Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Steve went facedown, hoping to avoid shrapnel, and when he got up, he could see Brandon was trying to pat down his flaming suit. Steve grabbed a blanket that he’d dragged out of the rover earlier, when trying to get a nap, and hurried to Brandon’s side to wrap him in it. This while Jim Rose, avenger, walked toward them, the wild Martian winds compassing about him, from the beached aircraft.

There were a number of things to consider for Steve Watanabe, in the moments he had at his disposal. There was enough juice in the rover to go a little bit. And there was, about ten miles south, a route out of the Ius Chasma. There had been a collapse there, ten or so million years ago, and the wind had eroded the channel down enough that Brandon had found himself able, he’d told Steve, to get the rover in and out. This was the one way, short of driving thousands of miles in one direction or several hundred in another, to get out of the Valles Marineris quickly, if you couldn’t fly . But what would happen if Steve and Brandon just drove off? What would happen with the important scientific work they had recently done, not to mention the gathering of ore necessary for a whole new breed of cybernetic semiconductor, at the behest of levelheaded administrators back home, if they absconded? What would happen, Steve thought, to this work they’d been doing on behalf of a large digital operating systems consortium based in Kuala Lumpur, and its American affiliate in Dallas? Brandon did have a Taser that had been provided by NASA for self-defense, and which he and Steve had been advised to employ as needed.

Brandon’s inclination, it seemed, was to tackle the problem mano a mano. Despite mild burns. And Jim Rose seemed to have no better idea himself. The two of them fell upon each other. Steve Watanabe, who, unlike his colleagues here on the Mars mission, had not been in and out of the military in Central Asia, had only rudimentary combat training. He was a Buddhist. In fact, as a kid, he’d never come out on the winning end in any fight. He was the kind of boy, by virtue of excellent skills in areas that others disdained (cello, chemistry, velvet paintings), who had always come in for a lot of racially dubious ribbing about how easy it all was for him, and he had attempted to defend himself physically on certain occasions with disappointing results. He’d had a couple of teeth knocked out; he’d bloodied his nose, even had it reset once. He took these lumps and moved on, more wary and a little bit more hapless about the world.

Steve’s inclination, therefore, was to escape with the rover, as soon as it was feasible, and to head the ten miles south, hugging the wall of the canyon, where it would be very difficult for the ultralight to follow. Eventually, the plane was going to run out of fuel. Because some of its fuel had already been used to fashion the impressive Molotov cocktail. The ultralight stayed aloft during the day with its solar panels, but the sun was all but set. It was going to get very cold very soon.

Two men bent on doing each other harm. Even under the best of circumstances, such a thing can be a drawn-out and unpleasant affair, and Steve, in his later report to NASA, did not give an account of every blow and counterblow. We know that Brandon was once a welterweight, and he was probably good on his feet, especially with the gravity only about two-thirds what it was back on Earth, so that the dancing and feinting of this prizefight was like some fabulous ethnic ritual, or like one of the fight sequences from old Hong Kong action films, whose only raison d’être was holding gravity in abeyance. Nothing was more impressive, when the goal was insuring the stock valuation of a large Malaysian entertainment provider, than the cessation of the law of gravity. And that’s what this fight was like, with Brandon bobbing around and using, Steve supposed, some very traditional pugilistic combinations. Meanwhile, how inhuman , how cold, how expedient was Brandon’s antagonist. Jim Rose had no compunction about making sure his style, as a combatant, was about forcing total and unconditional submission. There was going to be no prolonged mixing it up. In the dusky light, it seemed as though he’d seized one of Brandon’s arms and had bit down on it, shoving the forearm into his mouth and chomping.

Brandon squealed and somersaulted out of the way, behind the end of the rover, so as to put the vehicle between them. Whereupon, in the interval available, Brandon seemed to be squatting down to look for a rock of some kind. It was at this point in the conflict that Brandon, who had treated Steve as if he were an indentured servant, called his name. “Steve! Steve!” I have no more details than that, just Steve’s name. And then Brandon heaved some small piece of volcanic rock at Jim Rose, striking him in the solar plexus without much apparent effect. The two warriors breathed great gasping breaths, because they were running short of oxygen as Jim worked his way around the rover, and when they fell against each other, mountain goat style, they clutched and clawed, in an attempt to wrestle each other to the ground.

“Steve!”

There was nothing for Steve Watanabe to do but to get in as close as he could get, in order to, if possible, affect the outcome of the struggle. The two wrestlers flipped each other around a couple of times, working toward some ineffectual attempts to strangle, and when Jim Rose was on top, about to prevail, Steve grasped a spade and went up and whacked him hard on the back of the head, on the part that he knew controlled autonomic physiologic functions like breathing and swallowing, so that Rose toppled over onto his side and was disoriented for a moment. It was precisely in this moment that Steve climbed into the nearby rover. He was followed not long after by Brandon Lepper, who flung himself into the back where the mining equipment was meant to go, and then, as quickly as he was able, Steve thrust the rover into drive and started off. The rovers can’t go very quickly on Mars, where there are no roads and where there are bits of disjecta from crater impact everywhere. Even when Brandon and Steve were making the best time they were able to, they were not terribly fast. They were in danger of shredding their tires. This made it not at all impossible for Jim Rose to chase after his quarry on foot. At the first opportunity, he attempted to latch on to the back of the rover. They were dragging him for a little bit, until Brandon, with a hammer he found in a wheel well, tried to hammer Jim’s digits. Because of the choppiness of the ride, he missed many times before he was able to connect with one, leaving Jim howling in pain, as, upon letting go, he collided with some rocks on his way to a prone position.

Now there was time enough for Brandon and even Steve, who kept turning back to survey the progress of the fight before nearly hitting various boulders, to understand how disheveled and unlike himself Captain Jim Rose appeared. Not the magnetic and dashing former military hero who was, in the press, one of the bright stars of the Mars mission. Steve’s question to himself later was: Had he himself fallen as far as Jim? Had he become someone else entirely , a nomad of the desert of this place, a miner in the salt mines of Mars, someone capable of malevolence or of crimes that were unacceptable to his earthling analogue?

The rover ground along the floor of the Ius Chasma, its enormous and threatening wall flush against the side of the vehicle. Brandon lay in the back clutching at an assortment of burns and wounds, until they came, after thirty minutes’ time, to the collapse where a slope had been rendered for them. A slope brushed clear of debris by the ceaseless winds. Elsewhere, Jim was undoubtedly heading for his ultralight, where he would wait for sunlight in order to conduct the second phase of the manhunt. Steve and Brandon needed to get as much lead time on him as they could. But the question was which way to go? They were soon to be on the far side of the Ius Chasma, and it had taken Brandon a good ten days to get there when first surveying his mining sites. Upon crossing the chasm, they would be far enough from the campsites containing the remaining Martian colonists, not to mention food and water, to make long-term survival difficult.