Romeo Delta 2

by Taylor Rikkinen

  After a volley of questions from Doctor Singh and a light sedative being administered, Erin was finally able to focus and dispel the wide-awake night terrors that she could not often repress. She felt dull and tranquil and in a way, she felt like a reflection of Doctor Singh’s calm and controlled demeanor. Before she knew it, she was rambling her story out like a soulless reporter and even in her detached state she had to wonder if there was something more than just a sedative in what Doctor Singh had injected into her.

  “There was a turning point in our little pockets of society and it all started when the first bullet was fired,” Erin said with no filter between thought and words. “No matter how big or small it is, war never changes. It starts with an act of aggression followed by an act of retaliation and then everything goes to shit until one side claims a victory and erects a few shallow monuments to those we lost… We could have had Sky Base 10 operating again in perhaps another three months, but fear overpowered our better judgment. Some of our community came to see what the noise was about and before long the word of gremlins spread throughout the station like a grade school rumor. It was also made known that Major Tom’s team was becoming trigger happy and that right there was the act of aggression that led to retaliation.”

  “How did that affect the rest of the station?” Doctor Singh asked as she jotted down some notes.

  Erin tried to focus her half-lidded eyes and her head dipped to the side as if she was about to sleep. “Fortifications, factions, iron rule, and conspiracies ruled our minds. Those Napoleons that we had feared finally had their crisis to shine in and segregation became a fact of life. There were suddenly gremlin sightings everywhere and a lot of guns being fired blindly into the darkness where glowing amber eyes lurked.”

  “And you have proof of this?” Doctor Singh asked incredulously.

  “Find my PDA and I’ll show you things you’ve only ever dreamed of,” Erin said as she began to nod off and snap awake repeatedly.

  “I see…” Doctor Singh said, deep in thought.

  “What did you inject into me?” Erin asked with unfocused eyes.

  “Phase three of the psych evaluation,” Doctor Singh said without emotion. “As a convicted criminal, you have few rights to speak of, Misses Wilco, and these are the measures that I deem necessary at this moment. You are dancing around issues and wasting our time. If you will not give me the information willingly in a timely manner, then I will extract it from you forcefully.”

  “You’re evil,” Erin said with a defiant slur.

  “I’m trying to save your life,” Doctor Singh said with a detached coldness.

  She watched Erin slowly zone out towards total compliance and look around like a disorientated drunk in the wee hours of the night. Doctor Singh then closed the curtains and lowered the lights until Erin had little to focus on within the room and was forced to fall into her own mind. From Erin’s perspective, Doctor Singh’s voice had become distant and hollow and the words she spoke were muddy and difficult to understand. There was a nagging in her mind and it sounded a lot like Doctor Singh’s monotone drawl, but instead of the itch she normally felt in the back of her mind, the voice simply asked questions and she felt compelled to answer them.

  “Tell me what happened after word of the infection spread,” Doctor Singh ordered calmly.

  Erin tried to remember where she was in her story and rambled for a bit as she repeated old stuff, but she eventually got to a point of lucidity as her mouth let out words with an unhindered willingness.

  “I remember someone coming up with a test to see if we were gremlins hiding in plain sight, but I think it was just a pile of shit. There was no test. No way to tell for sure unless death pulled away the shroud. There were whispers of people being dragged off into the vents and I saw enough bloody trails to believe it. There was also an odor that got stronger with each passing day. Our noses never became numb to it. The stench continued to grow to the point of making the air heavy and hard to breathe.”

  Erin then heard a question in her mind and was unable to process what it meant, but she spoke and answered it all the same.

  “Conflict was inevitable, but I never raised a weapon. I couldn’t. I’ve never had that kind of violence in me and I was called weak because of it. Nobody trusted anyone after that and it soon spiraled into a free for all. I was made an outcast and branded as a coward too scared to fight. They wanted me to kill people that they suspected, but I refused. When I didn’t listen, I was put into a dog kennel and told to behave.”

  There was another nagging in the back of her mind and visions of sexual assault filled her memory. She shook her head and tried to close her eyes. She didn’t want to see it, but it was burned in her memory.

  “No…” she groaned miserably. “Not me… Hannah though… She was in the kennel next to me. She was…very beautiful… I was a gaunt amputee… They didn’t consider me…” There was that sound in the back of her mind again and it was muddier than normal. “What? No… They hit me, but they never did that. They talked about it, but I was lucky.”

  The nagging came in more aggressive than it normally did and it hurt her head. “Why do you keep asking me that? I said no. We need to help Hannah. We need to break free and save her.”

  Erin began rambling for a bit, but she eventually felt a prick against her arm and a calming fluid rushed through her veins. She went quiet as she began to nod off into slumber, but the nagging voice in the back of her mind wanted more answers and forced her to remain awake. Her eyes flew open and she was there in the kennels again fumbling around and attempting to force the lock open. The kennels were meant to hold dogs and other such animals, but not humans. She was able to bend and break the door off using leverage from a sturdy metal rod from one of her artificial legs and quickly did the same for Hannah’s cage. She thought for sure that they would both run out of there together, but Hannah had other plans. She took a long cruel makeshift blade off a nearby table and told Erin to leave before things got messy. She never knew if Hannah had killed the men who had assaulted her, or if she was overpowered once again, but there were bloody screams that Erin would never forget and it was clear that someone was most certainly slain in a savage attack.

  After escaping the kennels, she was on her own and scavenging for weeks. She found herself living in fear within a hostile station full of paltry dictators defending their empires of trash with little grey creatures scuttling overhead. Every time she was scrounging for food and saw the glowing eyes in the dark corners of ruined sectors, she ran as fast as she could without ever looking back. Depression began to sink in as she walked wearily from district to district to try and find a place that would take her in, but every time a guard saw her synthetic legs or recognized her from her brief ranger days, she was turned away and told to keep looking.

  She soon discovered that she had been blamed for Romeo Delta 2 being opened and unleashing the hell within it. The sole figure that the hopeless citizens could sink their blame into and no amount of pleading and begging would sway their hearts from the rumors that had been spread along with her name. She desired community over everything else and was denied it over and over again due to prejudice and the fear of her spreading the Romeo Delta 2 infection. After being chased away and shot at several times, she eventually tried to band together with some of the other outcasts, but every time she approached them they would raise their weapons and make threats that she whole heartedly believed.

  Erin found herself wandering the corridors alone day after day while trying to dodge stalkers attempting to ambush her, and the glowing yellow catlike eyes of the gremlins watching her from within the dark abysses of the shadowed hovels. Trust no longer existed in those dark passages, only fear and scraps of garbage that were barely edible and the fragility of society had collapsed due to one itchy trigger finger. Hope was lost, the station was a dying husk floating in space, and Erin began to cry every night before she slept.

  One tear soaked evening, she began to thi
nk about Dale and how he had escaped the nightmare and suffering by way of death. The air was becoming heavy and all she could think about was suffocating and clutching her throat as her stifled scream struggled for breath. She didn’t want to go through with it and yet she was too afraid to take her own life. Slit wrists and bullets to the head were frightening and violent, but she remembered that she had some pills with an overdose warning in the bathroom cabinet back at her home. It was then that she decided to travel through the carnage and make her way home, the place where she should have died in her sleep if not for Major Tom and his determined team.

  She was ready to quit back then and figured that her bed would be a quiet place to die and where she would no longer be an inconvenience to anyone. It took a few days of traveling and digging, but she eventually found it. There was the door that Major Tom and his men had pried open and there was the room she had once sat dormant in shrouded darkness for 20 days. The insane collective will of the people had spoken and there was no place left for her on Sky Base 10. It was time to swallow the pills and sleep for eternity.

  As she looked into the slivered opening of a door that could no longer fully close on its bent hinges, she saw the shimmer of a glowing eye hiding past the veil of shadows. Instincts forced her to back away from the door and demanded her to start running, but she repressed the urges. She was done and she no longer cared how she went, so she stared at the single eye staring back at her and she heard the familiar whispered tones of the gremlins that ceaselessly bored into her skull countless times nearly every night. It whispered for help and begged her to save it and a part of her empathy was snagged by the pathetic simpering voice, but she knew better. She knew not to trust them, but she was tempted into their game all the same. She decided to play her own game and why not? She was on the verge of death and what was the point in crying any longer? Who were the tears for? No one was watching and no one was listening, except for the gremlins.

  She reached out her hand and repeated the gremlin’s words back to it in a mocking tone. Her hand rested on the edge of darkness waiting patiently as amber eyes vanished from her vision. She kept her hand out and whispered their words again. Help me. Save me. The gremlin whispered the words back and so did she once more. Then a deafening silence fell between herself and that slender opening into the abyss and as she waited and waited to hear their whispers once more she held her breath and forgot to breathe. Soon all she could hear was her own beating heart of anticipated fear and she wanted nothing more than to be taken into the darkness with swift and hopefully painless ferocity.

  As the tears began to roll down her face, she recalled the horrific signs of bloody trails and desperate hand prints leading to openings far too small for a human being to fit through. The feeling of electricity crawled along her skin in ambient waves of discord and just when she thought that the creatures would not accept her willing invitation towards an impending doom, there was a sound so slight that one could hardly describe it as ever truly existing. It was the sound of dust settling in a room that had been untouched for years. A sound that is not meant to be comprehended or heard and yet she heard it then at that moment even if it was only on the very edge of her imagination. She continued to hold her breath and ignored all her other senses so that she may hear that impossibly vague sound once more. Then she felt it. A slender grey hand had touched hers more gently and carefully than she could have ever imagined and it beckoned her towards the unseen blackness. She obeyed, believing it to be her salvation from that lonely and alienating existence and she closed her eyes as she was led into the darkness.

  Though she did not believe in a god or an afterlife, she did believe in pain and an ability to suffer in hopelessness. Embracing an eternal nothingness, much like the time she perceived before her birth, felt welcoming in that moment. She opened her eyes in the mechanical cave and saw only amber eyes in the darkness. She stood still, awaiting her end in moments that dragged like days. The eyes moved through the darkness and she could not gauge how many there were. Their little feet and claws made almost no sound as they pattered around her in search of her motivations towards suicidal insanity.

  She gave no dignity or validation towards those shambling dregs as she heard their whispered pleas for help and ignored their words for as long as she could before she finally lashed out in anger. It started with a seething rage as she commanded them to kill her in muttering tones beneath her breath. The gremlins in the dark whispered amongst themselves and she spoke louder and louder until she was shouting and demanding that they fulfill her request. She began to scream in madness, kill me, kill me, kill me, over and over again. She even began to lunge and swipe at the amber eyes, but those grey little crawlers evaded every wild attempt she made. Then it got worse as they mimicked her words and taunted her with them. They parroted her demands in their hushed whispers as each and every one of them begged her to kill them.

  She continued to yell and scream, but their whispers burrowed into her skull with an unrelenting grinding and she felt herself slipping into insanity’s embrace. They mocked her and stayed just out of arm’s reach as they began pulling at her hair and nipping at her hands. She wanted it to be over and picked up a jagged piece of metal to provoke their attack, but it was in that moment that she saw him again. Her hero and savior coming to her rescue once more. Major Tom was shouting her name and prying the door open. A dim florescent glow leaked into her living quarters and the gremlins hissed and scuttled away from its radiant touch. They began crawling back into the vents as gunfire broke through the air and flashes of gunpowder bursts filled her vision.

  One of the creatures shrieked a piercing wail as it fell dead onto the floor and Major Tom rushed towards her to grab her hand and pull her out of that dark hell. She nearly resisted him at first, but he was a friend coming to her aid. Someone who cared and had not turned his back on her. He took her away from it all and brought her to a safe area that he had fortified about half a mile away down the railway. She was in such a state that it was only after they sat down that she realized he was still wearing his enviro suit, but it was scuffed, dirty, and the darkened glass was cracked over his face. She couldn’t help but be reminded of her husband Rodger in that moment and a wave of tears exploded from her as she buried her face in her hands and sobbed over what she had nearly done. What she had nearly invoked. She found herself lying to Major Tom and saying that she had simply entered the living unit to get some personal items and it was doubtful if he ever realized that he had pulled her away from suicidal tendencies.

  As Erin sobbed, she heard an uncharacteristically compassionate voice in the back of her mind and felt her hair being stroked soothingly. She felt herself begin to calm down as she was told to go to sleep and know that she was finally safe. She clung to the hazy monotone words and nodded as she faded into comfort and tried to forget what had happened that cold and lonely night.

  Chapter 15 – Crash and Burn

  The roar of motorcycles doing laps around a rugged dusty obstacle course could be heard for miles around the stadium and sitting in the bleachers was Eddie Knox with a ticket in his hand and an enthralled expression surrounding his wide smile. The racer that he had bet his rent on, Meatball, had finally gained a steady lead over Gogo, the chick that had been dominating the track all day in defiance of every number cruncher present that day. The two had been going at it since the beginning of the race with baseball bats and chained whips. It had been a brutal melee ever since the first lap and the person in third place wasn’t making any attempts to gain a lead. He was happy writing that race off as a lost cause. At one point, Meatball had gotten his hands on a blaster pistol that someone in his pit crew had smuggled in and the rules dictated that if it had slipped past security, then it was fair game. Ever since Gogo had caught a glimpse of that blaster pistol, she had been holding back to the point where it looked like she was finally going to lose her first race of the day, which was something else because most racers weren’t brave enough to do mo
re than one race a week, let alone five in a single day.

  Eddie was on the edge of his seat as they came upon the final lap and nearly every one of the racers was either dead or their armored motorcycles were barely holding together from the beating that they had received over the ten-lap gauntlet. Men wearing long coats, scarves, and fedoras were standing in the bleachers with tickets in their hands and shouting at the racers they bet on to pull through and win them some money. It was a hopeless act of cheerleading because Eddie was sitting next to some of those shouting gamblers and even he couldn’t hear them over the violent squeal of the revving overcharged engines. For a few moments, he was dumb enough to think that he was above those shouting mooks, but as Gogo began to edge closer to Meatball, Eddie felt his heart begin to pump a steady flow of adrenaline through his body and soon he too became part of the standing shouting masses.

  “Behind you, ya idiot! She’s coming up behind you!” Eddie shouted like a moron.

  Meatball eventually saw Gogo coming up beside him, but at that point they were both nearly neck and neck and their front tires were practically touching. Meatball raised his gun to fire a disintegrator beam into the side of Gogo’s head, but she snapped her arm out and punched Meatball in the neck with a brave and savage strike. Meatball nearly fell off his motorcycle and began to wobble dangerously as Gogo tried to kick him off his ride.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” Eddie shouted in desperation. “Stay on your bike, you worthless bastard! You’re nearly there. Stop dicking around and focus on the finish line! Use your nitro!”

  Eddie’s advice was apparently ignored as Meatball turned all of his attention towards fighting off Gogo, which caused him to overlook the dip and jump that was coming up in his lane of the track. He panicked as he felt his motorcycle hit the steep bump and Gogo took that opportunity to ram the side of her bike into his and send him flying off the track and into the junk heap of jagged metal and burning tires. As Gogo crossed the finish line, she ripped off her helmet and threw it into the air as she claimed another victory for the Japanese convicts in the Death Row Derby. Eddie shouted his grievance and swore up a storm as he ripped up his useless ticket in frustration. Maybe he could have made some of his money back if Meatball had not just died and instead claimed second place, but the idiot had acted like a chump and lost everything. It was while Eddie was stomping his fedora into a tattered disk of fiber that Romney showed up and watched in amusement at the spectacle. He set his cycloptic eye to record the event so that he could later post it to social media for his own amusement.