The officers decided Jack should choose. He knew the camp better than any of them. He had friends everywhere. Guys who had become trading partners, guys he gave bland cookies to in return for favors, guys who trusted him, guys like the doctor and the doctor’s assistant, who could tell Jack in confidence exactly which men were too sick to recover. These would be the first to go. The remainder would be thieves and hoarders, and there were plenty of them to choose from. Like the group of fifteen men who’d set up a gambling racket. They played for food and water and they never lost. Desperate delirious men continued to play.
At first, Jack protested. The officers circled his bunk and told him it was this or it was all of them. He could not argue.
The most difficult aspect was finding men to help with the executions. Four officers volunteered, Wojak and Keshawn among them. None really knew what they were getting into. The rest they bribed with promises of extra food, which would come from the officer’s very quarters, since they very rarely went on work detail and could make due with less. Fifteen men in total would kill ten times that many.
They could not tell the rest of the camp what was happening. It would start a riot, which was maybe the guards’ true intention. In secret, they went after the thieves first, many of them loners.
Wojak showed the assassins how to kill a man with a knotted sheet or piece of rope, twisting it around the neck, turning your back to your victim’s, bending forward, pulling the rope over your shoulder. Of course they had considered more humane means, but the doctors could not spare morphine or syringes, and other poisons would have been more painful than hanging. The gamblers put up the biggest fight. Keshawn lost three fingers and suffered a severe gash on the head when one of the guys pulled out a saber he meant to keep as a souvenir. They went after the hospital the next day. When the doctor realized what was happening, he tried to stop them, but he was overpowered, held down in the distance where he could not hear the slaughter. They killed 130 sick men. After the gamblers and the thieves, it was easy and shameful and Jack would forever be haunted by the sound of his axe crushing the skulls of the sick, and although in the coming days the officers would try to explain to the rest of the camp the rationale for these actions, Jack could not blame the prisoners who abducted Wojak on his way back from the latrine one day and beat his head in, nor could he blame Keshawn when he killed himself, nor the men who came for Jack and held him down and tattooed him as a killer and a coward and a traitor and wished him a long life remembering what he had done to his brothers.
And now 13 years later, as Jack says these words for the first time, he relives the details he thought for so long would destroy him. But they do not destroy him. He wonders instead at the way nobody in the camps ever mentioned to him that their stomachs were noticeably fuller, the color in their cheeks noticeably pinker, or that his process of selection included the maximum number of inevitable casualties—sick men who would have died regardless and were in fact taking more than their allotment as treatment for incurable diseases—or how they discovered below the concrete pad of the gamblers’ hut a massive store of canned goods and bottled water which those men had been gorging themselves on while so many others clutched their ballooning stomachs and died. These things were not mentioned because it was easier to believe that Jack had made the wrong decision, was a killer and a coward and a traitor, that certain lines cannot be crossed, even according to men who in the eyes of society had already crossed so many. What could Jack say to this? Today, what can he say to it? They were right, and they are right, and although the camp was liberated, he will never be free, and this is what his friends should know on this ship before they open the panic pod doors, if he should never see them again. And they should also know that suiting up before the doors are opened will prove much easier than waiting until things are in motion, because once Jack and Gregorian and Hunter reach the Homunculus, the pod will need to be ejected, and it’s hard to put a space suit on in Zero-G, so better get to it.
Chapter 34
The hydras have not moved from their original positions. Hunter gives them names for reference. The small one on the first level will be known as Thumper. On the second level, slightly larger, they have Squiddy, and outside the panic pod doors, Big Bear. The ship has six internal defense turrets: one in the forward airlock, one in the cargo hold, two on level two and two on level three, above the forward and rear Zero-G shafts. Hunter and Gregorian will take the laser rifles, programmed to the same intensity as the turrets, a frequency so low it would cause a mild sunburn at worst. They will sprint to the bridge. Hunter will program Bel while Gregorian slips through the emergency hatch down to the airlock and unlocks the Homunculus. When Bel is good to go, Hunter and Jack will follow.
Meanwhile, the survivors in the pod will standby to eject. Lana has still not fully processed the fact that she will be performing a spacewalk in a matter of minutes. She tries to think only about the plan and how to work the EM-pack, seeing in her mind the field of stars and such vast blackness all around and hearing over and over Jack’s confession about the camp until she wants to scream.
There are things people should never experience. The human race was scandalized by The Great Solar War, but the individual stories are what break the heart. He could have told her this in their time together, she thinks, but knows it is not true nor fair. But she has a clearer portrait of Jack than before. All his running around, incapable of an emotional connection, the drinking, what he said before about nightmares. Like so many others, he was a textbook case of PTSD, untreated and left fending for himself.
She used to have nightmares, too. Patients who wouldn’t stop bleeding. The lights going out, operating in the dark, feeling their wounds with her hands, pressing into their guts, being swallowed by them.
She could have helped Jack through it.
Couldn’t she?
They could have helped each other if they’d only been honest. That’s how real relationships are supposed to work. Even now, he avoids looking at her as he talks with Gregorian and Tarziesch yet again about the layout of their ship. A layer of oil sheens his face, strands of hair pasted to his forehead. He must be exhausted.
“Hey.” A hand grabs her wrist.
She jumps.
Stetson pulls away, stabs a finger at the nearest EM-pack. “Just follow my lead and you’ll be fine. Right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
His smile is all sympathy. “You’re not gonna talk to him?”
She’s never really spoken to Stets about her relationship with Jack. Or really anything of consequence. Like Hunter, Stets always maintained a comfortable distance. Friendly but not too friendly. She always respected him, though, and his opinion. “It can wait,” she says.
“Can it?”
Chapter 35
Jack has not been so focused in years. No fear about whether or not he has made the right decisions, if he is a fuckup or unredeemable. No guilt. There is a problem to be solved and a solution to implement, and all that needs to happen next is for things to go smoothly.
Except.
There is something. A needle of anxiety in his mind, like he’s holding back tears though he isn’t. Whatever it is, there’s no time to deal with it now.