Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

He locked the doors.

  “Stay back there,” he said. “I’ll be right back, Jamie. I promise, I won’t leave you. I’m going to get you out of there.”

  The sun had breached the trees, the jungle already steamy. Paul ran without stopping. He’d talk some sense into the old man. And if that didn’t work, he’d make him do it. Somehow, he’d make him. Because, before long, this island would crack them all like eggs.

  Paul was already cracking.

  That was a cross she was holding. Raine’s cross. The one she had on the Settlement, the one she carried to the dream disease lab.

  And now it’s here.

  Marcus

  The building chattered.

  Marcus snorted awake, his neck savagely twisted over the back of the wheelchair, pain spearing the back of his head. All the monitors were streaming newsfeeds from around the world. There was no recollection of falling asleep, just hazy glimpses of searching in long blank gaps.

  The night’s cache was spread across a tabletop, a collection of tubes and wires, clear plastic IV bags and a box of sterile needles encased in clear tubes of gel. They were neatly arranged in piles, unwrapped and displayed. But there were no directions for where wires went or what computer to use, what program to run.

  Even if that was all solved, there was the issue of the needle. He couldn’t hammer the thing into his forehead like a roofing nail. There was a stent and a precise method of insertion. He was out of options. If he died trying, then at least he wouldn’t die a slow death of dehydration and neck injuries.

  The chatter was back.

  It was in the hall, not one of the noisy newsfeeds.

  Marcus wheeled out and saw the elevator doors gnawing on an aluminum cane. He didn’t recall dropping the cane between the open doors, but then he couldn’t remember much with any clarity. The elevator gummed it with impatience, the bumpers bouncing in the doors’ tracks.

  The down arrow flashed.

  He quickly wheeled to the end of the hall. The dormitory and field were quiet and empty, and there was nothing directly below. Marcus went back to the lab to see Paul on one of the monitors. He was prying at a curved elevator door, the glass wall behind him shattered.

  He’s on the first floor.

  A sweatless wave of panic swept through him. How close had he come to waking up to Paul standing over him with vengeance on his breath. If not for the cane.

  “Hey! Let her go, Marcus! Let her go now!”

  He was talking to the old man. Does he see me?

  Three of the monitors projected views of Paul backing away from the elevator, looking up at a monitor. The first floor looked like a lobby with couches and chairs and at least a dozen monitors that all projected the same newsfeeds Marcus was watching. But the one above the elevator was filled with Marcus’s pasty gray face, dark age-spots spilled on his scalp like paint.

  “All she did was help you,” Paul said. “Let her go.”

  What the hell is he talking about? He did his best to go along with it. Clearly Marcus had an advantage. He just needed to figure out what it was.

  “You choked me, tried to murder me.”

  “And she stopped me. You owe her that. You want someone to pay for all your mistakes, take me. But let her go.”

  “Mistakes?”

  “You brought us here.”

  The ashes of anger swirled like a tiny twister. If it wasn’t for Marcus, Paul would still be on the Settlement with body parts under the cabin.

  “Her leg is shattered. She can’t walk. She won’t survive in there, Marcus. Let her go and leave us alone. We’ll do the same to you.”

  Marcus had locked them out of all the buildings, paranoia whispering in his ear. They’ll find a way into the tower. There might be controls in the other buildings. Get them. Get them first. He remembered, vaguely, they took refuge in the strange little hut, but he had no control of the door.

  Paul’s tone was pleading. He’d already lost Raine, he couldn’t stand to lose Jamie. His vulnerability stirred a wicked tang of power. It tasted sweet.

  “You’re still a threat.”

  Paul put his hands on his hips and bowed his head for a long moment. And then began prowling the first floor, studying the ceiling, the seams around the elevator. The elevator doors on the second floor began to chatter.

  “What are you doing?” Marcus said. “If I let her go, you will not harm me?”

  “I haven’t harmed you, not since you murdered Raine.”

  “I… I… no, no. That wasn’t my fault. Stop searching for a way up here, stop now. I will help you if you leave me alone.”

  Paul looked up at the monitor.

  “I’ll need a few minutes to, ah, get things undone,” Marcus added.

  “You have five minutes. That’s how long it will take me to walk there. If the cell is not open, I’ll return and destroy every monitor so that the next time you hear my voice, I’ll be standing in front of you.”

  “It’s a complicated matter, Paul. I can’t just undo it. I may need more time.”

  Paul began laughing. It was so loud that Marcus could hear it through the floor. “Why are you laughing? Stop that.”

  “You think you’re the victim?”

  “We’re all victims, Paul. Until you understand that, we will remain at a stalemate.”

  “You’re a sick bastard, Marcus. The shit you’ve done to the world and you think you’re a victim.”

  “I am trying to save the world, you ingrate. How do you not understand this? I had everything before this. I didn’t… there was no need for me to pursue the truth. I could’ve lived out my life in luxury, nothing could stop me.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “I… I…” He tried hard to find the words. There was no explanation. He was compelled to find the truth. Mother was there to push him forward, to tantalize him with those prophetic lines. He had to find the truth. He had to. That was not something he could explain. No one would understand the itch to come back home.

  Come back home? He wondered where the thought came from. “I don’t want this,” he muttered.

  He wanted to believe those words, but they were hollow. He did want this. Why?

  “You have five minutes.”

  “Wait… I give you my word… just wait a moment, Paul. Let me… I need to look.”

  Marcus wheeled around the room, scanning the various monitors. They were all newsfeeds. He was reluctant to call out commands and didn’t want Paul to see what he was doing. He needed to be on the third floor, that was where he controlled all the buildings. At the very least, he could find out where Jamie was and just what the hell was going on.

  But it was too much risk to get in the elevator with Paul down there. What if it took him to the first floor? No, he would wait until Paul was in the grassy field, far enough away that should he go down, there would be time to come back up.

  “Within the hour,” he called. “I will have your problem resolved within the hour, you have my word.”

  He expected laughter, but the lobby was empty.

  “Paul?” He searched all the angles. “Paul, I’ll need some time!” he shouted, hoping the volume would carry.

  Marcus slouched in the wheelchair. His knee was beginning to ache with shooting pains. He would wait at the window, wait until Paul was in sight and then push the wheelchair to the elevator, retrieve the cane and go to the third floor, where he would find out what was happening and access his leverage. Then he would consider helping.

  A newsfeed caught his eye.

  There was a large building on fire. One of the wings had become a crater, an explosion disintegrating the rooms and charring the remaining walls. Equipment was scattered like a tornado of fire had dropped on it. He recognized that building, had seen it from above the day he flew over it. The day he landed in front of it. The day he walked inside it.

  The Settlement.

  IV

  The son to be.

  The Archetype’s Knowledge

&n
bsp; A commercial.

  An air freshener, maybe.

  Bob sat in his fat chair, watching a woman vacuum carpet with a cat rubbing against her leg. He couldn’t see the connection between the cat and the vacuum, although it did stink something fierce in his room. Maybe he needed one of those air fresheners.

  He sank into the cracked leather like a suit of armor, his arms lead weights. His belly, an overloaded sack of lard. At some point his ass itched. Now it felt like the rest of him. Numb. Dead, fucking numb.

  It was a pleasant buzz, sensations that hummed with sweetness, a sort of opium high that leached from his bones and quietly saturated the rest of him. Home sweet home, it was. He wanted to be nowhere else but sitting in that chair. Which was good. He wasn’t sure he could move if he wanted to.

  But the smell was goddamn awful.

  The commercial ended and the program continued. He’d been watching a rerun of a sitcom, something about a single mom selling weed, but now it was something different. He couldn’t remember changing the channel, couldn’t even feel the remote trapped beneath his hand.

  A fishing show.

  Yeah, he liked those, too.

  It was a boat with two professionals. Their advice seemed to burble like a stream despite the glassy lake they fished. Rods bending, lines tight, they spun their reels and hauled catch after catch into the boat.

  Bob could feel the slimy scales in his hand, could smell the briny life flail against the yellow threads of the net. His eyes burned as the boat sped to a new fishing hole, the wind blistering his face, stealing his breath. The location was a stream that started out quiet and wide. A hot tear rolled down his cheek.

  He wasn’t blinking.

  At some point, he lost track of the fishermen. Now it was just him in the boat and the current was picking up. There were boulders and waves. The stream transformed into a river, the water white-tipped and hungry. Bob swayed with the turns, trying to lean into the current. He didn’t know who was driving, couldn’t turn around to yell at the dumb fuck for steering them toward a wall of granite.

  His teeth ground together like bricks.

  The bow splintered on the lip of an immovable boulder, its mass undercut by an unrelenting current until a sharp edge jutted just above the water. The momentum threw Bob into the frigid current.

  Fed by mountain streams, his extremities were the first to go icy. Lost in the stir, there was no up or down, only tumbling. He hit his head. A splash of pain lit behind his eyes, a small patch of warmth gushing from his scalp before cold water iced it numb.

  His lungs burned for air.

  He reached for a window of light, a watery glimmer of hope, felt air on his fingertips before rolling over to take another blow, this one breaking open his bottom lip, spreading red iron beneath his tongue.

  He lunged again, but survival was out of reach. The skeletal structure of a bridge was too far away, too high. He broke into daylight on his third attempt, floating like driftwood long enough to see the people near the shore. Someone was weeping.

  He tried to shout. Warm water gushed over his tongue.

  “Bob!” someone shouted. It came through a straw followed by thumping.

  Bob’s father was one of the people on shore. He had waded into the river, water that soaked his jeans up to his waist, splashed his shirt. Bob thought he was coming for him, would save him, but his father was too far away. Besides, he was holding something.

  Someone.

  “Hey! Bob!” Something rattled. A doorknob.

  Bob went down for the final time. And over he went, down he sank.

  Heavy. Heavy, heavy.

  “Bob! Hey, what are you—what the…” The voice was louder this time, clear. It was followed by gagging.

  “I think he shit himself,” someone said.

  A form stepped into the white swirling water, bubbles flitting around the dark, fuzzy edges. It leaned closer. The details of eyes and a nose came into focus; the slit between two lips moved.

  “Bob! Can you hear me?”

  The water went still, but the cold still trapped him. A fish in a bucket.

  “Get medical,” he heard. “Now!”

  But Bob didn’t see who said it. All he saw was the glassy surface of a calm lake, the bouncing bow of a boat heading toward a stream that would transform into a raging river where he would crash again. Where he would drown, again.

  And again.

  Jamie

  Water lapped the shores of Jamie’s dream.

  At first, she thought she had fallen into the ocean, had sunk to the bottom. But the ocean floor was hard and unforgiving. She woke to splashing and the rattle of a pill bottle.

  “Don’t move.” Paul poured water into a cup from a plastic jug. “You need to get something in your stomach.”

  Peeled orange slices were arranged on a plate with a banana and toast. Citrusy aroma dampened the moist smell of despair seeping from the curved walls. The round skylights looked down with gray eyes.

  The sun was low. It was late.

  He slid the plate like a shuffleboard disc, rolling the bottle of water after it. Shivering, she took a few bites. He tossed the pill bottle.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Painkillers. And something for infection.”

  He watched her swallow the capsules. No longer shirtless, he’d found new clothing in the dormitory. A stack of blankets and pillows were on the floor. Her clothes were soaked with sweat; her shorts, though, were especially wet. She most likely pissed herself. It had been almost twelve hours since the cell bit her.

  Paul held up a small cross. She saw it in the cell; that was what she was reaching for when everything went wrong. Because she remembered those sticks.

  Remembered that cross.

  “I dreamed this,” he said. “When I was in the lab, I saw it on the bed. She brought it with her, clutched it for good luck. She held it by the end.”

  Paul raised it to the skylight’s pale beam.

  “I always let her believe Joshua somehow sent it to her. It gave her comfort, thinking that he was safe, that he was somehow watching her. She always believed that dreamland was just out of reach, another reality that was right here, neither one seeing the other except when we dream.”

  He held it like someone palming a baby bird, nodding. Perhaps remembering.

  “How’d it get here?” Jamie asked.

  Paul laid the cross just inside the bars. “I blew up the Settlement.”

  “You what?”

  “I set the bricks free by destroying the power grid in the Visitors’ Center. There’s no more perimeter and the monitors can’t swipe them. They’re free to go.”

  A long pause. “What are you talking about, Paul?”

  “I dreamed it, last night. I fell asleep sometime just before daybreak and found myself on the Settlement again, this time in the Visitors’ Center. It was just like I remembered it. And then I just decided to blow it up.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There was an explosion, that’s all I remember.”

  “That was just a dream, Paul.”

  “This was in a dream, too.” He tossed the cross next to her. “And now it’s here.”

  She shook her head. He was under stress; she was coming out of shock and couldn’t feel her leg from the knee down. They were connecting dots, looking for patterns that weren’t there. The chances there was a cross like this were slim, but maybe they’d brought it with them. We couldn’t have.

  “Someone else did it,” she said. “Doesn’t mean you blew up the Settlement.”

  “The newsfeeds carried the story. I saw it at the tower, aerial reports showing the entire west wing destroyed. Some of the monitors lost their lives.” He sighed. “That’s what I blew up in the dream, Jamie. The exact same spot.”

  “But… maybe the newsfeeds are fake.”

  “How would someone know what I was dreaming?”

  “I don’t know, Paul. It just…” She dropped the last b
ite of toast. “It doesn’t sound possible.”

  “How is any of this possible?”

  “Marcus is doing something.”

  “He’s not going to let you out.” He leaned into the bars. “I don’t even think he knows what’s happening.”

  A thick wave of panic swam through her, clinging in her throat, the room slowly turning. Memories of carnival rides and vomiting filled her head, the time she fell off her bike and broke her leg.

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered.

  “I’ll get you out, search for tools in the morning. Can you scoot closer to me?” When she didn’t respond, his voice cut through the fog. “Jamie, look at me and listen. I will get you out of here. I just need you to move closer, a little at a time. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “When you’re ready.”

  It took a few minutes to work up the courage. The leg was dead, but the memory of the shocking pain was still fresh. She lifted her buttocks off the concrete and slid a few inches at a time. The strangeness of bones wobbling where they shouldn’t be moving spun the room a little faster.

  The pills kicked in somewhere at the halfway point, infusing her with false confidence. She listened to Paul and took it an inch at a time until his voice was in her ear.

  “There you go. Now lie back, slowly. Good, good.”

  Her head fell onto the heavenly softness of a foam pillow. He managed to get her hips off the floor to slide a cushion beneath her. Then he lifted the dirty gown, peeking at the leg. An iron tang of blood and bruised flesh puffed out.

  She didn’t have to ask if it was bad.

  Paul made a splint from trim he’d broken from the doorway, wrapped the leg with a clean sheet and loosely duct taped it above the knee.

  He sighed. Swallowed.

  “What now?” she asked. “You get me out of here, you fix my leg and then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Night darkened the skylights, the round eyes closing. Paul made his own bed next to her, a row of iron bars separating them. Her leg was beginning to throb, but she didn’t worry about it for long. Sleep, it seemed, was undeterred. It would fall on her like a thick flowery breath that filled her head with sweetness, blot her mind like an inky rag.