by Chris Capps
All of them. They've all lost their minds.
He heard a gentle rip, pulled the seam across as quietly as possible, let the serrated metal teeth of the bottle cap tear into the fabric thread by thread. It was painstaking to use only one hand, to keep his eye on the guard reading across from his cell. It was Frankie, the new deputy. The one still fresh out of high school. Still undisciplined.
"What are you reading?" Chance called out to the guard.
"Book on Sailing," Frankie said, "Why?"
"Plan to go sailing some day?" Chance said, faking a smile as the metal from his bottle cap uncovered one of the springs, and he tried to pull it through the thick fabric material covering it. He casually looked down to the rip, noting the spring was wrapped around the latticework of supports atop it several times. He sighed, and continued working as Frankie replied,
"I'm not going sailing any time soon, no. But you never know what the future may bring if we survive the next few days."
"How are things out there?" Cooper asked, stifling a hiss as the sharp wire poked into his finger.
"Fine, Chance. Everything's fine out there."
"Quick question," Chance said, "Why am I here?"
Frankie looked bored and sighed before replying with silence. Of course he didn't know. Chance knew, and the Sherriff knew. Beyond that, he wasn't sure. It was the island, not the fact that he had been duplicated on it. No, it was what he had seen there. The Sherriff knew what was happening to him even now on that distant hill in the water.
The Mollys had an unstoppable supply of him. They were cracking him like a safe. Every time one broke, they'd get another one. And another one after that. Chance shuddered as he forced a white curtain to drop in his mind.
They have me too.
But they didn't seem to hate Chance the same way they hated the Sherriff. When he had come back, they had been away. They just let him float off in the chopper, taking Rob with him. Poor Rob. And at the same time, lucky Rob. When that place remade him, it remade every detail, right down to the massive coronary that had been brewing in the old alcoholic's chest without anyone knowing. He'd come back, sure. But he'd never suffer more than a few minutes. He'd stay a mystery to those monsters for a long time.
Unless they knew how to save him. Give it enough time, and they'd figure it out. With sticks and rocks they'd eventually be able to keep him from slipping away. A million times they might try, but eventually they'd get a working Rob Howell. And they'd remember how to do it too. And how long was this going to go on?
With his fingernail digging out the spring, idly plucking it millimeter by millimeter from the lattice frame, he shuddered again. It had already been going on for years. And how do you stop a place from doing something? Was it something under the island's dirt that did it all? He felt the spring unclasp from the frame. He pulled it straight and started bending it back and forth.
Maybe it was something in space. Some alien satellite that had been dropped here millennia ago. Maybe it could detect the localized surface of the island and scan anything that walked onto it - pull new copies from the dirt. Maybe that's why it was an island. All the ground around it had dropped into a hole that filled with water over centuries.
He smirked at the alien explanation, shaking his head.
It just was. It was an island that made people. It simply existed without purpose - without explanation. Like him.
The spring twisted free, and Chance had to stop himself from immediately examining the lock in front of his cell. Of course it would be near impossible to pick something like that, but after lights out he would have to try. He didn't have anything to use as a tension wrench aside from the twisted bottle cap now resting in his sweaty palm, but he had to try.
He'd sit at the door until sunup if necessary, twisting the wire in the lock until it broke or opened. He wasn't going to stay in a cage until those things showed up, eager to show him how much they had learned about his capacity for suffering.
"Hey guard," Chance said, "Frankie, right?"
"Yeah, Chance," Frankie said tossing over one of the pages, "What is it?"
"Think I could get a cup of water? I'm parched."
Frankie sighed and dropped the book down on his chair getting up and leaving for the bathroom. He could hear the faucet around the corner turn, and he lunged for the door. He reached through the bars, his fumbling hand bending the end of the wire in the lock and slid it in. He scraped it back out, counting the pins he felt on the way.
Six. Damn. Six?
He had once, with great difficulty picked a lock that had three pins in the top, but this was going to be another matter completely. He bit hard on the bottle cap, flattening its tip and wrestled it into the lock, twisting it and holding the pins on top in the pressurized limbo Rob had once taught him when he was much younger. But this wasn't Grandma Cooper's liquor cabinet. This was a reinforced six pin lock with a bedspring and his life on the line. Sweat was catching between his fingertips, sliding them against one another.
"Hey Chance," Frankie said out of sight from down the hall, "You know we've got coffee. You want some coffee?"
"Yeah!" he exclaimed, his face pressed against the bars, "Thanks, man!"
"No problem, Chance," Frankie's voice echoed back as he walked out the front door.
He's going to get a cigarette too. No smoking in the holding area.
Chance gnawed at the front of his lower lip as the bedspring slid out of the lock, but still held the bottle cap fast in place. If he remembered correctly, the liquor cabinet generally took the better part of an hour to get in. There was no way he could get through this one.
Click. Ping. Ping.
The bottle cap rocked from side to side on its back on the polished floor.
"Shoot."
Chance leaned low to the ground, pushing his arm through the bars to feel for the cap's ridged surface. Just out of reach.
"Hope you like honey in your coffee," Frankie said backing through the door with two steaming cups in his hands. Chance leapt up, locking his eyes with Frankie, willing him not to look down.
"Thanks, Frankie."
"Not a problem, my friend."
Don't do it.
Frankie looked as though he was going to reach through the bars to hand Chance the coffee, but then paused as he caught sight of Chance's eyes. He shifted on his foot uneasily, and said,
"Rind says you've gone bad because of the island. Can I hand this to you, or are you going to try to grab my hand and take my gun out of its holster?"
Chance sighed again, taking a step back and looking down at the floor,
"I wasn't going to, but maybe you should do things by the book."
"Fair enough."
Frankie leaned down, setting the coffee on the floor just outside of the cell. Chance visualized kicking between the bars perfectly like he was in a spy movie, hitting the deputy in the head and sending the keys cascading into the cell. He thought about it, but didn't do it. He wasn't stupid.
"This is Jessica," the radio said, "Bring Cooper here. Rind says he's got one more question for him."
The foam cup in his hand, Cooper sat back on the bed, thanking Frankie. He knew the final question the Sherriff had. He hadn't asked before. He had avoided that specific one, instead asking about the layout and location of the island. He hadn't asked if Chance had seen Rind at the island. That was the last question, Chance figured. That would be the last question before Rind would go absolutely ballistic and cave his head in.
"Yes sir," Frankie said into the radio, then dropped it back to the steel table, "Let's head to the warehouse."
"Can I finish my coffee?"
"Sorry, man. We've got to move. The Sherriff says go now."
Frankie unlocked the door and motioned with his hand.
The car ride over was quiet. Occasionally the emergency band would paint pictures of the scene around town. Deputy Myers was radioing in, trying to get a hold of several patrols with little luck. Everyone was away from
their cars, patrolling on foot and checking in from time to time. It wasn't unusual.
"Electric team," Jessica's voice said from the radio. It seemed strained, "Please respond."
"Just up ahead," Frankie said as the car rounded the corner up by the MacReady house.
"They're at the warehouse," Chance said.
"You bet," Frankie said, "Sherriff's not taking any risks. This and the generators at the edge of town are being heavily patrolled."
The car coasted through the fog to a thin line of deputies milling about with rifles in hand. Next to the Sherriff's car a card table had been erected with an old CB plugged into a large portable battery alongside a jug of water and several crumpled paper cups. As Frankie pulled the car to a stop, the Sherriff came up and motioned for them to get out, leaning a rifle on his hip.
As Frankie opened the back seat of the car, Chance heard a sound. It was a sound he hadn't heard from this distance in ten years, since before the gate closed. It was faint enough that he thought he might have been mistaken, but as heads turned up to the sky, he could soon hear it even over the men calling to one another and rushing toward the warehouse.
"No," Chance said shaking his head as the Sherriff glared at him, "I wouldn't."
"You son of a bitch," Rind said, rage snarling up his face.
It was the sound of a distant helicopter approaching.
Chapter 14
Andrea stood, mouth timidly hanging open at the front door of her house. She had been dreading this moment for months, having thought about it week after week in the early hours of the morning as she waited for work to begin so she could leave home. She had thought about it late at night as Mark occupied the rest of the house, wandering from room to room muttering to himself. It was the one conversation she had wanted more than anything, and now as she stood in front of her house, she stopped with blood freezing in her legs.
The front door was hanging wide open, swinging gently in a gust of wind.
In twenty years she had never come to the house to find it open. But she'd had this dream. The door is open. Inside she finds Mark. And he's hanging from the rafters in the attic.
It was one of a thousand nightmares illustrating the terror she felt when she closed her eyes. And it was the one that stuck out in her mind now as she slowly heard the creak of the stairs beneath her feet in front of their house. Staring into the open living room she heard a sound like rushing water. It sounded like a roaring waterfall. But that's not what it was. She searched her mind for the noise. It was something that had grown alien with time.
Static from a television. Loud static.
But the television was in the basement. She crept in through the door looking around the living room. The window shades were drawn, and if it hadn't been for the front door, it would have been entirely dark in the house. She quickly stepped into the shadowed room and yanked one of the curtains down to spill more light into it.
Her heart was pounding, thumping in her chest as she pulled another down, illuminating still more of this darkened room. She tossed the curtains to the floor in front of her, stepping over them and making her way past the basement to the kitchen. The sound was coming from downstairs. She looked on the kitchen table. The bottles were still there, and another one had been added.
Maybe it was unreasonable that she had taken to counting them, but it was something she did anyway.
She returned to the static filled cellar hallway and looked down. A black hose was there, leading down into the darkness. She stepped down onto the first step and was awash in the deafening cry of that television. She flicked on the light switch, realizing that if anyone was actually down there, enduring the constant shriek of that useless machine, they would now know that she had arrived. Emboldened by a sense of anger, she thumped down the stairs and glared out at the scene.
She nearly screamed.
Mark was sitting in the old green bathtub they had replaced years ago, facing away up to the neck in what appeared to be mud, staring at the television. The television static was odd. They weren't speckles of white and grey like she remembered. They were red. Years ago, Mark had explained to her that television static was a visual representation of stars far away that had died.
Somehow, in her mind as she stared into that red static flickering at the foot of the tub, she thought for a moment that she saw the birth and death of a trillion alien stars.
She imagined lighting a candle in a darkened passage only to find that the flame on it was a pale sickly green. She held her hands up to her ears and tried to shut out the sound. That too was alien. It had a voice to it. She hurled herself forward, over to the television and twisted the knob to turn it off. But the voice continued. It hummed, throbbed in her ears. She spun around and faced Mark. He closed his mouth, and the voice stopped.
He turned his head slightly, glaring out at her now with something behind his eyes. She watched as he rose from the tub, the filthy water pouring heavily from his clothes as he stood and watched her with back completely straight. There was something in those eyes.
"You're crazy," she said, and meant it. But there was something more there. Something behind the madness that had trickled into the very core of his being. She searched his gaze, inexplicably feeling like she might go blind if she stared into his eyes too long. There was another thing in him. A deep and terrible knowledge.
A nightmare truth.
It was that truth that was staring back at her, not her husband. She took a step backward as he stepped out of the tub with long legs, sloshing water onto the cellar's dirt floor below. Water trailed around him, spiraling in long dusty streams around him or gouging the dirt with water beaded craters.
He raised his hand long in front of him, pointing at Andrea. He didn't say anything.
And then the thing that was no longer her husband turned and walked casually up the stairs. She waited for some time there, staring into the muddy waters of the tub sloshing back and forth in his wake. The footsteps went up the stairs, over the floor above her head, and to the front door. And then they were outside.
She stood there, transfixed by the strangeness of what had just happened.
"Kiss-kiss," she heard from the shadow at the edge of the room.
***
It was a helicopter approaching. The last bit of doubt in Chance's mind left when he saw the familiar shape lunge from the fog, slowly drifting over them. The crumpled cups on the table scattered, cascading down and bouncing hollowly onto the pavement below.
Rind had broken his gaze, shouting orders to his men as the helicopter floated over them, roaring suspended in the sky. Chance was looking up, straining to see the pilot of the craft. But there was no way to see up into the cockpit from the ground. He tried to catch his breath as the craft twisted to the side and drifted over the top of the warehouse, touching down and landing on its flattened roof.
The rotor slowly died.
"Up there!" Sherriff Rind called out to his men, "Right now!"
"We need a ladder!" another man called from the crowd, "Someone get a ladder!"
More voices called out from the crowd, faces only occasionally drifting out from the fog to meet Cooper's eye.
"S'got to be thirty feet up! We need the fire engine!"
"Fire engine's not going anywhere."
"Get a rope up there!"
The men were scattering at random now, it seemed. The sliding steel door of the warehouse had been thrown open, revealing the darkened interior. Flashlights beamed into it, tracing long shadows as Chance could see the boxes within. There wasn't as much as he had imagined. Stacks weren't filling the room entirely, but the entire back wall had been covered with cardboard and wooden crates. Chance shook his head as two men burst in, shining their flashlights on the ceiling.
Thud.
The rotor was winding down, replacing the incredible flapping sound with a slow and steady whine. Once again Chance was staring at the edge of the roof, trying to see if anyone would walk out. The thudding
sound was coming from further away, on the other side of the warehouse.
Thud.
A single tiny beam of light dropped down into the room from the roof. It was a column of light masquerading as one of the flashlight beams. One of the men inside called out,
"Hey! I think someone's trying to chisel through the ceiling!"
"Shoot her!" Someone else cried.
Thud.
The hole was getting bigger. Chance thought he heard someone on the roof screaming as the hammer above sounded again. It was a voice like his. So much like his.
"Stop! Please!"
He looked up to where the voice was approaching, to the edge of the building. There a shape looked down, a terror in his eyes Chance didn't recognize. The shape was being held by two others, who pushed him over the edge of the building.
Thud.
It lay on the pavement nearby, motionless as a wet and broken doll. The crowd hardly seemed to notice, rushing past in a long line, rifles trained up toward the hole in the ceiling. Chance Cooper dropped to one knee, staring long at the broken thing.
"Don't shoot!" Rind shouted running after them, "You'll only hit the chopper!"
A gunshot. Not from the crowd. On the roof a gun fired. Noxious pale green water started falling from the hole in the ceiling. It poured from the hole, splattering in a wide arc near one of the boxes. The puddle spread past the wood and cardboard piles, growing quickly.
"Get out!" Jessica Myers screamed at the men from the door. They ran. Cooper looked up at the two shapes still calmly standing at the entrance of the building. Two cans of gasoline fell to the pavement at the entrance and popped like water balloons. Men sprinted past, stumbling over the thing with Cooper's face that bled dark red over the shining colorful film around him. Chance had never seen blood in a rainbow before.
A bright flare dropped down through the hole into the warehouse, lighting the stacks of boxes up like fuel soaked kindling. The Mollys on the roof stared down over the entrance, daring anyone to run back inside. They stared with long lashes over the eyes of murderers.
