Claire Holroyde - The Effort

“You must think of all children now,” Zhen told Dewei quietly. “Just as you think of your own daughter.”

The suspicious major moved closer.

“That cargo is a spacecraft,” Zhen said, raising her voice. “We need it to stop the comet. Unload it now.”

Dewei nodded. This was the order he had waited for. As he turned, the major shouted again in English.

“Stop!”

The loadmaster held up his hands but spoke defiantly.

“Whatever is in that plane, we need to give it to them. We need to end this.”

The major yelled without taking his eyes off Zhen and the SWAT team.

“We don’t have orders.”

“And we never will,” Dewei insisted. “Give it to them.”

More Chinese engineers flanked Zhen until they were all standing shoulder to shoulder. The major lifted his gun and pointed it at Dewei’s head, taking aim at the first detractor. A sniper bullet knocked the major off his feet before he could discharge his weapon. There was a moment of silence and indecision. Then one Chinese soldier set down his rifle. Then another. And another.

JACK’S PARENTS INHABITED his dreams. He was usually lucid enough to know they were both probably dead—and Jack told them so. In some dreams, his mother and father nodded in sad agreement, but in others, they held out hope for their real selves. Jack woke one afternoon alone in Maya’s lower bunk. The memories of his dreams were already fading, but he could still recall his mother pointing to the scar on his neck and asking, Remember Germany?

Jack didn’t remember the military hospital in Landstuhl very well, but he did remember the stray piece of hot shrapnel in the Syrian city of Homs. Jack also remembered waking up on the flight to Bethesda Naval Hospital. His parents were beside him. They had immediately flown to Germany and then flown right back to the States forty-eight hours after their only child survived surgery for a nicked artery.

When it was time to be released to a caregiver, Jack had no one but his mother; he had broken off his last relationship right before leaving on a dangerous assignment. Mrs. Campbell readied his old bedroom in their house back in northern Virginia. It was easy at first. Jack was foggy from pain medication, and his mother was gentle. When she spoon-fed him soup and antibiotic pills, Jack teared up with each painful swallow. He was still so close to death that she forgave him then.

But the days passed and, by small degrees, their patience ran out. Mrs. Campbell filled the silence with talk of her familiars. Some of it was harmless enough: milestones like birth, marriage, and death. But that usually transitioned to gossip, judgment, and competition. Jack knew his mother hid pettiness behind good looks, charm, and polished manners. Others were easily fooled, while Jack saw the underlying comparisons over money, real estate, dress size, popularity, successful children, cruises, tennis—in fewer words, everything that Jack found superficial. Laid up inside the same four walls he thought he had escaped, Jack was his mother’s captive audience, just as in childhood before puberty stoked his fire and told him to get the hell gone.

When it was time to peel away the surgical tape and remove Jack’s bandages, her fury percolated to the surface. Your father and I won’t always be around to take care of you, you know , his mother said, losing the smile she always wore like a favorite lipstick. You need to settle down with the right girl and a steady job that won’t keep trying to kill you. Jack balled his fists, but the fight left him soon as his mother broke down in tears at her first look at the jagged stitches, running from his collarbone to the corner of his jaw.

Jack reached for her, but she batted his hand away and cried out, You did this to yourself! Jack answered slowly, No, Mom. This was a piece of metal. What I did was expose the truth about attacks on civilians. He knew that his parents assumed his injury, one that nearly cost his young life, would be a call for major change. They assumed wrong. Jack realized that he thought he had been running away from his parents, while he was really running from a sheltered life like theirs, spent at a desk or a country club. He was better built for the great wide open, fighting and dying for what mattered.

When Maya returned to her room, Jack was rubbing the scars on his neck. He pulled his hand away and reached for her, but Maya brushed by and squatted by the sink cabinet.

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Jack said to her bent back.

It sounded needy and desperate to his own ears.

“Do you have any Dramamine?” Maya asked with her head still in the recess of the cabinet. “I’m out.”

He told her to look in the pouch of his Healy hoodie that was cast off somewhere on the floor. Maya and Jack were sick as dogs, but they weren’t the only ones. All passengers and inactive crew were advised to medicate and take to their beds. Even as Jack sat, seemingly stationary, his body orientation told him the truth: Healy was rolling along the Bering Sea with sixty-two-knot wind speeds and twenty-foot waves slamming into her red chest. The ship’s engines were running at full power just to maintain position.

Maya found the pill bottle in his hoodie. She took in water from the sink with cupped palms and swallowed, then smoothed down the crown of her tousled hair with wet palms.

“There’s gonna be a vote tonight,” she said to her reflection in the vanity.

Maya said she ran into a Coastie on her way back from the head. He informed her that there would be an announcement over the pipes for all to gather in the helicopter hangar at 2000 hours. Captain Weber wanted to put to vote whether to stay in the safety of the ship until supplies ran out, or to return to Seattle or even Joint Base Lewis-McChord if the city was too dangerous.

Jack reached out for Maya a second time. Not since he was a child holding the fabric of his mother’s clothes in tight fists did he feel such a hysterical need for another person. There were moments when they couldn’t bear to be on opposite sides of the same room. In bed, they held each other’s bodies so tightly their forearms trembled with fatigue, but no matter how close their embrace, it never felt close or comforting enough.

“I guess the others won’t get a vote,” Maya said. “You know, the ones who’ve… stopped talking.”

No one bothered with the Healy accountability form anymore, so it was hard to tell who had succumbed to the comatose state. Suicides were also harder to find ahead of the smell. By the time the crew disposed of the body overboard, the rest of the ship knew about it anyway.

When Maya ignored his hand the second time, Jack jolted with something of a laugh. He was too self-aware to miss the irony.

“What’s so funny?”

Maya sounded angry. Jack smiled at her, but it wasn’t the usual flashing of perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. This was a lopsided smile that made him look young and exposed.

“I’ve always run away from the people who loved me. Who needed me,” he admitted. “I’ve put whole time zones and continents between me and mine. Now here I am, needing because I can’t handle UD3 alone.”

Jack lay back and wondered if every solitary consciousness eventually suspects that reality was created for them only. Healy ’s cramped quarters, with nothing to do but fear loneliness and stew in guilt, were a personal hell that felt to Jack like proof of this far-fetched speculation.

Remember Germany?