Текст книги "The Infinite Sea"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

61

I’M READY WITH an apology when the door opens that night. The more I think about it with my feverish mind, the more I feel like the bully at the beach who kicks over some little kid’s sand castle.

“Hey, Razor, I’m—”

My mouth drops open. There’s a stranger holding the tray, a kid around twelve or thirteen.

“Where’s Razor?” I ask. Well, more like demand.

“I don’t know,” the kid squeaks. “They handed me the tray and said take it.”

“Take it,” I echo stupidly.

“Yeah. Take it. Take the tray.”

They pulled Razor off Ringer duty. Maybe chaseball’s against regs. Maybe Vosch got ticked, two kids acting like kids for a couple of hours. Despair is addictive, for the one watching it and the one experiencing it.

Or maybe Razor’s the ticked party here. Maybe he asked to be reassigned, took his chaseball and went home.

I don’t sleep well that night, if you can call it night under the constant sterile glow. My fever shoots up to a hundred and three as my immune system launches its final, desperate assault on the arrays. I can see the blurry green numbers on the monitor inching upward. I slip into a semi-delirious doze.

Bitch! Leave me. You know why they call it baseball, don’t you? It’s a deep drive into center field! I’m done. Take care of yourself.

The grungy silver turning in Razor’s fingers. It’s a deep drive. A deep drive. Lowering toward the board in slow motion, where the fielders come up, second base and shortstop go back, left goes right. Blooper on the first-base line! Fielder races up, baseman back, boom. Fielders up, infield back, cut to the right. First baseman back, right fielder up, boom. Up, back, cut. Back, up. Boom.

Over and over, let’s go to the instant replay, up, back, cut. Back, up.

Boom.

Now I’m wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. No. Can’t see it as well. Better with my eyes closed.

Center and left slash down. Left cuts across:

H

Right steps up. First base runs back:

I

Oh, come on. Ridiculous. You’re delusional.

When I got back to our camp that night with the vodka, I found my dead father curled into a fetal position, his face covered in blood where he had clawed at the bugs born inside his mind. Bitch, he called me before I left to find the poison that would save him. He called me another name, too, the name of the woman who left us when I was three. He thought I was my mother, which was ironic. From the time I was fourteen, I was more like his mother, feeding him, washing his clothes, taking care of the house, making sure he didn’t do something catastrophically stupid to himself. And every day I went to school in my perfectly pressed uniform and they called me Her Majesty Marika and said I thought I was better than everybody else because my father was a semi-famous artist, the reclusive genius type, when the truth was that most days my father didn’t know what planet he was on. By the time I got home from school, he’d be full-on delusional. And I let people on the outside hold their delusions, too. I let them think I thought I was better, the way I let Sullivan think she was right about me. I didn’t just foster the delusions. I lived them. Even after the world crashed around us, I clung to them. But after he died, I told myself no more. No more brave fronts or false hopes or pretending everything’s okay when nothing is. I thought I was being tough by pretending, calling it being optimistic, brave, keeping my head up or whatever bullshit seemed to fit the moment. That’s not tough. That’s the very definition of soft. I was ashamed of his disease and angry at him, but I was just as guilty. I played right into the lies right up to the end: When he called me my mother’s name, I didn’t correct him.

Delusional.

In the corner, the camera’s blank, soulless eye staring.

What did Razor say? Just think about it!

That’s not all you said, is it? I ask him, looking blankly back at the blank, black eye. That isn’t everything.

62

I HOLD MY BREATH when the door opens the next morning.

All night I seesawed between belief and doubt. I wallowed in every aspect of the new reality.

First option: Razor didn’t invent chaseball any more than I invented chess. The game is Vosch’s creation for reasons too murky to see clearly.

Second option: Razor, for reasons only clear to Razor, has decided to seriously mess with my head. It wasn’t just the hardhearted and resilient who survived the winnowing of the human race. A lot of sadistic assholes persisted, too. That’s the way of every human catastrophe. The douchebag is nearly indestructible.

Third option: All of it is entirely in my head. Chaseball is a silly game made up by a kid to take my mind off the fact that I may be dying. There’s no other point, no secret messages traced on a chessboard. My seeing letters where there are no letters is the human brain’s tendency to find patterns, even where there are no patterns.

And I hold my breath for another reason: What if it’s the squeaky-voiced kid again? What if Razor doesn’t come back, ever come back? There’s a real possibility that Razor is dead. If he was trying to secretly communicate with me and Vosch figured it out, I’m sure Vosch’s response would be one thing and only one thing.

I let out my breath slow and steady when he steps into the room. The beeping of the monitor kicks up a notch.

“What?” Razor asks, narrowing his eyes at me. He senses something’s up right away.

I say it. “Hi.”

His eyes cut right, cut left. “Hi.” Drawing the tiny word out slowly, as if he’s not sure if he’s with a lunatic. “Hungry?”

I shake my head. “Not really.”

“You should try to eat this. You look like my cousin Stacey. She was a meth addict. I don’t mean you literally look like a meth addict. Just . . .” Face turning red. “You know, like something is eating you from the inside.”

He pushes the button beside the bed. I rise. He says, “You know what I’m addicted to? Sour Patch Kids. Raspberry. Not so crazy about the lemon. I have a stash. I’ll bring you some if you want.”

He sets the tray in front of me. Cold scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a blackened, crusty thing that may or may not be bacon. My stomach clenches. I look up at him.

“Try the eggs,” he suggests. “They’re fresh. Free range, organic, chemical free. We raise them right here in camp. The chickens, not the eggs.”

Dark, soulful eyes and that small, mysterious, beatific smile. What did his reaction mean when I said hi? Was he startled I offered him a halfway human greeting or was he startled because I had figured out the real point of chaseball? Or was he not startled at all and I’m picking up cues that aren’t there?

“I don’t see the box.”

“What box? Oh. It was kind of a stupid game.” He looks away and says softly to himself, “I miss baseball.”

He’s quiet for the next couple of minutes while I move the cold eggs around the plate. I miss baseball. A universe of loss in four syllables.

“No, I liked it,” I tell him. “It was fun.”

“Really?” A look: Are you serious? He doesn’t know that I am 99.99999 percent of the time. “You didn’t seem too down with it at the time.”

“I guess I’m just not feeling well lately.”

He laughs and then seems surprised at his own reaction. “Okay. Well, I left it in my quarters. I’ll bring it someday if nobody swipes it.”

The conversation meanders off the game. I discover Razor was the youngest of five kids, grew up in Ann Arbor, where his dad worked as an electrician and his mom as a middle school librarian, played baseball and soccer and loved Michigan football. Until he was twelve, his great ambition was to be the starting quarterback for the Wolverines. But he grew tall, not big, and baseball became his passion.

“Mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the old man didn’t think I was smart enough . . .”

“Wait. Your dad didn’t think you were smart?”

“Smart enough. There’s a difference.” Defending his father even in death. People die; love endures. “He wanted me to be an electrician like him. Dad was a big union guy, president of his local, stuff like that. That was the real reason he didn’t want me to be a lawyer. Suits, he called them.”

“He had a problem with authority.”

Razor shrugs. “‘Be your own man,’ he always said. ‘Don’t be the Man’s man.’” He shuffles his feet, embarrassed, like he’s talking too much. “What about your old man?”

“He was an artist.”

“That’s cool.”

“He was also a drunk. Did more drinking than painting.” Though not always. Yellowed photographs of showings hanging crooked in dusty frames and the students buzzing in his studio nervously cleaning brushes and the cathedral hush that fell when he walked into a crowded room.

“What kind of shit did he paint?” Razor asks.

“Mostly that. Shit.” Not always, though. Not when he was younger and I was small and the hand that held mine was stained with rainbow colors.

He laughs. “The way you joke. Like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and it’s your own joke.”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t joking.”

He nods. “Maybe that’s why you don’t know it.”

63

AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:

HI

Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”

“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”

“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.

“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.

The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:

HLP

Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands . . .”

He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.

HOW

I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged runners. Time slows down; events speed up.

PLN

I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.

“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”

And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.

“I didn’t understand that last play,” I tell him.

“Chaseball isn’t some lame-ass game like chess,” he says patiently. “There are intricacies. Intricacies. To win, you gotta have a plan.”

“And that’s you, I guess. The man with the plan.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Tap.

64

I HADN’T SEEN Vosch in days. That changes the next morning.

“Let’s hear it,” he tells Claire, who’s standing beside Mr. White Coat looking like a middle-schooler dragged into the principal’s office for bullying the scrawny kid.

“She’s lost eight pounds and twenty percent of her muscle mass. She’s on Diovan for the high blood pressure, Phenergan for the nausea, amoxicillin and streptomycin to keep her lymphatic system tamped down, but we’re still struggling with the fever,” Claire reports.

“‘Struggling with the fever’?”

Claire’s eyes cut away. “On the upside, her liver and kidneys are still functioning normally. A bit of fluid in her lungs, but we’re—”

Vosch waves her off and steps up to my bedside. Bright bird eyes glittering.

“Do you want to live?”

I answer without hesitating. “Yes.”

“Why?”

The question takes me off guard for some reason. “I don’t understand.”

“You cannot overcome us. No one can. Not if you numbered seven times seven billion when it began. The world is a clock and the clock has wound to its final second—why would you want to live?”

“I don’t want to save the world,” I tell him. “I’m just hoping I might get the opportunity to kill you.”

His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes glitter and dance. I know you, his eyes say. I know you.

“Hope,” he whispers. “Yes.” Nodding: He’s pleased with me. “Hope, Marika. Cling to your hope.” He turns to Claire and Mr. White Coat. “Pull her off the meds.”

Mr. White Coat’s face turns the color of his smock. Claire starts to say something, then looks away. Vosch turns back to me.

“What is the answer?” he demands. “It isn’t rage. What is it?”

“Indifference.”

“Try again.”

“Detachment.”

“Again.”

“Hope. Despair. Love. Hate. Anger. Sorrow.” I’m shaking; my fever must be spiking. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Better,” he says.

65

IT GETS SO BAD that night, I can barely make it through four innings of chaseball.

XMEDS

“Heard a rumor going around they took you off your meds,” Razor says, shaking the quarter in his closed fist. “True?”

“The only thing left in my IV bag is saline to keep my kidneys from shutting down.”

He glances at my vitals on the monitor. Frowning. When Razor frowns, he reminds me of a little boy who’s stubbed his toe and thinks he’s too big to cry.

“So you must be getting better.”

“Guess so.” Tap-tap on the bedrail.

“Okay,” he breathes. “My queen is up. Look out.”

My back stiffens. My vision blurs. I lean to the side and empty my stomach, what little is inside my stomach, onto the white tile. Razor leaps up with a disgusted cry, toppling the board.

“Hey!” he shouts. Not at me. At the black eye above us. “Hey, a little help here!”

No help comes. He looks at the monitor, looks at me, and says, “I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m okay.”

“Sure. You’re fine, just fine!” He goes to the sink, wets a clean towel, and lays it across my forehead. “Fine, my ass! Why the hell did they take you off the meds?”

“Why not?” I’m fighting the urge to hurl again.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you’ll die without them.” He glares at the camera.

“Maybe you should hand me that container over there.”

He dabs at the crud sticking on my chin, refolds the cloth, grabs the container, and places it on my lap.

“Razor.”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t put that back on my face.”

“Huh? Oh. Shit. Yeah. Hang on.” He grabs a clean towel and runs it under the water. His hands are shaking. “You know what it is? I know what it is. Why didn’t I think of it? Why didn’t you think of it? The meds must be interfering with the system.”

“What system?”

“The 12th System. The one they injected into you, Sherlock. The hub and his forty thousand little friends to supercharge the other eleven.” He puts the cool towel on my forehead. “You’re cold. You want me to find another blanket?”

“No, I’m burning up.”

“It’s a war,” he says. He taps his chest. “In here. You gotta declare a truce, Ringer.”

I shake my head. “No peace.”

He nods, squeezing my wrist beneath the thin blanket. Squats on the floor to gather the fallen chess pieces. Curses when he can’t find the quarter. Decides he can’t leave the vomit just lying there. Grabs the dirty towel he used to wipe my chin and swabs the deck on his hands and knees. He’s still cursing when the door opens and Claire comes into the room.

“Good timing!” Razor barks at her. “Hey, can’t you at least give her the anti-puke serum?”

Claire jerks her head toward the door. “Get out.” She points at the box. “And take that with you.”

Razor glowers at her, but he does it. I see again the tightly contained force behind his angelic features. Careful, Razor. That’s not the answer.

Then we’re alone, and Claire studies the monitor for a long, silent moment.

“Were you telling the truth earlier?” she asks. “You want to live so you can kill Commander Vosch? You’re smarter than that.” In the tone of a mother scolding a very young child.

“You’re right,” I answer. “I’ll never get that chance. But I’m going to have the opportunity to kill you.”

She looks startled. “Kill me? Why would you want to kill me?” When I don’t answer, she says, “I don’t think you’re going to live through the night.”

I nod. “And you’re not going to live out the month.”

She laughs. The sound of her laughter causes bile to rise into my throat. Burning. Burning.

“What are you going to do?” she says softly. She yanks the towel from my forehead. “Smother me with this?”

“No. I’m going to overcome the guard by smashing his head in with a heavy object, and then I’m going to take his gun and shoot you in the face.”

She laughs through the whole thing. “Well, good luck with that.”

“It won’t be luck.”

66

CLAIRE TURNS OUT to be wrong about me being dead by morning.

Nearly a month later, by my reckoning of three meals per day, and I’m still here.

I don’t remember much. At some point they disconnected me from the IV and the monitor, and the silence that slammed down after the constant beeping was loud enough to crack mountains. The only person I saw during that time was Razor. He’s my full-time caretaker now. Feeds me, empties my bedpan, washes my face and hands, turns me so I don’t develop bedsores, plays chaseball in the hours when I’m not delirious, and talks nonstop. He talks about everything, which is another way of saying he talks about nothing. His dead family, his dead friends, his squad mates, the drudgery of winter camp, the fights borne of boredom and fatigue and fear (but mostly fear), the rumors that when spring comes the Teds are launching a major offensive, a last-ditch effort to purge the world of the human noise, of which Razor is very much an active part. He talks and talks and talks. He had a girlfriend, her name was Olivia and her skin was dark like a muddy river and she played clarinet in the school band and was going to be a doctor and hated Razor’s dad because he didn’t think Razor could be a doctor. He lets it slip that his given name is Alex like A-Rod and his drill sergeant named him Razor not because he was slender but because he cut himself shaving one morning. I have very sensitive skin. His sentences are without periods, without commas, without paragraphs, or, to be accurate, it’s all one long paragraph with no margins.

He shuts up just one time after nearly a month of the verbal diarrhea. He’s going on about how he won first place in the fifth-grade science fair with his project about how to turn a potato into a battery when he stops in midsentence. His silence is jarring, like the stillness after a building implodes.

“What is that?” he asks, staring intently into my face, and nobody stares more intently than Razor, not even Vosch.

“Nothing.” I turn my head away from him.

“Are you crying, Ringer?”

“My eyes are watering.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me no, Razor. I don’t cry.”

“Bullshit.” A tap on the blanket.

Tap-tap on the railing. “Did it work?” I ask, turning back to him. What does it matter if he sees me cry? “The potato battery.”

“Sure it worked. It’s science. Never a doubt about it working. You plan it all out, follow the steps, and it can’t go wrong.” Squeezing my hand through the blanket: Don’t be scared. Everything’s set. I won’t let you down.

It’s too late to go back now anyway: His eyes wander to the food tray beside the bed. “You ate all the pudding tonight. You know how they make chocolate pudding without chocolate? You don’t want to know.”

“Let me guess. Ex-Lax.”

“What’s Ex-Lax?”

“Seriously? You don’t know?”

“Oh, so sorry I don’t know what Ex-Lax-who-gives-a-shit is.”

“It’s a chocolate-flavored laxative.”

He makes a face. “That’s sick.”

“That’s the point.”

He grins. “The point? Oh God, did you just make a joke?”

“How would I know? Just promise me nobody slipped Ex-Lax into my pudding.”

“Promise.” Tap.

I last for a few hours after he leaves, long after lights-out in every other part of the camp, deep into the belly of the winter night, before the pressure becomes unbearable, and then, when I can’t take it anymore, I start shouting for help, waving at the camera and then rolling over to press my chest against the cold metal railings, pounding my fist into the pillow in frustration and fury, until the door bursts open and Claire charges in, followed closely by a big bear of a recruit, whose hand immediately flies to cover his nose.

“What happened?” Claire says, though the smell should tell her all she needs to know.

“Oh, crap!” the recruit burbles behind his hand.

“Exactly,” I gasp.

“Great. Just great,” Claire says, throwing the blanket and sheet onto the floor and motioning for the recruit to help her. “Fine job, missy. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“Not yet,” I whimper.

“What are you doing?” Claire shouts at the recruit. Gone is the soft voice. Vanished are the kind eyes. “Help me with this.”

“Help you with what, ma’am?” He has a flattened nose and very small eyes and a forehead that bulges in the middle. His belly hangs over his belt and his pants are an inch too short. He’s huge; he’s got about a hundred pounds or more on me.

It won’t matter.

“Get up,” Claire snaps at me. “Come on. Get your legs under you.” She takes one arm and Jumbo Recruit takes the other and together they haul me out of the bed. Big Recruit’s smushed-in face is twisted with revulsion.

“Ah, God. It’s everywhere!” he softly wails.

“I don’t think I can walk,” I tell Claire.

“Then I’ll make you crawl,” she snarls. “I should just leave you like this. It’s so perfectly metaphorical.”

They haul me two doors down and into the shower room. Big Recruit is coughing and gagging and Claire is bitching and I’m apologizing while she strips off the jumpsuit and throws it at Jumbo Recruit, telling him to wait outside. “Don’t lean on me. Lean on the wall,” she orders harshly. My knees are buckling. I hang on to the shower curtain to keep upright; I haven’t used my legs in a month.

With one hand locked around my left arm, Claire pushes me under the water, bending at the waist to stay dry. The spray is icy. She didn’t bother to adjust the temperature. The slap of cold water against my body is like an alarm going off, snapping me from a long winter’s hibernation, and I reach up and grab the showerhead pipe coming from the wall and tell Claire I think I’ve got it; I think I can stand; she can let go.

“Are you sure?” she asks, holding on.

“Pretty sure.”

I wrench the pipe downward with all the force I have. The pipe breaks off at the joint with a metallic squeal and the cold water gushes out in a ropey snarl. Left arm up, slipping through Claire’s fingers, then I’ve got her by the wrist and I swing my body toward her, rotating my hips to maximize the blow, and slam the jagged edge of the broken pipe into her neck.

I wasn’t sure I could break a steel pipe with my bare hands, but I was pretty sure.

I have been enhanced.