Romeo Delta 2

by Taylor Rikkinen

  Chapter 31 – Farewell Dear Friend

  The day of Erin’s departure had arrived and she was finding it difficult to keep her beating heart still. She was trying the breathing exercises that Doctor Singh had given her, but they weren’t working and she felt herself shaking as Joe reattached her legs. A week before, Doctor Singh had surprised her with an offer to buy her some more time by claiming that she was pregnant, but Erin refused it outright. She was done with the Milo Medical Institute, done with Doctor Singh’s tests, and done with the bullets hitting her window. She wanted out of her hospital bed and moreover, she wanted her legs back. The electronic nerves sent sensations to her mind that she had been sorely missing and she gave her synthetic calves a tender rub in the hope that the tingling sensation would go away.

  Joe was being quiet and somber as he worked on Erin and she eventually reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Joe… I hate having to do this to you.”

  “It’s my job,” he said simply. “I just hate seeing a good person having to walk the mile. I… Are you sure I can’t convince you to take Doctor Singh up on her offer? She can buy you time. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but she’s had someone working to prove your innocence this whole time. She does this often and I would hate…”

  Erin shook her head and took Joe into an embrace. “It’s not going to change the fact that I was the one that brought Sky Base 10 down. It was my hands on the controls and my decision to do it. No amount of fear or justification will change that fact. I am guilty of a terrible crime and right now I’m putting everyone here in danger. What’s it been? Six bomb threats since I arrived? Half of which were legitimate. No… This needs to end before you or anyone else gets hurt and this is my decision.”

  Joe wrapped his arms around Erin and squeezed her tight as the door to the quarantine room opened and Doctor Singh stepped in with a group of Kyva Corp security guards. “I’m sorry, Joe, but there will be no more delays. The transport has arrived.”

  Joe nodded and stepped away from Erin as Doctor Singh stepped forward with a dull look on her face and gave Erin a look up and down as if trying to figure her out.

  “Something wrong?” Erin asked.

  “No,” Doctor Singh said in her monotone. “Just thinking on what someone told me recently. I wish to apologize for failing you, Erin. I did not perform my duties as a doctor to heal your condition before we ran out of time.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Erin said grimly. “I was a waste of time from the get go.”

  Doctor Singh then hugged Erin quite unexpectedly and with a confused expression, Erin hugged her back while feeling awkward.

  With her back to the guards and her head over Erin’s shoulder, Doctor Singh whispered in Erin’s ear. “I have a vague idea of what you are planning to do and I hope it works out. Tread carefully and good luck.”

  Surprised by the gentle encouragement, Erin’s hug became more legitimate and she gave Doctor Singh a tight squeeze. “Joe was right about you, doc. You’re not so bad after all.”

  “Hiding my better nature is my best illusion,” she said in a genuinely caring voice. “It keeps my employees safe when I am viewed as the big bad guy around here.”

  “That’s a hell of an illusion,” Erin assessed.

  “Don’t spread it around,” Doctor Singh requested respectfully.

  Moments later, heavy handcuffs and a bulletproof vest were put on Erin and she was told to walk with the towering security officers. Everyone filtered out into the hallway and the security officers marched with Erin in tow as Doctor Singh and Nurse Joe Hisaishi stayed behind and watched their patient leave. The two stood in silence and Doctor Singh seemed to resume her dull expression and stiff professional demeanor.

  “I’m not ok with this,” Joe finally said with a disgusted look.

  “Neither am I,” Doctor Singh admitted. “But our feelings on the matter mean nothing. She has made her decision and we must respect that. It is her right to choose, not ours. Now let it go. We still have work to do and patients to heal.”

  An hour later, Erin arrived at the event center where her execution would be taking place and was marched into a glass booth with a bag over her head. Once she was strapped into a chair, the bag was removed and she was startled to see people lining the stands and cheering for her death. It looked like a wrestling event with loudmouthed idiots holding up handmade signs and shouting slogans that they had coined in their trailers. Her heart sank when she saw kids with their parents having the times of their lives as they ate popcorn and drank soda from large plastic cups. The sight was alien to her in nearly every imaginable way and yet somehow familiar. She wondered how far society had to fall in order for it to be screwed up enough for loving parents to bring their laughing children to a public execution, but then she realized that she was living that very reality and it made her sick to her stomach.

  There was a raffle going on where prizes were being handed out and she could not help but feel a certain level of revulsion towards the onlookers as they greedily snatched at the sponsored trinkets being offered. Novelty gas masks were being sold for children 6 and up, as well as cheap bobblehead figures of particularly notable executed criminals. There was no connection or empathy that she could feel coming off the crowd and despite there being thousands of people crammed into the stands to watch the show, Erin felt completely isolated and alone. Joe was right. She may have escaped Earth years before, but humanity brought all the same baggage wherever it went and that was never going to change.

  An announcer by the name of Larry took the microphone and began speaking into it with enthusiastic tones as he riled up the crowd. He listed off the names of other convicts that had been gassed before Erin that day, as a way to lead up to the main event, but Erin blocked it out as she felt herself becoming numb to the world around her. She had no place she belonged and nobody wanted her. It was the same old song and dance that she had come to expect. She wanted to close her eyes and block it all out, but didn’t want to be perceived as weak or afraid, so she sat there staring down the crowd as Larry announced all 37 sponsors of the event.

  Reading the signs that people in the crowd had brought was a good pastime and she had to admit that some of them were morbidly humorous, but most were just downright cruel and lacking in any true form of basic human decency. It was when she looked at some of the nearer signs that she saw a familiar word and felt her attention drawn to it like a moth to a flame. As she read the message, she felt her heart break and involuntarily began to smile slightly. There was a group of people close to the front looking a little rough around the edges who were neither cheering, nor waving their signs excitedly. They were standing in vigil with sad looks on their faces as they all took in the terrible reality around them. Their signs were simple and told Erin exactly who they were. We remember Erin’s Rangers.

  She ignored the crowd of degenerates screaming for her attention and focused solely on the small group of Sky Base 10 survivors. She recognized some of their faces and even a few of their names and they were all people that she had helped and rescued while stuck in that terrible nightmare. She felt a swell of pride to see that her small contributions had amounted to something significant and meant the world to those that had survived. She was satisfied with that and Erin Wilco was ready to die knowing that she had done some good in the universe.

  The chamber soon filled with gas and Erin began to choke as the oxygen left her glass prison. Her greatest fear had come to life once again as she involuntarily struggled to gasp for breath. Bets were being made on how long she would last and a timer counted the seconds of her dying gasps. She was terrified and tried not to show it. She wanted dignity in a place where it was impossible to have any, but she attempted to achieve it all the same. As her vision began to fade, she saw a familiar man step into the front row with a wide toothy smile. His gently glowing red eyes and finely tailored suit made him distinguishable to a single identity. Kyva Falschwesen had stopped b
y to watch the show and he locked his sinister eyes on Erin with an infatuated stare. He then unfolded a sign that he had been carrying and in thick black messy felt marker, his message to her was simple. Deep breath.

  Despite her rage and animosity towards the debauched corporate overlord, she listened to his instructions all the same and inhaled the noxious gas deeply until her lungs filled with a poisonous air and her heart stopped. As her head slumped forward and her vision became nothing more than a tunnel into an abstract void, she saw her husband in her dying memory embracing her in a weightless void and surrounded by a trillion burning suns. They were finally together and though it had been years since she had seen him so vividly, she was still truly, madly, in love with Rodger Wilco and that was all that mattered in that moment.

  Chapter 32 – Tinfoil Hats

  Erin Wilco was left in the gas chamber for the required ten minutes and though electronic sensors had been measuring her vitals leading up to her death, a doctor walked in once the gas was clear and confirmed her to be deceased. The crowd let out a final cheer as a couple men in scrubs and surgical masks lifted Erin’s corpse onto a stretcher and proceeded to take her to the morgue. Once there, her body was put on a cold steel slab and put into a refrigerator where she was meant to lay for a few weeks before she was fed to the incinerator and forever forgotten.

  It was not long after the orderlies left that another man in scrubs stepped silently into the chilling tomb of linoleum floors and florescent lights, with a leather bag in his hand and a mildly suspicious look. He had come directly from the security office where he had drugged the security officer in charge of monitoring the surveillance feeds and replaced the recorded footage with a looped recording that he had made a few days previously. He strode with confidence towards the cooler where the bodies were stored and looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching him.

  He started opening stainless steel doors and sliding out bodies to check their identities until he eventually found the recently departed Erin Wilco and began going to work on her. He was completely silent in his task as he hooked up strange devices to Erin’s body as well as a breathing mask that covered the lower half of her face. Once the odd peripherals were applied to her, the man then took out a roughly modified PDA and began scanning her body until he was satisfied with what he had found and began tidying up. He soon left the morgue and came back after a few seconds with a wheelchair in tow that held the corpse of a woman with burn scars across her body that resembled Erin’s in some slight way. The man then proceeded to switch the bodies as well as the clothes on the two women and finished up by applying the toe tag to the woman who would be replacing Erin’s corpse. He gave one last look around to make sure no one had seen him and looked up at the dead camera that should have been recording the room and soon he was off with Erin’s body in tow.

  Moments later, a discreet mechanical device, which had been placed on a shelf overlooking the room a few days previously, opened its cycloptic red digital eye and scanned the room cautiously. Romney then received a text message from Eddie who had been watching the live feed and it was another one of his stupidly rhetorical questions.

  ‘Please tell me that you were recording that.’

  Romney tried to repress an audible groan as he fired back his own text message. ‘No Eddie, I completely dropped the damn ball after three days of anticipated waiting. Now get your ass in gear and follow Donavan. He’s heading towards the western exit out back.’

  Eddie did as his partner advised and hoofed it towards the exit outside of the stadium. He had nearly missed spotting Lewis Donavan because the guy had changed clothes and had done up Erin Wilco’s wheelchair bound corpse to look like nothing more than an infirmed old woman taking a nap during a daylight stroll with her care aid. Eddie blended into the crowd, and so did Donavan, and after dashing down back alleys dogging his mark for the better part of an hour, Eddie watched as Lewis Donavan wheeled Erin into a discreet low-end Laundromat and disappear. He waited a few minutes to see if Donavan would exit out of the establishment, but when nothing happened, he took a snapshot of the place and sent the image to his partner.

  Mere seconds later, Eddie got a call from Romney and he put his PDA to his ear. “What have you got for me?”

  “Bad news,” Romney said. “That’s one of the places that Norah runs her underground railroad out of. They’ve got a tunnel leading under the wall that scouts use to gain access to the prison district. If Donavan isn’t coming out, then he knows about the tunnel and he’s already gone.”

  Eddie grimaced to himself as he stood in the street and continued to stare at the Laundromat. “Do you think Norah is involved?”

  “She has to be,” Romney reasoned. “She’s the one that approves the use of that passage and I doubt that all of her revolutionaries are bad apples letting anyone through. My guess is that she was a step ahead of us because she knew you wouldn’t drop it like you were told.”

  “That woman…” Eddie breathed. “I love her and hate her. It looks like this ain’t over. Not by a long shot.”

  “I agree,” Romney said. “What’s the plan, partner?”

  “We do what we always do,” Eddie said with a lazy smile. “We dig and dig and keep digging until we get to the bottom of this. Erin Wilco has got a secret and I want to know it.”

  “I don’t know…” Romney said skeptically. “She looked pretty dead to me.”

  “And so did Lewis Donavan all those years back after his execution, but that was before the mandatory 10 minute wait.” Eddie said. “That Erin chick didn’t give up. She took a gamble with her life and I think she won. She somehow knew that Donavan was going to find her and I bet you a thousand bucks it had something to do with her and Kyva’s private meeting. I don’t know who, or how, or what, but Erin Wilco is alive and I get the feeling we’re going to find out why.”

  “I trust you, Eddie. I’m sorry I doubted you,” Romney said respectfully.

  “Don’t be,” Eddie said with his usual lazy smile. “I was ready to fold myself a tinfoil hat on this one too. Now let’s go chase our scoop.”

  Chapter 33 – Hello Dear Friend

  A few weeks had passed since Erin’s execution and Nurse Joe Hisaishi was taking some time off to be with his family. He was used to seeing people die every day, but it didn’t mean that he had an easy time stomaching it. He had helped heal thousands of patients in his time as a nurse and gotten to know many of them, but Erin was a particularly special case. She was unlike most of the people he had treated in the fact that she was somewhat normal and relatable. In his mind, she was never a true convict, but a friend that he had gotten to know and share a few special moments with. It wasn’t fair, but nothing ever was on a planet like Dusk. Everyone was out for themselves and waiting for the next big crisis to devour; and that was life. Wash, rinse, repeat.

  As Joe walked into his apartment and was given a kiss by his girlfriend of 9 years, and somewhat ignored by their son who was engrossed in a video game, he was handed a letter and he turned it over with a quizzical look. “What’s this?”

  Joe’s long term lady just shrugged. “Some guy by the name of Eddie Knox stopped by today and handed it to me. I thought he was a private detective or something by the way he was dressed, but apparently not. He said that letter was for you and that it was from an old friend of yours.”

  Confusion consumed Joe as he sat down at the dining room table and tore open the envelope. It was the first physical letter that he had ever received in his life and the experience was somewhat novel to him. He then opened the folded paper within and began reading the handwritten letter.

  Hello Joe, I hope this reaches you because I’ve got a lot to say and have to be somewhat vague for safety’s sake. It has been a wild ride since I last saw you and I wish I could have told you about my plans earlier, because it would have been nice to share them with a friend. I’ve been wrapped up in a lot of mayhem since the big event and there were some scary moments when I didn�
��t know what was going to happen. Luckily, I’ve got a good set of legs to run on and a special someone watching my back, so it could certainly be worse right now. I miss you Joe, and there were so many things I wanted to say before I left, but was too afraid to say because I didn’t want to sound like a sappy idiot. It’s only now that I realize I was truly an idiot for not saying it when I should have. You know, when it counted. I am fortunate enough now to be given a second chance at life and rectify my past mistakes while continuing to move forward.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that out of all the people in the world that were trying to use me for some sort of personal gain, you were the only one that was looking out for me for my sake. You were my shimmering light of hope shining out of Pandora’s Box and I’m not sure you realize how rare you are on a planet like this. You are a decent caring person that enriched my life with good will and generosity. I remember your boss asking me if I had any regrets about my situation at the time and I said something along the lines about never wishing to change it because there was so much good filling the voids of pain that I once felt. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that despite all of the horror and trauma I had to endure, I wouldn’t change any of it for a second because it would mean that I would never have had the pleasure of meeting someone like you and sharing a lunch while we shot the shit. You’re worth it Joe, a hundred times over, you’re worth it, you’re worth it, you’re worth it.