Nighthawks at the Mission: Move Off-World. Make A Killing.

by Forbes West

  There is enough light that you can see where you are going very easily and avoid the accumulated debris from that rotten sea.

  You yell out, “Hello! Hello! Anyone? Please, anyone?” There is no reply except for the constant crash of waves. It makes you question yourself. Are you alive? Dead? Or just dreaming? You sit down on your haunches for at least five minutes, trying to think up your next move.

  The box from the temple has made it to the beach—you realize quite belatedly that the box was what you felt shoot over your head as you fell into the sea.

  Looking down the beach, you see for the first time these black silhouettes—tall and dark, three of them, maybe a mile from where you are. They look human but their large size means they can’t be. As you stare in their general direction, they fade away and are gone.

  The Voice of the Four Winds book flickers with green light but does not seem to do anything more than that. You can’t get it to work and hope to God it just needs time to dry.

  You hear something crying off to your right, behind the wreckage of a fishing trawler. Carefully and slowly you walk behind the ship. There’s a cat carrier there, and Slinks, the cat you left behind, is inside. Slinks, the cat you left at home in Long Beach. Slinks, who should definitely not be here in The Oberon.

  You open it up and out he comes, unruffled and unperturbed, except for his constant meow. You hug him deeply, checking him for any scratches or injuries. By some miracle, he is here.

  Holding his warm, little, furry body in your arms, you look out towards the moonlit coastline. “How-what are you doing here, Slinks? How did you get here?”

  You put him back inside his cage, determined to ignore the absolute strangeness of his arrival. Where in God’s name? you think—then clamp down on that thought, pushing it away and focusing instead on survival. A beached fishing ship is nearby and that part of your mind that is always struggling to keep you alive directs you towards it. You search through the wreck for things to keep you alive.

  * * *

  When you finish, you decide to do an inventory of things you already had and what you have salvaged from the beached fishing ship and from the stasis container. An ori-baton with a blue-green orichalcum stone embedded into the hilt—animal control ori, Guy had said. If there are wild animals hopefully you can control them and dissuade them from eating you. As many paper match packets as you could grab from the lounge of the empty fishing trawler, in order to start a fire. Slinks meows again in his travel cage.

  You continue the inventory. Two good sized plastic squeeze bottles full of water, again rescued from that trawler’s wheelhouse. Six cans of chili con carne, plus a can opener. A tiny, white, metal first aid box with antiseptic, Band-Aids, etc. You put everything into a gym bag you’ve also grabbed from the wreck.

  One transistor radio. An old gray one, Sony, maybe from the ‘60s even, with a single silver antennae that you stretch out. It was on the floor of the small kitchen space of the fisher’s lounge, so you grabbed it just in case. You push up the black on switch and move the volume dial up as well, hearing only a good squeal of static. As you move it across the FM dial, you get nothing but more static. You keep messing with the dial until you get to about 100–101 FM.

  Almost passing it completely, for a second you can hear some music faintly coming over the air. You try to readjust yourself on the sand, and as you do, you notice that if you take the radio and face it into a certain direction, the signal gets stronger; if you face it in another direction, it is weaker.

  You turn the volume up as much as you can; some bouncy techno pop comes on.

  A male announcer comes on with a very deep and cracked voice. Static crackles beneath every word spoken. “That was Dream Machine, Lazerhawk. The time is 10:32pm, Winkie Standard Time. You’re listening to non-stop night-time music, the Old Man at Midnight, and you’re listening because it’s something else to listen to than Radio Oberon. The Midnight Special here’s going for the record on how many hits off a bong one can do and still maintain a functional broadcast. See you in a second kids, hmmm?”

  So you are definitely in The Oberon, or close enough to get a radio signal from Guy’s contact. Considering the broadcasting range of a typical radio station, this is not completely reassuring. You could be twenty miles or two hundred miles from rescue. After multiple attempts, you light a fire with your matches.

  As the fire flickers and the waves crash, you lie down on the sand in your flight suit, using your heavy rubber gloves as a pillow. Another pop song, that one from Drive, comes over the static-filled air.

  I’m giving you a night call to tell you how I feel...

  You doze off a little.

  I’m gonna tell you something you don’t want to hear...

  You do not sleep, but only stare up at the stars. The constellations are so different, so jumbled up compared to what you saw on Earth. It’s there, somewhere, you suppose, up in the middle of all that.

  You realize you’ve dozed off when you suddenly feel the soft heat of a clouded, overcast sun on your face. Waking up, you see that the cliffs have become covered in those manta ray creatures that are busy chirping and chattering away at each other, hissing sometimes as well, like a flock of seagulls would on our world. You brush the sand off, take a swig of water from one of the water bottles, and then pour some into the little inside tray that hangs off the travel cage door for the cat. You eat some chili cold from the can, and give some to Slinks as well. He likes licking it off your salvaged spoon.

  You are lost in thought when you hear the Voice of the Four Winds start to vibrate on the green sands. It’s dry enough now, and as you flip eagerly to the map pages, you find that blinking red dot and see your location on an outline of the coast—you are directly on the beaches next to the Super Sargasso Sea, some three hundred kilometers from the Funeral Breaks/Star in the Mountain/Mission Friendship area.

  Lines that you assume are for roads and rivers trail up and down the map. The roads are marked in a series of Xs, the rivers are marked by tiny images of running water. You decide to follow the river that dumps out into the Super Sargasso Sea. You remember something from a television survival program about how settlements are always next to running water. Maybe there is a settlement not marked on the map that is closer than your new hometown.

  It is time to make some sort of a move forward.

  Lifting the travel cage by one hand, you realize that it will be too bulky to carry down an entire beach. You need to be able to move as fast as you can.

  You get on your knees, open up the cage, and let Slinks out. You breathe deeply, almost hyperventilating.

  Slinks should not be—you push the thought out of your mind.

  Using the ability to push and control from the orichalcum baton, you give him a nudge to run up ahead. You leave the cage behind on the sand, an empty, discarded container that will wait by the waves. You make sure to bring out what you can from the Temple of Kern box—several orichalcum pieces, uncut, a wine bottle, a piece of cheese —and put it all into the gym bag.

  After forty minutes you see it—the cliffs have a massive hole in them over a wide churning river that pours into the ocean. Daylight streams through it from the other side. A sandbar separates the edges of one cliff side from another. You and Slinks travel down the sandbar closest to you, underneath the cathedral-like ceiling of rock. There is a vast plain on the other open side of the cliffs with high grass blowing in the wind. Black storm clouds lie on the very far horizon; thunderheads as large as skyscrapers make their way across the distance.

  The cavern must be over three hundred feet high, with heavy stalactites hanging from the top. A fine spray of water fills the air, perhaps from drops of moisture coming from that rock ceiling. Faint pictures decorate the rock surfaces. They are mosaic images, like the ones that they dug out of the ruins of Pompeii. Humans in robes and colorful tunics, cavorting or eating or kneeling to unknown idols, adorn certain areas of the cavern, and each image is tens of feet tall.


  They are, in some cases, frightening—humans feasting on humans, some many times larger than their compatriots, with lightning coming from their hands and greenish eyes. Half-man, half-animal creatures are there as well, fighting and eating each other. There are old iron torch holders scattered all over the mammoth cavern, unlit but dirty with soot from frequent and presumably recent burnings.

  As you and the cat make your way through that massive and long cavern, you see a massive lagoon that leads inward and perhaps onward. The sandbar ends a few yards ahead of you, and there isn’t any way to cross without swimming.

  Something titters and screeches in that cavern. It is a mad woman’s laugh, a haunted asylum laugh. You freeze in place, Slinks near your side. His ears fold back and he bears his fangs. He crouches on the sand, ready to pounce. You feel very cold all of a sudden. Voices whisper out from all corners.

  “Sarah? Sarah?” A voice you were used to hearing when you were little beckons to you. “Oh, Sarah?”

  “Rachael? Rach, is that you?”

  Rachael Zur, née Orange, moves towards you, walking on water. She looks healthy, lively, like her picture on the cover of TIME. You hug for a long time and feel her warmth. There’s a growing darkness in the grotto, every source of light dimming but not extinguished. Shadows grow from every corner. You look down, unable to look at her, unable to go anywhere, to retreat, to run away. There isn’t a way to get across the water.

  She grabs your hands and pulls you down onto the cold wet ground and smiles. “So whatever have you been up to, sis?” You smile but cannot respond. “You’re in The Oberon now. You’ve been thrown out of Sargasso-3.”

  You can’t raise your eyes from the cavern floor, ashamed of yourself. “I don’t know why I wanted to come out here. I don’t know why I left Mom, but I wanted to be somebody, and I wasn’t going to be someone at home,” you gush out.

  Rachael looks at you with the countenance of a Buddha—serene and still. “You wanted to be successful, am I correct? Like me.”

  “Mom wouldn’t stop talking about you, before you…died.” Rachael wipes your tears with her shirt sleeve.

  “Thanks.”

  “You wanted to come here and become as rich and famous as I was?”

  “Yes,” you confess.

  “You wanted to be in TIME Magazine as I was?”

  “Yes.”

  Rachael nods. “Then do what I would do. I made a fortune here—am I correct? I didn’t share that, greed was my sin. How did I do that as a simple professor? When I was first here, this was a darker place. I planned my way out of any situation I was forced into, and...” You nod, swallowing.

  “I’m sorry for your troubles here, Sarah. I am. I started all of it.” She blinks her eyes three times, looking sad, and her eyes turn a deep green. “And I killed whoever, whatever, was in my way.”

  Shocked, you can’t believe it.

  “Mathias and Petty are mine. They are mine.” A mist appears as a sandbar slowly emerges from the depths of the river. You and Slinks will be able to cross the lagoon after all.

  “If you see me again, it won’t be me,” she says, as she disappears into the mist. “I have to go. He’ll be here any moment.” A pair of green eyes flashes in the mist.

  Fear washes over you like a tide.

  You grab Slinks, cross the sandbar, and run for at least a mile. When you can’t run any more, you slow to a walk, walking forever, in a daze, without a real ounce of energy behind any footfall. The landscape is constant—high grass plains, the river churning next to you. At one point, you and the cat crest a series of hills, slipping on some of the jagged rocks that point out of the ground.

  It is dusk, and you must’ve traveled fifteen or twenty miles. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you are in decent shape, fantastic shape even, although you can feel blisters developing on the sides of your feet. The storm clouds you saw outside the cavern are still high and far away, though you can make out small flashes of white lightning in the distance.

  When you can’t take another step, you plop down on some grass and rest your head against your gym bag as a sort of half-assed pillow. Only the faintest glow of moonlight makes its way through the cloud coverage, and rain begins to fall from the storm that has finally caught up with you. A few drops hit your face, then more, and then more still, until it is coming down hard. Slinks curls up next to you, his warm and wet little body snuggling against your head.

  You can’t sleep and just lie in the grass as the rain pours down. There are no more of those umbrella-like trees around to give you shelter. You stare into the empty, hazy space ahead of you, not able to think or react to anything.

  Soon you are soaking wet with and a sort of shaky chill runs through your veins. You try lying down again but can’t with the rain hitting you in the face, so you sit up and pull Slinks into your lap. Thunder cracks incessantly, though you don’t see any lightning strikes at this point. With every rumble Slinks shakes a little and you hold him tighter and tighter.

  The storm passes after a few hours, leaving little rays of sunlight shooting out from the clouds. Lines of light spread across random spaces of ground, making small islands of light.

  You hear something far off, a pop, pop sound. It’s not the thunder rumbling but you can’t tell what it is. The grasslands that are now a soggy mess still stretch out in every direction. Something like jeep tracks appear in the mud of the Sargasso Breaks.

  A half hour passes as you follow the jeep tracks. You come upon a large and wide road, black, covered in bright yellow Xs. The vehicle tracks clearly lead right onto this road. It isn’t made of any asphalt from Earth—it is a smooth, solid, jet-black block, with no lines or grooves or signs of potholing or deterioration. The hairs on your arms stand up a little, as if you are next to something giving off static electricity. Slinks growls. There’s a hum coming from the road—something that you can feel in the back of your teeth. When you step onto it, all the yellow Xs light up and flash. They come on one after another. For at least a tenth of a mile you can see the road light up once you stand on it, but once you step away, the yellow Xs become dark again. After taking a deep breath, you start down the road, walking a little easier, and the fear subsides a little.

  For about twenty minutes you walk down the highway until you see a fork in the road. You take out one of the water bottles, sip a little of the stale, warm water and consult the Voice of the Four Winds, which tells you that the right fork leads to Mission Friendship, which is still so many miles away.

  You really want this to be over. You want to sleep somewhere that isn’t out in the open, to be clean again, and maybe get the hell off this planet.

  As you walk, you notice that your limbs feel lighter than they should. The road pushes you forward. Your feet, which no longer exactly hit the ground, slide forward, almost levitating a half an inch into the air. As you walk you feel like you are on a very, very slow airport people mover, though the ground doesn’t seem to be moving at all.

  A little later, a playing card, the ace of spades, slides towards you, and you pick it up. The back side of the card is like a tarot card, with a giant goat-faced devil on his throne, crowned with a pentagram; in one hand is a torch pointing downwards. Chained to his black throne is a nude Ni-Perchta woman, with gray skin, pointed ears and long platinum hair. A young, naked human man is chained to the throne as well. Both figures are holding hands. Embossed under the scene are the words THE DEVIL, M AND P. You drop the card, feeling dirty for having touched it.

  A blanket of fear smothers your senses as you wonder what that card could possibly mean. Nothing but emptiness surrounds you for miles. There is this feeling of being watched, however. It feeds the fear you’ve had for so long and have been struggling so hard to knock down.

  But even fear can’t take away your hunger, and you take a moment to eat another can of chili con carne while sitting off to the side of the road, giving Slinks his fair share, too.

  Chewing on the cold
meat and beans calms you down somewhat. The desolate emptiness around you has no sound.

  The Sargasso Breaks, this area you’re stuck in, is beautiful, but you can’t stand it anymore. The hills and the grasslands, the canyons...

  The yellow Xs begin to light up again, though you are not touching the road. Fearing that a predator is coming, you look around for Slinks and panic. He has disappeared from sight. Your heart nearly bursts and you cry out for him several times, not able to see where he has gone despite it being so wide open that he could not have hidden anywhere.

  A black DeSoto convertible with a cracked windshield glides towards you and honks. Unsure whether to wave or run away, you make no decision. You just stand there, shell-shocked.

  An old man sits behind the wheel. He wears a black sweatband on his head and looks like a crazed Uncle Sam who has joined the hippies. He stops the car and gets out with an effort, standing with the help of a black cane. He slams the door and waves to you. “Good afternoon, there.”

  You nod and wave back. “A-after-noon.” You can barely talk as your mind starts to check out on you.

  “Was taking my afternoon drive, wasn’t expecting someone like you, all alone out here.” You nod again.

  “I’m not alone, I had a, a-”

  “Come on over, I’m no cobra.”

  You walk over, still looking for Slinks. Your impression of the old man changes. He looks like an old Abraham Lincoln—a dignified old hippie wearing a black leather biker jacket. Tall too, way over six feet, maybe six foot five. “I work and live just moments away.”

  “No sir,” you say, thinking that he has asked you a question, and walk back over to where you sat and look for Slinks. You try to mention it to this old man but the words just won’t come out, and you start to cry again and hate yourself for it.

  “Looks like you just fought a cougar and, uh, barely won.” You turn and nod, looking around.