Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  The Sticker closed his mouth, which had fallen open. “So… I don’t have to go into surgery tonight?”

  “I hope not,” said Razz, “you’re being announced tonight at the company’s annual dinner. All division executives have to attend. That’s why we fixed your grill there. Hope you like the new pearly whites, makes you more diplomatic looking.”

  He looked at Tasha, who beamed. “I just found out this morning.”

  “It’s been tough handling two divisions on my own,” said Razz. “Now I can focus on Ganymede division and you can oversee here.”

  “Los Angeles?”

  Razz laughed. “No, Earth, of course.”

  The Sticker choked on some spit that went down the wrong pipe. He looked at Trevor. “But what’s he do? Besides be rich and an asshole?”

  “Those businesses are fronts. I answer to the Earth Director here. My sole position is a supervisor of operations in the Los Angeles office,” Trevor put mildly. “Are you going to fire me now?”

  “Are you joking?” The Sticker swung out of bed. Both his feet touched the cold ground. It was a lovely, powerful feeling; he wasn’t dreaming after all. He stood toe to toe with Trevor Milstead now. He’d never been afraid of the man, but he’d never felt like an equal either. “I’m never going to fire you, Milstead,” said the Sticker. “Where the hell is the fun in that?”

  Tasha sniffed out a laugh and looked away.

  “Thanks, Director,” answered Trevor. When nobody said anything, he hurried from the room.

  Razz took the Sticker’s hand. “And thank you, Director, for saving my life.”

  “I don’t know how to do this job,” the Sticker admitted.

  “Nobody does at first. But with my help,” he said, “you’re going to do great.”

  “Phenomenal,” added Tasha.

  “But isn’t this strange? Me… working directly for you guys.”

  “I told you before. This kind of thing happens all the time. Most of our recruiters were once clients, in fact. It’s because our contracts are so blasted weak. I’ve been meaning to revise them.”

  “So you?” the Sticker asked Tasha.

  The little girl smirked. “No, I’ve never worked outside the company. I was the first recruiter and I’ll be the last.”

  “But how—”

  “I’ll send a courier later with your new clothes and invitation,” Razz interrupted. “Sound good, Slaughter Man?” He lifted a hopeful eyebrow.

  The Sticker threw up his hands. “Sounds good.”

  They left him there in the plush hospital room. He felt like hooting and crying and laughing all at once, but instead sat on the bed and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, Annette stood in the room.

  “I don’t expect you to forgive my actions or how brutal I’ve treated you lately. I just wanted to congratulate you. Trevor’s not happy, but I know you’ll be a good boss. I’m really stoked for you. I am.”

  The Sticker opened his arms and Annette moved into them. It felt so damningly good to hold her again, savor the moment, before he pushed her back and searched her pleading face. Annette studied his eyes for a moment. “You aren’t still mad at me. Are you?”

  He shook his head.

  She smiled and went to embrace him again, but he put his hand up. “Of course I haven’t stopped caring about you, Annette, but I do have a business to run now.”

  She frowned. “But…”

  “So,” said the Sticker, pointing to the hall, “if you please, kindly get the hell out of my building. Now.”

  *

  The last course was rainbow sherbet molded into a Limbus globe. The Sticker thought it almost too pretty to eat. Tasha and Razz argued a bit about something work-related into which he hadn’t turned his attention.

  “You’re so sensitive,” said Razz. “Must get it from your mother.”

  “You haven’t even met my mother yet!” Tasha said.

  “Uh, how, uh, does that work?” asked the Sticker, jumping into the conversation.

  “Time doesn’t matter, remember?”

  “Yeah…”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Razz.

  The Sticker sighed. The reality of what happened had finally connected. With everything he’d faced, this new world, a world of boundless responsibility, seemed even more terrifying. “It’s just… I don’t feel I’ve earned this.” His voice betrayed him with a quiver.

  Razz shook his head in respectful disbelief. “You have. More than anybody here.”

  The Sticker looked down under the table, at his loafers, so strange on his feet.

  A representative stopped by the table with individual packets. “Hello, Mr. Willing. Hello Ms. Willing. Here are action items and annual budget breakdowns. Oh and hello, Mr. Fulsome, here is yours.”

  The Sticker took his packet and nodded thanks.

  Tasha said, “Funny, I remember your name from our files, but it sounds strange to hear spoken. We all just called you the Slaughter Man.”

  “Dean Fulsome… not sure I ever knew the man,” said the Sticker.

  Razz raised his glass. “Happy Birthday, Dean.”

  Tasha lifted hers.

  Dean lifted his.

  “To time not mattering,” he said.

  Their three glasses met.

  For Dean Fulsome, that was the moment everything began.

  The Sacrifice

  By

  Brett J. Talley

  He couldn’t see anything, and all he could hear was a steady drip, drip, drip that thundered in his ears. Drip, drip, drip in regular beats, too loud to be real. And then it wasn’t real anymore. It faded out and almost away—but not quite—as his consciousness expanded to encompass something more than just that sound. His eyes fluttered open, but all he saw was red. A pool of crimson that seemed to expand beneath him as he grew colder. The drip of blood from his forehead added to the flow, but it was a larger opening somewhere else on his body that served as the fountainhead.

  He started to lose focus, and the black shroud of unconsciousness mixed with the crimson of the blood on the edges of his vision. As darkness took him, his eyes fell on a piece of white cardboard floating in the midst of the red ocean. It hung there like a ship on the verge of floundering, until a rivulet of red water poured over its side. He watched as the blood touched the thick, black letters. And then, in the instant before consciousness left him, he would have sworn those same letters ignited in a flash of red light, the name they formed glowing in the night.

  *

  “So what were you doing at Cliff’s Edge last night?”

  Katya. It all went back to Katya.

  The detective waited, drumming his notebook with his pencil while Ryan thought about her.

  “It’s a simple question,” he said finally, leaning forward in his chair and putting the sharpened end of the pencil to paper, ready to write.

  Ryan looked at him. “No,” he said, “nothing is ever simple.”

  Detective Fox frowned. Ryan wasn’t trying to be mysterious, but he knew that’s how he came off. The detective had been patient, giving Ryan time to recover after he was found that night, lying in a pool of his own blood outside of the Cliff’s Edge nightclub. Ryan had almost gone over that edge. He was as near to death as a man could be and still come back from it.

  “There’s nothing much simpler than a bar fight, son. But I’ll never find the guys that did this if you don’t give me something to work with.”

  Ryan thought back to Katya. “I was there to meet a woman,” he said.

  “Ah,” the detective mumbled in a knowing way that made Ryan cringe. It wasn’t that simple, but he had chosen his words poorly. And now for Fox, it would always go back to the girl. A jilted lover, a guy who tried to flirt at the bar only to be rebuffed. A rival for her affection that saw Ryan as a threat, one that had to be eliminated. Yeah, for the detective, the answer was obvious. But he was right in one thing. The girl was the key.

  But even that wasn’t
true. It went back further than her. It all started with the nightmares.

  *

  A few days before the incident at the bar, Ryan lay in his bed, fighting sleep. It was a losing battle.

  When they first started, Ryan had told himself that the dreams would go away. That once he was home long enough, the familiar would kick in. He would be reminded of who he was. Not Lance Corporal Ryan Dixson. No. He was Ryan from Carbondale. Starting linebacker on his high school football team. Son of David and Joy. Regular guy with a regular life. But the dreams wouldn’t let him forget. So he lay there, waiting. It hadn’t gotten better. In fact, it had gotten worse.

  At first, when he landed in the States, they had come once every couple weeks. But with every few days that passed, he saw them more. The last night he had slept through without having the dream was Saturday. Now it was Wednesday, and he didn’t know if he could handle another one.

  He wasn’t sure that he should call them dreams. They were more like memories in dream form. Night terrors of an actual event. No embellishment needed, for it took no dark conjuring to turn Ryan’s dreams into soul-rending flights of horror. No, the dirty work had been done in the real world. The only conjuring needed was the fumbling hands of a tribal rebel.

  He was probably still alive, out there somewhere. That singular day was no doubt burned into his mind as well. Perhaps, on long nights in the Afghan waste, he and his fellows would sit round a low fire. In the sparking embers, as the others waited silently, ready to hang on his every word, he would weave the scene.

  It was a convoy, seven Humvees deep. The Afghan raiders sat on a low hill a mile from the dusty, desert road on which the soldiers traveled. They were members of a local tribe. Not Taliban, but angry enough at the world and the invader to accept their generosity in the form of crude explosives.

  Their methods were simple. Bury the device along the side of the road. Wait. When the target was over the area, trigger the bomb with a remote. Run.

  The last part meant they were never really sure whether they succeeded. Sometimes the bomb went off too late or too early. Sometimes it just disabled the vehicle or caused minor damage. Most times it was more of a nuisance than anything else. But every now and then, it all fell into place. And that was the story the Pashtun man would tell his brothers in the dark watches of the night. Of the time that he killed an American.

  Of course, Ryan never saw it that way, figuratively or literally. The dream was always the same. He was in the middle Humvee, the one that, by all rights, was the safest. He was sitting in the center of it, protected by the vehicle’s most heavily armored section. His back was to the windshield, facing Philip O’Connor. Philip was grinning. It seemed like Philip always was.

  That smile was the last happy memory Ryan ever had.

  It happened in an instant, as these things always do. One moment Philip was smiling. Then, somewhere on that distant hill, a man Ryan didn’t know and would never meet pressed a button. It took a split second for the signal to travel from the hill to the road. Long enough for a heartbeat. Long enough for the Humvee to roll the few extra feet it needed to for fate to have its due. But as thunder follows lightning, so too did the roar of the explosion follow the pressing of that button. On that roar rode death.

  He only really heard it for a singular instant. After the pressure wave burst his eardrums, everything that followed was more of a low, echoing murmur, like he was sitting at the bottom of a well. Somehow that made everything all the worse.

  He felt his stomach drop as the whole vehicle lifted into the air. But it wasn’t the feeling of weightlessness or the bursting of his ears that filled his nights with horror. It was what he saw.

  Philip was sitting across from him, smiling. Then he was ripped apart. Even as it happened, even as parts of his body were twisted and torn off, he still wore that smile.

  They said he died instantly, and Ryan believed it. He often wondered what exactly it meant to die instantly, though. It was true—the smile never left his face. But that only meant that his brain didn’t have enough time to register what was happening and send a signal to his muscles to better reflect it. Even if the control of every fiber was cut in that instant, even if that smile remained frozen in place, Ryan still wondered what the brain knew. If Philip’s last thoughts were simply the echo of soundless screaming, confined within the walls of his own mind.

  Then Ryan wasn’t just thinking about it—he was living it. In that instant of reflected terror, he watched it happen again through his own eyes but with no power to stop it, a passenger in the flights of his own subconscious. As much a prisoner as one bound by chains.

  He awoke from the dream as the sound of thunder ripped through the cabin of the vehicle and the body of his friend.

  That night, the transition was a quiet one, his eyes simply fluttering open to the darkness that seemed eternal but in fact ended in the ceiling above. It had not always been that way. At first it was a shock. He would jerk himself from the dream, sitting bolt upright in his bed, drenched in sweat. At least, with time, he had overcome that part. Now that the dreams came more frequently, he had plenty of chances to practice self-control.

  Not that it made it any easier to fall back asleep. No, in the hours that followed, he was as awake as he would ever be, even as he knew he would pay for it in the coming morning. There was no point in lying there and fighting it. If anything, that would probably make it worse, prolong the agony. He sighed as he pushed down the covers and pulled himself out of bed.

  He wandered down the steps in the dark, not bothering with the lights. As if there was anyone else but him there, someone he might disturb, someone he might awaken. But he was alone, and he felt it.

  He tripped on the final step, almost falling as he stumbled into his living room. He let himself collapse down into the recliner that sat in front of his television and turned it on. Then he reached over and opened the small refrigerator that he kept permanently stocked with beer. As he opened one, he couldn’t help but think that he was drinking more of it these days.

  Bottle in one hand and remote in the other, he pressed a button and the electronic firelight of the television outshone the meager glow of the moon that had, until that point, provided the room’s only illumination. Ryan flipped through the channels, pausing briefly on an infomercial that made him smile for the first time in what seemed like ages. But it was a horror film that struck his fancy, one of those bad sci-fi flicks they only play at three o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t long before his eyelids began to grow heavy. They had almost closed completely when the movie faded out and the commercial began.

  If it hadn’t been that particular commercial, Ryan wouldn’t have remembered it. If it had been anything else, he simply would have slipped away into sleep, never recalling the televised message he’d seen before dreams took him. Maybe then things would have been different. Maybe then, everything would have changed.

  But it wasn’t just any commercial. It was something much different. Ryan watched through barely opened eyes, and later he would tell himself it had been a dream brought on by too much beer and not enough sleep. It started as a flash that filled the screen in blinding white before fading to an equally empty black. There was a pause then, the image emanating from the television now giving no light, and darkness held sway. But then from that black void, letters started to form, silhouetted in a dirty red. But it was the voice that broke through the dream-like haze that gripped Ryan.

  “We are Limbus,” it said, as the shadowed outlines cleared into letters that formed the word. “We stand on the edge. We stare into the abyss. We do not discriminate. We do not forget. We employ. Join us.”

  Then there was another flash of light, and in that flash Ryan saw a girl, no older than thirteen or fourteen. In that solitary moment, he watched her, wearing flannel pajamas covered in shooting stars and moons and unicorns. Rough hands grabbed her tightly around the arms and legs. And though she struggled, they did not relent. She screamed, and Ryan
awoke, still in his bed.

  *

  The next evening he found himself in the bowels of Hendricksville Community College, standing in one of the basement hallways, staring down a corridor to a classroom that contained the support group for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. HCC was housed in an ancient government building of post-War vintage. If it were one of the new lofts in the warehouse district, the exposed pipes and naked brick would no doubt have added hundreds of dollars to the cost of rent, and young couples and hip singles would call the place home. It just made Ryan feel dirty and worn down.

  He had known for a while that someday, somehow, he would find himself in a place like this. It was hard enough holding down a job in the civilian world anyway, and bosses didn’t like employees who at any moment might find themselves back in the middle of a firefight or a roadside bombing outside some dusty town in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  The dream of the night before had been the final straw. Somehow, he’d grown accustomed to the other nightmares, as horrible as they were. But there was something about this one, something sinister and disturbing, that he could not shake. He needed to get help, even if that help was only the kind ear of someone who had suffered the same pain.

  That had been the plan, but like all plans this one was laid waste by the unexpected. His started to unravel the moment he saw Katya.

  He would always remember that moment, the one when he caught a glimpse of her for the first time. It had been a revelation. She had been walking from one open classroom to another, probably finishing one meeting before his own was set to begin. It was a passing glance, but in that instant she cast a singular look down the hallway, and Ryan froze.

  Maybe it was her eyes, pale green flashes that grabbed him even from that distance. Or the hair, a bright, crashing red all the wilder above the tight cut of her black jacket, one that covered a matching skirt that somehow seemed incongruous with the rest of her. Whatever the answer, it lasted only a second before that locked gaze was broken as she passed into the next room.