“What about Marty?” Dana gasped as they skidded to a stop.
“They got him,” Curt said.
Marty? Holden thought, feeling a deep loss for someone he hardly knew. Marty’s—?
Curt pointed at the door handle and touched his finger to his lips. Holden looked and saw what had made him so cautious. Dirt on the handle, a wet slick with half a dead leaf trapped in it like a fly in amber.
Marty, Holden mouthed, but Curt shook his head. Whatever he had seen, it must have been enough to mean Marty couldn’t possibly have recovered.
Curt hefted the plank over his shoulder and stepped back, looking from Holden to the door and back again, and Holden nodded in acknowledgment. After three, he thought, crouching beside the door and reaching for the handle. He mouthed one… two… three… then flipped the catch and moved aside.
The door swung open. Curt tensed, shuffling a half step forward. Shook his head.
“Okay,” Dana said. “Okay. Now can we please get the fuck out of here?”
“Seconded,” Holden said.
“Yeah,” Curt nodded.
They climbed inside, slammed the door behind them, and Curt took the driver’s seat. He whispered a prayer and the Rambler started first time. Its headlamps pushed darkness back between the trees. As he steered them out of the clearing, the lights splashed across the front of the cabin. The door was cracked and broken, but still solid in its frame. A lamp still burned in the large main room. There was little to show what had happened there.
Good fucking riddance, Holden thought as Curt swung the vehicle around and headed back along the road they had traveled so recently, and a lifetime ago.
Oh fuck, Sitterson thought, they’ve gone and screwed it up. And much as he always enjoyed the tense competition between themselves and the Japanese, and the friendly rivalry to see who could produce the most perfect, most imaginative, most effective scenarios, he also liked to win. And what he saw on the screen meant that they weren’t out of the woods yet.
And that brought immense pressure to bear.
Hadley had wheeled his chair over to sit beside his friend, an unconscious desire for closeness as they watched the Japanese effort fall apart on their central big screen.
The hideously screaming face of the drowned Japanese girl filled the screen, long black hair floating and waving about her head like a million individual snakes ready to inject their own unique venoms. Yet horrible and terrifying though the floating drowned girl was, both Sitterson and Hadley knew what was about to happen.
To this story, there would be no shock ending.
The screaming face started to relax. She looked bewildered, as if remembering that she had once been a little girl, not this screeching banshee-thing with hair that cast lethal shadows. A warm glow grew around her, driving away the monochrome of dark tendrils and white pasty skin, and imbuing her visage with a semblance of life.
Sitterson sighed as the view pulled back to take in the entirety of the Japanese classroom. Several children knelt at its centre, carefully placing lotus flowers into a large bowl of water above which the floating drowned girl hovered. She seemed smaller now, her hair more lank than wild, her eyes sad instead of filled with vengeful rage.
The kids sang a song whose lyrics Sitterson did not understand, but his skin prickled with the happiness of the tune, the love it conveyed, and any other time he might even had felt a lump at his throat.
But not now.
“This is just too fucking fucked up,” he said.
The floating drowned girl began to glow. For a moment her face dropped in fear, but then she smiled brightly as light enveloped her, spewing from her eyes and mouth where previously there had been only darkness. She waved her hands in the air as if swimming, and her hair drew back and hung across her shoulders, no longer obscuring her eyes.
The light grew brighter still, and then it faded away to a background glow that seemed to fill the whole classroom with sunlight. The girl faded away, as well.
A frog leapt from the bowl of water and flowers, sitting amongst the other girls and looking around.
They chanted something, and at the bottom of the screen a line of subtitles appeared. Sitterson wondered who in control was translating. He didn’t really care. He knew the gist of what it would say.
“Now Kiko’s spirit will live in the happy frog!”
The girls laughed and hugged. The picture flickered, went to static and then cut to black. Sitterson hoped that somewhere in Japan, heads would roll.
“Fuuhhhcck yooouuu!” Sitterson shouted.
“Not good,” Hadley said, shaking his head. “Not good.” Sitterson turned to his friend and colleague, a useless anger brewing, and then something buzzed and something else flashed and he had an incoming communication.
“That’ll be Lin,” Hadley said, wheeling himself back to his control panel as Sitterson composed himself a little. He flicked a switch and a monitor on his desk lit up. Lin stared from it. It looked to Sitterson as if she’d had her hair pulled back even tighter since he’d seen her last. Maybe she had a machine that did it.
“You seeing this?” he asked.
“Perfect record, huh?” Lin said without expression.
“Naruto-watching, geisha-fucking, weird gameshow-having dicks! They fucked us!”
“Few injuries, but zero fatality,” Lin said. “Total wash. Any word from downstairs?”
“Downstairs doesn’t care about Japan,” Sitterson said, sighing. Move on, he thought. Accept it, stop stewing, stop blaming everyone else when everything is down to you and everyone else here and… Move on!
“The Director trusts us,” he said softly
“You guys better be on your game,” Lin said, voice even more impersonal than ever over the electronic link.
Before Sitterson could spit out something offensive Hadley cut in. He knows me so well, Sitterson thought as his friend spoke. “You just sweat the chem, Lin,” he said. “While these morons are singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Shinto’, we’re bringing the pain.”
“Fuck was up with that fool’s pot, anyway?” Sitterson asked. “He shoulda been drooling, and instead he nearly made us.”
“We treated the shit out of it!” Lin said, and her defensiveness was the first real expression he’d seen on her face. He shouldn’t have enjoyed that—they all worked together, after all—but he did.
“Got ’em in the Rambler, headed for the tunnel,” he said to Hadley, spotting the vehicle’s movement on a big screen. He turned the central monitor back to focus on their own concerns, now that the Japanese were out of the picture. They never messed up, and deep inside he found that cause for concern.
But it also presented a challenge.
And what a challenge, he thought. But he couldn’t go that way, couldn’t let the implications get on top of him. Right now he needed to focus like he never had before.
“The Fool is toast anyway,” Lin said from the monitor, as if that could excuse the mistake. “You better not fuck us on the report.”
“Shit!” Hadley said.
“What?” Lin asked. “Shit why?”
Yeah, shit why? Sitterson thought, looking across at his colleague. Hadley glanced up and flicked his fingers across his throat.
“Work to do,” Hadley said, and Sitterson could hear the urgency there. “Gotta go.”