The prolonged, desiccated horizon like the roof of his mouth without the drugs. The glare of the blazing sun, as noisy as a car alarm, sizzling in his face. And them, swaddled by base camp like fucking babies. This false comfort that if they pissed their pants everything would be okay. That they would “establish” this fucking place that had been miraculously built before their “first” expedition arrived, and not a soul among them questioned that bullshit?
Whitby had said, “Don’t be surprised if it’s brighter,” and Lowry at the time had said, “Brighter than what? Your mother’s—” But Winters had given him the stink eye and he’d aborted that thought, replaced it with another. That Whitby kept saying things like some kind of demonic travel agent. That on the one hand sounded okay or good, but on the other hand, when you thought about it … this was bad. This was something you’d like more of Landry’s drugs to process. Or sunglasses, except they already wore sunglasses everywhere, so maybe that’s what Whitby meant. But, mostly, Lowry wanted to ask, “How do you know?”
He could’ve used some advice from Whitby, too, on exped morale, because he might never forget how some of the team had looked at him just because he’d unleashed more than the usual number of “fucks” and then gotten nude. All those fucks in human form leering and glaring and indifferent encircling him, who, back at the old SR, Lowry had mapped upon his living-room wall, where the abstract art went if you liked to be spoon-fed pretentious crap.
The expedition names, yes, the death predictions, but also who fucked whom or whom all. But to that he’d added other data until the crisscrossed lines in different colors of ballpoint pen he took a fucking step back to look at seemed like one of the psychics’ cursed diagrams. If he was honest. In the corner, he’d scrawled, “evil advances with good,” but could not fucking remember why.
So many connections. So much fucking life. And what did it all mean? In the end, all these welters of lines, these fucking names, these fucking faces. Reduced down to shapes fated to fucking go somewhere fucking unknown fucking scary fucking it they were invisible weren’t they that’s what it all meant. A flaming mandala of nightmares or daydreams. A map for the ages. They’d all be fucking coming back. They’d all be fucking each other for all time, because at base, no matter how they looked at Lowry now, they all loved each other, and the mish.
The base camp lay at the edge of pines and black swamp, looking out through a clear space toward the coast, with reeds and marshes in the foreground. When they had, exhausted from the shocks of the day, set up tents and then lifted their heads to the horizon, when they had that luxury, the coordinates of the lighthouse in the distance left most, including Lowry, without words. Best to ignore, although Landry had specific experimental drugs to “destroy visions.” What if, though, what Lowry wanted was some other vision? No mere negation? If only he could make some of these decisions, just some. All he would have needed was for Jack’s secret mission to not be so secret—that was where his sole authority lay.
Holy fuck, his fucks had come back, even without Landry’s miracles, but he held them close, doled them out sparingly, for fear he still had only a finite supply for now.
While Sky love-bombed them with the language of bases, the value of headquarters even if you strayed from them, supply chains, remembering training protocols, proper camp workflow, maybe even, fuck that, good karma. Juxtaposed with an inserted word from the gaggle of psychics about “prebiotic particles, ghost energy, and establishing mirror rooms.” Strange bedfellow, like you’d wake up to a divining rod up your ass with that lot. Lowry fucking hated it. Yet still a sense of strutting and invincibility and how strong they all were, despite that downer.
Where was the fucking off switch when you needed it?
Sky asking if anyone needed “preventative drugs to suppress visions” struck him as a good fucking joke. Suppress visions? They needed every motherfucking vision they could lay their hands on, to counteract whatever Area X might throw at them. Visions to combat visions. Psychics to combat psychedelics. Early days. They might all wind up thinking they were the cast-off suits and never make it out, just liquifying in a pile for eternity, drool rolling down their fucking faces.
There came out of Sky’s mouth also the ghost of the Director, noting that the old fuck had asked for “preventative diplomacy if possible,” but reminding all twenty-one of them that “peacekeeping allows for self-defense.”
“I plan to shoot to kill,” Lowry said, and he fucking did. He’d been hired to do a job—several jobs, actually—and one of them was to shoot the fuck out of things when the things needed the fuck shot out of them.
Sky’s reply, besides a burning stare meant to reduce his meat facade to a skull face, was to urge them to “Remember the four points of our star,” which meant it was a starfish with the limb of shoot-anything-that-moves missing. But the four points were: “evaluate, do not engage, sample, withdraw.”
Really? Withdraw to fucking where? What if Area X erupted somehow in the middle of base camp? Retire in good order to their suits? Run screaming into the bleak corridor that from this side looked like a collapsing oval of fizzy water with a filigree of trembling mitochondria across it. The stained-glass window of some fucked-up nature church.
“In view of the unnatural state of the lighthouse,” Sky said, “our rendezvous point in the case of unforeseen circumstances should be the village halfway between base camp and the lighthouse.”
Oh, yes, the lighthouse they all kept ignoring while “establishing base camp.” The fucking burning symbol on the horizon that should have half of them fuckled and fucked up if not for Landry’s fantastic drugs.
Yet the lighthouse did not bother Lowry overmuch, even if like many he avoided a head-on collision with the optics of it in relationship to his eyes, as if it were an abscess or an obscene eclipse. He had expected the fucking lighthouse, or something, to be unusual, not just this banal underbrush and squeakings of marsh rats like a fucking convocation and the birds like normal, inhabiting the sky like bosses.
So maybe they should all compare their fucking versions of reality, using the metrics of the lighthouse, because to Lowry the lighthouse looked like a séance-searing gush-fountain of aquamarine cum spurting from some giant, protean dick.
Which he said to Danika Miles and Peng Jiamu, who happened to be standing beside him and then were held back by Winters, always the reasonable one, like they had meant him some kind of laughable fist violence. Even though Lowry had no problem being coldcocked by Peng and Danika, if he deserved it. Another black eye to write home about. Dear Diary which I do not keep, got coldcocked again for pointing out a cosmic hard-on.
“We all kill what we love and love what we kill,” he said.
“We all kill what we despise and want to shut up,” Peng said.
“That’s not the quote.”
“Just stop,” Danika said.
“Well, what the … what the fuck? What the fuck,” it was coming back to him, thank god. “What the fuck do you see that’s so special you’d take drugs from a fucking psychic not to see it?”
No reply. They didn’t want to tell him. They were scared, while Lowry wanted to scream at them that it was a goddamn walk in the park. A haunted, messed-up park, but what had they expected? To be greeted with garlands of flowers and hand jobs?
“Psychics? Not seeing a Gothic tower with your cathedral mother’s great big head shoved on top?”
By then Sky had come over, and Winter had cordoned off the other two and led them away.
“Lowry. You’re becoming unhinged or dissociative … strange.”
“No no nope nada. Just me. The usual Lowry.” But Lowry felt the lie in how the words came out of his mouth, like they were made of tapioca. Panic, but nothing was oozing out of him.
“I don’t believe so, Lowry,” Sky said, and he was touched to hear concern in her voice, although not touched to hear pity, preferred just to be touched.
“What do you see?” he asked, to distract himself.
“The lighthouse? I see a beautiful blue-green sea anemone. Most of the others see the same, and some see the lighthouse. A few are using meditation aids because what they see is much worse than an erection.”
“Can you hear the sound it makes?” Lowry asked. “The sound like it’s seething? The vibration of that? Like it’s a real factory, churning out little baby Area Xs or something.” The on-switch assembly line.
“No, I do not,” Sky said flatly, followed by another “Get your shit together” as she left him there to contemplate whatever glowed green on the horizon that they could not fucking agree on.
“It’s a flume, plume, a tragic backstory, a fairy godmoth, I mean mother, who changed into a pillar of neon. Who cares. We are here and we have a mission,” he said to no one in particular, as they were all fucking ignoring him, despite how oracular he had been, would continue to be.
A fucking prophet lost in the wilderness, whom no one believed.
That morning, they had discovered that the mound of suits had gone missing. Disappeared. Plum dumbstruck all at the absence, almost easier to believe they’d imagined wearing suits in the first place. No one had an explanation for it. No breach of the perimeter. No eyewitnesses. It was as if they’d melted into the earth, and if that were so, Lowry felt vindicated, although he said nothing. Mum’s the word. He feared but hoped he might somehow be blamed, although the task lay beyond the ability of one remarkably capable and ultra-strong man, even given all of the night.
“I have to ask,” Sky had said, after roll call and a perversely reassuring twenty-two total, “did anyone do this? As a prank? As a precaution?”
Which concerned him, because it meant Sky was rattled and wanted a lesser, a trivial explanation. Oh, how Lowry wished he could give her that—an answer as insignificant as the eyelash of a diamond he had given her via the ring. Oh how he wished, those quicksilver fishes, that they could stand once more in the echo chamber of jars and he could have a do-over on the saying of stuff.
But, no, she hadn’t really needed to ask, shouldn’t have asked, because Lowry could see how it demoralized the others and he saw Winters shoot a look to Easterling, Hargraves, and Fu when he should’ve shot that glance at Lowry.
So when she had walked away to clear her head or to think or to plan the day’s hike on the map, he had addressed the others. He addressed them as he would have wished to have been addressed.
“Don’t you see, those of us who survive will be kings when we get out? None of this will matter. None of it.”
But he had forgotten to mention what they all thought: Would they survive the corridor without the suits? He also didn’t mention that maybe clothes in general were the problem, not the suits. It felt weird to bring up. But, then, nothing had felt quite real to him in that moment and maybe that was the advanced training kicking in.
To not worry. To float careless as a cloud, as the poem went. Continuous as the stars that twinkled, stretched on a motherfucking endless line. The fucking flash of an inward eye, ripe with the bliss of solitude. Because they hadn’t found a single fucking survivor, and the oddest fucking part was no one wanted to talk about it.
“And queens,” Hargraves said. “Some of us will be queens.”
“There you go,” Lowry said.
As they continued to just kind of jack off at base camp, spinning their wheels, Lowry wondered, too, if in the course of fucking coarsened human events there had been a blessed moment when the concept of provocation had entered the planning stages. How a fucking base camp felt like one—not just to Area X but a fucking affront to Lowry. Because not only was a base camp too trad an idea for combating something unknown, but who had set it up? An advance team of chickens?
The answer to some shitty questions was to beg experimental drugs off Landry and not worry about it, Landry being in a happy happy place, always, and not a downer like all the rest. Tossing out uppers like the fucking celebration of an armistice when, in fucking fact, they were just at the start of the war.
So he could not fucking keep still and base camp felt like ultimate stillness so he distrusted it worse, and all who fucking believed in it. He fucking preferred they keep in constant motion across that fucked-up landscape, had the instinct deep in his bones and spleen that his need for motion was the fucking world’s need for motion and that the sloth of inactivity, of sitting still, of “establishing” base camp, after the weird fucking deaths, had infected the expedition as a way of defaulting to what they knew and had expected to do, as anchor, but, in fact, it was deadly Area X telling every single last fucker among them to do so. He knew Whitby would understand him, that if along for this wicked ride, Whitby would’ve raised the fucking issue, somehow someway. Even though it was too late, since they fucking lived here now, apparently.
And if the fuckers in charge insisted on establishing a fucking base camp only to leave it—another fucking folly. How in the name of all the unholys and the holy craps was that a great plan, after seeing a man’s face fused to his helmet? Which in the meantime rendered them all still, although seemingly in motion getting busy “establishing” the base of the camp so it could be a goddamn safe haven, sanctuary, a place to retreat to, and he already had the sense there’d be no retreat worth the fucking name. More like screaming all their limbs running and fingering their way separately and the head bouncing along fucking behind shrieking “Wait for me!” In which case, more folly still.
Why he expressed this to Winters rather than Sky he put down to the fucking fact that Sky might say she’d had enough of his fucking “bullshit” whereas he saw it as bullet-shit: The truth delivered with velocity. And, also, if Winters did have to take over, until Lowry decided to do so himself, he needed to be in the loop.
“Move, Winters. Let’s fucking move.”
“Chill, Lowry. Be still.” Was Winters telling him to just fucking die? Because that’s how he read “be still” now. Winters liked this rhyming too, considered himself a fucking poet who had perhaps joined the wrong calling. Well, he might’ve joined the wrong calling but if poetry was it instead, he had no fucking calling at fucking all.
“Besides, history favors us.”
“Why?”
“This site was a fort once. Someone saw it as having strategic value.”
“Oh, this site was a fort once? Where is it now? How’d that go for the folks in the fort? Are they still around? Is it still standing? Anyone other than you remember its name?”
Winters ignored that, said, “You got naked for no reason in the middle of an emergency situation, Lowry.”
Just jealous he hadn’t dropped trou first. Just envious of Lowry’s massive cock, shining in the sunlight as it lolled all the way to the ground in that first fucking glorious moment in Area X before the rules descended again and they were closed in, contained, made to fear what might be dealt with by medicine, remedy, in kind. The base camp was a bad fucking idea. But Winters didn’t even know what he was talking about. Even Whitby had known Lowry had something special, some special insight, or why would the loon have spent so much time talking to Lowry. Because he was a fucking clown? No. Not that.
Ah, fucking hell, Winters could just fuck off. What was an expedition but a pain in the ass expressed twenty-four ways.
Twenty-two ways.
“Base” camps also meant other places that were not base camps—meant roving like nomads out from the perimeter of a “base camp,” and that fucking process had already started, probably under mish orders from the Director (“imperative to find the fucking off switch, to unhaunt us brass”). That invisible hand from so far off that Lowry felt compelled to tell Sky, “You don’t have to do anything now except what you want. How would they stop you? How would they stop me?” But he held his tongue. His tongue might need the silence to be credible if some other more imperative blurt overcame him.
So Sky ordered Lowry to assist Easterling with the “side expedition” Lowry knew had been fucking inevitable—she was to take four with her and go forward to secure the village, or if unsecure, to return with intel. The holding of territory when all the territory was potentially hostile struck him as stupid. He didn’t know how fucking else to put it. As if the mole from under his tombstone was conducting mish ops.
“You want me to throw confetti?”
“Whatever Easterling wants.”
Turned out Easterling wanted him to assemble supplies for their packs, test compasses and walkie-talkies, and make sure they had adequate rations. Five against a village. Central must have some information or some urgent need, and the pang came that maybe he should’ve gotten himself involved in the side mission. That maybe Jack-in-the-Box (the box being Central) would’ve told him to do that.
But he didn’t trust Easterling, and it wasn’t because she said “dude” like “dew-duh,” which got old fast. So let Easterling wipe the fucking village clean of demons, witches, and aliens—do the hard, the dirty work and then he’d sweep in behind as the cavalry without a horse.
Easterling, Frank Delmas, Karen Hargraves, Angela Hernandez, Danika Miles—cross them off his list. Figured Area X might have plans for them that they might not like, headed off by themselves. That it was no business of his, despite a twinge for the potential of Hargraves, who, typically, smirked at him in a way he couldn’t decipher, said, “Maybe it was my idea. Maybe I wanted to stretch my legs.”
No fucking reply for that, so he packed them up and off—and reported back to Sky, who seemed to find him underfoot, so he spent the rest of the day dozing under a shaggy salt oak or whatever, listening to either birds hunt for insects above him or the clanking, trudging, grunting sounds of a perimeter being set up and a fire pit dug and all the fucking rest.
Until the grunts dolloped up changed to shouts of alarm and he raised the brim of his messed-up hat to the news that the first casualty of base camp was by the hand or paw, or whatever the fuck you called it, of an alligator: Sherri Binder, the half-assed psychic whose CV had been so soft the file had gone limp in Lowry’s hand, and gooped into the ground.
She hadn’t taken chances but the gator had gotten her anyway. It was unnerving. Mating season, according to Kalliope Benner, and the gators were hyperaggressive. The bellows and depth charges of the males in pursuit of females had gotten their attention.
“Whatever else Area X is doing,” Benner said, “it hasn’t affected the gators.”
“Right,” Winters said. “That’s really what’s important here.”
“Threat assessment of the real and unreal,” Ferreira muttered, first thing Lowry had heard him fucking say.
Stunning. An alligator was just a fucking scaly basset hound that lay sun-dazed, a lot like a log. A lot like a fucking log. How the fuck did you get killed by something that lived in the fucking drink and all you had to do was be moderately careful to avoid? Like, how the fuck did you not see a huge alligator moving toward you across a stretch of wildflowers? How, as a supposed psychic, did you live down dying from being devoured by the most obvious clichéd source of death in the whole damn swamp?
Here, bite my fucking leg. Have a chop. Just take this fucking hand. I want to pet you, are you a doggo, I don’t have my glasses or my psychic abilities turned on, so I’m just going to stand here while you eat the shit out of me. Fuck. He could take the first deaths, or thought he could, but this one. It was like she’d given up before they’d even started.
What had she thought the alligator would do? Had she never seen a fucking gator in the swamp beyond the Southern Reach during training? He was forced into fucking incoherence in his own mind from trying to contemplate this situation until he realized that what agitated him was simply the shittiness that maybe she hadn’t given up, but this was the way it would be here. That it wouldn’t be with a blam but a whisper. A whisper that said, Why resist?
Tracks all around the body and actual sightings of animals they could have eaten. They could be eating fucking bears! They could be eating otters and dolphins and, yes, alligators. They could be eating herons and kingfishers, raccoons and possums. Deer, lots of deer. Wild pigs! Lots of pigs. They could be feasting on grilled manatee, for fuck’s sake. They could be pulling apart the thigh meat of roasted sandhill cranes. They could be eating tons of fish, with no batter. Songbirds were delicious to some—why not crank a bunch of them on the barbecue and eat ’em whole, crunchy and succulent?
Never given a calorie-count chart—a better info chart on a laminated card dangling from a lanyard would’ve been useful. More than the shit they had—like, charts of the offshore shallows, these topographical maps when the whole place was as flat as fuck.
Because the goddamn energy bars and New Age hardtack in their packs that barreled through their stomachs like a tank smashing through a Shriners’ parade barricade—they tasted to Lowry, at least, like fucking freeze-dried sandpaper duck pâté shoved inside a chocolate candy bar and the whole thing dropped in the fryer at a county fair, put on a stick, shoved up someone’s ass, and then let to sit for hours before being liquified by burning and then re-formed into a fucking bar and meanwhile there were animals to eat all around!
Except Central and the cautious Director forbade it, so Sky did too. Why the fuck not eat them? They should’ve been able to eat their own suits like body-shaped placentas, born into this new world and needing the fucking nourishment. The suits should’ve been made that way, so the sausages housed within could feast on the bounty.
Earthworms, grubs, other insects—Area X held a wealth of protein, and as far as Lowry could tell, every other goddamn organism was partaking of every other organism in a great clusterfuck of devourification. Everything that creeped and crawled and swam—tasty or disgusting on the hoof—totally off-limits, though. Meanwhile, the expedition walked around with swagger and strong intent, breathing the ever-loving air that could be contaminated, too. Why not pluck a fucking woodpecker from the air and chow down?
All over the fucking place. Waiting to be plucked, cooked, and served.
Down to twenty-one, the legal age to drink.
Samuel Bronen, a sick fuck in Lowry’s opinion in how he trended toward invisible in every situation, so what a surprise when Bronen popped up like a puppet fucker when Lowry was still in his tent trying to read the Old Jim file he’d prayed out of the Bible.
Fuck that fuck. Lowry didn’t really know what Bronen had even done that day, but he had served one useful purpose—he had snuck alcohol in, vodka as water rations, careful to weigh it proper so his pack wouldn’t weigh more or less. “Water weighs more by a bit,” Bronen had told them, proud of himself. “So the bottles look like I drank some.”
“Get the hell out, Bronen!”
But soon enough he’d had enough anyway, and Bronen out there pouring the booze and calling to him as if trying to apologize. So then he had to drink with them and sat there by the campfire, Sky abstaining like a fucking leader should, when all he wanted was to read what he’d pulled out of the mutilated Bible. Yeah, a third fucking time, but maybe some fucking secret meaning would appear like fucking magic.
“You’re like my grouchy younger sister,” Kalliope said to him. “That’s how I’ll think of you.” The others laughed, except Winters and Lowry. If Hargraves had been there, maybe a third.
Lowry had two sisters growing up and they were older and he felt like he had to work the angles not to be left out or left behind. Mauve and Becka. Tomboys who didn’t give a shit what they broke because they were big and loud and strong, and, yes, loved by all. Unbreakable themselves.
“Don’t care what we think of you?” Mauve asked him once, after he’d done something selfish and stupid. “Don’t care what I think of you?” he retorted. “Hell no,” Becka said. “Too much fucking work.” And they dissolved into laughter and roughhouse wrestled on the living-room couch. While he’d searched for a comeback, and couldn’t think of one.
Nor could he now.
Because there was a point, right? Or had he made that up on the fly the sky the why?
The psychics were there. Like hitched twins afraid of the dark. The shuffle, shuffling forward like the shuffling forward of a chain gang or into a Victorian past. They had spent the day issuing “soothing suggestions.” Like “Think of the largest, juiciest grapefruit you’ve ever seen.” Like, “Think of a cute little pig at a petting zoo.” Fuck cute pigs. Fuck grapefruit. Fuck the Victorians.
As they sat around the campfire, Lowry felt a kind of warmth … a kind of loosening … that frightened but also excited him. An exhausting exhilaration. As if for all his life he had been trapped in spools and spools of cloth and now someone was unwrapping him until soon there would just be the real him, unmuffled, and the world beyond.
Sad for the other fuckers around him that in addition to the mish-specific files Jack had given him access to, he’d had a quick look at the expedition personnel files. Nothing too drill-down and suspicious, but with the names filed off some personal histories and important moments, and it all mixed anyway with S&SB members, too. Telling those stories around a campfire would be like playing Battleship.
What might happen then? Because now, in the moment, Lowry began to feel the urge to say any damn-fool thing, to do whatever. But he couldn’t pin down the origin of the impulse. His mind or some external agent, and how would he know? And maybe for this reason, Lowry resolved while watching the flames to stick to Jack-in-the-Box’s orders. A structure, the skeleton, of a plan. Something to hold on to as befit a man. As Winters’s face jutted out across the fire laughing at a bad joke by Benner.
Go as far as the lighthouse and then strike out on his own north, up the estuary, to Dead Town. Okay, but while Jack called it “Dead Town,” the map, which Lowry kind of fucking believed in, called it “Fort Jones.” What the fuck kind of name was Fort fucking Jones? No wonder it’d failed and everybody fucked off to Hedley.
Jack had said, “I don’t think the Director would approve of you going to Dead Town. He’s a Brute. If things go badly, for the main mission, they might blame me.” Lowry didn’t give two belches in a firestorm about Central factions like Brutes, or “fractions” as he disparagingly had called them talking to Sky pre-Border. Being blamed he didn’t give a shit about, what he cared about was finding leverage.
But what did Jack really want, Lowry wondered? Since the fucking campfire kids didn’t care if he lived or died now, happy to see him retreat to his fucking tent to resume rereading instructions.
What the fuck was Lowry supposed to put his back into, and what would be his reward if fucking successful?
“The mission first and last,” Jack confirmed. “But second, in the Village, these other two locations, and the place I call Dead Town on this map—don’t take it, commit this to memory—any files, videotapes, or other documents relating to an operation called Serum Bliss or to Séance and Science Brigade. Bring back everything you possibly can. In the rooms marked on the detail map, you may find money, other types of funds. Note the location of what you can’t carry. I have a list of key words, too, that will appear in the lining of your backpack, along with some of the detail-room map intel. Near the inseam for the label.”
Not for Lowry the fucking lion to growl about it, but that all fucking stank of some secret op before the Border came down. Didn’t take a brain scientist, who mostly just mindlessly removed brain tumors anyway, so maybe it was like a being a brain scientist to suspect Jack feared the secret ops had something to do with Active Area X, which was now fucking Area X. Okay, that was a lot to process, if he really thought about it, like so much beyond his control … so he just didn’t.
“Can do, boss,” Lowry had said to Jack, getting a nightburn from the fluorescent lights in that blank, bleak, black corner of nothing. But maybe he could use this as leverage with Jack later, beyond the promised monetary reward (half now, half to his corpse, or his corpse’s widow, whomever that might be), or maybe after he came back he got his ass hauled off to help staff a peace mission to a tiny country in the Fucklord Landlocked Twhut region. There were so many places he hadn’t been yet that looked like fucking fun. Or Central would just swallow him up, a leviathan breathing in a damn minnow through its merciless gills.
“Another thing,” Jack had said. “If this guy, Henry Kage, turns up—assume he’ll gouge your eyes out and replace them with pebbles. Treat with extreme prejudice.” The photo Lowry had seen before, but not with the advice attached. Henry did look fucking dire—like some Nordic gloom flick where a buzzing fly trapped in a room was the only other fucking character.
Jack smiled like some fucking shark showing him Henry, but later Lowry realized Jack was wincing, almost like he was fucking embarrassed, so when Jack told him there would be “consequences” if Lowry fucked up, it felt like Jack really meant he’d fucked up and was just kicking that ball forward to Lowry.
Jack-in-the-Box called him “barrel boy” twice during that fucking convo, but also “thistleblower” like it was a compliment, but Lowry fucking despised it and would’ve gotten in a bareknuckle fight with a brown bear in a bar if anyone had called him a thistleblower. But Jack knew he’d get things done because otherwise why would he have recruited him? Jack wanted the one true thing, he’d known that since Jack had first met him in a really swank strip club, getting a lap dance. He didn’t panic. It made him such a good lacrosse player in college, in the Ivy League–adjacent Virginia Creeper league, as someone put it.
Jack-in-the-Box also had given him the False Daughter Project files like it was a fucking sign of trust rather than just another dumbass thing Central had been into. Up to. Stepped in. Tripped over.
The files felt like they’d been written by a bad campfire storyteller, so Lowry had to piece it together, around the fucking redactions.
So, maybe, Old Jim had a dissociative break over the death of this almost-wife and Central rewired him because they’d already spent time on conditioning him, he had all these mad skills, mad kills, and was an asset. Although sometimes Lowry thought Jack-in-the-Box just fucking kept Old Jim around as some kind of a pet.
Old Jim had had a daughter too, sad, messed-up “Cass,” but at some point said sad daughter must’ve seen through him and done a runner, scurried off to some other life, had known everything was very, very fucking off and given Old Jim the fuck off.
Can’t have a life without being gone. Can’t have a life without being strong. Something something so the lyrics went in Lowry’s head. Fly away little bird, far away from jerk dad and his problems Central made worse, made into a different kind of hearse, made him learn some verse, too, it looked like, to keep that conditioning in place.
Old Jim had control words and Ol’ Jack-in-the-Box had given them to Lowry, thinking twhut-like that Old Jim lived on instead of being changed into a moonbeam or kibble or something hideous but flappy, the kind of thing Lowry hated worst. Bats fucking sucked. Fuck bats. Smash them out of the sky with their namesake and then eat them whole, on spits. As they chittered outside Lowry’s tent like errant punctuation set free from Jack’s orders.
Jack put stock in Old Jim, but the file on Old Jim he gave Lowry was nothing to write home about. The guy seemed like a basket case, starting with the ops on which his wife had died, them both in the Humvee, navigating back streets as best they could in the middle of a desert by a glittering blue sea in the middle of a civil war. And rammed by a truck, shot at. She’d died instantly and he’d lost a lot of his memory, including everything about that op, including about his own fucking wife.
So Central used that to construct the idea of a “car accident” and memory loss resulting as a “lesser trauma, removing complicating context,” which included that possibly Old Jim had been responsible, gotten them lost, not been paying attention, had been impaired in some way. And then they’d shitcanned him, kind of—admin and desk jobs, until, Jack said, they had need of him on a special special op, off the books.
So it looked like this fucking basket case got fucked up again, from something to do with his daughter disappearing. Like, this guy Old Jim had fan-fuck-tastic luck. Like, the worst, most terrifying luck. Except, also, from the files, Lowry couldn’t fucking tell if the “daughter” ever existed. And, like, there was a real “false daughter,” another Cass, and what the fuck did that mean?
Why did Jack have to be so scheme-y, all foreplay and no fuck? Or did everybody devoured by Central become that way? So, “false daughter,” what the fuck. Something to distract Lowry from no animal eating and base camp. Had they implanted a daughter in Old Jim’s head like an angel on the head of a pin embedded in his fucking brain—a brain already full of Central’s rusty nails? All those nasty psychewitches down in Central’s holding ponds, their basements, their rough-hewn caves. Cackling subterranean while secretly beating off beneath their jet-black robes.
Or, at least, that’s how Lowry imagined the jack-off mental tools at Central. How convoluted they were, like the folds of a fucking complicated brain, but the brain preserved in a fuckling jar, hermetically sealed, so what difference did it make?
False daughter, “real daughter,” real daughter—maybe in the end who gave a fuck, though it bothered Lowry. It nagged at him hard, despite all the other shit that could’ve had his fucking attention. That they’d done that to Old Jim. Do that to a man, he’s going to fuck with you, if ever he finds out. Lowry would’ve come after Jack with a nail gun, a dull knife, and baseball bat. Maybe still have to, fuck.
And so it was supposed to look like retirement, Old Jim going to the Forgotten Coast. A gift to a loyal old-timer. While the mission in question was secretly feeding the beast that was Jack with some good old stateside grift in the manifests. Let’s turn those manifests into manifestos.
But Old Jim had been smarter than he’d looked and managed to fuck Jack on the money somehow, and Jack needed it back, which is where Lowry came in. Jack acting like Lowry was getting a ticket to a theme park and going to go on some rides. Not, heavily armed and drugged up, to take on the unknown on its home territory.
Because Old Jim had also fucked up Central, “some perfectly good minds, for nothing, after we took such good care of him,” Jack said. Something about surveillance tape of Old Jim playing the piano and Central too relaxed and too many people viewed it and “got infected,” which didn’t make Lowry that happy about finding Old Jim, if the guy could fucking rip off a song and put knives in Lowry’s head.
And what the fuck was Lowry supposed to say to this “Old Jim” when he pulled him out of some fucking hidey-hole in the middle of some shit-tastic black swamp nowhere? “Come back into the fold, fucklehead! All is forgiven!” Because no bones about it, Jack-in-the-Box wanted Old-Jim-in-the-Hole brought back fucking alive, not goddamn dead. Unless dead he already fucking be, lying lifeless somewhere by the sea. And they had “every reason to believe based on last comms” that Old Jim still breathed, if in some shaky way. Whatever that meant. Last communion? Last communism? Last commission? Last commensuration? Last commode?
Yeah, “last communications,” but the nature of those remained fucking raw, unattainable, not beamed from Jack’s mind to Lowry’s via mind ray or humble file. Just that look on Jack’s face in the dive bar, the smug fucking look of a champion fucking secrets keeper. Maybe, though, Jack cared about the money as much as the other shit.
Oh yeah, the files also mentioned someone involved named “Schubert,” but no fucking context. Who the hell had Schubert been? Someone who reported to Old Jim, is all he could tell, maybe. Plus there was some shithead thug named Commander Thistle who also knew Schubert but Old Jim reported to him?
And Old Jim might’ve fucking killed Commander Thistle or maybe Commander Thistle was still alive if Area X hadn’t snuffed him out like a bad suit. Look for a black mask. “Unpredictable and off mission,” read the note.
What was this, fucking Zorro? Fucking sorrow. Fucking fuck fuck fuck all of that.
Down to sixteen at base camp. He fell asleep to the echo of the psychic twins’ titanic snores. But when he woke up, they were down to fifteen. Not enough of Landry’s fucking drugs in the fucking world fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Hinojosa had disappeared, presumed missing, presumed dead, presumed more fucked than those who remained behind.
Last words, anecdotal: “Pass the scotch, asshole.”
HAUNTED WALKIE-TALKIE TWHUT FEST
The walkie-talkies turned against them the next morning, when Sky tried to contact the Village advance team. Screams. Pleading. A manipulative child’s voice, incomprehensible. She had ordered radio silence, all comms off, for morale and because it felt like an attack and Lowry in her tent felt like attack, too, to him. He’d had no chance to re-up with Landry for drugs and felt scraped raw of fucks. Nerve lacking. Nerve fucked.
For a second, he thought she was going to ask him if it was one of his jokes. A long way to go for a joke. But her look was haunted and he didn’t like to look at her directly because he didn’t fucking want that in his head—that look, from her, from the expedition leader.
Because the strangled quality to the child’s voice, how the speech seemed to be trying to approximate something it had heard from afar, distant, garbled, or was being said through a bloody mouthful of broken teeth. Or, and this was why Lowry defaulted to “it” … what if the speaker crackling through their comms wasn’t a child at all but something else? Would that be better or worse, or just the same?
“Listen,” Sky said, and Lowry felt unintended rebuke. He’d thought she’d sought comfort from him, but no: She wanted him to listen to more of this shit, to become more and more embroiled, implicated, in the nightmare that had affected her face such that the left corner of her mouth drooped slightly, like she’d suffered a tiny stroke.
What came out through the walkie-talkies was clear, but not reassuring. Also, her tent was a fucking mess, like she’d torn it apart looking for something or thrashing around in her sleep, and he didn’t know what to say to her about that.
“Perimeter wire in place. No intrusion intrusion.”
“Yeah, like, any greener and and it’d be blue.”
“Say again, red leader. Missed missed that.”
“I wish the rations didn’t come in this gray color. Paint that damn bar some color, I don’t care if the food coloring is bad for you. I I just can’t eat gray.”
“There’s no juice left in that. It’s just going to sit there like a toy toy.”
That last one from the walkie-squawkies he recognized. “That’s a recording of something said at the camp yesterday. They’re surveilling us and using psyops on us!”
“No, Lowry. No. They’re not surveilling us in the usual way.”
They. Who the fuck was “they”?
“That’s a recording.”
“No, it’s not. That’s real time.”
“How do you know?” He wanted to say, “That’s fucking impossible. Get your shit together.” But the quaver in her voice warned him against it.
“Just turn it off,” he said. “Just turn it off and it’ll go away.” Because if they couldn’t even find the off switch on the walkie-talkies, then Area X was a fucking lost cause.
Lowry wishing he hadn’t seen the batshit conclusions of Jack’s psychics before the Border had come down. That there was a “temporal storm” of obscene proportions, that they were “receiving visions out of the typical order.” With directions from Jack not to share with others, who only showed Lowry the batshit barf shit in an empty dive bar while they sat at the upright piano in the corner and pretended to play sea shanties like fucking assholes.
All of which seemed to tell him that Central didn’t know an off switch from a hole in their butts and the walkie-talkies might outlive them all. Wishing they could perpetually live in the weeks before going across the Border, in that nervous but exalted energy, that fine and private space.
Sky’s face, the way he willed by telepathy that she acknowledge the commitment his gifts had meant. That maybe it might now soothe. But: Fuck. No.
“It’s not on, Lowry.” Using his name like it was his fault. “It’s not on. It’s not on. It’s not on. It’s not on. It’s not on. It’s not on. It’s not on.”
He took a step back. Her combat knife was in her hand. His combat knife was in his hand. How had they gotten there? What the fuck had they been about to do with the fucking knives?
He dropped his, but he could pull his sidearm quick if needed. Why did he think he needed to?
“Give me the fucking walkie-talkies,” he said. “We’re going to take all the fucking walkie-talkies and lock them away.”
She looked at her knife, dropped it too, nodded.
“Do you think this means the five who went to the Village are dead?”
“Who the fuck knows.”
Had he taken his knife out first and she’d reacted to that? He didn’t remember taking out his knife.
He took her hand, which lay limp in his, not so much that she despised him now but that her attention lay so far inward she could not relate to her own body.
So, in the end, they put all the walkie-talkies in the box, and the box started talking to them in one voice, in words incomprehensible, but like buzz saws cutting into their skulls, so they stuffed their ears full of cotton, and fuck that, so for once he agreed with Winters: “Let’s throw the whole lot in the river.” Estuary, really, but fine, Lowry let Winters have “river.”
Let that box gargle bargle gasp wheeze with water in the goddamn walkie-talkie lungs. Let that damned choir chorus itself into the fucking muck and filth and silt at the very bottom and haunt some fucking salamander’s nightmares.
If the comms were from the past, maybe eventually everything would be from the fucking past, the thought occurred. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. Yet, in the end, he had hidden his walkie-talkie from the general confiscation. Just made sure to bury it deep with some of his clothes around it, in his pack, so the dribble of mumbling it resorted to couldn’t be heard. Everything might be crazed, but one day he might need to talk to Area X, direct line.
But the very next morning the box was back in the camp, by the dead fireplace. Lowry had a fucking twinge of guilt that faded fast. Maybe his walkie-talkie was the leader and the box of submissive walkie-talkies had come back to the boss of them. Hated that fucking thinking, which was no thought at all but some impulse of the reptile part of the brain to be scared, to be small, to be repulsive. No, his walkie-talkie stuffed inside of four pairs of socks was not the cause of this shit.
Sky just looked at the box like it was poison and retreated to her tent. That left Winters to give orders.
He stood there tall and straight and said, “Let’s shoot up the box and take it farther away.” He had no tremble to his voice, but no feeling either, at all, and Lowry felt that was a tell that something had slipped away from him the way it had slipped away from Sky. Which meant Lowry third-in-command might have to step in sooner rather than later.
So they shot the box up with their automatic weapons and tossed it, full of holes, back in the river, but far distant.
Cold chill. How had the box gotten back into camp? How was there such a passage of time that Lowry felt starved between lunch and dinner, but couldn’t be sure it was the same dinner it was supposed to be. Their compasses had fried themselves. All the equipment for measurements, Winters reported, had become toast, toast, toast. Not fried but spinning wildly, no use to it except to commit all of the electronics to the funny farm for rehab and therapy. Maybe go themselves and slam the door shut behind them.
They would not let the walkie-talkies rule their lives. Where was he again, in the scheme of things? He had a mission within the mission, and this mission seemed to be collapsing around them.
And, in the end, he took his walkie-talkie out into a sudden, black-water shithole of a watering hole beyond the camp and shot it dead. Shot it full of holes, and then tossed it in the water while it screamed at him: “I’m hit I’m shit I’m shit I’m shit.”
Goodbye dear walkie-talkie. Sweet dreams. Do not return home. Do not fucking come home.
But he kept his small satellite phone. It had behaved. It had not talked to him.
Where did the fucking time go? They lost more of it all the time like they should fucking chase it down. Lowry couldn’t tell. No one knew. Like, were they always around the campfire now. Always going to be around the campfire now. Always around the fucking merry-go-round they’d go.
But Lowry couldn’t get free of the calorie counts, the fucking wildlife. But not just the fucking wildlife.
“Why no moo-moos and cluck-clucks all over the damn place?” he posed to the group in general, to no applause and no response. “Farms here before the Border came down, for sure, folks. Where’ve all the domesticated moo-baas gone? All the bleaters just fucking vanished, raptured into nothing? We could’ve had a pig on a spit right now, roasting by this very campfire.”
No plump succulent geese? No fucking nothing other than the undergrowth, the untouchable wildlife, the buildings that looked like they’d been mugged and aged fifty years, not one year. And the giant, spewing lighthouse like an oil-derrick gusher in the distance.
Oh, the flaming lighthouse game they still wanted to play, while Landry handed out happy pills. Of them all, Lowry now realized, Landry was the least expendable. Landry could not die, because only Landry now knew the identity of the pills he had in his pack, because they’d gotten all sloshed together.
“It’s just a lighthouse.”
“I see a snake rearing up on its hind legs.”
“Snakes don’t have legs. It’s a pillar of smoke.”
“A tower of ice.”
“It’s made of insects. Tiny swirling green insects.”
“Fucking cocktail with all this good and weird shit in it, like protoplasm and gin and Chartreuse and riboflavin, gentian, electric daisy, maybe a splash of lime with a cherry. I could go for that right now.”
Who the fuck could find that right now? A cocktail out here was one fucker with a twig swirling mud water in another’s cupped hands.
“We don’t know what it wants. We don’t know where its command and control is. We don’t know why it’s mimicking us. We should go back—abort the mission.” But it was too fucking early to abort the fucking mission. They’d just gotten there and maybe it was the embarrassment of that that felt like too much, like they should keep going.
Sky did not put it to a vote, though. They would continue on, soon enough. To the lighthouse.
They may have become drunk and sullen and started watching each other for some sign of becoming feral.
The mood, man, the fucking mood.
So they sat around the campfire not talking and into his awareness there came a shadow moving through behind them, in the trees, coming down out of the trees like a vast blanket, invisible but thick, filling in the spaces around them until Lowry couldn’t breathe, but he couldn’t move, either, and he wanted to scream, he wanted to run away, and he could see that the others did too, and yet they could do nothing as if encased in cement, and only their eyes shone out, terrified, and Lowry tried to remember his contempt, his contempt for the others—because they had been trained to ignore or deal with such phenomena, they knew it might happen, and yet so many had lost their shit so quickly. And yet still he couldn’t breathe, was suffocating, and the night marched on, darker than dark.
He concentrated on calories, on his rants.
“Calorie count on a gator not including the gristle had to top a few thousand Hamiltons. Muskrat—did they have muskrats or just regular old marsh rats—maybe eight gees.”
One of those fucking protected wood stork thingies a thou or coupla, and you could cook the head, stringy-looking motherfuckers.
He stared trapped at Sky opposite him and the thickness was the worst, the contact of skin on skin, but the other skin of such a consistency, a feeling of revulsion and shock from the gliding through, as if it wasn’t flowing through and between them, but in some other way touching them. Inside.
Swamp rats like snacks, just pop ’em like hairy marshmallows on a stick around a fire. Pretend you’re back at summer camp with some dirty hippie playing the banjo at you. Some marsh rabbit—though they’d been told to especially never put a hit on them.
The living wall had curled around the whole campfire and opposite him he saw Singer disappear into it, just completely come apart at the fucking seams in that moment, screaming and screaming until that cut off as the molecules of body became nothing more than molecules of Area X.
Calories, though, didn’t mean edibility. He’d had “alligator wings” once that were tire-rubber quality, but in a pinch…’cause what if the protein bars were spiked or had some subliminal taste or message on the wrapper, making them do things or hear things or, fucking hell, feel things. No, he wanted those wild calories. Wild calories were free and everywhere. He could feel the thing cloying closer, the dull hum and rumble and the sensation of flesh moving across the back of his head, his neck.
But fuck if he would be frozen. Fuck if he would succumb to the terror, the paralysis. Fuck that fuck that. Fuck fuck fuck.
He turned and lunged into the backdrop, jumped right into that hell of skin and flesh screaming his own name over and over. He pulled it to him with his arms, bit down hard on that rubbery fucking manta ray, that fucking monster that had been a thing in a jar in his head grown as wide and large as the world.
The wall of Area X felt tremulous, vulnerable, surprisingly delicate. It made him want to protect it, not destroy it. But he’d not have a thing in a jar best him, not now. So he bit down hard and Area X tasted like sour juice, like fresh hail sucked on before it became water, with some acid rain in there and grace notes of fucking merlot for all he could guess. Just gnawing and he was going to fucking eat Area X before it ate him. Even though he should have punctured it with a sharpened metal straw and drunk it like a milk shake or that bubble tea with the little “tadpoles” at the bottom. That he could’ve just drunk the wall down to nothing, that it would have deflated like a kid’s beachball.
He grappled with it to hold firm, like it was a climbing wall without purchase and he was a sweaty-ass climber still jumping up farther and farther, feet in tune to some invisible grips, but really he was just poking holes into the wall, into the fucking whatever the fuck it was, still screaming his own name like a mantra against dissolution.
And maybe in that moment he thought he saw the face of a fucking deity in the wall of flesh, or maybe just a wall of jars exploded to fucking free their essence. But in all other ways, Lowry thrilled to the experience, he leapt toward it, not cringed away. Because he was motherfucking Lowry, nobody’s barrel boy. Nobody’s fool or tool, nobody’s anything anymore except what he fucking wanted to be.
Then it was gone, just fell away, so he was chomping down on night air and he was spitting out what he’d begun to chew because now it felt like carrion in his mouth and also like a vast conspiracy to colonize his throat, and Lowry felt ancient, muscles aching, and he toppled over as did the others. Around the snuffed-out fire.
“Fucking calories,” he shouted, still spitting, too. “Just calories, all around us.”
While they looked on like nothing had really happened, dulled by drugs or dulled by the reality or all in shock and really he should be in shock too, but he was too excited by his own triumph, and pushing people over to wake them up, dragging out more rations, even sanctioning the banjo that John Fu liked to play, he made them party.
“Some music to get the night the fuck out of here.”
Winters staring weary at him, like he was Area X, somehow, instead of the only one to bite Area X in the ass and get away with it. And why the fuck was that, anyway?
But soon even Winters joined in the frenzy of the party, the frenetic quality of it, and they were dancing dancing dancing to the flame and trying to ignore that the flame kept staring back at them with its own eye, but as long as the fucking eye stayed in the fire and didn’t lunge out at them, Lowry could deal with that.
“Did one of you sick fuckos cut the eyes out of a hamster and replace them with pebbles? Well, that’s what I heard. Back at Central. Looking through your files.”
He only said part of that aloud and then defaulted to his own history. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe because he liked sharing it without really sharing it. Maybe because he wanted it out of his soul.
What was it Whitby had said? Sad Whitby. Wise Whitby. Just all the Whitbys in his head. They had said, “You can’t escape the past.” Or had he seen that on a bumper sticker. Maybe someday he would be an entrepreneur, after he got the gold, and he’d have a bumper sticker commemorating him. His industry. His hard work. The fact he’d jacked up all the gold and used that to become successful. But, anyway, his own history …
“Someone’s granddad took me to a department-store lingerie show when you were ten,” Lowry shouted.
“Your mom made one of you follow an old boyfriend around in a car to see if he was cheating on her but they hadn’t dated for years, then had you and your sisters beat him up when he went out to a bar.”
Winters had brought the alcohol this time, lapse of protocol unbecoming a second-in-fucking-command and Sky had come out of her shell/tent and just sat there on a log, like a spectator, still in shock. A spectator at her own expedition. Lost. Already lost. And Lowry channeled all of his own lost into her, willed it there, because why should they both be lost, and then relented and stopped, even as a mental exercise, but still she was not fit company to talk to and they all got roaring drunk on Winters’s liquor because why not why not?
Shouting and talking loudly disguised the silence of the woods. The silence of the air. The silence in their hearts at the thought of the fucking wall returning. Let there be light! Let there be noise. Let there be more dancing!
Into the middle of all that, Ferreira confessed he had brought a bomb to blow up the lighthouse. Shrugs. I just like bombs. “I have a bomb.” “You are a bomb.” “Do you think it’ll work?” “I don’t know. I just thought I’d give it a try, you know.” “BYOB. Radical.” “So you thought a bomb would work against a gigantic green cum geyser?” For it was still there after dark, spewing, sparkling, roaring incandescent emerald, the most beautiful thing Lowry had ever seen that was also terrifying as fuck.
He couldn’t go straight to bed when the others finally did, when they all fucking thought they might be safe, just a little bit fucking safe for a while. He snuck over to Sky’s tent, ripped open the flap by mistake instead of using the zipper.
“Want company?”
From the dark corner, Sky and a video recorder, kind of both slumped there, her half curled up.
“Go to sleep, Lowry.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Everything okay?”
“No, Lowry. Everything is not all okay.”
“Last chance.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
In the morning, Ferreira was dead of a gunshot to the head, but no one had heard a gunshot. No trace of any bomb. He’d lied.
Down to thirteen. He thought.
Last words: “Abalone tastes disgusting, by the way. Gonna turn in.”
No one slept except Lowry fucking slept like a baby that had been drugged, his mouth enflamed but the outrage of what it had received receding, so by morning with Sky kicking them in the ass to get moving he felt refreshed. He’d made the right fucking decision while they all cowered or froze. Except no one appreciated it, thanked him for biting Area X away. No one gave him a nod or a clap on the shoulder. Like, somehow he’d been fucking complicit and just been acting.
That, some fucking how, he and Area X had colluded ahead of time, choreographed the whole thing, and that wall of midnight flesh would never have hit their encampment except for him.
How did that work? What kind of fucking allies did he and Area X make? Except maybe both of them were fearless, unlike the fearful fucks that were Scaramutti, Landry, Winters, Bukvic, and all the rest. All the cowering masses that didn’t know how to face down Area X. Who somehow thought that the best way to win against this place was to just wait and let it permeate them, overtake them, mash them into the soil until they were nothing but the dirt.
But on the playback of what Sky had recorded, Lowry was jumping into that alien flesh, was kissing it, was dry humping it, while the others looked on in horror, but Lowry knew that was fucking false. That the vid was wrong. That this was all wrong, and he’d been biting it, stabbing it. That he’d not been enveloped by it, stuck in, hadn’t rubbed his head up against that soft, velvety expanse and nuzzled it and cooed like a fucking lamb or something. He’d been aggro incarnate. He’d been telling Area X to fuck off.
“Winters, you saw,” Lowry said. “You saw what happened?”
“We’ve got to get going,” Winters replied, and that’s all he said, and by the time Lowry could gather his own shit and pack it up, the whole expedition had headed out and he had to fucking catch up.
By the time he’d reached them again, they’d come to a halt at the trucks. But fuck the trucks. Fuck the fucking trucks. Who cared about the trucks. He’d saved them all from dying the night before and none of them, not even Landry, gave him the gratitude of that. He was the fucking third in line to the crown, to the throne. In a week, if things went bad, he could be leading this expedition. But they all stood there looking at the fucking trucks like he was invisible and he’d done nothing to help.
The trail of trucks looked from afar like kids had been playing with toys. But overgrown with vines, so that ruined the childhood-memory effect, fond times moving armies around the backyard while the parents yelled at each other inside. All of it so subsumed into the substrate that had one year or fifty damn years transpired in the interim. Gear shifts rusted and rotting. No fuel.
What a useless bunch of fucking junk, and he watched with contempt as Winters tried to turn the key and reanimate the dead, living in vain hope of engine rumble like he was a circus freak, an illusionist who had once reassembled a cut-apart rabbit as a fluke and now put on airs, didn’t realize there’d been divine or infernal intervention. Not a single fucking tire was sound or could even make a sound if you shoved a pressure gauge into it.
“Push on!” Lowry shouted at them. “Shove off. Ignore this shit and push on!” “Push on” just a term he’d heard in a war movie once, but it fit.
Bridge over the River Who Gives a Shit. If they were going to ignore him, he’d be the fucking loudest ghost in the world. He’d be the ghost with the most, the one with the fucking megaphone shouting out the truth of the spirit world, which was that it was just the real world when no one listened to it. That was the spirit world. Just people other people fucking ignored. Fucking ignored at their peril. Like a bunch of cowards and shitheads.
Why’d he even have to put up with this crap. Well, for now, he didn’t want to be on his own. Because this place was creepy-scary-shitty. But soon, motherfucking soon, he’d strike out on his own and hit gold. He’d be the one who brought back the good tidings, the real thanksgiving, and the rest of them would be still in Area X, shivering in a ditch while some wall of flesh took a dump all over them.
“Where are all the soldiers? No one. No one to fucking rescue. Just ourselves. Just our-fucking-selves.”
Sky didn’t even tell him to shut up anymore.
But she sure was shouting soon enough.
About two clicks past the stupid trucks, a line of slurping goo people sprang up—a surprise because the expedition had gotten sloppy. Because they’d been fucking sloppy the whole fucking time, like a bunch of amateurs, they were strung out in a line on the trail such that the swoop and tackle of the enemy frags sliced right through them, and Lowry along with Sky, Winters, Fu, Benner, Formsby, and Jiamu on the far side and, dammit, Landry, Henkel, Scaramutti, Fussell, Bukvic, Bronen trapped behind.
How to describe this fucking line of non-people in his incendiary memoirs after this was long past and he had white hair and a beard, or maybe no beard at all and had become an Ichabod Crane haunted fucker who snarled at the neighbors?
Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn’t it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.
By then, Lowry had snorted and swallowed a lot more drugs from Landry, thank the gods. So maybe he was shouting at the liquid things that seemed so joyous in how they could dissipate and re-form and why couldn’t all in life be like that? Why did anyone have to commit to just one fucking shape. It was a fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes and what if he just wanted to be a circle or an oval with no end and no beginning?
But he had his automatic weapon out and the depth of his fucking spiraling mattered not because his body understood what he was supposed to do. And what he was supposed to do was kill the shitheads. Kill all the shitheads to protect the expedition.
For now the lopers of the interlopers had re-formed into beings much more familiar and more fey and Sky let out a fearful yip of a shrieking shout because she was gibbering terrified and so was Winters, who Lowry was fairly sure had just shat himself, and that was the smell not the marsh that overtook them.
The enemy had stopped their schtick on all fours and now doubled dead exped mems good, doubled them like they fucking would for psyops and max confusion. They were naked and crying and shrieking and calling out Sky’s name, which did her morale no further good.
While Landry, trapped behind that line out of his mind on drugs, was giggling and pointing at them and ranting “Into the armpit of the universe, we’re in the armpit of the universe” and “Far far worse shit I’ve done now than I’ve ever done before fuck fuck they are ugly.” For they were ugly. They were uggos from way back, because they’d mimicked most of the expedition in their gallivanting bipedal numbers. But not just like naked people.
No, it was slinky-dinky pinky-winky shit, loopy and looping, and the flexibility of them at the joints and how they swung around and stared upside down felt like something out a tube of toothpaste. But then they became frozen in form like it had set and there came a kind of roughness to their texture more like the papier-mâché of a hornet’s nest.
One eye in the heads that watched him, that watched Sky, jutted out oracular, bulged, while the other receded into the orbit, so that if you focused in on that, if you tracked them with binocs, it made you want to throw up, to see both the black hole of the receding eyeball and the quaking jelly of the one half ejected but still hanging on.
While the rest of them were ribbons that had mass, that you could pump water into the lining of to fill out. Yet still they fucking looked like the dead expedition members somehow. The faces. The faces so rubber and coalescing and also poignant, as if they held the memory of something true.
Eels and flatworms came into his thoughts un-fucking-bidden as the doppelgängers began to seethe toward them, to seethe and then retreat, and once again seethe, each time in this sidewinder method coming closer across the marshes, and no fucking evidence at all of feet or stumbling or anything other than this gliding freak-circus act, atrocity.
“Wait until they’re closer!” Sky ordered. “Wait and save ammo.”
Save fucking ammo? For what? For twenty-one-gun salutes at all their secret fucking funerals? No, he would spray fucking ammo like it was going out of style, like he was some inaugural water sprinkler of bullets at some new municipal park and he was going to annihilate every cardboard cutout of every smiling public official who hadn’t sanctioned a fenced area for dogs so everything was dookie dookie dookie that people stepped in.
So he sprayed it, with a mighty hell, with a hallelujah to the Landrys and alike who might be in the line of fire to get down, so they hit the ground and he just let ’er rip in a fucking cataclysm of bullets, making the weapon hot in his grasp, but he liked the heat and those motherfuckers all fell like wheat before the scythe as someone had said in an old action movie back in the day trying to take yet another motherfucking bridge, except here the “bridge” was the whole bunch of party-crashing freaky-deaky shitheads who had decided to Hey Nonny Nonny their way right through the middle of them.
But he also didn’t care for the way the doubles loped across the landscape with half their faces shot off, smiling, mutilated arms outstretched in greeting, like they really were their dead pals.
Didn’t like that and also didn’t like how the others had frozen but then added their own weapon fire after these overenthusiastic door-to-door salesmen had been so torn apart by his own automatic rifle that they couldn’t stand anymore and fell back into the reeds like they normally should’ve long before that.
All this to the cascading smell of he didn’t know what. Awful offal but also something so foreign it made him disgusted by the fact that he couldn’t identify it, like his nose became intelligent on its own just to revolt from having to smell that and relay it to his brain.
Calm, he danced close while the others hung back and put the parting gift of shots to each of the deadlings’ heads, even dared touch the side of one to see if it felt like the wall of fucking flesh—before leaping back, benefit of the enemy’s undulating line.
Well, yes, and maybe no, on the texture. More like a manta ray, firm and smooth and a serrated roughness, but with more give and behind it the sense, yes, of something vast, breathing in and out.
Like the line of dark blood leading to a corpse in the snow. Like some vast quest to a tower they never reached but kept turning in the widening gyre and holy shit holy shit holy shit.
The doubles of the dead had begun to re-form despite Lowry having shot their brains out, and the exped mems trapped on the other side remained trapped, and a mighty horrifying scream came from the doubles as they became their dead comrades again, and a shriek and a bellow like he’d never heard or wanted to hear again, and it was rude and not awesome that he’d killed them, he’d stormed the ramparts like a fucking hero and yet they still lived, they wouldn’t stay down dead but wanted to be all expantual again when he’d shut them down already, and what kind of fucking party was this, that didn’t eventually wind down?
“How do we kill them? How do we kill them? How do we kill them?” Fussell screamed, on a loop that had been helpful only the first two times.
The worst thing was that the feel of Lowry’s weapon changed then. It changed so it was a different kind of smooth-rough and when he looked down at it, his automatic rifle had become flesh, elastic, and narrow fishlike, like a fucking gar or something, and it had eyes. And it wasn’t just the fucking eyes but the whole situation that made him toss the rifle into the marsh.
Tossed the rifle into the marsh toward the rein-fucking-carnates and shouted at the rest, “Toss your fucking rifles! Toss them!”
Sky and Winters obeyed that command, but not the others and as their weapons turned into some kind of prehistoric narrow long fucking gar with strange eyes, their hands fused to those creatures, the texture like a flaring slime-covered pinecone, and they could not get free even as those fucking whatever the fuck they were thrashed about and, with a musculature more in keeping with a bulldog or bowling ball, pulled the recipient of their new motor function down into the reeds with them, fins thrashing, where Lowry could hear them being devoured both externally and internally—as he ran really fucking fast to the west, wherever there might be a skimp of trail, with Sky and Winters behind him.
Like, their hearts were exploding into fish but also the fish that was their weapon had started feasting on their external parts. And it was a sound he never wanted to fucking hear again. Yes, they ranted and shrieked like little blinches in the long grass, but he thought it warranted because how do you fight an enemy like that?
Over his shoulder, Lowry shouted at Landry, “Stay safe! Keep the drugs safe!” Oh, shit, he was going to lose his fucks again. He would have to fucking ration his fucking fucks and oh shit did it even matter, if this was the state of the world.
Sky and Winters now, somehow, surging past him in the sprint even though he was fitter than both of them, so maybe shooting so much evil goopy twinky dinky shitty pitty had made him weak.
When they had petered out and stopped, breathing hard, to look back through the safety of a lens, Lowry could see the doubles had risen again to peer at them curious, so fully recovered from their deaths that they had risen twice as tall as before, no longer like humans but like carnival performers on stilts, walking across the landscape of their sideshow.
Before they had well and truly fucked off and left the fugglies behind, there came a moment, too, that Lowry took pause. Even so fey and alien and tall, the winky-dinkys began to look like better copies of the original. They looked more like they belonged in that late-afternoon light golden upon the reeds.
It was the imperfections of the reals that stood out, that was fucking inhuman, wrong.
The enemy, Lowry knew, had fucking put that thought there, for sure.
BEACH OF BONERS, DEATH DESTROYER
Four left, that Lowry knew of: himself, Sky, Winters, and the psychic Scaramutti. Who limped their fucking way down to the seashore by the seaside. In the dark, exhausted, to the calming sound of the tide rippling in and out over the shells. Lowry was still in mow-down mode, vibrating with it, like keep that lawn an inch, maybe half an inch, but no higher. Everything above that, blotto with bullet holes. Rounds ripping through would be fine with him, didn’t care what it was, it was going down long before he fucking was. But nothing to shoot at, nothing at fucking all, though he had a fuckling backup rifle would do the job.
The tinkling, pleasant sounds of the water against that rough sand and shells, the lighthouse thankfully gone boring, or maybe they’d gone boring, but either fucking way, it gloomed over them, but did not loom, so that they camped that night as if free of anything but the idea of the beach and memories from childhood of wet sand and sandcastles, and all the ways in which this grit that got into your underwear, and up your crack as far as cracks went … how a fucking stupid experience was rendered nostalgic by the grandeur of a fucking view.
Yet, in the morning, Lowry realized their mistake, for it was not shells that the water lapped against and surged across in the shallow water just offshore but bones. Thousands and thousands of bones.
While on the horizon the fabled dead destroyer from the elongated briefings listed like a blade or wedge. But mostly looked exactly like a destroyer cut in half. And, for a moment, like a vast, half-submerged potato wedge. The magnetic pull of that, Lowry could feel, epitomized by the word “survivors.” Of which there could be none, and yet because of “survivors,” they all ignored the abso-fucking-lutely terrifying beach of bones to gaze out at that mystical sight, which registered as hope though none of them could fucking reside there.
“Beach of bones, death destroyer,” Lowry said, and then couldn’t stop saying it. “Beach of bones, death destroyer. Beach of bones, fucking death destroyer.”
How was it even possible that the destroyer had mirage-like entered their frame of reference? The charts had it farther out to sea, and farther west.
“This place is undergoing temporal enticements,” Scaramutti said.
“Dislocations you mean,” Lowry replied. Because Scaramutti only fucking said that to stop him from saying “beach of boners.” But it had to be fucking said. Temporal enticements fucking fuck fuck.
Scaramutti just looked at him as if he were the disturbing one.
“The bones. They’re not real here.”
“They’re real somewhere. Say I.” Hard to say if one fucking day would make a difference and the prior day would have been different.
“No, they’re real here, Lowry,” Sky said. “They’re real here, we are seeing them right now, and so is the destroyer. And we’ll take samples—of everything.”
As if he were a fucking child making fucked-up beach-of-boner death-destroyer sandcastles out of words and like they were still a fucking expedition. Instead of just four clueless fucking people who’d washed up by a lighthouse and couldn’t go on, must go on, who the fuck cared if they went on. But, perversely, Lowry did.
Four people, three of whom had no qualms or cares about security, the way he did. As if the pallid beach dunes they stood upon in a brisk wind wouldn’t crumble away under their tents or slinky-dinkys stream out of the sea at them in the night, or crawl toward them undulant from the land.
And, yes, there was a fucked-up death destroyer on the horizon and the bones of what might be thousands of people beneath the shallow water but, surely, they were owed the sea— that the sea, reaching it, should fucking soothe, getting there, after all they’d been through in such a short time.
Winnowed down to the mighty Fuck-All Four and who knew who on the other side of the dancing daisy-chain wall of shithead goopy Smurf-flesh might still be this side of fucking mortal, but Lowry bet that by the time they all met up again, if they did, the others would be unrecognizable. Maybe he would be too, although Lowry didn’t fucking care if he was profaned or changed after death, on the principle that he would not be alive.
But the sea did not soothe—the seagulls were screaming shit not making it and he could not quite make out what they were saying. But all four of them knew it should not have been words, and Lowry did not like to recall how in the shitty horrifying gap of the killing and resurrection of the winky-dinkys, how their own words had come out funny, disjointed, as if the murder of their shit-gobby doubles had scarred their minds, as if they, not their doubles, had created a crack in the logic of the world.
Oh how miraculous and how deranged, the way the seagulls melted and re-formed, dropped out of the sky and into the sea like eggs cracked open into yolks, splooshing into the water.
The lighthouse up close did not soothe, either, how it still crackled with a hard sheen of electric green if you looked close, but why the fuck would you look close—look away, onto the boner beach and destroyer all dead.
Anyone could make a lighthouse anyway. You could just fucking shove a big ol’ fatty dead goose on a stick and hoist it up and set it aflame and have a lighthouse. Hey, fucking presto. So, yeah, anyone could make a fucking lighthouse. Anyone could be a light or a bulb, for that matter. Except not anyone could be a flaming fountain of green ooze ejaculating enthusiastically high into the horizon, against a yellow ochre sky. Nor be ever more fucking boring the closer they got to it.
The great wand of the wizard, the huge dick some amateur psych would say one day, the subtext spurting out of the top. What manner of insult given, to make, to keep making all the inanimate objects of the landscape into portions of one’s anatomy, and yet Lowry could not help the impulse, even now, on the beach of bones. Because it did not fucking help to think of that thing as a lighthouse now. So boner it be. It helped not at all to remember the original function, the safe harbor by the sea, the way ships could navigate by its light. There was zippo point to retaining some fucking sentimental view of anything in that fucked-up landscape. It was an anthropological nightmare, this festering need to hold on to the foundations of your vision, your prior frame of reference.
Everyone knew it was not a lighthouse anymore. Why not call it Fuckhead or Bastard or Crate of Monkeys or Shitface or the fucking Pillar of Salt or the Damned Yankee or the refrigerator of souls. Mock it. Scream at it. Anything to try to see it clearly. No matter how ridiculous. And maybe to see it clearly meant to stop worrying about the beach of boners death destroyer.
But, mostly, Lowry mourned what they’d lost to the slinky-dinkys. Landry had been such a special, perfect find, complete with more drugs than an emperor who ruled over a thousand pharmacies and now the fucking Village was off-limits and the first thing he was going to cross off his Jack-in-the-Box list … he fucking couldn’t. Five things, five fucking places, and now he felt thrown off, adrift.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to go to all of them. Maybe Old Jim and the money were still holed up at his place and all he’d need to do is go there after this and have a good old-fashioned heart-to-heart and bring Old Jim home and maybe just shove some fucking bill wads down his own pants as insulation before crossing the Border again. Nobody would notice and he’d still be the hero.
Yet maybe in the end, the very fucking end, he was just distracting himself from the destroyer.
The dark shape seemed to breathe in the distant roll of waters. In Lowry’s binoculars, the line of the ship’s hull was fuzzy, like the edge of a wall coated in moss. But so, too, was the edge of the circle of each binoculars lens, so after a time he put them down on a rock and did not pick them up again.
Sky swore she had seen people out there and Lowry swore she had not. No instrumentality to peer through could resolve that opposition.
The bones, they crunched under Lowry’s feet, snapped under the weight, fucking snapped and ground down while the surf rushed up to greet him like a sycophant and made the ivories tinkle and groan like some dainty sick monk ringing the bells to some tiny fucked-up fairy kingdom. But it was fucking bones. Could’ve been the bones of centuries of shipwrecked sailors, recruited by Area X. That’d had the fucking gall to goddamn accumulate, the sounds all as unexpected as the reliquary itself.
An unruly ossuary, and the skulls, they all cursed and clacked in their way, their unnerving way, the sand washing through their jawbones to make some stupid point. They were piddling small, too, it seemed to him, like he lost some height entering Area X, or like the water shrank them like dicks or the flesh around people’s skulls was swaddled in many more inches of fat and epidermis than known and over time human skulls had gotten smaller, but he didn’t even know what that meant except he didn’t like crushing the bridge of a nose or the side of an orbital or to make the lower jaw of some grinning fool fucking hang loose, except he couldn’t help it, there were too many, his boots too heavy, and he was just smashing skulls like gourds now as he followed Sky to a better view of the damned destroyer.
Lowry could not shut off the irrational fucking fear that one of them was actually his skull, that he’d seen the future and the future was bones and his skull lay there too and he’d smashed it in all unknowing. He’d stove in his own future skull. And now it could never be rewound time-wise into a fat head with a brain in it because he’d crushed it almost to powder. Fuck the luck of that sucked.
All while the doomed destroyer lolled and languished like some dead angular beast that had beached itself.
Sky had shown him the video at some point after the winky-dinkys, the slinky-shitties, whatever the scientific term was for creatures so fucked up he couldn’t get them out of his fucking mind. The video showed Sky doing things she’d never done, including screaming at her double on top of a dilapidated picnic bench they’d never fucking passed by, because he would have noticed that, because he loved picnic benches, if only because you could really heap a whole smorgasbord on a picnic bench and you could laze out on the plank full length after gluttony.
But he understood why it unnerved Sky, why she’d been unnerved since she’d seen it back at base camp, and why she hadn’t shown it to anyone. Because maybe they wouldn’t fucking follow her fucking lead if they thought that was going to happen. Because it felt like a documentary from the future showing that Sky went fucking insane or at the very least bifurcated into two separate but equal Skys, and who the fuck would know whom to follow. And that’s what it was showing on the vid—that civil war, and maybe the most unnerving thing about it was how their numbers had swelled, so there were more than twenty-four, somewhere south of one hundred, and each couple of frames of video, more fucking people showed up, like Sky had called a block party on an Area X street and let the booze flow and they’d all get higher than high and say the word “fuck” blissful forever and ever.
“I can’t stay here and wait for that,” Sky said to him, Winters a bit squeamish about the bones and still on the beach. And who could be squeamish by this point. Squeamish was an imaginary, made-up word that needed to be tossed out of the fucking dictionary.
“Are you listening to me, Lowry?” she asked, urgently, and he nodded.
“Yes, I understand. You don’t want to be someone else.”
“I think that’s a premonition. A warning. Maybe this way something different will happen.”
Lowry didn’t think the footage had been the future, just a fucked-up horror show, a cavalcade of ghosts trying to frighten them with tricks.
And the more he thought about it, two Lowrys could be fucking tremendous, even three Lowrys or four, if the other Lowrys would just listen to him and do what he told them to do. Maybe that was the fucking point Sky was trying to make—that the double wouldn’t do what she wanted, might even do the goddamn opposite of what she wanted.
“How do you know I’m not already someone else?” she asked, maybe because he’d been silent, doing the math on how many Lowrys were needed to give them all back scratches and not leave anyone out, while churning grapes to wine so they could make money while scratching each other’s backs and how many Lowrys to climb a mountain and have there be a trail of Lowrys the whole way, how many Lowrys to hold hands and form a ring around Area X, even floating Lowrys out at sea … and the fear came out of her so fast and somehow loud he forgot about the bones all around and the other Lowrys.
“I started out this exped talking to the original, and you’re still the original,” he said forcefully. “I know I’m talking to you, only to you. You are you. You are you. You are you are you? I mean, you are you.”
The look on her face, so doubtful, had confused him, messed him the fuck up.
“I can’t stay here and wait for this,” she said again, as if she needed the resolve of saying it twice, though it just made Lowry wonder if she might be her own double already.
Her stare toward the destroyer made his guts churn. Her stare toward the fucking dead destroyer like it was the answer, like she’d done some complex fucking equation in her head and come up with an answer he didn’t like … that was the fucking look she gave the wedge of half-ship.
“You’re going to just fade into the gray lands like a fucking wraith? What the fuck, Sky? I gave you a ring. We committed to each other with witnesses.” Witnesses that were dead things in jars, dredged up from the bottom of the sea, but that made it somehow more serious to Lowry, like all of natural history, made unnatural by the Southern Reach, had attended, had consecrated whatever giving someone a tiny ring meant. But also flowers.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Shit.
Shit.
There was a boat. A green rowboat. Why did there have to be a fucking boat? Where had a fucking boat even come from? But Sky didn’t seem to care about that question and Lowry’s boots crunched and crushed bones as he paced the waterline.
The fucking mirage of it, the way it didn’t fucking mean anything, couldn’t, not now. Sub-fucking-jective. In a fucking word, a fucking trap.
“It’s not real, Sky,” he said to her as they kept loading provisions into the goddamn boat. “It’s an illusion. A magician’s been practicing his act on this beach, and I’d give him an F for fuck no.”
“Never known what’s real and not, Lowry.”
“I know what that giant metal potato half-sunken wedge is. It’s not real. It’s enticement. It plays on your need for control, the need for salvage. But it’s just sea wrack. It’s just skulls on a beach. A false fucking horizon as sheets of metal and matted lashed-together lifeboats. Nobody is alive out there. Not a fucking soul. Can’t the bones convince you? All these fucking bones—they’re real. They mean something. They’re telling you not to go. Don’t go, Sky. Don’t go. You, Winters, you can go, and Godspeed. Why don’t you go, check it out, tell us what’s over there behind the curtain, over the rainbow, however the fuck you want to view it, down the fucking sunken yellow brick road. Tell us if you see a magic lamppost while you’re at it, complete with a fucking centaur or giraffe or whatever the fuck it was.”
It felt like more than he’d ever said before in his whole fucking life, and like a lot less.
“He’s a complete Section Eight discharge,” Winters said to Sky. “But I think you already knew that.”
“No, I don’t think I knew that.”
“I’m right here in front of you both, you assholes.”
“There’s nothing for us here,” Winters said, and by that Lowry took Winters to mean that they were not Winters, nor Sky, but sneaky fucking copies, and maybe when the dead had come back to life as slinky-dinkys, he’d taken his eye off the ball and everyone on this side other than him was also now a slinky-dinky working for the other side. And had eating the fucking living wall saved him? Was that why he’d not been fucked with yet, or just general strength of heroic character?
Or maybe they were the real Sky and Winters, but the fact he’d eaten the wall had made them fucking paranoid about his true self, and whether he was going to go all slinky-dinky on them in the middle of the night.
“And, again, I must raise the issue of the fucking boat. Isn’t the fucking boat convenient? Is this not the most convenient fucking boat in the fucking history of boats. Surely you will not trust this stupid fucking boat. Made of stardust and the applesauce apparently pouring out of your skulls where your brains used to be.”
“I can vouch for it myself,” Winters said.
“What?”
“I found it. This perfectly innocent boat.”
“I don’t think you did, Winters. I think you’re just saying that so you can go visit the destroyer.”
Winters shrugged, trying to not laugh, Lowry could tell, and Lowry had no defense against that laugh, that shrug. No fucking way was he going to disarm and safely detonate that shrug or Winters would’ve been protesting more, trying harder to sell the idea that he’d blown up the dinghy with his own lungs rather than the fucking thing had been burped out from some eldritch coordinates onto this goddamn beach.
“It’s seaworthy,” Sky said. “It has oars. We have to try. We have to see for ourselves. There’s no one here—anywhere. But there might still be someone out there.”
“And it’s evidence,” Winters said. “Even if everybody’s dead. It’s a clue.”
Evidence? Lowry felt a harrowing incredulity.
“It’s a clue like my ass hairs are a clue,” Lowry said. “It’s not a clue. It’s not a clue. It’s nothing. There’s your clue. What’s a fucking clue to you if that’s a clue? Because it’s not a fucking clue!”
“Help me push the boat out, Jamal,” Sky said, and Winters went to the left side while she got on the right side.
“Do not do this,” Lowry said. “Friends. Lovers. Comrades. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
Soon enough while Lowry watched, the two fucking fools, one of whom he once more loudly reminded he’d given flowers to and a fucking ring quite recently were shoving off into the water, headed for a fucking deathtrap.
He watched as they receded into that vast indifference, the arc of sky. He almost wished he had followed them. Even when they did not come back.
“I’ll just fucking wait here for your return,” Lowry said. “Just fucking loiter around for you.” Near sobbing, but he thought that was the lack of fucking drugs, not the loneliness, not the fear of being alone. Even though Jack had said he might have to go it alone. What did alone mean, anyway, here? Soon enough, he’d have a ton of fucking friends, and not like a single one of them.
They just kept rowing and Sky didn’t look back and the destroyer seemed to dwarf them much more than just moments before. While still the water made the dead bones and skulls sing.
“Oh god, Sky! Don’t go! Don’t leave me here! Not here! Come back! I’ll do better! I’ll be better! Please! Please?”
But she didn’t. She didn’t even turn around despite his pleading, and he knew she wouldn’t come back.
He sank to his knees on the bones, the crunch and crack, the glittering mass of them, and he watched Sky and Winters grow distant.
They had become all the same silhouette, as if their bodies were just part of the boat, wreathed in gray and black, with some glint off the waves of the sun around the movement of their oars.
Lowry watched them for a long time, until he could watch no more, as they appeared to perpetually approach, but never reach, the ship. The lighthouse beam that night was like something refracted through the fucking glass that, diluted, still harvested the world. Not a light that would ever reveal Sky to him lost at sea.
The next morning, he couldn’t see the fucking boat at all.
By dusk, the green boat had drifted back, empty, run aground on the bones, and he had his answer.
Winters he could give two fucking shits about, but he could not stand the empty sound of the waves against that hull, the hollowness, the way it meant Sky had left whatever places he might now tread. Fuck.
He flicked a tear from his eye, and liked to think that the jars of deep-sea creatures shed a tear with him, bonded by the bond of being in the same place when he had given her the ring. The delicate, little ring that might now be at the bottom of the sea. If she had taken it with her.
Idly, Lowry realized he hadn’t seen Scaramutti for two fucking days. Two days and he hadn’t fucking noticed the lack of the jabbering psychic. How, if he had to be honest, it was the one good thing about coming to the lighthouse. The silence of the goddamn psychic.
How fucked up was that?