Crimson Son

by Russ Linton

  “Where’s Hurricane?” I wait for the air to form that solid fist and punch me in the chest.

  Hound shakes his head.

  I breathe. Again. And nod.

  A flash of crimson flutters in the doorway. His mask is clenched in his fingers. Solid and callused, the hands made to transfer unimaginable power twist the cloth into a wrinkled mess. He moves to the bed quickly and I look away. Those same hands touch lightly on my arm and I shrug them off.

  “We’ll give you some time,” Hound says. He escorts Polybius and his train of equipment into the hallway closing the door behind them.

  “What happened to Hurricane?” I demand.

  “She was in my head. Nothing seemed real.”

  “You killed him?”

  There’s a long pause before he answers. “Yes.”

  “Eric? What about Eric?”

  “He’s fine. Sharp kid.” He speaks with genuine admiration as he clears his throat.

  Drake’s final taunt fresh on my mind, I press for more details. “Emily?”

  Dad breaks eye contact. “She’s outside.”

  That leaves Martin. Tears trickle down my cheek, hot with anger. Our eyes meet and mine aren’t the only ones swimming in tears. The accusations die in my throat.

  He speaks. “God, Spencer, I’m sorry. I couldn’t break free of her. I never meant to hurt them. You. Anyone.”

  My tears have stopped, dried by the shock. The Crimson Mask, my dad, crying. All the expectations, all the isolation, all the missed childhood moments seem to come together all at once, and I don’t know what to say anymore.

  “I understand.”

  But I don’t want to forgive. Not yet. Not with Hurricane dead. Martin.

  “Hurricane wouldn’t back off,” Dad tries to explain. “He was fast, but he got tired. And Martin. I didn’t even know his name.”

  “He was a doctor. Doctor Alexander.”

  Dad sits up and wags a weary head, “Emily broke free somehow. Charlotte sent me after her.” He stares into the distance replaying every detail. “That’s when he tried to stop me.”

  “Dad, I can’t listen to this right now.”

  He nods. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Three days.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I was worried you weren’t going to come back.”

  “Almost didn’t.”

  I push back the covers and swing my feet off the bed. My pasty legs stick out from a Whispering Pines-issue gown. Dropping to the floor, I wobble and Dad’s hand engulfs my shoulder to steady me.

  “Ready for a walk?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got some clothes for you in the closet.”

  “Nah. I’m good.”

  Unfamiliar faces line the halls, each sporting implants hidden under a crazy collection of scrubs, scavenged clothes, and a few more hospital gowns. They all watch with grim faces. One, a woman who’s more flesh and bone than tubes and chrome, steps up with her arm extended. She’s got close-cropped hair with an orange mohawk down the center. Her skin is ashen white, and a subtle warmth radiates from her body. I hesitate but take her hand anyway, and the touch sends a hot sensation up my arm.

  She smiles wryly as I squirm and says, “Thanks, kid.”

  I wait to roll my eyes until we pass. I’m never going to shake the nickname. Kid.

  “Ember?” I ask. “Are they all here?”

  “No. Many went their own way. Some weren’t so appreciative.” He keeps his eyes straight ahead. I imagine that the ones Dad captured are on that list—whether he knew what was going on at Killcreek or not. “But you and Eric. You’re the only reason they’re all free. The ones that stayed, stayed because of you guys.”

  “Eric? My friend, Eric?”

  We walk down the compound’s halls and out through the reception area. The space has been cleared except for the deep gouge in the floor where Cuddles tried to skewer Hurricane. Outside, the sun shines down on a no-longer-empty parking lot. A black SUV, a few sedans, and then there’s Eric’s car.

  “Hey! Spence! Dude!” His voice drifts down from the sky. I turn, backing away from the building to scan the rooftop. My involuntary smile is lost as I take in the scene.

  Eric is perched on the roof in some kind of black unitard and a belt full of tools. He looks like an eight-ball collided too hard with a stripe and had a baby. His broad belt sports an assortment of wire cutters, cables, spools, and a tablet tucked in the front of his waistband. He’s scrambling down a metal platform that definitely wasn’t part of the retirement home before. It takes me a minute to grasp that this is the enormous platform from the cavern, studded with cylinder bases.

  “How did that get up there?” I ask.

  Dad shrugs, “I needed a way to carry everyone out of there.”

  Overwhelmed, I examine the scene again. What I see next causes two reactions. First I stagger blindly backward to get a better angle, and then I wonder how far away I can get in the nearest car.

  Charlotte. She’s wrapped loosely in a collection of sheets in the chilly air. The array of flexible hoses and tentacles sprouting from her are entwined around a building antenna sticking through the center of the platform. Motionless, her back arches to the sky and the wind whips her ghostly hair. She seems inanimate. Just another fixture amid the straight brick edges of the building or the bristling antenna array.

  “Holy…” I start but never finish.

  “He’s alive!” Out of nowhere, Eric wraps me in a hug and lifts me off the ground. “I thought we were gonna have to sew some robot parts on you!” I wiggle free with my hands up defensively and he laughs, “Just kidding, man! Cyrus said you’d be fine.”

  “Cyrus? The Augment?”

  “He used to be a doctor,” says Dad. “He’s been checking up on you.”

  “What’s going on here? Why is,” I swallow, watching the loose cables around Charlotte’s form sway, “she here?”

  Eric lets out a heavy, “Oh,” and tries to explain. “She did that herself. We didn’t have time to dump her during the evac. When the Augments all grouped at the cavern, Uncle Sam – no, not the Augment, he died a while back – decided to call in the air strikes. Bombs were falling, the whole damn place shaking, it was FUBAR! So we left her on board and your Dad gave us a lift. Dude, I didn’t open my eyes until we were back on solid ground.”

  “All the way here?” I stammer.

  “Had to take a breather in Northern Utah,” Dad adds.

  “But why come here?”

  “Eric’s suggestion,” says Dad, like it’s a normal everyday thing for him to take my slightly nutty friends seriously.

  Eric appears to blush again but maybe it’s just the heat in his unitard. “Yeah, I guess I did. We needed a place with medical facilities, and I didn’t think a public hospital was going to work.”

  “The government just let you guys move in?” I’m slack-jawed, standing in the fluttering breeze with my ass sticking out of my gown, but I couldn’t care less at this point.

  “No, dude, better than that. We weren’t gonna stay this long. But Charlotte, who we all figured had a skull full of V-8 after whatever you did, made her move. She walked over and latched on to the antenna with her freaky tentacle shit. I think Pops here,” Dad doesn’t even cringe at the pet name, “was going to, well, finish the job. But he asked me to find out what she was doing first.”

  I’m speechless. Probably still asleep in a hospital bed. That’s the only explanation.

  I eye Dad who gives a tight nod. “Pulling punches,” he says.

  Too bad he couldn’t do that before now.

  “Where’s Emily? You said she was out here.”

  Dad eyes the edge of the parking lot and a stand of pines. “Just past the parking lot, other side of the ravine. C’mon, I’ll take you.”

  “No thanks,” I brush his hand aside. “I can find her.”

  I can feel both of the
ir eyes on me as I walk away. Eric starts to speak but falls silent. Barefoot, I relish the feel of the rough concrete of the parking lot, and then the soft bed of fallen needles. A light breeze is shuffling the pines and the fragrance reminds me of the night I flew on the Cuddle’s back. Why am I even still alive?

  It strikes me: in Charlotte’s snow globe, I could never smell the world around me. The fabricated ocean breeze was the closest thing, but now that I’m wandering with nothing between me and the woods but a flimsy hospital gown, I realize how immaterial that place was. That same place where I left Mom.

  Emily’s there, on the other side of the ravine. The pines grow tall and in nearly straight rows. The lowest branches are far off the ground, creating ordered lines of bare trunks. Except for where she sits.

  There is a circle of sorts among the trees, and Emily is sitting cross-legged at the center. Stuck in the ground in front of her is a chrome IV stand, bent into the shape of a cross. A stethoscope is draped across the bars along with a surgical mask.

  Another cross is next to that one. A worn prosthesis, the foot melted and mangled, lies on top of a folded flag in front of that one.

  I don’t know how long I’m staring before she turns to face me.

  “Spencer!” Her puffy eyes fly open and she scrambles to her feet. I smile weakly as she rushes over and throws her arms around me. I close my eyes and bury my face in her shoulder. Wood smoke. Pine. I look to the side and see a makeshift tent and a fire ring.

  She steps back to arm’s length and tries to smile. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up. I’ve been checking on you. I told them to come and get me. They knew to come and get me.”

  “Don’t worry. I came to you.”

  She tries to smile again but it’s a wounded look. I don’t know if I’ll hear that awkward snort anytime soon. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  I flick my head toward the tent. “Been out here long?”

  She scrunches her lip and follows by motion. “It feels so, so real out here, you know?”

  “Yes.” I don’t know how to say what needs to be said. We stand there, checking out the woods for far too long. I’m staring at the needles between my toes when I finally say, “He wasn’t a douchebag. He was a really great guy.”

  She bites her bottom lip and swallows, nodding in short bursts. I feel my throat constrict and tears start to form.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  She turns to the graves and walks toward them. I follow and as I approach, my head goes numb. Lying on my back for days hasn’t done me any good. I press forward anyway. I should pay my respects, or say something. The people there… they deserve it… for… Wait… what am I doing here? Why did someone jam a couple of metal bars in the ground?

  Emily plants her hand on my chest and draws me back a step. The feeling returns to my brain, and the chrome grave markers glare against the brown carpet of needles.

  “What was that?”

  Her voice cracks. “I put them there. I don’t want to remember.” She clears her throat.

  I nod sympathetically, hoping that Emily hasn’t been permanently damaged by Charlotte, but I can’t tell.

  “What do you do now?” I ask.

  “I want to go home. Stuff my head into some research back at the university.”

  “That actually sounds good.” I stare into the canopy, imagining a ring of light I hope to never lay eyes on again. “Fuck computers and robots, though. How’s the neuroscience program at George Mason?”

  She almost smiles. “Not bad. I could use some help in the lab if microbiology is ever on your schedule. And you could use someone to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “Homework, cheeseburgers, girlfriends; I can handle college.”

  “Please, Spence, you have the social skills of a—”

  “Teenager? Child? Kid? Go ahead, say it.” I can almost laugh at it now. “Yeah, I need help. I could use a big sister.”

  We talk by the gravesites for a long time. She tells me stories about her and Martin, slogging their way through undergrad at George Mason. I regale her with stories about my short experience with Hurricane and finally get a snort out of her, imitating Eric’s face when he and Hurricane first met. When the chill finally starts to sink in, I turn and hold the gown closed and make my way back toward the retirement facility. She stays behind. “A few more minutes”, she says.

  Dad and Eric are still outside. Eric stands tall and proud, and despite the ill-fitting costume, he doesn’t appear to be the translucent hermit living on microwave cuisine that he really is, or was. He waves when he sees me coming.

  “Found her?” asks Eric. Dad clears his throat.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Dad says.

  “I might need to talk to Cyrus. Got a little head rush walking around out there.”

  “Oh no. I bet you’re fine.” Eric continues under my skeptical gaze. “Turns out, Char is cloaking the place. She’s somehow deflecting every kind of signal you can imagine. Polybius and I are pretty sure she’s still using the antenna and the metal in the platform as a dish. It’s freaking amazeballs.”

  I nod and stare up at Charlotte, planted on the roof. “What does that have to do with me being fine, Doctor?”

  “Get this—she’s messing with people’s minds, too!” says Eric excitedly.

  “What he means to say,” Dad interrupts, “is that nobody knows we’re here.”

  “Yeah, you can’t get close to this place or even leave without hitting some serious brain fog. I can’t explain that. Way outside my pay grade,” intones Eric in a voice of quasi-authority.

  I don’t want to question the suit. The lingo. I mean, I really want to sling a heater in that direction, but not today. Eric’s face is beaming. And Dad, despite the red-rimmed eyes, they’re showing a new emotion as he waits for me to speak.

  Pride.

  “So if I go too far from here, I’ll forget about it?”

  Now I understand what Emily meant, when she said she put the grave markers there.

  “Well, maybe,” Eric says, then whips his face toward Dad and back again. “What do you mean, leave? I mean, you could leave, and I guess we could write a note. I don’t think we can call you ‘cause there aren’t any signals going out, or in. Not even the radio in my car, which sucks because the Giants—”

  Dad places a hand on Eric’s shoulder. “As far as we can tell, you might not be able to get back here. She’s selective about who she lets in. It’s between the two of you, but so far, everyone here has been cleared.”

  “I imagine the government is out looking for a bunch of escaped Augments again?”

  “Not yet. They’re still trying to explain to the world what happened.” Dad looks at Eric and he continues, “Eric sent that information to the press and blew the lid off the ‘military exercise’ at Killcreek.”

  I take in his words, Eric’s expectant face, the fierce shine in Dad’s eyes. It’s a look so genuine I can’t watch him with the balled-up pain and anger burning inside. I could tell him off. Make him apologize for all the shit he put me through. For Mom. But this is so different now. I’m the one in control. I’m the one who saved his ass, when all that time he wanted to keep me locked away for my own good. I’m free.

  “I might need those clothes after all,” I say. “I was talking with Em. College doesn’t sound half-bad right now.”

  “Whoa, Spence! Hang on!” Eric grabs my arm as I turn back to the building. “I mean, we just got here. College is cool and all, but, um, I think they need some more help around here.”

  “You’ll be fine here. You’re the Augment. Not me.” Eric starts to protest but I interrupt. “I made a promise. A couple, really, and I intend to keep both of them.”

  “He’s right, son. You could stay,” Dad says. “These men and women here, these heroes, they’d be willing to follow you. There’s a lot to be done. Not everybody wal
ked away from Killcreek without revenge fresh on their mind.”

  “Yeah, I guess I could stay, but I’m not going to.” I turn and look Dad straight in the eye. “You’re family. I really care about you. I love you. But you’re an asshole. A self-centered son of a bitch.” He lowers his head and starts to apologize but I cut him off. “There were heroes at Killcreek. Normal people, like me, who didn’t have powers to shield them.” I throw an arm around Eric’s shoulders as I continue. “So pay attention. You might learn a thing or two from this guy.”

  Dad seems to swell, from his jaw to his pecs. He isn’t about to explode in anger, though. A look of resignation sets into his features. “I’m going to make this right, Spencer. As best as I can. I want to have you here with me. This won’t be like the bunker, I’m not going to be that same person. But I understand if you’ve got your own plans.”

  I try to smile but it’s hard. I have to step away. “Yeah. Cheeseburgers. Ball games. Girlfriend. More girlfriends. A little homework here and there.”

  Walking toward the building, I make sure to let the gown flap freely in the breeze. Sure it’s cold, but it ain’t arctic, ball-numbing cold. Not here. Not ever again.

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