by David Coy
As they walked along the jungle’s edge, she ambled over to within a meter of the little guard. She crossed her arms, waited a step or two, then cocked her head at him. “Do you jack off?” she asked bluntly and loud enough for all of them to hear.
John groaned inwardly. Rachel turned away toward John with her eyes and mouth pinched tight against the impending explosion.
“I’ve heard it said that if a man’ll lie about that, he’d lie about anything,” she continued, unabashed. “So? Do ya?”
The little guard cocked his head right back and ran his tongue around the inside of mouth before he spoke. “Every day,” he said, without blinking.
“I guess that makes you an honest man, then,” Donna said, beaming too broadly.
“Not really,” he said. “I learned to lie at an early age.”
The other guard chuckled.
“So, every day, huh?” Donna went on.
“Almost.”
“No pussy, huh? Things pretty tough around here, pussy-wise?”
“Yep.”
“Better not let Jacob find out you’re jacking off,” she said.
Chuckles.
“Right hand or left hand?” she asked.
“Both hands,” he said. “You know what they say about short guys.”
“Now there’s a lie!” she said.
They all had a good laugh over it. The next day, the walk felt a little more fun, and the guards let them stay outside a lot longer. Within a few days, they knew the guards' names and were having something resembling conversations with them. The rules of conduct for the prisoner-guard relationship are universal. At first the conversations were awkward, but over the course of days, they became more and more relaxed. The guards, it turned out, didn’t know much, or at least pretended not to. They were soldiers, mercenaries, they said often, recruited from Earth and under contract to the Sacred Bond. As long as the Council was in charge, they’d follow orders, they said, and they didn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions. Some tidbits did come through, mostly rumors about this or that, but nothing they could really use. The idea that drifted to them the most often, frequently through veiled innuendo, was that the Council and most of the soldiers were one and the same and that the Sacred Bond hadn’t just hired mercenaries, but had recruited ruthless men and women, or trained them to be so, from their own ranks, sometimes from their own families, to enforce the Council’s will with the force of arms. John believed it without blinking. He said the guards were too dedicated to be anything other than blood kin to the ranks of the Bondsmen. “I doubt they’re doing this just for the money,” he said. “Some are maybe, but most of them are in it because they share the faith.”
Mike came to Eddie’s window every night and talked to him through the bars. Unlike the guards, Mike was a pretty good pipeline to the rest of the world, but his perspective was limited, too. Mike told Eddie everything about the big move or whatever else sounded important, and Eddie, in turn, would tell the others. Rachel asked Eddie if she could talk to Mike, but Donna said it was a better idea if just Eddie did that for now. Donna knew the talks with Mike were helping them both. Eddie was finally healing—a process that was very important to her.
They learned from Mike that the road to the sea was under construction and preparations were being made to start hauling things over by truck. They had dozens of trucks to do the job, and Joan said it would take them just a month or so to get most of the stuff moved over. Mike told Eddie he’d never been so busy and kept asking Eddie to get out and help them. That always made Eddie feel good.
Then one night Mike told Eddie that the road was done and the schedule was in place to start the move. When Eddie relayed the news, Donna wanted to talk directly to Mike. Serious questions needed answers right then, and Mike was the only way to get them. Mike would have to bring them a pad; the system had the answers—bulletins, schedules, notes. All the plans were in the system.
* * *
The next night they sat in Eddie’s room with the lights out, waiting for Mike.
“What time’s he usually get here?” Donna wanted to know.
Eddie checked his watch. “About now,” he said.
As if on cue, they heard Mike’s shuffling and grunting and a light bong sound as he climbed up on the barrel. They all stepped up on the bed and huddled around the window.
“Mike? I’m Donna Applegate. Do you remember me?”
“Are you kiddin’?”
“And this is Rachel and John.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“We have some questions for you, and we might want you to find out some things for us. Do you think you can do that?”
“I’d do anything for you ma’am,” Mike said.
“Call me Donna, okay?”
“Okay.”
“These are very important, Mike, and we need you to find the answers right away, if you don’t know them.”
“I’ll do everything I possibly stinkin’ can.”
“That’s good,” Donna replied, inwardly smiling at his complete willingness. “Now. Do you know why Jacob is moving the settlement?”
“Nobody knows that one.”
“Somebody must know,” John said.
“Everybody just guesses or makes things up,” Mike said. “People think Jacob is either crazy or some kind of super leader or something . . . a . . . a . . . what’s that thing . . . ?”
“A prophet?” Rachel asked.
“Yeah. They call him that,” Mike said.
“Mike?” Donna asked. “Is Jacob the one who's giving all the orders now?”
“He sure is,” Mike said. “Nothing starts or stops without a order from Jacob.”
Rachel lowered her head, shook it and chuckled. “When do they start moving things to the sea?” Donna asked.
“We start loading the warehouse stuff into the trucks tomorrow.”
“What’s the mood,” Rachel wanted to know. “What do the people say about the migration? Are they in favor of it?”
Mike thought it over. “Well, all the religious folks seem to like the idea as long as Jacob says it’s okay. The rest don’t like it. My boss hates the idea—almost everybody does—includin’ me. The guards don’t seem to mind too much. Nobody even knows what they’re moving into. It sounds pretty weird.”
“It is very weird, Mikey,” Rachel added. “Mike?" Can you get us a key to the door of this shelter?”
“Skip it, Mike,” Donna said sharply to Rachel. “He can’t do that.”
“Never hurts to ask,” Rachel came back in a whisper, and shrugging her shoulders.
“I wouldn’t know how to do that . . . ”
“Forget it, Mike,” Donna said. “She was kidding.”
“How many Council members are there?” John asked.
“Five, I think,” Mike said.
“So Jacob is the main one now—the highest in rank?” John asked.
“That’s what I heard. He’s the boss.”
“Christ,” John said under his breath, “and he’s got a boner for the three of us.”
“A what?” Mike asked.
“Never mind,” John said. “Sorry.”
“Mike?” Donna asked. “There’s something we need you to do for us. It’s very important.”
“What?”
“It’s really important, Mike.”
“Okay.”
“Can you bring us a pad in good working order? It doesn’t have to be a new one.”
“I don’t know,” he replied tentatively, “I’d have to steal it. ”
“Just borrow it,” John said. “You could just borrow it for us for a while.”
Mike thought it over. “I know where there’s one that nobody uses. I don’t think they’d mind if I got you that one for a while. I might have to ask, though.”
“No. No, don’t ask,” Donna said quickly. “You see, we don’t want anyone to know we have it.”
“Oh . . . ” Mike said.
“G
reat,” Donna said. “That would be a big help. If we had a pad, we could find out for ourselves when everything was happening, and we wouldn’t need to depend on you so much for the answers, okay? And I promise we’ll give it back as soon as we’re done.”
“Okay.”
“Can you bring it tomorrow night?”
"I guess so."
“Good.”
“Thanks, Mike,” John said.
“Yeah, thanks, Mike,” Rachel added her real gratitude.
“Well, I guess you two buddies want to talk some, so we’ll get out of here. We’ll see you tomorrow night, okay?”
“Okay.”
When they were in the hallway, Donna took Rachel by the arm. “Don’t ask him to take a risk like that again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That key business. He can’t be skulking around trying to cop a key to the damned door.”
“Oh fuck it,” Rachel said disgusted. “I was just asking.”
“Well, don’t. You’ll get him killed.”
"Fine."
“Good.”
“There’s no difference between that and making him steal the pad, anyways,” Rachel said to Donna’s back.
“Hey, we’re all going nuts. Let's just forget it. Okay?” John asked of the two women. He was right, of course. They were all going nuts.
That night John and Rachel made love. Under the hot sheets, they tied themselves with arms and legs and labored against those willing bonds until the sweat ran. They lost themselves in each other’s scent and touch and taste and forgot for a while where they were. In that mindless time and space and for the briefest of moments, dread died with a carnal gasp.
7
Soaking in boredom, they were perched atop the rig, which was now parked a few hundred meters west of the structure. The last thing they’d done before parking the behemoth was to level the ground in front of the entrance to make a staging area for the material as it came from the settlement.
“Who the hell are those guys,” Lavachek asked idly, looking over the activity below. “They look like doctors or something.”
“Good bet,” Habershaw said. “I think they’ve been here for a while already.”
“Doin’ what?”
“Got me! Doctor stuff, I guess.”
“On who? Nobody else’s here yet.”
“How the hell should I know?” Habershaw asked vacantly, sucking at his teeth.
From their high vantage, they could see most of the activity below. There hadn’t been a lot. Looking westward, they could see the flat, nearly motionless ocean stretching to the horizon. It wasn’t like any ocean Habershaw had ever seen. It was as flat as a sheet of glass; and when the sun set, the impression of uniform smoothness was enhanced by the red light that reflected from it as if from a mirror.
The ocean usually looked dull and dead; but the evening before last, just at sunset, Habershaw saw something break the surface far, far out. It was something large enough to send ripples expanding for what seemed like kilometers in all directions. Habershaw’s bored mind found the sight pretty interesting, and he asked Lavachek if he’d seen it, too. Lavachek said he hadn’t and seemed about as interested in it as a speck of dirt on his filthy boots. He looked where Habershaw pointed with a trace of courtesy, but smacked his lips in mild disinterest. “Aw, well, shit. It was there,” Habershaw said.
“I believe you,” Lavachek yawned.
The rig’s cab was big and had sleeping quarters in the back with two bunks. There was a cooler and a heater for food and a fold-down table at which to sit and eat. There was a toilet and a little shower. It wasn’t as nice as a shelter, but it would do in a pinch. They’d been in the rig for three nights now waiting for their next orders from Chief Engineer Patel. The last thing he’d told them was to “relax for a while and enjoy the view, high away from most of the bugs.”
They hadn’t heard a word from him since. Once or twice Lavachek had suggested they work their way back and smooth out a couple of sections of road he thought were too rough, just for something to do. “Hell with it,” Habershaw had said. “Wait ‘til the little prick tells us to.”
Habershaw talked to Joan a couple of times a day by phone to see what was going on. She was grumbling, moaning, bitching and loading trucks and told him that the first load was coming over in two days. She couldn’t understand what was going on, that was her problem. She was an expert in logistics, and what they wanted to get done and the way she’d been told to do it made no sense to her. She’d been instructed to move the settlement as quickly as possible but hadn’t been allowed to plan what to do with the material when it arrived. The only plan they had to work from was a simple priority list from the Council. That was all.
Most of the home shelters would be left behind. A good part of them were empty now anyway since the residents, former contractors whose work was done, had been sent back to Earth just prior to, what was now referred to as, The Collapse. The remaining science labs would go first, which Joan thought was strange. The trucks were big enough to carry ten complete shelters or labs at a time, stacked on them. That part wasn’t too tough. Then the warehouse contents would go. Next would be the Bondsmen’s personal stuff—the tons and tons of furniture, art, fixtures, china, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, baubles and whatnots they’d had shipped out with them.
She’d been too short-handed to meet the schedule and had asked for permission to recruit resources from other trades. Working nearly day and night, almost all that shit had been crated and sealed and marked by Joan and her crew of nearly one hundred workers. The occupants of the cloister were left with a minimum of possessions. Living in near-empty apartments, they sat patiently on bare floors, waiting for the big pilgrimage to begin. It made her sick, she said, how they just smiled and blindly went along with any goddamned thing Jacob told them. “Damned dummies," she called them in one breath and “fuckin' sheep” in the next.
Her biggest complaint was that she hadn’t been allowed to create a storage system at the destination. There would be a pile of crated stuff fifty meters high by the time she was done shipping it. There wasn’t a chance in Hell anything could be found in that massive heap until it was all distributed back to the owners. To top it off, the structure, from what she could gather, was some kind of organic thing with no goddamned markings on it, or in it—no order to the layout at all. It was going to be a damned maze inside. She’d have to think of some way to distribute the material other than conventional methods. They hadn’t built any platforms for the material, and Joan hoped they could get it disbursed quickly. The rain, bugs, mud and mold would get to anything left outside for long, even if it were in sealed crates and containers.
The whole thing was making her sick. She was exhausted and could barely deal with it any longer. She threatened again to run away into the jungle. He had told her that wouldn’t be a good idea.
She cried over the phone. He tried to put her fears to rest gently but couldn’t quite do it in the end. Finally, he told her that if she caved in, if she gave up, they’d kill her for it. They were that ruthless, and it was that simple. He didn’t have to tell her that because she knew it already—that’s why she was crying. He told her to finish her job; to knuckle down and finish it. “Work is what we do," he told her. “Fuck ‘em,” she said. “I hate them all.”
Lavachek had been spending a good part of his wasted time looking at the structure, puzzling over it and staring or squinting at it top to bottom. Sometimes, he’d just look and shake his head. Sometimes he’d idly squirt spit in its direction.
“Are we gonna live in that goddamned thing?” Lavachek asked.
“Christ, you keep asking me that. I don’t know. Don’t ask me,” Habershaw replied.
“Just askin’.”
Habershaw laughed at him. “Well, don’t! I don’t know shit anymore!”
“Okay, fine. You don’t have to be pissy about it.” Lavachek was leaning on the railing looking down at the entrance wh
en he saw two men bring the thing outside. At first he thought it was some kind of flesh-colored garbage, some bundle of strange meat they were throwing away. He was high and far away, and Lavachek had always been proud of his good vision—“Runs in the family,” he’d say. But the distance strained even his good eyesight. The two men, dressed in dun-colored fatigues, were carrying the object between them. He could see that it hung down, bowed in the middle and that the men were carrying it by what looked like its legs and arms. The problem in Lavachek’s mind, the thing that puzzled Lavachek, was why the thing seemed to have so many legs and arms. Some of the limbs were flailing aimlessly, others barely moved or just waved in the air. He could swear he saw two things like heads attached to the pink and brown mottled trunk.
“Hey! Hey, Habershaw! Look at this goddamned thing!”
“What is it?” Habershaw asked from the cab.
“Look, goddamnit!” he pointed. “What is that?”
Now it was Habershaw’s turn to be disinterested. All things needed balance. “What?” he said. “I can’t see that goddamned far.”
“There! What the hell is that?”
“Two guys carrying something. I said I can’t see that far.” Lavachek shook his head in disgust at him. “Go get the scope out of my locker. Hurry up!”
Habershaw didn’t mind doing a little step-and-fetch-it for Lavachek since over the years Lavachek had done plenty of it for him, but what he couldn’t do was hurry up about it. Lavachek understood that and dashed past him as Habershaw ambled toward the lockers.
“Never mind! I’ll get the goddamned thing!”
“Okay.” Habershaw muttered and returned to the railing. In seconds, Lavachek was back at the railing with the scope trained on the activity below. Now he could see it all close up. As the men carried the thing across the freshly graded ground, Lavachek’s mouth formed into a tight scowl. His deep breathing hissed and whistled through his nose. Habershaw noticed it. “What is it? Let me see,” Habershaw said.
