Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “What do you want?” the President asked again, only this time it was reverent.

  ‘Kyler,’ apparently deciding he was properly softened, finally got to the point. “One of the cities that Whitney is about to wash off the map is called Port Allen, Texas. You know it?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Not surprised. There’s not really much to it. About seventy miles northeast of Galveston, population of near 300,000, lots of oil refineries, fishing, modest economy, people run the usual gamut from rich to poor you find in coastal hubs. Pretty average, mostly invisible.”

  The President waited for Kyler to continue. He didn’t resemble what he figured someone from Aurora would look like, but, hell, he’d never even been entirely convinced the agency existed.

  He really only knew enough about them to be very, very scared.

  “The thing about Port Allen is, it’s going to be hit hard by this hurricane. Real hard. It’s in a valley depression, most of it between seven and fifteen feet below sea level. A bowl, in other words. It has a rudimentary seawall that will fail under this kind of strain. The place is going to be hell on earth during and after Whitney. I need as many people as possible out before that happens, but the whole city is surrounded by shallow hill country and a fucking canyon, with two land routes in and out, which is going to make evacuation a real bitch.”

  “Why? What’s going on there?”

  Kyler let out a giggle. It was short and soft—almost under his breath—but it conjured gooseflesh across the President’s arms and neck. “Tell me Mr. President, do the words Project Mercury ring any bells for you?”

  “No. Should they?”

  “Not if I’ve done my job.”

  “Plausible deniability?”

  “More like a need-to-know basis.”

  “And do I need to know now?”

  “Not really. The only thing you need to do is make sure the National Guard, or whoever you send to keep order in Port Allen, stays out of the city. Once they’ve established posts, they’re to let people leave, but not enter. And once the storm begins, all access either way is revoked. At that point, anyone inside the city, be they civilian, Guard or otherwise, is…let’s say, off limits. You are to withdraw your forces and turn complete control of the situation over to my team.”

  The President snorted. “Oh really? And just what am I supposed to tell the press and the refugees and the family members and anyone else that asks what’s going on, huh? I’m up for reelection this year, I can’t just—”

  Kyler moved, gliding from his chair with ghostly speed and leaning across the desk to grab his collar. He hauled the President of the United States forward until their faces were inches apart.

  “That doesn’t concern you.” Kyler giggled again, the crazed grin on his lips in direct contrast to the emptiness in his eyes. Looking into those murky pools, the President understood one very important fact: this man was insane. “If Aurora wants you in this office for another term, you’ll be here. If they want you in a grave up at Arlington National…you’ll be there. Most of the attention will be on the big cities, so when the truth needs to be told about what’s going on in Port Allen, we’ll decide what it is and give it to you.”

  Kyler released him and stood up, running a hand down his shirt, passing for normal once more. He headed for the door. “We’ll be in touch,” he said over his shoulder. “Just remember, when the wind starts blowing, not a single soul leaves that city. I have a few creative ideas in mind to assist with that.”

  He reached the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, then turned back and pointed at Sinclair slumped in his chair. “When he wakes up, he’s gonna have one helluva headache. Tell him to eat a banana. You might want one yourself. You look pale.”

  With that, Kyler opened the door to the Oval Office and disappeared from the President’s life.

  ~ ~ ~

  WHITNEY -29:53

  That dick UPS driver left the package by the mailbox.

  This was the only thought in Carter Vance’s head as he paced by the huge, double-paned bay window at the front of his house, repeating like a brainwashed cult mantra, edging out all other mental traffic. He stopped halfway through another trip to look outside, to see if this fact had somehow changed on its own since he last checked. Nope, thar she blew: a brown parcel sitting in the strip of grass outside the gate, too big to fit inside the mailbox. As tantalizing through the iron bars as a raw steak held in front of a starving lion.

  Less than twenty yards from the front door of his home.

  Might as well be the moon.

  That prick, Carter thought, before realizing he was actually muttering aloud. “That…asshole. I don’t know what circle of hell Dante reserved for negligent deliverymen, but I’m gonna make sure he ends up there.”

  He resumed pacing, this time craning his neck to keep the source of his agitation in constant view. If only Terrance, the old route driver, hadn’t retired and paved the way for this little…this little…cockbite to begin delivering Carter’s daily packages, this never would’ve happened. Terrance, God bless his patient, understanding soul, had known the routine—call at the gate, wait for it to trundle open, bring the boxes up the drive and into the glass alcove at the side of the house, then place them behind the airlock door until pressure equalized so Carter could get them. And he never griped, never complained, and never seemed as generally put-out and unfriendly as this intolerant…twenty-something...nerf herder, if you could excuse a Star-Warsian insult, because he was just too frustrated to think of any more on his own.

  Or if Rosa hadn’t taken the day off for her cousin’s roommate’s uncle’s funeral, she would’ve been here to get it, and this crisis would be over. Or if he could only fool himself into believing the package in question was just the fifth season of “The Simpsons” on DVD he ordered from Amazon last week—instead of the latest specs on the Southerland project from the Houston office he knew it to truly be—he could at least get back to work and stop obsessing.

  C’mon, cut the whiny bullshit, Cart. He recognized this sarcasm. It was the non-deluded part of his psyche that had been banished to a back corner of his brain sometime after college. He’d taken to calling it the Lucid. You’re not so far gone that you really, deep-in-your-heart believe there’s any physical reason you can’t go out there and get that package.

  “That’s not the point,” he argued aloud with himself. “I shouldn’t have to.”

  Something about that sounded like a five-year-old stamping their foot in defiance of parental logic. He tore his eyes away from that package and stared to the left, down the road his house overlooked, to where Teague Street ended at the western section of the Port Allen city wharf. A snatch of the boardwalk was visible from here, then a stretch of sand, and the cool, emerald green Gulf beyond. He could still see the army of volunteers there, stacking sandbags to form a barrier against the coming fury of Whitney.

  If anything, this should be eclipsing his delivery dilemma. He could hear the TV in the other room, preaching the same doom since Whitney’s announcement three days ago, the brutal violence of the hurricane ripping across the ocean and the massive destruction, flooding and power outages predicted in its wake. It was a little hard to swallow, with the sun shining now and not a cloud in the sky, but he had no illusions about it staying that way. Evacuation of the city began two days ago at Mayor Edward’s decree. Carter’s neighbors, none of whom he’d ever met, had skedaddled already, leaving behind condos and beach houses like shed snake skins, windows boarded over, gates locked tight against looters.

  Meaning that only he and yon witless volunteers were still stupid enough to stick around here…and even those brave souls would be gone by the time the storm made landfall at 7:30 PM tomorrow night.

  A twinge of fear rattled somewhere deep in his guts like a shaken maraca.

  No, he refused to rehash this. He’d made up his mind that he wasn’t leaving (couldn’t leave, he defended, let’s use the proper t
erminology, I can’t leave) so why spend the remaining time before the bitch blew into town stressing about her?

  Because this is stupid, the Lucid argued in its languid tone. You can leave, just like you can walk out there right now and get that package.

  That is…if you really wanted to.

  Carter looked back at the delivery, sitting next to the mailbox where it would stay until tomorrow morning, when Rosa promised she would return to bring him some supplies. Besides the fact that it would start raining long before then and ruin the contents, he needed those specs in hand today if he hoped to make his deadline before the hurricane.

  He sighed and wiped a hand across his eyes. Might as well face it: he couldn’t rest with that package sitting out there. The only thing worse than his extreme agora/germophobic complex was his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his mind had clamped down around this with the tenacity of a pit bull.

  He let his eyes wander the length of the driveway.

  Twenty yards.

  Front door to gate, and back again.

  A sixty second trip, if he ran.

  Carter’s stomach performed a tightly executed barrel roll.

  He crossed the room, past his massive computer center in the sunken living room and his 80-inch widescreen TV, to the house’s only door. He keyed the code for opening the gate on an entry pad set into the wall.

  On the opposite side of the door from the keypad hung two compact rebreather oxygen masks on steel pegs. These little gadgets consisted of a clear plastic cup with rubber seal that fit across both nose and mouth, a heavy-duty strap to hold it in place, and a thin, metal cylinder attached to the left side that lay across the cheek during operation. They looked rather cheap upon first inspection (Rosa, that Spanish comedienne extraordinaire, called them ‘jock straps for the face’) but they were, in fact, state-of-the-art and not easy to come by, requiring government permits to own and each costing somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars for their miniaturized filter technology. He picked up the one on the left, stretched the strap over his head, and positioned the cup over the lower half of his face. He flipped the tiny switch on the small unit under his left eye. The air tasted fresh and slightly metallic as he began to breathe.

  He paced a little more, now with the mask on. He turned on one of his three iPods that housed his massive music collection, found some mood music—Green Hornet theme, thank you very much—and cranked it through his house-wide stereo system.

  Finally, Carter reached out and put a hand on the pad that opened the inner airlock door and noticed the appendage was vibrating. He almost stopped there, but something steely inside him took over, relegating him to a bystander in his own body, and he watched as the hand pushed against the pad. The thick glass door swung open.

  He knocked exactly four times on the jamb, as he did with any door—a superstition picked up sometime in the last six months, when he became certain that failure to do so would result in a cataclysmic separation of all the molecules in his body—and stepped through.

  It swished shut behind him and sealed against the frame with a pneumatic whoosh. The air changer in the ceiling cycled. The entire house was built to his specifications. He often wondered how he would’ve indulged his growing phobias if not for his lucrative job that allowed him to not only work from home, but to turn that home into a clinically sterile fortress. Dr. Pellner, the psychiatrist he saw by video conference once a week, presented it a different way: Carter’s dementias developed because he had the means to sustain them.

  A soft chime sounded above him, indicating the airlock was now open to outside air. Disgusting air, air full of putrid infections and diseases by the thousands.

  And he was now ready to step outside in it for the first time in more than eight years.

  He hummed along to the muted music coming from inside the house, the rebreather distorting his already quavery voice. Carter pushed on the outer door and stepped onto his driveway.

  A wave of vertigo hit him almost immediately, hard enough to make him swoon. Agoraphobia: the fear of open spaces. He’d once heard someone on TV call it ‘a kind cousin to seasickness,’ but there was nothing kind about his version. He was safe as long as he was inside, even windows didn’t bother him, and he loved being able to see the ocean, which was the whole reason he’d moved here. But everything was so frakkin big out here, with no walls to hold it in, and a sky that stretched into cool, blue infinity. He glanced up only once and was stung by the surety he would fall into it, spinning forever without any point of reference, and then looked away so he didn’t fill his mask with his still-digesting lunch.

  The sun beat down on him in crushing waves, the air compressed. Carter stumbled a few steps up the driveway, realizing he must look like a mime doing an impression of an astronaut, or maybe an Antarctic explorer in jeans and a Blue October t-shirt, struggling to walk against an invisible wind. He fixed his eyes on the end of the driveway, but that twenty yards had multiplied into forty, a hundred, a thousand.

  His chest hitched once. His breath disappeared. He clawed at the mask, helpless, frantic, not concerned with germs and filtered air now but desperate only for air of any sort. He was dizzy, so dizzy his eyes must be spinning in their sockets, and the first black motes spun across his vision. Nothing was obstructing him except his own stubborn brain, which had shut down his lungs as a way of dealing with the fear consuming him from the inside out.

  He had, quite literally, forgotten how to breathe.

  He couldn’t make it. Couldn’t; not wouldn’t or shouldn’t or any of the other contractions the Lucid wanted to heap on him.

  There was just too much world out here.

  Carter turned back, and was shocked to find the door of his house looked just as unattainable, though he’d gone only a handful of steps. He staggered forward, but as the black motes played connect-the-dots in front of his pulsing eyes, he fell to his knees on the driveway and crawled. His memory of reaching the airlock would be completely erased by oxygen deprivation, but when he passed through the first door—even forgoing his obsessive knock—he curled up into a ball and closed his eyes as the air changer did its work and his lungs finally did theirs.

  Whitney could blow as hard as she wanted.

  Carter Vance was simply unable to get out of her way.

  KEEP READING WHITNEY NOW!

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Russell C. Connor has been writing horror since the age of five, and is the author of two short story collections, five eNovellas, and fourteen novels. His books have won two Independent Publisher Awards and a Reader’s Favorite Award. He has been a member of the DFW Writers’ Workshop since 2006 and served as president for two years. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his rabid dog, demented film collection, mistress of the dark, and demonspawn daughter.

  His next novel—The Halls of Moambati, Volume IV of The Dark Filament Ephemeris—will be available in 2021.