The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  “The prisoner has been brought to sick bay, ready for you to examine him, Sir,” a female voice said from behind his back.

  He’d released his grip on the railing and started to turn toward her when his entire left arm began to tremble. The blur of white fingers as he failed to bring them under control disgusted him. “I’ll be along in a minute,” he said, and grabbed the rail again, hoping the woman wouldn’t notice. Outwardly the shaking stopped, but he could still feel the muscles jumping beneath his skin, like frog legs connected to a battery.

  * * * *

  “I don’t know why I did it, Sir,” the nineteen-year-old said. His ID badge read Billy Johnston, and his boyish features were stretched white with earnest bewilderment. Until today, his record as an ensign had been spotless. Sitting on the examining table, stripped to his boxer shorts, wrists cuffed, ankles shackled, he looked puny, and had remained completely docile from the moment they’d subdued him. He’d also been desperately polite, as if a show of good manners might undo the carnage of his sixty-second rampage.

  A few hours ago down in the engine room he’d grabbed a lug wrench and cracked open the skull of a second lieutenant who’d ordered him to wipe up an oil spill. Before the MPs could pull him off, his victim’s head resembled a hollowed out melon, the kind with a decorative zig-zag cut around its edge and used to hold fruit salad at fancy buffets, except this offering contained shards of bone protruding from a white and gray puree of brain matter.

  The ten others in the morgue had been killed under similar circumstances, each a victim of inexplicable, out-of-proportion rage. And ten other murderers were in shackles below decks, each as stunned by what they’d done as the one who sat before him now.

  It had all occurred during the last seven days.

  “Hold out your hands, Billy,” Paul ordered.

  The young man complied.

  It wasn’t obvious, but to a trained eye, the fingers had a tiny vibration.

  * * * *

  Paul once more clasped the promenade rail with both hands and breathed in the night air. He kept turning over in his mind what he’d done, and what he should have done.

  A dark shape flitted along the back of the promenade.

  He swung around and saw nothing.

  He glanced right and left.

  Nobody near enough to worry about

  He turned back to face the sea.

  Despite armed MPs stationed about the ship, he watched his back, especially out here and, above all, among those wearing the signature, wool-lined, leather jackets of flyboys. They had it in for him because he’d decked them. Not that the other ranks were any more sociable. Everyone remained snarly, suspicious, and hostile. Even those who lined the railing with him kept to themselves, shoulders hunched up as much against company as the damp. Little wonder. People had disappeared from this very spot. Maybe they leapt to escape private demons, but rumors circulated that some had been thrown.

  He glanced over his shoulder again.

  This time not even a shadow stirred.

  Of course there were those on board who’d try and harm him in other ways than with a lug wrench. They’d say that he’d been incompetent, had covered up his own problems while denying the need to get help himself. Well, just let them try. He’d taken precautions on that front. Logged everything. Made detailed entries in the clinical charts of anyone who’d shown symptoms.

  He looked at his watch.

  The whole mess would soon be PACOM’s problem anyway. It was their medical officers at Pearl who’d agreed that the Reagan could push on to port where they’d sort everything out.

  “Commander Wilson, Sir!”

  He pivoted about, hands raised defensively in front of his face as if to ward off a blow.

  A young woman wearing the insignia of second lieutenant stood at attention a safe distance away.

  He immediately lowered his guard. “Yes?”

  “The captain requests your presence on the bridge, right away, Sir. There’s been another incident.”

  “Incident?”

  “Argument, Sir.”

  An icy burn ignited in the core of his slightly protruding gut. The growing number of shouting matches on the bridge had been the one set of events that he hadn’t put on report. He should have, but the captain had pressured him to cover them up. No surprise there. The bridge was a captain’s most immediate turf. He’d be held responsible for a failure to rein in undisciplined squabbling amongst his officers anywhere on the USS Reagan, but especially on the bridge. “Anybody hurt?” Paul said, preparing to hear the worst.

  “First Lieutenant Peterson has a bloody nose, sir.”

  He let out a long breath. Thank God no one was dead. Still, this could be trouble with the brass if they investigated and found out the full extent of what he’d kept under wraps. “Well then, that’s not very serious, is it?” he said, affecting a breezy manner. When dealing with a screw-up that could be a career breaker, minimize, minimize, minimize.

  “Well, actually, Sir, it is pretty serious. The reason First Lieutenant Peterson got popped on the nose is that he misread the global positioning satellite readings, then crashed the tracking system trying to override it with bad data. Some of the officers took exception, Sir. They wanted him busted for incompetence. That’s why the captain sent for you--to declare Peterson medically unfit.”

  “Not fix his nose?” Paul said, allowing himself a slight smile. It seemed he could handle this one easily enough.

  “That too, Sir.”

  They started toward the nearest stairwell. “So there’s no problem to navigate home?” he asked, just to make sure that all was once again well on the bridge.

  The woman flushed, but said nothing and quickened her stride, pulling slightly ahead of him.

  “Lieutenant?” he said, expecting an answer. From a few steps behind he saw the sides of her cheeks glow crimson.

  She entered a corridor leading under the carrier’s tower. He picked up his pace and followed at her heels, trying to steady the familiar flutter of his heart as the walls pressed in on him. “Answer me, Lieutenant.”

  She swallowed. “Permission to speak off the record, Sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She looked behind her to make sure no one else had followed them into the passageway. It was empty. “Sir, when the captain threatened to relieve First Lieutenant Peterson, the lieutenant accused the captain of being equally unfit for duty. He claimed the man gives an order for a course correction, then repeats it a minute later, as if he’s forgotten the first one. It apparently happened several times tonight.”

  Oh, Jesus, Paul thought, not again. “But we’re on course now, aren’t we?” He wanted to slam the lid on this fast.

  She looked at him in surprise. “I suppose so. Lieutenant Peterson said something about we’d have been up shit creek if the other officers on watch hadn’t pointed out both his and the captain’s errors, so I guess that meant they corrected all the mistakes.”

  “Well, then, no harm, no foul, right?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Everything’s worked out fine. I wouldn’t make a big deal of it. As for poor First Lieutenant Peterson, he’s obviously suffered the same breakdown that’s taken everyone else. We can’t put much stake in what he says.”

  She looked puzzled, but nodded.

  As he followed her up several flights of stairs, instead of worrying about the woman keeping her mouth shut, he found himself admiring how slinkily her ass moved under her uniform. Christ, he was old enough to be her father. That was another change. He kept getting horny.

  When she wasn’t looking, he opened a small vial of the Ativans he’d come to rely upon and slipped two of them under his tongue. It was only the third time today, he reassured himself, but then wasn’t so certain of the count.

  Shadowy movements off in the darker corners of the stairwell continued to plague him, and on one landing, he glimpsed the bristly leg of a giant spider before it scuttled out of sight.


  Chapter 2

  That same evening, Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 7:31 P.M. IPT

  Kapiolani Courts, Honolulu, Hawaii

  Carla Ho leaned into her backhand and returned Terry Ryder’s serve with a sizzling stroke. The ball cleared the net by a breath and brought him scrambling forward. He lobbed it toward her with a clumsy underhand, and as it looped upward, she lost sight of it in the blaze of sodium lights, then spotted it again, a yellow planet floating down from a star-studded night.

  “Got you, Ryder,” she called out, raising her racket. The tips of her black hair brushed across the tops of her hips as she readied to blast a shot by his ear. She arched her body into the swing, and her entire forearm started to tremble.

  Outwardly nothing showed, a least not enough to be noticed, but the quiver of it vibrated through her as the biceps, triceps, and extensors locked in spasm. She stared at the limb as if it belonged to someone else.

  It felt like nothing she’d ever experienced before.

  A belated swipe at the ball winged it with the rim, sending a weak bouncer to the sidelines. The impact, albeit feeble, caused her to lose her grip on the rubber handle, and it slipped from her fingers.

  “Choke!” Terry teased, unaware of her difficulty. His tanned face crinkled easily as he smiled, and his eyes, sea-blue, did a playful roll toward the heavens in mock disbelief.

  She said nothing, opened and closed her hand a few times, then took a couple of practice swings.

  Normal.

  Must have just pulled the muscles, she thought, and resumed playing.

  Everything seemed fine.

  But she reined in her effort, not wanting to provoke a repeat attack. Minor or not, it had made her apprehensive.

  “You went easy on me tonight,” Terry said after the game as they walked back to her apartment. He slid his arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him. “It took twice as long as usual to beat me.”

  The hug reassured her more than he knew. “Maybe you’re getting better, mister almost forty,” she razzed, determined to blow off what had happened, but it still bothered her.

  He grinned and gave her neck a nuzzle.

  Carla slipped her own arm around his waist, and took comfort from the muscular feel of his six-foot frame. Its sinewy movement alongside hers provided a reassuring reminder that they were a perfect fit.

  She needed such reinforcements from time to time, as theirs was not an obvious match. Twelve years her senior, his lean face bore the worry lines that went with a lifetime of traipsing into hot zones to confront the creepiest microbes on earth, and his hair, though still primarily black, had acquired sufficient streaks of premature gray to highlight the difference in their ages. At twenty-seven and lithe enough to be mistaken for a teenager, she reveled in the raised eyebrows they invited when she smooched him in public. “I like them weathered,” she’d sometimes quip, just to watch an onlooker’s reaction. But such bravado couldn’t hide her deeper concern that Terry might find her too young and want the company of a more experienced woman. Funny how tables turned. Five years ago, when they’d first become lovers, she twenty-two and he thirty-four, it fell on her to overcome his concerns about their twelve-year gap. “Men my age are still boys, Ryder,” she would tell him. “One way or another, they try to anchor me down, so I won’t show up how green they are. You let me fly and seem to enjoy the ride.”

  Then there were their discrepancies in disposition. “The brain and the surfer slut,” she’d sometimes tease, worried that he would tire of her intellectually.

  “Hey, I’m the all-too-dark idiot, remember? And you’re a sunburst who keeps me sane,” he’d counter, laughing, until she began to believe him. Yet her insecurities lingered. The man still had no-go zones that a laser couldn’t probe.

  But I’ll open them up, sooner or later, she once more promised herself.

  They neared the entrance to her building, and she nuzzled her head against his chest, catching a whiff of his sweaty skin. “You need a shower,” she said, pulling away from him.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  As he entered her under the steaming jets of hot water, she felt an odd tingle in her right arm again. Seconds later it disappeared, allowing her to cling to him while they found one another’s rhythm.

  Afterward, he slept soundly, which meant he’d no intention of driving back to his own home that night. She loved it when he chose to stay over and they could cuddle in their sleep. But her hand had gone numb again, and the sensation of pins and needles kept her awake.

  As a nurse, she normally wouldn’t have thought twice about such fleeting symptoms. But in the last seven days there’d been dozens of people who came to ER because they had experienced odd episodes of weakness and tremors. The mildness of the symptoms provoked the residents to joke about how underwhelmed they were by them, and they christened the syndrome The Paradise Shakes. Always open to the fastest way of writing down a disease in a chart, the nurses, herself included, shortened it to TPS. The physicians, Terry among them, had been less quick to make light of the whole phenomenon.

  Well, she certainly wouldn’t bother him about her own episode. If anything obsessed the hell out of Dr. Terry Ryder, it was mystery illnesses, even minor ones, until he figured them out. He’d only start in on this one again, having already spent hours poring through charts and puzzling aloud over what was going on. Besides, there was nothing he could do about it. Nobody had come up with any treatments.

  Outside the window of her bedroom, a grove of slender palm trees stirred restlessly in the trade winds, the sudden rustle of their fronds causing Terry to jerk his arms straight out in his sleep, as if to ward off some approaching intruder. It happened less and less these last few years, but still, she sensed the competition for him between her and his inner demons.

  She placed her hand on his head and stroked it until his body relaxed, then curved into hers. She felt his breathing match her own, and it seemed even their heartbeats pulsed in cadence.

  No, don’t start him in on little muscle tremors again, especially after she’d done such a fine job of taking his mind completely off work for the night. And she intended to keep him similarly distracted a while longer, once the birds woke them at dawn, a time he particularly liked to make love.

  She drifted off, oblivious to the sound of distant thunder, but her sleep was far from peaceful. Dreams turned the sibilant whisperings of the leaves on the breeze into the hissings of a thousand snakes.

  Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 9:02 P.M. IPT

  USS Ronald Reagan, Nimitz Class Carrier, CVN 76

  Paul Wilson’s moment of clarity had become more terrible than the black and orange spiders that scuttled into the shadows or the squeeze of metal walls that pressed in on him. He paused, gripped the edge of a bulkhead door, and tightened his hold, pressing the riveted surface into the palms of his hands. The pain helped him focus, and he resisted the urge to slip another Ativan under his tongue. How many had he taken today?

  At least they were nearly home. Then he could put the whole goddamned ship on medical report--reputations, careers, and pending promotions be damned. Maybe it was time to consider a career change himself, to private practice. He wouldn’t have much of a future around here. Whistle-blowers never did.

  First he’d have to get out of the inevitable quarantine that awaited them all. He saw himself as a patient, dressed in a skimpy gown with his ass hanging out the back and started to laugh, then noticed a puddle of liquid had formed at his feet.

  He’d pissed himself.

  He bolted, the way a criminal might flee the scene of a crime.

  Time to confront the captain. After tending to First Lieutenant Peterson, there’d been no choice.

  “Doc, I’m not the only guy who’s screwing up,” the young officer had screamed, bug-eyed with fear as the MPs dragged him off the bridge. “You’ve got to believe me. Everybody up here’s losing it. Especially Captain Washington. Lock ’em all up before they sink us.�
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  His fellow lieutenants had scoffed at the accusations.

  But six days earlier Captain Thomas Washington had committed a similar navigation error. “Who told you?” he demanded when Paul confronted him about that initial misstep.

  Paul had refused to give names. “The real question here,” he said instead, “is can you keep control of the Reagan? You know I’m duty bound to notify PACOM if you’re not medically fit.”

  With bags under his eyes as big as prunes, Washington had studied him a few more seconds, sighed, and nodded. “Okay, I repeated an order. It happened only once. Just lack of sleep, is all. My staff picked up on it immediately. Besides, the computers would have howled bloody murder if they hadn’t. We’ve so much fail-safe built into these babies, it’s practically impossible to run them up on the rocks. And you’ve got to admit, a single slip of memory is a far cry from erupting into a homicidal maniac, like some of these other crackers on board. That’s what you’re really worried about, right?” Handsome, ebony-skinned, and the first African American slated to be Admiral of the Pacific Fleet, he pleaded that Paul let this one go.

  A chill rippled through Paul, snapping his thoughts back to the present. How many other people were covering up to protect their behinds? Or worse, had made mistakes that no one caught. Hadn’t even been aware of their screw-ups themselves.

  Five minutes later, after a quick shower and change of uniform, he was knocking at the captain’s door. “Sir, it’s Commander Wilson.” Open up, you mother fucker! he nearly added. He never should have covered up for the son of a bitch in the first place.