The Terminals Page 8

  “I know you …” the starry Hillar mouthed, eyes narrowing.

  Charlie remembered his duty. But, how? No longer corporeal, no longer a man, merely a collection of thoughts, he could only think himself to flee.

  What you feel is what you’ll be.

  He thought. He remembered. Deep within himself, Charlie held the knowledge of millennia, he had only to rediscover it. To accept it.

  The globe of Hillar swelled, trying to encompass Charlie. Lightning wormed across its semi-transparent crust. Balls of energy swung out and spit and hissed past.

  In the distance, the wall of bodies was gone. It had become the flesh of the Being, disinterested as it picked at its serrated beak with a fingernail annealed by the fire of souls. Flame and smoke feathered its head, surrounding eyes of ash and death and ignorance. Its torso was human, made from human husks, but the waist ended in scales, and snakes writhed where legs might have been. And Charlie knew its name.

  “Yaldabaoth!” he cried.

  It paused with its finger in its mouth, almost contemplative before the expression fractured into horror.

  “I name you, Yaldabaoth!” Charlie shrieked. And the Being reached with a hand spattered with carcasses and pinched Charlie from Hillar’s atmosphere to fling him across the stretch of deep to where darkness yawned and then, like piercing a velvet curtain, Charlie broke out and through.

  The needle trembled in my hand. Deeth had left it with me. Left the murder weapon.

  No forgiveness shone in Charlie’s glassy eyes. I reminded myself that this was different than what had happened in the Middle East. This man had chosen to die. But it was a choice tainted by my having convinced him, and with a promise I had no intention in keeping. I bit my lip as the tears began to threaten again.

  Attila opened his mouth as if to say something more, but I didn’t want to hear it. He wouldn’t say the right thing. It didn’t matter what side of the room I stood on.

  I rushed from the operating theater into the hall. Laughter followed my clumping steps. The general’s guffaws—the man fed on pain, and I hated myself for giving him a meal of it. As the door to my quarters slammed behind me, I buried my face in the slim pillow on the bunk. It offered little comfort as it soaked with tears.

  “Hey,” a voice intruded between my sobs.

  I twisted and snarled. Morph stumbled back, staggering more than I would have expected.

  “You did good,” Morph said.

  “Get the fuck out of my room, you know nothing about me.” I shook my head. “And I sure as hell didn’t do good.”

  Morph swayed where she stood, hands outstretched for balance. She didn’t leave.

  “You’re high.” My tone dripped disgust. “The Morph … it stands for morphine.”

  Morph blanched. “Liver disease—”

  “Yeah, we all have our reasons.” I interrupted. “I get it.”

  “Listen, I know you’re upset. I threw up with my first terminal and Euths are worse. But give yourself a break,” Morph said, finally regaining her ability to stand upright without appearing to be at sea.

  “It’s not just about Charlie,” I replied. “This is my whole fucking life.”

  “West Point, meteoric rise through the ranks, MoH.” Morph concentrated on each finger as she counted off my achievements, and it reminded me of the general pointing out why I should believe him.

  I wasn’t about to explain to Morph why I had applied to West Point, or how my rise through the ranks had more to do with my sex than any other grounds and that the Medal of Honor was a piece of tin awarded for the wrong reasons. And how, for all of these forged successes, it meant when I needed to be the hero, when it really counted, I couldn’t take the shot. Soldiers had paid for my false life. And maybe Charlie was paying too.

  “I’m not fit for duty,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

  Morph snorted and, when I didn’t break the silence, grew rock steady.

  “You damn well better be,” she said, “because there’s a corpse in there and a soul in some godforsaken deep fighting for you as hard as any soldier has ever fought.” The words were spoken in a hush, but they rang in my skull. “I don’t know what’s eating you, but if you have any chance at redemption, it’s not crying into a pillow.”

  I stared at the pillow, darkened by tears and the ooze from burns. I nodded. I may have let my men down, but I’d never done so on purpose. I wasn’t drugged or drunk. Maybe within the context of the choices available here, I was the best soldier for the job. Whatever my pain, Charlie’s would be surely worse. And I’d put him there.

  I wiped my eyes with my palms. It was another few minutes before I walked back into Purgatory.

  Chapter 11

  Charlie struck stone, his shoulder dislocating and sleeve tearing from his black robe. He rolled until he lay still.

  With his consciousness only freshly reacquainted with his body, the pain took a moment to register. But after the lull, it screamed into his skull. He clutched the injured shoulder. Lying face down, he was only dimly aware of the oven of the world above him, broiling his back.

  The silence and heat of this place shocked him as much as the impact. Beneath the coarse fabric of the robe, the crystal lay cold against his spine.

  He heaved himself over, cradling his arm, and checked for the wounds at his chest; his fingers probed his ribs and stomach, but the hole was gone. The pain in his shoulder ebbed. Looking up, his head lolled in disorientation. He stared at a roof of canyons as if he clung precariously to the ceiling of some elemental Earth. Green luminescent rivers ran through the canyons above him in a maze of glowing emerald that lit the deep. All of the rivers coursed to a distant horizon. While he watched, clouds of vapor exploded like fireworks, billowing up and down from the canyons and combusting in thunderous cracks of fire that shattered the quiet.

  He levered himself to sitting and rubbed his head, stopping when he clutched a shock of hair. Brushing it into his eyes, it was sandy brown, as it had been in his youth. Charlie combed the hair behind his ear with his fingers, disused to the movement. On his hand—veined and lacking the wrinkles and discoloration of age—shone runes, each excised into his flesh. They spelled in Coptic script a name few would recognize, Yaldabaoth. More symbols, lion-headed snakes, circlets divided into fours, ankhs and rings, these trailed up his sleeveless arm over its thin, wiry muscle. The sigils glowed faintly. On his wrist, he wore the bracelet stolen from Jo’s room, a gold serpent eating its tail. He flexed his young muscles, a smile finding his lips even through the pain in his shoulder, which was now diminishing.

  He traced the seam on the other side of his robe and picked at the stitch until it loosened. Gripping it, he pulled until it tore, slipping the sleeve off like a snakeskin and dropping it on the ground of the rock spire.

  Before he could again look around, a cold weight tapped at his back. Charlie snatched at it, but it hung from one of two leather straps looped about his neck. He drew the thinner of the two straps out. At its end was the crystal doorknob; his face distorted in its glass, but younger, fairer and—may the Aeon Sophia forgive his vanity—handsome. Strong jawed, and with a fierce brow and full lips. He chuckled and the sound was rich and sure.

  Attila had warned him that connections were fickle and the doorknob was only a focus for the psychic, some sort of inter-planar geodesic marker. Charlie lifted the doorknob to his lips, as if it were a CB.

  “The whole Christian—just ask forgiveness thing? It now seems a better route,” he said. But he couldn’t be certain Attila could hear, yet another leap of faith. What was the lag time of messages sent between planes?

  To his surprise, Attila answered. It came with a whiff of coffee scent. “Happy hunting—”

  The flippant response recalled the memory of the big doctor’s final words. There will be no pain.

  Charlie licked his lips, and his gr
ip tightened around the bulb of glass. “Go to hell,” he whispered.

  He fingered the thicker leather strap that hung around his neck and pulled what weighed there to his hand. The wooden gunstock was warm to touch and covered in the same symbols as his arms. The gunmetal shone blue, the barrel inscribed in black. After a short, straight length, the muzzle bloomed like an antique elephant gun. Charlie lowered it, braced the butt at his shoulder and fired. The runes at his arms flared, and a bolt shot through him and out the muzzle, shattering the bridge between two distant upper mesas. The recoil lanced through his shoulder, but it was already almost healed.

  Somewhere behind him a screech resounded, and he searched the rivers that swam about his mesa for the source, looking up at the sound of another second screech. Above, the ceiling ran with the arteries of a hundred luminescent tributaries. Deep within a great delta was a blur of darkness, and a thousand flapping wings. Something else shone beneath the fabric of Charlie’s robe but it was only a hint of color, and at the noise of whatever he’d awakened, he decided not to linger.

  He slung the shotgun across his back as he walked across the mesa to peer over the edge. The cliff dropped sheer to the river, easily a thousand feet below, running swiftly, and at times in alternate directions so that standing waves formed where they clashed. At the peak of the wave, another cloud formed, and flashed with an explosion that shook the earth beneath his leather boots. No bridge. No path down. His brow furrowed at the dilemma of how to get off the mesa.

  Charlie turned to look for the birds, bats, whatever came for him, and smiled. Set on its kickstand, leaned a motorbike shimmering with cerulean chrome and black glossy enamel. It gave Charlie his age. Twenty-one. The same age he’d last straddled a hog so fine. The same motorbike he’d inherited at Jo’s death and given up shortly after to join the monks. He jogged to it, the shoulder pain gone, and started the bike with a swift punch of his boot. When the chop had settled into a throaty beat, he shut his eyes and felt for Hillar.

  The first dart struck his side. Charlie cried out and fell off the bike, landing hard on one knee.

  With its long needlelike beak, the little bat-like creature had impaled itself deep in his flesh and was already becoming engorged. Another one shot into his shoulder and immediately braced its many talons into his flesh and suckled. Tears sprang to Charlie’s eyes, and he realized that these didn’t feast on his blood, their beaks sucked the marrow from his bone: bone-bats. He ripped their snouts from his body and stomped on the bats until their legs curled to their abdomens. A cloud of them neared, the whistling of wings urging him on, as they moved between bursts of exploding vapor.

  He mounted his bike and squeezed the throttle, aiming for a lip at the rim of the mesa as the bike accelerated.

  The ground blurred beneath him; knuckles whitened as he gripped the handlebars and wind made his eyes tear. Crotch-rockets, Sister Angelica called them. Had called them. And Charlie shot forward. When he hit the lip, he flew, and Charlie blew well past the slightly lower mesa that he’d been targeting. As he sailed higher, the gravity decreased, and he tensed, uncertain as to what movement would send him spinning into a cliff face. The colony of bone-bats fell back.

  He grinned and felt a moustache tickle his lip, and tried to remember if it had been there moments before. The ground dropped farther away and then he looked up. He hurtled toward the stone pillared ceiling. Head first.

  Angelica also called them donor-cycles for the number of organs their riders gave up. This from a woman who had ridden the dragon, smoking crack for a decade before falling in with the neighboring convent.

  Charlie cried out, clenching shut his eyes as he was about to strike and pulled back hard. The front tire hit, and he reflexively braked. The rear tire remained in the air, and the front discs smoked with friction. Somehow, he’d returned to right side up. The rear tire bounced once and then settled onto the ground as he skidded to a stop. He drew a deep breath. The bone-bats moved as a swarm, heading back toward him. He let out a great whoop, wishing that he could share his experience with Angelica. Being here—knowing it all to be real and the quest true—it would have changed so much of what Charlie had taught her.

  “Who’d have thought hell would be this much fun?”

  He revved, circling the bike, looking at the horizon and searching it and his senses for evidence of Hillar. At the farthest reaches, a blue spark flickered, like the cool part of a flame, or a distant lightning storm. The bone-bats chirruped, nearing. The engine of the motorcycle chopped faster and he struck the edge of the mesa, pulled up, and launched. He guffawed, the runes on his arms flaring with light. Then he couldn’t breathe and the air misted green, and he realized he’d entered a vapor cloud. One of those he’d seen detonate.

  A spark struck, and the air around him ignited.

  A great weight knotted in his throat, and he couldn’t breathe. His mouth gawped for air, but none would flow. Parts of Charlie lay strewn across a mesa’s parched and cracked earth. He no longer knew if he were down or up. Despite being unable to inhale, he felt none of the burning, lung-humping that he associated with asphyxiation. Only his neck blazed with pain. Nearby, a hand clawed at the soil with twisted and torn nails. It wasn’t attached to a wrist. In slow realization he lowered his gaze. The missing legs and arms. The lack of torso. He had been decapitated.

  As a boy, Charlie had placed firecrackers in dog shit and watched them explode, sending shrapnel of crap across the lawn. He felt like the dog shit.

  He tried to gulp, but his throat seared with pain. And in that moment it was all too much—hell. The pain. The bone-bats perching on his bits and pieces.

  The fingers of his severed hand balled in sympathy. He clenched shut his eyes, tears squeezing free. And then he opened them again and watched his hand. He contemplated his fingers. The pinky lifted. He squinted, forcing his mind through the agony. The thumb traced a slow circle in the dust.

  He struggled to feel his arms, his chest, his legs, but couldn’t see them. He willed the hand to scratch toward him. The runes on the fingers flickered. A pinky—his pinky—dug into the dirt and curled into the palm. It did it again, gaining a half inch. He willed it faster. Four fingers worked together, and soon they gripped his long hair and tugged his head in a jerking loop until he could see all his remains. The neck and torso with one arm rested about eight feet distant; a bone-bat jammed its beak into his spine. Inch by inch, the hand hauled him toward his neck. The crystal still hung around it, glowing green in the light. The bone-bats eyed him and blinked.

  He hoped the concept of what you feel is what you’ll be still applied.

  He thought hard to situate his head back on to his neck. Veins wormed out from beneath his chin, slithering to his torso and inching upward to bind on to his ragged neck. Each new connection brought more pain. His veins spooled, lifting his head, until he could speak directly to the crystal.

  The crystal flared weakly. “What’s going on, monk?”

  Charlie wasn’t certain he could speak until he did. “I think I’m … dead.” He swallowed and it took the knot away.

  “Can’t die twice.”

  “I’m making a good go of it,” he replied through clenched teeth.

  “Can’t die in the afterlife. It’s a rule, I think.” The crystal took on a steady phosphorescence. “More pain that way.”

  “That I believe,” Charlie said. “But I’m in … I’m in pieces.”

  “What you feel is what you’ll be.”

  “Then I’m puzzled.”

  “Have you seen Hillar?” it asked.

  Charlie lifted the stump of one arm and aimed it at the bicep and elbow scattered near the edge of the precipice. A vein dripped from the stump and made for its mates.

  “This may take longer than I thought.”

  Chapter 12

  Ming’s eyes throbbed. Worse than the actual stitches that stretched her
upper eyelids to her eyebrow was being unable to blink. This hadn’t kept her eyes from trying, and they twitched and tugged against the sutures. Tears left cold tracks down her cheeks, but did little to wash away the feeling that debris collected in her eyes.

  The operation had been completed one kid at a time, Ming fourth. When the psycho was done, she had cuffed Ming back to the metal bar and stuffed a ball of cloth back into her mouth. Ming had regained consciousness nauseated and disorientated.

  By the light of a lantern, Ming watched each of her friends have their eyes sewn open. The woman bobbed her head as she worked. Her snub nose wove a pattern in the air, her cheeks sucked in, augmenting fine bones. The same lamplight that reflected fear in the stitched eyes of the children lit the walls of their prison. Those walls were coated in thick rust that smelled like blood. With the last boy sewed, the woman snuffed the lantern and, ever since, darkness had prevailed. But Ming remembered her friends’ eyes.

  Over the hours, she managed to push the rag out with her tongue a second time. The cloth had absorbed all the moisture, leaving only a dry paste in her mouth. Her jaw ached, and her thirst and hunger defied description. Despite the press of the two other bodies—one on each side—she quaked with cold. The air tasted of rust and the urine that had drizzled from pant legs.

  She tried to recall anything that might help her escape or tell her where they were. Slowly regaining consciousness upon entry, she remembered sounds like boots kicking off of ladder rungs, and she’d been lowered inside a tank that echoed with breaths and whimpers.

  Ming wanted to cry, but she swallowed the tears, trying to stay strong for the others. She tried to take strength from Cordell on her right who, unlike Luke, breathed deep even breaths, and whenever the light flashed, could be seen staring stoic and grim. But then, they were all staring, weren’t they? For a moment she thought she might actually laugh. She caught herself, knowing that it would be the pale, cold laugh of the broken.