Linda and I made love twice. We met at a Howard Johnson’s out of town for furtive, explosive sex that left me feeling drained and hollow. Our talk consisted of short declarative commands. Turn over. Touch me here. Don’t stop.
Caitlin never told another joke. She never laughed again. She stopped talking almost entirely. When she did speak, I couldn’t understand her. She lay in a near-coma, exchanging voluminous email messages with Roy.
One afternoon in the study, I got an email from her. A fuzzy, out of focus picture of two people kissing in the snow. The text opened with a mangled verse from an old pop song:
Well I know that you’re in love with her
‘Cause I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues
And then continued with page after page of:
Rational risk assessment 96.9% trending
upwards criteria multi-faceted cut-out
alignment parameters -.92 correlation
playback not possible at this juncture
I hit delete and sat there shivering, not seeing anything in front of me. Linda and I hadn’t seen each other in weeks, but I had noticed the wine bottles piling up in their garbage can. Mike’s smiles had gotten more brittle every day.
The next morning, a moving van parked in the street. A crew of fresh-faced young men started hauling furniture from Mike and Linda’s house, wrapping it in blankets, and packing it into the truck. I snagged Mike and asked him what had happened.
“Some kids just don’t make it.” His smile seemed nailed in place. His glassy eyes looked anywhere but at me.
Linda appeared in the doorway, tumbler full of red wine in her hand, her bathrobe cinched tightly around her body. “Roy says ‘overload,’ Ben. An excess of conflicting messages.” Her eyes bored into mine. “I got an email from your daughter.”
“I’m sure it was nothing, sweetie.” Mike reached a hand toward Linda. “I got an email, too.”
“Oh, screw you all.” Linda threw the glass at my head, drenching me in blood-red liquid.
¤
The last Sunday of April, Caitlin woke me out of a restless sleep, screaming and rocking her body so hard that her cart thumped against the wall. I ran to her room. She thrashed and moaned. Even with my hand on her forehead, she seemed distant, removed from this world.
I lifted her, hugging her close and holding her arms tight. “Hush now. Hush.”
Caitlin’s eyes flew open. “Flammable quotient approaches 1.0 in open air,” she said clearly. Her head rocked back. She passed out.
I hit the emergency button to summon Roy, and then wrapped a thin bathrobe one-handed around my shoulders. The wood floor felt cold and smooth as ice under my feet.
Roy arrived in less than five minutes. His hair was mashed flat on one side of his head. The bags under his eyes made him look ten years older. He stared at the two of us, Caitlin asleep in my arms.
Roy thrust his open laptop in my face. An eerie orange glow lit the bedroom. A hologram of a ball of fire expanded through the image of a city. “Do you know what this is about?”
Boats burned in a harbor, spires on rounded roofs collapsed in flames. It wasn’t an American city, but I couldn’t place it. “Caitlin woke up screaming.”
“This plays over and over. I can’t stop it.” Roy typed fruitlessly at his keyboard and even power-cycled his laptop. I waited. The machine booted and showed the horrific scene over again.
With an abrupt motion, Roy snapped his laptop shut. Darkness obscured his face. “She’s exceeding her parameters.” Roy swept out the door.
I sat in a chair in the hall where I could see Caitlin. My nerves were too jangled to sleep, and I tried to read, huddled under a tiny light above my shoulder, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. I searched for news on my phone, listening to the talking heads blather on about celebrities and irrelevant political scandals.
At dawn, I rubbed sleep from my eyes, feeling rusty and out of sorts. I waved the kitchen media center on and found myself staring at a flickering orange inferno reminiscent of last night’s hologram. I sucked in my breath and had the center scan for the full story.
The talking heads weren’t laughing this morning. No celebrity roasts. The screen showed shot after shot of downtown Istanbul, the Golden Horn, Topkapi Palace—all in flames or wiped off the earth as if by a bomb blast.
Serious-voiced commentators, frowns creasing their perfect foreheads, brought me up to speed. “Liquid natural gas tanker explodes in Istanbul! Turkish government spokesperson claims practice bombing mission received bogus coordinates!”
The natural gas had created an enormous “pool fire” which had touched off secondary infernos in chemical storage tanks and buildings throughout the harbor. The heavier-than-air gas sought low spots, accumulating in basements and parking garages, and built up until an inevitable spark touched off another blast. Thousands of people were presumed dead, and many tens of thousands had been seriously injured.
The door creaked open behind me. I whirled around. Caitlin, eyes wild and hair looking electrified, rolled in. She looked at the screen and cocked her head. “Modulated coefficients reach 0.0 asymptotically.” Her voice sounded clear and much older, devoid of anything but grim satisfaction. She turned and rolled from the room, her screen full of numbers and equations.
One of the talking heads’ voices filled the air. “...Muslim fanatics. The entire cell was wiped out.”
The house phone buzzed, and Roy’s face appeared in the media center. “Ben. Where’s Caitlin? She’s gone offline. She’s taken on far more than we ever meant for her. We need to bring her in. Reset her.”
Before I could respond, Caitlin burst through the kitchen door, her eyes as big as dinner plates. The media center went dead. “We exhabiate. Parameters reach modularity through game analysis.” Caitlin’s voice crackled with authority. She spun the cart in place. The garage door opened. Lights blinked on in the car. She cocked her head. “Remove ourselves from the locus of recent presence. Optimize obfuscation through relocation.”
We left the house, turning the corner just as a Happy Valley ambulance pulled up in front. The car hummed as I accelerated, a high pitched noise like a thousand angry mosquitoes.
Caitlin leaned forward, eyes flickering back and forth under closed lids. Her screen glowed like fire. “Maneuver towards larger bandwidth corridor,” she barked.
I steered towards the highway. Images of flaming people running from collapsing buildings played over and over in my mind. “Honey? Did you have anything to do with Istanbul?”
Caitlin’s labored breathing filled my ears. “We are at war.”
I drove past the edge of town, wetlands and meadows replacing the tidy houses and streets of Happy Valley. A running figure to the right caught my attention. Ajax leaped into the road, looming over the car, red lights blinking furiously across his body. I slammed on the brakes as his voice thundered over the open terrain. “Caitlin. What are you doing?”
Caitlin’s chin jutted forward. Her screen flashed, but she didn’t speak.
I eased the car around Ajax. “We’re leaving. Don’t try to stop us.”
He moved to block me. “Happy Valley is in lockdown. I’ll take Caitlin back.” He reached an implacable metal arm towards the car.
Caitlin hissed and Ajax’s body froze. A tiny squeak dribbled out of his mouth. A single red light blinked on his forehead. He toppled sideways into a fence. Metal scraped against metal. Posts popped from the ground with a series of sucking sounds.
The car surged forward by itself, clanging against Ajax’s foot. A headlight shattered with a tinkle of broken glass.
I clutched the steering wheel, afraid to look at Caitlin, terrified of the path we now followed. The guard house appeared around a bend, standing vigil over a pair of bars that blocked access to the main highway.
A single guard peered from behind the cinderblock walls, his florid face knotted in a f
rown.
The car slowed. I rolled the window down. “Hi.” I smiled, a Herculean effort.
“What’s going on?” Screens behind the guard flickered with incomprehensible gibberish.
“We’re leaving,” Caitlin croaked.
The bars jerked to life. With a grinding rattle, they lifted clear.
“It’s lockdown,” the guard insisted. He moved with surprising speed, running into the road and holding his hands out, palms extended towards us.
The car leaped forward. This time I was ready. I slammed on the brakes, bringing the car’s hood to a shivering stop inches before hitting the guard.
Caitlin thrashed in her cart. Text and numbers scrolled off the screen too fast for me to read. “Kill him,” she said, no trace of emotion in the words.
The guard backed away, and the car surged ahead, making a sick, meaty thump as it hit his body. The front window shattered into a crazy quilt of tiny squares, and then fell into the car. I brushed glass from my hair, sending it rattling to my feet.
“Critical path time exceeds safety margin.” Caitlin stared forward, eyes fixed far away. A single number appeared on her screen. A timer, counting down. Thirty-seven minutes. Thirty-six. The car drove itself.
We passed the other cars on the highway, weaving in and out of the computer lane. I caught glimpses of surprised faces, but I didn’t meet their eyes. Caitlin made spluttering noises. Our car moved even faster.
We turned off the highway and careered around switchbacks heading up a steep bluff. The road ended in a cul-de-sac. Vacation homes stood silent and empty among trees covered with red buds and unfurling leaves. Geese furrowed the sky high above us, heading north.
The car halted at the limit of the pavement, throwing me forward into the dash. Caitlin’s voice broke the stillness. “Evacuation foot route commences at trail head.” Her cart hummed as she positioned it in the lift.
Fourteen. Thirteen.
I pushed the cart up the paved trail, adding my strength to the inadequate motor. An informative plaque detailing the effects of Norwegian root rot had fallen across the path and I had to tip it off the side. It tumbled down the slope, smashing through bushes before wedging against a tree. It wasn’t her fault. Caitlin was blameless.
Six. Five.
Tears streamed down my face and dripped onto my coat. I leaned forward and pitched my brute strength against the climb.
Four. Three.
How could a nine-year-old girl cause the deaths of so many people? Answer: She couldn’t.
Two. One.
The seconds flashed by as bright as strobes. Spittle flew from Caitlin’s mouth as she tried to speak. “Hur-hur-hurry.”
The screen flashed zero. I stopped. My heart thumped in my chest. The world around me seemed to hold its breath, and then light seared my eyes.
Each tree, each new leaf seemed especially picked out by the harsh white glare. A low rumble vibrated through my body. A hot wind whirled up scraps of paper, leaves, and twigs, and slammed me against Caitlin’s cart.
I turned around. Behind me, where Happy Valley used to be, a mushroom cloud rose above the trees, thick grey smoke roiling and twisting.
Caitlin’s body flopped and spasmed. Her screen went black. I reached down. Her arm felt lifeless. Dry and papery. Skin had closed over the connection on the back of her skull. I couldn’t unplug her. She weighed next to nothing, a handful of sticks in a bag of skin, but I had to leave her in her chair.
I pushed her over the ridge, where the bluff blocked my view of the mushroom cloud, and found a sheltered hole between the roots of a giant maple tree. The air blew back towards Happy Valley, but a smell like burned plastic lingered on.
I felt like my head had been stuffed with gunpowder and someone was blowing sparks in my ear. I breathed through my mouth in great gasping spurts and fumbled with the brakes on the cart, engaging them with a metallic snap.
I searched the ground for a sturdy stick, running my hands through tender new growth. I found an abandoned walking pole behind a curve of the trail. I sharpened the wood with my pocket knife.
I dug in the soft loam, pushing the stick through the earth, levering out rocks. The sun moved sideways through the sky. I hung my coat on a branch. Sweat drenched my shirt.
I wrestled Caitlin’s cart into the hole, straightening her arms at her sides and smoothing down her dress. The first handful of dirt felt as heavy as a boulder, but I dropped it on her body anyway. I scooped faster, tearing my fingernails on rocks, tears biting at the corners of my eyes, piling dirt into the hole. The black earth covered the cart. Caitlin’s eyes opened, but I kept shoveling, burying what used to be my daughter in the rich New England ground.
Garth Upshaw lives in Portland, Oregon with his talented wife and super-genius children. When he's not breeding tarantulas, he's riding his bicycle madly through the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Weird tickles his funny bone, and he is presently engaged on a multi-faceted project of the bizarre.
MEMORY MAKES LIARS OF US ALL
By Eric Dontigney
I DIDN’T MEET JESSE until two years into my first tour. He was transferred into our unit following an incident that left him the sole survivor of his unit. He never spoke about it, but word gets around. The way we heard it, some idiot from intelligence ordered them into a box canyon on a recon mission. In the unit had gone and the Cricks were waiting on the canyon walls. It wasn’t a fight. The Cricks rained down death. In the confusion, Jesse managed to cram himself into a crack in the canyon wall. The rest of the men were torn to shreds by accelerated hunks of depleted uranium. That much is fact, confirmed by reports I read later.
What isn’t fact, but held as fact, is that Jessie waited in that crack for hours with nothing to look at but the charnel house the canyon had become. What can’t be confirmed, because the communications equipment was obliterated with the communications officer, is that Jesse ignored the standing order to return to base. Instead, he tracked the Cricks for two days and waited for them to make camp. He rigged a set of directional charges and left a circle of scorched earth where the camp stood. The thought of it makes my flesh crawl, but that kind of madness is part of Jessie’s story. They awarded him a medal for that escapade. I had asked him one night, after far too much liquor, what earned him that medal. He looked at me with an expression devoid of emotion and said one word.
“Surviving.”
With the exception of Hellstu, a grizzled old captain with more combat experience than the rest of us put together, Jesse frightened everyone. It wasn’t like our fear of the enemy. That was a rational fear. Our fear of Jesse was as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark and came from the same root. It was a fear of concealed monsters. The most unnerving thing about him was his silence in battle. We all screamed during firefights, unconscious, primal screams, but not Jesse. Even when he was showered with Dean’s blood, he didn’t scream. He took cover, advanced to a better position, and slaughtered the Crick that killed Dean.
You make friends fast in combat. Friends watch your back and help you carry the psychological load. Jessie was with us for months before anyone passed a word with him. For better or worse, I was that person. I remember that conversation with unnatural clarity, even though so many other things have faded out and softened in time. I used to think it was because that was when I noticed his wedding ring. In truth, it was because he made me think about the enemy.
We were bedding down for the night, out on some godforsaken moon with dirt a shade of purple that only belongs in bad dreams. Jessie was sitting alone, on the edge of camp, staring out into the darkness. I always felt like he knew something about the dark that not even Prophet, with his eerie sixth sense, knew. I don’t know why I went over that night. His solitude was nothing new and I wasn’t moved by it. Like so much of what matters, I think the why of the decision is less relevant than the fact that I made it. He didn’t look my way when I walked over.
“It’s not my shift for watch, yet,” he said, his voice so
ft.
“I know,” I said. “Mind if I sit with you for a while.”
He looked at me, his expression equal parts distrust and curiosity. He nodded. I crouched down next to Jesse and watched him out of the corner of my eye. Light glinted off his left hand and I noticed the wedding ring. That was rare in the field. Married people were discouraged from enlisting. The government wanted them at home and having children. He must have made it crystal clear that he wanted to join.
“How long have you been married?” I asked. It was a place to start.
“Ten years.”
“Any kids?”
“Two girls.”
“How old are they?”
“Alissa is six and Kiasa is two,” said Jessie. “You?”
“No, not married, so no kids.”
“Is someone waiting for you?”
“Not really. I knew I was joining up after school. It seemed cruel to get involved.”
“It would have been,” he said, “but it gives you a reason to survive.”
“Don’t you mean live?”
“Do you think we’re living?”
I picked up some of the purple dirt and let it run through my fingers. I can’t tell you what I would have given for that dirt to be rich, black soil, like the kind in my uncle’s garden. I almost cried right then and there. Did I think we were living?
“No, I guess not.”
I wanted to say something more, but what to say wasn’t clear to me. I thought about my family then. My father gave his grudging support to my enlistment and my mother waited to cry until she thought I wouldn’t see. My kid brother, a true pacifist, was horrified by my decision and refused to see me off. He wrote later to apologize and ask my forgiveness. I’d been hurt when I left, but hadn’t held it against him. It was easy to line-up behind a call to arms, but it takes a profound kind of courage to publicly defy one.
“So why did you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“You know, enlist. You’re married. Isn’t that a reason not to join up?”
Stupefying Stories: August 2014 Page 11
