Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  The doors to the bus station are just ahead. There’s a ticket counter in there, and then a big stairway that leads down to where the busses pull in below. I’ve never been in, but I’ve seen it plenty of times from the street. I’m careful to not alter my pace, or do anything else that might draw attention. I simply walk along the building and swerve around a homeless guy huddled on a piece of cardboard.

  There’s something wrong with him, but it takes me a second for my eye to land on it. It’s the fur sticking out from the cuffs of his shabby coat, and the claws where fingers should be.

  “Damn it to fuck,” I whisper. I can already see how this is going down. The cop is in on it. The homeless bear is going to herd me from behind. I’m surely walking into a big trap.

  They knew where I would go. I can see through the glass doors of the bus station—there’s nobody inside. They have the place cleared out so there won’t be any confusion and they can close in on all sides.

  I study the faces of the people coming towards me on the sidewalk. They sense it, even if they don’t exactly react. I can see their eyes drawn to something behind me. Even in his disguise, the homeless bear is attracting attention.

  I see my escape. As people move away from the side of the building—probably to swerve around the homeless bear behind me—they open a path to a bike messenger ahead. He has unlocked his bike and is holding it to his side while he argues with the recipient of his delivery. He takes his hand off the bike and uses both hands to try to wrestle the package back from the person in the doorway. If I sprint past the bus station, I can grab that bike. I’ll swing my leg over it and use my momentum to carry me down the hill. I picture myself furiously pedaling away from the bus station.

  I know it can be done.

  It’s too much.

  I’m giving up on the plan even as it solidifies. The messenger turns even more. The bike is just barely staying upright as it flirts with the spandex covering the man’s butt. It’s like he wants someone to steal it. He’s fully engaged with his altercation.

  Instead, I turn and push through the glass doors of the bus station. Believe it or not, but I actually hold the door open, knowing that there’s a bear dressed up like a homeless guy who is surely following me.

  Yup. Here he comes. He nods as he comes through the door.

  Once through, he pulls it from my hand and closes it. Through the glass, I see the police officer pull his horse up onto the sidewalk, dismount, and stand guard at the entrance. I’ve made my choice, and now I’m trapped in here. There’s nobody manning the ticket window. Another bear bounds up the stairs. This one isn’t dressed up as anything. He’s just a bear.

  I look once more through the glass. Doesn’t anyone outside see this? How can they just ignore a man in the bus station, confronted by two bears?

  “This is not a dream,” I whisper. I remember the sequence of numbers. “6C 1B 7F 80 0D 5F F6 CB.”

  “What?” the big bear asks.

  ---- * ----

  We’re in the men’s room of the bus station. It doesn’t smell as bad as I assumed.

  “I didn’t aid or abet anyone. I was a hostage,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  The brown bear is standing. They are imposing when they stand. You have tilt your head way back, unless you want to address a furry belly. They have no ability to look casual. Their arms hang in a funny way, and it makes them look goofy. His shoulders slope away too much. It really takes away from the gravity of the situation.

  “You have no right to hold me,” I say. “I didn’t commit any crimes.”

  “You work for puzzleBox,” he says. It’s not a question.

  “What? No. I escaped.”

  “From where?”

  “puzzleBox,” I say. “They tried to hold me there, but I escaped.”

  “After what?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “You escaped after what?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

  “You escaped after working there.”

  “For one day. Less, even. I was only there a few hours until I could escape.”

  “We have you in on the twelfth and out on the nineteenth. That’s eight days,” the bear says. It would be easier if I was being questioned by the homeless bear. He’s not as tall, and he’s wearing clothes. My eyes want to move to him as the authority, but the tall bear is the one talking.

  “I don’t know. I was unconscious for most of that, I guess.” Is it really the nineteenth? I look at my phone. He’s right. Someone must have charged my phone.

  The tall bear turns to the other. “Take him to Bauman. Tell them to get a full account. I want to know everything he’s seen.”

  The bear drops to all fours and heads for the door. The homeless bear opens it for him.

  I’m alone with the homeless bear in the bathroom. If I had to guess, I would say that under those rags he’s a black bear, but his color is different than the other black bear. He’s lighter, almost brown. It’s mostly his muzzle and his stature which lead me to the conclusion.

  “I’ll tell you everything. There’s no need to go to Bauman or whatever.”

  “We want captures. Don’t worry—it won’t hurt much. There’s something you have to know before we can go. Listen close. I’m only going to say this once. In the seventh dimension, all possible outcomes of this universe, from the Big Bang to the collapse, are represented by a single point.”

  I want to ask a question, but he holds up a claw.

  He continues, “All the branches of your timeline exist in the fifth dimension. To jump from one possible future to another, we have to fold the fifth into the sixth. What’s your question?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because if you go insane and your brain is unable to function, you’ll be no use to us. Take a step forward.”

  “What if I don’t?” I’m comfortable where I am, leaning against the plastic counter of the bus station sink. The last thing I want to do is get closer to a bear dressed up like a homeless guy.

  “Then I’ll have to fill out two additional forms explaining why we had to do a third-dimension lateral shift on top of the budgeted sixth-dimension fold.”

  I don’t move.

  He sighs and rolls his big bear eyes. “Fine,” he says. He cocks his hips and jerks them to the right. When his hip hits the wall, it feels like the whole room moves. In fact, when I look down at my feet, I see that the floor has shifted under them. I’ve skidded twenty inches across the tile. When I blink, it’s not tile anymore. I’m standing on fine white sand.

  I can’t breathe.

  My whole body stings as my skin begins to freeze. My ears pop and there’s nothing but silence.

  When I see Earth over his shoulder, hanging on the horizon of the lunar landscape, I realize that I’m going to die.

  I fall forward, trying to move my frozen arms to my throat, but they won’t obey.

  The bear catches me with one lazy paw and drags me forward.

  “Sorry,” he says as sound rushes back into my ears. “Guess I missed by a foot or two. I suppose you should have taken a step forward, huh?”

  My eyesight disappears for a second as pain washes over me.

  I drag in a breath and it feels like daggers stabbing at my lungs.

  My body hunches over and I vomit onto the white sand. My used food splatters, kicking up a little dust. There are wriggling little metal things in my vomit. They’re about the size of grains of rice. The sight of them makes me regurgitate even more. I can’t believe those things were inside me.

  “Settle down,” the bear says. “You’ll be fine. Let’s get you inside.”

  I don’t know what he means. We’re somehow standing in a crater on what I have to assume is the moon. Still, I let him help me back upright and lead me forward. He reaches up with a claw and something beeps when he presses. I don’t see anything there at all until the door opens in the ground.

  The
bear leads me down a flight of steps. As our heads cross below the plane of the crater, I see the room open up around us. It’s a cave excavated in the lunar rock, but the ceiling is glass, or at least transparent. The rocks have been coated with something black and rubbery. The shadows are impossibly deep.

  The room is about the size of a parlor, but the transparent ceiling makes it feel enormous. From around a corner, we’re approached by a polar bear with glittering black eyes. I take a shy half-step back, to get the homeless bear between me and this newcomer. Polar bears are the only bears who will actively hunt humans, or so I’ve read.

  “Decon?” the polar bear asks.

  “Yes,” the homeless bear replies. “But he just booted in the sand, so there’s probably no rush.”

  “Still…” the polar bear says. He turns and begins to go back to where he came from.

  I stay put until he turns around and fixes me with those black eyes.

  “Are you coming?” he asks slowly.

  I nod. As I come out from behind the homeless bear, my former guide gives me a shove in the middle of my back and I stumble forward into the polar bear’s rump. The contact serves to dissipate some of my fear. After all, I survive the encounter.

  The hall is a channel of carved rocks. Above, I look up into the cosmos. Without Earth’s atmosphere to soften it, space looks cold and deep, ready to suck me in. The cave is a comfortable temperature though. The polar bear leads me into a room with a rock slab in the center.

  “Take off your clothes and lie down,” the bear says. He points a claw at the stone altar and then moves over to a hole in the wall. “Decon in five,” he says into the hole. He turns back to me and finds me still standing there. I fold my arms. “Would you mind undressing and lying down?” he asks.

  “Why?”

  “For decon?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I say.

  “It means you’re contaminated. This is a closed environment here. We can’t have you walking around, spreading potential contaminants. We could all be dead in an hour.”

  “Oh.”

  He speaks slowly and enunciates each word. “Take off your clothes and lie down.” There’s an unspoken threat with this command. I pull my shirt up over my head. When it clears my eyes, I see something different. There’s a bird’s head poking through the hole in the wall. It’s a gull, like at the beach. Its yellow beak has a red mark near the end, like a dab of lipstick. Its eyes are even blacker and shinier than the bear’s.

  The bear spins its head and spots the bird. I have a premonition as to what’s going to happen. The bear is going to strike out with one of those massive white paws and slap that bird dead in an instant.

  Instead, he says, “Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”

  The bird swivels its head in a series of quick jerks. Its beak opens and a deep, rolling voice emerges. “Why isn’t it undressed yet?”

  “I don’t know,” the bear says, shrugging. Polar bears are good at shrugging—it almost makes him look like he has shoulders for a second. “I keep telling him.”

  “Get undressed!” the gull says to me. His voice is strong and commanding. He sounds like the only adult in the room.

  I follow orders.

  The stone table is cold, but it warms up quick under my touch.

  The gull flutters from the hole in the wall and lands next to my shoulder on the table. He cocks his head, regarding me with one eye and then the other.

  He opens his mouth. With his voice, he could be an announcer on a TV show, or do voiceovers for commercials. “Do you have any cigarettes, marijuana, or pipe tobacco? Anything to smoke whatsoever?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Shame,” the bird says. He hops down towards my chest and swivels his head again. This time he leans down close, putting the side of his head near my stomach. The bird turns towards the bear. “There’s a stitcher in there. Might not be done.”

  “Stitcher?” I ask.

  “Get rid of it all,” the bear says. “He’ll live.”

  I try to look over at the bear, but I realize that my head won’t turn. I try to push up from the stone, and I realize that I can’t move my arms. I’m stuck to the stone. Trying to move only pulls at my skin.

  “Okay,” the bird says. “This is going to hurt.”

  I’m looking down the length of my naked body. I see him pull his head back and then jab it towards me. I try to flinch, but the stone holds me in place. His beak plunges between my ribs and I feel it lacerating my flesh. The pain is a volcano, erupting from my chest and sending burning waves through me. His stupid beak is ripping a jagged hole in my skin and lacerating my muscle. I want to scream at him, but nothing comes out of my mouth.

  I’m panting in and out. My breath grates through my vocal cords.

  I try to speak. “The fuck are you doing?” My voice is shaking like I’m soaking up to my chin in freezing water.

  “The more you relax, the quicker this goes,” the bear says.

  “There’s a ton of them in here,” the bird says. “He’s going to have a rough go of it.”

  I feel his beak pulling and tearing. When he comes up, I see blood up to his eyeballs and little strings of my flesh hanging from his jaws.

  “Stop!” I say.

  “Can’t be helped,” the bear says. “Didn’t they explain this to you?”

  “Whu-what?” I ask.

  The bird has one of those little shiny things in his beak. It’s squirming in his grip. He lets it go and it falls out of sight.

  I hear the bear get up and approach. His voice sounds close when he speaks, but I’ve only got eyes for that stupid bird. Every time his head disappears, it turns into fresh agony.

  “You have helpers in you,” the bear says. “They would have disabled soon anyway. They’ve only got power enough for a couple of hours once they’re away from their charger, and that’s about a quarter of a million miles away.”

  “Help…ers,” I manage.

  “Stitchers,” the bird says.

  “Yeah, stitchers, to be precise. You must have had some internal injuries they were putting back together. You didn’t realize you had stitchers in you?”

  “N-n-no,” I say. The bird lays his feathery head down on my stomach and I think he’s going to leave me alone. Instead, he rears back and plunges his beak into a new spot. I suspect that the new flare of pain is from my kidney, but how would I know?

  “Problem is, they might have sensors in them. We can’t take that chance,” the bear says.

  I look up into space. It’s easier to deal with the pain when I consider the infinite depth of space above me. In different circumstances, it might be described as beautiful.

  “You never know how far those things can transmit. It seems like they improve them every day.”

  After a brief respite from the tearing beak, the bird jabs into my inner thigh. I feel my warm blood gushing out onto my leg as he pulls at my veins. The world goes dim and I welcome it. The pain drifts farther away.

  ---- * ----

  I sit up fast and the sheet falls away from my torso. I’m alone in a circular room that has no doors. On all sides, I see rough rock walls coated in black rubber. Above me, I’m looking at inky black space, dotted with stars. They don’t twinkle. They’re just little pinpricks of white in the void. My clothes are piled at the end of the slab. I start to pull them on as I hide under the sheet.

  I wonder—is someone watching me right now? Is part of this wall an illusion, behind which bears and birds are observing me. Before I pull on my shirt, I think to examine my chest. There are no holes from the bird’s serrated surgery. There are no scars from the earlier clawing, or stab-wound from the thief. My skin is smooth and perfect. If I weren’t in a crater on the moon, I might think that the whole thing had been a bad dream.

  “Are you sane down there?” a voice asks. I look every direction, but I don’t see the source. “Hello?”

  “Yes?” I ask.

  “Are yo
u sane?”

  “Yes. Definitely,” I say. I don’t know who I’m trying to convince—me or him.

  A wide ladder flips over the wall of my room and is lowered to the floor. I move slowly until the dust and sand begins to spill over the side of the another wall. Once that cloud reaches me, I’m climbing fast, to get away from it. It’s hard to breathe with that stuff in the air. As I reach the top, I see that we’re in an open space. A metal machine is pushing a mound of dirt into the pit that I recently occupied. A brown bear lifts the ladder as soon as I’m on firm ground.

  There are other circular patches around me where the dirt looks loose. I wonder if there are other people buried under those patches of white sand who perhaps didn’t answer the question correctly.

  “How you feeling? You hungry?” the bear asks. He begins to walk away and I follow.

  “Yes,” I say. I’m not sure hungry is the right word for it. I feel so empty that it’s like my stomach acid is starting to devour my own flesh. I have the urge to vomit, but I’m afraid that my esophagus would come out of my mouth.

  “Good,” he says. “That’s a good sign.”

  I follow as he weaves between the covered-over excavations.

  The rock wall juts out in a way that disguises the hall behind it. I follow the bear around the corner.

  This bear seems nicer than the last few I’ve encountered.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Could you tell me what happened? How did I get here? Did a bird rip me apart?”

  He swings his head and glances back.

  “Let’s get some food into you,” he says. “Everything makes more sense with food in your belly.”

  The room he leads me to looks just like the rest—open ceiling and rubber-coated stone walls. There’s an alcove along one wall though, and the bear sticks his head in the hole. He comes back out with an enormous flapping fish between his teeth and water cascading from his jaws. He shakes his head and then tosses the fish in my direction. I barely dodge the flying fish. It skids to a stop in the sandy moon dust.