Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

  * * * * *

  Need-to-know basis. That was my policy for the first hundred miles or so. I didn't ask a question unless it was absolutely vital that I knew the answer. Most of my inquiries involved the gas gauge. And more than once I consulted Corin's phone for traffic alerts and route decisions. That was it. The rest I tried my absolute hardest to tune out.

  So when Ghi squinted at the dash clock, fished two separate orange pharmacy bottles out of his pocket, and swallowed a handful of pills in the back seat, I very actively paid no attention.

  Corin was driving at the time. I use the term "driving" loosely here, mostly because I have yet to decide on a word that accurately describes what Corin does behind the wheel of a car. It hardly resembles driving, I know that much. Corin had to be the worst driver I'd ever encountered, worse even than Jesse, who once―I kid you not―confidently drove a limousine full of male dancers into the lobby of a Vegas hotel because he believed the valet sign indicated a parking garage.

  It's not my job to make this stuff up.

  Anyway. Back to the Honda.

  I vividly remember watching the guardrail sail by, precious inches away, and looking over my shoulder every so often to see if anyone in the back seat understood that certain death was near. Ghi would smile politely back each time, oblivious to our peril. And Jackson would do nothing. Jackson slept. He slept in a way that was more like a special ability, a super power, than a simple biological activity, and I envied him for it.

  As soon as Ghi started popping his noon-time pills, Corin turned in his seat, dragging his arm―and the steering wheel―a little to the side as he did. The right tires and the rumble strip began a lengthy duet.

  "Ghi," he said over the grating sound, retrieving his Sabre phone from a nearby cup holder. "Do you need to make any calls?"

  Ghi froze up, forgetting for a moment how to swallow. Calls? He hadn't even left Dr. Avery a note. What would it have said? Off to battle Death Incarnate. Real important. Be back later. Ghi could only hope the doctor would assume that his prized patient had gotten lost, wandered off and been hit by a subway train, anything. But he also doubted that life would be so forgiving.

  He coughed, dislodging the pill from his throat and willing it to go down quietly.

  "No thank you," he said hoarsely.

  We arched boldly into a ramp lane and I locked eyes with a merging driver, sharing with her a moment of primal fear. I squeezed my eyes shut and curled into my seat.

  I will live. I will live. I will live …

  "You sure?" Corin asked.

  Ghi cleared his throat. "Yeah. I don't know what I'd even tell him."

  Didn't need to know what they were talking about. Didn't care. But I clearly heard Jackson sit up a little straighter. His superhuman sleep was apparently triggered to shut down whenever there was potential for interesting conversation.

  "Tell who what?" he asked through a yawn.

  Corin opened his mouth to politely fend him off, but it was Ghi who answered. He shrugged naively. "My doctor."

  Jackson stretched in the compact confines of the seat, yawning again. "Doctor?" He cocked a perfectly rectangular eyebrow, noting the additional pill bottles visible past the open zipper of Ghi's backpack. "You gonna be in trouble if you run out of any of these?"

  "Honestly!" Corin snapped. I opened my eyes and immediately shut them again. We were now taking up most of two lanes.

  Jackson dismissed him with a smirk. "Focus on the road, Tea Time," he said, turning again to Ghi, who disappeared just a little more into his sweatshirt.

  "Look, we're all on the same team here," Jackson said. "So let's go ahead and dispense with the unpleasant secrets. I've been watching you twitch all day. What's your deal, man?"

  "I am here legally!" Ghi insisted reflexively.

  "Good start," Jackson said. "Here legally from where?"

  Ghi swallowed. "Jordan."

  "Hngh?" I grunted without opening my eyes.

  Ghi’s confusion lasted only a moment, and then he laughed. "Jordan the country. I'm from Jordan."

  "Oh. Right. Awesome." I settled farther into my seat, doubling my efforts to ignore the conversation.

  "Alright, Ghi from Jordan," Jackson continued. "So what's going on with you? Because if you're some kind of tweaker or something, then we―"

  "For Christ's sake, he has a condition," Corin exclaimed, fortuitously jerking us out of the path of a logging rig.

  "So?" Jackson sat back expectantly, hands behind his head, getting comfortable. "Then let's hear about it. Because if we have a potential medical emergency on our hands here, then I'd sure like to know."

  Corin looked over at me. As if there was something I could do.

  Ghi sighed. He looked across the seat at Jackson, who smiled back at him.

  "Same team," Jackson pledged.

  "Same team," Ghi repeated. He paused for a long moment, organizing his thoughts, deciding how to word them all, how to explain them in a way that would cause the least amount of alarm.

  "I, uh, I live with what's called a fugue state," he said, not waiting to be asked for a definition. He knew this conversation and the usual reactions by heart now. "Or protracted retrograde amnesia."

  I could practically hear Jackson's eyebrows raising. "So you―"

  "Don't remember some things, yes," Ghi continued, nervous but matter-of-fact. "I suffered a traumatic brain injury. A gunshot to the head, during a hotel bombing. I was in a coma following that, for more than a year, and I came out of it during a fluke power outage at the hospital. And that's the first real memory I have."

  Jackson stared as if waiting for him to finish the sentence. "Of anything?" he finally asked.

  "Of anything," Ghi confirmed.

  The car was silent for a moment. Except for the rumble strip.

  "Damn," Jackson breathed.

  "Bullet in your head?" I blurted, abandoning my policy. This was too interesting.

  Ghi took our shock in stride. He went on to explain that, upon surfacing from his coma, he'd had no recollection whatsoever of his life before the incident―and, despite a range of treatments, still didn't. He had awoken able to speak, to read, to do almost everything normally, but without any sense of self or identity. Where he had lived, who he had known, nothing. He hadn't even remembered his own name. He'd eventually adopted a new one based on suggestions from hospital staff.

  Dr. Avery, he said, worked specifically with memory loss patients, and had offered to help him after three years of unsatisfactory progress. Ghi's memory continued to be the main point of concern. The physical recovery was mostly behind him, though the medication he took now was for migraines and muscle tension, side effects of a somewhat delayed sensory motor cortex.

  "Sometimes," he said, "when I'm not paying attention, I still drift slightly to the left."

  Jackson listened, wide-eyed. His jaws had been hanging open on their square hinges, but he finally got them working again.

  "Okay, so you're basically a Science Channel documentary," he said, prodding Ghi on the shoulder.

  Ghi laughed. An honest, relieved laugh. "Story of my life." He shrugged, adding, "What I can remember of it, anyway."

  Jackson slapped him on the shoulder again, appreciating the humor. His perpetual smile shifted to maximum mode and he settled back into his seat, supremely relaxed. "Okay then. That's nothing we can't handle."

  Ghi's smile froze.

  "Well," he said, swallowing. "My condition isn't the part I'm worried about."

  Oh boy.

  We waited, and after a moment's wary hesitation, Ghi carried on. "My standing in this country depends on my doctor. I could be deported if I don't do what he says, and, well ... you might say I'm considered a flight risk."

  I tensed at those words, awaiting more of Ghi's increasingly rambling explanation.

  "My identity was never confirmed. No one was reported missing in my area and no one ever came forward to claim me. So, well, because of all that, and because of
the bombing and everything, I've been accused by some of faking my condition."

  Just wait. It gets better.

  Ghi cringed in the waiting silence, then blurted it out.

  "They suspect I was a terrorist."

  "Awesome!" Jackson, naturally.

  I turned completely around in my seat, swinging from piqued apathy to total outrage in an instant. Really. A loose terrorist was all I needed.

  "Well are you!?"

  Ghi's eyes flew wide in total panic. "I don’t know! If I was, then I’m not anymore. I promise!"

  "Dude." Jackson scooted to the middle seat, eyes wild and serious. "Are you, really?" He winked, punting an elbow into Ghi's arm. "You are just faking it, aren’t you? You can tell us. Come on, you probably haven't killed more people than Khan―"

  "No!" Ghi threw his hands up in defense. "I swear! But don’t you see? They're going to think I'm running." He sank into the seat with a miserable expression. "What if they’re already looking? The police, the FBI, the CIA, the National Guard ...."

  Clearly, deportation was the least of his worries.

  I looked at Corin. Corin looked at me.

  Correction: least of our worries, as of this morning. That woman he’d frozen, maybe she hadn’t been a Hollow after all. Maybe that was why she’d gone straight for Ghi. Still didn’t explain why she had a water cannon. Unless Jordanian terrorists had a collective aquaphobia I wasn't aware of.

  "Relax," Jackson drawled, waving a casual hand through all the tension. "The man ain’t going to catch up to you, not today." He started rummaging through his duffel bag on the floor, and pulled out, of all possible things, a sandwich.

  He tossed it onto Ghi’s lap.

  "Just calm down and have a sandwich."

  I was still too stunned to react with anything less than hostility when he pulled out three more and tossed two of them at me. I held one up, appalled.

  "What is this?"

  "Baloney," Jackson said, his mouth already full. "You want a different kind? My mom probably packed more'n twenty."

  "Your mom?’"

  "Yep." He shrugged his imposingly square shoulders. "I told her it would be a long trip."

  I spun back into my seat and stared out the windshield, at the open highway ahead. I held the slices of bread in my lap and very carefully, very thoroughly, picked the situation apart piece by piece, just to make sure I had it right.

  I, Jordan Murphy, a perfectly innocent individual, a grown woman of sound mind, was trapped in a rented Honda with a driver who may as well have been geriatric, a wanted terrorist with amnesia, and a grown man whose one solution to it all was a bag full of sandwiches that his mother had made.

  Also, it was a likely possibility that the CIA would gun us down at any second.

  And my boss was probably already dead.

  "Jackson’s right, actually." Corin interrupted my list, looking in the rear mirror at Ghi. He took a bite of his turkey and swiss and then rested it against the wheel. "There's nothing we can do about it just this second, is there? I mean, even if they are looking for you, it’s sort of irrelevant now, isn’t it? We really do have bigger problems."

  Oh yes, that too.

  The whole Vessel thing. The Hollows. Undead soul-suckers and all of that.

  I twisted around again and grabbed the strap of the duffel bag. I never have cared for baloney. "What else did your mom put in there? I’m starving."