Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“Everybody knows why,” Mirotic says. “Where’s the rest of it?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. He snatches the rattling sock out of Elliot’s lap and yanks him to his feet. Mirotic is tall. But he’s slow, too, the way everything is slow on the morphine, and Elliot still has his old tricks.

A hook, a vicious twist, then Mirotic is on the ground with the needle of the syringe poised a centimeter from his eyeball.

“I need that,” Elliot says.

“You’re pathetic,” Mirotic grunts. “Holding his hand and wasting his morphine.”

“Why do you care?” Elliot asks, suspicious now, wondering if maybe it’s Mirotic who Tolliver visits in the night when he doesn’t come to him.

Mirotic slaps the syringe away and drives a knee up into Elliot’s chest. The air slams out of him, but he feels only impact, no pain. He staggers away, bent double. If his lungs were working he would maybe laugh.

“I care because you used to know what the fuck you were doing,” Mirotic says. “Back before they stuck you with a con squad.” He taps the high-grade neural plug at his temple. “You read our records. But I’ve seen yours, too. These personnel firewalls aren’t shit. And if we’re going to get out of this, it won’t be with you doped to the eyes.”

“Give Private Tolliver the paineaters,” Elliot rasps, straightening up. “Leave the morphine. That’s an order.”

Mirotic shakes his head. “It stays with me, now. You’ll get it when we get extracted.” He tosses the black plastic cube; Elliot nearly fumbles it. “Worry about this, instead,” Mirotic says. “Worry about a fungus that eats our flesh and uses the bones like scaffolding.”

Elliot turns the cube over. Through the transparent face, he sees sticky strands of the glowing blue fungus moving, wrapping around Tolliver’s scoured-white knucklebone.

In the morning, Snell is gone.

“Never woke me for my watch,” Santos says, picking gound out of the corner of her eye. “I checked the tent. His kit’s not there.”

“And now he’s out of range,” Mirotic says. “Could get the drones up to look for him. Keep them low again so we don’t trigger any more mines.”

The inside of Elliot’s mouth feels like steel wool. They are standing in the sunshine, which makes his head ache, too. A cool breeze is rippling through the blue-and-purple flora. The sponge trees are swaying. It’s peaceful, near to beautiful. In daylight it’s hard to believe what happened only hours ago in the dark. But the twins’ tent is empty, and Tolliver is drugged to sleep with bloody gauze around the stump of his thumb.

“Why would we look for him?” Elliot says.

Santos gledges at Mirotic, but neither of them speak.

“He deserted,” Elliot says. “If he doesn’t pose a threat to us, we let him walk. He’ll either step on a mine or get eaten alive.” He feels slightly sick imagining it, but he keeps his voice cold and calm. “Mirotic, rig up a saw to one of the drones, start clearing the vegetation on our flank. Make sure we have clean line of fire. No use watching them on the cyclops if we can’t hit them ‘til they’re right up on us. Santos, get the comm system out of the Heron. We’re going to make a radio tower.”

When Santos departs with her sloppy salute, there’s less contempt in it than usual. Mirotic stays and stares at him for a second, suspicious. Elliot meets his gaze, pretending he doesn’t care, pretending he didn’t already ransack Mirotic’s cot looking for the morphine while he was on watch.

“Good,” Mirotic says, then goes to get the drone.

Elliot turns back toward the tents. He lets himself into the one Tolliver and Snell were sharing, and realizes Tolliver is no longer asleep. He’s sitting up on the sweat-stained cot, staring down at his lap, at his hand.

“How are you feeling?” Elliot asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“You took my thumb.” Tolliver’s voice trembles. “I needed that thumb. That’s my good hand.”

“It was moving deeper,” Elliot says. “That’s why we had to amputate. You probably don’t remember.” He hopes Tolliver doesn’t remember, especially not the pain.

“Still got a trigger finger, so I guess it doesn’t matter to you, right?” Tolliver says. “Still got a mouth, still got an ass. All the parts you like.”

Elliot feels heat creeping under his cheeks. “You can get a prosthetic when they pick us up,” he says, clipped.

“At this rate?” Tolliver gives a bitter laugh. “There’s gonna be nobody left to pick up tomorrow, fuck a week. That’s if you really did get the extraction request through, and you’re not just lying through your fucking teeth. I know junkies. I know all you do is lie.”

Elliot wants to slip his hands around Tolliver’s throat and throttle him. He wants to slip under the sheet and hold Tolliver to him and tell him they’re going to make it. He does neither.

“I needed that thumb because I was going to be a welder,” Tolliver snaps as Elliot goes to leave. “When all this shit was over and I’d gotten my clamp out, I was going to be a welder like my grandfather was.”

But war is never really over, and there’s a sort of clamp that doesn’t come out. Elliot doesn’t even remember what he used to think he was going to be. He turns over his shoulder.

“Your head’s not right,” he says calmly. “It’s the drugs. Try to sleep more.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Tolliver says, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Fuck you, Elliot.”

Elliot steps out, and the tent closes behind him like a wound scabbing shut.

By the time night falls, they’ve cleared a perimeter, cutting away the vegetation in ragged circumference around the Heron, the tents, the cyclops. Tolliver came out to help mid-afternoon, jaw clenched tight and eyes fixed forward. Nobody mentioned his hand or even looked at it.

The few incendiary grenades they have in armory have been distributed. Mirotic is trying to rig up a flamethrower using a soldering torch and fuel drained from the tank. Santos and Tolliver are perched on the roof of the Heron, hooking the makeshift antennae into the comm system through a tangle of wires.

Mostly busy work, Elliot knows. They can’t be sure the incendiary grenade did anything but distract the fungus, and it moves fast enough that having open ground might only be to its advantage. They don’t know anything about this enemy.

But if he keeps up appearances, maybe he can get the last of the morphine back from Mirotic without resorting to violence. Act sharp, act competent, and then when the withdrawal kicks in he won’t have to exaggerate much to make Mirotic realize how badly he needs it to function.

“Nothing,” Santos says.

Elliot looks up to the roof of the Heron. Tolliver is still trying to rotate the antennae for a better signal, but all that comes through the comm system and into their linked implants is shrieking static. He dials it down in his head. They are too far from the outpost.

Then a familiar signal comes faint and blurry. A blinking yellow nudge slides into the corner of his optic.

“Snell,” Tolliver says. “Shit.”

Elliot feels a shiver go under his skin. The sky is turning dark above them. The cyclops picked up no movement during the day, but like Mirotic said, plenty of predators hunt only at night. There can only be one reason Snell would send the nudge. Elliot can picture him stumbling through the bog, maybe dragging a turned ankle, with the blue glow creeping closer and closer behind him in the dark. Or maybe the fungus already has him, is already flensing him down to his skeleton.

Tolliver’s upvote appears, then Santos’s. It will only take four votes now to trigger the nanobomb. Mirotic looks over at him, and Elliot doesn’t think Mirotic is the merciful type. He executed three people and put their bodies through a thresher. But then Mirotic’s upvote appears in the queue.