Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Upon awaking, Steve Watanabe found that Brandon was gone. Considering the portion of the night he’d spent awake, this seemed frankly miraculous, nearly as miraculous as the fact that Steve was still alive. He had no food, he had almost no water, he hadn’t bathed in so long he could scarcely remember what pleasure was afforded by bathing. But he was alive. And he was in possession of the rover, and all he had to do was start it and drive around the long way, into the outflow channels of the chasma, and around, and he would be back among the living. It might take a little while, but still. That is assuming, you know, that he intended to rejoin the rest of the crew. Maybe it was some kind of residual guilt about Brandon, and about the bad shape that Brandon had appeared to be in when they last had a conversation, but Steve found that the one way he could expiate some of the remorse he felt about everything that had happened on the Mars mission was to drive back to the site of the dig, so that his son and his wife would be well looked after, so that things would be made right. He waited for the morning sun to charge up the rover, and then he began driving back toward the cliff wall, looking for the spot where they’d come up. This while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky for the marauding ultralight.

In time, he came upon the collapsed section of the wall, which looked quite a bit more fearsome going down than it had coming up, even with the gentler slope, the sort of clamshell slope of the collapse. This was when Steve Watanabe — because going down is always more dangerous than going up — somehow managed, first to get the rover stuck between a couple of sheets of rock, and then, in attempting to dislodge it through expert manipulation of gears and transmission, to plunge the rover off a steep incline, and, luckily separated from it, to free-fall, landing on a shelf about two hundred meters or so above the floor of the Ius Chasma. The rover landed facedown, at the bottom, so that many of its solar panels were shattered in the accident, and it would have taken any number of Martian colonists, a group of them, to overturn the vehicle and restore it to running condition. In the meantime, Steve Watanabe also fell into unconsciousness.

There can no longer be a language with which to describe the psychology of Captain Jim Rose, because his consciousness as it might now have been described was so other from Jim Rose, as I had understood him, that language itself no longer applied. In the process of hunting Brandon Lepper on foot, Jim was reduced to a very primordial set of impulses. Of what did his consciousness consist? His command structure was at its most uncomplicated. He wanted only to find Brandon and squeeze the life out of him. It was no longer entirely apparent, nor would it have been to the old Jim, why this was so important. But the impulse remained to be satisfied, and Jim followed the tracks in the sand, and with an acute sense of smell that was new to him, he tasted the breezes. Amid the natural sulfur reek of this desolate place, he smelled the desperation of Brandon.

Jim would have been troubled by the spontaneous bleeding, had he language with which to describe it. The spontaneous bleeding was happening from a number of unlikely places. From interstitial spots in his physique, the crevice in his elbow, from somewhere in his neck. He would have been frightened in language, but outside of language he was just irritated with the gouts of blood that occluded his eyes. Or he was slowed down. The same with the rents in the uniform that he was wearing. He had slept out in the desert and had been incautious, for a lack of language, about preventing frostbite. The tips of his fingers had lost all sensation, but he had no particular allegiance to the individual fingers. He had no particular allegiance to anything except to the tracking and elimination of Brandon Lepper.

Brandon was traveling west, and so Jim followed westerly, though this meant that they were moving farther along the cliff face of the Valles Marineris, and farther away from the rest of the colonists. Brandon’s path was erratic. Here he swerved in on the plateau, and here he seemed to decide that if he didn’t keep the Ius Chasma on his left, he was doomed to wandering endlessly, unsure of his location.

It was on the morning of the third day that Jim, who had slowed to a few meager steps for each minute that passed on the Martian clock, saw, up ahead, a body slumped over in the sands, and he knew, in a way that was no longer of language , that he had treed his quarry, so to speak. He had little left to accomplish in his time on Mars. He rested, now that Brandon was in sight, and licked his fetid and cracking lips, which were streaming with some combination of viscosities that would not entirely clot, despite the lack of fluids in him. The rest of him, his back brain seemed to suggest, would aid in the dispatch of the evildoer. Brandon, meanwhile, as Jim drew closer, also readied himself. He was in possession of a knife, or perhaps a homemade razor, his Taser having plunged into the canyon, and the reflection from this weapon kept striking Jim retinally, so that, in a primeval way, he too knew to be prepared. And Brandon took this opportunity to try to use language, what was left of it, to head off the mortal assault that was in his immediate future. Since Jim didn’t care about language any longer, and had cast himself back into some much more elemental system of clicks and grunts, this poetical and uninflected plea for Brandon’s life was lost on him. Brandon muttered something about the good times they’d had together in the old days. Perhaps he said something like: “Can’t you just let me do what NASA brought me here to do?” Or: “Do you know what this meant to me?” Or something like this: “Could you really cut a man’s life short?” Which was not a question Jim asked himself. He responded resoundingly in the positive with a quickening of his pulse at the idea of squeezing the life out of Brandon. It was invigorating, except that he was not in possession of the concept of vigor. “You know that if you get back to Earth they will execute you.” But what was Earth to Jim now? Earth was nothing .

The moment of last resort was upon Lepper now. Pleas for mercy had gone unheard. Appeals to Captain Jim Rose’s conscience had elicited no reply. Lepper had only one remaining bargaining chip that he could introduce into the exchange. As Jim approached, Brandon rummaged in the pocket of his jumpsuit (which, kids, let me tell you, is not easy to do with the gloves on, even though the gloves are magnetically tipped in order to make it easier, theoretically, to pick up tools). With the onrushing of his antagonist, he was unable, at first, to procure the item he wanted to procure, but in time he did. He pulled it out, and in the palm of his glove, at first, it looked perhaps like some ancient home-rolled stogie, or perhaps like a small doughy confection that was ready to be oven fired into an agreeable dinner roll.

It was my finger.

“You looking for this?” Brandon said, and now the malice in his heart, since he believed his cause was nearly lost, surfaced in him, and he didn’t care any longer what Jim thought. “You looking for the finger of your friend? He’s your friend, right? Or maybe he was a little more than your friend? José, you know, he really wasn’t that bad a guy, until he went all soft, and at first he was kind of worried that he had been bunked on the gay capsule. So maybe you want a little memento of your good friend. I’ll give you this if you let me go. I think it’s only a little bit decomposed. Actually, you know, the Martian surface would be really good for tanning skins . Look how well preserved this is!”