by Greg Boose
Jonah doesn’t know what to say; he doesn’t know if he should defend himself and tell him the truth or stay silent. How much did Griffin really tell Mirker?
“That wasn’t us,” Paul says.
Mirker purses his lips and nods. “So, then what happened, huh?”
Before Paul can answer, Jonah asks, “Does Earth know? Do they know we crashed and most of us died?”
“They know you’re here now,” Mirker says. “They know poor little street kid Jonah Lincoln made his sad little way to Thetis, and he’s being cradled to my bosom, yes.”
“Sir, do they know most of us are dead?” Paul asks.
“All they know is that I said we were happy and enjoying life and that we’re ready for the Mayflower 3 to bring us some more people and supplies. Should I get them on the com right now and let them know you boys have been slaughtering scientists and doctors and cooks and hanging them from trees to scare each other like this is all some kind of sick game?”
Paul shrugs and buries his head into his pillow. Jonah sits forward in his seat, ready to leave, to find Freeman or someone else he can possibly trust. Maybe the woman in the farm building taking care of the frosties can help him. He’ll run by Brooklyn’s room first, put her over his shoulder, and then with Vespa, they’ll figure out their next move.
“Here’s my big question,” Mirker growls. “There was a second-year cadet on your trip who we didn’t rescue. His name was Sean Meebs. What happened to him? Where can we find him?”
Jonah’s vision tunnels at the name. It was Sean who took down the ship in the first place. It was Sean who helped his brother Tunick attack the adults and terrorize the kids. What happened to him? His arm was practically blown off by Vespa, and then he broke his neck trying to jump over the canyon to chase down Jonah. The boy is dead. Jonah swallows the memories and trauma, looks directly at Mirker, and says, “I didn’t know him. I didn’t know a lot of people. I like to be by myself.”
Mirker’s shoulders rise and stiffen, and then he pivots swiftly on his heels toward Paul who remains motionless, as if he didn’t hear the question. The man grunts, reaches down, grabs ahold of the thin mattress, and he flips it completely over, sending Paul crashing to the floor.
“Motherfucker!” Paul rolls back and forth on the ground, clutching his side. His bandage immediately starts to turn red with fresh blood.
Mirker places a boot on top of Paul’s wrist. “Don’t you boys lie to me now. I’m the law here. I’m the law and the judge and the jury.” He steps down on Paul’s wrist, straightening out the boy’s trembling fingers. Jonah thinks he can hear bones crunching against each other. “What happened to Sean Meebs?”
Paul grabs Mirker’s ankle with his other hand and shouts in pain. The man winds up his left foot and punts away the cadet’s hand. “Don’t you fucking touch me, boy.”
Mirker steps down harder. Paul shouts louder.
“He’s dead,” Jonah says. “Sean is dead.”
Mirker turns his head and exhales through his nose, fire in his eyes. “I thought you didn’t know him?”
“I don’t. I just figured…if we didn’t know him after the crash, then that means he died in the crash, right? Most everybody died in the crash.”
“You’re a couple of liars. And what about Kip Kurtz? When did he arrive?”
“Kip went into a cave and we lost him,” Jonah says. “We didn’t see him again until you guys picked us up on the island.”
Mirker steps off Paul’s wrist and moves quickly toward Jonah, grabbing his jumpsuit and balling it in his fist. He pulls him off the ground and slams him against the wall, shaking the entire room. The door opens, and Freeman’s head appears, and when he sees what’s happening, the man enters the room with his hands up.
“Sir, they’re just boys. Just—”
“Get out of here! Now!” Mirker barks. He raises Jonah even higher up the wall, presses him harder into the wood. The ceiling bows as if it’s about to collapse.
Freeman takes another step inside, locking eyes with Jonah. “Put the boy down, sir.”
With his free hand, Mirker whips a gun from his pocket and aims it at Freeman’s face. “Get out.”
Freeman looks from Jonah to Paul writhing on the ground, and then to Mirker’s gun. The commander rubs the trigger with his finger and a smile starts to crawl across his lips. Freeman’s face goes from concerned to apologetic, as if he’s seen Mirker act like this before and knows what he’s capable of, and before Jonah can plead for help, Freeman blindly reaches over for the doorknob, opens the door, and sidesteps back out into the hallway.
As soon as the door closes, Mirker tosses Jonah onto the bed frame. The thin metal wires dig into his back and legs. Immediately, the man places a boot on the middle of Jonah’s chest and rests his elbow on his knee. “You’re going to tell me the fucking truth. Right now. Tell me about Sean Meebs.”
“Why do you care so much about one cadet?” Paul asks. He struggles to his feet and shuffles toward the door, blood dripping down his side. His bandage is completely red and peeling away from his skin. “Lots of cadets are gone and missing. Lots of cadets are dead.”
Mirker slips the gun back into his pocket and reaches down to touch Jonah’s face. Jonah jerks his head away, but the officer places a thumb above the boy’s right eye and raises the skin. “Yup, these babies are going to be blue again real soon once we start taking away your medicine. Take a good look at me while you can, street boy. Cadet Griffin told me you were buddies with Sean Meebs, that the two of you went on a little journey on the second day together. You guys were friends, were you not?”
“Who cares about Sean Meebs?” Paul spits.
“I do,” Mirker says. “Because that’s my son.”
The door opens again and in spills Freeman and three other men with rifles in their hands.
“That’s enough,” Freeman says. “Sir.”
Mirker chuckles and takes his foot off of Jonah’s chest. The cadet wheezes for a lungful of air, and as the men shout back and forth, all Jonah can think about is if Mirker is Sean’s father, then that means he’s Tunick’s father, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jonah lies sweating and panicking in a hospital bed down the hall from Brooklyn and Paul. He tries to rest, to feel safe with the soldiers patrolling the hallways and Mirker sent away to cool off, but all he can do is stare at the doorknob, waiting for it to turn just an inch. He’s decided that the wooden pole next to his bed holding his medicine bag will be his best weapon against whoever, or whatever, will surely attack him in here.
A hundred things sit and swirl in his mind, combining and separating, rising to the top and making room for more and more worries from the past two days: Paul’s story about meeting the kids from Module Eight and them saying they want to keep the fingers; the two-headed ghosts that Paul says roamed Achilles and the combined skulls he saw himself in the tunnel on Thetis; Mirker is Sean and Tunick’s father and what he’ll do when he finds out he and Vespa murdered them; Griffin has been talking to the commander, telling him god-knows-what; Louis in the village says they’re all doomed because something on board the ship was destroyed; Brooklyn’s not getting better even though she’s getting her medicine; Kip has seemingly disappeared with no one knowing where he is and yet Mirker and others talk about him as if they already know him; the voices in his head returning in the tunnel; Dr. Z saying things about him to Paul and how she’s on the loose and could be anywhere. Jonah’s brain fires with every thought while his toes clench with readiness to jump off the bed in an instant.
There’s a quiet knock on the door, and Jonah rips the wooden pole from its stand, sending his bag of medicine sloshing to the ground. He sits up just as the short and skinny Matteo enters the room, his shaggy mop of black hair pulled into a neat bun on the top of his big head. He holds a clipboard in his hand.
“Whoa. Hey there, buddy,” he says. “How’re you feeling? What’s with the big toothpic
k?”
Jonah aims one end of the pole at his roommate. “What are you doing here?”
“Uh, relax. I’m just checking on you. You haven’t been around, and so I asked where you were, and someone told me you were back in the luxurious hospital we have here at the beautiful Athens colony. I heard you had quite the adventure outside the gate.”
Jonah lies back, balancing the pole across his stomach, his fingers itching to grab and swing it at a moment’s notice.
“They caught Dr. Zarembo. I thought you might want to know that.”
“Good,” Jonah says. The relief that tingles his skin is brief, but strong. He’s not ready to fight her again.
Matteo pulls a chair away from the wall and sits down with sigh. “You want me to bring you some tea or something? Read you a bedtime story? I’m just on my break, and we’re on lockdown right now, so I can’t exactly go exploring.”
“Why are we on lockdown if they caught Dr. Z?”
“Oh, there were some animals outside the fence causing trouble, trying to get in or whatever. Happens from time to time. Plus, um, let’s not forget about those creepy-ass kids walking around together that you guys brought back from Achilles. They managed to sneak outside the fence and somehow got back inside.”
Jonah thinks of Paul’s encounter with the Module Eight kids and the black rock and the two-headed aliens. He thinks of the tall boy standing in the huddle on the road in front of the rover, his blank stare, his finger pointing to the sky.
“So,” Matteo says, “You feeling better or what?”
Jonah rolls over and picks the bag of medicine off the floor and gives it a slight squeeze, sending a stream of medicine down the tube and into his arm. “I want to know what was onboard the Mayflower 2 that everyone is so pissed off about.”
“So, Mirker still hasn’t told you guys? I don’t know what he’s waiting for, as if it’s a huge secret around here. Well, here’s the deal: Something that people on Earth don’t know about is that the atmosphere here on Thetis ain’t exactly what we thought it was. The instruments from the initial probes somehow messed up or something because when we got here we learned pretty quickly that the oxygen level here is a bit too high. By like five percent.”
“And that’s bad?” Jonah asks.
“Well, if you consider being slowly poisoned over time and everyone dying in a maybe another year or so bad, then yeah, it’s pretty bad.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jonah rubs his face with his giant hands. The air on Thetis is poisoning them? They can’t live here? If they can’t live here, then where are they supposed to go? Achilles? Peleus? Back to Earth? It makes Jonah want to curl into a ball and give up. How could they let them come all this way here when they knew it was a death trap?
Matteo stands up and brushes something off the front of his jumpsuit. “So, you see, you guys were bringing us this super important terraforming device that was supposed to be able to alter the atmosphere here and bring the level of oxygen down enough for us to be okay. It was like a satellite that would orbit around the lower atmosphere and release a bunch of super-condensed nitrogen and carbon dioxide and eventually it would change the overall composition of the air over time. I think that’s what it was supposed to do, anyway. I only heard rumors about it. I’m not told everything.”
“You aren’t told everything? Jesus Christ, we weren’t told any of this shit. Why wouldn’t they tell us on Earth about this before letting us take off and come here? And why would we still come here if this place is poison?”
“Well, because I guess they thought they had a good solution with the terraformer and didn’t want to panic everybody. There would be egg on faces—a lot of people’s faces. A lot of money gone to waste. Top scientists would look like assholes. The terraformer was going to be the big fix. But then…you guys crashed, and shit got broke, and now we’re kinda screwed.”
Jonah sets the pole back in its stand and stares up at the ceiling. He holds his breath, thinking that perhaps that it will somehow keep him healthy. But then a thought comes to him: “What about gas masks? Couldn’t we wear masks until the next ship arrives with a new terraforming thing?”
“Hey, sure, we could all wear masks and have it be Halloween year round, but guess what? They were on your ship, too. So, trick or treat, buddy. Or I guess just trick. You happen to see any of them lying around after the crash?”
Jonah thinks back to all the debris he sifted through and jumped over. The crash site was over a half mile long. He doesn’t remember seeing any gas masks or anything like a satellite. But there were so many things on fire and thrown in so many directions. “I didn’t see any, no, but I wasn’t exactly looking for gas masks or satellites, you know? We were looking for food and water and clothes and guns and this big orange energizer to fix Tunick’s ship. Maybe if I were actually looking for them…”
“From what I heard, they did a sweep for the masks and the terraformer when they picked you guys up. They didn’t find any of that stuff. I don’t know; I think we’re screwed, roomie.”
Jonah pulls his pillow out from underneath his head and presses it hard against his face. He screams as loud as he can. Once. Twice. He sucks in the cotton and bites on it. And then he screams again
“You done?” asks Matteo.
Jonah pulls the pillow from his face and looks at him in disbelief. “So, what’s the plan now?”
“I don’t know. There’s talk of flying back there to look again, but who knows. I don’t think there’s enough juice left in the battery for another trip like that.”
“So, we’re all just going to die.”
Matteo shrugs and stands up. “We all die sometime, right? And look at it this way, you’ll outlast most of us. You and everyone from the second ship. For the rest of us who have been here, we might have another year. Maybe six months. Everyone feels it differently. But who knows? Maybe our bodies will somehow evolve and adapt, and we’ll be fine. I mean, it’s just a little extra oxygen. Maybe we’ll grow gills or something.”
Jonah stares at the ceiling and grits his teeth. “I need to get out of here.”
Matteo smiles and claps his hands. “Well, good. Because that’s why I’m here, to get you out of here and get you to work.” He holds up his clipboard and shakes it over his head. “And I’m your new boss, so don’t give me any lip, or I’m going to make you work overtime without time-and-a-half.”
Jonah looks down at the tube sticking out of his arm, but before he can say he can’t go anywhere until the bag is empty, Matteo leans over and yanks it out.
“Jesus!” Jonah immediately presses his fingers against the bandage on his bicep.
“You know, I don’t really think Jesus can hear us in the Silver Foot Galaxy,” Matteo says as raps his knuckles against the clipboard. “He’s a Milky Way guy. We’re on our own up here.”
The tube dangles over Jonah’s shoulder, dripping onto the floor. “Yeah, so what gods do you all believe in up here?”
Matteo takes a few steps toward the door and then stops and looks over his shoulder. “We’re the gods of this galaxy. We’re in charge.”
Jonah knows who’s really in charge here: the two-headed yellow aliens, the voices, the ghosts that Paul saw circling the Module Eights on Achilles. But he can’t bring himself to truly believe that. Maybe Achilles’s air is just as poisonous as Thetis’s and everyone is simply hallucinating all the time. That’s easier to believe than conjoined twin monsters roaming around. With his one hand applying pressure to his bicep, Jonah gets up to follow Matteo. “So, what? I should be praying to you?”
“You should be praying to yourself, man. You’re the only one who is going to answer any of your problems up here. But, hey, if you want to pray to me and get down on your knees and worship the ground I walk on, I’m not going to stop you.”
• • •
The clipboard has several jobs for Matteo and Jonah to do around the community for the day. It’s a welcome
distraction for Jonah; his mind is full of so much anger and so many questions that it helps to be put to work. Most jobs were simple and benign: security detail, general maintenance, and kitchen clean up, while other jobs were a bit more mysterious like espionage recon and animal control.
“Animal control?” Jonah asks as they wind their way around the village. “What does that even mean?”
“Our fence keeps out most of the little guys, and the big guys, I guess,” Matteo says, “But of course there are flying things like the vulture fish and animals that dig underground and pop up and freak everyone out like the pickers. We’ll be on animal control around dusk because that’s when those little bastards show up.”
“The pickers?”
“Yeah, they’re like ground hogs or beavers that burrow underground and then pop up inside the fence and literally try to pick up anything they can touch: tent poles, piles of wood, bowls of food, the tires attached to our rovers. Doesn’t matter how big something is, these little guys try to pick it up and see if there’s anything to eat inside. You’ll know them when you see them: They’re about as big as dogs and completely white with six legs and sharp teeth, and when we find them, we kill them.”
“No catch and release?”
Matteo laughs. “More like catch and squeeze the trigger.”
The two boys slowly walk up and down the rows of tents and yurts and sheds looking for maintenance issues. Any time they find a splintered piece of wood on a door or a frayed edge of canvas, Matteo writes it down on his clipboard. Jonah pays more attention to the big picture, counting the buildings, making mental notes of the villagers and seeing who nods at Matteo and who seems to shy away. He wants to grab each person by their collar and tell them that the crash wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t Vespa or Paul or anyone else’s but Sean Meebs, Mirker’s own son. He wants to tell them he knows the danger they’re all in. But instead, he puts his head down and follows Matteo.