by Gemma Files
Search and destroy, no questions asked. So we smuggled ourselves into the area, clinging barnacle-fast to the hull of a rented ship—dropped blind, docked ourselves at the base of volcano 037, got equalized with the pressure, and spent the rest of the day marking off time. And when the sub’s shadow fell over us, we swum to meet it in perfect formation, convinced—like the brave little hardbodied boy scouts our training had made us—that the computerized codes we’d been issued with would be enough to trick our way inside. Which they were, of course; when you’re working for folks who routinely drop $50 million or so on new toilet paper dispensers, a string of numbers probably comes comparatively cheap.
No, it wasn’t the codes that betrayed us, or got us captured within an insulting half-hour. The codes didn’t give us up to the Doctor, to serve as cannon-fodder in his continuing quest to find out what that thing in the Waiting Room was—aside from almost-instant death for anybody he threw in with it.
’Cause codes, you see, don’t really come equipped for treason—hold no political opinions, weigh no options, covet no raise in monetary reward. Risk nothing and nobody on the simple hope of gettin’ pee-ay-ei-dee-paid.
So who?
Well . . .
* * *
Like participants in any arranged marriage, The Doctor and I agreed to consummate our vows only after an exhaustively negotiated ritual of long-distance courtship. Acting under Kiley’s orders, I used my satellite access as the unit’s translator and intelligence liaison to track the sub’s location and eavesdrop on its internal mutterings—and when his back was turned, I used the same good ol’ U.S. technology to slip inside the Doctor’s laptop, read his notes. Send him e-mail. Tell him he could protect his precious project, and gain a core group of experimental subjects, for the one-time-only price of a hefty Swiss bank-account deposit, a trip back to the surface and an artfully-faked sole survivor scenario: Me cast momentarily adrift in the unit’s life-pod, beacon on, with an enemy bullet lodged in some suitably fleshy body-part (exact location to be determined later on, at both our conveniences.)
“You tellin’ me all this’s about money?” Kiley demanded. And I just shrugged, snapping back: “What else?”
Thinking, all the while: Disappointed? Well, fuck you, dead man. You can yap all you want about honor, and duty, and the idiot joy of the holy patriotic Cause—but from where I stand, you’re nothing but worm-food with an attitude. So go ahead, strike that pose. When you’re being buried with full military honors, I’ll be cutting myself a slice of apple pie and negotiating a thousand-dollar blow-job.
“You know when the Old Ma’am and the rest of those REMFs back at HQ find out, they’re gonna cancel your sorry ass.”
I smirked. “Find out from who?”
“Ain’t you got no pride at all, boy?”
“Well. I guess not.”
Behind me, somebody spit on the floor. All of them glaring through me, turned back first: If looks could eviscerate. Even fey little Ed LoCaso, the training camp’s token cocksucker, suddenly pumped full of indifferent hauteur and undying contempt—if the situation hadn’t been just a little too butch to bear it, he looked like he might have given me the finger-snap, or maybe just the finger.
“You just better be ready to live with yourself, Book,” Kiley told me, finally, right before they hauled his kneecapped ass onto that medical stretcher and took him down the hall to meet our mystery guest. Last words, and he knew it, so he thought he had to make them count—make his point before it was too late for me to repent, and come to an impressive eleventh-hour understanding of the error of my ways.
“Is that meant to be some kind of challenge?”
A frown—a wince, almost. Like: Jesus, Regis!
“History—”
“Yeah, right. Now, let’s see: Who is it writes history, again, exactly?”
We both knew the answer, and so did everybody else—it’d been one of Kiley’s favorite saws, back up top. So no one bothered to reply.
Not even him.
* * *
Distant echoes, as the dim lights fade further: Roils and rumblings, metal gamelan trills. The odd hollow clang, barely audible, as the Waiting Room floor’s dip slowly steepens. Behind the two-way, I hear the Doctor’s autopsy equipment start to skitter down the counter, catch and clatter on the fixtures—all those poor lonely clamps and scalpels, laid out in eager anticipation of my corpse.
And cheated instead: Cheated, cheated.
For now.
The voice seems to smile, seems to agree. And tells me:
Soon.
* * *
Oh, Book, Book—shape up, soldier. You think you really got all the time in the world? You believe everything some fossil full of prehistoric bacteria tells you?
. . . can’t believe I even just thought that sentence . . .
So talk it out straight, for once, you crooked motherfucker—before your brain turns irretrievably to mush.
Regis Aaron Book: Me. 28 years old. Specialist rank 4, Lang-Intel. Cheat and smart-ass. Traitor.
Coward.
Born in Louisiana, raised in Pittsburgh; deaf grandma, absent Mom—gone so long, all the photos burned, I barely remember if she had a face. But I suspect she was probably pretty; I sure am.
After she ran off, Dad re-enlisted, went to Germany. Got all ripped on LSD one night and drove his tank into the Rhine. The government sent us a letter. I got to it before Nanny Book could see, read it, and flushed it down the toilet.
No great conversationalist, my Nan, and that wasn’t all because of her pronunciation problems. She did teach me ASL before I was five, though.
Ever see the sign for drowning? It’s kind of cute.
I played football in high school, got a university scholarship. Fucked my left foot (deliberately, I must confess)—hairline fracture, long-healed now. Transferred streams. Did languages: French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, five different Slavic variants—the USSR grand tour, they used to call it. Which is how I caught certain people’s eyes.
When I went ROTC, I told people it was because the recruiting officers said they’d kick me $40,000 toward the rest of my fees. But that was a lie. I joined the army so I could kill people—after which I joined the CIA, so I could do it for no good reason and be virtually assured of getting away with it.
I’m an American, born and bred. I like money. I like power. I like sex, as long as it doesn’t lead to anything too permanent. I—
. . . blood in my . . .
—what else? Anything relevant?
(there’s a concept)
Oh, fuck: Shut up. Will you just shut the hell up, already?
. . . noise. In my . . .
My name is Book, Regis—Regis Book—and yes, I am a coward. And you know why? Because the proper synonym for coward, in this messed-up post-Berlin Wall world of ours, is “smart person.” Cowards always come out on top. We try harder, and when we screw up it hurts worse, so we make damn sure it never happens again. We’re the ones who live to fight another day—or just to live.
. . . blood.
Stay alive: My sole, my only legitimate consideration. The only one that matters.
Five more minutes, five more hours. Five more days, more years. Fifty. Five hundred—I don’t discriminate. But I am selfish: Oh, yes. You damn betcha.
Because I’m not going to die, not here—never here, never like this. Watching image- and word-meaning shuffle off into disintegration as my mental deck of cards deals me a dead man’s hand, and the air runs out. Watching the Doctor cough his life away. Watching the lights dim, and hearing this thing inside me hold its figurative breath, waiting for me to get so loopy I don’t care whether or not I’m part of it, or it’s part of me. Or if there’s any me still left for it to be a part of.
No. I’m not going to die like this—or any other way, if I can help it. I�
�m coming out of this sub just the same way I came in, the same way the Doctor and company found me when they opened the Waiting Room’s mag-locked door, after the mandatory five hours had finally elapsed: Alive alive-oh, just like sweet Molly Malone . . .
. . . before the fever, that is. Before the last verse.
Yeah, well, whatever; folk music was never my strong suit.
Alive, spelled ay-ell-ei-vee-ee.
Anything else is gravy.
* * *
The Doctor has lapsed into some kind of half-sleep. In the two-way, I catch a glimpse of my fine new self, post-thing: My bone-blonde hair, my bleached-out skin. My eyes like bruises, cilia purple with broken blood-vessels. I sniff the air, and decide that my skin has begun to smell like hash packed in sulphur.
And this glow, this glow, around and inside me. This inmost light.
The whispers tell me: You are a chrysalis. And I counter by forcing myself to think hard about the shriveled husks I saw left behind in Nanny Book’s back yard, after the butterflies had gone on their merry way. I imagine my mouth splitting slowly open, ripping. Bending like vinyl under the eruptive strain, as a hitherto-hidden larva sloughs me off like so much deluded dead skin.
I feel the fear rise up in me again like wine, like flame—the salt and spices of it distributing themselves through my body while I struggle in its slow-cooking flame, rendering me ever more tender, more juicy. More appetizing.
’Cause fear is what this thing goes for, see? It loves it. Eats it. Got it in little tiny jolts from Kiley and the boy scouts, one by one by one; suck ’em dry and move along, bub. Skin packets, lit and hollowed from within, irradiated with detritus radiance. One big bruise, left to rot: An empty, man-sized wrapper, stuffed full of crumbly bones.
And why was I the only one, apparently, to ever figure this particular connection out?
Just my luck, I guess.
Dribs and drabs, after the long drought on the sea-bottom—aside from stealing the occasional muffled howl from a passing, boneless thing or two, in between geological epochs. From me, though, a veritable stream of terror, so constant as to skirt actual satiety. Fear-engine Book, running on empty: C’mon in and make yourself at home.
The Doctor turns his head again, heavier. Barely able to open his eyes. And tries to ask:
“What . . . happened . . . to—the—?”
“The shell?” I shrug. “Dust in the wind, Doc.” Adding, as though in explanation: “It was old.”
“Pre- . . . Pleistocene.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
A wheeze; a cough. “And—what was . . . inside . . . ?”
To which I smile, curling back my bruised lower lip. Showing the tips of all my remaining upper teeth—my ill-set front caps, my jagged, half-missing left incisor. And reply:
“ . . . Went—inside me.”
* * *
And hey, there’s even evidence: The Doctor taped it all, obsessively anal to the last, with a camcorder installed (as per tradition) behind the two-way—images skipping and fading between intermittent washes of static. I wound it back, watched it, in those first dim eons after I knew for sure that no matter what, the sub would just keep right on drifting further down and faster. Talk about post-modern: My cruel apotheosis, shot by shot, in all its real-time glory.
Hour one: Me pounding, pleading. Slumping. Turning.
Hour two: Me and the shell.
Hour three: The glow, beginning. Spreading.
Hour four: My hypnotized attention. Our conversation, me and it—that thing; not something which really seems to register, actually, on the purely visual scale.
Cajoling, flattering. Saying: My love. Saying: You know I will honor my promises.
The glow increasing steadily throughout, meanwhile; a slimy glitter. A blazing smokeless cloud, pillar of salt-white fire. A certain sense of boiling. Of moving outward, then—inward. Saying: Soon.
Soon, soon.
And in hour five . . .
* * *
The Waiting Room door clicks open, admits four—Doctor and goons, the original three-pack, already braced for action. They see me on the floor, face-down; the declining line of my limp back, head clutched in hands, shadow-rapt. No more light, bright or otherwise. No more shell.
. . . this quintessence of dust . . .
“Bastard ate the fucking thing, fuck your mother,” I hear one blurt. And think:
You could say that.
The Doctor kneels, waves them closer. One kicks me over. They see my face, hesitate as one—
. . . this noise . . .
—and I feel my hands knot, my insides furl. I feel them start to reel away from me, then stop dead—sway, dazed. Instantaneously lulled. All of them, Doctor included, plunged into a kind of half-intoxicated trance brought on by my—(its)—proximity. Like standing next to a generator, invisible energy pouring off me in waves. Drowsiness seeping in through the pores.
I feel their fear, like I feel my own. And I feel what was once inside the shell—what’s now inside me—sniffing at it: My mental tastebuds, gearing for the feast. My mouth, watering. The glow rekindling, a slow flame under my skin. This radiance looking out through my eyes, bruising them from the inside with the pressure of its glare.
. . . in my blood . . .
Disconnected, surfing the current: A battery. A contained conflagration, run on incipient panic. I lever myself up with both hands, mirroring the Doctor. Look around. See them return my look, all of them—helpless not to.
“Bet you wish we were back in El Salvador now, fellas,” I remark. Conversationally.
And I feel it let go of me, the thing, exploding outward like a concussion bomb-blast: Blow out the bridge, bring the bulkheads down. Crush the goons back against the Waiting Room walls. Crumple the Doctor in on himself. A surge of pent-up energy, driving me upward—haloed, paralyzed, cocooned in power. Catapulted into some pupa stage, lapped in adrenaline and brain-opiates. I feel the shell’s former inhabitant slip away from me, in search of fresher fields, and my terror surges, babbling. I match it, promise for promise—set myself up as its carrier, its willing Judas Goat.
Succor and repair me—love me for real, like you love yourself—and I will bring you prey and praise.
A modern Prometheus for the century’s end: Eat my fear anew each day, that I may live forever. Trying my level best to make it understand, through instinct rather than intelligence, that I’m not just a host—not just some new flesh shell for it to hide and sleep in, hibernating until the next best thing comes along. Wordlessly eloquent, I vow to trade keeping myself in a constant state of fear and pain for a vaccination—however temporary—against the whole concept of death: Death by drowning, by slow suffocation, death here at the bottom of the deep black sea, in the pressure-drunken final fathoms.
Making sure to also point out—with strictest possible attention to detail—that if I lose my personal identity, then I won’t know what I have to be scared of anymore.
And you’ll starve.
I hover, wait for its reply. Until the words come, soft as necrosis. Cells collapsing. A lie for a lie:
Time means nothing . . .
Yeah, yeah: To you.
. . . to us.
* * *
Which brings us, I believe, right back to where we started.
* * *
“Book,” the Doctor whispers, now—so soft I can barely hear him, over my own constant internal whisper.
“Doctor,” I reply. The word not meaning quite what it used to: Two empty syllables, ringing hollow in my skull. Language no longer seeming necessary, even as a nervous tic.
He clears his throat, or tries to, blood rattling in his lungs. Spits, or tries to. And shapes the words, with a last feeble breath:
“ . . . I’m . . . a—fraid.”
I shift
my gaze back to him, slowly. Take a moment to remember his title, his significance. Then nod. And think:
But not as much as me.
Thankfully.
* * *
Here on the Subeja Trench’s second shelf, already too far down to hope for rescue—anytime soon, at least—we drift past holes belching black lava, coral mountains crusted five arms deep with vivid, fleshy anemones. Everything watches us go by, large or small. They give us sidelong glances, and bare their teeth. And we keep on slipping down, fathom by fathom, until the foliage thins and the light falls away. Until there’s nothing to note our descent but a congregation of boneless, blazing things which regard us with a total lack of curiosity.
While I note the Doctor’s broken corpse, sprawled and sloughed on the floor beside me. Feeling similarly little.
Wondering: Did I really strike a bargain, just then? Or do I only THINK I did?
But if I can still think coherently enough to even consider the question, I guess, it probably just doesn’t matter all that much.
The sub buckles, twisting in on itself deck by deck. But I hold fast, footloose and evidence-free, to the improbable notion that I have been promised exemption—that even when the water seeps in under the Waiting Room door, this thing’s infernal patronage will render me impermeable, slicked with infection. No swelling, no softening, no gentle nibbles from passing teeth; just a long sleep, a long, long dream. One long nightmare, a phobophobic haze, during which I can jim in my own stew—
(you fucker, you promised)
—stew—swim in my own . . . juices. Awhile.
. . . a while, a minute, a century . . .
And when they (the CIA, the Doctor’s bunch, a salvage crew, whoever) finally find us, and pry open this busted can, how very sweet I’ll be. Well-marinaded, and ready to serve: To be my prehistoric savior’s chosen liaison, its translator. Its face prepared to meet the faces it will eat.
Or maybe we’ll just stay down here, forever, unfound and unmourned, until entropy eats us both.
