by Kieran Shea
Wire heaves back. “GAH! What did you just stick me with?!”
Britch tucks the spent pressure syringe into the breast pocket of his uniform and sits back. “That,” he says, pointing, “is an incentive.”
“A what?”
“A neural toxin. Untraceable, the serum is designed to spread severe damage to all four major lobes of your brain. When the toxin takes full effect it’ll render you into a vegetative state for the rest of your miserable life. You ought to feel the initial effects, well, right about now.”
Wire thrashes against her restraints.
“At first you’ll feel some mild euphoria followed by momentary disorientation, and then an alarming weakening of muscle control along with a heightened body temperature. I’ve an antidote mixed with a powerful sedative that will keep you sedated until you reach Surabaya if you want it.”
“Why you fat, slimy, four-flushing, piece of—”
“I tried to reason with you, but honestly you insist on being stubborn. If you want me to administer the antidote, act quickly and transmit the sum I’ve outlined via this handheld uplink to my private off-world accounts.” Britch pulls his data tab from the sleeve on his belt. “Oh, and don’t forget your flowcode address in the field at the bottom.”
Wire squeezes her eyes shut. As the seconds pass, each sensation Britch just described passes through her body in terrible, creeping curls. The tingling paralysis spreads first, fingers then toes, and then her body temperature skyrockets. Despite her best efforts to remain upright, Wire slumps over in her seat.
“You won’t get away with this.”
“I won’t? Please. I’ll say you got free of your restraints and the use of force was necessary. Perhaps you hit your head as I valiantly subdued you and voila! Selective organ harvesting, here we come.”
Wire clenches her teeth. “I am so going to kill you.”
“Look, I don’t get why you’re being so obstinate. Just give me what I want, and I’ll administer the antidote and forward our records along, I promise. Don’t worry. Even a primate specimen like yourself can navigate the rudimentary interface on the data tab screen.” He holds out the device and giggles. “See? All primed and ready to go. Just type in fifty thousand credits in the box marked sum and engage the transfer symbol on the bottom right-hand side.”
Britch tosses the data tab at her and the device lands next to Wire’s head. Awash in misery and half of her vision doubling, Wire barely musters together the coordination to pick the damned data tab up.
Goddamn it all to hell…
As she fixes her swimmy gaze on the screen, beneath Wire’s breastplate walls start to smother her lungs. Looking up at Britch’s dull, insouciant eyes, she has no doubt what the bastard told her about the neural toxin is true. Death feels close. It feels closer than it’s ever felt before. Her ocular hangs on, but the rest of her vision grays as she realizes she doesn’t have a choice. Using the numeric keys, slowly Wire thumbs in the right credit amounts and adds one of her shadow flowcode addresses in the address field.
Wire presses the icon on the bottom right to finalize the uplink and a trilling chirp confirms the transaction. Britch rips the data tab from her hands.
“There now, was that so hard?”
Wire’s tongue swells like a sausage. “Thheantidooooooo…”
“Oh, right.”
Britch removes a second syringe from his breast pocket and pauses to check whether he has selected the right one. Parrying carefully in case Wire thrusts for his neck with a last ounce of strength, he leans over and sticks the second syringe into Wire’s knee and frees the sedative-antidote with a quick pfhht.
As antidote enters her bloodstream, relief rides the rhumba beat of Wire’s quickened pulse. Within seconds her heart slows and the soporific sedative starts to take effect.
Smiling with smug satisfaction, Britch sleeves the data tab on his duty belt, and when Wire’s eyelids close he stands and kicks her in the face.
“Have fun in Surabaya.”
THE COMMONAGE I
THREE DAYS LATER
(SO THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE)
STORM SYSTEM 61.9-Theta–Northern Pacific
Central Pressure — 964 mb
Forward Speed — 15-25 knots
Sustained Wind Speed — 80-112 knots
Storm Surge — 5.5-6 meters
CLASSIFICATION: HAZARDOUS
The worst storms are always monsters.
With a backpack slung across her shoulders, a girl of thirteen years runs through the screaming, rain-swept dark. Cutting right, cutting left, and cutting right again the girl weaves around the broken, piebald vestiges of what was once a modest manufacturing municipality fixed along the North American prohib coast.
Taking a slippery, moss-covered set of stairs two at a time, through the heavy rain and darkness the girl sees torch beams not too far behind. A quick count of the lights tells her there are least five groups, maybe more, and she hears muffled snatches of barking.
It’s a search party. Someone must have seen her leaving the Commonage. And they’ve brought along the compound’s lone synthetic canine, a blue-furred Mastiff named Gammy.
It’s bad news, but her pursuers bringing along Gammy makes sense. No doubt by now the diagnostic capacities hardwired in the dog’s pronounced snout have all but confirmed her location and heading. Taking off again, the girl fights back her panic and runs faster.
Moving upward through the larger, cordoned sections of the ruined landscape, the girl is knocked sideways by a vertical downdraft. She tastes the dank toxic tang of the ocean on her tongue and with relief realizes she’s now less than quarter of a kilometer from the cliffs along the sea.
You’ve come too far to stop.
You’ll never have another chance at this.
Never.
A minute more of running flat out and she reaches the cliffs. The Pacific’s booming violence is shocking and more than the girl could have imagined. Massive spellbinding troughs of churning froth twelve to twenty meters in height wallop the rocks and shoreline over and over. After hurrying through a thicket along the cliffs’ edge, she locates her stowed-away gear lodged behind two boulders: a second lumbar pack that converts into a sleeping pouch filled with high-caloric rations, along with two canteens of water. The girl buckles the lumbar pack around her waist, clips on the canteens, and removes the backpack from her shaking shoulders.
From the backpack’s main compartment, she withdraws a wound length of line and lashes one end around her waist with a double hitch knot, and then fastens one of four homemade hooks to the lead end of the line with another knot. The line and hooks are her safety apparatuses. Yes, it’ll be a challenge to make her way along the cliff trail for sure, but the search party with Gammy in tow? Without securing hooks with tied-in lines, the gusts will be too much for them. They’d be crazy to follow.
As she jams her body sideways into the trail’s first tight pass, the girl’s thoughts pulsate. Imagine, no more Commonage. No more stupid collective edicts, no more spouting the hypocritical babble her parents are so fond of, and, most important, no more Sébastien or Dr. Corella. It’s the last point that strengthens her resolve. No more Sébastien and his puzzling creepiness or Dr. Corella’s phony compassion; those two and all their terrible, warped plans.
Eight meters in and the initial trail switchback is her first real test. Girding herself and pressing her body as close to the rock face as possible, with her right hand the girl lifts the hook end of the line. The switchback’s turn is sharp and fully exposed on the rounding, and when she peers around the edge her eyes get stung by a full-on sock of whipping spray. The girl lifts the lead end of the line and reaches out for a crag when a deafening wail drills through the watery roar.
A quick glance at the storm-thrashed waves reveals an incomprehensible sight. A thousand meters out, a black-marbled wave of astounding size is pierced from below by a submarine. Skate-shaped with floodlights alight along its curved flanks, the
breaching vessel bellies down the wave’s face and, as its bow dips, lambent phosphorescent engines in its stern shriek with the sudden exposure to the air. Breaking, the wave becomes a dooming avalanche of white water and propels the sub forward.
Behind the girl, suddenly a beam of light splits the darkness and her heart leaps into her throat. Torn-away cries beg her to stop, and she can hear Gammy barking. Cringing, the girl adjusts her hold for only a second, and slips.
After all her preparation, after all her meticulous mental rehearsals, her failure to hook into a crag is a mortifying error. Like an invisible hand, a hard blast of wind yanks her backward and out.
Inexplicably, the final moments of the young girl’s life are everything and nothing all at once—hyperconscious pulling the world together and apart at the speed of light.
Everything is fear.
Everything is loss.
Everything is beauty and sadness and regret with the possibility of unimaginable pain moments away.
No one will be able to stop Sébastien and Dr. Corella now. She’s failed.
The submarine crosses the girl’s line of sight twice just before it collides and inverts on the rocks below.
Last thought:
So this is what it’s like to die…
AGROUND
With a jackhammering slam and metallic squeal the submarine’s endless nauseating churning stops—KA-BAM! And like that, Koko’s entire subaquatic world is upside down.
She’s lashed securely in the pilot’s seat in the sub’s forward bridge, her legs and arms dangling out, a meat chandelier. Stupefied by the impact, she’s still able to judge that she’s intact. Bruised ribs, seasick to beat the band, and upside down, but, yeah, still miraculously intact. No dislocations or broken bones, she thinks, though there’s no way to know for sure until she gets down from the bridge deck and pilot’s seat that is now, in effect, the sub’s ceiling. With a deflating croon, the sub’s fusion engines power down and then cut off. Emergency backup lighting in the cabin sputters on and a pinwheeling tangerine wash cycles all around.
Like an ogre’s punch, a wave hurtles into the sub’s stern and one by one the cabin lights start to fail. Outside the bow screen, the view is blacker than black, with a re-forming slide of white bubbles shifting in abstract. Koko believes she can make out the edge of a surface of some kind. Greenish rock, kelp peppered with white.
Are those… barnacles?
Oh, shit—we’ve run aground.
Another wave hits and with a stomach-turning creak it slowly spins the sub around like a turtle flipped on its back. Koko then detects an unmistakable pressure differential and a shrill, cold whistle pouring past her ears. A briny stench and then another noise that’s muculent at first and then rushing.
The hull has been breached.
Koko looks back for Flynn and sees he’s still inverted and lashed into a makeshift berth in the submarine’s narrowed stern section. All wadded up in his puffy lifejacket, he still mercifully looks out of it, as he has been for days with the spread of his infection. Like a morbid party balloon, Flynn’s head hangs at a terrible angle.
A third wave erupts on the hull and terror grabs Koko by the throat. Beneath her feet, an eddying slosh of water rises.
Koko gropes for the clip on the pilot seat’s safety harness. Freeing a buckled lever, she crashes brutally into the vessel’s ceiling-now-deck. The impact sends an ache up her leg like it’s been popped with a meat mallet, and she feels something hard pressing into her back. It’s a ruptured metallic edge torn free. Koko rolls over and pushes up, scurrying hand over hand into the rising broth aft.
Water now seems to be leaking from everywhere, and it feels colder than Koko ever thought possible. Her fingers unsteady, she desperately claws at the knots of webbed lines holding Flynn in place. When did she tie him down? Was that two days ago? Three? It was just after they hit something and the submarine’s steering went straight to hell, right before they entered the outer bands of the massive storm.
Flynn’s weight keeps the lines taught, and no matter what Koko tries it’s impossible to work the knots free.
She needs a knife.
But their bug-out packs and the rest of the vessel’s maintenance tackle and tools are stowed in the lockers in the engine access area—now completely submerged under the mounting water. Koko can’t get to it in time. Another wave hits and the blow drives her beneath the rising water. She springs up and clings to Flynn’s bindings. Sparks snap and shower down.
There’s no time.
Koko tears at the knots with her teeth. If she can just loosen half of them she could wrestle Flynn out of the makeshift berth. But then what? Wrestle him out to where? Where are they?
About to drown, that’s where.
She stops biting and shakes Flynn’s shoulders.
“Flynn! Baby! Wake up! You have to wake up!”
A feeble mutter and then nothing.
Koko falls back into the water. She trudges forward toward the bridge and studies the consoles above her. Just behind the pilot’s seat, she sees a recessed rectangle with a scuffed patch outlining a set of emergency instructions. A red plastic lever is on the port side of the rectangle, and from flipping through an operational manual earlier, Koko knows the lever will trigger an explosive charge that’ll blow an escape hatch just behind the pilot’s seat. The escape hatch isn’t the way Flynn and Koko boarded this miserable, sinking coffin a week ago, but now that they’re upside down, it sure as hell is their only way out.
Koko braces herself against the starboard-side electronics. Clasping the handle with both hands, she takes a counterintuitive pull and releases the charge. When the bolts blow, in the sub’s tight confines, it is like a small cannon going off. Ears ringing, Koko tumbles back to the ceiling/deck again as a weir of water cascades down from above.
Koko splashes her way back to Flynn as the overwhelming finality of their predicament sinks in. Even if she does get Flynn free from where he’s tied in, he’s unconscious and there’s no way she can lift his body out of the submarine all by herself. Maybe with a strap or pulley, but it would take time to fashion such a measure even under the best of conditions.
Shit—this can’t be it.
It can’t.
I won’t leave you.
But then—a loud sound clanging from above and a shout.
“YOU!”
Spinning around, Koko loses her footing and again slips under the mounting water. She lunges upward, pawing at her eyes and questioning whether what she’s seeing is real. In a red poncho, half of a man reaches out to her through the newly blown hatch.
Before she can say anything the man throws a black snake at her, and then holds both of his hands to the sides of his mouth.
“Tie that off under his shoulders! Do it now or you’re both dead!”
Dumbfounded, Koko sees that the thrown snake is not a snake at all, but a thick length of line. Quickly she picks up the line and yells back.
“I can’t get him free!”
“What?!”
“His weight! The knots are too tight, and I can’t get him free! I need a knife!”
Another wave detonates on the hull and the swirling tangerine-tinted wash of light goes black. The man in the red poncho slithers out just as another huge torrent of seawater floods down into the sub’s cabin. A moment later he reappears, and on a hand-signal count of three, he tosses Koko a rod encased in black rubber. Koko catches the rod and looks at it with awe: a battery-powered ignition tool. She presses a button and a triangular-shaped prong slides out, glows yellow, then red, then hot white.
Eight minutes later Koko, a band of men, and a large blue dog are moving to higher, rocky ground away from the wreck and waves. With the incessant wind and driving rain, their progress is brutal, and they cover the ground mere meters at a time. Koko and the men share the load: Flynn’s body and the body of a young, dead girl.
HE’S GOT THE FEVER
Delirium.
Haptic
pulsing gyres of fevered misery.
A seeping chilly wetness, mouthing Flynn’s clothes and flesh all over. And then hands on him.
Wait—hands? Whose hands?
A burn close to his skin and then the helpless sensation of a gallows drop. Next, a series of hard jerks and bindings across his chest and under his useless, limp arms.
Water.
So much water.
Cold, cold water and dragging.
A bitter taste of compounds in his mouth and an acrid, salted slurry funneling up his nose. A reflexive esophageal clamp and warm bile overflows.
More dragging.
Up. Up.
Over sharp shapes.
Up. Up.
The bindings tear at his body. Whatever or whoever has him won’t let go and now—oh God—it’s up again. Up into a realm of expansive air and roaring water. He drops once more and each hoist, each knock, each drag amplifies the countless dull aches in his bones.
Flynn wishes for the boundless, sleek nothingness of all things dreamless. To be nothing, to just take one last, deep heave of the lungs and give up. But the torment has no end.
His ears sing and memory cells fire. A line Flynn once read or heard somewhere, some place long, long ago comes to him. Something about bells.
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me…
Shakespeare?
No. Something else. Soldiers? No, that’s not it.
Airmen. Yes, an airmen’s song. Something sang in some long-forgotten war.
I was an airman of sorts once, wasn’t I? Living in the sky?
But now there’re no bells, only the keening in his ears, the unremitting roar of water and air, the slow thumping pump of his heart denying him oblivion’s release.
Stupid heart.
More wracking tremors, and the air blowing against his face feels roomy and cold. Heavy rain rakes his body. Flynn hears people shouting, their words swirling and lost in the crashing wind.
Where am I?
