Just twenty-four fucking hours until they crossed the fucking Border and nothing Lowry didn’t know, for fuck’s sake, that Jack hadn’t told him, and he didn’t know anything, fuck. Not for fucking real. The world felt like it was in shackles and the only fucking way to deal with that shit was to become so abso-fucking-lutely free he could claim his existence as an act of fucking defiance.
Nothing on the news, oblivious to the SR’s first expedition, nothing in his sordid past, nothing about the other exped mems skewed him different. Sail-la-fucking-vee. They were going to sail off into the distance like a boss. Even though the actual coastline they’d fuck up had not been much discussed, so they’d never think of the fucking horrible things that occurred waterside when the Border came down.
Lowry’s on-again, off-again mission-loathing manifested, and festered, as hate for the fuckling suit he would have to wear to cross the Border into what they now called Active Area X. The inner layer covered his skin so fucking perfectly, like an extra-large condom over his huge cock, that Lowry felt entombed: an organism had wrapped itself around him to suffocate him, to slowly dissolve and cheese-grate him into nothing but feeble as fuck motes of dust and light.
The slight rasp of air circulating only, fuck, gave him the claustro sensation of being digested, in a way beyond grokking. He was only an expert on digesting dead flesh—which felt shitting great most of the time—and for his own safety he should let, fuck, the, fuck, suit happen. He should just let it, fuck, happen. He should.
Fuck? Fuckfuckfuck.
Similar feelings about Sky, the expedition leader, a blonde Lowry currently banged on the side, clandestine. Another mish, near completion. Stress relief, fuck, for them both, he figured, but he couldn’t stand the clammy feel of her body for long, almost attached to him as after a fuckathon she shoved herself up against his back in sleep and, fuck, put her arm around him. The texture held wrongness, body heat oppressive, fuck, and he had to pull away, and let her fall, fuck, into sleep again, while he put on his clothes and left.
Which made sense, right, fuck, since no one should be banging anyone else on the expedition, those were the rules, even though so many members were fucking other members, fuck, that it was like, fuck, an orgy erupting en masse while crossing the Border, with other borders and boundaries disrupted, no longer valid. If, fuck, they ever had fucking been.
A huge stretch of intestines, fuck, formed the corridor from the Border to Active Area X. That, too, a kind of suit, fuck, and intestines made sense to him not “corridor,” because no one could convince him, fuck, it was straight, but the Director, fuck, kept talking “a straight shot” instead of “a coiled mass.”
If he thought long enough, fuck, then fuck would stop appearing in his thoughts, fuck. It came out of his mouth too much, fuck, so fucking fucking fuck stop it. Stop saying it. Not a condition, just a nervous tic, more fucking clear the closer the day approached, but maybe all the drugs, too, fuck. Some experimental as fuck. Fuck. Fuck on a clear-sky day, hopping into the truck to be fucking carried away to fuck all fucktown. Area Fuck. Southern Fuck Reach.
There. No fuck.
Fuck.
Lowry liked Sky, just couldn’t stand her sometimes, fuck, and Lowry knew she must feel similar. A relief, fuck, so it could never become serious. She had a girlfriend, fuck, or a girlfriend and a boyfriend, something ambidextrous, back in some non-fucked-up mid-Atlantic state, which is where Central pulled her from, and must’ve been a find, beau coup creds, given what it would take to tempt her, fuck, because she’d been high up in the unnerved brass. What Lowry monikered anyone above, while below was just a mass of basement twhuts.
Snagged a bouquet of flowers, fuck, and snatched a ring ground-zero’d with a diamond splinter, fuck, before this last time, fuck, and who knew what kind of sleeping arrangements they’d have beyond the Border or if anyone would even be in the mood. Fighting off the unknown with their glorious automatic rifles, fuck, forging ahead for the glory and the power.
Flowers and the ring made an ironic statement on the conditions of their fucking, fuck, but somehow, when Lowry had handed Sky the white lilies and proffered the ring, fuck, it had become something more serious or mysterious—fuck, and why not? He was going to be shoved like a Vienna sausage into a truck and hauled to the Border like a Vienna sausage and then all the fucking anonymous sausages, standing upright, would fuck off into the unknown. So was she, fuck.
The look on Sky’s face became clouded, vague, as she said, “Ah, well, Lowry, you’re surprising me here. I didn’t know you were one for a grand gesture.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
But he was—he was!—and he couldn’t control the pulse of impulse, and didn’t, as then, fuck, know when he was succumbing to the impulse, the disease, the sentimentality that he’d tried to crush and crunch inside him like a field of broken glass, a diamond fragment … still, that quality was, fuck, a part of James Danforth Lowry, son of a bunch of deceased shitheads and fuckfaces reaching back to old fuck farm money in the Midwest.
Forget about chickens sent across on leashes. Forget they would be thrust through the Border like a cock thrust through a glory hole in the back of that bar in Bleakersville that Delmas, no fucking psychic, had mentioned one too many times.
Stupid security breach in the damn middle of the Southern Reach, fuck, the unholy reliquaries, centered around a goddamn tombstone, fuck, what a pain, that, fuck, they couldn’t remove for twenty more years, out of fucking respect for a dry bag of bones underneath that had owned the doll factory the gov had bought to find the space for the command center, fuck. All the enviro regs in the world quashed, fuck, but this ancient fucker leered up at them from almost dead center of the main building, and would for two decades more. Fuck.
And the only disrespect or concession or whatever the fuck it was that meant they’d piled all these jars of finned fuck specimens around them—all the deep-sea critters, so it was a glass room of dead marine spectators fucking graveside, fuck, and the old dead guy, fuck, could not have thought in his shitting will to put in the clause “shall not be overshadowed by dead sea proteins.” So, fuck, now hemmed in and frayed by these glorious fuckers in their surveillance chambers of clear glass. Backlit by a spectacular set of tech rave lights on “perpetual memorial mode” as even the most drama-crazed Eurotrash bro could wish or fish for in a lifetime of snorting the white stuff, fuck.
This clarity of neon blue, yellow, green, red, and then some ill-advised return of a too-light blue on the bottom shelf, fuck, all of it on the shelves looking like the liquor wall at your fav swank bar. So, fuck, less rave than smash a hole in a jar, pick it up with both hands, decant it into your face and learn by taste the briny secrets of the Southern Reach. Seaside moonshine, aged in the dark depths. All of the creatures, fuck, samples from the seaward side of the Border come down, none of it useful, fuck, none of it, fuck, helping know what, fuck, happened, but still they kept it there, all cute creepy maybe a fuck-you to the oldster in the ground who made them keep his gravestone.
Including, fuck, the cheery-looking dapper little shark, tail fins down, squat face peering out with a wicked smile, like a fucking stand-up comedian in some backwater failing seaside town with a bad beach, about to launch, fuck, into a, fuck, old-fashioned shipwreck of a performance. Listen, folks, have you tried the halibut? I halibut you haven’t. Costs too many clams.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
Others lagged not far behind. Cuttlefish Lad, with the tricorn-hat-looking tail at the top, jammed into a jar too small, so, fuck, the eyes bugged out at the bottom, perpetually shocked by his fate, like anybody at the Southern Reach, fuck. Or maybe Downward Diving Shark was his fav, because he liked all the sharks, being one, for the fucking gravitas on the face. The texture that, fuck, seemed plush like a stuffed toy from childhood, and that expression almost priestlike, so you, fuck, could tell DDS anything you felt, even about priests.
In this chapel, this cathedral. Ah, fucking god, it was all death, wasn’t it? And yet with those glass shelves, fuck, the jars all lit up like Christmas in that square room, a little cramped, but the ceiling, fuck, so high up it got lost in darkness, perfect as a storeroom once they cleared, fuck, the riffraff out.
While down below, in the center, surrounded by low gray metal benches set into the wall … the gravestone with the, fuck, improbable patch of dirt and grass, so, fuck, that a goddamn mole breached security once or twice, well, you could sit there, fuck, and meditate, while all the weight of hundreds, fuck, of dead souls stared hard at you. That was worth the price of admission, fuck, because where the hell could you see anything like this? Nowhere, fuck, except, maybe, depending, what did he know, Area X itself.
Chaste Dickdred, the fucking name on the tombstone. Couldn’t make that shit up, unless Central had, for psyops reasons, though, fuck, what would those reasons be? Saint Dick Dread the Chaste. Chase that Dread Dick around the room, breaking glass with baseball bats. The ghost that remained steadfast, reliable. And, fuck, maybe that also drew Lowry to the room, that and how his security clearance, fuck, just barely cleared that limbo bar. Chin, above, or maybe limbo bars worked the other way, but still it felt like being in limbo, sitting in that, fuck, space. Also, Whitby, who had become his fucking default-o confidant on mish-sensitive topics favored the room, so it felt comfortable.
So those were all the whys he’d given Sky the ring and flowers there, fuck, in the one fucking place in the whole goddamn brutarian Southern Reach complex with, fuck, the most character and, fuck, the most history. Except she’d recoiled or coiled, couldn’t tell which in that light, over the monstrosities he, fuck, saw as old friends. And him in-fucking-articulate arggle-bargling it in trying to explain he, fuck, had more in common with them things in jars, fuck, than the things in bars he shared space and time with, fuck, his fellow exped members. Estranged, fuck, strange, ’cause none of them had problems with extra skins. While these fine fellows, fuck, secure in their jars must sympth with him. Must simp for him. Must, oh fuck these drugs were so good and so invisible to their piss tests and he knew from experience fuck fuck fuck that his expression and his words came out not all chewy and elongated and melty how it felt but pure and resounding and, fuck, like he had the resolve of backbone, even when he did not.
But yeah, so, fuck, Sky had unnerved him with the blasé blast of a response, the coldness, fuck, of that place a refrigeration of both sea friends and his regard for her, and now, fuck, he spiraled more, fuck, thinking there was no anchor, no anchor, except the anchor of being encased in a second skin, fuck fuck fuck. Somehow, sentimental, fuck, he’d begun to think of a future post-mish, maybe back in the land of Midwest farmhouses, maybe somewhere, fuck, more esoteric.
Yet, too, he had to admit, fuck, he’d ruined it by expounding fucking fuck on the fact that the tombstone of Boonies Landowner Doll Factory Founder lay atop a colonial fort, the last foundational remains of such, fuck, and Lowry had strong feelings about that, especially on the drugs.
The fucking invaders had fucked it up to begin with, with their pograms and their shitty forts dumped on the landscape like they fell from the sky as alien spaceships, each polygon or hexagram or whatever shape they chose, drawn up like thrusters on a central space capsule. So maybe the forts were the ass-end of the spaceships, and the rest had detached and fucked off back into the sky to their home planet, because they sure as fuck had seemed like aliens. Spreading disease and death and a stupid fucking language that Lowry still hadn’t completely learned.
Like, what if they’d had spaceships made of some dense wood or stone and they did fall out of the sky on entering the atmosphere because they were incompetent and made it wrong. But, anyway, as he’d said to Scott Landry, who got him the drugs, when Landry had put forth this theory, the thing was that those forts didn’t belong in the fucking area and the whole Active Area X didn’t belong, either. It might be invisible, the Border, but the imprint was the same. Like a bunch of fucking stone forts had smashed down into the firmament … and just stayed there.
Just fucking stayed and spread and how the hell had anyone lived in those things in this climate anyway? What a disaster. So they would be inside an invisible fucked-up fortress that was enclosing many earlier fucked-up fortresses, as surely as if the invisibleness were visible and made of coquina or whatever other stupid-ass materials the invaders had used, and just sproinged up out of the ground. Just sproinged up out the ground, as Landry put it, and Lowry who called it “widescale anthropology,” rude-corrected by Landry to “That’s just history, man,” couldn’t erase from his mind this idea of all these spaceship forts landing and all these invisible walls sproinging out of the earth like, well, not like suddenly erect penises, because they were the wrong shape, but the word sproinging was like that, this suddenness was sudden fucking yeah it was and then their fucking moats and cannons and so on and so forth.
To which rant Sky appeared immune in, fuck, a romantic sense.
The great final briefing. An anti-briefing, by the haunted brass, the unnerved brass, the brass not fucking going into Active Area X, swerved up by the Director the day before the mission, Central like an elephant that ate its own giant turds as they came out.
Lowry had cooled it on, fuck, the fucking drugs so maybe he wouldn’t spew mid-spew. The standard words, in the standard ranks and rows of high-salutin’ sentences. How there was the possibility the expedition would be met by soldiers still alive in there, from the army base, navy seamen from the destroyer cut in half by the Border, who might’ve swum to shore, to lead a fucking resistance against … what? No one knew, still. At least, no one would tell them. But morale was high, and some of them just high.
Jackie there for a time, Jack’s daughter, looking imperious and crew-ella-effing-deville. Rumor had it, around the locker rooms and in the playpens they called the exercise rooms, that Jackie had just gotten out of Area X—not by the skin of her teeth but the skin of her ass. Felt the breeze of that Border on her butt hairs. Doing one last thing for dear old dad, fuck, some skulduggery alluded to like smarmy subtext in the files.
The way it got told, fuck, which wasn’t the way it happened, no doubt, fuck, it was like stalling out on the train tracks. The Border came down and chopped her car in half like a butcher with a cleaver. And her there in the front seat, fuck, the metal sheared as fine as if with a precision laser so it was like one of those slices of the human body at those fucked-up museums that gave Lowry the chills.
As fellow misher Karen Hargraves would have it, like some sadomasochistic storyteller, the cut had been so close it had sliced away the layer of her pants waistband jutting in a soft v past her underwear, left her untouched. Stupid fucking story, fuck, the anatomy of it made no sense, but that breathless moment of belief, that idea of brushing up close to something so absolute and alien, and in that moment … what? Did you shit yourself? Piss yourself? Cum all over the place until you had no internal organs left? Or just sit there like a dumb statue, traumatized forever?
Maybe it had happened to someone even if not to Jackie. Maybe that’s how it sounded so real and un-fucking-real at the same time. Like an encounter with God, if God wasn’t just a fucking terra-cotta joke shoved on a stick and sold to unsuspecting shitheads.
All twenty-four of them, fuck, had been made to gather in the Southern Reach cafeteria, which still had a plastic-rubber chemical new-place smell, so Landry at Lowry’s bidding called it the “catheteria,” which still felt like fucking largesse.
The rest of this fucking ridiculous section had been the part wrenched and recruited out of retirement as a factory making children’s dolls. Way out in the middle of nowhere, it had died along with the tourist attraction Doll Land, fuck, just a bunch of smashed foundations among weeds on a back road that led to the town of Hedley. The Southern Reach so loathed these origins, none of the documentation mentioned it.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
Now Doll Land bespoke multitudes of high-end thrill seekers, people in the know who had clamored to join. No sense of the “existential threat,” as Whitby—world champ exped alt, a twee too-cheery enviro scientist—put it. “What existential threat?” Lowry had asked. “Oh, you know.” “No, I do not know,” Lowry had fuck fuck fuck snarled. “Well, the unknown. The fallacy of thinking we know what’s going on in there, just because of a chicken.” A chicken. Fuck Whitby. Fuck Whitby’s chicken. Just … fuck all that.
But Lowry thought about the chicken, without a contamination suit on, navigating that dank corridor from the Border to AAX, fuck, and some small part of him wept over that fucking chicken’s terror. While the Director droned on about all the insignificant things, which was anything that happened now, before getting on with it … and Lowry thought also about how the arrows of the sprightly, colorful cafeteria carpet pointed out toward the just landscaped exterior, which included a scooped-out artificial holding pond and some gaudy stupid benches painted in shit stripes of primary colors, which no one fucking used because of the heat and no tree cover.
How they’d covered up the doll factory real good. You could barely tell, although Lowry had this fucktastic disaster scenario in his head where after the Director’s droning, fuck, he’d tug on a string and a thousand doll heads would come tumbling the fuck down from some hidden panels in the ceiling, fuck, rather than the customary party balloons.
The old chain gang getting the lecture, plus (poor double-fucked exped alt, X-alts, fuck, the exped membs calls them) Whitby Allen, at his usual seat at the back of the room, facing out. Like he expected bounty hunters to burst in, fuck, chain him to a wall, sizzle-brand his ass, and dry hump him all the way to jail—and was fucking ecstatic about it. No one had dropped the basket or kicked out, or whatever the hell the expressions were that tumbled through Lowry’s head along with all the other stuff, fuck, so Whitby would remain a Behind, which was another way the exped membs ref’d the X-alts.
“I’ll be there in spirit,” Whitby ventured, fuck, probable belief that all twenty-four wolves staring at him from time to time thought dippy-shitty sheep thoughts. “I hope not,” Lowry stage-whispered back, “’cause you’re needed here.” “Look for the tag TOT,” Whitby said mysteriously, fuck, with a thin smile. “Remember that. And then you must run, because you won’t know what it is.” “Like, jog?” Whitby shook his head, whispered “trash or treasure, trash or treasure,” like a sinister parrot, but then said no more, in part because the fucking Director had begun to look at them as if they were misbehaving schoolboys at some fucked-up boarding school where everyone took turns whipping the shit out of each other’s bums of a fortnight, to leg-trembling excess.
Extra drone: “The natural state of men living side by side is war. The natural process of peace is to side with war. This expedition goes in peace, but with the capacity to wage war.” Did it? All twenty-four of them?
The deep-sea fish stared out of their jars at Lowry and it seemed to him they were fucking judging him. Even dead in their jars, dredged up from the bottom of the goddamn ocean, trawled to be truths about AAX and they’d failed that—so fuck these fucking fish for judging him. He was about to be a hero, along with twenty-three other heroes, well, fuck, maybe more like nineteen other heroes because some didn’t seem like they had the gumption for it, would wind up in jars themselves, floating for-fucking-ever until Central carted them away to be jar things in some invisible warehousing space that no one would ever see and the dust would collect on the jars and even though some would be human-size, fuck, you wouldn’t know until you fucking wiped the dust away whether it was some goddamn sunfish with an accusing eye or Private Shithead Crapseed, giant octopus squish-jellied or Colonel Kickedbucket.
And which one had the worse fate, the scientific experiment or the guy or gal who didn’t turn this huge opportunity into a win? Lowry knew the fucking answer to that. Oh my fucking god, this fucking fuck briefing would never be over, not in his lifetime. The expedition would start five years from now, fuck, and they’d all be dead from standing in this spot, pissing themselves, dehydrated, all that training down the drain, where the fuck was Landry with more drugs he was running out of fuck fuck fucks, which now felt very wrong, so he knew he hadn’t maintained a level but was coming down, and that couldn’t happen until he was out of the suit skin suit skin suit skin shit now he had to stop saying suit skin and get more drugs for the fucks to replace suit skin suit skin suit skin. And, finally, the briefing was over and all the brain powers sucked out of all of them jumped right back in and amid the muttering and little chuckles they decamped to the catheterrarium to see what new lunacy Whitby Allen might have in store for them, theory-wise.
What might greet them inside Area X? Nothing had come out. Not a thing. But the great final briefing? That came out, fuck, kept coming out, and might never stop.
Morale-boosting booster of a briefing received, roll call came next, which meant the stink eye for Lowry from some, because the Southern Reach had let him keep his mane of golden hair. Because he’d snarled deadly enough, or barked enough, or expelled his organs like a sea cucumber when they’d tried to insist. But they knew why they’d brought him on. Charismatic and direct, a little nutty, the craggy good looks, the athlete’s build, the fittest member by far. Resolute jaw. A comedian as a bonus, could tell a great joke. Unpredictable moves. Bright blue eyes, “piercing” some women called them. Yeah, baby. Keep the mane. Be a downer during roll call all you all, all you fucking want, all you shaved scalps and close-call twhut cuts.
Still, who the fuck didn’t feel quasi-invincible on this mission? They all did, even the psycho psychics. They had trained like banshees, like windmills, like robots, like pixie fairies made of some unbreakable metal. Pumped up on adrenaline and, some, drugs. All the best equipment, why not use it, Lowry was itching to use it all.
Director Captain Chef the kind of paunchy, white-dress-shirt-wearing, tan-blazer-wearing, navy-trousers-wearing motherfucker Lowry preferred to think of as overseeing a physics lab or a high school as principal, but not well, did the old hem-and-haw at start of roll call, like they weren’t highly trained, highly motivated mofo pros. Jumping up and down on blocks while screaming insults at their parents. Enduring temp extremes while “girding” their minds against “contamination.” Shouting “yes please may I have another” while lashing each other with whips while they wore heavy clothing and helmets with masks. Practicing hiking the fucking football in a wind tunnel. The usual.
If Lowry fidgeted, fuck, in that interregnum before the names, it was twofold: Some tiny abnormal piece of him, deep inside, worried that this time the Director would leave his name off the list.
But, also, there were too fucking many of them, which got on Lowry’s nerves, because there were also, as he’d explain later to anyone who would listen, too few of them. But, for the roll call, just trying to remember the names, let alone the personality behind a name … just awful. A chore, a horrible task. That was Tommy Ugh, that was Gretchen SuperGroper, that was Prick the Super Psychic. Redundancy, yes, but twenty-four felt like Central expected attrition not insurgency followed by conquest, or even just a plain old walk in the park.
Dan Henkel looked like a walking talking unlit matchstick with legs. Christopher Formsby was too tall. John Fu told stupid bad jokes. Frank Delmas folded his arms as a preamble to pedantic lectures about nothing any twhut would want to hear. Marie Bukvic believed too strongly in the supernatural, so he always saw a black cloud over her head. Joanna Easterling was all right, but in small doses, due to her fucking way of repeating what you said as a question to give her time to think. And so it went and so it goes. Lowry bonded with himself first and foremost, and he believed that was right and true.
Jamal Winters grated and got on his last nerve for the simple fucking reason that Winters was second-in-command and Lowry believed he should be second-in-command. Animal, visceral reaction, and Lowry believed in allowing those, encouraging those, as the true fucking reaction. None of this bullshit of pretending. That led to repression, heart attacks, soft cocks. Fuck that shit. Also, Jamal had a wonderful personality and good leadership skills, and that pissed Lowry off because in AAX none of that might matter. They might get there and figure out “good leadership skills” got them all killed. Been there, done that. Checkered history, but also he’d played chess and played fucking well for a long time. He was ready to jump in when Jamal failed.
Lowry only took an interest in a few of them because the rest might be cannon fodder despite their bona fides. But he’d been wrong before, fuck, so tried not to alienate any of them but Winters. Although he knew most of them hated him on principle. Yet, would any of them fucking die for him on the mission, the way he would for them? Like, he would fucking dive in front of a burning bus full of killer whales with a monster on the roof directing traffic while shooting RPGs out of its ass—for them. All of them. Any of them. But he fucking liked very few of them, except Landry, Hargraves, and well … maybe just those two. Sky didn’t count because she fucking counted too much.
At first, fuck, he’d liked Hargraves because she fucking accorded him respect, understood who she was talking to and how poised on the cusp he was—and not just because, like fucking usual, she wanted a special gold-plated invite into his pants. Cusp of greatness. Cusp of valorous deeds. Cusp of solving AAX (he had theories he had never fucking shared, because only AAX deserved to hear them, like he was facing the Sphinx and figuring out its riddles).
But, then, Lowry’d fucking figured out she was taking the piss out of him, as his Britcrumpet friends on prior mish’s had put it. Trying to piss-take him, a bit. With a smile that never changed a degree, so it was hard to tell. Plus, Hargraves, along with three others, were top brass, haunted brass, protected species, fuck, the rumor papermill belching out the smoke signal that they came from long histories of military service at the highest levels.
So, over time, he’d figured out Hargraves was the Great Pumpkin, if someone else jumped out of a fetal position from a huge pumpkin in a ghoul costume. Hargraves was like if a bunch of intelligent knives with an education had first become a huge colander of talent and then morphed into a human being right before you used the huge colander to get the world record for boiling broccoli or some such fucking record.
Who the fuck knew what she was thinking. He just knew she was thinking, all the time, and it made him fucking nervous. Something always got in the way of liking her—and it was Hargraves who got in the fucking way. She was always tripping up the like so he wanted to keep distant and not treat her like a drinking buddy. Except she was like a drinking buddy to every fucking buddy else.
So why couldn’t he commit to even just that fucking kind of buddy relationship, let the water slide off his back, not some other duck’s back? Maybe because Hargraves reeked of competence and commitment. Besides him, she finished first in almost every fucking thing. Open a goddamn can of tomato paste, she’d make her own fucking can opener and have it open before you’d have half a chance to gnaw a hole in the metal with your own fucking teeth. Ordered to bash gophers with a mallet at the county fair and she’d bring her own multiheaded mallet and bash all the gophers in three goes and take the fucking huge teddy bear the goddamn disgrace of a fair-fake thought no one would ever attain and she’d stuff it full of sticks of dynamite and carry it on her back like twenty fucking miles with no complaint, jogging the whole way if Sky told her to—and probably Lowry if Lowry told her to. Then explode it all over whatever colonial colonic fort she’d been told to blow up. And that was just irritating as holy fucking fuck fuck, wasn’t it?
Landry disagreed like a fucking asshole, about Hargraves and about Winters. He also didn’t think Formsby was tall or too formal, but then Landry was tall as fuck, a flagpole in a storm, a lighthouse to guide you home. Just put a blazing light in both his eyes and turn him on. Of course, he’d lead you astray because he’d be giggly high the whole fucking time anyway.
Roll call, which was such basic fuckstoic stuff. Like, if some of them didn’t answer, weren’t there, where the hell could they be? Also, not a damn thing in roll call about sleeping arrangements. Everybody was celibate and stored their fucking genitals on a shelf in their lockers next to their fucking deodorant, according to the Director.
Even if, perk of alpha order? Scaramutti diddled Singer as if it were a sacred duty and the church would go bankrupt if he stopped, while Winters reached back across the rows of names to subject Bukvic to his no doubt unimaginative thrustings. Did artist colonies operate this way? He’d heard tell but never been close enough, except once tiptoeing through one after midnight, on the way to a firefight in a forest. But the mish felt like a too-close commune already, minus the skunk pot smell, exped somewhat secondary. And what of it? They had the best of everything, why not fuck out any fear. Fuck. Out. That. Fear. Let it go. He should be a goddamn motivational speaker, and maybe, with the right publicist, he would be, after this mish. This mishmash.
Then they were all still kind of there, milling, malingering, and Lowry watched Whitby’s grin hit a glitch before it flared forth once fucking more. Poor Whitby. Always the fuckee and never the fucker, succor not suckee. Hypnotists and jugglers, acrobats and psychics, fire-eaters and crypto-ecologists had gotten their claws into the exped, and Whitby’s rather déclassé, anti-bohemian creds … did not cut it.
So. The first expedition, it numbered twenty-four.
18 Skyla Overbeck (expedition leader, naval intelligence)
13 Kalliope Benner (biologist)
14 Sherri Binder (archaeologist, psychic)
15 Samuel Bronen (surveyor)
04 Marie Bukvic (psychic)
05 Frank Delmas (military)
22 Joanna Easterling (hypnotist, military)
06 Jon Erlickson (physicist, some anthro)
10 Dambeku Ferreira (military)
21 Christopher Formsby (psychologist)
11 John Fu (physicist, no anthro)
07 Norayan Fussell (psychologist)
12 Karen Hargraves (military)
19 Dan Henkel (medic, military)
20 Angela Hernandez (biologist)
03 Rebecca Hinojosa (biologist)
09 Peng Jiamu (biologist)
01 Scott Landry (medic)
24 James Effing Lowry (hero)
23 Danika Miles (military, anthro)
02 Marianne Rodgers (biologist)
08 Sophia Scaramutti (psychic)
16 Tamesha Singer (material sciences)
17 Jamal Winters (medic, military)
ALTERNATES
Whitby Allen (cosmic star child)
David Read (cosmic dipshit)
Jenny Spirling (not dipshit, not cosmic, not going)
The numbers Lowry drew on the sheet with a blue ballpoint pen each roll call had a secret but simple significance. No goddamn soul but Lowry, no twhut or bastard would ever be privy, although maybe once he’d fucking told Landry because they’d both been so fucking high.
Some positions had changed due to new intel, but most had held steady and with the slight singe of burning metal as of a fucking Gatling gun exhausted from continuous fire. First through last to die, drop the bucket, smash the flask, end up ashes. No point rating the fucking riffraff of the alternates, as he had no idea which of them was more likely to succumb to a slip-and-fall on the Southern Reach’s over-waxed concrete floors.
The numbers had analysis behind them, with no bows to fucking bastard esoterica like friendship. Which was why the number-one candidate to drop dead sooner than later had always been and always fucking would be … Scott Landry. Nothing personal, Scott. Nothing personal in this chart I keep making where you fucking kick the fuckets right off the fucking bat.
Landry was cool, though. Lowry thought Landry was way fucking cool, but also that Landry would be the first to go. Nothing wrong with that. One thing was a friendship based on Landry giving Lowry the fucking drugs that made him think or say fuck too much, but also kept him on this plateau somewhere high up close to Mount Olympus. Landry and Lowry, buds, sitting in a tree D-O-I-N-G D-R-U-G-S. Landry and Lowry meeting out back after Lowry had visited Sky so they could do more drugs. Landry made things pop and frizzle. He always had the right amphetamine mix and he fucking gave it up a lot. Everybody knew. Nobody cared. Came with the territory as a perpy exped memb who owed allegiance to both the army and Central, got to raid both their fucking pantries. But they were all supermen and superwomen. In the prime of their fucking fitness. Who gave a fuck what they did, so long as they showed up and kicked ass?
“Storm the torpedoes! Damn the Speedos! All hail!” had been his and Landry’s battle cry for a while, forced through obstacle courses and the like. One of those things you couldn’t explain to anyone else, but made Landry and Lowry laugh so hard their sides hurt.
But kicking ass was hard work, fuck, even ahead of time, in abstract, and the drugs kept him even-keeled rather than keelhauled. He took one almost any time he thought about putting on the suit. He was taking one right now, and then another, over at the watercooler, sneaky as roll call progressed with all the speed of a blocked colon. He fucking fuck fuck had taken two two earlier while in his apartment in the complex on the army base outside of Bleakersville, behind the barbed wire and giant tiddlywinks, propped up by guards’ automatic weapons or bazookas or land mines or something, and guard dogs. The usual kit.
So now he was fucking ready for the sausage-skin suits, ready to face his fucking fears in the fucking right way. With all his fucks in order and on the rise. The rise of the fucks, yeah.
“You have to bring all the drugs into Active Area X, Landry,” Lowry had told him and nodded now at Landry across the table and cocked his finger at him and winked, to emphasize the point he was mind-pushing in Landry’s direction.
Alllllllllllll the druuuuuuuuuuugs. Yesssss baauss. Yeah, it’s gonna happen. They’re going to sausage wrap us those chancy motherfuckers. Need to smuggle the drugs.
Oh man, that had given him a great idea he wanted to shout at the others, but now had no time to execute. Even just getting the design done would take too long, an epically sad thought.
Because “Fuck Out the Fear” should really be on a T-shirt.
Last fucking lunch in the cafetorium after the last words from the Director, all these fucking lasts lashing at them, at him, while someone had put on a morale-inducing film as a fucking backdrop. A Great Nation thanks you for your service, fucks its thanks right into the fuckservice of propping up a rickety fuckscreen while not a fucking soul watched this ripe ol’ tripe.
Lowry felt his left foot tap-tap-tapping no matter how he tried to stop it. The usual Last Words, bleached of meaning, prattling over images of military helicopters blat-blatting over some jungle. About honor, duty, honor, duty again. Had they not already had this at the briefing? Risk-reward ratios mentioned prominently and other weird sayings. Shit-tastic.
Round table, none of them fucking Lancelot or Lancelottia, Lowry staring at his pallid lunch as if it should be lobster and a bottle of champagne, because it should. Even if they were promised immortality in the afterlife that was Active Area X. Fuck that.
Stale bun of disappointment. Fillet of flat fucking flounder that looked like it came decanted from the jar room, with some dirt and tombstone on the side. Mixed vegetables someone had thrown from a great height, stepped on, smashed, and then used a buzz saw to render into a fucking mash before boiling them in a pot with too much water. A pint of milk like they were wee bonny bairns in some school lunch program not fucking earthbound astronauts about to put a beatdown with nunchucks and automatic weapons on a fucked-up “foreign entity.”
“Why’d you agree to sign up?” Winters, to the room in general. Sky had checked out of the conversation, and Lowry admired that commitment to not letting her fucking nerves go for a scrum. She’d be wound as tight as a Swiss watch anyway. She’d be sweating orders through her pores as practice.
Loud agreement to a word Lowry didn’t like. Twhut twhut twhut.
“Cock.” Also loud agreement.
Whitby blushed in his corner, squirmed, very high-schoolish. But Lowry squirmed too. Blinch, twhut were approved terms. Cock was fine except when it wasn’t. Twhut we owe the honor, Your Honor. Twhut is on the agenda today, Winters?
“Love.”
“Death.”
Now. That was real.
“Is this just a banal Rorschach test? Using words?”
“For the witty re-partying.”
“Tour of France, tour of underpants, that old beret’s dirty rants.”
“Still time for some Bleakersville glory-hole action, assholes. I’ll be there with my cock gently shoved through a hole almost too small for it until seven. Stall three, my lovelies.”
Except Lowry’s quip made them all go quiet for a time. Fuck f f. Time counting down and counting out more twhutty repartee.
“We’re like the colonists in days of yore,” someone said, and even Lowry winced. Fucking shitheads on wooden ships finding the wrong fucking place and spearing wild pigs on their arrival and eating them off spears el dente like fucking snacks. And, also, they had no honor, not really.
“Who said that? Who fucking said that?” Winters, again asserting himself, like he’d been made second-in-command or something. And he was, with Lowry third. He thought third, couldn’t remember if his request had been affirmed or if they’d made it more complicated than that.
“Spreading death and disease? I think not.” This from Erlickson, somewhat fucktatingly tedious to Lowry in his anthro role. The basic 101 lectures should be subtext, fucking subtext. Explain not the furies of the past at a catheteria table.
“Finding honor and glory in courage,” Easterling said, down two spots and wrong. Sometimes you had to run like a little brat from danger.
“Foraging for scraps from an unknown entity.”
“Titty,” Lowry offered, to break the mood.
“More likely we will injure it than it us.” Erlickson, who was moving from six to four on Lowry’s fucking list, rapidly.
“Find the off switch, we just need to find the off switch.”
“Who the fuck just said titty for no fucking reason?” Lowry asked.
All the most important haunted fuckers, from the Director on down, fucking vomited from their mouths all the time about the fucking “off switch.” As if the mish exped would saunter into Area X and find a huge red fucking button like a giant toadstool, sans caterpillar, and all jump up and down on it until the fucking thing depressed and Area X would just go away and they’d come back to endless thankful reach-arounds and ticker-tape parades.
Lowry preferred to fucking assume Area X had eaten the off switch and that meant if it still existed they’d have to dive down Area X’s throat to find it, experience a thousand fucking stings of hell to get at it, battle their way down to the bottom of the sea, climb a sudden mountain. But still the Director was “off switch this,” “off switch that” like a fucking broken record that someone had smashed over Lowry’s head.
What if Area X wasn’t even truly “on” yet and thus no off switch, but somewhere there was an on switch. What if they fucking turned Area X on instead? Hideous thought, hideous truth that gave Lowry vertigo.
There in the catheteria, Whitby’s grin had glazed over and Lowry didn’t know what to read into that. He couldn’t fucking tell. Was their banter boring? Was their banter passé? Was their banter an off switch for Whitby? What did he know that made him so fucking glazed?
Exasper-fucking-rated with himself. Because: Why Whitby? Why fucking Whitby? Whitby who was like an old duck, or whatever the fucking phrase was. Freak, piece of work, crackpot, coot, fruitcake, black sleep, no, black sheep. Not his type. But still Lowry sought his guidance. Were his instincts better than his conscious brain? Maybe. Still, oddly—fuck it, incomprehensible—that Whitby’d been the siren Lowry had listened to most over the past months, lost in the mist.
“How’d you get this gig?” he’d asked Whitby once and Whitby had said, “Teachers. Love of nature. Someone yelling at me from a school fence.”
Okaaaayyy.
Whitby Twitchby Snitchby.
Fuck.
Almost time.
The Director shortened “Active Area X” to “Area X” at exactly 17:00, their on-base curfew. Like a fucking coward, although he couldn’t finger why it felt fucking cowardly, only that the Director felt fucking cowardly, so must be fucking cowardly and maybe “coward” could become his fucking drug word not fuck but fuck there it was again, fucking creeping in.
By then, Lowry had snuck into Sky’s quarters, because she had her own private suite, even if it still just boasted a damn bunk bed.
“Sawed off that shotgun like everything else,” Lowry said.
“Exactly,” Sky said. “Like everything else.” She had expressed more than once concern for what she called “the paucity of our supplies.” Lowry thought living off the land sounded fucking fun so had always kept quiet when she brought it up.
Except for all the regs imposed on fucking foraging, lousy with regs like fucking head lice. More like mind lice, like the sea lice in their jars, chewing away on the gray matter until all that was fucking left were roll call cells, briefing cells, and, yes, regs cells.
“Except the number of expedition members,” Lowry said, another perpetual fucking sore point, hand on her left breast. Where he preferred it, his hand fucking loyal in that way—and she, too, preferred it. He thought. Except she also didn’t fucking care for anything too complicated in that arena, nothing that might seem more like he was trying to tune in a fucking radio station.
“Two less psychics than I’d prefer,” Sky said. That would leave two and a half. Which was two and a half too many for Lowry, except one of them had weapons training or knew how to play fucking bass guitar at least.
“The psychics go first,” Lowry said, left it cryptic whether he meant get culled, be pushed on ahead as bait, or what. He ran his finger in the approved counterclockwise motion, not pausing because that tickled her. This could fucking go on for a while, but that was a-okay. And he just agreed with her sometimes for the fuck of it because personally he did believe there were too many other fucking fail-safes. Yes, burn the psychics as witches, but also torch the fail-safe anthropo. To the funeral bier with you, metaphorically speaking. Ex-fuckling-filtration had been his specialty, the anthropo shit secondary, if useful, especially if you tossed in some psychology and stirred the pot with some sniper experience.
Fuckable fucking fucked fuck future terminology for college degrees that fucking fell fuck apart in the fuck field like fucking paper bags filled with fuck water. Landry’s cocktail mix this time blew Lowry’s mind, pills ground up into one bolus for his throat to receive … the fucks were incredible, the number of f-bombs going off in his head, trembling off the charts on the tip of his lips.
What thrilled his fucking blood, what Sky didn’t know as he continued as if she were a safe and the fucking combo would unlock a blow job but also a bomb would go off if he didn’t find the right numbers soon, was that the civilian degree had just enough community-college vitality for show-and-tell and that was about fucking it.
Central, or Central’s emissary rather, had popped up to fucking embed him, as Lowry saw it, as Central’s right hand on the mission, to be the lion at the heart of it, the king beast, the secret leader if it all went to shit, despite cocky predictions and cokey ones from Landry.
The thrill of how Jack Severance, Central’s bright and shining spymaster—from way back a legend, legion, and lesion in the field (boil of vengeance wreaked upon the enemy)—talked him up in private to people he met but didn’t know but must be fucking fucking fucking important if Jack intro’d them. Wanted him as an extra set of hypervigilant eyes “from my perspective,” in addition to his actual secret fucking mission.
Although, if Lowry was fucking honest, Jack was a lot to take in, especially the first couple of times. Jack had the fucking effect or affect of a human can opener fused to a walking talking oldie. His beard—fake for the occasion?—peppered with salt already, the red burnished glow to his face either perpetual fuck sunburn, fuck, or some skin ailment that could not be simple-slapped off his features, but it lent fucking urgency or at least a scorched authenticity to all Jack fucking said or did. He wore surf-brand button-down flowered shirts with a silver cross on a chain around his neck, with dress slacks and shiny dress shoes it looked like his granddad’s granddad had bequeathed to motherfucking him.
Lowry would meet at Bleakersville’s bleak as fuck Snucker’s Balls Pool Hall, him forsaking the true fucking name as fuck-false for sure. And there, in a back room that smelled of chalk, pesticide, and jizz, Lowry gave him reports on progress, including what he thought about the Director and Whitby.
Why Whitby, he didn’t know, but Jack had his eye on Whitby like a fly on a juicy piece of dog shit. He had an eye on Whitby, Lowry wanted to tell Sky, like the Dark Lord with a hard-on looking through a peephole while jerking off to some local fuck folk singer’s version of “Hey Nonny Nonny.” Could get your eye poked out that way, but breach or not, Lowry’d “breathed not a word” (Jack’s pumped-up spy talk) to Sky or anyone else.
She could lead and he would follow and back her play, making happy humping loyal gestures and roasting the dumbfuck part of his personality—currently fuck fuck fuck wrestling with the sentimental part of him as he fought off a burst of tears at the thought that he might never cup Sky’s breast again if things went wrong. A whopper of a bad thought, right up there with playing fucking tiddlywinks and weeping at a shit-tastic sappy movie. Or was this some other emotion welling up that he dare not put a fucking name to? No way.
Sky thought corners had been cut prepping the exped for the mish. Lowry thought that might be the point—haste. You had a fucking foreign entity that had taken over part of the coast of a country “and it’s a goddamn miracle,” Jack muttered once, over his stale pale ale, baptized in the salt of the Forgotten Coast’s marsh flats, “that we covered it up and sold a bullshit story. Put an expedition in there too? This country’s damn heroic, puts her mind to it, not that any slob out there will ever know.”
She’d never know Lowry had fucking pushed Jack on that, asking Jack to “slip us the super weapons, you know, the stuff that’s experimental but it’s particle waves or shit like that. Can blow the fuck out of shit. I’m good at that, Jack. Blowing holes in things. Fuck this anthropology shit. Anyone can do that.” And Jack had been all like, “Yeah, yeah, barrel boy, you got the best stuff we have, even your video cameras—we R&D’d those out of evidence recovery on other ops, including captured cams of foreign entities.”
Well, Lowry liked the sound of most of that, but not “barrel boy” and not the way Jack said “foreign entities,” which didn’t ring up right at the fucking register. He said it like a strand of hair snatched from fuck knew where had been perpetually caught between two of his teeth and he was using it to floss while he said “foreign en-tities.” And later Lowry figured it out: Jack-in-the-Box hadn’t meant to say it. He fucking hadn’t meant to say “foreign en-tities” or tell him about the damn cameras at all. So what the fuck did that mean?
But Jack-in-the-Box must’ve thought it didn’t matter, because the next day, from the Southern Reach chaplain herself, Lowry got the full instructions for the “seek-mish” as he liked to call it in his head—most of which involved some ancient fucking dude named “Old Jim” who Jack O’Lantern thought might still be alive in Area X. A guy Jack said had been “compromised by a foreign entity and affected by pre–Area X infiltration.” Along with a phrase that caught Lowry’s eye about a “secret room in Dead Town.”
Delivered unto him via a cavity scooped out of a fucking Bible like it was a book melon, which Lowry found priceless. This new intel that Jack didn’t give a fuck about Bibles or, thus, religion, and thus was also a bit more like Lowry despite the cross at Jack’s neck. Hell, he would’ve taken that paper, devoured it, and shit it out patriotically, except it said “Burn When Done” right at the fucking top. So ashes to ashes it—
“Stop dialing long-distance phone numbers and put yourself to better use,” Sky said, slipping from his grasp and pushing him into a lower position. “Twenty minutes and then you should go.” Next round of checks on quarters by fucking security, she meant. No nookie or cookie until crossing Bordersville into the unknown.
“Aye, aye, captain,” Lowry said, and shifted his fucking priorities to where the fucking expedition leader fucking wanted them, right there in that fucking place he love-hated and it was going to be all right, this mission, this fucking mission was going to be fine and they would all come out of it alive, they surely would. Even if he didn’t believe in the off switch as he tried to find the on switch.
He noticed out of the corner of his eye that the lilies had not survived the trip to her suite, just the vase, which sat next to the little ring on the nightstand. Would she put the ring on for fuck’s sake? Or had she and it didn’t quite fit? He didn’t mean this fucking second, but had almost blurted it aloud, which also almost meant he’d been talking sentences into her like some kind of erotic mesmerist.
Fuck fuck fuck. His jaw felt detached and numb and he was drowning and all the jars of dead things had gathered to watch what was not a fucking spectator sport. Breathe through the nose. Breathe. Goal had been five minutes to save his jaw from clenching in stress over crossing the Border because even with the fucking drugs, it was already clenched from the fucking stress of being about to cross the fucking Border.
Jack had slapped him on the back as he walked out, “That’s my boy,” kind of the same way Sky did now, to indicate the twenty minutes was up. He was pretty sure it had gone spiffy, but mostly he was happy to disengage and fall away down onto the floor for a bit, on his back, his arms outstretched and his cock tingling along with his mouth. Peach-stung fruit of more distant youth. Fields of wheat in summers where he’d sneak a fruity beer and sit in the shade of an oak along a dirt road, getting gently drunk.
Shit. He was going to have to cross the Border, in a stupid skin.
So, then, in the end—the fucking end of the beginning of it all—they faced the suits in the special wing of the Southern Reach reserved for the equipment, with the disconcerting look of a fucking high-school football locker room. It shouldn’t look this fucking way, Lowry’s senses screamed at him. It shouldn’t fucking ever look this way. It fucking shouldn’t.
“Are we going to the moon?” Hargraves asked, but she had always asked something like that, during the run-throughs.
Tremor of an almost laugh, and then fucking death silence, except the exhalation of Dan Henkel, medic and heavy mouth breather both. Lowry sharing a glance with fucking Sky, who broke it off like it had been a too-long piece of fucking peanut brittle. Date night over. So Lowry had to resume negotiations with the fucking suit he hated so much.
Worse, some problem with the fuck fuck fucking forward post position, pre-Border, where they were supposed to “get dressed” as Sky put it. “For the formal dinner party in hell.” Like, one day they’d be husband and wife attending an awards ceremony for Best Fucking Secret Exped.
It felt to Lowry—and apparently only him—like wearing the skin of another human being and then putting over that a fucking constricting fucking tight turtleneck sweater made of rubber … that covered his entire body. And then, over that, a fucking deep-sea diver’s suit—of the kind popular in old silent films, where the air line to the surface or air fuck pipe or air fuck tube air something gets tangled or cut and years later at the bottom of the fucking sea “they” find your jellified, algaed, nutrient-rich corpse, still constrained, still being destroyed by the goddamn suit. The gleam of bone peering out through all the human excesses of liquids and goop and just plain old shit-your-pants human grossness.
God, he stank already, something he fucking hated to do, to stink, just putting on the suit, sour from nervous sweat. Only so much cologne he could ladle on to cover it before somebody like sensitive Easterling the hyper hypnotist went all westerly on him and complained she was allergic. Well, fuck her and the toad she rode in on down shithead road. Her face could puff up to the size of a … a puff adder … a puffer fish … and her throat tighten to a hot wet rope, twisted taut for all he fucking cared. He wasn’t going to smell himself the whole shitty trip. But, in fact, she said nothing, except “Good luck,” and he felt totally fucking ashamed for about two seconds, which was two whole seconds he wasn’t thinking about the fucking corridor into Area X.
Then they were all in fuck fuck fuck their suits, so ballooned up in that garish, tightish space that there came the vague scratching sound of the outer surface of the suits rubbing up against other suits and the more they squirmed, waiting, the more it sounded like a basement full of gimps. Bring the ball gags, the rubber helmets, the whips, and the giant dildos. They were in for a fucking hell of a ride. Area X, yeehaw.
But all they could do was shuffle-shuffle like sumo geishas until the guys with the special clearance came in with the wide dollies to scoop them up, two or three at a time, and wheel them through a cellophaned door to their pathetic doom on a fucking truck ramp, to be loaded up like human-size souvenirs commemorating some shitty catastrophe, “some human-size trophies,” Fu the physicist said.
With their helmets on and locked in, “to avoid contamination before the Border,” except “contamination” was there, here, everywhere. How Lowry wanted to just fucking divest, divest, divest, and scamper on all fours across the Border, howling at the moon or sun or whatever celestial body happened to be on fucking offer.
Shoved so tight together in the truck bed that Lowry couldn’t have fucking moved if he’d wanted to, human sarcophagus being offered up as sacrifice to an uncaring god of no particular nature, since they had no fucking clue what kind of god animated Area X, or if a god had anything to do with it at all. Maybe a demon, a devil, a sphinx, a gryphon, a talking head on a spike.
Staring at each other from the humidity-tinged helmets—air valve open for now, but filtered fucking pure. Lowry hoped they wouldn’t have to use their oxygen tanks on the other side, or stay in their suits. It felt so wrong, got under his skin, to be sitting so close, surrounded on all sides by such beautiful, fit people and unable to touch, to feel … much of fucking anything.
Let the dicks commence to reveal themselves through the hole, like “guess the cast member.” Who would go first into the breach they called the door in the Border? Not I said the fly, not I said Lowry. Put a psychic first—they should know what was about to happen to them. Old joke, would never be tired, though.
A rush of sadness, out of nowhere, just as suddenly obliterated by the lurch of the truck hitting a pothole, forward, to the Border.
Just like the chicken before them.
Chicken fucking noodle soup. Chicken fuck stuffed with another bird, like duck? Chicken broiled. Chicken fucking fried, with fries. Chicken shoved in a microwave, irradiated on high. Chicken boiled in a goddamn pot for hours and hours to make it less tough, just enough so you could sell that shit at a fancy French restaurant.
Fucking fuck fuck Whitby had told Lowry about the chicken. Why had he told Lowry about the chicken? Why had Lowry let him? But it was Lowry’s damn fault, too, because he could’ve put that on someone else. He could’ve told Sky. He could’ve been K-I-S-S-I-N-G Landry, scratch that D-O-I-N-G D-R-U-G-S. Scratch that. DOING DRUGS. Sitting on a goddamn motherfucking branch and doing drugs … he could’ve told Landry the chicken story, gotten it out of his head. Because he didn’t fucking even know why it was in his head.
This had been when Lowry thought of Whitby as “that strange little prick,” or “that straight albino pretzel,” or “that starving marshmallow showin’ his ribs.” So cheery “out of season,” as the saying went.
That fucking fuck last had been chumming it with Landry, snorting something while shooting something fucking else. It had been white stuff and brown stuff and red stuff, maybe. So anyway, Whitby, new to the job and so damn fucking cheery no matter what, still convinced he’d make the expedition. Maybe stow away in the suit of someone more voluminous, fuck, get lost in a fold like a sail, only discovered taking off the fucking suits on the other side.
Back when Whitby clearly had hope and esprit des corps rather than the fucking corpse variety that metastasized later as black humor, sleeping too much, drinking too much, and talking about shit in evil ways. No one else saw Whitby as the fucking prince of fucking Denmark or whatever, but Lowry could tell the shift.
Of course, fucking Whitby had cornered Lowry in the hauntable dining digs to tell him the fucked-up chicken story. Although mainly because Lowry had been pissed off with his comrades for reasons he forgot and sat next to or near Whitby to have distance from the rest of the twhuts. Use the Head Twhut to keep the other twhuts off him. Lowry had taken someone’s meat portion, gibbering on a thick pile of napkins, and pilfered an apple just to make a point. Also now fucking forgotten. The meat likely wasn’t quivering or gibbering, but even back when Whitby told him the fucking chicken story he was pretty high. Pretty damn high. Aspic—his pilfered meat was glubby aspic with murdered fruits.
“Do you know the story of how they tested the corridor?” Whitby asked him. “How they field-tested it, I mean to say?”
“The corridor from the science department to the catheteria? Do tell.”
“No, from the Border into Area X.”
Lowry sighed—a huge, heaving, melodramatic sigh meant to exhale all the air in the room that he’d been saving up in his lungs. This guy. This fucking guy, at lunch. This Southern Gothic happy happy small-penis guy, fuck, who probably had to pay for a reach-around when freebies existed everywhere in the universe, for miles.
Whitby had, at best, made the prancing pony team armed with mallets back in college. Or not even that, but clotheshorses or hobbyhorses, and they’d been swatting each other’s bums with mallets and the balls had all been just clicking and dancing around on shiny lawns, forgotten. Then, continuing this line of thought, Whitby had probably been kicked off the team for freezing up from the stress of accidently riding his hobbyhorse to death—a first—at the Extended Rallies, or Balls in One, or Horsey DeComp, or whatever they called the stupid fucking horse stuff at fancy prancy universities.
Lowry had been so invested in his vision of … what? Incompetence? Coming in last-ness?… that he totally fucking forgot it was his turn to talk.
“Robots, right? Funny, fancy prancing robots with weird hats and weathervanes for heads?”
Whitby shook his head with such enthusiastic negation Lowry feared the fucking thing might fall right off and spin across the floor.
Lowry looked at his aspic jiggle, juggling interior fruit slices via some dubious molecular equations, and debated leaving the table for the table with the popular kids he currently hated. All laughing about some dirty joke, he fucking hoped.
But … the chicken beckoned. The chicken coerced. The chicken chided.
“Okay, Corporal Fresh Fuck III, tell me about the chicken.”
“I’m not—”
“Just tell me. Tell me now before my jiggle settles, man.”
“So, I learned this information from the robotics department.”
“The whole fucking department?”
“From a woman who—”
“Never mind. The chicken?”
“Yes, so,” Whitby continued, undaunted, which Lowry grudgingly began to fucking admire, “they did send in a robot on a track, but it became stuck halfway through or ran out of energy, but, anyway, they brought it back and sent in the backup chicken instead. A chicken in a harness with a lightweight rope attached to the harness.”
“So?”
“They put the chicken in the robot carriage and unspooled the rope—a very thin, very long rope, because they didn’t yet know the length of the corridor—but at some point the robotic carriage encountered some obstacle, but the chicken went toward the light in front of it.”
“The light?”
“The opening at the other end. And because they’d put a small, primitive camera on the chicken and the chicken went through the hole—they knew it was possible for a person to go through.”
Lowry, hooked: “Wait—what do you mean? And how many times did they do this? Just once? And what happened to the chicken?”
He didn’t know why, but he felt very invested in the stupid fucking chicken all of a sudden. He could imagine the chicken drawn by the light, hoping for something to peck. Was there a juicy worm in the fucking light? Surely light was better than the damn darkness. Fuck the darkness, head for the light, chicken. You can do it. You can make it. I know you can.
“More of a rooster,” Whitby said. “A fighting rooster of some kind.”
“The chicken was a motherfucking rooster.”
“Yes, I believe so. I believe I misspoke about the chicken.”
“Choke the fucking chicken, Whitby.”
Whitby laughed, high-pitched, startling, never wanted a repeat performance of that. “So what happened to the chicken-rooster is they had to pull it back to get the camera from around its neck. And that’s what they did.”
Relief mixed with the existing aspic nausea. The chicken had been all right. But then realized he was fucking making assumptions.
“But … the chicken? The rooster, I mean?”
“Oh, unrecognizable. That’s the really great, interesting part—it didn’t resemble a chicken at all any more, but at least the camera was intact. Anyway, that’s what I heard.”
That’s when Lowry did leave the table. Left his aspic fruit behind for Whitby or whomever. Because of the sloshing stack of bullshit. The expedition might be compromised by fucking and the army might pull shit like sending a chicken over.
But no way the Jack-in-the-Box he had come to know would allow Lowry to risk his life based on that kind of fucked-up shit.
But no way had the chicken been the first expedition. Because all the people trapped in Area X—they had been the real first expedition.
What had the chicken-rooster looked like in the end?
Whitby never fucking said.
You fucking sugar count. You fire dick twhut flying cocksucker. You cock cocksucker sucking cock with another cock you goddamn piece of shit. Fuckbuddy long-dick penis shitter. Drown in an outhouse you fuckland fucklord reach-around meat-beating county old hallucination. Get your claws off me fucking dark lord, dark fucking whisp get you gone and off of me. You fucking low-carb crisp of a fucking fuck. You mind’s eye sphincter. You asshole-licking lying treasonous sons of blinches lying in the long grass with your fucking dicks in your hands. Fuckside fuckling fuck-a-mole fuckshot fucksicle fuck fuck. You witch you witch you witch. Goddamn nothing mother-humping bastard of a twhut-whipped fuckup. You pathetic blinch ghost fool-fellating your own dead body’s cock with some other mouth. Shove it where the sun don’t shine with all the rest of your fucking hoarder’s booty. See how I care you filthy flapping dick dying in the sunshine, shit gatherer. You talking talking walking shitstorm of a shit stain. You wallowing swallowing fuck go get fucked skullfucked fucking fucked fucking fuck fuck ah make it stop get me out of here.”
Lowry only realized his voice was saying these things from the look on the faces of those around him, the echo on the comms. The silence on the comms after all the shouting.
Who had he been talking to? Who had he thought was in the tunnel behind them? Who had scared him that much? No idea. Not a clue. But he shook it off, could pretend it had never happened, would never happen again. Besides, some of that had been decorum, Lowry trained not to say the bad words. So it was twhut and blinch forever. His sisters had beat the real words out of him.
Ah, hey, he was stone-cold sober now, staring out at a hazy horizon full of trees—how could there be so many trees—and couldn’t say the f-word. Even thinking it made him nauseous. What the f-f-f-f had happened. Where were his swears?
He threw up in his helmet, staggered to the side, sitting down heavy on a rock, throat raw. Oh holy h---s oh holy f---s. Oh solid ground. Even with the filter, and through the vomit, Lowry could already smell Area X and the sun felt heavy on his face, even dulled by the helmet. Heady mix of humidity, a vegetal thickness, expressed all around in undergrowth and trees familiar from the Southern Reach. A jarring rhythm or distant sound or hum in the air. Like a dessert made to look like a hamburger, a sound that shouldn’t have been a sound so he couldn’t describe it, except as a creature, a subtle monster grating against his teeth, popping from his jaw.
By the time he’d recovered, the Border had pooped out almost everyone. Sky had ignored his outburst and barked out the roll call head count, moving among the writhing bodies of sausages not yet oriented, struggle-fighting to regain motor control, to stand. A writhing mound of giant tardigrades or he didn’t know what, but it was natural/unnatural the way they couldn’t come to their senses, kept falling and getting up and falling. As if they’d suffered some natural disaster, been half electrocuted in a freak storm, some enduring yet fading trauma.
Sky’s movements in her suit became more frantic.
“Marianne? Rodgers? Marianne?”
But Dr. Marianne Rodgers, the junior wetlands biologist with the startling blue eyes and perky nose, never answered, never made it through, would never be found, had to have vanished “in transit” as Winters put it later. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take whatever Area X whispered in her ear, whatever it showed her that it hadn’t shown the others.
“One sausage down, twenty-three to go,” Lowry said, amazed at how old his voice sounded. Like a cracked statue in a public park. Like a man in a coffin a thousand years. Like whatever the vultures couldn’t bear to eat.
He couldn’t imagine being lost in the corridor. Although maybe she had made it back to the Border? “What a story that’d be for the grandkids: I got stuck in a magic culvert and did nothing except get lost and come back and yet here’s a medal pinned to my chest for no reason. At all. Could be. Could be.” Unaware he’d muttered most of that aloud over his comms.
But they all knew it couldn’t be. She was gone.
F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f …
Cascading alarm about Rodgers, which turned most of them into suit-clad synchronized dancers, who drifted out of the crude circle, regaining motor function, but then drew close again, precarious, to form a ragged flower-petal design. Except the edges were as sharp as trauma, as sharp as something that could rip you apart. If anyone had seen it from above, and Lowry kind of hoped not because they had no air support.
Hoped yes, though, Let’s get this party started. Let’s see what greets us here.
Ten, fifteen minutes, in the chaos, that’s how long it took. Sky barking orders no one at first thought to follow—all that training circling the drain, not able to escape for the clog and heavy fog in the brain pipes—before anyone realized Jon Erlickson lay in a fetal position on the ground. Known by the prominent duct tape across his chest with his name in all caps with Magic Marker. Like his parents had been afraid he’d get lost his first day of school, but because everyone knew he’d been terrified no one would know who he was in the suit and even though against regs, what was the harm?
Had it been a bull’s-eye for Area X? Lowry would ask Sky later, just to make sure she was still talking to him. But also because doubt had pierced him.
Henkel and Winters tended to Erlickson awkwardly on bended knees in their suits—their quivering forever tombs, their embryonic inverted doughnut holes—while all the other earthbound astronauts gathered in a circle, no doubt blotting out the sun for Erlickson during his last moments. If he wasn’t already dead. Lowry abstained, noted, destined for his memoir, that the butt patches on the suits exaggerated glutes so much there was a crinkly shelf or human flesh ledge around Erlickson, Henkel, and Winters on which he could have rested some of the medical equipment.
Although not communicated directly, more through psychic osmosis and group feeling, and some seeing … Erlickson’s suit had fused with his body so hard that his helmet had form-fitted to his face like a scene in a gangster movie where they suffocated a snitch with a plastic bag. What had Erlickson done to Area X to deserve that? What had the rest of them, to have to see that shit.
Somehow, when they straightened Erlickson out, it became clear the whole suit had shrink-wrapped him, and the glass helmet, now a profile of his face, had begun to turn from tinted copper to a milky white … white pores like the maggots in tapioca pudding (or that was how Lowry perceived the evil that was pudding) and Lowry wanted to vomit again, peering in on all that as the tapioca moved slightly—a kind of rasp, and he realized they were witness to Erlickson’s last breath, juddering through the goop of not-milk.
“Take off your suits!” he screamed into their helmet comms so hard some held the sides of their helmet heads with their hands. “Take off your suits. Contam! Contamination!”
As he scrabbled at his helmet latch. As he gibbered pointlessly, swears still snuffed out. But instinctually, he knew this was true. Knew he was right. Or so close to right as to be no difference. Their suits, as he had always known, would betray them. Their skin might betray them too, but at least it was part of them, more a civil war than a foreign invader.
F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f …
The straps and traps and clasps and lapses on their lumpy chastity suits, their elaborate costume for clowning chumps up for adventure—frantic, because he’d realized Erlickson had only been two in line ahead of him in this cosmically fucked-up grocery store checkout, check-in. And what happened had happened in Area X, not in the corridor.
Was he still shouting? Did it matter? No one else had the balls or ovaries or moral equivalents to say what needed to be said. Yet, slowly, then swiftly, the others followed his lead, even as Sky ordered them to wait, to wait, to wait and become squishy tapioca pudding in a fancy multi-million-dollar flesh bag.
“No more flesh bags, flesh bags no more,” just saying whatever rant came to mind, but still avoiding the f-word for fear he might burst into flames now that the drugs didn’t work and he couldn’t quite remember if the f’s had been effin with him before the drugs in quite such a profusion, as if f’s were a million minks in one of those terrible farm places, with not enough room between each f and like forest fires some places the whole world would burn if he started saying the word the f word in such close proximity and profusion oh my god was he losing his mind when would this shitting suit come off come off, get the sausage off the sausage.
Ah, then, divested of his own death, gushing forward into the exhale and inhale of the unrecycled, and the feeling of the humid air, redoubled, beautiful rot, thick and thrusting and ready, the squawk-tweet-chirp of the birds, the sudden onrush of such a more intense blue to the sky, all of this better than sex, at least better than sex in that moment because who knew how he’d feel in another moment, but released into a kind of paradoxical paradise. It gave him a hard-on because, hell yes, he was alive, not like Erlickson. He breathed deep, even as he kept, melodramatically now, having fun, feeling like an actor taking off a period costume after the play, removing his exoskeleton, but keeping his bones and his skull. Although his skull was a bone, technically.
Soon enough, Lowry felt weightless, gorgeous, and lusciously naked, along with the rest, most reaching for their trail clothes in their packs. But not Lowry. He beat his chest with one fist like half of an old movie, then left off seeming celebration in consideration of the death of dear departed Erlickson, who, to be honest, he had hardly known. Happy enough to let his dick dawdle and dangle there in front of all of them. If he could’ve swung it like a vaudeville entertainer with a cane, he would’ve, then taken a bow. For hadn’t he saved them all?
“No compelling reason for clothes,” he could see putting in his report to Jack after they got back. “Especially clothes that betrayed us so hard and so badly.” Terrible thought—what if Dr. Rodgers had transmogri-died and was also sploosh in the suit with Erlickson and they just couldn’t see her amid all the viscosity, the slime, the squirm.
No, f f f f f f no. No.
What if, here, they could be free to burrow into each other’s skin to protect themselves? Burrow in deep for freedom’s sake. Maybe the people he hated most on the expedition would allow the loan from time to time. Even as he recognized this as more spiral, more panic, disguised as experimental ideation.
Another terrible thought: If suits could collapse into hard jelly, what use the hiking clothes? It would always be hot here, unless it wasn’t, and that, too, the biologists, there being no meteorologists among them, would put a finger to the pulse of temperatures, take samples of pieces of sky, to see if this cracked, brittle shard they’d knocked loose with a hammer tasted better than that piece, trying to forecast the next week, while they all cowered in their skins and … and even Lowry realized he was beginning to spiral, not twenty minutes out of the cave mouth or symbolic vagina or whatever the psych-witches back home would no doubt assign it without the imagination to just think of it as a conduit between states of being.
While in front of them, the high pile of discarded suits grew and grew—some of them entire and some in pulled apart pieces. A grand, frenetic molting into their original forms to mark the start of this glorious asshole of an expedition. Should they burn it now or leave it? What if they had to mix and match to make it back at expedition’s end, or were they going to do it naked, like the chicken? Mound. Mountain. Here lie the remains of some peeled astronauts we cooked, cracked, and ate.
Somewhere under there lay Erlickson.
Lowry, staring at that f f f f f site and sight, wanted someone to hug him and reassure that Erlickson and Rodgers had failed to follow some vital protocol, although what it could be other than don’t die and have no damn bad luck, he could not imagine. They’d been no less fastidious or “with it” re: the program. But, still, that they had been their own worst enemy. That must be the fundamental truth. Better you than me. Better the rest of the yous than me.
While the rest of the you yous stared at him like he’d forgotten to bark out another order, all in various stages of dress or undress, with some like him, perhaps dazed by death and disappearance so early, unable to put on pants quickly or competently, and falling over on their sides and having to do it with butt firmly on the grass. Some butt to butt, a sensation he loathed like it made him unsure of whose butt was which, especially if your butt had fallen asleep. This made him giggly, an impulse he suppressed as he could not tell if that impulse came from his face or some aftershock influencing his face.
Soon only Sky, the one who had tried to stop them, still wore her suit. But something in looking around at everyone in their trail clothes and Lowry still naked exerted too much peer pressure. Even as expedition leader, and the practical matter of all the rest’s divestment of trust in the personal architecture provided to them by the Southern Reach.
Zippers unzipped and then the arms she pulled out from the suit, then stepped out of the legs, and soon enough she was naked in front of them, these people she was supposed to lead. Standing there with her arms by her side, with a look both defiant and vulnerable.
F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f!
“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Lowry quipped, and he meant it gentle, maybe even affectionate. But it did not hit that way. Fell flatter than a topographical map of flatness. Even though in every way looking like a goddess, Sky had ascended and showed herself to be above the fray, above even Lowry’s useful/useless panic. And he a Neanderthal or first man of some sort, there in that bird-shrieking, anxiety-inducing Eden-not.
“Get dressed, Lowry,” Sky said, even as he couldn’t stop staring at her, at all of her, as naked as the day she had been born. For a pang of a forlorn moment, Lowry wished he’d never volunteered, that she had never volunteered, that it wasn’t probably now that most of them would die here, given twenty-two was less than twenty-four in only twenty minutes. At that rate, they’d all be dead well before next sunrise.
“We’re free now, though,” he said. “We’re free.”
“That’s an order,” Sky snapped.
“I’ll get dressed,” Lowry said, even though he didn’t want to get dressed, because he felt naked without his f f f f’s, without his drugs, and knew Landry was nearby but could not visually locate him for the nod that meant the drugs had come through unscathed.
The chill he felt was due to that, and also because some part of his mind knew that how he had behaved might not be considered normal or un-histrionic, and also that he might have been wrong about taking off their suits, because now they might be subject to every pathogen in the air, in the soil, in the water.
Together, Lowry and Sky dressed in their trail clothes, facing each other, to an audience of twenty, not twenty-two, and a pile of dead suits.
“I fucking hate you,” Sky hissed in his ear as they headed toward base camp. “Get it the fuck together.”
That was where his f’s had gone, Lowry thought, sadly. Into her brain.
Would he ever get them back?