Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  A strange green ray struck up into the sky from the sunset point, just for a second, and was gone.

  And then the sun was gone too.

  DAY SIX

  SEPARATION & GRIEF

  Theme of the Day: Missing

  I haven’t had time to write. It’s been nonstop action around here in the Twilight zone.

  LaT. led the whole group of us back to our rooms after the Happiness Observing, making the dropoffs one by one at the different suites. It was a quiet procession, almost blasted by silence, you might say, except that—luckily for Sam and me, because it meant we didn’t get much unwanted attention—there was one survivor who was sobbing and a mess. Maybe her pharma hadn’t taken or something, because the rest of them were zomboid.

  Anyway, the girl didn’t have any brothers or sisters to help out, like most of them she was an only child, and LaT. had to walk the whole way with her arm around her to keep her from falling. LaTessa doesn’t usually touch, it must be against protocol, but she kind of had to in this case because the girl was like a human puddle. LaT. held her with a mixture of delicacy and what I personally suspected was revulsion.

  The puddlegirl’s suite was on a floor above ours so we had the benefit of a distracted LaTessa all the way home. She barely even nodded at us when we got up to our door. We went into the suite, where we had one hour of Personal Time on the plan before we were supposed to meet in the Twilight Lounge for dinner and an evening healing. I leaned back against the door after I closed it and let out a long breath. I didn’t see any of my parents’ stuff around, which was a relief, but also alarming. It was like someone had come and cleaned it out, because I was pretty sure they’d had a few things sitting around. But I didn’t have the heart to go into their bedroom yet.

  We went out onto the balcony, and I hid Sam from anyone who could be watching from the outside by blocking his body with my own and chattering as he checked the light fixtures and corners and railing for bugs. When he decided the area must be clean he turned to me.

  “So here’s what you do next. We’re separating for a while. You take the things you can’t stand to leave behind and stuff them in your shoulder bag—no extra clothes or anything. Change out of that robe into the loosest, darkest clothes you have. Then go to the waste room—give it five minutes after we finish talking—and wait there.”

  “But—what happened down there? What about Mom and Dad? Are they—”

  “We have to wait and see, Nat. I don’t know.”

  “We have to take on faith someone’s trying to help them? We have to just hope that wasn’t them really, truly dying?”

  He stared me down.

  “Are you heartless?” I burst out. “They’re our parents!”

  His face got stony and his mouth twisted like it does when he’s really upset and trying to hide it. “We’re taking care of ourselves now, Nat. This is us. Living. As they’d want us to—their real selves anyway. And we don’t have any time to waste. So just—do what I told you to!”

  I stared back at him, furious.

  But a couple of minutes later I did do what he’d told me to—though I was still angry at him, my face still prickling with heat. I stuffed this journal into the bag, and my collection and the goodbye letters, and a babyish, tiny stuffed animal I’ve had since I was a kid and still keep with me. A mouse.

  I know it’s juvenile, but it was the only thing I had from my old life. I’ve had it forever and it reminds me of my earliest memories—the one house we ever lived in before our condos, before separate houses disappeared. The worn mouse has a particular smell of oldness—not a bad smell but just a really specific one. And the smell reminds me vaguely but nicely of that house. It was an olden-times house, one of the last remaining on a big complex, with two others like it right nearby; it had a porch swing and faded, flowery curtains, these creaky boards on the floor, and bushes in front that made the old porch smell like lilacs.

  Then they bulldozed it under the new housing rules, and we moved into a complex.

  Anyway, I stuffed my possessions into my bag and shoved it all under my shirt. I couldn’t allow it to show up on the cameras as I walked down the hall.

  From the living room, I called out to Sam that I was headed to the waste room and would be back in a minute. I was amped still from the meds, I realized, as well as being really pissed at him, so I was actually glad to be able to expend some of that excess adrenalin.

  Does it have to be the waste room? was what I was thinking. I would have preferred to rappel down a wall or some­thing.

  But I took what I could get.

  Once I was in there, and saw it was empty except for me, I started looking around. The waste room didn’t have windows, only these vents high up, and I knew the hall outside was covered with surveillance cameras, so I was confused about how I was supposed to get out of there undetected.

  I barely had time to do anything, though, before the door opened and someone stepped in. Not Keahi—I was kind of disappointed, I admit—but his friend from the night before.

  “Didn’t the hall cameras catch you?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Come over here. You’re not going to like this, I warn you. But it’s necessary. Here.”

  And he walked straight past me to the far back corner of the room and clicked open a wall panel, which fell forward from the ground. There was an opening behind there—about three feet by two feet or so.

  Unfortunately, it was the waste chute.

  There was a smell coming out of it, not of waste exactly but of waste covered with a perfume that helped disguise it. The combination was nauseating.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  “I’m not. Listen: I can’t come with you, I have another role to play. So do what I say. At the bottom you’ll be in a waste compost room. Put this over your nose and mouth.”

  He took a white mask out of the pocket of his robe and handed it to me.

  “The fumes can be overwhelming. Wear that while you’re in there. Go out the door and along the path to your right. Right, not left. The first door you see. Out that door, you’ll see a sign that says, Employee Transport. Follow it. You’ll see a row of big recycling bins. Hide behind there until your guide shows up. It could be minutes or hours. Just stay put. Got it?”

  I repeated it back to him and he nodded at the chute door.

  “It’s safe? The—the fall, I mean?” Because we were on the fifth floor.

  “Safe as we could make it,” he said. “There’s a full bin beneath. You’ll drop into straw and feces.”

  Nice.

  “One other thing. These chutes aren’t soundproofed well. So as you fall, whatever you do—don’t scream.”

  I couldn’t go without asking him one more question. “Listen. Um, I need to know …” I began.

  “Yeah?”

  “My—my parents. Do you know? Did they—are they really—” And I couldn’t say it. Even then. Dead.

  He looked at me steadily and then put a hand on my shoulder. “You have to be okay on your own, Natalie.”

  My stomach sank. I tried to blink back tears.

  “And if you want to live, you have to go now.”

  Every bone in my body shrieked out against it; I still felt confused, partly terrified and partly desolate. But I put on the mask and held my breath out of pure fear and then he grasped my arm to guide me. And I stumbled in.

  I must have done it more awkwardly than I should have, because I didn’t fall straight, I bumped against the side of the chute a couple of times as I fell, and it was all so quick all I knew was adrenalin and the pain of bumps and scrapes as I plummeted.

  But I didn’t make a sound.

  I’m still proud of that.

  I didn’t even notice the smell at first, I just lay there stunned and thought about the throbbing pain in my hip and the searing pain in my elbow. I felt like my whole skin was a bruise. And into the confusion of the pain was mixed confusion over my parents—my
parents who, now, were confirmed gone.

  But no bones seemed to be broken, and I hadn’t hit my face on anything.

  I pulled myself up after a while, dizzy and sore and disoriented. I was in a kind of square bin, with walls almost as high as I am tall. The room was dim, the walls of the bin I’d fallen into seemed high, but I climbed out of it with a little effort, my feet slipping and churning in the straw and the waste, and then stood on the clay floor and lifted my arm to look at my elbow. It was bleeding hard from a big gash and the blood was dripping down my arm and all over my hand and onto the floor, even, which couldn’t be good, so I grabbed some dirty straw from the bin and tried to sop it up. Well, it was more of a scraping than a sopping. But better than nothing.

  I had no cloth to wrap my elbow in except the mask, so I took that off and was hit by a terrible stench and just held it to the cut as I jogged out the door. Luckily the directions weren’t hard to follow; it was more about whether I ran into anyone, because there was no way, now, I could pass myself off as a normal obedient survivor. Covered in straw and waste.

  But I made it to the building door, which was closed and said, Emergency Exit Only Alarm Will Sound, and that stopped me for a good minute while I pondered if that was actually true or if they’d been able to disconnect it. And finally I took my chances and pushed on the bar, and it opened silently.

  Silently for me, that is. Somewhere else, on the speakers of some monitor, I knew it might be shrieking hysterically.

  That pleasant thought powered me as I ran along the gravel outside, probably looking like a 20th c. Halloween monster with hay and dung hanging off me like dirty hair. I saw the row of recycling containers, which were these big metal bins, and I ducked behind them, basically into a thick hedge with waxy leaves and bright flowers. I pushed myself along between the bins and the hedge so I was further in, and then hunched there, shivering.

  I was wet as well as filthy—damp all over, and the blood from my elbow had soaked through the mask, which was useless for stopping it anymore. So I threw the mask into the bin in front of me and rummaged in my bag for something else to stop it, but all I had was the bag itself and my ancient stuffed mouse. I used the cloth of the bag.

  Above me the sky was dark, the stars were out, and I had nothing to do but hold the bag against my elbow, wait for the blood to stop, and think about the fact that it would be easy to find me here, if you were a service corp worker. It wasn’t the smartest hiding place.

  At some point the blood stopped flowing and was more like seeping to the scraped, raw surface of the flesh, and though the pain was almost worse at that point the blood wasn’t much of a problem itself anymore so I took the pressure off. I sat down on the ground under a gap in the hedge and picked straw off my clothes to pass the time, counting my aches and pains. Elbow, hip, knee, ankle.

  Then I counted the ways in which I was mad at Sam for his coldness about our parents. Then I counted the ways I’d failed as an older sister. Finally I got done with counting.

  I didn’t have a handface, of course, so I don’t know how long it was but it seemed like forever before anyone arrived.

  It was Keahi.

  I was so relieved to see him I didn’t even have time to remember I was smelling and looking grotesque.

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked.

  “His plan’s on track,” he said, and I tried to read his expression but couldn’t; Sam was coming, I told myself. Sam would be there.

  Keahi was rushed but focused, his actions compact and neat. He stripped off his beige robe and underneath it he had on his camo gear. “Stash this in your bag for me, okay?” he said. “I’ll need it again. Now let’s book.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have been thinking like this, that it’s kind of selfish, but he was so efficient in that moment that I felt I could have been anyone, that I was nothing special to him. And I bundled the robe into my blood-wet bag and scrambled to follow him through the dark. We had no flashlight to guide us, because that would be too easy to spot, I guess, if anyone cared to look, so I just followed right behind him through all this bushy vegetation, with nothing to guide me but his narrow back and wide shoulders, which I could barely make out sometimes. He went fast and my body was starting to ache more and more from that fall, I felt like one giant bruise, but I gritted my teeth and tried not to grunt or moan.

  Once or twice when the twinges were extra bad or I panicked, not being able to see him close enough, I did beg him to slow down—but either he didn’t hear me or he did hear me and the answer was no.

  It went on and on, like the waiting had before that, but worse because it was so hard, till it seemed like hours that I’d been following him with my last vestige of energy, and then the last one after that, when I already felt tapped out. It was always uphill, it was always through trees, we were slapped by slick leaves and branches and scrambling in slippery mud. I was sweating and panting, out of breath and bone tired all through me.

  Then at a certain point there was no more vegetation, and around us it was even darker but airier, and I knew we were in a lava tube.

  Up ahead was a light, dim but real.

  We went toward it, slogging, dragging. At least I was; Keahi was still moving fast.

  There were more lights, strung up along the tunnel wall. And there were people.

  There was Xing. And Keahi’s mother.

  I practically fell into their arms.

  They gave me the bad news a bit later: Sam wasn’t there.

  And not only that.

  I heard the story lying on a cot in the camp, while Aviva, the baby-guarding lady, sewed up the cut in my elbow and some other cuts I turned out to have. One was on my head, under my hair, and she had to shave some of the hair off to sew the scalp together. The blood from that one had run down the back of my neck, though I hadn’t noticed it, and soaked my shirt. There was another cut I hadn’t noticed on one of my bottom ribs. She sewed that one up too and then put ointment and a bandage on it.

  The stitches actually hurt a lot and I didn’t hear everything that was said to me while I was clenching my teeth and trying to ignore the pain of the needle. But I got the gist.

  What happened was, the plan for Sam had gone wrong. He did what he was supposed to do, it wasn’t his fault at all, but the corp caught him.

  One of the cameras Keahi and his friends had disabled set off a backup alarm it wasn’t supposed to. That is, the backup had been disabled too, or the connection to it anyway, but the central computer fixed the connection faster than they thought it would. So in the middle of Sam’s breakout attempt it switched back on and there he was in his full digital glory—perfectly visible to the guys watching the screens in the guardroom.

  Not only Sam was caught but also Keahi’s friend, the one who made me jump down the waste chute.

  So while I was lying there on the cot, the people from the camp blew up one of the lava tubes, the one that led most directly to the resort and which, if they tried hard enough, the service employees could maybe have got to us through. The rebels had certain key parts of the tunnels rigged with explosives the whole time, Aviva told me, in case they had to do just that: cut off access on short notice.

  We heard the low rumble and we felt the vibration.

  “But then how can we get to Sam?” I asked her, panicked. “How will we get him out?”

  “It’ll be harder now,” she admitted.

  They must have moved me while I was fast asleep and dead to the world, because in the morning I woke up alone in a small tent, lying on a thin bedroll. I sat up and inspected myself, the bandages stuck onto my skin beneath some clothes I didn’t recognize, a pair of camo pants and a dark tank top. I touched the back of my head gingerly, the bandage over the cut up there.

  And then I remembered Sam.

  And my mother. And my father.

  I looked around for my shoulder bag, suddenly needing to know I had this journal and my collection and my old, bedraggled mouse. The bag was still with me, lucki
ly, crumpled near the bedroll, and I leaned over and pulled my stuff out, the journal and the pouch housing the best of my collection. And the mouse and my parents’ letters.

  I just sat on the bedroll for a while clutching those things and feeling alone. Not only alone but completely out of place, a mistake, something shaken loose from where it was supposed to be and dropped in a corner, forgotten.

  Everything was black or shades of gray, like the inside of my tent, which had a kind of dim gray light filtering through the cloth. Outside could have been anything, with only that flat grayness showing through.

  And I still smelled really bad, I noticed. I hadn’t bathed—how could they take baths or showers here? I’d probably never be clean again. I smelled like the sickly sweet perfume they used on the compost, and behind that of pee and moldy dung. So here I was, sitting cross-legged and slouching in a gray tent, patchy with crusted blood and filth and sporting a shaved-bald patch on my head and without anyone in the world who was mine or loved me. All I had were the pouch with my few collected items, some pieces of bound write-fiber with cheesy sayings and messy writing on them, and a sad little stuffed mouse missing its tail and both ears.

  You couldn’t even tell the thing was a mouse anymore, I realized. It looked like a fist-sized ball of lint.

  Sam had to be even worse off than me, I thought next, and then … my poor parents …

  I thought: They wanted to be gone.

  I thought: They insisted.

  But it didn’t make me feel better.

  More slowly than you’d think, maybe, I also realized the amped-up feeling was gone, that I was empty of all my happy pharms and the adrenaline that had been driving Sam and me.

  In all ways, I was flying solo.

  I wondered how many years it had been since I was completely flat like that. I wondered if this was depression; I’d never been depressed before, only sad. It was hard to see an upside.

  Almost impossible, actually.

  The people here—the people at the camp—hadn’t said we couldn’t go get Sam, though, I reminded myself. They’d just said it would be more difficult with the tunnel blocked. But they hadn’t said they were giving up.