by Joe Hart
She put a hand to her temple, feeling a bout of exhaustion roll through her. It was extremely late, or really early, depending on how one looked at it.
“Last call,” a voice said, stopping her in her tracks. She bit back the startled cry that tried to escape her and looked to the left.
Orrin sat behind the bar in the rec room. He was tipped back on his stool, a glass of amber liquid in one hand, and even from a distance, she could see how utterly wrecked he was.
She moved to the bar and took a seat across from him as he finished his glass and refilled it from an open decanter. “How are you doing?” she asked as he settled back into his seat.
“Me? Just fine. Drinking with all my friends,” he said, spreading his arms out to the empty room. “Anything?”
“Um, no. I was just heading to bed.”
“Come on. One won’t kill you.” He slopped some of the whiskey into a tumbler and slid it to her. Gillian placed her hand on the glass but didn’t drink. “You’re up late,” he said after taking another sip.
“So are you. I’m very sorry about Dennis. Your father told me you were friends.”
Orrin stilled before shrugging. “Didn’t know him as well as I thought, I guess.”
She hesitated, turning the glass around in circles on the bar. “Did he seem strange to you lately?”
“You mean like he was acting before you tested him the other day?”
She nodded.
“Not really. I could tell something was bothering him, but Dennis was a private guy. Took us a while to get to know each other. We both had trouble sleeping. Sometimes we’d watch movies in the rec room. Both of us liked Cary Grant flicks, North by Northwest, Suspicion, stuff like that. He was quiet, but he had a real sharp sense of humor. Never would’ve guessed . . .” His words fell off in a slurred tangle.
Gillian picked up her glass, at first not intending to drink, but the liquor’s aroma was so enticing after the stresses of the last few days, she tipped some into her mouth.
Her tongue caught fire but just as quickly became numb as the booze flowed down and bloomed like a depth charge in her stomach. She coughed, eyes watering as Orrin grinned.
“Smooth,” he said.
“Smooth,” she rasped, coughing again as he laughed. “Maybe not the best choice after being exposed to Mars’s atmosphere, or lack thereof.”
“We got beer. And wine. And . . . what’s your poison?”
Opioids, she thought absently, picturing the stashed pills beneath the sink in her old room. “I’m good.”
He stared at her in his unflinching way. “You getting anywhere with all this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Word was you were leaving.”
“Not yet, I’m afraid.”
“Figured you’d be going home to your daughter.”
She stiffened. “Who told you about my daughter?”
“This place, everyone talks. Doesn’t matter who they are. Gossip is currency around here. I’m sorry, overstepped my bounds. Just heard she was sick, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Yes, she is.”
“Can’t imagine being that far away. Don’t have kids, but my dad’s the only person I had growing up. Part of the reason I wanted to come here.”
“And what’re the other reasons?” she asked, surprising herself by taking another sip of whiskey.
Orrin tilted his glass again until it was empty. He set it down. “Guess I was running away. Why else would someone come way the hell out here?”
“Spirit of adventure.”
“Bullshit.”
Gillian laughed a little.
Orrin sat quietly for a few minutes, and when he spoke, he sounded completely sober. “I wasn’t right for a while. Up here,” he said, tapping his skull. “I was deployed. And it was . . . bad.”
“Your father told me a little.”
His eyes snapped up to hers.
“He didn’t go into detail,” she said.
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were the only person in your squad who survived.”
Orrin poured another dose into his glass and stared at it. “He tell you it was my fault?”
She managed to keep the surprise from surfacing on her features. “No.”
Orrin drank his glass dry and held it loosely in one hand. When he spoke, the soft airiness of his voice she’d grown accustomed to was gone. Instead, he sounded flat and hollowed out, like the words were echoes from someone else. “We were clearing a side street in this devastated neighborhood in a town I couldn’t pronounce if you paid me. There was a Stryker on point carrying half a dozen guys. Me and my team were next, followed up by two jeeps and twenty or so on foot. Thirty-nine in all. Good guys. The best. From all over, every last one of them there to do their job, nothing more.” Orrin grimaced, and she could see his teeth clenched tight.
“You don’t have to—”
“We were coming up on an intersection, and something set me off. Half the time I had these—I don’t know what you call them—omens? Premonitions? I learned to trust them. We roll up on this intersection, and I call a halt. My team and I move up, and there’s this hubcap lying in the dirt beside a street sign that’s bent over flat. See, normally there’s all kinds of junk in the dirt, everything from old batteries to rusted spoons, but this hubcap is shiny in places, like someone’s been handling it.” He paused, pouring the last dregs of the bottle into his glass. “I run one of the bots up and start digging. Sure as shit, there’s a pressure trigger in the road. I do my thing and call the all clear.”
Gillian felt herself sitting forward, a sick anticipation growing in her stomach. Orrin sipped, eyes unfocused.
“What I didn’t see was the secondary trip. Concealed infrared projector. It armed the other fifteen bombs hidden next to and behind us like dominoes falling over.”
“God.”
“Thought I was dead,” he said tonelessly. “It was the loudest thing I ever heard. Then the shooting started. They came out of one of the buildings on the north side. Just mopping up since almost everyone was already gone. One of the jeeps’ doors landed on me after the blast. That’s why I’m alive. Came down like a shroud covering me up, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t reach my rifle, and I had to listen to the last of my friends die until it was all quiet except for the ringing in my ears.”
Orrin finished his glass and tried to set it on the bar, but it slid from his fingers and thumped to the floor, then rolled away until it clinked against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say after a moment.
He looked at her finally, returning from the past. “Not as sorry as I am.”
She held his arm lightly on the way down the hall, not unlike a nurse helping a bedbound patient walk for the first time after a long illness. Orrin’s shoulder brushed the wall every few paces, and she kept him from stumbling too far away from it.
“Me,” he mumbled, half pointing at the next door on the left. Gillian guided him to it, and he brought his card out, having to swipe it twice past the reader before the lock disengaged.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked as he pushed the door open and stepped inside the room.
“Be fine. Been in worse shape before.” He glanced at her, the fog of liquor clearing from him for a second. “I knew you weren’t what everyone was saying you were. I could tell.”
“Thank you.”
“Overheard people talking about me too. We’ve got that in common, I guess.”
He looked so vulnerable, so sad, she felt the urge to reach out to him, but stopped herself. “Always another side, isn’t there?” she asked.
He smiled in a way that broke her heart a little. “That’s right.”
“Sleep well, Orrin,” she said, starting down the hall.
“Doctor?”
She paused and looked back.
“Thanks for listening.”
“You’re welcome.”
S
he waited to hear his door click shut before continuing on to her own room. The hall was still void of anyone else, and there wasn’t another sound besides the soft squeak of her shoes. It reminded her of the months alone on the ship, the quiet so palpable it was like a presence. At that second, she could’ve been the only person on the station, the only person for hundreds of millions of miles.
The notion sent tendrils of ice through her. She moved faster, located her room, and threw a last look down the deserted hallway before scanning inside. With something like relief, she locked the door, leaving the thoughts outside.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A soft knock woke Gillian.
The bleariness of hard sleep followed her across the room to the door she opened a crack. Carson was there, hands clasped behind his back.
“Breakfast?” he asked.
When they entered the communal dining room, half the seats were already filled with crew members eating quietly. A few sets of eyes found them as they gathered an assortment of food from a dozen stainless-steel bins and moved to a corner table where Easton and Lien were already waiting.
“How’s your new digs, Doc?” Easton asked as they sat down.
“Roomy.”
“You look a hell of a lot better than you did yesterday.”
“Such charm. Wherever did you pick it up?” she said.
“Born with it.”
He chuckled and winked, sipping his coffee. Carson drained nearly his entire cup in a few gulps, took a breath, and drank the rest.
“Guessing you were up almost as late as I was,” she said.
“Took a long time to get things in order.”
“I can imagine.”
“Pendrake’s key was in Kenison’s room,” Carson said quietly.
“Really?”
“Under his bed frame.”
“Did Leo do an autopsy?”
“He did. I had to get fairly firm with the ranking physician before he stepped aside. I think Leo finished up late last night. You can ask him about it yourself,” Carson said, inclining his head to her left as Leo sat down beside her.
“Morning, all,” Leo said.
They rumbled their greetings as Leo dug into a pile of powdered eggs.
“Carson said you finished Kenison’s autopsy?” Gillian asked.
“I did.”
“And?”
“Asphyxiation. But, of course, we already gathered that much.”
“Anything else unusual?”
He sat back from his plate. “Not really. Gouges from his fingernails on his neck where he clawed himself.”
“Is that . . . common?”
He nodded before beginning to eat again. “Automatic reaction to strangling. Why do you ask?”
Gillian pushed the contents of a protein pack around her plate. “He didn’t seem suicidal.”
“People hide things, the worst of themselves, from everyone,” Lien said. “My father killed himself, and up until the day my mother found him, we thought he was happy.”
“I’m sorry, that’s—”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. I was only a child. My point is, there is no way to truly know someone.”
Gillian and Carson shared a glance.
“You saying you don’t think Kenison killed himself?” Easton asked.
“He was afraid,” Gillian said after a moment. “When I tested him, I think he was expecting terrible news, like he had a tumor or something.”
“So someone else killed him? Used his key to shift down to the surface and planted Pendrake’s key in his room?”
“I don’t know. But something did happen last night.”
The others leaned closer as she told them about Ander’s visit.
When she was finished, Carson frowned and shook his head. “So do you think Ander’s affected, or is it just old age like he said?”
“It didn’t sound like typical forgetting. This phenomenon, whatever you want to call it, it takes certain things but leaves others. It’s not a natural fading of memory, it’s a deletion.” When she finished speaking, she felt an incremental movement in her mind as if she’d just cleared some kind of barrier, had taken another step in the right direction. But the overall pall of mystery remained. The answer was somewhere in their midst, an evanescent shadow in the corner of her mind’s eye.
And it was close.
“Uh, you guys feel like the air just got a little heavier in here?” Easton said in a low tone.
When Gillian looked at him, he was calmly surveying the room behind her. The crew members were staring at them.
“Let’s adjourn for now,” Leo suggested, tossing his fork on his plate. “Food sucks anyways.”
They left the dining room with the weight of steady stares on them. Once in the hall, Easton said, “That was some Village of the Damned shit in there.”
“They’re leery of us,” Gillian said.
“They have no reason to be,” Carson said, a militaristic edge to his voice. “We’re all here for the same purpose. There’s billions of people depending on what we’re able to accomplish.”
“So what’s next?” Easton asked. “Far as everyone else is concerned, the bad guy’s dead, right?”
“I sent a message to control last night bringing them up to speed. Should hear back within the next twenty-four hours.”
Gillian chewed on her lip, a sudden craving for a hydro almost overwhelming. “There is one person we haven’t talked to yet,” she said, forcing away the need.
“Who?” Carson asked.
“Someone who’s actually the most affected of all. Henry Diver.”
Diver’s cell was located on the lowest level, several doors from elevation control. Carson explained to her as they rode down the elevator that security had needed to retrofit one of the few vacant storage rooms on the level to hold Diver since no one could get close to him while he was awake.
“He injured the person who found him in Pendrake’s room pretty badly. Luckily the guy knew some self-defense and was able to choke him unconscious.”
They stopped before an unmarked door where Vasquez, the guard who had accompanied her several times while she was under suspicion, stood outside.
“We need to see him,” Carson said.
Vasquez eyed her before turning to scan his key card. The door unlatched, and he held it open for them.
The room was square, perhaps a dozen feet long and wide. A clear plastic wall bisected the space, fastened on all four sides by large steel anchors. In its center several holes were drilled, and a small makeshift sliding door was cut near its bottom, a lock securing one end.
The smell was the first thing that hit her.
It was fecal matter and unwashed flesh melded together into the scent of despair. It permeated the room so thickly, her gag reflex stopped her in her tracks.
Henry Diver sat rocking in the right corner of the room behind the clear barrier. She had never seen a picture of him, but his file had said he weighed 165 pounds and was six feet two inches tall.
The man before her now might have weighed 110.
He was a scarecrow dressed in sagging skin and a stained pair of briefs. Bones protruded from him at every angle, and his dark eyes watched her out of carven tunnels beneath a jutting brow.
She heard herself make a sound in her throat, a moan of disgust that became a gag as she inhaled more of Diver’s stench.
“What the hell happened to him?” she whispered.
“He’s been like this for months from the reports I’ve read,” Carson said quietly. “Barely eats and drinks. Doesn’t sleep. Moves constantly. They have to sedate him to clean the cell every week.”
While Carson spoke, Diver rose from where he sat, unfolding to his full height. His arms looked too long for his body, and Gillian could see the thrust of each hip bone like angled blades beneath the skin. But his hands held her gaze the longest.
They were masses of scars upon scars. Hundreds if not thousands of furrows had been torn in his f
lesh from the wrists down. Several places wept blood, and dozens were scabbed over, crusted and flaking.
“What the hell happened to his hands?” she heard herself ask as Diver approached the glass.
“He did that to himself,” Carson said.
And now she could see the dark crescents of dried blood beneath his blunted nails.
Diver pressed his palm against the barricade below the drilled holes.
Gillian gathered herself, finding that she’d taken half a step back toward the hallway. She moved forward, trying to ignore the smell. She stopped a foot from the glass and watched Diver place his other palm beside the first.
“I’m Dr. Ryan,” she said, clearing her throat. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind talking to me today, Henry. Is it all right if I call you Henry?”
Diver tilted his head to the side at the sound of his name like a dog might do.
No, she thought. Not a dog. A wolf.
“I’ve been told you haven’t been feeling well,” she said, beginning to look for signs or symptoms of brain damage. Several had already been checked off the list. Aggression; change in appetite; change in sleep patterns; loss of speech; loss of bowel control; and Christ, his hands. They’d been flayed and healed hundreds of times.
As she watched, his fingers went to the scars and began to work. Fingernails dug in, penetrating the damaged skin.
“Henry, please don’t do that,” she heard herself say. “Please. It’s okay. I just want to talk. Can you tell me about where you’re from?”
The fingers worked. Blood oozed and began dripping to the floor.
“Henry, what was your job here on the station?”
The blood flowed faster.
“Gillian . . .” Carson said from somewhere behind her.
She looked down at the damage Diver was inflicting on himself, the manic movements jerky and erratic.
