by Gary Gibson
‘Bullshit,’ I said thickly. ‘You caught her and brought her here.’ I leaned towards him as far as the chain would let me, and felt a small rush of pleasure when he ducked his head back slightly. ‘I want you to know something. She had nothing to do with . . . with what I did to Nussbaum, and Keene. That was all me, do you understand?’
‘That doesn’t quite fit with what you wrote in your diaries,’ said Sykes.
I looked at him, baffled. He opened his briefcase again and lifted out something I recognized immediately. I stiffened, outraged to see something so precious in his vile, criminal hands.
‘Where did you get that?’ I demanded.
‘From the place you made your home the past several years,’ he said. ‘It’s your diary, isn’t it? One of them, at any rate.’
I stared back at him, mute. He licked his lips and turned back to some of the earliest pages.
‘Alice is the reason I’m here to talk to you,’ he explained, passing the diary over to me. He tapped at the top of one page, where an entry began. I stared down at the words, then back up at him.
‘Read it, please, Jerry.’
‘I . . .’
The words I had been about to say caught in my throat, and my vision blurred with tears. I didn’t need to read it; I knew the entry off by heart.
This morning I dug the grave, out back in the garden where Alice liked to sit on sunny days. I talked to her for a while before I put her in the hole, about the things I was going to do, and about how I’d come and visit . . .
I pushed the diary away.
‘You tried to save her, but you were too late,’ said Sykes.
‘She was right here,’ I said numbly.
And yet I had written those words. I remembered, then, for the first time in a long time, the journey I had worked so hard to suppress: travelling across a blighted landscape filled with the bodies of the dead, the air thick and rancid with their stink, hunted by dogs already turned feral. I remembered . . .
I don’t remember exactly what I said next, or what I did. All I really remember is Crew Cut wrestling me back down onto the bed, and holding me there while Sykes hurriedly stuck something in my arm. They said much later that I hit Sykes, but I don’t remember that bit. Mostly, I remembered all the things I had worked so hard never to have to remember again.
Alice was sitting on the end of my bed, still wearing that same ratty green scarf she’d picked up in Toulouse during our honeymoon.
‘I miss you,’ I said, my throat so thick with emotion I could barely get the words out.
‘I know you do, sweetheart,’ she said, and glanced towards the door. ‘You stay here while I get myself a coffee, okay?’
‘Wait,’ I said, as she got up and pulled the door open. ‘Don’t go.’
She turned and smiled, hair swinging around her shoulders. ‘Look at you,’ she said, nodding at my wrist, still cuffed to the bed. ‘You never miss a chance to do your party trick, do you?’
I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Take care, honey,’ she said, pulling the door open and slipping out of sight.
That was the last time I ever saw her. I suppose that’s the moment I started to regain my sanity. But at that moment all I could really think was, Party trick? What party trick?
Then I woke up for real, and realized what she meant. It had been such a very long time ago, it was hardly surprising I had forgotten.
Floyd had taught me the party trick back when we had been students together, and long before he recruited me to help him try and save the world. His love for cheap magic stunts knew no bounds, especially if any pretty girls were in the vicinity. One time at a party he got a girl to cuff his hands behind his back, before we all participated in locking him in the bathroom. We stood outside, beers in hand and counting down from sixty en masse, barely reaching twenty before he came bursting out of the door, unshackled arms raised in triumph. The last I saw of him that night, was as he disappeared into his room with the girl who’d cuffed him, and a stolen bottle of wine.
Naturally, I had to know how he did it. And since I was his roommate, he showed me, although I was never as good or as quick as Floyd.
First, he explained, you need a paperclip.
Thinking back, I must have been aware on some subliminal level of the paperclip lying on the floor. I had lashed out at Sykes, who’d made the mistake of sitting just that little bit too close to me, sending his briefcase flying, cards and papers scattering across the floor.
I pulled myself off the bed, dropping down on one side of it until I could see the paperclip, lying just beneath the sink. I had a struggle reaching it, chained to the bed as I still was, but I finally managed to scoot the paperclip under my fingertips and get a hold of it.
I unfolded one end of the paperclip, before inserting the tip into the keyhole of the cuffs. Then it was just a matter of bending the wire back, with the tip still inserted, until it was at a ninety-degree angle to the lock. The fiddly part – which I always had the most trouble with – involved carefully working the wire until the inner mechanism popped loose, thereby releasing the coiled spring which opened the lock . . .
I muttered and swore and worked at it for a lot longer than just sixty seconds. But after some minutes of muted swearing, I heard a satisfying click, and the cuffs slid from around my wrist.
I stood properly for the first time in days, my muscles aching as I did so. I slipped quickly through the inner chamber door, then gently eased the outer one open too. I felt a rush of relief that it hadn’t been locked. But then, why lock it when I was chained up inside?
I peered up and down a corridor, seeing and hearing nothing. There was a window at one end, through which I saw the night sky. I tiptoed along the corridor to a corner where I found an empty nurse’s station, a stairwell visible beyond a set of fire doors.
‘Hey!’
I twisted around to see a uniformed soldier back the way I had come, his eyes wide in shock. His hand reached for the holster at his hip.
I ran through the fire doors and into the stairwell, throwing myself down the steps as fast as I could. Almost before I realized it I was on the ground level, and I battered through another set of doors until I was outside. The air was summer warm, and I tasted jasmine in the night air. Crickets chirped somewhere off in the distance; wherever we were, it was a hell of a long way from snowy old England – indeed, a lot farther, I would soon learn, than I could ever have imagined.
To one side, I saw a tall wire fence surrounding both the hospital building, its blocky exterior decorated in white stucco, and what looked to my eyes like a military barracks. I twisted around, unsure where to go next, until I saw a wide unmanned gate perhaps ten metres away, not far from the barracks. I also saw a huge hangar, light pouring from its interior.
Then I looked up, and saw something that will remain forever seared into my memory. The moon hung overhead, fat and pale – but not the moon I had known all my life. There was a jagged chunk missing from one side, as if it had been smashed with some monumental hammer that had nearly, but not quite, cracked it apart. I stared up at it, frozen, until a siren began to wail through the night air.
Suddenly I was in motion again, making my way towards a row of jeeps parked next to the barracks. I threw myself in the driver’s seat of the first one I came to and found the keys in the ignition. I got it started and reversed hard, catching sight of numerous figures who had come spilling out of the hospital. One of them – the same guard or soldier I had encountered within – raised his pistol towards me in a two-handed grip.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I heard someone shout at him, ‘don’t shoot him! He’s one of ours, you moron!’
I didn’t hang around to ask what they meant by one of ours. I gunned the engine and aimed directly at the open gates. I bounced straight through and onto a road that led into the distance. I could see the sea on one side, and the dark mound of a steep-sided hill of black rock.
The road took me
towards a town. At first it looked just as deserted as anywhere else I had seen in the last ten years, but as I drew closer I saw lights, and even heard music drifting on the warm, scented air. It sounded like Springsteen. I again caught sight of the moon’s cracked face. An after-effect of whatever drugs I increasingly felt sure they’d been feeding me, no doubt. Who knew what they might have been putting in the food they gave me?
I heard an engine roaring behind me, and glanced in the rear-view mirror to see headlights come bouncing after me from the direction of the barracks. Something pinged off the dashboard before me and fell clattering into the shadowy recesses of the passenger-side foot-well. I hunkered down low, guessing someone was taking potshots at me. I reached the outskirts of the town, swinging past buildings that looked dark and deserted. The music and lights came from somewhere up ahead.
I took a corner at full speed, and the jeep fishtailed, its rear slamming into the trunk of a palm tree leaning drunkenly over the road. The impact sent me spinning around, and the engine cut out. When I tried to start it again, it turned over without catching.
I got out and started running. I turned another corner and found myself confronted by the source of all the light and noise: a hotel bar, like a vision from a dead world. I caught the murmur of voices and saw a figure that looked strangely familiar, standing near the steps leading into the interior of the building, a rifle held in its hands. More people appeared at the top of the steps behind the figure as I gawped.
The sound of the pursuing jeep drawing nearer galvanized me into action. I sprinted diagonally across the road, towards a shadowy alley opposite the hotel, but not fast enough. I felt something hit me in the back of the neck and I yelled from shock and pain. I reached up and plucked a dart out from my skin. I dropped it, fingers already growing numb at their tips.
I took a step forwards, and collapsed. I managed to turn to look over at the man who had shot me. He had slung his rifle back over his shoulder: it was the Asian man with the handlebar moustache, the one who had captured me. Instead of a hazmat suit, he wore a garish Hawaiian shirt and had a pink cocktail glass held delicately in one hand.
‘Still a crazy son of a bitch,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘You’ve been giving us all conniptions ever since you got here, you know that?’
THREE
They moved me to a different room in the hospital. To my surprise, it had a window, through which I could clearly see the moon’s fractured face. I stared out at it deep into the night, until I realized that I wasn’t crazy, and it was real; and that wherever I was, I was a long, long way from home.
I might easily have accepted the notion I had been transported to some alien planet, but for the fact that aside from the monstrous gash in its face, the moon was recognizably the same one I had seen all my life.
By confronting me with my diaries, Sykes had forced me to face the madness into which I’d fallen during my long years of isolation. I had buried Alice myself. I had even written of the event, so that I would never forget, but had then worked hard to do precisely the opposite. When I thought back to my imagined conversations with her, they seemed entirely real. I could still see her in my mind’s eye, standing there before me. But try as I might, I could no longer conjure her into even the illusion of objective existence. She remained a phantom, even as I curled up on the narrow bed they gave me, and I wept and cried out her name, filling myself with a grief too many years delayed.
That night, I remembered with desperate clarity my journey across a dying land to try and rescue her, only to find her dying. I remembered burying her in a shallow grave in the garden of the home we once shared. I remembered our honeymoon in Toulouse, where I had picked up a broken I Ching coin at a flea market, and joked we should each wear one half. And she, despite her derision, and her despisal of anything resembling sentimentality, had nonetheless followed my suggestion. I remembered taking her half of the coin, and pushing it into her cold and lifeless hand, before spading the dirt on top of her body.
I had failed to save her, as I had failed to save the human race. And then I had failed even to join the rest of my species in death. But at least now I knew that this place in which I found myself was, undeniably, real.
I was still, however, cuffed to the bed, and a guard had been posted outside my door, which remained open at all times. Every twenty minutes or so he would peer inside to see what I was up to.
The morning brought me a new visitor: a small, heavyset woman with short dark hair. She carried a tray loaded with coffee and toast in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. She waited as the guard uncuffed me, then she handed me my breakfast before introducing herself as Nadia Mirkowsky. There was an Eastern European lilt to her accent.
‘You want to know who we are, and why you’re here,’ she said. ‘In order to explain that, we’re going on a trip. But you need to promise you won’t pull any more stunts like last night.’
I rattled my chain. ‘You’ve been holding me prisoner without explanation. Why should I trust you?’
She inclined her head, as if acknowledging the point. ‘Personally, I think that was a mistake. But they had to make sure you were clear of the virus first, and we weren’t allowed in to talk to you.’
Who are ‘they’? I wondered. ‘Go on then.’
‘Everyone here works for an organization that calls itself the Authority. I’m in charge of something called a Pathfinder team. In order to explain who we are and what we do, we need to go on that trip.’
I nodded towards the window. ‘Where are we, exactly?’
‘Easter Island, a couple of thousand kilometres west of Chile. So if you were thinking of running away again, believe me – there is, quite literally, nowhere to run.’
‘So we’re still on Earth?’
I saw a flicker of a smile. ‘You thought you were on some other planet, maybe, when you saw the moon’s face?’
‘It crossed my mind,’ I said, chewing my toast, ‘except it doesn’t make sense that some alien planet would have the exact – well, almost the same exact moon as us.’
Her mouth broadened into a grin. ‘It doesn’t, does it? But it would all make more sense if I just showed you, instead of telling you everything.’ She nodded at the remains of my breakfast. ‘Just about done?’
I took a last gulp of instant coffee before putting the tray down. ‘All done.’
She handed me the plastic bag, and I found it contained a pair of black jeans, a grey T-shirt, leather boots, socks, and a pair of shrink-wrapped boxers. She stepped over to the corner of the room and stared into space while I quickly got dressed.
I was then led back outside, and into the beginnings of a sunny morning. A few soldiers strolled past the barracks from where I had stolen a jeep the previous evening, and I stiffened when they glanced our way, but they merely bent their heads towards each other and muttered some exchange as they continued past us. Nadia meanwhile climbed in behind the wheel of one of the parked jeeps and gestured at me to get in.
‘And that’s it?’ I asked, climbing in beside her. ‘Just like that, I’m a free man?’
‘When you see what I’m going to show you,’ she said, ‘you might understand us a little better. If we’d just told you everything at the start, before you saw that moon, you’d have assumed we were lying, that we were really your Red Harvest cult, trying to twist your mind. But what you’re about to learn is still going to be a shock, Jerry. I want you to be prepared for that.’
I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘All right then. Where are we going, exactly?’
‘Not far,’ she replied. ‘In fact, we’ll be there in less than two minutes.’
The engine throttled into life, and we drove deeper inside the fenced-off compound within which the hospital and barracks sat. The compound covered about a square mile, and also contained a training ground, several warehouses, a couple of prefab one-storey buildings and the big hangar, outside which a number of trucks were parked. Next to these were two bulbous,
silvery vehicles, like props from a science fiction movie, which hadn’t been there the last time I had been outside.
Nadia pulled up next to the doors of the hangar and we got out. I tensed as the same Asian man who had shot me twice emerged from just inside the entrance. He was clearly waiting for us. Nadia jumped out and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You two met already, I think?’
The Asian man chuckled and stepped towards me, one hand extended and a wary but friendly look on his face. ‘No hard feelings, right?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t personal or anything. Just following orders. My name’s Yuichi.’ His accent sounded West Coast, possibly from California. ‘We just didn’t want you to hurt yourself, the way you were charging around the place.’
‘When?’ I challenged him. ‘The first time you shot me, or the second?’
‘Whoa, there,’ he said, leaning back from me with a grin that was only slightly fixed in place. ‘Okay, sorry on both counts, then. I did try and tell you we were there to rescue you.’
‘Gee,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t realized. But maybe if you’d knocked on my front door, instead of chasing me halfway across the countryside with guns and vans and scaring the living shit out of me, I might have believed you.’
‘Would you really?’ he asked me, and in fairness I couldn’t be at all sure just how I might have reacted. ‘For what it’s worth, we were still trying to figure out how to approach you when you fled. After that, we didn’t have much choice but to go after you.’
‘I saw your footprints,’ I said. ‘They were everywhere.’
‘Yeah.’ Yuichi scratched the back of his neck. ‘I guess we screwed up a little.’
An awkward silence grew between us. Nadia widened her eyes at me, nodding towards Yuichi in a clear exhortation to shake his hand. Instead, he made the first move, stepping forward and clasping one of my hands in both of his.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine conviction. ‘We really, honestly, were worried you might hurt yourself. Both times.’