Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Bob smiled like an eight-year-old. He hopped off the couch to help the old man clean up, and when Marcus offered him cookies, he helped himself to three of them then wrapped three more in a napkin for the ride home.

  Through the frosted kitchen window, Marcus saw a figure crossing the field in the dimming light of evening. Snow up to his waist, Paul made his way to the new research facility and snuck inside. Once inside, the lights remained dark.

  “Better get going,” Bob said, zipping up his coat. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Marcus followed him to the door. “How did your sister die?”

  Bob’s hand froze on the twisted knob. He remained like that for a full second, even considered pretending he didn’t hear the question.

  “A boating accident.”

  “How dreadful.” Marcus put his hand on the man’s arm. “Must have been heartbreaking.”

  “She couldn’t swim.”

  “Did you see her? When she died?”

  Bob started shaking his head and didn’t stop. It was like someone had flicked a bobblehead in zero gravity, a needle stuck in an album’s groove. He was trying to follow up with the story he had told so many times that he’d come to believe it. She’d fallen off a bridge and never came up, that was what happened. No one could do anything about it.

  Marcus eased the real memory into the light.

  “Did you see her?” he asked again.

  Head still shaking, Bob answered, “Yes.”

  “You did. And what happened?”

  “She had…” He swallowed hard. “She broke my fishing pole when we were on vacation. She was always breaking my stuff even when I told her not to touch it.”

  His voice shrank.

  “So I got mad and I shoved her.”

  The words stopped.

  Marcus let him swim in the memory that welled up from the deep, a leviathan that swallowed him whole. He slid down the slimy gullet and went through the intestines where memories—bad, bad memories—had been stuffed and forgotten.

  He stood on the bridge and watched her flail.

  He could’ve saved her, but she was always getting into his things. He just wanted her to go away, wished she’d never been born. He watched her go under, her hand the last part of her to splash beneath the cold, cold water.

  Her knee scraping the sandy bottom.

  Lungs burning wet and full.

  He could feel her now. Could feel her go cold. Feel her heart thudding in her ears, the sun rippling above—

  “Robert.”

  Bob jumped off the floor like he was pushing off the sandy bottom, sucking for air, spitting and blubbering. Tears streamed into his coarse beard. Completely vulnerable.

  And open.

  “I will need some help in the next couple of weeks,” Marcus said. “Will you help me?”

  Bob nodded. Of course he would.

  “You’re a good boy.”

  He sped off into the night, the snowmobile carving a new track. Yes, a track. One that Marcus would need. It was better that he would want to help Marcus than to be forced to. After all, his heart wants what it wants.

  The old man told it what to want.

  “You did him a lot of good,” Mother said. “I don’t believe he deserved as much mercy.”

  Who was Marcus to judge? His sins outweighed most.

  Before he closed the door to seal out winter, he noticed a small light on the third floor of the George R. Simpson building. Nothing anyone else would see. Mother noticed it, too.

  He would need Bob’s help very soon.

  Paul

  3:20 am.

  Paul jolted upright, wrinkles imprinted where his cheek had lain against his sleeve. Like deer listening for another twig, he held still. Not breathing.

  It could’ve been the storm that spattered the third-floor window with fistfuls of sleet he heard, heaving long frigid breaths against the building. It was still whiteout conditions, the ground a hazy oblivion through frosted glass.

  In the lab, the rhythmic strokes of the fabricator hummed and hissed. The glass walls were dark (research had already shown improved stability when fabricating without exposure to ultraviolent light). The outline of the organ’s form was barely visible. It looked something like a bowl.

  The most complicated piece yet.

  He rolled the chair to the computer and tapped the space bar. The job was supposed to be finished by sunrise. Estimated completion was now mid-morning. It was too late to stop, not without risking complete malfunction; it had to be finished when he wrapped it.

  All of the major organs were done, wrapped and hidden beneath the oven. This one, though, was complex and critical. A faulty kidney could be repaired, a leaky stomach patched.

  The brain had to be perfect.

  The storm was a lucky break. Raine called it a blessing. God is good. Whether it was God, statistics or good karma, it didn’t matter. The storm gave him the ten to twelve hours he needed.

  The blizzard would continue until noon. That would be just enough time. If someone walked through four feet of snow, he could simply abort, run the cleanup program and try another time. He had dug through an eight-foot snowdrift just to open the front doors. No one would be coming.

  Still, it would’ve been nice to finish before sunrise.

  The fabricator’s hypnotic thrum wooed his eyes to close. He stood up. There would be time to sleep later, when this was all over. Besides, the monitors would see his location in the lab, they’d know he was working. He tried to set these jobs up and let them run from a distance, but this one needed his guidance. If they came prying, he’d have to be there to clean up.

  They said his locator was still blinking out despite repeated attempts to recalibrate. They accused him of sophisticated tampering, but he had nothing to do with his occasional disappearance from their radar. If he was honest, he was counting on their incompetence to avoid investigating where he was at. It was a horrible plan.

  How am I going to do this?

  He had a crawlspace full of Jamie that couldn’t simply be popped together like plastic doll parts. And beneath that question was an oil slick of doubt and more contaminated questions that invaded his sleep, niggling beneath his scalp.

  Why?

  That was the big question. He knew why he was doing this—she was his daughter. It was his job to protect her, to keep her from harm. He failed her, though; he thought if he surrendered peacefully when the People came to the farm that nothing bad would happen.

  But why am I doing this?

  Paul pried open the blinds; he thought he saw someone. He rubbed his eyes. Marcus Anderson’s cabin was obscured in the whiteout. Darkened dust whirled against the glass.

  He blinked lazily.

  Conjuring up a memory, he looked into the storm and saw the outlines of trees and a distant outline of a pitched roof. He could smell the hay, the fresh-cut grass. The hint of a spring shower lingered.

  He squinted into the dark as if that would bring the hallucination into focus. He just wanted to see her, even from a distance. It would make the night go faster if he saw her carrying the steel buckets of feed. The shadows were long. It was early in the morning, that was when Cali would feed the horses. The colors of the farm were vivid, the hallucination fully developed.

  Like he was there.

  He was jerked back by the sound. His fingers still plying apart the blinds, ears pricked, nervous system lit. Dark and gray, it was impossible to see anything outside. The monitors would’ve pulled up on a snowmobile. Did he miss the engine’s report?

  He shouldn’t have given in to the hallucinations. Now was the time to be vigilant, not dreamy.

  Something wet slapped the floor. A soaking wet towel or a slab of meat. Paul tensed. A minute later, he heard it again. Paul waited, then went to the lab door, looking through the mesh glass. He pulled the door handle, the greased hinges silently opening.

  A form stood in the shadows. “What are you doing?” someone said.

&nbs
p; “Dennis?” Paul answered.

  “What… what are you doing in the lab?”

  “How’d you get here?”

  He took choppy steps, his legs stiff, feet slapping. Paul blocked the doorway. Dennis moved into the dim light, cheeks bright red, twin rivers of snot running over his lips.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Where’s your coat?” Paul asked.

  “Why are you here?”

  He pushed through the door, snow falling off his frozen jeans. His feet were bare. He couldn’t have walked all the way from his cabin, not in this weather. Not like that. He was going to lose toes.

  Sleepwalkers don’t ask questions.

  Paul stayed in front of him, bobbing and weaving to keep his line of sight off the humming fabricator. Dennis stepped into the soft computer glow. His lips were blue.

  “What’s in the fabricator, Paul?”

  “Work.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “What are you doing, Dennis? You’re frozen.”

  Violent shivers attacked in short bursts. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, tight white flesh drawn over his knuckles.

  Dennis attempted to get around him. Paul put a hand on his chest when the computer chimed, a new execution signaled. The next phase began. A digital image rotated on the screen.

  Jamie’s disembodied head looked at them.

  “You… you…”

  “Dennis, no. This is… you wouldn’t understand. Let me explain—”

  “You-you-you… you’re going to get us shut down.” He leaned into Paul. “They’ll shut it all down, Paul!”

  “No, they won’t. Just…” He couldn’t tell him that he’d been fabricating her for over a year and no one knew. “Listen, I have this under control, Dennis. We don’t have to tell anyone. I have a… I’ve been using a program to wipe the computers.”

  “No, no, no, no…”

  “They won’t know, Dennis! They don’t know! I’ve been using it for a while, testing it. There’s no trace of what we’re doing, you understand what I’m saying? This is like a test.”

  Dennis left small puddles on the floor, shaking his head in time to the word no. The sleepwalking reverie was gone. He was completely awake now. Lips quivering, fists clenched.

  “They’ll shut us down,” he muttered, over and over.

  “They made me do it!” Paul shouted. “You don’t understand. You never had anyone in your life, I know that. They never took anyone away from you. If they did, you’d be doing the same thing. None of this matters to you, all you need is a lab. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the Settlement or a corporation—”

  “No, no, no, no…”

  “You shouldn’t have come up here, Dennis. What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

  “No, no, no, no… NO!” His hand shook. “NO!”

  “Dennis, calm down. Let’s talk about this.”

  “This… this is unsanctioned, Paul. They-they-they won’t let you do… they’ll shut us down, Paul!”

  A maelstrom of thoughts jetted like gamma rays. Paul squinted through the mental sandstorm, raising his hand like that would shield him from Dennis’s exploding mind—a mind showering him with fear and anxiety.

  Afraid they would shut down the facilities.

  Afraid the Settlement would go back to year one.

  Afraid he would sit in his cabin alone.

  Why is he here?

  The eye of the psychic storm passed. Calm returned. Dennis blinked away the melting crystals from his bunchy eyelashes, the baby blue irises cut to thin rings by expanding black pupils.

  A thought formed.

  Not one that Paul could see, but a thought formed in Dennis he could feel like a pebble in his sock. A thought that would connect with the monitors, tell them what he found, secure their favor, get rid of Paul and maybe, just maybe they would let Dennis stay in the lab because Paul was the one—

  “No!” Paul shouted.

  Dennis’s head snapped and he stumbled, waving his arms. The sound his head made on the floor resembled something like a melon dropped from the second floor.

  The fabricator continued to hum.

  But nothing else moved.

  Raine

  Nix and Joshua.

  They were on the porch, sitting on the rickety top step, Nix helping their son carve with a bowie knife. Shep lay in the grass, tongue out, slimy stick under his legs.

  Raine could walk up to them, could sit down and ask what he was carving and what they’d done that day, but they wouldn’t answer. They never did. Because this was a dream—a flimsy thin movie, a string of memories that pretended to be her husband and son.

  This was not dreamland.

  The front door slammed open. Raine bolted off the floor. She’d fallen asleep in front of the fireplace, the blackened logs dying in a thin stream of smoke.

  Paul stood in the doorway. Winter bellowed icy spittle inside, little diamonds trickling across the hardwood and sticking to her wool blanket.

  It was still dark out.

  He wasn’t supposed to be back until daylight. He clutched a bag at his side, stumbled into the couch and fell on the floor.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s outside,” he said.

  “What? What’s outside?”

  His next attempts to speak were slurred by stiff lips. She pulled him upright, leaning him against the couch. His skin was icy. He tried again, but she only caught one word.

  “Accident.”

  “What accident? Is everything all right?”

  He shook his head, huffing.

  “What’s outside, Paul?”

  “I didn’t…I didn’t mean to…”

  “What? Why are you back?” His fingers were locked around the bag. It appeared empty. He always brought the fabrications home hidden in the hollow shells of various components. It was unlikely anyone would be out there to stop him, but he almost froze to death in the storm.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

  His breathing began to thaw—big gulps separated by shaky pauses. He looked at the door.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Sorry for what?” She shook him with knotted panic. “Sorry for what, Paul?”

  She let go and stood. The front door appeared to recede, a surreal dreamlike wobble; the bogeyman was at her heels and she couldn’t run. Her toes were marbles on the wood floor, her ankles rusty hinges. The brass knob burned her hand. She braced against the door and cracked it open. Eyes watering in the subzero gale, she peered through fuzzy eyelashes to see a dark form half-buried in the snow.

  She slammed the door and bowed her head, wishing for the security of the rosary beads. Her lips fluttered in prayer.

  “What have you done?” She turned. “What have you done?”

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “What have you done?”

  “I stopped him from reporting us. I only wanted to block the thought, but…”

  She began walking and praying, hand on her forehead, face to the ceiling. She wasn’t going to die. She couldn’t die. Nix and Joshua depended on her, they were in dreamland—her dreamland—waiting for her to return, and now there was a dead body on her steps and a crawlspace of body parts.

  He held the bag with both hands.

  She dropped next to him and peeled away his dead fingers one by one. The bag thumped with the hollowness of a husked coconut. She pulled down the zipper. The orange glow of the fireplace’s dying embers glittered off the preservation wrap. She reached for it.

  “Jesus.”

  The fabricator had printed half of Jamie’s head, upside down, stopping just below the nose. The bald scalp soft on her fingertips, the eyelids squeezed tight like a child wishing away a nightmare.

  “I never should’ve let you,” she whispered.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “No. No, this is insane. What were you thinking,
Paul? Did you think we were just going to glue her together and live happily ever after? Huh?”

  His head hung dead, eyes dry. His grief a limb long pruned from a tree, rotten and alone.

  “This isn’t her, Paul.” She flipped the skull upright, her finger slipping into the hollow of an open sinus. “Even if it worked, you can’t bring her back. You understand? I can’t die for this, Paul. You get caught and they shut us off and I can’t fucking die!”

  She dropped the thing in his lap and stormed away with finger and thumb buried in her eyes, plugging the weepy dikes that never seemed to dry up. Why couldn’t she cut off the emotions like him? Why couldn’t she be more methodical? Because if she was him, if she had a sample of Nix or Joshua and someone said that maybe they could piece them together an organ at a time, she would risk her life to do it. She’d risk everything. Everybody.

  Even put a dead body on the steps.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Dennis. He… I don’t know why he was there.”

  “Doesn’t matter. What are we going to do?”

  He studied the bald scalp in his hands. “We take him back to his cabin, put him in bed. No one will find him for a few days. If the storm holds up, maybe a week.”

  “Then what?”

  He shook his head.

  One step at a time. She’d lived the last couple years that way. Take one step and let God show you the next. Surely God didn’t go away just because there was a dead body.

  They got dressed and stepped onto the porch. As they hauled the dead weight onto Paul’s shoulder and started into the night, she wondered if this didn’t count. Maybe if bricks weren’t real, this wasn’t murder.

  She’d have to accept her own unreality then.

  But one step at a time.

  ______

  Dennis’s cabin was tucked beneath trees, the snow drifted along the front porch. The front door was a black rectangle. As they drudged along the tree line, they realized why it appeared so ominous.

  The door was open.

  A white dusting had settled on the sofas and coffee table like a lumberyard. Small piles had blown against the fireplace and table legs.

  Paul collapsed on the couch along with Dennis’s body, a cloud of crystals whooshing toward the ceiling. He labored to breathe. Raine’s chest hurt; she was numb from the waist down. The scarf around her face was wet, delicate flakes of ice clinging to the fabric like cockleburs.