Tully’s voice is muffled, his head down, words swallowed by the rumble of the plane. “It’s the small things,” he says. “On Caligo, you got to be sure and watch out for the small motherfuckin’ things.”
Giggles.
I unstrap my seatbelt and get up without a word. Go for a long walk around the humming belly of the plane. Try to work the dread out of my belly. That soldier should be in a hospital, not sent back into service. But we’re both on our way to Caligo: an infected soldier and a broken scientist. It smells like desperation.
After a while, I find a coffeepot strapped to the wall and pour myself a cup. Find another seat by myself. Sipping coffee, I look out the window and try not to shake. Some city is sprawled out far below. A gleaming explosion, spreading its smoldering tendrils across cold earth.
Light eating the darkness.
The barbed memory appears unannounced, as it always does. That morning my head was tucked under the ventilation hood. The rush of air in the cleanroom was hypnotic. I remember being hungover from the night before, watching my gloved hands at work, thinking about whether or not I should have had a beer and a shot for breakfast. My wife was across the room, working at her station with her back to me. We hadn’t been speaking much.
The vial fell.
More accurately, I dropped it. Being a little drunk, I hadn’t bothered to activate the plastic shield that was supposed to cradle my arms. The finger-sized cylinder was made of inert hardened glass, but it took a bad bounce and the lid shattered on the outer lip of the hood. The vent pulled in part of that puff of concentrated crete dust in a swirling arc that moves slowly in my memory, like the spread of a galaxy. But the rest of the dust was thrown out into the room in a fine expanding powder.
I remember touching my face by instinct to secure my respirator. The baffled plastic was there and ready. I had put it on to hide my beer breath from my wife. The drinking had been getting out of control, and I knew it, but it didn’t scare me. I had only felt curious about how far it would go. That respirator was the reason that I recovered after two weeks in the hospital, instead of bleeding to death from the inside out.
For a moment, the other scientists stood oblivious at their stations. Then a panicked scream muscled out from under my respirator. My wife half turned to face me, her thin arms out and holding a pen and clipboard. A lock of blond hair had escaped from her paper hat and hung curled behind her ear. Seeing my wide eyes and empty hands, she flashed her teeth, nostrils flaring as she drew a sharp intake of breath. An autonomic startle reaction. Designed to increase oxygen flow to prepare the body for fight or flight.
Evolution is so slow to catch up with technology.
While I was yelling in half-drunken fright, all three of my labmates were inhaling airborne particles of an experimental self-replicating creticide variety down their windpipes. The cretes were immediately embedded into the soft tissue of their lungs.
Christoff ran for the door. It was locked. Shoulders slumped, he kept rattling the bar up and down. The panicked synapses of his brain were stuck in a loop. Jennifer stood frozen, her mouth moving, repeating the same words over and over: “You fucker. You stupid fucker.” She knew what was coming and she had never liked me anyway.
But my wife just stared, hands over her stomach. Pen and clipboard fallen to the tile. Her blue eyes were sad and round. They were filled with tears.
And the hemorrhaging began.
I force my eyes open, snap back to the present. Outside the window of the cargo plane, the shine of that anonymous city licks the underside of the airplane wing. It paints the sobbing jet engines as they choke down the frigid night and shit out thrust and toxins and torn air. Outside, the plane and the night pound into each other. Like the surf crashing against the shore, each trying to consume the other without hunger or urgency.
Turning my face up, I stare into the dome of space. Far above, hundreds of billions of stars invade the night sky, gorging on the vastness.
Mindless, and eternal.
4
I wake up with Tully’s grinning face inches from mine.
“You’re dropping with me, doc,” the paratrooper says, shoving a harness into my lap. “Put this on and let me check it. You drop no matter what, so put that shit on tight and right if you want to live.”
Rubbing my eyes, I see it’s still night outside. A chill has seeped through the thin padding on the metal chair and through my suit pants. Standing, I stretch and stamp my feet on the metal decking, trying to get feeling back. Tully is already down the aisle, mechanically checking the chute pack of another paratrooper.
“Can I get some warmer clothes?” I call after him.
“What you got is what you got,” he says, not turning.
My response is cut off by a wall of wind. Stitch has just opened the side door, yanking a bar and pulling the whole thing in and up. Only blackness and noise is on the other side.
Hurrying, I slide into the brown harness. I tug the straps tight, ignoring my awkwardly cinched-up pants. With shaking hands, I button my pathetic suit jacket. As an afterthought, I lean over and retie my wingtips as tight as possible.
“Let’s go,” shouts Tully, grabbing my arm.
The dozen other paratroopers are lining up, lifting their belly-mounted gear bags with both hands. Stitch is at the door, shouting commands to the soldiers. They waddle like pregnant women, latching carabiners onto a sloping wire that runs down the wall.
The floor shudders and the rear bay door of the plane yawns open, revealing a grinning slice of ocean. I can see a sprinkle of stars above a purple horizon. Someone pulls a switch and pallets of supplies whip past me, inches away, rolling down and right out of the back of the plane. Falling into nothing, deploying damp parachutes that glisten like exposed lungs.
My limbs start to shiver uncontrollably.
The line of paratroopers is moving now. A round light next to the open doorway shines a steady piercing green. Stitch is methodically collecting the umbilical cables as each paratrooper steps through the door.
“Time to go,” Tully shouts over the wind.
“Wait,” I’m saying.
From behind, he yanks hard on my leg straps. My breath catches from another momentous tug on my shoulder straps. Tully latches his harness onto mine. Hands on my shoulders, he shoves me to the rear of the line. I lurch forward on my slippery dress shoes, legs numb. Then we are trotting, a shuffling column racing toward a flat purple doorway.
“Wait!” I shout, but now I can’t even hear myself over the ringing of boots on metal. I trip on my next step, feel Stitch slap me on the back of the head. There is no step after that, just wind, and my eyes squeeze closed. Twin tracers of freezing tears crawl blindly over my temples. My breath is pulled out of me and shoved back in, mixing with the bellowing atmosphere.
And finally, I open my eyes.
The island is real—a brownish scab on the broad silvery ocean. A pall of dark smoke hovers over it. The dawn sun, a pink smear sitting on a perfectly flat horizon, pushes stained fingers through the smog. It spills the rest of itself in streaks and dashes over miles of ridged waves below.
As I hang from the deployed parachute, the harness bites into my armpits. My suit is ripped, my legs dangling, pale ankles flashing. My pant legs flap in the breeze. It’s quiet now, and I hear the parachute canopy creaking in a nautical kind of way. Instinctively, I grab the strap over my chest and hold on to it with everything I’ve got.
We drift through the smoke and into the light.
The air still has a chilly edge, but I can already taste the moist tropical undertones. And something else underneath. Something burnt and coppery.
“Doesn’t look so bad,” I call to Tully.
“Even hell looks pretty from far away,” he says, as we sway together.
And then the ground is looming. Instead of a green-brown blur, I see individual trees and military buildings. I catch flashes of detail from all over the tiny island. Far inland, there is a stone pavi
lion surrounded by deep jungle canopy. Radio towers sprout from a cliffside. And directly below, coming fast, is a sprawling vista of soldiers and buildings and vehicles. It’s insectile—looming termite mounds of human activity.
“Feet up,” calls Tully, and I comply.
A grassy field speeds past like a conveyor belt. Tully’s boots flare up and he plants them loosely on the grass. He runs a few steps and leans back into the parachute’s drag until we are sitting, my body buzzing with sensation, dewy grass soaking through the thin fabric of my pants.
I hear a clink as Private Tully unfastens himself from me.
Around us, the dozen other paratroopers are landing, too. Hopping up and chasing down parachutes and folding them. Nobody speaks to me. As the field clears, I wriggle out of my harness and hold it in dumb fingers. It has no more purpose, so I shrug and drop the high-tech bundle into the deep grass.
Warm sunlight winks from the metal bits as I walk away.
5
“We’re reclaiming the heart of Caligo, one speck of dirt at a time,” says the captain, dabbing sweat from his forehead with a starched white handkerchief. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Tall and broad with too much skin around his neck, the captain stands with his arms crossed over his chest, watching me without much interest. I’m in my torn suit, stained with water, ears still ringing. Trying to get my bearings.
We are standing in the shade of a canvas field tent erected on a small hill, the ocean at our backs, looking out toward where the grass meadow turns to dim jungle. The smoke above is only a faint haze here at ground level. At the tree line, a ragged band of probably twenty soldiers is spaced out over a half mile. Each grunt wears a peculiar backpack and sways slowly in place. Liquid flame spews from the guns they carry across the dark face of the jungle. The fire creates a glowing rind that eats its way into branches and vines, sending up a wall of black smoke.
“Flamethrowers,” says the captain, following my gaze. “Outlawed by the Geneva Conventions for half a century. Those were requisitioned from an old World War Two ammo dump. Took the army two and a half years to get ’em reconditioned and transported here. First batch got dropped straight into the ocean, half a mile off the coast. Close, but no cigar. Second batch was compromised. Four fatalities in two weeks. Necessary evil. Can’t risk buying ’em foreign. This whole operation is under Uncle Sam’s hat, understand?”
“Nobody told me this was classified,” I say.
The captain’s eyes bounce up to the skyline and back down. The message is clear enough. It didn’t matter.
“Enough chitchat,” he says. “You want to get situated, I can tell. The research facility is about ten klicks inland. Things are haywire there. Pumping out all sorts of funny shit. Closer you get, the more hilarious it is. Get close enough and you’ll laugh yourself half to death.”
“The colonel mentioned a laboratory for me?”
“Your fancy laboratory caught fire. Set it up too close to the jungle and one of the boys got overexcited. Hell of a show. Don’t know what they had in there, but goddamn it sure burned pretty. Bright as the sun, too. Me and the boys were betting oxygen tanks against chemicals.”
The captain raises his eyebrows at me, waiting. “Maybe you could settle the bet?”
My mouth must be hanging open, because the captain nonchalantly reaches over and taps my chin. I snap my jaw closed.
“Gonna catch flies like that. Or something worse. Don’t you worry, doc. They’ll drop another lab down here for you. Give it six months.”
“Six months?” I ask.
“A year at the latest,” he adds.
“What am I supposed to do until then?”
“Field expeditions. Need you to get out there into the shit and bottle any wild cretes you find. By the time you’ve got a couple of species on ice, why, we’ll have your little laboratory all set up. Then you can get right to work figuring out how to kill all them little buggers.”
“I don’t understand why you need me,” I say. “Why don’t you go shut down the facility yourself? Maybe use some of these soldiers.”
“Can’t get near it. Place sort of defends itself, you could say. There is a certain talented but stubborn individual running that operation, and he is not always a friendly man. Our monitoring indicates that he has something big planned. And soon. Current goal is to build an arsenal of specialized creticides before pursuing our next discussion.”
“Is it a discussion or a war?”
“Caldecot is a great man. His mind is a serious asset. As such, we are in an ongoing discussion with him. A spirited discussion.”
The captain flashes a grin at me with his mouth, not his eyes.
“Part of your lab didn’t burn. You can kit up with what’s left. I sent a boy down there to help you. Name’s Fritz. He’ll provide maps and a uniform and whatnot. We may not have a lot of time. Get set up and head toward the center of the island. Just a little walk. Grab anything interesting and bottle it. Leave now and you’ll be back by nightfall.”
“By myself?”
“Take some of the paratroopers you showed up with. Hell, take ’em all.”
“Don’t they have jobs to do?”
“Negative. Those boys you dropped with are rebounders.”
“Rebounders?”
“Sent back.”
“Sent back from where?”
“You are not afraid to ask questions. That’s good. What I’m saying is they escaped. Off the island. Rigged up a boat maybe a month ago. Picked ’em up at sea and brought them back on the round trip. Boys will be boys. Now they understand. There isn’t any way off this island. Not until we reach an agreement with Caldecot. Meantime, we gotta get our creticide in order and get that research facility shut down before Uncle Sam decides to hell with it and starts dropping nukes.”
“We can’t leave the island,” I say slowly.
Hearing myself, I instantly know these words are obviously, immutably true. The captain searches my face to see if I’m joking. Decides that I am, and bursts into laughter. “Why, hell no, we can’t leave! Not until it’s mission accomplished.”
He claps me on the back hard.
The captain’s snarling smile worries me. The sunlight reflects so brightly from his squinted eyes. I’m losing confidence that he and I are seeing the same things.
“But this ain’t all fun and games,” he says. “When a bad breeze sends a crete variety sweeping through here, the men start dropping like flies. If they’re lucky. Sometimes … they sort of melt. Never know what the cretes were designed for in the first place. Some of them react with human skin, others don’t. The smoke helps. But it’s best to get hold of a respirator and have it handy. Keep your eyes open, but not too wide. They’re a prime vector for body penetration.”
“This is insane,” I mutter.
“Yes sir. Now you’re getting into the spirit,” says the captain, grinning. “You’re gonna do fine, boy. Just fine!”
I start to walk away, the sheer pointlessness of this place settling into the meat of my shoulders, making them tight. After one step, a hand clamps onto my bicep. It nearly jerks my shoulder out of its socket and I spin around, fingers curling to fists. I stop when I see the captain’s face.
“Don’t walk that way,” he says quietly. “Take the long way around.”
I look where I was headed and see nothing. Just a broad mound of soft dirt. The earth has been pushed into a swollen oval about the size of a baseball diamond. Some kind of pale gray slime that must be creticide bubbles up in slick patches. Beyond the mound is a distant white tent framed by a blurry line of flame. The far-off soldiers sway at the hip and continue coating the dark jungle in arterial spurts of red glitter.
“Why not?” I ask, glancing at the soft dirt.
“Because, son, it’s bad luck to walk on the other men’s graves.”
6
A pungent wind wafts in from the jungle and ruffles my hair in a friendly way. I catch myself holding my br
eath, my chest tight, throat locked up. Any breeze or blade of grass or particle of dust could be carrying rogue cretes.
Melt, the captain said. Sometimes the men sort of melt.
Whatever has gotten loose on this island makes the worst day of my life look like spilled milk. The technology here has gone native. It’s lurking in the hazy jungle, stalking the quiet shadows, burrowing into tree trunks smooth as skin and clutching on to membranous leaves. And the captain says it’s floating, too, buoyed on the swell of the wind. Roaming free but not off the island. Not yet.
I take the long way around the mass grave.
Under the lazy sun, soldiers hurry back and forth in crisp steps. They jog past wearing spotless camouflaged fatigues, the respirators around their necks flopping like metronomes. Aside from curt nods, nobody speaks. These men all seem to have serious business to attend to. Not rebounders, but full-timers. In it for the long haul.
The white tent I spotted earlier turns out to be a hospital. As I get nearer, I can see that it is made of bulging translucent plastic. The gymnasium-sized structure quivers like a mound of Jell-O in the hot breath of the jungle, pressurized from the inside, like a balloon.
Rounding the corner of the path, I see that air is being pumped into the tent by a sputtering generator mounted on a diesel truck. Two soldiers lean on the truck, dark eyes lazily tracking me, mouths hidden under the dirty canisters of their respirators.
The sight of them accelerates me.
I stride past the inflatable hospital, catching tessellated glimpses through the gently breathing plastic walls. It’s a single huge room inside, canvas-floored, easily the length of a football field. The expanse is filled with a sweeping, precise grid of identical cots. At first glance, every one of the low folding beds seems to have an occupant.
At the back end of the tent is a cornucopia of advanced medical equipment that’s all been pushed into a haphazard pile. Defibrillator paddles hang from their cords. IV stands are tossed on top like silver matchsticks. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment tossed uselessly into a frozen avalanche of technology. It’s the future, abandoned in a heap, apparently not advanced enough for whatever shining afflictions have come marauding out of the black jungle.
Robot Uprisings Page 36
