Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Those two make a cute couple.” Sam thought another beer to the table.

  “You think?”

  We laughed.

  “Just like you and…” His eyes indicated Hope, who was lost in conversation with West at their table, her glass displaying the day’s kill stats.

  I’d heard it all before. “Sam, there is no ‘me and…’ Regardless of what you hear. This place is such a soap opera sometimes.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Jesus, I’m sure, okay? She’s in love with her integers.”

  “And you’re in love with impossibilities.”

  “I’ve killed almost everyone I’ve ever loved.”

  “And you’ll have to kill the rest before this is done.” Sam had a way of cutting not only to the chase, but to the end credits.

  “Pretty much.”

  I studied the table, my bottle. I knew he was staring at and through me.

  “You should meet my Captain.” Some smiles, the most conspiratorial, evidence in eyes.

  “Oh yeah? Why?” although I already suspected. I’d written her to cursory life, but my characters always had a way of growing into themselves, adapting, becoming people without any input from me.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” his eyes swept the construct, “but Al has a little crush.”

  Suspicion confirmed. Only in a universe I’d made would that happen. “Well…Huh. Send her my regards. Tell her to keep up the good work. The Author appreciates all she’s done. Purpose be and all that jive.”

  “You conceited prick.” Another sip through the grin. “‘The Author,’ huh? I’ll be sure to tell her.” He winked.

  West called to me from the other table.

  “Better go, Sam. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Good luck with your insertions.”

  “Good luck with your own.” I patted his back as I stood. “Bring Alina with you tomorrow.”

  “Ha! Will do, buckaroo.” Sam snapped to fade through the echoes of his best Hank impression.

  “How’re the boys?” “Getting by.” Paul sat down, the now-cold steak on the table before him. He thought it away.

  “Nice Jedi powers, Obi-Wan.”

  “Nice fishsticks, Batman.”

  Benton looked from West to Paul to West, rolled her eyes. Her gaze fell flatly back to the numbers on her glass.

  “Working through recess, Hope?”

  “No rest for the quantum theorists.”

  “Any leads?”

  “If we pick up the bear, it should push us to Alpha fifty-five-to-sixty-over. Seems that toy was a big part of our target’s pattern.”

  “God, I hated that fucking cartoon.” West grumbled over his ketchup and maybefish. “And those toys were just creepy.”

  “I never had toys.” Benton didn’t look up from her calculations.

  West studied his plate.

  “You can play with Honeybear once we get him. Fair enough?”

  “Great.” She snapped the glass shut and it faded from the construct. “I’ve mapped the insertion for tomorrow. You boys get some sleep at some point. We want a good run.”

  “Yes, dear.”: unison.

  Benton shattered from the construct.

  “Enough exposition for today.” West wiped his mouth. “I’m turning in. Night.”

  “Goodnight, Adam.”

  After he’d faded, Paul sat at the table until the bar construct was empty and he was alone. Well into the non-night of his consciousness, he mulled over the select regrets, fears, and dreams that had created the person he had become, and when the false sun had risen over the false horizon, he decided to sleep.

  There’s a moment when panic becomes sensual: you can taste the copper of your blood, the tang of adrenaline and sweat, and the deeper wash of terror. Suddenly I felt that the innovative new helmets I’d designed for insertions were entirely too suffocating.

  My breath came hard and ragged as I began to choke on the blood filling my left lung. I felt the suit envelop the shard of phase flak and begin to repair me.

  I struggled to my feet. Another wave of splinters from the wrecked vessels coming apart in the atmosphere above us struck the city.

  “Take cover! Jesus fuck, take cover!” My words sounded like a blood clot feels.

  I glanced right to see West throw himself over Benton as the shards fell. His armor was fluctuating phase; one shard hit his leg but harmlessly faded from being. He grabbed Benton and hefted her to safety under a shattered concrete support tilted precariously against the nearest building. I crawled into a doorway across the debris-littered street.

  “They’re not here!” Benton shouted over the roar of the battle above. She had her glass out, and I saw numbers flickering through the display. “Something’s wrong with our position!”

  “Stay here.” I heard West speak to Benton over his subdermal. He ran from the protection of the overhang across the street to my side. “You okay?”

  “Just some flak in the lung. Suit’s fixing me.”

  “Okay…Okay. Hope! Can you make it over here?”

  She did.

  Her eyes and hands swept my armor. “Is it bad? Oh god… Are you—”

  “I’ll be fine.” I sat up against the wall under the grind of my still-shattered ribs. “What’s your glass say?”

  “Half-empty. Position’s off. The attack’s happening, but our target isn’t at the Maire complex. Neither’s his mother or the toy.”

  “Any readings at all on them?”

  Another blast of flak hit the street. Benton flinched. “Too much shit in the sky. Can’t get a lock.”

  “Okay.” West rose from his crouch. “Maybe they’re still at home. We have to go check.”

  “He’s wounded. We could log out and try a closer insertion.”

  “I’m fine.” I grunted through the words and stood with West’s assistance. “We can’t risk slipping even more.”

  “Fine. Where do they live?”

  I paused. “You have the stats.”

  “You wrote the book. The stats are fucked, anyway.”

  “Okay.” The hole in my chest sealed. The grating of bones was almost gone. “Let me remember.”

  By the time they reached Helen Windham’s humble apartment, Paul’s wounds had healed and he was walking without West’s assistance. The veils of phase flak falling from the sky became more and more sporadic as the battle ended. The quiet in the city was broken only by the collapse of the massive cannon to the west as it broke apart and fell into the ocean.

  West kicked down the door to the apartment.

  It was dark. The curtains were still drawn. They activated their halo lights and began to search the home. There wasn’t much to search.

  They found the figures in the living room, two husks of silver dust prone on the floor, the larger mostly concealing the child below.

  “Don’t touch them.” Paul sighed. This was an unfortunate development. “Got any signal on the glass, Hope?”

  She opened her panel. “Yeah.” She hesitated. “Running at Alpha ninety—”

  “Shit.” West shook his head through blades. “Must have just missed ‘em.”

  “What about Honeybear?”

  Her face brightened. “He’s here. He has to be! The reading’s off the scale.”

  “Okay, where’s the kid’s room?”

  “No…” Paul walked to the far side of the living room. “I remember where he is.” He reached under the couch and pulled out a ragged brown bear. “At least that didn’t change.”

  Benton ran her sensors over the toy. “It’s a close enough signal match. Should bring us back down to Alpha sixty-over.”

  “What about those two?” West stood over the dead shells of silver that had recently been Helen and Hunter Windham. “Does this seriously fuck up our line on Delta?”

  “It shouldn’t. I can bring in Helen from one of the Seattles, and Hunter…We can try to bring Hunter and Lilith both in at once.”

  �
�That’s gonna be tricky.”

  “That might be mathematically impossible.”

  “We’ll do it.” Paul tossed the bear to Benton. “Trust me.”

  retrieval and concealment crews are finished with the salvage and load placement.

  “I guess we’re leaving now?”

  time to hit the road.

  “Alright.” Alina stood up on Samayel’s hull. She’d miss the warmth from below. She’d miss the light, and the wind, and the real air. “Real” air. “Sam? How far down to the shield layer?”

  three hundred miles or so.

  “That’s enough.” She ran toward Samayel’s edge. “Catch me at fifty!”

  al, don’t—

  But she did.

  The rush of vertigo, the wind and heat around her body, caressing in ways no lover could, enveloping, becoming. She spun to see Sam dropping away above her, his nacelles flickering to life as he dove after her. She swam.

  The heat grew.

  It was freedom; it was everything.

  She laughed through the tears of that limit experience.

  Falling, falling through light and heat. Falling through silence. She felt the stillness, but knew she was falling. How the senses are deceived into stasis; how the senses lie through the truth of the heart.

  It seemed hours before Sam matched her descent and she landed gently on his back. He coasted along the shield layer, swept upward on an exit vector.

  girl, you’re crazy.

  “I know.” She couldn’t force her grin from her face.

  By the time Sam had reached the atmosphere barrier, Alina was snuggled into her command chamber, sleeping peacefully the sleep of those who had fallen into a sun.

  They left Fort Myers forever.

  “Mmm hmm.” Judith looked at the bear with skepticism. “That’s it? A toy?”

  “Not just any toy, Jud. Honeybear Brown.”

  She picked him up and turned him over. “And this toy is important to our mission how?”

  “He’s a character in both timelines. A potential Delta crossover in and of himself.”

  “Paul,” her metallish eyes betraying her disbelief, “it’s a fucking toy.”

  “Not to Hunter.” He took the bear from Judith’s grip. Static and shift and

  The bear moved. Jud jumped.

  “Honeybeeeeear, Honeybear Brown!” The toy’s eyes lit up. “I’m the nicest little bear in the whole darned town!” He looked around the room. “Where’s Windy?”

  Jud looked like she was about to answer Honeybear, but she shook her head. “Paul, that thing’s god damned scary. I should know. I’m god.”

  “You’re neat!” Honeybear smiled at Jud.

  Paul stifled a chuckle.

  “Take that talking bear and get back to work, author. Next run, you’d better bring me back a human being. No stuffed camels or ostriches, you freak.”

  “Gotcha, sweetness.”

  He picked up Honeybear and faded with a smirk.

  She’d heard that their counterparts on the Judas side of the Delta bleed piloted vessels powered and protected by black holes, and the captains linked with their ships through mechanical gauntlets and webs of silver (not exactly her silver, but a silver nonetheless). She’d heard that they had fought a war against an army of consciousnesses emulated with machines from the future. She’d heard that they were cannibals. She liked cannibal movies; she still believed in werewolves.

  Sam draped her with her silver, the veil webbing and penetrating her skin, concentrating over her cardiac shield plate. Locked securely into the firing chamber, she shared all that was her existence with all that was Samayel.

  She wondered how different she was from the Alina on the other side, if there even was an Alina on the other side.

  “What’s on the plate for today?”

  smash and grab mission. we’re meeting up with remnants of the fort john wayne fleet.

  “Frosty’s fleet?”

  captain frost, yes.

  “Wait.. This is a frag or a bleed?”

  bleed.

  “Oh.”

  well, lock and load, kid. we’re hitting the stream.

  “Jim?”

  shut up.

  “Jimbo?”

  shut UP.

  “Come on, pardner. You gotta talk to me sometime.”

  no i don’t.

  “You just did.” Hank grinned from his command chamber. “Anyhow, what’s it look like out there?”

  whiter than jo’s inner thigh.

  “That white, huh? That must be pretty white. You know, one time I was at a saloon in—”

  for the love of all things holy, shut UP.

  Crawl, crackle.

  “You feel that?”

  certainly did. initiating full sensor sweep.

  “Looks like we ain’t alone out here, buddy.”

  They fell through time.

  tomorrow and tomorrow and just make a thread that says “no” and

  “Hey, dude.”

  I won’t lie. His voice caught me off-guard. No one had ever been with me before, not there, not in the little bubble I’d carved for myself, just for myself, deep within the registry of the Judith ME.

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  I’d thought people into existence before, but they’d only been characters. Whistler and Hank. Benton and West. Jacob’s voice slammed into and through me, echoed through the sphere of nothing within which I floated, and all became my parents’ living room: the old green carpet snaked with guitar cords, the bite of woodsmoke, brownies for us in the kitchen. I knew this without vision; I was too tired and broken to open my eyes.

  Lithe fingers climbed over nylon strings, coaxed forgotten songs from a long-dead soul.

  “I don’t know anymore.” I knew that choke in my voice.

  He stopped playing.

  They’d told me, of course. I’d asked to be inserted into the fourteen-seven variant, just two years into the future from which West and Benton had removed me. Hope had come with me, had stood with me behind the mourners at the burial. Wraiths. She’d held my hand between its frequent trips to my mouth, choking back sobs that no one but she could hear in that when.

  When my future self placed a guitar pick on the coffin and touched it, he looked up for a moment, and in those eyes, I saw everything that I knew I must end. What tragic cycle, what series of events could inspire such madness in those once-forever eyes? The then-gaunt frame sweating under a gray suit suddenly entirely too big, the sun-burned nose a red foil to those pools of teared ash, hands and wrists shaking, scarred with

  He was the madness I must end.

  Other friends would have asked if I wanted to talk about it. He knew better. He started playing the guitar again and

  bonfire, scorching the leaves of the ice storm-tilted tree that was now entirely too close to the pit and the wind was entirely too cold for the early-summer night I knew it was from the taut skin on my nose and arms and neck, the slivers of chaff now roiling beneath the surface of my forearms, placed there not tenderly by hundreds of bales of hay stacked mindlessly into the mow.

  His song never changed, never faltered. He hummed along sometimes.

  “I miss you.”

  A string snapped. His hand went to his neck, found the speck of blood and wiped it away, red from flesh too lifeless, too gray. I thought color back into him.

  “Miss you, too, dude.” He pulled the broken string from the guitar and threw it into the fire. He kept playing; he could do that.

  There were so many things I wanted to ask: the hows and whys of his hanging, those last moments. What happened after the electricity had flickered away? But I knew that there were no answers in this place. No one within the Judith or Judas programs had any idea what happened when we died. I guess I’d written it that way for a reason. I didn’t really want to know.

  “We’ll have to get together the next time you’re home. I should be around.”

  The broken string crimped and danced a
s it burned.

  “Yeah.” From that side of the fire, he couldn’t see eyebrows furrow, lips twitch, two lines of tear slip down stubbled cheeks. “I should be home again soon.”

  “It’s easier when nowhere feels like home.”

  Jagged exhalation. I struggled to maintain.

  “Well, the bed is looking pretty good right now.” He placed the guitar back in its battle-scarred case: stickers, newspaper clippings, scatter of plectrums. Snapped the snaps, stood up, brushing ash and bark from his knee-holed jeans.

  “Damn, I want some eggnog.” He smiled that sly, shy smile. “Goodnight.” He started to walk down the driveway.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do I—How do I—What am I supposed to do?”

  He frowned. “Huh?”

  I forced a smile. “Want me to drive you home?”

  “Oh. Nah. I’ll walk. Stars are out.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked down the driveway and the image faded to nothing: bubble.

  I sat there for a long time.

  midsagittal plane breached it’s spread into ready lesioning probe on my physiologic confirmation of the target location initial pass in three two

  but if i take a few days between sleeping, my dreams have answers in them, and

  a pain so great and sudden that he dropped his cup of coffee to the table.

  “Paul?” Hope’s voice: confusion and concern.

  He felt tissues give way as blood surged from his nose. He coughed in reflex, a fine mist of red spattering his hand as he clamped off the flow with a napkin entirely too flimsy to contain it all.

  “Jesus, boy.” West pulled more napkins from the dispenser at the table’s center. “You okay?”

  He waved away the extra napkins. His eyebrows furrowed, and the blood was gone as he thought it away. “Don’t know where that came from.”

  Benton’s eyes met West’s.

  “You need to sleep. You can’t stay awake like this.”

  “I don’t need sleep.”

  “That wasn’t normal, kid. Nosebleeds don’t just happen like that. Maybe you have high blood—”

  “Cardiac shield’s not beeping, is it?”

  “Well, maybe—”