EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum

by Shane Stadler

  They seemed to be panicking.

  5

  Sunday 10 May (8:17 p.m. EST – Antarctic Circle)

  The USS North Dakota maneuvered to a position directly above the object. The Little Dakota had been fitted with sample collecting tools to extract a material sample for analysis. LD was ready and waiting in the load lock.

  “Flood the chamber and let’s get this show on the road,” McHenry ordered.

  Stuart filled the chamber and launched the min-sub.

  In 20 minutes they had the same view of the object that they’d had over 12 hours earlier. Stuart inched the LD closer.

  “Activating the arm,” Stuart said and pushed a button.

  A metallic, multi-fingered appendage came into view and approached the sphere. One of its fingers resembled a drill bit, and three others had thick rubber pads on their tips.

  “What are those?” McHenry asked, pointing to the padded fingertips that were now in contact with the surface.

  “Suction mounts,” Stuart said as he pushed a button. “An onboard pump will create a vacuum at the tips. The connection should stabilize the sub and allow us to mill into the surface.”

  “And the drill bit?”

  “A diamond-impregnated end mill.”

  An end mill was much like a drill bit, but its tip was nearly flat. It could be used to plunge into metal to create a hole, but could also cut laterally to machine flat surfaces. A diamond mill could cut just about anything.

  “Cut in no more than a millimeter,” McHenry said.

  Stuart started the motor and the tip spun up to a blur.

  “How’s the material collected?” McHenry asked.

  Stuart clicked a button, and one of the free fingers on the appendage moved to a position close to the contact point between the tool and the surface. “That’s a suction filter system,” Stuart explained. “It sucks the debris and water in through a sieve which collects the pieces. Material might also be stuck on the cutting tool afterwards.”

  The spinning bit made contact, and McHenry strained his eyes to see if material was being removed. The cutting edge of the mill was undoubtedly in contact with the white surface, but didn’t look to be cutting into it.

  Stuart seemed to notice the same thing, and backed the tool away from the surface. “Didn’t even make a mark,” he said. “Let’s increase the speed and put a little more pressure on it this time.”

  The cutter pressed onto the surface, but again didn’t do any damage.

  “Go to the highest speed and largest force you can apply without damaging the tool,” McHenry said. He didn’t like the North Dakota sitting in one place for too long.

  Stuart changed some parameters and engaged the cutter.

  Finley, who manned the sonar system at an adjacent station, pulled off his headphones. “Sir, we’re making noise.”

  McHenry nodded. He looked back to Stuart. “Anything?”

  Stuart backed the drill from the surface. “Nothing – no change in appearance whatsoever.”

  “Are there other options?” McHenry asked.

  “There’s a diamond grinding wheel,” Stuart replied. “It should cut through anything. We’ll make a lot of noise.”

  McHenry gave him the go-ahead, and then watched as the drill retracted and a dark wheel, about four inches in diameter, took its place. About a quarter-inch of the outer edge glittered with tiny chips of diamond. They faded into a blur as the wheel spun up to full speed.

  “Here we go,” Stuart said, and guided the grinder to the white surface.

  The wheel made contact, and Finley turned to McHenry and put his hands on his headphones, indicating they were making a lot of noise.

  “We’re getting debris in the filter,” Stuart said in an optimistic tone.

  “We don’t need much material,” McHenry said, “but let’s make sure we penetrate into the surface about a millimeter.”

  Stuart nodded and pressed the wheel in slowly. Finley warned again about the noise, this time motioning with his hands that his head was exploding.

  “The filter indicates we have a lot of material, and we’ve moved in about a millimeter,” Stuart said. “Back off?”

  McHenry nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve done.”

  Stuart retracted the grinding wheel and spun it down to a halt.

  Confused, McHenry looked more closely at the monitor. “I thought you said we were catching debris.”

  Stuart squinted at the screen. “We did, sir. I don’t understand … there’s not even a scratch.”

  “I see the problem,” McHenry said and pointed to the screen. “Look at the wheel.”

  The diamond-impregnated outer edge of the cutting wheel seemed to be thinner, now only about an eighth inch of the outer edge glittered – it had worn down.

  At that moment, Finley turned with a look concern. “Sir, there’s another vessel in the area – a sub.”

  McHenry’s vision faded and he felt dizzy for a second. “Get the Little Dakota back home now,” he ordered. “Notify me immediately when the bay is closed. Be prepared to cut the line.”

  McHenry’s neck muscles tightened as he made his way to the conn. This was exactly what he’d feared.

  6

  Sunday, 10 May (8:00 p.m. CST – Baton Rouge)

  Will spent the afternoon exploring Baton Rouge and the campus of his former graduate school. He’d avoided the Department of Physics since he’d likely be recognized, especially if he crossed paths with his former research advisor who was near retirement age, but still there. The day had been a pleasant trip to the past, like walking through an old yearbook. But he could never go back to being the person he was at that time: positive, happy, and naïve.

  He returned to his apartment at dusk and unloaded the groceries he’d picked up on the way back. He poured a glass of a cabernet recommended to him by a young woman who’d browsed the same display of wines at one of the stores. He couldn’t relax in public, always keeping an eye out for possible pursuers. The woman had caught him off guard, and his interaction was nothing short of awkward.

  He sat down on the couch and set the wine glass on an end table to his right. It was time to check out his neighbors. He took a deep breath, relaxed, and concentrated on one of his painful experiences in the Red Box. An instant later he viewed his body from the ceiling. His shoulders slouched, but his body remained upright. His face was blank, resembling that of death more than sleep. It had always given him an eerie feeling seeing his body that way. Sadness would set in quickly, and he couldn’t remain in the separated state for very long. It was a feeling he could only describe as that of watching someone drown.

  Passing through walls and other obstructions, he made his way through each room of his apartment and returned. His range improved daily. He lifted the glass of wine and moved it from the end table to the coffee table in front his body. He then softened his state, and passed an imaginary hand through the glass. An almost imperceptible ripple appeared on the fluid’s surface, and a cool sensation washed around his fingers. He knew his fingers weren’t really there, but his senses and perceptions seemed to follow those of his body. He wondered if it would remain that way when he’d have to leave his body for good.

  His turned his attention to the wall opposite the couch. He passed through a flat-screen television and the wall to which it was mounted, and entered his study. He continued through the next wall and into the vacant bedroom of the adjacent apartment. Sounds of young children came from the next room over, which would be the living room if the apartment had the same layout as his. He pressed forward, through the next wall, where two young girls played on the floor while their mother and father worked in the kitchen. The aromas of baked fish and freshly cut lemon filled the air. He hadn’t considered the idea of smelling things while separated, but now he knew it was possible. These neighbors would not be a threat.

  A physical tugging and emotional falling indicated that he’d reached his limit – in distance, time, or both. He quickly re
traced his path, returned to his body, and opened his eyes. He picked up the glass and took a sip. He was getting better.

  Since his release from the Red Box, he’d had to continually convince himself that his ability to separate soul and body wasn’t a hallucination. Soul was the only word he could use to describe what he was when away from his body. He’d used other words before – consciousness, perspective, self-awareness – but they were awkward. Soul was best because it described his essence. When separated, he still sensed stimuli to his body, but the sensations were tempered, and were only in the background. In the Red Box, separation had saved him from pain. It was pain that had driven him to separate. That had been their plan all along.

  A total of about 1,200 people had been admitted to the Compressed Punishment facilities at Detroit and Long Island. Of those, over 300 died during the treatment, 500 were placed in mental health facilities upon completion of the program, 100 committed suicide within weeks of release, and 200 fell off the grid entirely. Not one went back to prison.

  One thing he found strange, and frustrating, was that no one since his release had asked him to demonstrate his abilities. It wasn’t that he wanted to reveal it to the rest of the world, but there were a handful of people who supposedly knew of his transformation, as it had been called in the reports, but they’d never seen it with their own eyes. Even Denise had never asked him about it. He figured that they either didn’t believe him or they didn’t understand what transformation meant.

  After resting for a few minutes, he separated again and checked in with the other neighbors, all around, and above and below. No apparent threats – mostly families and young professionals. He did, however, suspect that the FBI had someone in the complex to keep an eye on him.

  He changed into the swim trunks he’d purchased that afternoon and grabbed a towel. He’d been looking forward to a nighttime swim in his apartment complex’s large pool, and perhaps a soak in the outdoor hot tub.

  As he reached for the door, his phone chimed. He picked it up and read the message: 523. The FBI was going to call. The phone rang a half-minute later, and the phone number had a Baton Rouge area code. “Hello?” he answered.

  “No names,” a man said. “Let’s meet at the College Palms Café in Corporate Lakes Plaza, tomorrow at 10 a.m. Got it?

  “Yes,” Will replied and hung up.

  He sighed. Maybe they actually had a plan for him – something for him to do.

  He picked up the towel, slipped on his flip-flops, and headed for the pool.

  7

  Monday, 11 May (12:28 a.m. EST – Flint, Michigan)

  The damp nighttime air made Lenny’s shoulder ache. Even though the first half of his life had been spent in the coldest parts of the planet, he now hated cold climates. He often dreamt of a warm place to retire, maybe the Cayman Islands or somewhere in Central America.

  It was unseasonably cold for spring in Flint, Michigan, and he had to circle the car around the block a few times to warm himself. He stuck his fingers inside the heater vents, and then did the same to his black leather gloves to soften them. He’d been waiting for over an hour for the woman’s husband, an emergency room doctor, to leave for work. According to the file, he was supposed to have left by midnight. Also, her young children were supposed to be long asleep by then.

  The info he’d been given on Dr. Martha Epstein, a.k.a. Dr. Smith, had been accurate. However, one could not account for unplanned delays or unseasonable ice storms, the latter of which was on the way. He’d been given an SUV for the job, but he was supposed to ditch it afterwards. If the storm hit, he might be stuck in it for a while. The four-wheel-drive might come in handy.

  Lenny parked a block short of Martha Epstein’s driveway and waited. At 12:40 a.m., her garage door opened and plumes of white car exhaust wafted over the cement driveway. He held an electronic device about the size of a car key remote up to the window and pushed a button, and a red light flashed near its tip. The white BMW SUV backed out of the garage and down the steeply sloped driveway into the street, where it hesitated until the garage door began rolling down. The red flashing light on Lenny’s device turned to constant green, and he watched in the rearview mirror as the SUV sped away and turned right at the first street.

  He put the device in his coat pocket and grabbed a long, white zip-tie from the passenger seat. He fed its plastic tip through the slot on the other end to form a loop about a foot in diameter, and then pulled the tip until heard it ratchet a few times. He tucked the loop inside his coat and held it in his right armpit. His gun, silencer installed, was fastened to a Velcro holster under his left arm. Finally, he donned a black ski mask. These days there were cameras everywhere, so every job had to be done either in mask or disguise.

  He got out of the car and crossed the street. The damp cement had started to freeze, making him slip and nearly fall on the sidewalk.

  He passed the driveways of the adjacent houses in the dense residential neighborhood, and pressed a button on the device in his pocket as he approached the Epstein place. The garage door squeaked loudly as it lifted, and light shone through the crack that formed at the bottom. He turned left, up the driveway and, misjudging the slope, nearly slipped again.

  The door fully opened as he reached the top of the drive and entered the garage. He pushed the button again and the door lowered behind him. It was a typical suburbanite garage, with bikes hanging on the walls, toys scattered about, and pool supplies and tools piled on shelves. Shoes of all sizes littered the stoop in front of the door that led into the house. He assumed the silver Volvo sedan belonged to Martha. Cat prints decorated the hood, and stick-figure stickers representing the members of her family, ordered largest to smallest from the left, were stuck on the back window. Evidently she had three kids and two cats. No sticker for a dog – that was good, since there wasn’t mention of a dog in the file.

  He slowly turned the knob of the door to the house. It was unlocked. He turned it as far as it would go, and pushed the door with his shoulder. It barely opened a crack, but made a loud squeak that he knew could be heard throughout the house. It didn’t matter. He was at a point of no return.

  He opened the door fully, and stepped into a foyer filled with more shoes, and coats on hooks. He closed the door carefully enough to avoid the squeak, but it didn’t matter. A woman’s voice chimed from deeper in the house.

  “What did you forget?” she asked.

  Lenny responded with a soft muffled grumble, after which scuffing footsteps came from the same direction as the voice. A second later a thin woman in her late-forties with short, gray-speckled hair entered the room. Her eyes widened behind wire-rimmed glasses. It was Martha Epstein.

  Lenny struck her square in the nose with his fist, smashing her glasses and knocking her to the tile floor. He opened the door and dragged her by the collar into the garage, where he kicked her once in the stomach. He went back into the house, picked up her mangled glasses, and went back into the garage, closing the door behind him. He threw the glasses into a trashcan, and then turned back to Martha Epstein.

  The woman gasped for air, but at the same time he thought he heard her try to ask, “Why?”

  “You should know why, Dr. Smith,” he said calmly.

  The woman’s eyes widened, first in recognition of her alias, then in horror.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said as he pulled the large zip-tie out of his coat. “Did you really think you could just live life as if nothing happened? No one escapes, Doc.”

  The woman put up her hand and shook her head. Lenny lowered the noose down but the woman struck out, flailing violently. He grabbed her face with a gloved hand, squeezed as hard as he could, and pushed her head to the cold floor. He put a knee on her chest and slipped the zip-tie around her neck. He then stood, stepped on the side of her head with a heavy boot, and pulled the end of the zip-tie with all of his might. The woman’s gurgling drowned out the ratcheting.

  He backed off and left her writhing on th
e floor, rolling and clawing at the plastic band around her throat. It was hard to watch her bulging eyes, but it had to be done this way. He couldn’t allow his jobs of the past months be connected by method. He had to mix it up. Besides, dead was dead. And, as far as dying was concerned, this wasn’t the most painful way to go. He figured a drug overdose was the best way, but a headshot was probably the quickest.

  What was different about his jobs during the past months was that he had intimate knowledge of the reasons for each of the hits. Every target had been involved in the Compressed Punishment program – which was much more sinister than the story the public was being fed about it. They all had blood on their hands in some way. They deserved what they got.

  When the kicking stopped, Lenny walked over and looked into the lifeless eyes of Dr. Martha Epstein, touched one eyeball with his gloved finger – no reflexive response – and then walked around to the driver’s side of the Volvo. He popped the trunk and shifted things around inside it to make room. He then picked up the body, put it in, and pressed the lid down slowly until it clicked closed. He thought it might take them a while to find it. The longer the better. And the cold might keep the stench at bay for a while.

  He took one last look around. He spotted a paint scraper on a shelf, grabbed it, and walked to the back of the car. He scraped off the second stick-figure sticker from the left – the one representing Martha – rolled it into a ball, and tossed it into the garbage.

  Convinced that he’d left nothing behind, he pressed the remote in his pocket and the door rolled upwards. When it was half open, he ducked under and stepped out. As he walked down the driveway, he pressed the button once to stop the door’s ascent, and a second time to get it going back down. He got into the SUV, started it, and drove away.

  Killing civilians had many advantages over killing professionals. Civilians weren’t trained to fight or to take the precautions that professionals never overlooked. It was easy money. And there was more to be had.