he wasn’t just moving away on his own, right until he fell in. He’d already cheated death in Sector 6, but this time death would claim him. Justin closed his eyes, resigned to his fate.
A deep, angry shout split the cavern air. It cut through the crackling Geiger counter in Justin’s ear and overwhelmed the electronic alarms
.
Justin opened his eyes, his vision blurry. From across the cavern, a mech lumbered toward him with heavy, rhythmic steps that shook the ground underneath him.
Ralph’s mech reached out to slow the approaching mech, but Connie’s mech shoved into Ralph and knocked him on his side, clearing the path.
Justin’s vision focused.
It was Keontae.
Why are they not helping him?
Etya’s augmented vision zoomed out, and she opened her human eye. Justin Barclay lay there, next to a glowing chasm of radiation, and only one mech had taken so much as a single step forward to help him. But the supervisory mech had grabbed ahold of her and halted her progress.
The seismic alarm activated anew, and the real-time seismograph on the window in front of Etya spiked. And instead of helping, everyone else in the cavern either fled or encircled him, watching.
Cowards. Etya cursed in Russian, under her breath. If she could’ve gone back to save Mark, she would’ve done anything to prevent his fate. But these craven miners were going to let Justin die the same way Mark had.
She wanted to shout at them, flay them with her words. She wanted to hurl them into the crevice herself for their fear and apathy.
The seismometer danced with tiny spikes in intervals, and Etya watched a mech thunder toward Justin from halfway across the cavern.
Hope, a long-forgotten emotion, sparked in her chest.
Justin marveled at the size of Keontae’s mech as it approached. He wondered if Keontae could stop in time to keep from crushing his head with a heavy, metallic foot, but Keontae did. The mech’s alloy claws skidded along the floor and halted just inside a fresh crack in the floor.
“It’s okay, bro. I got you,” Keontae said, but Justin barely registered its meaning in his mind.
The weight on Justin’s chest lifted and slumped to his right side. It pulled him down at first, but he felt the harness around his shoulders recalibrate. It kept the hand-laser from hauling him into the crevice.
Something latched on to his leg and began to haul him away from the crevice. It felt like his leg was going to rip off, but the teal light faded from his periphery, and he soon found himself away from the fissure.
Then another loud crack sounded, and Justin’s progress ceased. Then it reversed.
Keontae yelled.
Justin forced his head to turn back, and he saw Keontae’s mech slip into the crevice.
Etya gasped. The ground beneath the savior’s mech gave way. He fell partway into the abyss, but the claw on his left hand snagged a piece of uneven ground and anchored him in place so only his legs dangled inside the crevice.
She looked away. She had to. She couldn’t watch another man in a mech perish as Mark had. Once was already too much.
Etya turned, pushed past the other scientists gawking at the sight, and headed for the science office door.
Somehow, Keontae had managed to get Justin away from the crevice, but now he struggled to stay out of it himself. Justin could see him from the waist up, clinging to an exposed chunk of the cavern floor with his mech’s claw attachment and trying to leverage his way back upright with the laser-arm side.
“Key?” Justin uttered. He wanted to reach toward him, to help him, but his body did nothing.
Keontae didn’t respond. Instead, his mech pulled on the claw side and pushed on his laser side. The mech’s waist rose into view, and the top of its thighs came next.
The ground shook, and Keontae’s grip faltered. His claw still held, but the cavern floor had lurched upward. The protrusion holding Keontae’s claw shifted down, and the mech went with it. Now Justin could only see him from the chest up.
“Keontae,” Justin rasped. “No!”
Keontae looked at him with dark eyes and fear etched on his brown face. “JB, I can’t—”
The protrusion crumbled, and Keontae slid into the bright blue hell below.
17
Two days later, Justin dragged himself from his bed, dressed in his nicest, darkest clothing, and headed to the cafeteria for Keontae’s memorial service. Though he’d mostly recovered from the phichaloride gas’s effects on his body, sorrow now weakened his muscles.
Keontae had died, and it was Justin’s fault.
Only ten people stood inside the cafeteria: Shannon, Harry, Stecker, Connie, Candy, Tara and Misty from the club, Oafy, Gerhardt, and a man wearing all black with a priest’s collar. Justin was the eleventh.
He exhaled a shaky sigh and headed toward the gathering. It was an accident. I never meant for him to get killed.
But you took the adrenalite. You didn’t admit that you couldn’t work. You were weak.
He was my best friend. I never wanted this to happen.
He was your best friend. Now he’s dead because of you.
Justin swallowed as Shannon turned toward him, but she looked away just as quickly. Then Harry hooked his arm around her shoulders.
Justin’s stomach stabbed with compounded grief, and he frowned.
Then Shannon shrugged Harry’s arm off of her.
It wasn’t much, but it gave Justin a fragment of hope. What for, he didn’t allow himself to wonder.
Candy noticed him next, and she nudged Connie and nodded toward him. Connie whirled around, hurried over to him, and wrapped him in a strong hug. He returned it without shame.
“How you holdin’ up?” she whispered as she held him close.
Justin swallowed. He almost broke right then, but he clamped his eyes tight and clenched his teeth. He inhaled another shaky breath. “Not good.”
Connie patted his back, gave him another squeeze, and then released him. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”
She nodded to Candy, and Candy came over and wrapped him in an even tighter hug. Aside from backing Keontae and Justin in the showers against Dirk and his idiots, that hug marked the first time Candy had given any indication she even liked Justin.
He returned her hug as well and smiled. “Thank you, Candy.”
She let go of him and nodded, but she said nothing.
“Are we ready to begin?” the priest asked from the front of the gathering.
Everyone in the cafeteria turned toward Justin. The last thing he wanted was to be in charge of this or be the center of attention, but they hadn’t given him the choice. And no one else would do it anyway.
“Yeah.”
Someone had positioned one of the Plastrex tables at an angle, and the priest stood next to it. A handscreen with Keontae’s image sat atop the table, and a wreath of brilliant orange flowers lay next to it. Tara and Misty must’ve brought them from the greenhouse.
“We are gathered here today in remembrance of Keontae LaTroy Oluwelu,” the priest began, “and to celebrate his life, his friendships, and his legacy. But first, let us pray.”
Justin bowed his head, but he didn’t close his eyes. Instead, he watched as everyone else also bowed their heads, except for Gerhardt, who stood there with his big arms folded, and Candy, who just stared at the floor. Her response didn’t bother Justin’s, but Gerhardt’s did. The annoyed look on his face didn’t help, either.
The priest ended the prayer, asked them all to sit, and uttered some words about faith and hope. Justin heard it all, but it couldn’t drown his guilt. Not a chance.
“In speaking with those who knew Keontae in life, one attribute stood out to me.” Blue light glinted off of the priest’s bald head, and he raised his left index finger. “Courage. Those who knew and loved him spoke of his unending courage, and it was a demonstration of that same courage that yielded his death. He sacrificed himself to save another.”
Justin shivered. Tears welled in his eyes, and he fought to resist them. The sequence of Keontae struggling to climb out of the crevice, slipping, and falling in replayed in Justin’s mind.
My God, what have I done?
“Because of his sacrifice, another now has life who wouldn’t.” The priest looked directly at Justin. “Keontae has moved on from this worl
d, but we who are left behind are faced with a choice. Will we live with courage, or will we live in fear? Fear of death? Fear of failure? Fear of anything at all? Keontae faced his fears head-on. He gave no quarter to fear, and so he lived a courageous life.”
Tears streamed down Justin’s cheeks. The sheer terror written on Keontae’s face in the moment before he fell contradicted the priest’s words. When faced with certain death, even the courageous succumbed to fear. Even Keontae.
“In this spirit, I humbly ask that we all re-evaluate our lives and our choices. Do we live in fear, or do we live lives of courage, despite the challenges, trials, and tribulations we encounter every day?”
Justin wiped the tears from his face, and Connie passed him a sheaf of tissues. He took it, thanked her with a nod, grabbed one, and blew his nose as quietly as he could.
He stole a glance at Shannon and caught her staring at him. He could only see her right eye looking at him. Harry’s head obscured the rest of her face.
She continued watching him for several seconds, where she normally would’ve looked away immediately. Only when Harry turned toward her did she break eye contact with Justin.
He fumed. So much for avoiding relationships with coworkers.
“I have decided,” the priest scanned the room, “to choose courage. I choose courage because Keontae chose courage, and because, like Keontae, another man chose courage in the face of death thousands of years ago. He sacrificed himself that all might receive the gift of eternal life.”
Gerhardt huffed, plenty loud, and Justin turned toward him. He tried to melt Gerhardt’s face off with a glare, but Gerhardt just glared back.
The priest cleared his throat. “I can’t speak to Keontae’s personal faith, but the best chance any of us have of seeing him again is to accept this free gift of salvation with the hope of reuniting in the afterlife, in paradise.”