Kissing Carrion

Five times out of five. Granted, I’m a traitor, not a scientist—but to me, those odds do suggest a certain pattern.

I felt myself freeze, then, settling instinctively into much the same position I hold now, except with my back up against the door instead of the corner. Freeze and listen, straining for a hidden warning, some cold whisper beating up through the rush and gasp of my own hot blood—a hum beneath the hum.

Beneath the human.

The flutter of my pulse, quick and light with morbid anticipation. The—

(Phobo)

—inescapable fear—

(phobia)

—of my own fear.

. . . and why do I keep forgetting that fucking word?

Oh yeah, right; brain melting. Memory—drowning.

Terror-struck, I held my breath, tried to slow it down. Closed my eyes and prayed to simply disappear, before the sheer, dull, palpable horror of it all ate me alive.

But I didn’t piss my actual pants until the first time I heard that noise in my blood begin to talk.

* * *

Two weeks, ten days and five other men ago . . . five men I knew well—my trusting comrades, my trusted co-operatives . . . five men plus dear, dead Captain Kiley, that old Cold War-horse, who once let slip (in strictest confidence) how he considered me his second son . . .

The call came straight from the top, wherever that is: A need-to-know mission with an unstated goal, just a set of coordinates and a schedule on a sheet of flammable fax-paper.

Search and destroy, no questions asked. So we smuggled ourselves into the area, clinging barnacle-fast to the hull of a rented ship—dropped blind, docked ourselves at the base of volcano 037, got equalized with the pressure, and spent the rest of the day marking off time. And when the sub’s shadow fell over us, we swum to meet it in perfect formation, convinced—like the brave little hardbodied boy scouts our training had made us—that the computerized codes we’d been issued with would be enough to trick our way inside. Which they were, of course; when you’re working for folks who routinely drop $50 million or so on new toilet paper dispensers, a string of numbers probably comes comparatively cheap.

No, it wasn’t the codes that betrayed us, or got us captured within an insulting half-hour. The codes didn’t give us up to the Doctor, to serve as cannon-fodder in his continuing quest to find out what that thing in the Waiting Room was—aside from almost-instant death for anybody he threw in with it.

’Cause codes, you see, don’t really come equipped for treason—hold no political opinions, weigh no options, covet no raise in monetary reward. Risk nothing and nobody on the simple hope of gettin’ pee-ay-ei-dee-paid.

So who?

Well . . .

* * *

Like participants in any arranged marriage, The Doctor and I agreed to consummate our vows only after an exhaustively negotiated ritual of long-distance courtship. Acting under Kiley’s orders, I used my satellite access as the unit’s translator and intelligence liaison to track the sub’s location and eavesdrop on its internal mutterings—and when his back was turned, I used the same good ol’ U.S. technology to slip inside the Doctor’s laptop, read his notes. Send him e-mail. Tell him he could protect his precious project, and gain a core group of experimental subjects, for the one-time-only price of a hefty Swiss bank-account deposit, a trip back to the surface and an artfully-faked sole survivor scenario: Me cast momentarily adrift in the unit’s life-pod, beacon on, with an enemy bullet lodged in some suitably fleshy body-part (exact location to be determined later on, at both our conveniences.)

“You tellin’ me all this’s about money?” Kiley demanded. And I just shrugged, snapping back: “What else?”

Thinking, all the while: Disappointed? Well, fuck you, dead man. You can yap all you want about honor, and duty, and the idiot joy of the holy patriotic Cause—but from where I stand, you’re nothing but worm-food with an attitude. So go ahead, strike that pose. When you’re being buried with full military honors, I’ll be cutting myself a slice of apple pie and negotiating a thousand-dollar blow-job.

“You know when the Old Ma’am and the rest of those REMFs back at HQ find out, they’re gonna cancel your sorry ass.”

I smirked. “Find out from who?”

“Ain’t you got no pride at all, boy?”

“Well. I guess not.”

Behind me, somebody spit on the floor. All of them glaring through me, turned back first: If looks could eviscerate. Even fey little Ed LoCaso, the training camp’s token cocksucker, suddenly pumped full of indifferent hauteur and undying contempt—if the situation hadn’t been just a little too butch to bear it, he looked like he might have given me the finger-snap, or maybe just the finger.

“You just better be ready to live with yourself, Book,” Kiley told me, finally, right before they hauled his kneecapped ass onto that medical stretcher and took him down the hall to meet our mystery guest. Last words, and he knew it, so he thought he had to make them count—make his point before it was too late for me to repent, and come to an impressive eleventh-hour understanding of the error of my ways.