Ceramic DM- The Renewal ( Final judgement posted)
- Thread starter alsih2o
- Start date
mythago
Hero
The Jeep bounced over the rough new pavement and passed through a gap in a chain-link fence. A metal sign on the right half of the fence cautioned visitors, in Thai, to show identification when approaching or they risked being shot at by guards. Or it asked everyone to please extinguish all smoking materials before continuing. Jordan had no idea; he didn't read Thai.
The next fence had a sign in English. As they passed, Jordan pointed at it awkwardly, the
restraints connecting his wrists and ankles making grand gestures difficult. "Please tell me that sign says what I think it said?" he asked.
Sendip laughed. She had been Jordan's guard and supervising nurse for most of the trip
from the mainland, and she was always in a good humor. Jordan suspected that he was not the first of her patients to dredge up ridiculous terms like "jolly" to describe her. Along with
"deadly". She young enough to be a hostess in Patpong and was ranked fourth in the world
among women muy thai fighters. Jordan guessed if you were capable of instantly killing anyone who looked at you funny, it tended to keep you in a happy frame of mind.
"No, really. 'Do not laugh at the natives'? Does that mean us patients or is this some problem with the locals?"
"Mistranslation," she said. "An admonition to treat the residents kindly. It is left over from when this was not a secure facility. I think the signpainter they hired was not very fluent in English."
"Why not take it down?"
"The Thai sign, the first one, is correct," she said. "And this one is funny."
The Jeep wove through gaps in fences now topped with concertina wire and punctuated by guard shacks. Jordan was surprised to see that the building was so small; he'd been expecting something like a hospital and this was more like a clinic. Armed guards wandered around the grounds, talking into headseats seated in their helmets. Far beyond them, and the wire, Jordan could see the ocean.
They pulled up outside of a loading dock. Sendip nudged him with her elbow. He got out, acutely aware that a little more speed on that elbow and the doctors would be pulling pieces of rib out of his lungs with tweezers. He shuffled along as best as his restraints would let him. When they were halfway down the hallway he realized why they'd come in the back way. Sendip paused outside a set of swinging double doors with a somber plaque to one side.
"The morgue," she translated.
"I know," Jordan said. "I can hear them."
"Even from the hallway?" Sendip asked. "What are they saying?"
"No idea. I don't speak Thai."
Sendip laughed and gestured for him to move on. Jolly, Jordan thought bitterly. Easy for
her to laugh. She couldn't hear the idiot chatter of the dead. It was as if they knew he was there; the noise level rising as he walked past, like a cocktail party where somebody famous enters the room. He ignored them and kept walking.
There were more hallways, a ride in an elevator big enough to move a guerney, and then they were finally somewhere familiar. This floor looked like every other mental hospital ward Jordan had ever stayed in. The doors swung open easily; he guessed they'd lock electronically if they had to, but there wasn't any need to worry. Anyone who got funny about trying to get out had to get past the guards, and if they made that, there was a fifty-mile swim through the Pacific Ocean to get back to Thailand proper.
They'd walked into a common room. This, too, was familiar. The handful of men sitting around the television wore regular clothes, not hospital garb. A television in the center of the room was turned to a soccer game. Two very large, very serious-faced male nurses exchanged a few words in Thai with Sendip. As they unfastened his restraints, Jordan turned to Sendip. "Now what?"
"Now, you stay here. The nurses will assign you a bed. You can go for walks on the grounds, with advance notice. Make friends with these people. They are here for reasons similar to yours. One week, you get a special visitor."
"That would be somebody from the government?"
"No," she said. "Somebody from your government." She gave him a little wave and walked through the ward doors.
An elderly man with glasses that might have been fitted with lenses from the Hubble Space Telescope turned to watch her go. "Nice legs," he said. "She from the..." He silently mouthed the letters C-I-A.
"Dunno," Jordan said. "I was afraid if I asked her I wouldn't get to keep breathing."
#
It was actually ten days later when the only white guy who wasn't a patient turned up and
knocked on the doors of Jordan's room. Jordan looked up, irritated; Ray had gotten him a lank
New York Times crossword puzzle and he'd been in the middle of it.
"Jordan?" the man called. He had a big, fake grin. Jordan hated him already. He reminded Jordan of the lawyer he'd had back in Ithaca, the one who showed up unprepared for his ninety-day review and left him stuck in the maximum security wing for six months. Knowing the guy was partly responsible for keeping him here didn't help.
The CIA guy tried pushing the door open; it didn't budge. "Jordan -- Mr. Williams. Would you please unlock the door for me."
"Not locked," he said. "Shayne had a little accident and it's glued shut."
The man withdrew, no doubt to get an orderly to use solvent on the solid mass. Jordan had expected they'd notice eventually and let him out, once they were done scrubbing the hallway of Shayne's panic attack. Jordan liked Shayne a lot, and felt more than a little sorry for him. Having to listen to the dead blabber was bad, but vomiting up superepoxy was well beyond bad and into territory where Jordan wondered why the guy didn't just run out and commit suicide by guard.
Of course, then they'd make Jordan talk to him.
It took about an hour to get the clear stuff dissolved enough to let one of Jordan's doors swing open. He slipped out reluctantly and had to submit to a painful handshake from the white guy, who introduced himself as Special Agent Foster. Jordan followed him to one of the
interview rooms, the kind he was used to using for chats with a shrink at a regular mental
hospital. Plastic chairs, door that didn't lock, Plexiglass window, check. He sat in the least beat-up looking of the chairs.
Special Agent Foster made with the fake grin again. "Well. How are the surroundings?"
"I've been in worse," Jordan said. "The food's not bad. Nice tropical weather. Why not Gitmo or one of those other bases, though? Or the U.S.? It's not like anybody cares what you do to me."
"Oh, there's always some do-gooder bozo whining about the rights of prisoners," Foster said. The grin was gone. "Even for you. The Mutilator."
"Don't call me that," Jordan snapped.
"Why not? They do. How are you finding your fellow inmates?"
"They're actually a good bunch," he said. "I like these guys. I'm not sure why you have Shayne here, though. He's not really crazy, he just....vomits that weird super-epoxy stuff when he gets stressed. Mike and his thing with water, I'd like to see that, but the guards get upset if he goes out near the ocean. I'd be a little scared of Ray if he wasn't sedated all the time."
"They're here for the same reason you're here," Foster said. "You all have...abilities that might be useful to your country, if we can figure out how to control them. You all are really crazy, by the way. I've seen your files."
"You'd be crazy, too, if corpses talked to you."
"Fair enough, fair enough," Foster said, and the fake smile was creeping back. It made Jordan instantly wary. "Well, why don't you give me a demonstration? We've got a subject downstairs who has, had, information crucial to national security. He killed some guards, escaped, tried to get out of the country through Mexico. Didn't do so well in the desert."
"I really don't want to. I don't like listening to dead people."
"You think you have a choice."
"Well, yeah," Jordan said. "What are you going to do, kill me? Before you figure out what makes me tick?"
"I'm pretty sure one thing I know that makes you tick. You don't like to listen to dead people. We could move your bed next to the morgue." Foster's smile spread across his face like an oil slick on water. "That sound good to you, Williams? The nurses get paid well. They don't care. They'd be just as happy to lock you to a bed downstairs, where you can listen to a bunch of
corpses for conversation. Up to you and how cooperative you want to be."
He waited, and Jordan would have gone across the table at him if he'd thought it would do any good. He took a deep breath and got up. "Fine, I'll talk to your dead guy," he said. "This time."
"I knew you'd see reason," Foster said. He opened the door. Sendip was waiting to lead Jordan to the morgue.
#
Jordan expected to pull out a drawer and listen to somebody...something...on a morgue tray. He didn't expect to see a corpse sitting at a table like a prop in a bad Halloween show.
Somebody had put a fake plastic brain in front of the corpse and tied a bib around its neck
advertising a restaurant for zombies.
Sendip frowned for what was, in Jordan's experience, the first time ever. "What is this? This is disrespectful of the dead."
"Oh, hell, I'm sorry," Foster said, sounding not at all sorry. "A couple of the Marines must have done that. Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Williams."
Sendip looked at Jordan oddly. He wondered how much they'd told her about his
reputation Stateside, whether she knew he'd been tagged "the Mutilator" by the cops. He had gone a little crazy when his ability had first appeared and he'd tried to get the dead to shut up and leave him alone.
"Whatever," he said. "I have to talk to a dead criminal, a lame joke isn't going to bother
me." He pulled up a metal folding chair and sat across from the corpse. The voices of the other dead were a murmur in his ears; he ignored them, listening to the dead man who looked him in the eye.
water water dry oh mother where is water so hot
The usual babble, the last thoughts of the dying bouncing around like pachinko balls. Jordan sat patiently, a guest at a dinner party waiting for the windbag dead guy to get to the point.
And eventually the dead man turned his head not physically, but in some way shifting his
attention to Jordan.
your friend with the water go to him water coming in soon coming the ocean over you all
of you drown get to the water kill the guards kill the agents death to the evil ones
and a dry chuckle from somewhere unimaginably far away, yet close enough for him to
touch
or you will be speaking from this side too
Jordan pushed away from the table in a blind panic. The plastic brain rolled off and disappeared somewhere under the dead man's chair. Sendip was on her feet, whether to help him or put him down, Jordan couldn't tell. Foster looked up at him with interest.
"He say anything good?"
Jordan licked his lips. "No."
"I have a few questions to ask him, when you're ready."
"It doesn't work that way," Jordan said. "I listen. I can't talk to them. They don't...they don't hear, not the way living people do. If he was thinking about whatever it is you wanted to know about, I could tell you that. I can't talk back. It's one-way. Death is always one-way."
Foster stood up and gave Jordan a long look. Then his mood broke and he shrugged as if the dead man's secrets were completely unimportant. "You're still getting settled here, Jordan. I
imagine you're a little disoriented. This guy was small potatoes anyway. Few more weeks, we'll bring you some bigger fish. I'll bet they have something better to tell you."
Jordan nodded but his mind was elsewhere. The water. He had to talk to Mike. He hated
talking to the dead, he'd never had one tell him something that was going to happen, but he knew that they never lied.
#
"No, it has to be today," Gary said. He glanced over at the nurses, who were sitting at their station filling out paperwork. Mike had turned the television to a loud Thai soap opera to drown out their voices. Jordan wasn't sure that had been such a great idea; they had to lean in close to hear each other, which he thought looked pretty suspicious.
Gary took off his Coke-bottle glasses and wiped them clean with the edge of his shirt.
Without his glasses his eyes looked very tiny. "If we wait," he continued, "they'll find out. Don't ask me how, it always happens. Even if nobody rats. Do we know when this 'water' is coming?"
Jordan shook his head no. "Is it monsoon season soon?"
"Nope. Which is why I don't know what your dead guy is talking about, but I'm notarguing. This is our chance."
Mike looked uncomfortable. He'd tried to talk them into warning the staff, to get the island evacuated, but he was the only one. First, Jordan wasn't sure they'd believe him Mutilator
or no, he'd never been told what was going to happen. Besides, if they were evacuated, they'd just be moved to some other offshore looney bin. This was their one chance for escape.
"How's Ray?" Shayne asked nervously. The other men edged away from him involuntarily.
"Think he's coming out of the drugs," Gary said. "I got at the nurse's tray when he wasn't
looking and switched out one of his pills. He won't be as dopey as usual."
They watched TV or paced the halls while they waited for Ray's glazed look to ebb. It was half an hour before Gary took him aside and whispered to him urgently. Jordan hung back. It
was kind of scary to see Ray's eyes taking in what was going on around him. He was afraid of what would happen if Ray didn't recognize him as a friend.
Ray put his arm around Gary and gave him a bear hug that looked painful. Then he walked to the nurse's station in the middle of the ward floor. The men looked up, surprised to see Ray lucid, and he killed them before they could raise an alarm. Jordan turned away and tried not
to be sick. He needed to get out before the dead nurses figured out they were dead and tried totalk to him.
Ray pulled his shirt off and wiped the blood from his hands. "Move it out," he said. It was
the longest sentence Jordan had ever heard him speak. They moved.
The men avoided hospital staff as much as possible. The armed guards were mostly outside with Ray permanently a vegetable there apparently hadn't been much concern about the rest of them. They ran into one guard coming out of the men's room and Ray killed him before he could zip up his fly. He had a pistol, something boxy and European, and Gary took it. Ray didn't need it.
Jordan guided them down to the loading dock, getting lost once before finding the right hallway. They'd agreed the back way would be less conspicuous. Jordan objected and was
outvoted. He didn't want to go past the morgue again. He pressed himself against the far hallway. The others, deaf to what he could hear, followed him. The voices were loud and excited.
water water deep in the earth soon company's coming
and then they were out. They looked away while Ray killed four armed men before they could scream. Lacking a shirt, Ray shook his hands like a man who's just discovered the hot-air hand dryer in the restroom is broken.
"Garage over there," Gary said, pointing toward the ocean. Towards the beach was a white wooden house shaded by palm trees. "Residence for visitors. Foster probably stays there when he's visiting. They'll have cars. Ready?"
They made a break for it, keeping low. There were guards, of course, and Ray jumped up on to the porch and then there were no guards. Ray collected their rifles while Shayne and Jordan worked on the garage door. It came open easily and revealed a couple of ordinary American cars. Why Foster wanted these here instead of military vehicles, Jordan had no idea.
"Heads up," Ray called. Something flew through the air and Jordan caught it without thinking: a rifle. He'd never fired a gun in his life. Ray turned to Shayne and held up the other rifle. "Come take this one. It's still loaded."
Ray doesn't know, he thought, he's always been sedated, he doesn't know Shayne was in Baghdad, and opened his mouth but it was too late, because Shayne was already hyperventilating at the sight of Ray offering him a rifle and opening his mouth, and Jordan dove out of the way just in time to avoid getting splattered. He covered his ears to block out the thick, liquid noises.
He wondered if it were some kind of Agent Orange thing that made Shayne into a human glue factory. It went on for a long time, and then there was a thud as Shayne collapsed.
They moved into to look at the damage. Ray swore. Shayne had been facing into the garage and heaved all over the cars. The epoxy was already drying as hard as diamond, and there were chemicals that would cut through it eventually but they didn't have any.
In a fury, Ray dragged Shayne to his feet. Gary grabbed him to pull him off and Ray waved his arm, like he was swatting at a mosquito, and Gary plumed red and died.
"Did you hear something?" Mike asked.
"Don't tell me you can hear them too," Jordan said.
"No, not the dead," said Mike, and then Jordan heard it too, a rumble like a very large freight train, getting louder, and they looked toward the ocean and saw the water rising up to blot out the sun.
They ran. They knew it would never work, but they ran anyway, unable to override instinct and make their legs stop running. The water roared and Ray, ahead, turned to look over his shoulder and Jordan saw his face and knew what was behind them, and he jumped on Mike and wrapped his arms and legs tight around the other man.
The wall of water slammed down.
Ray died, Jordan was sure of it. He didn't think he was dead, he felt dazed and something hurt deep, maybe a broken rib. Mike stirred and Jordan gripped him harder. He overcame his panic and took an experimental breath. Air. Mike was unconscious, but alive, turning the water around them into a little bubble of air, and they wouldn't drown. Die of injuries, maybe, but they could breathe.
Jordan wondered how long before the water flowed back to the ocean. Or were they in the ocean? He looked up at where he thought the sky should be. Something swam past them, near the surface, some kind of fish that breathed water as easily as they were breathing air right now. Jordan watched it as it swam peacefully past them, and then he realized whatever it was doing, it was swimming to the ocean. Away from shore. He turned the other direction and struggled through the water, and then Mike was swimming and pulling them along, and they were on the beach.
His rib had stopped hurting. He was going to ask Mike if he was okay, and Mike was giving him the strangest look, like something was very wrong with him.
"Jordan...oh, no...." He rolled Jordan over and looked at something. Jordan realized he didn't feel anything and thought maybe he was paralyzed, some debris had struck his back or his neck and his body was completely numb. He asked Mike what was the matter with his back, what Mike had seen when he had rolled him over, and Mike reached up and closed Jordan's eyes.
He lay on the beach a long time, listening hard but hearing no one, not even the dead. He supposed he was too far from the clinic to hear much. He had no idea how much time passed
before he heard footsteps and words. His ears felt like they were full of...of something, itwas
hard to make out sounds, and he could feel nothing. There was excited talk in what sounded like Thai, and a woman Sendip? laughing, or crying. It was hard to tell which. Then some English, in a voice he didn't recognize, and he could make out a few words in snatches.
Aid...survivors...report back...mass grave...
He would have smiled if he had been alive. A mass grave. He wouldn't be alone here, on this beach, any longer. And he would get to talk back.
The next fence had a sign in English. As they passed, Jordan pointed at it awkwardly, the
restraints connecting his wrists and ankles making grand gestures difficult. "Please tell me that sign says what I think it said?" he asked.
Sendip laughed. She had been Jordan's guard and supervising nurse for most of the trip
from the mainland, and she was always in a good humor. Jordan suspected that he was not the first of her patients to dredge up ridiculous terms like "jolly" to describe her. Along with
"deadly". She young enough to be a hostess in Patpong and was ranked fourth in the world
among women muy thai fighters. Jordan guessed if you were capable of instantly killing anyone who looked at you funny, it tended to keep you in a happy frame of mind.
"No, really. 'Do not laugh at the natives'? Does that mean us patients or is this some problem with the locals?"
"Mistranslation," she said. "An admonition to treat the residents kindly. It is left over from when this was not a secure facility. I think the signpainter they hired was not very fluent in English."
"Why not take it down?"
"The Thai sign, the first one, is correct," she said. "And this one is funny."
The Jeep wove through gaps in fences now topped with concertina wire and punctuated by guard shacks. Jordan was surprised to see that the building was so small; he'd been expecting something like a hospital and this was more like a clinic. Armed guards wandered around the grounds, talking into headseats seated in their helmets. Far beyond them, and the wire, Jordan could see the ocean.
They pulled up outside of a loading dock. Sendip nudged him with her elbow. He got out, acutely aware that a little more speed on that elbow and the doctors would be pulling pieces of rib out of his lungs with tweezers. He shuffled along as best as his restraints would let him. When they were halfway down the hallway he realized why they'd come in the back way. Sendip paused outside a set of swinging double doors with a somber plaque to one side.
"The morgue," she translated.
"I know," Jordan said. "I can hear them."
"Even from the hallway?" Sendip asked. "What are they saying?"
"No idea. I don't speak Thai."
Sendip laughed and gestured for him to move on. Jolly, Jordan thought bitterly. Easy for
her to laugh. She couldn't hear the idiot chatter of the dead. It was as if they knew he was there; the noise level rising as he walked past, like a cocktail party where somebody famous enters the room. He ignored them and kept walking.
There were more hallways, a ride in an elevator big enough to move a guerney, and then they were finally somewhere familiar. This floor looked like every other mental hospital ward Jordan had ever stayed in. The doors swung open easily; he guessed they'd lock electronically if they had to, but there wasn't any need to worry. Anyone who got funny about trying to get out had to get past the guards, and if they made that, there was a fifty-mile swim through the Pacific Ocean to get back to Thailand proper.
They'd walked into a common room. This, too, was familiar. The handful of men sitting around the television wore regular clothes, not hospital garb. A television in the center of the room was turned to a soccer game. Two very large, very serious-faced male nurses exchanged a few words in Thai with Sendip. As they unfastened his restraints, Jordan turned to Sendip. "Now what?"
"Now, you stay here. The nurses will assign you a bed. You can go for walks on the grounds, with advance notice. Make friends with these people. They are here for reasons similar to yours. One week, you get a special visitor."
"That would be somebody from the government?"
"No," she said. "Somebody from your government." She gave him a little wave and walked through the ward doors.
An elderly man with glasses that might have been fitted with lenses from the Hubble Space Telescope turned to watch her go. "Nice legs," he said. "She from the..." He silently mouthed the letters C-I-A.
"Dunno," Jordan said. "I was afraid if I asked her I wouldn't get to keep breathing."
#
It was actually ten days later when the only white guy who wasn't a patient turned up and
knocked on the doors of Jordan's room. Jordan looked up, irritated; Ray had gotten him a lank
New York Times crossword puzzle and he'd been in the middle of it.
"Jordan?" the man called. He had a big, fake grin. Jordan hated him already. He reminded Jordan of the lawyer he'd had back in Ithaca, the one who showed up unprepared for his ninety-day review and left him stuck in the maximum security wing for six months. Knowing the guy was partly responsible for keeping him here didn't help.
The CIA guy tried pushing the door open; it didn't budge. "Jordan -- Mr. Williams. Would you please unlock the door for me."
"Not locked," he said. "Shayne had a little accident and it's glued shut."
The man withdrew, no doubt to get an orderly to use solvent on the solid mass. Jordan had expected they'd notice eventually and let him out, once they were done scrubbing the hallway of Shayne's panic attack. Jordan liked Shayne a lot, and felt more than a little sorry for him. Having to listen to the dead blabber was bad, but vomiting up superepoxy was well beyond bad and into territory where Jordan wondered why the guy didn't just run out and commit suicide by guard.
Of course, then they'd make Jordan talk to him.
It took about an hour to get the clear stuff dissolved enough to let one of Jordan's doors swing open. He slipped out reluctantly and had to submit to a painful handshake from the white guy, who introduced himself as Special Agent Foster. Jordan followed him to one of the
interview rooms, the kind he was used to using for chats with a shrink at a regular mental
hospital. Plastic chairs, door that didn't lock, Plexiglass window, check. He sat in the least beat-up looking of the chairs.
Special Agent Foster made with the fake grin again. "Well. How are the surroundings?"
"I've been in worse," Jordan said. "The food's not bad. Nice tropical weather. Why not Gitmo or one of those other bases, though? Or the U.S.? It's not like anybody cares what you do to me."
"Oh, there's always some do-gooder bozo whining about the rights of prisoners," Foster said. The grin was gone. "Even for you. The Mutilator."
"Don't call me that," Jordan snapped.
"Why not? They do. How are you finding your fellow inmates?"
"They're actually a good bunch," he said. "I like these guys. I'm not sure why you have Shayne here, though. He's not really crazy, he just....vomits that weird super-epoxy stuff when he gets stressed. Mike and his thing with water, I'd like to see that, but the guards get upset if he goes out near the ocean. I'd be a little scared of Ray if he wasn't sedated all the time."
"They're here for the same reason you're here," Foster said. "You all have...abilities that might be useful to your country, if we can figure out how to control them. You all are really crazy, by the way. I've seen your files."
"You'd be crazy, too, if corpses talked to you."
"Fair enough, fair enough," Foster said, and the fake smile was creeping back. It made Jordan instantly wary. "Well, why don't you give me a demonstration? We've got a subject downstairs who has, had, information crucial to national security. He killed some guards, escaped, tried to get out of the country through Mexico. Didn't do so well in the desert."
"I really don't want to. I don't like listening to dead people."
"You think you have a choice."
"Well, yeah," Jordan said. "What are you going to do, kill me? Before you figure out what makes me tick?"
"I'm pretty sure one thing I know that makes you tick. You don't like to listen to dead people. We could move your bed next to the morgue." Foster's smile spread across his face like an oil slick on water. "That sound good to you, Williams? The nurses get paid well. They don't care. They'd be just as happy to lock you to a bed downstairs, where you can listen to a bunch of
corpses for conversation. Up to you and how cooperative you want to be."
He waited, and Jordan would have gone across the table at him if he'd thought it would do any good. He took a deep breath and got up. "Fine, I'll talk to your dead guy," he said. "This time."
"I knew you'd see reason," Foster said. He opened the door. Sendip was waiting to lead Jordan to the morgue.
#
Jordan expected to pull out a drawer and listen to somebody...something...on a morgue tray. He didn't expect to see a corpse sitting at a table like a prop in a bad Halloween show.
Somebody had put a fake plastic brain in front of the corpse and tied a bib around its neck
advertising a restaurant for zombies.
Sendip frowned for what was, in Jordan's experience, the first time ever. "What is this? This is disrespectful of the dead."
"Oh, hell, I'm sorry," Foster said, sounding not at all sorry. "A couple of the Marines must have done that. Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Williams."
Sendip looked at Jordan oddly. He wondered how much they'd told her about his
reputation Stateside, whether she knew he'd been tagged "the Mutilator" by the cops. He had gone a little crazy when his ability had first appeared and he'd tried to get the dead to shut up and leave him alone.
"Whatever," he said. "I have to talk to a dead criminal, a lame joke isn't going to bother
me." He pulled up a metal folding chair and sat across from the corpse. The voices of the other dead were a murmur in his ears; he ignored them, listening to the dead man who looked him in the eye.
water water dry oh mother where is water so hot
The usual babble, the last thoughts of the dying bouncing around like pachinko balls. Jordan sat patiently, a guest at a dinner party waiting for the windbag dead guy to get to the point.
And eventually the dead man turned his head not physically, but in some way shifting his
attention to Jordan.
your friend with the water go to him water coming in soon coming the ocean over you all
of you drown get to the water kill the guards kill the agents death to the evil ones
and a dry chuckle from somewhere unimaginably far away, yet close enough for him to
touch
or you will be speaking from this side too
Jordan pushed away from the table in a blind panic. The plastic brain rolled off and disappeared somewhere under the dead man's chair. Sendip was on her feet, whether to help him or put him down, Jordan couldn't tell. Foster looked up at him with interest.
"He say anything good?"
Jordan licked his lips. "No."
"I have a few questions to ask him, when you're ready."
"It doesn't work that way," Jordan said. "I listen. I can't talk to them. They don't...they don't hear, not the way living people do. If he was thinking about whatever it is you wanted to know about, I could tell you that. I can't talk back. It's one-way. Death is always one-way."
Foster stood up and gave Jordan a long look. Then his mood broke and he shrugged as if the dead man's secrets were completely unimportant. "You're still getting settled here, Jordan. I
imagine you're a little disoriented. This guy was small potatoes anyway. Few more weeks, we'll bring you some bigger fish. I'll bet they have something better to tell you."
Jordan nodded but his mind was elsewhere. The water. He had to talk to Mike. He hated
talking to the dead, he'd never had one tell him something that was going to happen, but he knew that they never lied.
#
"No, it has to be today," Gary said. He glanced over at the nurses, who were sitting at their station filling out paperwork. Mike had turned the television to a loud Thai soap opera to drown out their voices. Jordan wasn't sure that had been such a great idea; they had to lean in close to hear each other, which he thought looked pretty suspicious.
Gary took off his Coke-bottle glasses and wiped them clean with the edge of his shirt.
Without his glasses his eyes looked very tiny. "If we wait," he continued, "they'll find out. Don't ask me how, it always happens. Even if nobody rats. Do we know when this 'water' is coming?"
Jordan shook his head no. "Is it monsoon season soon?"
"Nope. Which is why I don't know what your dead guy is talking about, but I'm notarguing. This is our chance."
Mike looked uncomfortable. He'd tried to talk them into warning the staff, to get the island evacuated, but he was the only one. First, Jordan wasn't sure they'd believe him Mutilator
or no, he'd never been told what was going to happen. Besides, if they were evacuated, they'd just be moved to some other offshore looney bin. This was their one chance for escape.
"How's Ray?" Shayne asked nervously. The other men edged away from him involuntarily.
"Think he's coming out of the drugs," Gary said. "I got at the nurse's tray when he wasn't
looking and switched out one of his pills. He won't be as dopey as usual."
They watched TV or paced the halls while they waited for Ray's glazed look to ebb. It was half an hour before Gary took him aside and whispered to him urgently. Jordan hung back. It
was kind of scary to see Ray's eyes taking in what was going on around him. He was afraid of what would happen if Ray didn't recognize him as a friend.
Ray put his arm around Gary and gave him a bear hug that looked painful. Then he walked to the nurse's station in the middle of the ward floor. The men looked up, surprised to see Ray lucid, and he killed them before they could raise an alarm. Jordan turned away and tried not
to be sick. He needed to get out before the dead nurses figured out they were dead and tried totalk to him.
Ray pulled his shirt off and wiped the blood from his hands. "Move it out," he said. It was
the longest sentence Jordan had ever heard him speak. They moved.
The men avoided hospital staff as much as possible. The armed guards were mostly outside with Ray permanently a vegetable there apparently hadn't been much concern about the rest of them. They ran into one guard coming out of the men's room and Ray killed him before he could zip up his fly. He had a pistol, something boxy and European, and Gary took it. Ray didn't need it.
Jordan guided them down to the loading dock, getting lost once before finding the right hallway. They'd agreed the back way would be less conspicuous. Jordan objected and was
outvoted. He didn't want to go past the morgue again. He pressed himself against the far hallway. The others, deaf to what he could hear, followed him. The voices were loud and excited.
water water deep in the earth soon company's coming
and then they were out. They looked away while Ray killed four armed men before they could scream. Lacking a shirt, Ray shook his hands like a man who's just discovered the hot-air hand dryer in the restroom is broken.
"Garage over there," Gary said, pointing toward the ocean. Towards the beach was a white wooden house shaded by palm trees. "Residence for visitors. Foster probably stays there when he's visiting. They'll have cars. Ready?"
They made a break for it, keeping low. There were guards, of course, and Ray jumped up on to the porch and then there were no guards. Ray collected their rifles while Shayne and Jordan worked on the garage door. It came open easily and revealed a couple of ordinary American cars. Why Foster wanted these here instead of military vehicles, Jordan had no idea.
"Heads up," Ray called. Something flew through the air and Jordan caught it without thinking: a rifle. He'd never fired a gun in his life. Ray turned to Shayne and held up the other rifle. "Come take this one. It's still loaded."
Ray doesn't know, he thought, he's always been sedated, he doesn't know Shayne was in Baghdad, and opened his mouth but it was too late, because Shayne was already hyperventilating at the sight of Ray offering him a rifle and opening his mouth, and Jordan dove out of the way just in time to avoid getting splattered. He covered his ears to block out the thick, liquid noises.
He wondered if it were some kind of Agent Orange thing that made Shayne into a human glue factory. It went on for a long time, and then there was a thud as Shayne collapsed.
They moved into to look at the damage. Ray swore. Shayne had been facing into the garage and heaved all over the cars. The epoxy was already drying as hard as diamond, and there were chemicals that would cut through it eventually but they didn't have any.
In a fury, Ray dragged Shayne to his feet. Gary grabbed him to pull him off and Ray waved his arm, like he was swatting at a mosquito, and Gary plumed red and died.
"Did you hear something?" Mike asked.
"Don't tell me you can hear them too," Jordan said.
"No, not the dead," said Mike, and then Jordan heard it too, a rumble like a very large freight train, getting louder, and they looked toward the ocean and saw the water rising up to blot out the sun.
They ran. They knew it would never work, but they ran anyway, unable to override instinct and make their legs stop running. The water roared and Ray, ahead, turned to look over his shoulder and Jordan saw his face and knew what was behind them, and he jumped on Mike and wrapped his arms and legs tight around the other man.
The wall of water slammed down.
Ray died, Jordan was sure of it. He didn't think he was dead, he felt dazed and something hurt deep, maybe a broken rib. Mike stirred and Jordan gripped him harder. He overcame his panic and took an experimental breath. Air. Mike was unconscious, but alive, turning the water around them into a little bubble of air, and they wouldn't drown. Die of injuries, maybe, but they could breathe.
Jordan wondered how long before the water flowed back to the ocean. Or were they in the ocean? He looked up at where he thought the sky should be. Something swam past them, near the surface, some kind of fish that breathed water as easily as they were breathing air right now. Jordan watched it as it swam peacefully past them, and then he realized whatever it was doing, it was swimming to the ocean. Away from shore. He turned the other direction and struggled through the water, and then Mike was swimming and pulling them along, and they were on the beach.
His rib had stopped hurting. He was going to ask Mike if he was okay, and Mike was giving him the strangest look, like something was very wrong with him.
"Jordan...oh, no...." He rolled Jordan over and looked at something. Jordan realized he didn't feel anything and thought maybe he was paralyzed, some debris had struck his back or his neck and his body was completely numb. He asked Mike what was the matter with his back, what Mike had seen when he had rolled him over, and Mike reached up and closed Jordan's eyes.
He lay on the beach a long time, listening hard but hearing no one, not even the dead. He supposed he was too far from the clinic to hear much. He had no idea how much time passed
before he heard footsteps and words. His ears felt like they were full of...of something, itwas
hard to make out sounds, and he could feel nothing. There was excited talk in what sounded like Thai, and a woman Sendip? laughing, or crying. It was hard to tell which. Then some English, in a voice he didn't recognize, and he could make out a few words in snatches.
Aid...survivors...report back...mass grave...
He would have smiled if he had been alive. A mass grave. He wouldn't be alone here, on this beach, any longer. And he would get to talk back.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Hellefire said:
The front-page summary indicates a judgement, but if it's been posted, I can't find it.
Patience
I know first-hand how hard it is to sit and wait. First rounds are always the worst -- there are a lot of stories for the judges to go though, and the stories aren't always posted at a time when the judges can spare the necessary effort. The same with scheduling Round 2 matches before Round 1 is finished. Best to move things along as you can, so that you can afford the competitors some flexibility in scheduling.As far as the pictures, after screwing my first posting last summer, I've just referenced Picture 1, Picture 3, etc in subsequent competitions. The judges know what the pictures look like, and if they can't quickly discern which one you mean, then you've got more problems than formatting
BSF
Explorer
OK, Finally getting some time to sort of catch up.
Hellefire, thanks for caching the bad link to Maddman75's story. I hate it when I mis-link like that! Alas, I do occasionally make errors.
Speaking of which, just to be clear, I am handling the menu links for Alsih2o. It is my intent to do that so it is easier for people to read the stories. A while back, I was going through a Ceramic DM thread and it was hunting and pecking to match up stories, pics and judgements. I made the menu links to make it easier for myself and then shared. Last contest I was gone for a while and Mythago had to do the links herself. But I prefer to do it so the judges don't have to. Through the course of a contest, they are slated to read 30 stories and provide feedback on those stories. All without neglecting other things in life. Doing menu links is easy for me. Story feedback is hard. Judging between stories to advance to the next round would be even harder. By doing menu links, I fel like I am giving back in some small way. So whenever there is a problem with menu links, please notify me. You can PM me, email me or even post it.
Now one thing I didn't do in this contest was notate Judgement Pending correctly. Sorry about that folks. When the first story rolls in, I drop in another field for a judgement. Normally I put Judgment Pending but this time I left off the Pending. Oops. I didn't mean to imply that a Judgement had been posted with that. I am correcting that with my latest version of menu links for Alsih2o.
Picture notations can be done however you are most comfortable with. When I have the time (rarely) I try to inline link them. It's a little showy, but hardly necessary. Footnotes are fine. Brackets/braces are fine. However works best for you. As Rodrigo noted, if the judges can't figure it out, then you probably have other issues with the story.
Patience is a tough answer to swallow. Trust me I know how anxious you can get. But I assure you that the judges aren't trying to increase your stress. What they are trying to do is make sure they give each story a fair assessment. Sometimes a fair assessment takes time and sometimes other life things take precedence. I will see what sotry commentary I can drum up in the other thread to help make the waiting a little more bearable.
Hellefire, thanks for caching the bad link to Maddman75's story. I hate it when I mis-link like that! Alas, I do occasionally make errors.
Speaking of which, just to be clear, I am handling the menu links for Alsih2o. It is my intent to do that so it is easier for people to read the stories. A while back, I was going through a Ceramic DM thread and it was hunting and pecking to match up stories, pics and judgements. I made the menu links to make it easier for myself and then shared.
Last contest I was gone for a while and Mythago had to do the links herself. But I prefer to do it so the judges don't have to. Through the course of a contest, they are slated to read 30 stories and provide feedback on those stories. All without neglecting other things in life. Doing menu links is easy for me. Story feedback is hard. Judging between stories to advance to the next round would be even harder. By doing menu links, I fel like I am giving back in some small way. So whenever there is a problem with menu links, please notify me. You can PM me, email me or even post it. Now one thing I didn't do in this contest was notate Judgement Pending correctly. Sorry about that folks. When the first story rolls in, I drop in another field for a judgement. Normally I put Judgment Pending but this time I left off the Pending. Oops. I didn't mean to imply that a Judgement had been posted with that. I am correcting that with my latest version of menu links for Alsih2o.
Picture notations can be done however you are most comfortable with. When I have the time (rarely) I try to inline link them. It's a little showy, but hardly necessary. Footnotes are fine. Brackets/braces are fine. However works best for you. As Rodrigo noted, if the judges can't figure it out, then you probably have other issues with the story.
Patience is a tough answer to swallow. Trust me I know how anxious you can get. But I assure you that the judges aren't trying to increase your stress. What they are trying to do is make sure they give each story a fair assessment. Sometimes a fair assessment takes time and sometimes other life things take precedence. I will see what sotry commentary I can drum up in the other thread to help make the waiting a little more bearable.
OK, patience I have. Just thought maybe there was another thread for judgements somewhere and I couldn't find it. Also, I didn't realize it would be 2 weeks per round, and that might end up being an issue...I lose net connection on feb 27 and get on a plane for the states feb 28th. I'll be en route for about a week, then have to find a net cafe in Lyons, KS. Anybody from around there? Anyway, that is all assuming I pass round one let alone still be in the running then.
Aaron
Anyway, that is all assuming I pass round one let alone still be in the running then.Aaron
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