by David Coy
“When?” Habershaw asked dimly, in shock.
“Yesterday morning,” Peter said.
“How?”
Neither one wanted to answer. “They just killed her,” Mike said, finally.
Joan was dead, but his worst fears were still alive. He had to know. He could scarcely form the words. “Did they . . . ?”
“No. They . . . um . . . they shot her,” Peter said.
Habershaw felt himself sink into the chair, but he hadn’t meant to do it. He bent over, and his face went into his hands. He didn’t want to cry; he just wanted to sit there. It was okay. He had known she was dead before he got there. He was faintly aware of a trickle of warmth running under his clothes. As the blood ran toward his side and then down it, he thought of how meaningless the blood was and how he didn’t give a shit how much of it he lost anymore.
“I’m sorry we're the ones to tell you, Mr. Habershaw,” Mike said, his own swollen face showing signs of recent grieving he hadn't let the other dock workers see.
“What about the bomb?” he asked.
Peter and Mike exchanged looks.
“What bomb?” Mike asked.
“Never mind,” Habershaw said. “Forget it. What people? What other people did you mean? Who was with her?” His voice sounded far away in his own head.
“There was a guy named John,” Mike said.
“One of the pilots,” Peter added.
“Yeah. And the nurse lady, Donna, and also Eddie Silk,”
Mike continued.
“Eddie?” Habershaw asked weakly.
“And the biologist lady, Rachel,” Peter said.
“Yeah,” Mike confirmed.
“Where did they take them?”
“To the jail thing,” Peter said.
“Which one?”
“They took them to the one down below your place,” Mike offered.
The information rolled off his back like the blood. He leaned back in the chair and winced. Then a numbness came over him, and the air around him felt thick and quiet and too still to be real.
He closed his eyes.
* * *
When he woke up he was lying on the plastic sofa in the living room, and dim light was coming through the window. The idea that it was the dawn’s light sank in slowly like a rock dropped in mud. He wouldn’t make it back in time, but it didn’t matter if he did or didn’t. If he got caught being off his post, so be it. It just didn’t matter.
When he rose, he felt wetness under him. He was sluggish and weak as if he hadn’t eaten in days. When he looked, he saw a mottled pattern of thickened blood on the plastic seat where he’d lain. He began to think he should have a look at the wound.
He stumbled into the spare bedroom and stripped out of his clothes. The entire backside of his cottons was wet and heavy with blood. He turned the shower on a gentle spray and got in. He turned slowly and let the water hit his back. It hurt like hell, and he saw blood swirling pink around his feet. He felt dizzy. Using the walls of the shower as support, he moved and shifted, letting the water hit all of it. He wanted it clean when he looked at it.
He stepped out of the shower, dried off as best he could, tied the bloody towel around his waist—then collapsed in a heap.
Mike heard the noise and got up. He found Habershaw lying mostly face down, right in the bathroom doorway. On his back was an oval ring of about a dozen wounds. The flesh around them had been torn so badly that he could see white bone in some. Blood was seeping out of them and running all over the place.
“Oh, no . . . ” Peter said appearing at Mike’s side. “Maybe we should get a doctor."
“He don’t look so good.”
“There ain’t no doctors left for us,” Mike said. “They all went to the coast.”
“All of them?”
“Yep.”
Using the shelter’s first aid kit and all their ingenuity, Mike and Peter stopped the bleeding then dressed the wounds. Then they moved him to the bed and wrestled him up on it facedown. The bandages weren’t exactly neat, but they did the job.
“That’ll have to hold him,” Mike said. “Come on, let’s go. We gotta get to work. He’ll be all right.”
Mike thought about Peter’s question, and then looked at the bandages. He pressed down on a corner of one that had come loose a little. Bill Habershaw was like a father to him. He hoped he’d be all right—like he said—but he didn’t know for sure. You just never knew for sure, especially when it came to being sick or hurt. You couldn’t tell something like that in a million years. “It don’t matter,” Mike said. “It don’t matter at all.”
A few hours later, Habershaw got up, ate, then drank a gallon of water. Then, his back stinging and the bandages pulling at him, he made his way slowly to the truck and headed back to the rig.
13
Captivity didn’t sit well with Donna and she took every opportunity prod and dig at her captors, even with the virtually useless weapon of speech alone. “You’d think they could have flown us,” she said to the guard. “It would have been a lot faster, don’t you think?”
“Keep your mouth shut,” the guard, a steely-eyed veteran named Mahoney said, “or I’ll put a gag in it.”
“Just making conversation,” she said brightly at Rachel. “At least we know it can talk now.”
Rachel pinched her eyes closed then opened one at John. She worried that Donna would antagonize the guards to the point where they would kill them on the spot. She could see Donna’s mood building up to the I-just-don’t-give-a-shit point real fast.
John saw it, too. “Donna, relax,” he said.
“I’m relaxed. He's the one who's not relaxed,” she said with a crooked grin.
Christ. She never stops.
“Shut up,” Mahoney said to her.
They were in the back of a small troop transport, being moved from the settlement to the monolith. Hands secured behind their backs with restraints, they bumped along and tried to keep from falling out of their seats.
Taken from jail in the early hours of dawn, they’d been put in the back of the vehicle with hardly a word from the guards. After a month of captivity without so much as a walk outside, the sudden and brief exposure to so much open space had been refreshing, in spite of the circumstances. The prisoners dawdled on the short walk to the transport and breathed in the morning air and asked their troubled questions. Contained in the back of the transport, Rachel felt the oppression of stiff walls around her once more. She looked over at Eddie, his head resting against the seat back, eyes closed, trying to sleep. From time to time, his eyes would pop partway open on a big bump, then close again. He didn’t appear very concerned, it seemed to her. Maybe he just didn’t give a shit either.
“I have to urinate,” Donna said to the guard.
“Piss your pants,” the big guard named Mahoney said. “We’re not stopping.”
“Fine. If you want to smell my piss for the whole trip, I don’t mind.” She settled in her seat, lifted her head and closed her eyes. Rachel was sure she was going to do it.
“Stop the truck!” Mahoney yelled forward.
“Oh, God,” Rachel said. Now she’s done it.
The vehicle stopped. Mahoney gave Donna a disgusted look, opened the doors and jumped out. Using his rifle, he waved her outside. She got up and jumped down into the morning light.
“Turn around,” he said.
“Please don’t kill her,” Rachel said, leaning forward. “She’s just mean. She can’t help it.”
Donna chuckled into the air.
“You people are like kids,” Mahoney said.
He unlocked her cuffs and removed them. Rubbing her wrists, Donna walked a few meters away, unzipped then pulled her clothes down, squatted and peed. The guard looked away, but not too far.
When she was finished, she came back, put her hands behind her back and obediently turned around to be handcuffed again.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t mention it. Anybo
dy else have to piss?” he said gruffly into the vehicle. “This is the first and last goddamned stop.”
“I do sir, if you don’t mind,” Eddie said.
“Get in there,” he said to Donna. “Get out, kid.”
Eddie jumped down and turned around. The guard undid
his cuffs and barked, “Hurry up!”
Donna sat down across from Rachel, lips pursed and eyebrows raised—the very quintessence of victory.
“Very funny. How was I supposed to know?” Rachel said, embarrassed. “He could have been thinking about shooting you.”
“You wish,” Donna said.
Eddie walked a few meters toward the jungle’s edge. He could tell by the way the plants had grown there—some of them with just their tops showing—that they’d stopped next to a ravine. He’d have to decide in the next few seconds. He kept walking until he was just a couple of meters from the road’s edge, pushing the distance with each step.
“That’s far enough, kid,” the guard said.
If he ran and zigzagged, he might make it. He unzipped his cottons and glanced over his shoulder. He could see the guard in his peripheral vision, but he couldn’t tell if the guard was looking directly at him or not. He wondered if he would be able to hear his pee hitting the ground, or rather, not hear it. If he was going to run for it, he’d have to do it now.
He closed the zipper all the way up.
Eddie bolted for the jungle. He lunged two steps right, then turned and took two left.
“Stop, kid!”
Eddie tore right again and launched himself out over the tops of the foliage. The ravine was steeper than he thought. He tumbled once cleanly through the air and thought he would hit ground, but he continued over another full turn as the branches and leaves slapped at him. He landed on his back in the soft dirt, but the impact still knocked the air out of his lungs. Gasping for air and with limbs flailing, he crashed down through the underbrush.
Mixed with the sound of breaking stalks and thrashing leaves was the sound of gunfire.
He rolled and slid. Then, suddenly at a point of even sharper descent, his feet caught on a thick root that flipped him and he started to tumble end over end. Finally, he slid to a stop. He could hear faint voices far above and listened for the sound of crashing brush that would signal the soldier’s pursuit.
He kept very still, breathed shallowly and waited.
Up on the road, Mahoney stood at the point where Eddie disappeared into the green and looked down into it. His partner, an athletic and lively solider, had trotted up and was standing with him. “What happened?” he asked.
“The kid bolted—the dumbass kid bolted.”
“Hey, if that’s the way he wants to die . . . ”
“He was gone just like that,” Mahoney said, flashing open his hand.
“Well, it’s your lucky day,” the other said with a toothy grin.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it wasn’t Rachel Sanders that got away.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that there.”
They went back to the truck and Mahoney got in the rear, slammed the door closed and locked it. “No more stops!” he said before anyone could ask anything. Then he read the looks of concern on their faces and softened. “He got away. He ran into the green. I don’t think I hit him, but I might have. In either case he’s dead. Forget it. No more stops.”
Donna wasn’t sure the jungle could kill Eddie Silk quite so easily.
“The kid’s got nerve,” John remarked.
“Shut up,” Mahoney said.
They kept quiet for the remainder of the trip. There was little to talk about anyway. It was certain they’d get no more answers from Mahoney. Rachel was especially gloomy and leaned back against her arms and stared at the floor. John watched her, knowing full well that when she stared it wasn’t a good sign. He kept one eye on her the entire trip.
They arrived at the monolith with the sun at its highest. When Mahoney opened the doors, the air rushed in at them like something hot and alive. The oppressive heat hammered them. They marched across the open area toward the monolith’s enormous portal, Mahoney at the rear and the other one leading the way. “I can’t remember it ever being this hot,” John said.
“Me, neither,” Rachel said in a monotone. “It’s a real scorcher. Maybe summer has arrived.”
The entire clearing was now a mountain of containers, and the lifts worked at it like ants on something sweet, pulling off a bit of it with each visit and hauling it away to the nest. Huge trucks were queued up next to the pile, their beds stacked high with containers, waiting to be off-loaded. To the north were rows of shelters just going in, moved over from the settlement.
North of the machine was a power station. It looked like the one at the settlement, but this one was brand new. An elevated tray filled with a row of thick, silvery conduits ran from the power station and into the monolith through a meter-wide round hole bored in its side. Sunlight reflected from one of the panels in its metallic dome and hit John square in the face. He turned away from the assault.
“Christ, it’s hot."
* * *
The clean, spacious chamber they had once occupied was now a jumble of boxes, containers and equipment of every conceivable kind. Heavy power cables criss-crossed the smooth floor. A mix of transportation workers, technicians and tradesmen kneaded the clutter. Stacking it here and moving it there, the space was a mass of activity. John saw a couple of faces he knew, and Rachel said, “Oh, hi” to a woman splicing two pieces of thick black cable together. The woman gave a half-hearted hi back and eyed their prisoner’s entourage with a long and somber gaze. Rachel could read something else in the woman’s face—a fear unspoken, perhaps. It was there, just beneath the worried look. Rachel could almost hear it trying to get out and craned her neck around as she went by, waiting for it. But it never came.
Donna slowed down and tried to get a look at the manifests on some of the new containers.
“Keep moving up there,” Mahoney said.
“Don’t push me,” Donna said right back. She turned around to face Rachel and spoke walking backwards. “It looks like half this shit is scientific equipment.”
“Yeah,” Rachel replied. “I saw a gas chromatograph back there and a portable SEM.” Then she nodded in a direction over Donna’s shoulder. “Wow. Look,” she said, oddly animated. “That’s a full-sized Barne’s MAD.”
“I’ve heard of them, but never seen one,” Donna said. “They use the same technology as my medical scanner, right?”
“Right, but they’re far more sophisticated,” Rachel said.
“What is it?” John asked, looking at the huge two-meter-tall cabinet standing on the floor. The glassed-in part was high enough for a man to stand in and wide enough to lie in. A table-like affair was mounted to the wall inside it. The remaining third of the machine was all control panels and displays. Except for the clear glass, it was clean, satin-finished gray and quite a work of art.
“Multiple Analytical Device,” Rachel said its name. “You can use it to tell almost anything about the physical and chemical properties of a sample. You can see right in it and tell precisely how it’s made and of what. You can weigh it, image it, test its density or molecular structure, plot processes inside it, almost anything—all at the same time. The best thing is that it’s nondestructive. The sample comes out just like it went in. We had an old one at school that cost a fortune. That one’s new. It might be a hundred times the cost of the one we had. I wonder what the heck they’re doing with it?”
“Cut the crap up there,” Mahoney said.
Donna said under her breath, “Blow me.”
John was beginning to fear for Rachel. Sometimes the signs were subtle and sometimes not, but he’d come to recognize nearly all of them—even the most subtle one of all—swift changes in mood. Sometimes the biggest, most violent ones were preceded by just such signs. Deep in her brain, patterns of thought and non-thought wer
e shifting rapidly, changing places. Reason and emotion were playing musical chairs. He could sense it.
The way he figured it, she’d been damned lucky not to have killed or injured herself during her seizures so far. Prior to capture, the most dangerous object she’d been likely to collide with was the soft ground itself. During the long, motionless days of captivity, she would move slowly to the bedroom and lie down just before a seizure. “I have to lie down,” she’d say and Donna or John would sit at her side while the storm racked her. But now, she was walking through a literal maze of hard-edged equipment and cutting surfaces with a big one building steam. He wished he was closer to her. He wished his hands were free to catch her.
“So anyways, that’s what it is,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder and wiggled her butt. Donna, still walking backwards, must have sensed it, too. Her eyes opened wide at John as a signal. John mouthed the words “Watch her.”
“Where are you taking us?” Rachel asked loudly, happily. Then she stepped in a circle so everyone could hear and added in sing-song, “I hope you’re not taking us where I think you’re taking us. I wouldn’t want to go thaaaaay errrrr . . . ”
That was it. John moved up a step and was prepared to throw his body in front of hers—anything—to protect her, but he didn’t have the chance.
Rachel turned and looked at John as if he were standing on a precipice from which she had just fallen. Her eyes rolled and before he could get to her, she was falling like a tree, sideways into a crooked stack of boxed labware, half of the boxes opened—the worst of all possible targets. There was a sound of smashing and crunching glass as her seizure-stiffened body crushed through the stack on the way to the floor.
“Rachel!”
John and Donna were at her side in seconds, but there was nothing they could do with their hands bound behind them except squat and look horrified. Lying face down, Rachel twitched and pounded against the shattered glass. They could hear the grinding sound.
“Help her!” Donna screamed.
