Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “You’re the dude who wrote that anonymous post about the party and Mannerheim?” Natalie pointed at both of them.

  “Yeah …”

  “How did you know I would find it?”

  Josh started toward the apartment building door, he said over his shoulder, “because they had full control over the StreamNet whenever they wanted it and popped it in front of you.”

  “That seems incredible,” Natalie said.

  “Oh you haven’t seen anything yet,” Marsel said with a lot of accent and in the lower tones of her vocal range.

  “I’ve seen plenty. Do you know what she did to me?”

  “Hey,” Josh said from the door. “They know. Let’s go talk with her. I assume you’ve got a member plugged in already.”

  Marsel patted Natalie on the shoulder. “You’ll be happy she did … But! What’s done is done. Let’s go inside and talk with her.”

  Natalie pulled a notebook from her small purse and a pen. “Yeah, well, we’re through with any off-the-record bullshit.” She followed Josh. The couple followed her.

  Inside the French couple’s apartment, at the dining room table over which Natalie had watched many sunsets, a young woman in white T-shirt and jeans sat with her hands on the table top with an orb between them. A black filament linked the orb to the center of a metal necklace around her thin neck.

  “Trance?” Natalie said.

  “More technical than that,” Josh said, staring at the orb. “Nothing mystical about it. I’ve seen it just once before.”

  “Our first time,” Perran said. “Even to us, it does seem a little, well, mystical.”

  “That was rather dramatic don’t you think, Josh?”

  All three looked at the young woman and then at the orb and back.

  “A flash-bang grenade?”

  “Celestine.” Natalie and Josh said together.

  “Bingo.”

  The girl spoke the words in a voice that seemed to Natalie must have been her own, but the inflection and emphasis was Celestine. Natalie began taking notes, a sketch of detail around quotes. Then she remembered her phone still had charge and a sound recorder even if it couldn’t connect to the StreamNet. She got it out and turned it on.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Natalie asked. “To us?”

  “Why, Natalie, we’re going to save humanity from extinction and I’ll need your help. You and Adam.”

  XX

  Then it was just Adam in the newsroom. Just him and Kelli who was in God only knew what state of consciousness, if any. One quiet death among so many. In a movie, Adam would have rushed into Beach’s office, shook Kelli, slapped Kelli, cried out for Kelli to live, Live! Damn you! Live! But what for? he wondered sitting drunk in his chair. For how much longer? Oh, he assumed the world would come back. The deaths would be announced as some big amount, but the actual number would be less than what all had feared (or secretly hoped for). Death tolls are always assumed to be much much worse than they usually are. It’s better for people to find out that fewer than expected are dead, rather than the opposite. General Patton famously told soldiers, “You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle.” Even the terrible toll of terrorist attacks on New York City’s World Trade Centers were first reported to be potentially three to four times higher than the actual number killed and wounded. Adam had suspected, given what he’d heard and saw on television that morning, there were plenty of people killed already. Of the dozens of people hit by the tank and gun fire at the White House alone, at least a dozen had to have been killed. There were the eight kids found buried, though Adam still didn’t think the two incidents were directly related, regardless of the fantastical tales spun by the cult leader Celestine.

  No, Adam assumed that once the lights came back on and the dust settled, the number of powerful people dead would be much smaller than the number of people killed during the rioting that appeared to be going on out in the streets among the less powerful. After all, that’s the way it always went. Those in power and the protected rich, like Mannerheim, will crawl out of their bunkers, reassert control and the world will proceed much as it has. Even the increase in shots, screams and banging sounds around the Daily-Record building didn’t impress him very much. And if during this brief hiatus of normalcy, this romantic moment of indeterminacy, Kelli wanted to take her own life, who was Adam to deny it her. She had tried several times already, from what he’d heard. First when her son died; another time when her husband lost their house gambling in Las Vegas and again when his liver failed and doctors denied him a transplant because he wouldn’t stop drinking and smoking. Each time someone had saved her and each time she had recovered only to find her life worse off, even more terrible. So, he reasoned, if she wanted to do it now, where better? When better? Deep down, Adam didn't really think she was dying in Beach’s office. Had he seen her upend the bottle into her mouth, he might have acted differently, made her throw up or something. He had only tried to kill himself once and felt like a expert. For years he didn’t mind the prospect of death. Only his work kept him alive. The newsroom saved him, he told his therapist, while it killed him. He had sex with a stranger once, well not a stranger so much as another editor at a journalism conference, got tested for HIV to protect his wife, slowed his drinking and cigarette smoking when he hit fifty. He stayed away from pills of all kinds, especially after watching his mother’s body become addicted to pain pills. All so he could come into this office, sit at this desk, fight with reporters, rewrite and rewrite again their dreadful stories, chase leads and guide investigations … all so the team could publish a newspaper every single day of the year, year after year.

  And now what?

  He got up and looked in on Kelli, opening the door just enough to make sure she was breathing, which she was, vigorously. Some people simply have more life-force than life-desire. Without really thinking about it, though Adam suspected the racket outside the building drew him like a moth to flame, he went through the features and sports departments to the back balcony door. He opened it, stepped out and made sure to slide a book between the door and doorjamb, lest he be locked out there. At least two or three smokers and newsroom co-conspirators got locked out there every month. Even though he had heard the crescendoing of street noise, a blur of roaring punctuated by sharp bangs, crackles and those muffled humpf noises, Adam’s mind expected to see a calm Puget Sound with, perhaps, a sailboat regatta in play. Instead, he felt shock and disorientation at the scene spread out across the choppy waters. Even with all he had seen on TV and experienced in the office, the scene struck him as incredible.

  As far as he could make out across the Sound and up the deep channel to his right that led out beyond Port Townsend to the Strait of Juan de Fuca floated ships of all size and shapes. Massive cargo ships, tugs and yachts, several huge submarines and Navy war ships filled the water. Smoke poured out of some, mostly the military subs and other grey ships, but they all crowded together, jostling slightly against their neighbors. It seemed impossible that there were that many ships in the world let alone stacked against each other from shore to shore right in front of his eyes. But this was something else all together. Seemed to him, given how distances get shortened from one’s perspective, that a good jumper could get from one side of the Sound to the other by leaping from ship to boat to ship to submarine.

  Mostly the scene appeared orderly, with more ships steaming in from the far end of the Sound and shoving their way into the mass, pushing others tighter, accompanied by concussive sounds. Older, small boats and sail boats, just like old cars, still operated. Some sat there or idled along between the big ships. Others attempted speed and zig-zagged through the maze of increasingly shrinking openings, quixotically attempting passage to open water and perhaps the sea. Several more had been crushed but kept above the water surface by the pinning ships. As his mind adapted to the scene, he made out more detail, including people. They lined the sides of those shi
ps, leaning over, some trying to climb down ropes and ladders to other ships or boats below them. From the smoking hulks—perhaps they had tried to burn out their electronics or motors to regain control but had clearly failed, from those engulfed in that dense black smoke—crews hung from the side or out doors on the sides opened at water level. There had to have been thousands in the water, but he couldn’t see them for all the big ships. Other crews appeared calm, lining the rails of their ships, hanging out, perhaps waiting for things to calm down before taking action. Others, he assumed, were foreign merchant marines with no where to go, remaining aboard where they had food, water and security. Ringing the Navy ships and subs, those crews bristled with guns. One of the big aircraft carriers had lines dangling from the overhanging flight decks down to rubber craft and onto the decks of ships below or next to them. The soldiers appeared to be fanning out, creating perimeters. Others carried buckets to the side and poured out ash or sand. Not knowing what else to do with what remained of their commanders. One massive container ship several hundred yards or possibly a half-mile away from the cluster of military ships, repelled marauders of some sort with concentrated gunfire. The pirates or whoever had rowed out to them when open water was still available. They had either fired grappling lines up over the railings or had taken over the ropes dropped from the top. Adam saw puffs of smoke and heard the crackling of small-arms fire. The crews in those rowboats were exchanging gunfire as their compatriots climbed the ropes. They fired up at the railing to ward off shooters from above, while the ship’s crew stuck its guns over the edge and fired down. Several motor boats, a yacht—Puget Sound in the summer was home to thousands of rich techies and their yachts—and several sailboats had gotten mixed up in the fight or had come in in support of one side or the other and been floundered. One was still in flames as the others listed at various angles and smoked. He discovered the objective of one Navy squad as it broke onto to the scene and fired several rockets at the marauders, putting a sudden and explosive end to their adventures.

  A particular sound had been spooking him, he recognized. It even caused him to duck his head from time to time as he paparazzied the scene, an unconscious response. When a hole appeared in the window next to his head, the cause of the sounds dawned on him. He threw himself down below the concrete side of the balcony. Not many but a few bullets came in his direction. Most of them either zapped over the building or past it, but some were smashing into the windows and walls of the floor below and the floor he was on. It only takes one, he thought. He crawled back into the building and back to his desk. The elevator shafts came between his desk and the windows facing the Sound. He sat on the floor anyway. Panting next to his desk, he was too panicked even to feel the thumping and thudding going on in his chest.

  XXI

  Adam, digging out from under a mile of near-death sleep, didn’t know if he had passed out from shortness of breath and panic or simple exhaustion. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours, but the next thing he remembered after huddling on the floor next to his desk was being shaken by the shoulder and his ass so numb he couldn’t feel the floor. He felt, eyes closed, as if he were floating. He had the impression that he’d had a terrible dream and wanted to dispel it before moving on with the day’s work. Something about the tone of voice the woman used as she shook his shoulder made him want to take a moment to figure out why he had this feeling of profound dread. He was breathing fast, panting, his chest pounding in a scary way, but that was not it. Something else. Something …

  “Adam! Adam!”

  Something about …

  “Adam! Don’t die!”

  That wasn’t it, he wanted to say. My ass … He opened his eyes right into hers, into brown nearly black orbs. He pulled back to focus on the broader face for recognition.

  “You’re not going to die?” Natalie’s face. Her youthful, angry, panicked face, smooth forehead scrunched between black tweezered eyebrows. Her eyes watered. “Don’t die.” Natalie had dropped to her knees and felt his neck when she first entered the newsroom and saw him sitting on the ground, propped up against his desk. He was breathing shallow, his bald head chalky and pasty. She felt a rickety pulse under his skin and shook his shoulder, gently at first.

  “I’m breathing aren’t I?” Adam croaked. He pushed on the floor to get some blood into his ass. Then it all, the whole bit about the end of the world and all those ships outside on the Sound came crashing back. “Give me a second would you?” His chest tightened and he gripped his shirt below the collar, pulled, closed his eyes against the pain that had generalized throughout his body.

  Natalie shook him harder. “Adam!” She would not let him die. They had work to do. They had news to gather and stories to write. They had to expose Celestine’s role in creating The Mind Hive. Her complicity in genocide.

  “Stop!’ Adam put his hand up to wave her off. “You’re going to kill me!”

  Natalie backed away a bit. “Can you stand?” She pulled on his arm.

  “I don’t know. My ass …”

  Humans don't know how much they need an ass until they can’t use the muscles in it, he quipped silently, holding his breath and pushing up with one arm. He didn’t make his knees, so rolled to his side where he stalled. A memory from his youth popped into his head. He’s standing next to Clyde, his mother’s red-haired gardener. He’s saying to Adam while watching his son lumber off toward the garden shed at the back of his mother’s yard at the big house they lived in on Capitol Hill, “That boy is numb from his ass both directions.” Adam thought he was a horrible man. He was right about the mental powers of his son, but still horrible. Adam had been happy not to have a father. Sure, some male of the species had donated genetic material for his creation, but outside of that clinical moment he had no father.

  “Adam!” Natalie dragged him a foot to get his head out from under a chair.

  “Fuck,” Adam mumbled. She was on her feet, pulling on his arm. “Jesus. My ass.” She pull him onto his side. “Let go of my fucking arm would you. I swear to god!”

  She dropped his arm. “That’s more like it,” Natalie said.

  Adam got his knees under him and pushed up, grabbing the edge of his desk. “What time is it? Did you see what’s going on out there?”

  “Yes. Yes. We saw.” Natalie pulled the chair around his head and then sat in it.

  “Thanks for the chair.”

  “I thought you were going to die.”

  “Well, I may yet. Help me to my feet.”

  She stood up and put her hand under his arm and lifted. He got his left foot under him and pressing with his hand on the edge of the desk, lifted himself to standing.

  “Oh my god,” he said and rubbed his backside. His slacks were sweaty and for just the briefest panicky moment he feared he’d pissed himself. But he discovered that the universe had seen fit to spare him at least that indignity.

  He heard noises coming from Beach’s office. “Oh, Kelli,” he said as he turned. “Is she …”

  “There’s no one else here.”

  “Really? Funny. She abandoned me for dead the …”

  “I came back for you! … well you, Robert, Grant and Josh Fines, the federal guy you talked to on the phone.” Natalie, relieved now that Adam was standing, sat back down in his chair.

  Adam examined the tall man with white-blond hair in Beach’s office. He had his back toward them, fiddling with the dials of a box, pushing an antenna toward the windows, swirling it around. Screeches and squelches came from the shortwave the newspaper had used earlier to listen to the president tell everyone that everything was just fine … seemed like months ago.

  “Where’s Robert and Grant?” Adam looked around. “You need to stay away from the widows over in sports. Bullets.”

  “Yeah,” Natalie said, flipping through the pages of her notebook. “We saw that. They’ve gone back out to do some reporting and get some photos. I’ve got some incredible notes here.”

  “Of what? What for?” The presu
mption of work angered him. What could they possibly do without a press? Without electricity? Without a functioning society!

  “What?” She looked up at Adam, angry again. She’d been scared but also pissed off to see him collapsed like that. “What do you mean?”

  “Natalie.” He stretched and took a couple tentative steps. Looking down at her, denim working-girl button down, narrow-cut blue jeans hanging down on dirty, blue Vans. “What would we do with the information? The photos? We lack the means of production, even rudimentary production. What the fuck are we going to do? Handwrite the stories and paste the photos on it?” His frustration at her youthfulness, a year and a half of dealing with her youthfulness, peaked.

  Natalie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. All Adam ever talk about was the purpose of journalism. The necessity of journalism. It was as important now as ever. “Josh is boosting our shortwave radio,” she explained. “We can broadcast our stories, if nothing else.”

  “Jesus Christ, Natalie.” Adam coughed up laughter as he spoke. “Look. Around.” A window shattered back in sports, splattering glass across desks followed by a Woof! concussion. Natalie ducked in the chair, sliding to her knees just as Adam dropped back down to his own. “We’ll be lucky to survive!” He shouted.

  “We have a job to do,” she panted the words. “We’ve got to record what’s happening, tell people about Celestine and The Mind Hive.” Natalie’s panic at the explosion dissipated quickly. She got back to her feet. Her body felt light to her. “This is what we do. This is what people need from us.”

  “People … I …” Adam knew she was right, though. He crawled toward Beach’s office, which was the most protected corner on the floor. “Goddamn it,” he said. “God. Fucking. Damn it!” She was right. What else would he do, roll over and die? She was right, and he was not alone. He had a team. In the protection of Beach’s doorway, he got to his feet. He has a team.