by Jamie Nash
I steal a glance at her. She’s watching us hard, not even trying to hide it. Her face stern, a mask of worry. Her very fate rides on this decision. “She did give us that code,” I say. “She helped us.”
“Helped us?” Shaft throws up his hands. “Do you remember the organ harvest? That thing trying to kill us?”
“I remember you having a piece of metal sticking out of you.” I give his frilly robe the once over. He scowls. “We need to do something,” I say.
“Something, sure.” He casts a long grim look at the ceiling tunnel. “But something this stupid?”
Stupid. This whole thing is stupid. I just played hide-and-seek with Dr. Robot. Yes, our new friend has a secret agenda. She’s probably planning to get us up there so she can push us out an airlock or beam us to planet Krypton. Maybe my desperation to find answers is overruling my judgment. I still want answers. “What if we tie her up? I'll go up. Change the passwords.”
“No.” Taylor steps toward us. It’s impossible that she could hear us from over there. She must have Bionic Woman ears or be an expert in reading lips. “You have no idea how to use those computers,” she continues. “You’ll be worthless up there.”
“I know computers,” Crazytown joins in. “I booted up the one in the control room. I don't know how exactly … but somehow … I think I might have worked at IBM or Texas Instruments … or Babbage’s.”
Babbage’s. It’s a store for computer nerds. I filled out an application to work there once, the sweaty dudes were all over me. A real sausage party in the place. I took the job at the Sam Goody’s instead.
“You don’t know how to change the password,” Taylor shoots back at Crazytown.
“Um, we run the Password Change program,” Crazytown says.
Her eyes narrow. “You'll need to know the original password.”
“Maid of the Mist,” Crazytown says. Taylor flinches in surprise. He just nailed it.
“I’ll go too,” I say. “Crazytown and me.”
“Who?” Shaft and Crazytown’s voices sing out together.
“Oh.” Crap. I said his secret name out loud. I stumble to cover. “Crazytown? It’s just a saying. I think it’s a book or something. Old Crazytown and me.” They don’t nod, or smile, or let me off the hook, but they don’t totally care either.
“I remember it,” Crazytown chimes in. “I think it was an Ozzy Osbourne song.”
“That’s ‘Crazy Train’, nimrod.” Shaft rubs his eyes. “And what am I supposed to do while you’re off with Crazy Train?”
“You’re on guard duty.” I jerk a thumb toward Taylor. “You guard.”
Taylor sighs in resignation. “Go all the way to the top. The server room is there.”
We tie Taylor’s hands with some unused bandages Crazytown stashed in his suit. Crazytown does the dirty work. He’s way too into it, still looking for payback for his door-slammed fingers. He loops the binds behind a steel pipe and starts tying a complicated knot he must have learned in Boy Scouts. His swollen and purplish knuckles must be feeling better.
Shaft ushers me to the side so they can’t hear us. He keeps his volume at gossip level. “You think this is a good idea?”
“Of course not. I’ve seen horror movies,” I say. “But I don’t feel like waiting around here, giving this Phantom of the Space Opera time to launch his next attack.”
“Phantom of the Space Opera.” Shaft arches a brow. “That’s good. Funny. You’re funny.”
“I am?” I ask. Huh. I am. Maybe I was a standup comic back on Earth. A regular Yakov Smirnoff. Though it’s never a good sign when people tell you ‘you’re funny’ but don’t actually laugh.
“Here.” Shaft slips a surgical scalpel from his sleeve. “I snuck this out of the lab.” He secretly presses its handle in my hand. “Just in case.”
I guess this is ‘just in case.’ I’m a tad offended. He’s been hiding a shank. We’re supposed to be space buddies. I take it anyway, just in case, and tuck it deep into my own sleeve. We share a look, a secret. Shaft trusts me with what’s behind a curtain. It feels dirty. A good dirty. Like schoolgirls who saw the teacher making out with the gym teacher. Maybe we can braid each other’s hair next.
Crazytown’s on the move. He scrambles up the ladder rungs like he’s auditioning for the climbing Olympics. “Hold up!” I say. He doesn’t. I hurry after him.
“Hey! Wait!” Shaft calls out stopping me. Crazytown’s getting a big head start up the dark tunnel. Shaft takes the key ring off Taylor.
“You don’t need those.” Taylor squirms in protest. “Only the bulkheads that were sealed off need the override.”
Shaft ignores her and tosses me the keys. “Good luck.”
Good luck. It feels like bad luck to say it out loud. I wish he would’ve given me a ‘break a leg.’
I clip the key ring through a belt loop in the waist of my suit and climb the ladder into the tunnel. Crazytown’s butt stares back at me from fifteen feet above. He’s climbing fast for a guy who just had his fingers crushed in a door, mostly using his left hand to pull himself along. He's humming that song again, too. The one about castles and unicorns or whatever weird goofiness it is. His belting voice bounces around the claustrophobic vertical cave. Nice acoustics. Horrible singing.
A whip-crack snap rings out as an array of lights automatically blinks on and bathes the tunnel above in a dim yellow light. We both freeze.
“Cool.” Crazytown stares up in awe. Small bulbs affixed to the walls illuminate the next fifteen feet of tunnel. “It’s like a Clapper. Without the clapping. The future is now.”
I never had a Clapper, but I had a Chia Pet. Totally different thing but the same flavor of TV commercials. Now I have that song stuck in my head. “Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia Pet.” Better than Crazytown’s signing.
I double time it. The half-inch rungs are hard and round. Their metal digs into my palms and feet with each new step. I’d give my life for a pair of Reeboks right now. Even without shoes, I find my climbing groove. I’m impressive. I must have been a terror on the monkey bars in kindergarten. The vertical tube we’re ascending reminds me of those plastic mazes at Chuck E. Cheese. The kind your parents couldn’t fit in. The kind you—
Chuck E. Cheese. Parents. Mom.
Chuck E. Cheese was the last place I saw my mom. She promised me a fun day of pizza, games, and singing robot rats, then she handed me off to my new parents and vanished forever. It was confusing and sad, and the pizza sucked. I traded a boatload of prize tickets for a squishy spider. So, I guess it wasn’t a total loss.
Mom.
I can’t remember anything but surface level stuff. She was in a bowling league. She used to make me macaroni mixed with Heinz ketchup like it was some secret family recipe. She had pearl earrings, did Jazzercise, and pronounced batteries ‘bat-trees.’
I always wondered if I’d see her again. No. That’s a lie. I knew I’d see her again. Because that’s what movies taught me. There’s some great reunion right before the final credits. Moms don’t just abandon their babies. She must be dead by now. Probably died of heart disease or lung cancer from all that smoking she did hundreds of years ago.
I bet Chuck E. Cheese is dead, too. They must have something better in 2412. May the rat rest in peace.
The ring of keys jingles with each thrust of my leg. I might as well have a cowbell around my neck. Twenty rungs up, another loud crack heralds a set of activated fluorescents. About five more rungs and the lights beneath me flip off, leaving a pool of shadow below. I can’t see how high up I am, thank God.
Grab, step, grab, step. We’re already forty or fifty rungs up. The ladder is slick with something slimy. It’s Crazytown’s sweat. Gross. My lungs ache. There’s zero airflow in this inverted cave. It’s a long cylindrical coffin. Above me, Crazytown takes five. His chest heaves, and he’s dripping perspiration. Boy needs a Speed Stick.
“I have a theory,” he says. Uh-oh. This should be good. “This whole place, it’s not a ship at all—it’s an Ark. May
be there are two of every kind on here and it’s up to us to repopulate.”
“Oh lord,” I grunt. “Kill me now.”
He keeps talking as if I’m not even there. “Or maybe we’re space pilgrims. On a four-hundred-year journey.”
“To where? Plymouth Asteroid?”
He stops and turns, shooting me a confused look.
“It’s a Thanksgiving joke.” I groan. It’s never good when you have to explain the joke. “Pilgrims.”
A slow smile peeks through Crazytown’s bandaged face. He cackles hard, the type of laugh that’s often accompanied by milk shooting out of your nose or peeing in pants. I worry he might lose grip of the ladder. “Asteroid instead of rock! That’s good.”
“Easy there. Don’t fall on my head.”
“You should do standup.”
I laugh too. Not because the joke is funny. But because of this dork’s lame sense of humor. He’s really got to catch a few episodes of Night Court. He resumes climbing. So do I. He talks as he goes. “I wonder where we’re headed. We're well past Mars. We probably passed Jupiter a hundred years ago.”
“Or maybe we're headed back home.”
“Home?” Crazytown scoffs. “Who wants to go back there? By now, those stupid idiots probably nuked each other back to the Stone Age. Or maybe … they're ruled by monkeys. We're all that's left.”
“Viva la monkeys!” I shout.
He cracks up. “Damn, you’re funny for a pilgrim.”
I grin. That’s me, the funny girl. Not that there’s anything funny about mutually assured destruction. My world had enough nukes to blow each other up ten times over and everybody hated each other. It was bound to happen. People are dicks.
And now it’s all gone. Quarter Pounders with Cheese, Strawberry Lip Smackers, malls, beaches, boardwalks, even boardwalk fries—all gone. Do I really want to live in a world without boardwalk fries?
“You ready for this, Pilgrim?” Crazytown presses against a metal ceiling hatch. The effort makes him teeter on the edge of the ladder. It squeals open like the lid of a tank. He peeks through. “Hello?” He just hangs there for a second. I’m assuming nothing answered. “We come in peace,” he calls out. “Last chance. I’m warning you, I have nunchucks.” Crazytown waits another second. “Okay, Pilgrim, watch my back.” He hoists himself through, grunting and cursing as he snakes out of view.
I scuttle after him, gripping the ledge and hoisting myself through. The muscles in the corners of my chest burn. Sweat moistens my face. I roll out onto the vented metal floor. I could totally use a Gatorade or a Yoo-hoo. I pick myself up and peer into the murky hallway. It’s the same type of crappy hallway as downstairs. I’d call the decor Russian submarine. The only lights are the dim ones built into the grilled walkway. They remind me of the kind at Palace 9 Cinemas. Little Christmas lights are strewn along like a parade of fireflies.
And where’s Crazytown? “Crazy?” I call his nickname into the shadows as loud as I’m daring to risk. “Where are you?”
Why is it so dark? Where are those nifty auto-lights when you need ‘em? I clap my hands twice. “Clap-on,” I say, just like the commercial. No overhead lights turn on. Maybe a bad bulb. Who changes the light bulbs on the Starship Enterprise, anyway? Scotty? Maybe Spock. He seems a bit OCD. It’s hard to imagine the blood-crazed Phantom switching out bulbs. Shadows are his rainbows.
The hallway extends in both directions, forward and backward. No telling which way Crazytown went. The safe thing to do would be to wait for him. But I want this to be over.
Ain’t got time for safe.
I slink forward. My eyes adjust to the gloom. The corridor extends about thirty feet ahead of me. It ends at a flickering light that leaks from the bottom of a green door where everything dead ends. It’s like the kind of strobe you’d see from a lonely television left on all night playing out to the ghosts and the shadows. Poltergeist. It’s like Poltergeist. Hopefully, there are no possessed clown dolls.
I hesitate. Whatever is providing that light show, someone must have turned it on.
I wish Crazytown were here.
A low-frequency hum catches my ear. It’s coming from my right. Just ahead of me, almost camouflaged in darkness, is another door—this one steel. As doors go, it’s the normal kind, not the weird spaceshippy, whooshy kind. It has handles and no locked keypads with secret codes. The droning that initially caught my attention bleeds through it. It reminds me of the growl of an overworked air conditioner in the middle of July.
The knob is frigid to the touch. Freezing. For a second, I worry it opens into deep space. But that’s just dumb. I think. I double check my trusty scalpel. It’s still there, tucked away in the hiding place up my sleeve. I take a last peek down the hallway at the flashing blue light. It’s still going at it. For now, it’ll wait.
I push open the metal door. It’s heavy and built to seal tight into its frame. A gust of frosty air chills my glistened face and raises goosebumps on my arms. This isn’t a room, it’s a refrigerator. At least I’m not sucked out into a vacuum of zero oxygen and zero-G nothingness. The door clanks shut behind me as my eyes take in the space. It’s not as big as the control room downstairs but bigger than the bedroom I grew up in.
Baltimore. That’s where I’m from, just down the street from Johns Hopkins and across the way from the elementary school with the tennis courts that had no nets. Pretty useless for tennis but great for hopscotch.
Dark splotches mar the tiled white floor.
Bloodstains.
They’re dry and old, a little brown. To be fair, it could be spilled tomato sauce or ice cream. But after what I’ve seen in this place, blood and gore is the safe bet. One of the tables holds a long bag that zips up the middle. A body bag. An occupied body bag.
No thanks. The dead can stay zipped. That’s as good as a mantra as I’ve got at the moment.
A fogged glass door blocks the view of the rest of the space. I should leave. I’m on a mission to find computer servers, not bodies and guts. I highly doubt a wall of chilled IBMs awaits me on the other side. I push open the door. Even cooler air caresses my face. This is the freezer. A dozen metallic gray storage lockers surround me. Each is labeled with a stenciled barcode of bold black ink. They don’t have handles.
I wedge my fingertips between the frozen crack of the nearest one and pry it open. An automated light snaps on illuminating a glorified walk-in closet lined with long cabinets and shelves. It’s packed with murky jars and sealed bags. I tap one of the containers. Organs swim inside a bluish fluid that reminds me of the stuff hairdressers stash their combs in. The body parts are the usual butcher stuff—hearts, brains, lungs. There are also some milk gallons filled with blood. It’s like a Black Sabbath album cover.
The containers are similar to the ones Hero’s guts got packed inside. Everything is stamped with barcodes that match the one on the door. Somebody wants to keep track of all the pieces in case Dr. Frankenstein decides to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The corner of a single yellow file folder sticks out from one of the shelves. It’s about six inches thick and overstuffed with loose papers. I open it. A torn-out notebook page sits on top. It’s marked up with a blue pen. The handwriting is tiny, machine-like. It fills almost every inch of its whitespace. It’s not English but rather some type of cryptic language with no letters or discernible alphabet, all pictures and symbols. It reminds me of Chinese characters but not. Could be Middle Eastern or Russian.
Maybe it’s Martian?
I dig through the contents, skipping over other similar pages of handwritten weirdness and typed documents that resemble form letters or contracts. The loose paper is faded and stale to the touch, probably over one hundred years old.
Then I find the Polaroids, a stack of them sandwiched between other notes and printouts, bound by a tight and dried out rubber band. They’re also aged and yellowing. The first shows a girl about my age with auburn hair and fair skin floating inside a cryopod. Her eyes cl
osed. She could be dead, but more likely just frozen. Same as I was before this whole thing started.
What if she was a friend or schoolmate? Hundreds of years ago we might have had sleepover parties or got wasted after the homecoming dance, or maybe we shared sweaters.
But I don’t remember her. To be fair, I don’t even remember myself.
I flip to the next photograph. It’s the same girl. She’s still lifeless, laying on that all too familiar surgical table. One of the tentacles of the W.I.T.C.H. Doctor peeks into the upper frame of the picture.
The following photo is a close-up of her face, unsmiling and serious. She’s taking a picture of herself in a mirror, a big lens flare in the corner. There’s something almost procedural to it. Her head is tilted, revealing a huge scar on the side of her head. It’s identical to the one on Taylor’s scalp.
What did this maniac do to her? Brain surgery? Lobotomy? Or is it just some sick Ted Bundy thing?
I run my fingers through my scalp and probe for a scar. My fingertips push through my now dried hair and dig at my scalp. It feels normal. No stitches or bumps or trenches carved into my skin. I guess the brain butcher hasn’t gotten to me yet.
Next pic. The same girl and the same mirror, but her red hair has grown back, covering the scar. It’s long and tangled, almost dreadlocked. There are raggedy bangs over her eyes. I’ve never seen an expression so blank. It’s not sad or happy or bored. More akin to the face of a body in a coffin. Her pale skin is a roadmap of bruises and little cuts like she’s been living in the wild.
I flip through a few others. There’s a progression as if once a year she stood in front of this mirror and snapped a picture of herself. Her hair gets grayer, and her body gets thinner. Frown lines deepen and crow’s-feet grow. Her teeth begin to yellow, and her eyes appear more sunken. In mere seconds, I witness her transformation from prom queen to old cat lady.
The second to last photo could be my grandmother. She’s lived a lifetime in this hellhole. And now she’s ancient and dead, and I’m still just some stupid college-aged dork.
Goosebumps rise on my arms. This is all real. The death, the age, the weird technology—it’s all right in this room, bagged and labeled.
