A frightened Adam’s apple jerks under Jack’s hand.
“You’d better find a way. Or your family—”
“What makes you think I care about them? You see this?” He leans back so Dandy can see the tattoo. “I’ve already been to Hell, Jim. I’m not afraid to go back.”
Dandy searches the faces around him. Searching for what, exactly? Sympathy? Mercy? Forgiveness? Even Lana has gone silent. They must know that Jack is right. They won’t survive. Dandy coughs once, a dry hack. And again. His body trembles. Jack thinks he is crying, but no. He laughs. “Oh man,” he wheezes. “Man oh man. Those turrets weren’t on! I could have walked out the way I came in!” He gurgles and coughs. “You should have let me. If I die, then they die, and that’s on you, Jackie.”
Jack pulls the gun from his eye.
Dandy grins. “See?” he says. “You know I’m—”
Jack swings as hard as he can. Dandy’s head snaps back, clangs against the wall. He drops hard. Jack works up a good lather and spits into his hair, kicks him in the ribs for good measure. Lana grabs Jack’s shoulder. He shoves her. She falls, yelps. He could kick her too. He meant what he said about hell. What he didn’t mention was that he brought it back with him.
Fuck you, Dandy.
Fuck you, Jack.
Killer. Coward.
He stalks down the hall, locks himself in the bathroom, jams the revolver to his chin. He sits like that a long time, tears running down his cheeks.
Chapter 25
Morale has flatlined. Stetson paces and bites his thumb, repeating that they need to get rid of the creature under the helmet. Hunter groans and sighs and asks him what he is going to do, flush it down the toilet? He waves his hands and says something about giving it a shot. Justin is set on executing Dandy and his men. He strokes the rifle that had been Dino’s and before that Gregorian’s, fiddles with the knobs, mutters how this is all their fault and they deserve it. They’re going to die, anyway. Gregorian and Tarziesch plead that they are in the same situation and it’s Dandy who got them into this. Lana wishes they would all just shut the hell up and let her think.
Dandy has an inch-long gash above his left eyebrow. She wipes away the blood and makeup with an antiseptic pad and pinches the wound and seals it with a dab of liquid stitching. His ribs feel fine, but there’s no telling for sure until he wakes up. Not that she cares about his recovery. It’s just that caring for a patient settles her nerves. Gives her purpose. She’s not a violent person, but part of her wanted Jack to pull the trigger. Yet there are so many unknowns, so many things Jack should have been asking Dandy before he knocked him out.
Justin is still on the helmet. She crouches near the visor and peers inside. The creature has gone idle. It squats at the back of the helmet, looking like a clot of wet yarn.
Whack! It shoots a tentacle against the glass and retracts it, like a lizard tongue. She flinches.
“What are you doing?” Justin says.
“I wonder,” she says. She duck walks backward, then very slowly slides one hand across the floor toward the visor. When her fingers are maybe six inches away, the creature smacks the glass again. “No eyes,” she says. She drops to her hands and knees and swings around to the helmet’s back side. “Gregorian, look through the visor and tell me what you see.”
Gregorian positions to a better angle, keeping a generous distance. “It is just is sitting theres.”
“Hang on.” She repeats the same motion, inching her hand closer.
“It moves,” Gregorian says.
“Where?”
Thunk. It whacks the back of the helmet.
“Can you stop doing that?” Justin says.
She leans back. “I’ll be damned.”
“What is this meaning?” Gregorian says.
Hunter and Stetson stand close by. Hunter says, “It can see through the back of the helmet.”
“Maybe,” Lana says.
“Am I safe here?” Justin says.
“You’re fine.”
“Why doesn’t it attack Justin’s ass?” Stetson says. “If it can see through the helmet, I mean. He’s sitting right on it.”
“It was,” Lana says. “When I first trapped it. It kept hitting below my hands.”
“Why’d it quit?”
“I don’t know. Stop talking. I want to try something.”
They go silent. She keeps her hand away this time, waits.
Gregorian whispers, “It putting up feelers.”
She shushes him, lets the silence drag out. Then she snaps her fingers.
Thump.
“Oh shit,” Stetson says.
“It strikes,” Gregorian reports.
“It heard you,” Hunter says.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t make noise before. How’d it hear you then?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Extrasensory,” Justin says. “Like, psychic.”
She doubts it.
“Infrared vision,” Stetson says. “Like a rattlesnake.”
“That still takes eyes.”
“Yeah? You take a course on alien physiology we don’t know about?”
“Shut up, Stets,” Hunter says.
“Don’t tell me to shut up. I don’t see how this is helping.”
“Then I’ll spell it the fuck out for you,” Hunter snaps. “If we know how it sees, then we can hide from it, yeah? Then maybe we can get out of this tin can and onto the other ship.”
“Other ship,” Stetson says.
“Dandy’s ship.”
Gregorian says, “Not Dandy ship. My ship. Homunculus.”
“If we get to the—The what?”
“Homunculus.”
“If we get to the Homunculus,” Hunter continues, “then we can fly the fuck away.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Stetson says.
“Great. Glad you’re paying attention.”
“Why do you have to push my buttons?”
“To make sure you’re still functioning properly.”
“Ha-ha,” he says flatly.
Lana cuts in, “Is this really the conversation you want to be having right now?”
“Guys,” Justin says.
Stetson jabs a finger at Hunter, “Seven years I’ve had to deal with this shit. You’re a robot, you know that?”
“Cry me a river,” Hunter says.
“Guys.”
“You both need to cut it out,” Lana says.
“I don’t know if you know this,” Stetson says, “but there’s a monster outside the door! It maybe is just a little fucking stressful!”
“Guys!” Justin shouts.
They turn. “What?”
“Why don’t we ask him?” He gestures at Dandy, who sits upright and runs fingers across the gash in his face, hissing air through his teeth. When he sees them staring, he drops the hand.
“Ask me what?”
Chapter 26
He cannot picture Kip’s face. He knows it is an oval, that he has black hair, but the features are blank. He tries to focus on a memory. Something specific and vivid. Nothing comes to mind. He envisions moments that never occurred. A playground with a rubber floor, swinging the boy by the arms and laughing. That is what good fathers remember, right? Something from a commercial. Sitting with his boy on his knee while he imparts wisdom. How to deal with a bully or how to throw a ball. Instead, Jack slept with scrawny hookers in rented rooms while Ani raised his son alone.
Yet he recalls the bees at Ani’s parents’ place.
Her parents lived in a ten-bedroom farmhouse, and their backyard was fifteen acres of woods with a bubbling creek a few feet into the tree line. He’d been back from the war seven years but had been shipping for five, and still felt like a stranger, a visitor. He sat on the back porch watching Kip and wondering why he was here, buzzed on a flask he hid in his jacket. The others were inside the house, preparing salads or something. He liked the boy to have freedom, so he let him explore. He watched him wander into the trees to play in the creek. It was shallow that time of year. Every few minutes Jack would lean forward and shout, “How we doing, bud?” and the kid’s squeaky voice would come back, “I found a fossil!” or “Crayfish!” or some such thing. Mostly Jack couldn’t make out the words, but he heard it when Kip started screaming. A long wail, pained, confused, full of fear. Jack was in the woods in an instant, dashing between the trees. He found Kip running in circles slapping at himself and crying that he was being killed. Jack scooped him up and carried him back to the house. The bees had done a number. They clung to his knuckles, slipped down his shirt, tangled themselves in his hair. Welts covered his arms and legs. Ani and the in-laws crowded them, asking Jack what he had done. Jack ignored them, passed the boy off to Ani, slapped the stinging bastards from his own flesh, scooped the lighter fluid and matches from the grill, and bolted back to the woods. He found the nest in a rotten log, big as a basketball. A branch stuck out of its flaky side. Kip hadn’t stepped or fallen on it. He’d found it and decided to mess with it. Still, he didn’t deserve all that pain. Jack stood a good ten feet back and spurted the lighter fluid across the nest until it was soggy brown and the can sputtered. The bees swarmed. They crawled along his jacket and stung the sleeves, bit at his neck and hands. He ignored them and struck a match. The nest went up with a whoosh, erupted into tiny fireballs careening through the air. Water hissed from the log like small screams. He had heard that insects did not feel pain, but he hoped that was wrong. They needed to suffer for what they’d done. In short time, Ani’s father appeared with a bucket of water, calling Jack a lunatic and saying he could have burned the forest down. They got the fire out and went back up to the house. Kip sat on his mother’s lap with his shirt off, eyes swollen from crying, a pair of tweezers and a collection of stingers on the table beside them, white lotion dabbed on every welt. Jack said, “They’re all dead,” and grinned. The boy looked away and whimpered. Jack’s heart sank. “What’s the matter with you?” Ani scolded. “He’s five years old for God’s sake.” What’s wrong with me? Jack thought, indignant. He was only trying to help. Not his problem if nobody understood.