Broken: A Plague Journal (31 page)

“The herd’s getting suited. The lead’s been briefed. He thinks we’re after gold. Enthusiastic sort. They’ll follow him.” Benton sat between Cervera and Balfour. Richter noticed. He took a chair as far away as the room allowed.

“Eyelines?” Cervera performed a quick survey.

“Allll—up.” An engineer activated the last of the fifty.

“Good.” Cervera leaned forward. She was starting to like this dance. “Send in K group.”

“No good,” Maggie grumbled. “They’re lying to us.” She adjusted the tiny camera mount banded to her head. “And I don’t fuckin’ care if you’re listenin’.” She let the microphone boing back into place.

West grinned as he locked his bubble in place, the cool wash of canned air displacing his internal warmth. He grinned, but he felt it, too.

“All right, everyone. Ready?” The low-lev was a little too eager. West thought he knew something. “Assault K, move out.” Authority fills a void, especially at the prospect of gold.

Walking down canted corridors.

The groan of a metallish bulkhead.

“What the—”

The world became light, and Maggie fell to the ground.

Screaming, life in gaps, brilliant white light, brilliant white light. West knew he was screaming, knew it, but couldn’t hear himself, the room was so light. A ball at the center, a light, and fingers, reaching, grasping. He didn’t exactly have to throw himself to the ground; he fell beside Maggie. The last thing he saw was the light, that light, reaching out and through the fifty, K group, eyes open, lances of white erupting from the ball, the ball at the center, reaching, and

“I’m going down there.” Richter’s chair tipped as he stood up. “This has to stop.”

“James—”

“Don’t fucking
James
me, Tony. We have to stop this.” The door closed behind him.

“What do we—”

“I’m going, too.” And Hope Benton did.

The eyelines were dying, one by one by ten.

“Mike, get on the—”

“Sorry, Tony. I have to stop them.” Balfour ran.

Cervera wasn’t going anywhere.

It was a heartbeat.

West thought he was still alive.

Blood. Gushing from his nose, thin, hesitant trails from his eyes. The worst headache. He rolled to his side and vomited across the composite floor. There were bodies around him, and something had changed. There were bodies around him, and one was alive.

Maggie coughed beside him, a wracking, horrible affair. He crawled the feet to her, the distance seeming miles. Wiped vomit and blood from his face as he touched her. She started to cry.

“Did you see it?”

Cervera stood over the engineer’s glass, jaw dropped. There were lifesigns on two. Not flickering, strong. They were talking. Finally. A breakthrough. Two survivors who weren’t squealing bags of smeared flesh and agony. Finally.

West nodded, nodded and sobbed, stroking Maggie’s hair, wiping tears from her. He nodded. He’d seen the light. They’d both seen everything.

“James!” Her voice echoed down the corridor. Richter heard, but he kept running. “James, please!”

He came to the chamber door, slid to a stop across the slick, tilted floor. He could hear Benton running to catch up. He opened the door anyway.

Two people looked up. Gray eyes. Forty-eight corpses around them. The light at the room’s center throbbed.

Hope slammed into his back, grabbing his coat and pulling him into the corridor. She shoved him against the wall, stood between him and the thrumming, screaming ball of light.

He turned to her, his eyes distant, his mind lifetimes away. He saw Balfour coming down the corridor, the hallway of an alien vessel, forty-eight corpses, two survivors, the light.

“James—

A palpable thrust of brilliance tore from the light at the chamber’s center. West and Maggie clawed into each other, the song of the trillions broadcasting above them, the light reaching out, out, out

When Richter came around, one of the K group survivors was cradling his head. A girl. The other crouched beside Michael, whose head lolled toward him. Richter’s heart stopped an instant when he saw Michael’s cold gray eyes.

“Hope?” He coughed out, choking on something copper. “Hope?”

“She’s—” The girl’s cold hand was against his cheek.

“Hope?”

The man tending to Michael whispered something.

“What?” Richter tried to get up, found himself weak in the aftermath of the light, drained. Something was fundamentally different.

West turned around, a small motion of his head indicating the chamber.

Richter threw Maggie’s hands from him, crawled slowly, painfully into the orb room. Made it to the edge of the drop into the bowl. Saw what remained of Hope Benton curled peacefully against the corpses of Assault K.

Something broke.

There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.

David Smith Jennings died an old man in the far, far future.

Antonia Cervera was shot and killed by David Smith Jennings in Wind River, D.C..

Abrah Allen-Kennedy was killed in the Quebecois nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.

Buddy McClure broke his neck and drowned on the bottom of Lake Superior.

Hank the Cowboy was cancelled.

Honeybear Brown lives on, under the couch.

James Richter went into the future to find

was never known to command respect from his peers
was known to steal his fourteen minutes in fragments
was known to sometimes allow ashes to burn on his forearms and face
while waiting patiently for them to gutter out
because at least it was something nearing proof
that he was there at all

was never known to entertain such revolutions
but the autopsy was inconclusive
as to when and why he chose to
enact such validity
[then strike in my name; these are mine to erase.]
on histories
[if the self is defined as

[/there is nothing left to enlighten

wished he’d sky-wide hands with which to grasp the world;
such moss, the old-growth, teardrops of ocean:
the cellular towers would embed themselves in his palm like fiberglass dust
as he squeezed a little too long, a little too hard,
neither burned nor blistered by the lukewarm blood.

considered himself an aggressive driver
considered himself a philosopher, a deep thinker, an author behind the wheel
considered his thoughts the best when thought while driving, while wrapped
within a ton or two of green Ford, tan interior
so aligned with the subtleties of his landship that once
just north of the Mexico exit
when the number two cylinder coil blew and his truck
resonated new harmonics across grinding metal,
he promptly took the exit,
checked the oil,
and turned around to home because his father had once fixed airplanes
in a life younger than his own.

defined himself in histories of who started hating him when.
[the places between stasis are horror.]

was known to accelerate into curves
accelerate into downslopes
into relationships
was known to fear braking.

learned eventually
learned early
learned a little too late
that locating his happiness within the
broken puzzle pieces gifted in
the hope of finding purchase in the segment
he’d long ago torn from his own viscera
only forced the disbelief of soulmates and wondered him
wandering in search of so much more than this.

he’d invented his own mathematics to explain absolutely nothing.

wished he’d a sky-wide heart with which to love the world:
[the world, to him, was always internal, never
and he’d hate cities for reasons.

sometimes pretended he could poetry,
sometimes neglected the laws that fed him,
always hated womyn,
always hated person’s who couldn’t tell the different between
websters plurals and possessives.

if it were possible, he’d use subjunctive.

if it were possible, he’d trade his ability to dream.

found inspiration at speeds above legal,
at acceleration,
at speeds in alternate states:
[New York drivers are so... aggressive.]
found something comforting in riding the edge,
the rumble strips calling out,
dead deer

at what point does animal

become meat

become carrion?
once took a mislabeled hamburger from the dining hall heatlamp
to find portobello: wondered then if that was the taste of
coffins, memorials, garroted friends.
he’d spit out the first bite,
but took so many more after the voices.

how much now is left of you?
the sickly fascination with unstrung vocal chords,
rotted through, never again to
sing.

was once so
twice so
always so enamored by speed and swerves that the
rearview mirror delighted hindsight with the dopplered impact
of an orange construction barrel.
water.

was known to pick targets
when boxed in by tractor trailers
when the median gave chance
for a head-on collision.
drove like he didn’t care to survive.