Union

by Brian Spangler

  “What were you doing in there?” he asked, motioning to the blood vault. The young woman looked down at her hand, tending to a blood soaked wrap and then glanced at the blood vault. Phil searched the nearest lab table behind him, picking off a bottle wash and a towel, and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and then asked. “Do you know what’s in that room?”

  “I do,” he answered. “But do you know?” Without thinking, he leaned closer to the young woman and began to help clean the cut on her hand. In his many lifetimes enduring the machine, he had never seen anyone injured.

  She must be aware, he thought. A hundred questions came to the front of his mind like a gunshot. So much to ask her.

  “That’s why I was in there,” she answered. “To find out. It’s a vault with blood samples, but I’m not sure whose.”

  “Well, that part is simple,” he began. “The samples are us. That is… you and I and the rest of us.”

  “But why?” she asked, shaking her head. Phil suddenly felt overwhelmed, enamored with the conversation, finding her expressions adorable. He found a life in her eyes that he couldn’t get enough of… as if he were starving to listen to her.

  “We’re the workforce,” he said glumly and immediately he saw her expression change. “Not everyone is aware in the same manner that we are, so life here isn’t bad.”

  “Aware?”

  “I’ll explain that, but first I have to ask, what is your name?”

  “Isla,” she told him. He shook his head, excited to be talking to someone. A smile stretched from the corners of his mouth. She gave him an odd look, and her expression quickly turned to fear. “What? What is it?”

  “Aware,” he answered, having suddenly lost the million little different things he wanted to say. “It’s a rare and a beautiful thing.”

  “Okay,” she answered, sounding frustrated. “But what does that mean.”

  “You don’t always listen,” he answered and lifted his chin toward the lights. “I mean, you don’t feel the obligation pulling on your gut like the others do.” She nodded cautiously, her eyes darting from the lights and then back to him.

  “So the others here aren’t the same?”

  “Nope,” Phil answered, shaking his head. “Well, on occasion a few will become aware, but the machine won’t reanimate them if it knows.”

  “Then why did the machine bring us back?” she asked, staring at the blood vault. Phil looked over the lab and then back to Isla.

  “Must be something that you can do,” he told her but wasn’t entirely sure. “Something that only you can do.”

  Isla nodded her head, seeming to understand, and added. “You might say that.”

  “How many times?” Phil asked. The highest count that he had ever seen was ten years. A young man with a penchant for engineering—a gift really. The young man had become aware almost immediately, and with his gift for working computers, the machine brought him back ten times. On the eleventh year, Phil couldn’t find him—the machine decided he was a risk. A chess game they had started—the board’s pieces fashioned out of trash—remained unfinished, waiting for him to make the next move. Did the machine know? Phil wondered. A concern came to him.What if speaking to her, like he had with the young man put her at risk. “How many times have you been brought back?”

  Isla paused, saying nothing, but instead fixed her stare on a shelf beneath a lab table. Phil followed her eyes and saw a set of red books—lab journals. Picking up the oldest, he thumbed through the pages and found the odd scientific entries. But he also found personal entries and cryptic, puzzling entries. He sighed, admiring her strategy of writing things down where the machine’s computers could not wander: a book. Leafing through another lab journal, he found the notes intended to pass to herself.

  “Those are my lab journals,” she exclaimed quietly. His insides warmed with the sound of her voice interrupting him. Phil wanted to listen to it some more. “I know they are just lab journals, but there are things I write in them…”

  “Things from before,” he said, finishing her thought. “Like a clue or a message?” Her face brightened. Phil had plenty of his own clues—a lifetime of them. But they were all in his head, and he got to relive them every time they brought him back. He flicked a quick glance at the lights to make sure they were safe.

  “Yes!” She almost yelled, sounding thrilled. “But how would you know about that?” Phil shelved the lab journal and counted out the others.

  “Thirty years?” he asked, knowing he did not answer her question. “Thirty is a good length of time to be aware. It is hard though isn’t it? Being alone” Her earlier excitement faded, and she closed her arms around her front.

  “Sometimes,” she answered, offering a shy nod, and began to pick at the cut on her hand. Her hands moved clumsily, and he realized that his questions made her nervous. “I’ve been trying to understand why I’m here.”

  “We’re here to do a job,” he started. “But there is more. I helped build this machine. I helped build seven of them.”

  “If you helped build the machine, how can you be here?”

  Phil motioned to the lab journals and at once her expression changed, understanding.

  “Same as you,” he answered. “We’re good at what we do. That’s why they keep bringing us back, but I’m planning to end the cycle. End it forever.”

  4

  Declan collapsed to the floor of their room, gasping and trying to catch his breath. He sobbed as images of his mother and sister raced across his mind. Images of their bodies turning gray and then tumbling to the bottom of the machine’s enormous pit. Crunching sounds rung in his head like a tinnitus—incessant and never ending.

  And they never screamed, he thought gravely. Not once. Not a sound.

  He clutched Sammi’s lock of hair, thankful he had a small piece of her to help him pass through the maze that was the machine’s corridors. But would it let them pass to the outside, to the black sands that lead to their home and to their Commune where they belonged?

  She doesn’t know what this place is, he considered and wondered how to convince her that the machine was a monster feeding on them. Clones… over and over.

  He shook his head and cried and felt sick to his stomach as he tried to reason with what he saw and what he thought he knew. When the door opened, Declan jumped back to his feet and braced for more of the bodies to rush him. Instead, he found Sammi’s perfectly shaped figure, standing in the open door, waiting.

  “Sammi!” he yelled, his heart gushing with relief. “We have to talk. This place… this place isn’t what it seems.”

  The sound of the door whooshed closed as Sammi gingerly stepped into the room, and for a moment, Declan completely lost her in the darkness. He waited for his eyes to adjust. He sensed that she had stepped closer to him. A faint image of her came out of the darkness, and from her expression he realized how he must look. If only she had seen what he had seen. But then Declan saw that something was different and that it isn’t at all like he had seen with his mother and sister. There were no lines or creases or paling gray skin. No straying hair or sagging bags beneath their cloudy eyes. None of it. Sammi looked more beautiful and more perfect than he had ever seen her. She looked radiant.

  “I know,” she finally said, swiping at an errant tear. “Declan, we have to go before the machine doesn’t let us.”

  “I was going to say the same thing. But what do you mean? What do you know? What happened?” he quickly rattled, unable to stop the flood of questions. And before she tried to answer him, he pulled her into his arms and held her. He needed to hold her and to tell her what he had seen. “My mother and sister are gone. It was the machine Sammi. The machine killed them, and I saw what the machine is.”

  “I’m so sorry Declan,” she said, crying with him. She took his hand in hers—her skin felt warm and soft—and placed his palm on her belly. “Do you feel that?”

  Declan stepped back, his legs suddenly w
eak. He looked to her middle, and while there was nothing to see, he was certain he felt something. “Sammi?” he asked, his voice lifting and his eyes growing wide and wet. “Are you? Are we?” She nodded, embracing him and held him tightly. A storm of emotions tugged and squeezed Declan’s heart as he felt the new between them while having just seen the life of his mother and sister disappear.

  “We have to leave Sammi,” Declan exclaimed again. “And we have to do it now. We’re not safe here. Not anymore.”

  “But how… how do we get out of here? We—that is, your mom and sister and me—we were allowed to leave before, but that was only to get you, to save you, to bring you inside.”

  “I’m not sure,” he answered, shaking his head and taking her hand, leading her to the door. “What about them?” Declan fixed a stare at the lights, noticing a faint glow of begin to shine. An alarm, he thought, but dismissed it, feeling the urgency to run raging like a fire.

  “I don’t hear them anymore,” Sammi began, motioning behind her to the lights. “I can hardly even look at them! But I think the machine knows, Declan. I think the machine knows about us… and I think that maybe that is why the machine had us bring you inside.” Declan laid his hand flat against her middle, hoping to feel another nudge from the innocent life they had started.

  “All the more reason to get us out of here, to get us back home,” he told her and turned to scour the room, scrambling, looking for anything that might be help them.

  Declan ripped a sheet from the bed and waved it high into the air, throwing out the folds until it was flat. With his teeth, he gripped a corner and tore into the fabric, tasting the clean threads and spitting them from between his teeth. Within minutes, he had twelve long stretches of material. He glanced at Sammi and encouraged her to pick up the strips of material. She shook her head, quizzically, uncertain of what he was doing.

  “A tether,” he told her. And at once she understood and knelt down to braid three of the loose strands. “We’ll have to go through the big hall, the main hub. And when we do, I want to make sure that we’re tethered together.” He braided the other loose strips of the bed sheet, tying the frayed ends to Sammi’s braided ends, tightening the knot until the fabric creaked under the pressure of his hands. When the tether strap was completed, and tied off between them, Declan lead them to the door.

  “I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” Sammi confessed. A shudder of fear shook her words. “I’m terrified Declan.”

  “I am too,” he assured her. “But we don’t have a choice.”

  When they stepped closer to the door, it opened, surprising him. Deep in his gut, he imagined that the machine’s computer systems would have flagged them somehow, locking them inside the room, imprisoning them until it was ready to use them like lab rats.

  A sea of bodies marched by the opening, staring ahead blankly, ignorant of their presence. As they jumped into the line of bodies, taking the first steps of their escape, they tried to match the pace of the others as the door whooshed closed behind them. Declan reached behind him to take Sammi’s hand into his, squeezing it and assuring her that he had her. The tether strap swung down beneath them but stayed tight in the binds he tied. His mind raced with uncertainty as he tried to figure out where exactly it was that they could go in this mammoth labyrinth. He squeezed again, gripping Sammi’s hand, realizing for the first time that he held his whole family in his hand.

  Forward, was the only thought that came to him. Just move forward to the hub, but he had no idea where to go after that.

  5

  Janice Gilly carefully brushed away the grains of sand from her chin. She winced at the sting of the cuts on her lips and chin. Straightening herself, the pain in her back was far worse. Harold sneered while hiding behind a taller man, poking his head out as if to catch the hurtful emotion spill from her eyes. Richard nursed a ragged cut above his eye but turned to Janice to help. She saw the shame and embarrassment of failing to protect them in his face. His hands shook as he spilled fresh water onto a torn cloth. She tried to steady them, taking hold of the cloth and guiding him as he began to wipe away the blood and dirt from her face.

  “Thank you,” she managed to get out, taking the cloth from his hands. “And thank you for trying to stop them, too.”

  He half nodded, and her heart ached for him and the shame he must have been feeling. But there was no way he could have fended off their attackers. Richard stabbed Harold with a stare and stepped closer as if to finish what was started.

  “Now now,” the tall man intervened. “I’m sorry my scouts attacked. That was never the intention, and I promise you that a punishment will be swift and firm.”

  Richard backed away, resigning to help Janice try to recover from what Harold had done to her. She flinched at the sound of cloth tearing, but then saw that Richard had torn some of his coveralls to make a bandage.

  “Just exactly who is us?” Janice asked, sounding revolted. She winced again as the swell on her lip pulsed with her racing heart. “Who are you?”

  Her first thoughts were that Harold had joined the Outsiders, raping and pillaging anyone who had made the unfortunate mistake of crossing their paths. But that was not what she thought when the tall man came to her rescue. Harold was on top of her, and just as he was about to take her, she felt the air rush across her like a rare wind coming off the ocean. A moment later, the tall man was helping her to sit up, offering fresh water and brushing away some of what Harold had down to her.

  Taller than anyone at their Commune, nobody came close to reaching the man’s shoulders. With hair pulled back tight, dragging behind him in a long tail, his face was square and rugged and eclipsed with a thick brow above his sunken eyes. With a fixed look that was hard and made her nervous, Janice wondered if he had ever smiled. He was the obvious leader of a dozen or more that followed him, including Harold. There were woman and children in the group, as well as other men who carried, or dragged large packs.

  “You call us the Outsiders,” he finally answered, but she could see at once that he disliked the name. For a moment, she thought he was going to spit as if ridding his mouth of the word. “But we’re not at all the violent people that your stories describe.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Richard said, shaking his head and waving a hand at Harold. “How do you explain the attack?”

  “Gilly had that coming,” Harold jabbed. “Been teasing me with those—” Harold’s words were cut-off by a quick backhand from the group’s leader. Harold’s nose blossomed into a wide splash of red as he tumbled onto his rear. Janice couldn’t help but smile a little. She tried to press her lips firm, like she had so many times before in her classroom, knowing how the children would jump in and laugh along with her. She managed to hold her laugh, but felt the smile grow as Harold squirmed along the sand and tended to his bloodied nose.

  “What Harold did was unfortunate,” the group’s leader answered. “As you can see, we’re still trying to work with him… and a few others. There was a time when more of us were like him, but that isn’t who we are today.”

  “Then why stay hidden from us?” she asked. “Why not join our enter our Commune?”

  The leader wiped the blood from his hands and fixed a stare at her and then to Richard, waiting to answer. Janice felt uncomfortable in the bubble of silence and wondered what it was that she had said that was wrong.

  “It is your Commune that cannot be trusted,” he finally said. “The machine doesn’t exist without your Commune. They are one.”

  “What do you mean?” Richard asked, raising his voice.

  “In time,” the leader said, “But first I need to tend to my people.”

  Janice said nothing, but wanted to discount what he professed. She decided to wait, and though she took his words with uncertainty, she heard the sincerity in his voice.

  With a quick snap of his fingers, the leader motioned to the group and without a word, everyone began to work. Large packs were unfurled and spread ac
ross the sands before being stood up to become what she thought were some kind of teepee. At one time, they might have been called teepees. The fog in her mind was still thick, but she remembered the name from one of Andie’s history lesson about early America. The other packs were opened too, revealing everything the small group could need to spend the night on the beach.

  As if on queue, Harold quickly wiped the remaining blood from his face and entered the center of activity. There he dropped to his knees, resigning to the work before him, and began to dig a small pit in the sand. He burrowed down, hollowing out a small space, propping up branches and lumber.

  Janice helped where she could, offering to tie down straps, but remained cautious and never let Harold slip from her sight. She jumped at the sound of the stone striking stone. Harold had produced a flint stone and striker, and soon a small fire came to life. Within minutes, the fire blazed. The flames looked soft in the hovering fog and created a colorful glow like a large orange cover around them.

  An extra teepee was put up for her and Richard—a sturdy pile of old tree branches and building materials, propped up against one another up with a feeble wrap to bind it all together. Janice sat down, letting the events of the afternoon run out of her. She sighed and felt as if the day could slip into the evening in a blink. Richard settled next to her, the cut above his eye drying to a scaly brown. In the fire’s light, the bruising on his face was hidden, but the swell bulged under his skin.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, nursing his wounds with a light touch. And as she wiped away the dirt and the blood, Janice tried to remember what they were doing before the attack.

  “I should be asking you that,” he answered, taking the cloth and wetting it some more. She closed her eyes as he cleaned her face, appreciating that his touch was gentle. The abrasions around her mouth and chin stung but would heal. The sweet smell of the burning wood and the crackle and pops set a mood that made her sleepy.