What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  “Okay,” I said. “Couldn’t you appear to your son, then? Why waste time with me?”

  “Because I don’t know where he is. I was able to draw on your memories—your class’s combined memories of me to locate this spot and assemble a version of myself. I reached out to you in particular because we’d gotten along when you were my student. I hoped you would be willing to help me.”

  “How could I help you?”

  “I have a storage unit on Route 9, down by the malls. There are a couple of things in there, a book and—”

  “Mr. Martin,” I said. “Joel.” At the sound of his name, his head jerked, as if I had slapped him. I said, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, exactly, but I wonder if maybe you need to talk to someone who could help you with all this.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “That’s why I’m—oh.” His eyes narrowed. “I get it. You think I’m delusional. Paranoid schizophrenia, right?”

  “It sounds as if you’ve been under a tremendous amount of stress,” I said. “Things with your son—”

  “Don’t you understand? There are no ‘things with my son.’ I don’t know where he is. As long as I’m stuck in this prison—”

  “Stop. You’re in the men’s room of the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club. You are not in some kind of magic jail.”

  “You have no idea,” he said. “You have no Goddamned idea. This place is a blank. It isn’t a place, properly speaking. It isn’t; do you understand? It’s the white between the letters on the page. Most of the time, it’s all I can do to keep myself coherent. And on top of that, it’s getting smaller. It may have reached its limit. Any more loss of energy, and it’s going to collapse and take me with it. I am not shitting you when I say that you are my last chance. I’m doing everything I can to hold on, but time is running out.”

  A tremendous pity rose in me. I had been in here much too long. “I have to go,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I walked toward the bathroom door.

  “What? Hey, hang on.” He put his hands up.

  “Please get out of the way.”

  “Wait—”

  I was expecting Joel Martin to move to the side. If he didn’t, I had a good half a foot and probably seventy-five pounds on him. Should it prove necessary, I had no doubt I’d be able to muscle past him.

  When his outstretched fingers touched me, however, there was a sound like a houseful of windows shattering. Something like a blast of air shoved me across the bathroom, into the wall. Stunned, I looked at Joel Martin. The air around him appeared to have dimmed. He seemed to have lost substance, to have flattened. As I watched, he began to crumple, as if he were made of paper and a pair of giant hands were crushing him between them. His mouth was open; he was saying, “No, oh, no no no no,” over and over again. The words sounded as if they were reaching me from across a vast gulf. He tried to reach out in my direction, but the force that was compressing the rest of him collapsed his arms against him. Eyes wide with pain, he alternated his noes with his son’s name. His shoulders gave; his legs folded up to his torso. “Wait!” he shouted, his voice further away still. “Wait! Wait!” His body bent inward, condensing itself. As his face began to crumple, he screamed, a howl of rage and frustration.

  Then he was gone, and the air was full of swirling dust. Coughing, I raised my hands to my face. My eyes teared. It seemed I could hear Joel Martin screaming still, or maybe that was only the whine of the fluorescent lights. I coughed so hard, it doubled me over. The dust had triggered an asthma attack. I pulled myself up on one of the sinks and saw in the mirror a man whose scarlet face was streaked with tears and dust. For a moment, I remembered standing beside Joel Martin, the two of us vibrating with barely suppressed laughter, as we pointed at a corner of the hallway ceiling and said to one another, “What the hell is that?”

  Before the dust had finished settling onto the fixtures, the floor, I fled the bathroom, half running down the dark hallway back to the ballroom. Everywhere except the dance floor, the lights had been lowered. On the dance floor, men and women wearing the disinterested expressions of funeral statuary swayed and shuffled to the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” thundering from the speakers like a demented march. Those seated in the shadows bobbed their heads in time to the beat.

  Another round of coughing shook me. No one could hear it over the music. Hand covering my mouth, I stumbled to my table, where I was relieved to find Linda seated. She smiled when she saw me, but her brows lowered as I leaned over for a fresh bout of coughing. My head was spinning. I straightened, listed to the right, and Linda was there to steady me. Leaning close, she shouted, “What is it?”

  I managed to say, “Asthma,” loud enough for her to hear.

  She nodded, said, “Do you have an inhaler?”

  I shook my head.

  “Is it bad?” she said. “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Do you want me to drive you home?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. Let me tell everyone what’s going on.”

  This Linda did, drawing concerned looks and waves from the rest of the table. I returned the waves, but kept my distance. On the way out of the tennis club, we passed a man and a woman arguing. He was severely drunk, seated on the lowest of the front steps, his tie yanked to one side, his shirt half unbuttoned. She was standing in her stocking feet, using her flat pocketbook to punctuate the points she was making. The two of them had been among the popular crowd at Fatima, not homecoming king and queen but certainly part of their court. I was grateful another round of coughing took me as Linda and I walked by them, so I could pretend I wasn’t aware they were enacting what appeared to be a fairly regular drama.

  By the time Linda pulled into the parking lot in front of my apartment building, the worst of my asthma attack was over. It had prevented much conversation on the ride back, except for me to say that it had been triggered by something in the air in the men’s room. As she handed me the keys, Linda said, “Are you going to be okay by yourself? Because I can stay over if you need me to.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

  “Call me if you get worse.”

  “I will, but really, I’m fine. I’ll use my inhaler the second I walk in the door.”

  “You’d better.”

  I did. And since I knew there was no chance of me falling asleep anytime in what seemed like the next several days, I took down the bottle of Talisker from the top of the refrigerator and poured myself three fingers, whose effects I did not feel. I carried the bottle and glass into the living room, where I set them on the side table and found the TV remote. The nighttime channels were full of all manner of weird and pathetic programming, but together with the scotch, they were almost enough to keep me from dwelling on Joel Martin’s expression while his prison crushed him, on his calling his son’s name, on his final plea for a reprieve that was not granted. Eventually, I drank enough of the whiskey for it drop me into a black, empty place.

  IV

  When I received the e-mail invitation to my twenty-fifth high school reunion, I’ll admit I considered responding to it. Enough time had elapsed for me to hope that my classmates and I might finally have moved beyond our differences. Instead, what I discovered, after a couple of messages to old friends found again through social media, was that there were two reunions being planned, one for the former elites of my class and the other for the rest of us. I was sufficiently disgusted by the news to delete my invitation, washing my hands of the business of high school reunions for at least another quarter-century.

  My decision was influenced as well by information that came to me at almost exactly the same time via the same social media connections. One of those old friends sent me a message asking if I’d heard the news about Sean McGahern, the kid of Sinead McGahern and Mr. Martin. I replied that I hadn’t. She forwarded me a link to a story about the tragic death of the young singer-songwriter whose first album, Po
ssession with Intent, had won him critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The record chronicled his life growing up as the child of a narcissistic mother, an uninterested stepfather, and a father who appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth. (I thought about that locker on Route 9, the one I’d considered checking into but never had.) Emotional and psychological difficulties had led him to experiment first with pot, then heroin, to which he had become addicted. For a brief period of time, while he was working on his album, he seemed to have put his addiction behind him. The pressures of touring to support it, however, combined with those of producing his follow-up effort, had sent him back to heroin. He had died of an overdose; there was some question whether it was an accident or suicide.

  After closing the link, I had to stand up and walk away from the computer. I had to leave my office, within the buzz of whose fluorescent light I heard another sound, high-pitched, impossibly distant: Joel Martin, screaming—still screaming—for all he had lost, all he had given away.

  —For Fiona

  NOW AND FOREVER

  D. THOMAS MINTON

  Elise sits endless vigil over our daughter, and my boy is nowhere to be found.

  “I heard the door a while ago,” Elise says, cool rag in hand. “I thought it was you.”

  I know immediately where Owen has gone. If I don’t get there in time, he’ll be dead. Like the others.

  I grab the nail gun and my O2 breather, but there’s no time to don my skin-suit. The ribbon of nails bounces against my thigh as I sprint between dark rows of soybean and quinoa. The garden’s grow-lights have yet to cycle on. Through the dome overhead, the Milky Way wraps across the great dark like a diamond-studded noose.

  Fool boy! Twelve, and he thinks he can kill the Fiend, when forty-six others failed.

  I reach the edge of the garden and stumble onto the metal decking. I barely hear the thud of my feet on the metal plates over the rasp of my breath. The first door, welded shut and barricaded with a field cart, emerges from the darkness, bathed in red light from the night lamp above it. I’ve guessed wrong.

  I fly past, on to the other door.

  The cool air burns my lungs. The heat exchangers are failing; every day it gets a fraction colder in the dome, but those who could repair it died long ago.

  Ahead, in the next ruddy halo, Owen takes a pry bar to the door. He’s already broken the welds on the lower half and works feverishly to snap those across the top. Air hisses out where his efforts have warped the metal.

  As I near, Owen must hear my breathing; he puts his weight behind the bar and the last weld pops. The door swings open, but a pressure differential sucks it shut.

  The pry bar clatters to the deck as Owen stumbles back.

  The door cracks open. Fingers pale as lice wrap around the edge. They have nails like needles, hollow and filled with toxin. The Fiend can project them like darts. That’s what put Daphne to bed and Elise into her vigil.

  The nail gun is hard to steady as I run faster. . . . Nails ping against the metal door, the frame, and finally, the stream of metal zings through the crack. I throw my shoulder against the door.

  The Fiend’s fingers crunch and are sheared off by the sharp metal. They plop to the deck, still wiggling like a half dozen severed lizard tails.

  “Dammit, boy! You want to die?”

  Through the pounding of blood in my neck, I hear the clicking of the Fiend’s mandibles.

  “Give me the pry bar.” I kick at the fingers inching across the deck toward my foot. They’ll keep crawling toward anything with warm blood.

  Owen’s face is ashen, his eyes locked on the wriggling fingers.

  The door bounces out of the frame, but my weight is enough to slam it back into place.

  “Owen—the bar!”

  The boy is frozen and worthless, his stupid courage drained away by reality.

  My toes hook the curl of the pry bar, and I drag it to me. I wedge it under the door—it barely fits—then drive it fast with the heel of my boot.

  The trencher that had blocked the door sits to the side. I clamber behind the controls and press my thumb against the ignition scanner, and it whirs to life. I slam its back end against the door, and drop the cutter against the deck for added leverage.

  From a bottle I keep under the seat, I squirt accelerant on the fingers and scrape sparks from a lighter onto them until they flare into blue flame.

  Owen hugs his knees to his face and hides his eyes behind them. His knuckles are white.

  I’m too afraid and relieved at the same time to have room for anger. If I had been five seconds later . . . What’s gotten into him, thinking he can take the Fiend by himself? This isn’t the first time either. I’ve always stopped him, but each time, he gets a little closer. I don’t know what to do with him. I can’t lock him up, and I can’t talk sense into him.

  The Fiend’s scratching grates my nerves. Even with the metal door, it’s too close, too dangerous. I think it can sense us, even through the pressure door. Like it can smell our blood, or maybe our fear.

  I pick up my boy, frail in my hands. His shaking doesn’t stop.

  “Please, please, don’t ever do that again. I can’t protect you out there.”

  Owen nods his understanding into my shoulder.

  * * * *

  We were four years out, not even to the halfway point of our transit to Echelon Colony, when the first body turned up riddled with pinprick holes and strung up like an animal being bled. We thought we had a murderer on board, but the doctor assured us that no one on the ship was capable of that level of savagery.

  But people are capable of a lot.

  Then the sightings started. A pale creature lurking the corridors of the engineering module. Scrapings on hatches. Clicking sounds from air ducts. How it got aboard, we didn’t know. You’d think something like the Fiend couldn’t hide on a ship so small, but it was like a splinter of nightmare driven into the flesh of our reality.

  After that, the bodies began to collect like regrets. Smart and deadly, the Fiend was a relentless killer.

  Attempts to hunt it failed, so we launched the SOS beacons and retreated to the garden because it was two acres of open ground with limited entry points. We sealed everything up, but still it found ways in and picked us off one by one. Iulian . . . Traci . . . Michal.

  We decided to kill it by disabling the environmental systems in the rest of the ship. Four of us shut them down, but the Fiend found us in the dark corridors, and I was the only one to make it back.

  Now it’s just me and my family. And the Fiend.

  * * * *

  I make sure Owen is secure in his room. He’s scared and unharmed, his courage drained away. Elise is where she always is: sitting at Daphne’s bedside. I lean against the door frame, exhausted after the adrenaline rush has faded.

  Elise sings gently to our daughter, a lullaby we used to sing when nightmares ripped her from peaceful dreams.

  I can’t remember how long ago Daphne was attacked; the days run together. She had been harvesting peas in the far field when I heard her scream. By the time I got to her, the Fiend had pulled her halfway into a duct. The pop of nails from my gun made it drop her and retreat.

  Elise arrived, crying, and scooped our daughter into her arms.

  I stared at the open vent, the unbroken grate on the deck. How could I have missed sealing it?

  Daphne’s arms twined weakly around Elise’s neck. Her voice, a whisper I could barely hear, pierced my heart like a needle. “It hurts. . . . I’m cold. . . .”

  By the time we got her back to the house, Daphne had slipped into unconsciousness.

  As her father, it was my job to keep her safe. I failed.

  Elise startles when she notices me in the doorway. Her face is all shadows, and where her eyes are supposed to be are dark pits, like holes in a skull. She never sleeps, best I can tell, and it’s pulled her essence into something insubstantial like spun sugar.

  “I didn’t mean to scare yo
u,” I say.

  “She’s burning up and we’re out of medicine.”

  I check the cabinet.

  Elise stands in the doorway to Daphne’s room like she’s unable to cross its threshold. “She needs medicine.”

  My stomach curdles. The only medicine is in the infirmary.

  I check the cabinet again, and all the other drawers in our small house.

  Elise watches me, arms crossed.

  Nothing. My knees weak, I collapse into a chair. How can we be out?

  Elise turns her back on me and retreats to Daphne’s side.

  I wring my hands. The fingers are cold and numb. It’s my fault. That’s hard enough to live with, but every day, I see the accusation in Elise’s face.

  Saying nothing, I pull on a skin-suit and slide the hood over my head. It’ll keep me warm in the habitat module, and its compression bands will keep the blood from pooling in my extremities in the low pressure.

  I pick up the nail gun and decide against taking a second belt of nails. If I get into a fight with the Fiend, I won’t survive long enough to use it, so why lug the extra weight?

  “I want to come.”

  Owen’s voice startles me, and I nearly drop the nail gun.

  Sepia light leaks from his room, casting his face into a jigsaw of black and grey.

  “I need you to protect your mother and sister in case . . .” I work my mouth but find no moisture. “You need to take care of things until I get back.”

  He digs his trembling hands deeper into his pockets. I can’t tell if he’s relieved or not.

  I want to hug him, but I can’t do it. I’m not ready to say good-bye to any of them.

  “You better come back,” he says, his voice chopped off as I pull the door closed behind me.

  I jog along the decking on the edge of the soybean field. Overhead, stars spin in the great dark. I arrive at the door and need to sit for a moment. My mind is a jumble of regrets. My inadequacies threaten to paralyze me.