John Ridley: Those Who Walk in Darkness

So Soledad did that; tried to float to Reese.

She couldn't.

She went to sleep instead.

Reese made for a queer sight. Lying on her hospital bed, she looked tranquil; face placid. Body relaxed. The angel at rest.

In high contrast were blood-soaked bandages that covered her ugly red/black wounds, tubes and catheters and wires that ran from orifice to sustaining contraption—commingled in a complex matrix until it was pretty much impossible to tell where humanity ended and appliance began. If the devices sustained the body, or if the body justified the devices' existence.

And with the hybrid biomechanical form came the sounds of life: the slurping of the pumps and the suction of the tubes that replaced the inhale/exhale of lungs and the quiet, regular beat of a human heart. The beeps and clicks of monitors as they read cardio rate and pulse and respiration and alpha waves and tabulated their minute variances over a period of time, then printed this information so that the well-trained, highly skilled, overly expensive C-S medical staff could analyze the data and pronounce their prognosis: no change. The patient was, still, not dead, not alive.

All that science, all those electronics and gears and dials just to maintain the approximation of life.

Nearly two weeks. Ten days it'd taken Soledad to nerve herself for the event of crutching it from her room, down the hospital corridor to the elevator to the ICU to where what remained of Reese was kept. Ten days, not counting the five Soledad had no choice but to sit in her room, recovering, with nothing more to do than prepare for visiting Reese.

Yarborough she'd seen already. Visiting Yarborough had been easy. Even banged up and in the hospital, Yar was in good spirits.

Not that he'd been looking to get himself all fried, but he didn't much seem to care. Yarborough was the original BAMF. An MTac with an exponent. He didn't do what he did so much because he believed in the cause; because he wanted to protect and defend ordinary humans from the hegemony of the muties. He did what he did because how many times in life do you get to serve warrants on people who can throw flames from their bodies or make metal come alive? Not enough where Yarborough was concerned. Not hardly. It was like he was bred for the job. Five-ten, just over one-sixty, Yar was trim and light and moved fast, and that helped him get through a bunch of years of hunting freaks well battered but still alive. His scar tissue got worn like medals, were displayed just as proudly.

Soledad, hand to her throat. Absentminded.

Yarborough had pointed out his wounds to Soledad in a morbid show-and-tell. A puncture in his chest where a telekinetic had sent a sharp piece of something or other. Teeth marks where a shape-shifter tried to bite out part of his leg.

"And you see this?" A scar on his temple Yarborough stuck a finger at with glee."Know who gave me this?"

Soledad didn't.

"Gave it to myself. Shot myself in the head. Or a telepath tried to shoot myself for me."

"You went up against a telepath?" Soledad, impressed. There were only a very few MTacs, anywhere, who'd ever mixed it up with a telepath and lived to tell. And that was the thing: Out of all the boasts Yar'd made to Soledad since she'd arrived at Central MTac, going against a telepath wasn't one of them.

"Hell yeah." Big smile."When I was working Valley."

"What happened?"

Yarborough's smile got doused."You're looking at all that's left of that Valley MTac. Nothing you can do about telepaths. Not a goddamn thing."

Guilt. Heavy, hurtful, ugly. Yar had lived while others had died, and now he had guilt for doing nothing more wrong than somehow keeping alive. And Soledad got exactly why he didn't talk about going against a telepath; the guilt he felt, she knew very well.

Yarborough took a beat, recovered a little, got back to being a BAMF. Telepath couldn't put him down, he boasted. He hadn't met the freak that could.

Then he asked Soledad about her gun, about how she was able to take out the pyro.

She explained things to him, the tech that went into her piece: a modified O'Dwyer VLe. The first all-electronic handgun. No moving parts. Nothing to wear down. Nothing to ever get jammed in the middle of a shoot-out. Not even a magazine. Not a regular one. The bullets were stacked in-line in the barrels—yeah. Barrels. Soledad's piece had four—and fired electronically. Four shots in less than 1/500 of a second. A recoiling barrel meant the rounds would fire at one aim point before there was any recoil effect. Audio/visual settings confirmation. Distance-to-target meter. Electronic lockout. Digital download and upgrade capacity…

On and on and Yar got all juiced just listening. It was the future Soledad was carrying. And once they got healed up, with the new side arms Soledad had, they were going to kick some serious freak ass.

Except, Soledad thought, for what Bo had told her. There might be, there probably was going to be, trouble about her gun. Soledad wasn't on so many drugs anymore. The thought of trouble started to worry her. She didn't share the worry with Yar. Yar was happy with his new wounds. Why spoil things?

They talked on a while more. Yarborough talked on, told stories. Every one an adventure, and every adventure ending with a mutie down and him victorious. Soledad couldn't be sure of the ratio of truth to fiction, but for the minute that was unimportant. The stories were spun well, exciting, and they made her think at least for a second that normal humans had a chance in their war against the metanormals.

When she left Yarborough's room, when he was worn out from recanting and the sedatives a nurse had given him, Soledad felt invigorated. Felt almost good. Except for her limp and throb from her burns. Except for those.

Easy. Visiting Yarborough had been easy. Almost fun.

Visiting Reese…

Soledad stood looking at the body, wondering how many more seconds of searing heat would've left her in Reese's place. She wondered, too, if it would've been better for that thing to have fused the arteries that ran up and down her throat, to have out and out killed her rather than put her in the phantom zone between life and death where it put Reese.

Down the hall: A nurse walked. A door opened. A draft swirled through the corridor, finding Soledad. It lifted her flimsy gown and played with her flesh before dissipating to still air.

Did Reese even dream? Soledad thought she remembered hearing that people in comas don't dream. But she only thought she remembered that.

And weren't you supposed to talk to them, the comatose? Couldn't they hear you, and if you talked to them, wasn't that supposed to help make them better? Help them heal? Soledad thought she remembered hearing that too.

But if they— Soledad checked herself. Reese she was thinking about. Not they. They had no name, and they was faceless. Reese had a name and a face, and Reese was alive. Forget the machines and apparatus and contraptions, Reese was still alive.

So if Reese couldn't dream, if she couldn't hear herself in her own mind, how could she hear anyone else?

And what do you say to the comatose? Come on, you can do it. You can get healthy. You can exist again if you want.

Soledad thought about that, and thought it was like talking to a plant; like coaxing it from brown leaves to a bright green. Couldn't do it. She couldn't talk to Reese like she was some other form of life: alive but without expression. She couldn't talk to Reese like… as if she were the way she was: a thoughtless, senseless husk.

All Soledad could do was mumble something the content of which even she wasn't sure of. The voice she heard, her voice, was new and different. The burns on her throat had deformed her vocal cords. She liked to think she sounded raspy. Adult and mature. She figured she just sounded like she had throat cancer.