Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  She's lost so much, what does the mouse matter?

  But they're the same. Someone's insignificant stray pet.

  The orbiter enters the atmosphere between swaths of sky.

  Crane tenses again, holding back some inner fireball, then chugs the flask and puts his sunglasses back on. He knocks on the window again.

  “No luck,” he says, apparently having hoped it’d crash.

  “What do you want?” she asks as the truck begins moving again, but he doesn’t answer.

  They drive a while in silence. The woman, Mae, tells Crane “Perez is dead,” and “I hope it was worth it.” But Crane says nothing.

  “How many are there?” she finally asks.

  “How many what?”

  “How many survived?”

  He leans forward. “What? Survived what? You're not talking about the disease?”

  “Vesper Syndrome.”

  “You're delusional.” Then he looks at the other flatbeds, at the bodies. “It doesn't make any sense. You come flying out of nowhere in a strange aircraft with out-of-production bots and droids and don't know anything about the last four decades?”

  He's still acting, maybe just for her, maybe for everyone else too. She refuses to play along.

  “It doesn't make sense to me either.”

  “Come on,” he says. “Am I wasting my time here?” He raises a brow. “Was there anyone else on board?”

  Nothing but endless desert passes in every direction. Caligatha is long, long gone.

  “Jericho Amara.”

  He tilts his head, then pretends to laugh, still not truly amused. But then he stops, appears to realize something. He takes his sunglasses off again, stares at her.

  “Holy shit,” he says, backing up. “Lydia, you're dead.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I knew you looked familiar. You've been dead my whole life. You've gotta start giving me some answers.”

  She starts shaking at the word dead.

  “Jericho cloned her, planted memories in her–in my–head, and we've been sleeping in space for my whole life.”

  He relaxes his brow, exchanging glances with Mae, who remains silent.

  “It's a little complicated,” she says. “I just found out about it myself. Sorry to waste your time.”

  “Wait, wait.” He drinks from the flask. Calculating. Finding himself on the other end of the game now. “So Jericho is alive?”

  He looks to the horizon again, and she follows his gaze. The streak in the distance has dissipated Gone.

  Is Jericho alive?

  “No.”

  “Just you?”

  She looks at the bodies in the other trucks. “Now it is.”

  “Shit,” he says, leaning back. “You might not be infected yet. When we get to the refuge, you need to clean up immediately. I can keep you that way.”

  She shrugs, adjusts the surgical mask. “Really? I thought you just didn’t like my face.”

  “Lydia, if I can trust you, you might be able to help us.” He watches her for a reaction, then asks why they came back.

  “I never asked to go,” she says.

  “But what was the catalyst?”

  “They thought someone sent a signal out. They thought there was a cure.”

  “No,” he says.

  She shrugs again.

  “You sent the signal,” she says.

  “No. The Republic has been seeking you. We were in the right place at the right time.”

  She doesn’t know what it means. Doesn’t care.

  “You need rest, and we're almost to the refuge now. I hope we can trust each other.”

  He puts his sunglasses back on, bottom-ups the flask.

  “I'll be damned,” he says.

  He's right. Her eyelids grow heavy as they continue thumping along, a cityscape appearing in the distance. Nothing like Caligatha, this one is made of steel and glass and concrete.

  “You never answered me,” she says, struggling to hold her head up. “How many are alive?”

  He considers this for a moment. “Here in the States... It’s impossible to know. Eh, thirty or forty mil?”

  All that wondering if somebody, anybody was alive. Anyone at all.

  “You sent the signal,” she tells him, closing her eyes.

  He's quiet for a long time, and she begins to drift off.

  Maybe to himself, he says,“There isn't a cure, but we have medicines to keep the side effects at bay.”

  “Wasteland,” she says absently.

  He laughs. “Ain't it always?”

  She opens her eyes one last time, catching him forlornly staring at the sky, at his disappeared prize, at the only place she's ever known.

  23

  Refuge

  She's blindfolded once they reach the city. Crane gingerly tells her he has no choice, they can't risk the refuge being discovered, and rips his plaid sleeve off and ties it around her eyes. She remembers passing battered signposts along the way, but had been too tired to read them.

  They continue driving, stop-and-go, finally pulling into what sounds like gravel with a wide swing. But he still won't remove her blindfold, leads her through the stony path.

  There's the sound of old metal groaning, chains banging together, and he continues leading her onto what feels like tile, and then the metal groaning again.

  “I'm sorry this is such a process,” he says, removing her blindfold. “Keep that mask over your face.”

  All around her are beds, perhaps a hundred, row after row, some with machines beside them and some little more than broken cots. Children of all ages are curled under white sheets, some awake and sitting up. Many of them are missing arms or have many different types of prosthetics, mostly cheap metal appendages that barely resemble functional hands. Sunlight pours through high vertical windows above a metal catwalk connecting two rooms and glares off the seamless floor below.

  Behind her, the men are carrying Keene and Emma and the hulking insectoid bodies. There's a receiving door shuttering closed, chains still clanking.

  “This used to be a slaughterhouse,” Crane tells her. “Now it's the opposite. That's all you need to know for now.”

  Walking across the catwalk and to a long stairwell is a figure, entirely white.

  “This is Eva,” Crane tells her. “While you're here, you'll do as she or I say, and whenever you leave you don't mention any of this.”

  “Well, well,” Eva says, descending the stairs. “What have we here?”

  Everything about her is white. Her hair, the white cut off blouse under her white apron. Especially her face. Caked in layers of white makeup, only her pink lips and the shadow of her eyes showing through, there's almost an angelic appearance to it except there's something not right, something disfigured, asymmetrical. As she approaches, Lydia sees she's not only covered in white, but her eyes are the lightest albino blue-purple, and there's an imbalance in her jaw and cheek bone, like she's suffered a gunshot wound to the face. She's hidden her disfigurement from the children with an exaggeration of her albinism.

  Eva looks her over, then moves onto the white insect bodies, studies them, running her hands over the gunshots on the most damaged one. She pulls the face dangling from its chin.

  “You have refuge here, if you want it,” she says, then walks to the nearest child's bed, placing the face over her own. “Boo!”

  The child, only about five and missing a hand, giggles and throws the sheets over her head, pretending to be frightened.

  Eva turns back to Lydia. “I have a lot of questions, and so do you. But first you should get clean. Get some serum in you so you don't have to walk around with that awful mask on your face.”

  “Come on,” Crane says, motioning for her to follow him up the stairs.

  “In return,” Eva calls, “We'll be keeping your MeDX Medics. As you can see, they'll be put to good use.”

  Crane shows her the rooms on the second floor. The first four rooms are sleeping qu
arters, then a closet-sized lavatory, then an armory.

  He lets her shower privately in the lavatory, little more than a rigged, pressureless hose and drain in the corner. In the dim lighting from an ancient incandescent bulb above, Lydia watches the endless blood wash away.

  He waits outside with an alcohol-dipped cotton ball and a little syringe and says, “I hope you trust us.”

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  He shrugs, rubs the alcohol on her forearm and expertly pricks a vein.

  “You're tired,” is all he says, then shows her to her quarters. “The serum is a mix of things. In the worst-case scenario, it will stifle the effects for several weeks. In the best-case scenario, you might have resistance. But I haven't been able to do a trial until now. With your permission, I'd like to run some blood tests when you're rested.” He stares into her room. “Sleep well.”

  She looks around at the metal walls, the bare mattress in the corner.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Doctors of sorts. Get some sleep.”

  He closes the door, and she moves to the bed. Every muscle aches as she lies down.

  Everything is a prison. She only moves from cell to cell.

  ***

  She can't sleep. It might be hours, but she lies staring into the dim, bland room, listening to faint chatter from the children below.

  Every time she closes her eyes, she sees something horrible.

  Keene's neck exploding. The feral children in Jericho's nightmare.

  Eventually there's arguing outside her room between Crane and Eva, and she pushes up through the pain, places her ear to the door.

  “Because it's not safe,” Eva is saying. “You're always making promises we can't fulfill.”

  “Cassandra,” Crane is pleading, even though it's certainly Eva's voice he's talking to, “Just give me until I run tests. I finally have someone that might really be uninfected.”

  “Someone that's fallen out of the sky in a billion dollar satellite. Someone associated, or claiming to be associated, with Amara, who had ties to every corporation that has us by the throat.”

  “You saw the data on the droids' memory as clearly as I did. We agreed on this.”

  “Not on keeping her. We were supposed to gut the orbiter for any leads. There was no plan for sheltering anyone long-term. This is the exact opposite of our plan.”

  “It's only one person. And now we have a second set of droids to decode.”

  “What are we going to tell everyone else about this, Crane? Eric is already tired of the secrecy. We have to straighten this out tonight, or getting punched is just the beginning. We'll have a mutiny on our hands by morning.”

  Lydia pulls away from the door, lays on her bed and weeps.

  Everywhere she goes, she's a prisoner and bringer of death.

  Those lonely beaches she'd longed for seem so impossibly far. Never had she pictured barren deserts or slaughterhouses refashioned into infirmaries. And the people, too–at worst she'd expected everyone to be obliterated, gone, forgotten to the world and forever unknown to her. But all those mangled children, she'd never expected that.

  She curls into a ball just as there's a tap at her door.

  It creaks, and in walks Crane.

  “Just wanted to see how you're doing.”

  “I can't sleep,” she says. “I don't want this.”

  “I understand,” he says and sits. “Listen, for right now you need to stick to a very specific story, no matter how you feel. It's a simple story. You wouldn't be here if you didn't run us off the road. We were in the middle of intercepting a shipment of medicine to a corporate compound. We couldn't risk anything, and brought you back.” He pulls out another flask, hands it to her. “We'll get to the real story after you've had time to rest.”

  “Fuck it,” she says, grabs his flask and takes a burning gulp.

  “You should know,” he says, “I don't want you to be too afraid or think too much of the world outside just yet, but life is always shit, and you've been through a lot. There are a lot of people that won't believe what you've been through, either. You're always going to encounter assholes who think everything they're up against is the worst thing in the world.”

  She tries to swallow away the burning, tasteless sensation. “I just want to be alone. I don't care if anyone believes me.”

  Crane takes the flask back, swallows. “That's not what you really want. If you really wanted that you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't've come back.”

  “Does it look like I want to be here?”

  Crane snickers and gulps again, tosses the flask on the bed. “No one wants to be anywhere. That's how your dreamworld came to be, sweetheart. Jerk-offs spending their paychecks to be an anthropomorphic rabbit or pig or some shit for a day, to fuck avatars of little kids. Being anything is overrated, being anything gets old. The first thing that gets old is being a quality human.”

  He stands. “That's yours,” he says, nodding at the flask. “When was the last time you felt happy?”

  He's heading to the door, means for her to mull it over, but without thinking she says, “When I thought I was giving my father a last good memory. Making up for all the times I was obsessed with making him happy, but not really doing that at all. I was really obsessed with paying our rent and his medical bills. On my last day, I took him to all the places that made him happy to be a father, and me happy to be his daughter. But all of that turned out to be a lie, so what good was it?”

  Crane backtracks, picks up the flask, shakes it at her knowingly and swallows. “Did it? Who were you lying to?”

  And then he's gone.

  ***

  Lydia spends her days helping Eva administer serum to the children, and teaches them how to adjust to their new appendages. There's feeding schedules, and counseling sessions for which no one is qualified. Fights break out, and the kids sneak in drugs and alcohol. Sometimes they find a malnourished Expectant Mother Unit, and Eva confiscates it in anger, and the scary organic doll is never seen again.

  The youngest ones cry and scream in the middle of the night. Some come and go, only dropped off by their desperate and scavenging parents. Some are new. Some never return.

  She's already been infected.

  Crane's always leaving for the “lab,” or he and his officers leave with their combat rifles strapped to their back, returning with more serum or medical devices or food. Sometimes they're terribly injured by gunshots. Or the carnivorous wildlife. The animals are a lot more confrontational now that they’ve digested Jericho's artificial immune system.

  “It's a real shit show,” Crane told her. “The best laid plans, etcetera, etcetera.”

  They say one day they might be able to repair Keene and Emma, but their sticky black bodies were locked up in storage in the second building. They're sorry about all that.

  Sometimes she can hear Crane and Eva arguing, or having sex, or Eva crying. Except in all those moments Eva is always Cassandra. Afterward, almost every night, Crane stops by Lydia's room and fills her own personal flask, a gift for working so hard and not selling them out.

  The bridge of truth always leads to another lie.

  At night, she still can't sleep well. When she does rest, she no longer dreams of empty beaches, but the nightmares she's seen during the day.

  When she wakes, covered in hot sweat, she drinks from the flask, mindful to leave enough for daytime, and thinks of the world far above. The seventy passengers of permanent dream.

  No matter how many children's eyes she stares into, telling them the feeling of their missing fingers will transfer to the scrap metal at their wrists, that they'll be able to hold crayons and draw scary monsters, and no matter how often they remind her that it's a scary world and they don't know what crayons are and they need to hold guns–still, sometimes she panics at the thought of the broken paradise above. Sometimes she panics, wants to burst through her ceiling and rip those passengers of dream who've abandoned their children ou
t of eternal sleep, out of those cramped little cabins.

  She wonders in those moments why the scariest things she's seen are the things that don't exist, then she sips her flask some more, and thinks it must have always been so.

  She doesn't wonder anymore if she's human. She knows she's not happy, and she's drinking too much. Her greatest longing remains not so much freedom as to simply step out into the wilderness and see the sun, even have those moments on the beach where no one has ever existed, even her, her own footprints disappearing in the sand.

  She knows Eva doesn't trust her, and the kids don't like her very much. She has no maternal instincts. And it'll only be a matter of time before Crane tries collect his interest on all that alcohol.

  Still. The only time she feels real terror is when she remembers worlds far worse.

  Those scary words.

  Panacea. Elysium. Harmony. Rapture.

  The grotesque doesn't scare her anymore. Not the tortured clay people shaped out of dream. Not the feral children.

  It's the seventy sleepers, drifting eternally like the leftover embers of a great fire.

  In those moments, she sips her warm moonshine, and remembers an old mantra.

  They're not really there. They're not really there.

  Worlds come and go with the sun, Crane tells her. Everyone thinks they're living in end times. Everyone thinks their life is meaningless.

  It makes vanity easy.

  In this story there is no yesterday, no tomorrow.

  There's no end, no destination. Just eternal transition, he tells her.

  There's no linear time.

  But there is a beginning and it's every place, every time all at once.

  The story's just getting started.

  Thank you for reading Caligatha.

  Visit my website at www.mattspire.com and sign up to receive news and discounts on other books.

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