Keeping Luna Read online

  “By the time I had come into the picture, the ball had already been rolling for well over two decades, and the General’s network was vast. Over the years he had been instrumental in installing puppet governments in small nations around the world, usually by fixing elections, but a few by military coup. These lay ready and waiting. Sleeper cells, you might call them. In addition to these, he had some extremely rich men in his pocket, for one reason or another. And he had a solid core of U.S. soldiers ready to act at his behest, against any target, foreign or domestic, whenever his command came across the line.

  “We knew that it wasn’t going to be pretty when it all went down. It couldn’t be. But we knew in our hearts that what we were doing was necessary for humanity and for the planet that hosts us. Better than that, we knew it in our minds. After all, what the hell does a heart know?

  “Everything we planned to do was objectively justifiable, and done for the benefit of the generations to come. There was no malice in our intentions, though the means would surely be construed as malicious. We were intent on building a civilization in the truest sense, free of superstitions and the lures of self-interest.

  “But I don’t think that any of us really had any idea just how ugly things were going to get. Maybe the General did.”

  Lamar shrugged.

  “Now, Gabriel, I do believe that that was an ominous enough tone for us to stop on, so I’d like to shift direction. I’d like to talk about… you.”

  Gabriel sat forward abruptly, the dark red leather creaking beneath him as he did. “Me, sir? I mean… me? I’m really not so interesting. I’d much rather hear more about the General.”

  “You never use my name, Gabriel. Why is that? I think it’s because you’re holding on to some desire to sound like you respect me. When I am finished with my story, you will understand that I am not to be respected. At that point, you might be inclined to call me all sorts of things, but for now you can just begin by calling me Lamar. Now, I would take some more scotch, if there’s any more to be had, Gabriel.”

  Gabriel reached for the whiskey, which was nearing the end of its life. Only a few centimeters of its golden glory were left sloshing around at the bottom of the bottle.

  “Ok. Lamar.” He split the last of the bottle between them. “What was it you wanted to know about me, then?”

  “Mostly, I want to check your understanding. I want to know how much you know.” Lamar leaned back and threw an ankle over his skinny thigh, just above the knob of his knee. “Why is it, do you think, that I chose you for this job, Gabriel?”

  Gabriel didn’t like this sort of quiz, and if he hadn’t already been red in the face from the whiskey, he would have become so now. There was a definitive answer to this question. A very specific one, and it was an unfair request to ask him to identify it. And truly he had no way of knowing it.

  “Well, Lamar, at the interview…”

  “No.” Lamar cut him off with one word and let him try again.

  “My marks in school were…”

  “No.”

  The room was still, and becoming rather warm. It was heated from the outside by the sun, which beat down on the windows and through the half-drawn venetians, and from within by the radiating body heat of two half-drunken humans.

  Gabriel refused to venture any more blind guesses at this riddle.

  “As a student you wrote a paper. A critique that brought into question both the necessity and the morality of the Coupling Program.”

  “THAT is why? I barely even got any feedback from my professor! He just told me that my argument was weak and relied too heavily on the morality angle.”

  “Now morality is hard to substantiate, that is true, but it is important. And that essay got a lot more attention than you know. It got your name put on a list. Not a list you want your name to be on. They were watching you. Listening…”

  “Who?! What?! What are you…”

  Lamar raised his hand out in front of him, signaling that he was not to be interrupted just yet. Then he slowly brought the hand out to his side, motioning at the window and towards the visible corner of the main municipal building.

  “They were watching, and waiting for any reason to put you on a boat. Do you know what it means to be Reassigned and Relocated?”

  “Well…”

  “You don’t know a fucking thing!” Lamar snapped at him harshly, and Gabriel shrank back into his seat. Lamar took a moment to collect himself before continuing.

  “I watched that list for years, Gabriel. I waited for someone with a brain to pop up.”

  Lamar was smiling out of just one side of his mouth, and it made him look cruel and sinister as he spoke.

  “You see, Gabriel, people with brains don’t tend to be openly critical of the system.”

  Chapter Seven

  Owen could see his hands moving in front of him, but they would not obey him.

  They were busy.

  They had work to do.

  The left pressed against the man’s throat and the right buried a large hunting knife through his off-white shirt and into the side of his stomach, then pulled across the lower abdomen, and everything fell out onto Owen’s black combat boots. Owen blinked and the body was gone, replaced now by a straight, wet streak of dark red on the portion of the deck that stretched from his feet to the edge of the stern and then over it.

  His head filled up and rattled with a thousand voices, all frantic and muffled, crying and begging and pleading without forming words. A cacophony of pain, fear, and confusion, and it became Owen’s pain and Owen’s fear and confusion as it shook everything he was from behind his eyes.

  There was a loud splashing sound, as if someone had poorly executed a dive from five meters up, and then a new body was marched in front of these busy, busy hands of his.

  This time it was a woman standing before him, and her hands were bound behind her with plastic zip ties. Black cotton was pulled tightly over her head, obscuring the specifics of her visage, but it hugged the contours well enough to lend a half-accurate impression of the way she might appear if uncovered. The rest of her was dressed in the same creamy white color as the man before her had been.

  Owen wanted to pull her into his body, to tell her not to be scared, that there was nothing to be scared of. But his hands went back to work, throwing jabs at the center of her frame until her arms instinctively pressed together in front of her in an attempt to block, and then his hands came outwards, launching into two monstrous hooks and smashing into her from the sides.

  He could feel ribs cracking and pushing into her chest, and then she fell to her knees. She would have collapsed forward, had his left hand not caught her by the throat and held her up while the right came across and snatched the black cover from her head. Her dark hair fell down past her shoulders, all sweat and tangles. He shoved her backwards onto the blades of her shoulders, and she lay there looking up at him and struggling to pull air through her nose and into her broken body. Her brown eyes were wide open and did not blink, and they were wet and filled with a terror and a despair that no language has adequate words for. Suffering. Agony. Torment. Nothing came close to capturing it.

  A man’s rough voice was barking in Owen’s face, “The hoods stay ON, Soldier! Is that understood?!” This voice had its own set of hands, and those hands went to work on the ground beneath Owen. They took the heavy sandbag from next to the woman and heaved it off the edge behind her. As the sack disappeared overboard, the cord connecting it to her ankle went taut and spun her around, flopping her over onto her front side.

  Still gasping for air, the woman clawed desperately at the deck as she was drug feet first towards the aft of the ship. There was nothing for her to grab onto. Had there been, she wouldn’t have had the strength to hold on anyhow. She slid on her stomach to the edge and then over, her back crashing a moment later into the water below.

  Owen stepped over to see beyond the edge and saw her face looking up at his, her eyes staring into his eyes fo
r a split-second before they plunged beneath the surface and sank out of sight beneath the white churning wake.

  The wailing of the voices in his head was overwhelming now, and they were all crying to him for help. For mercy. His hands came up to his temples and pressed in on his skull, trying to force the sound out through his ears. He clinched his eyes shut as hard as he could, but all he could see were the woman’s own tortured eyes as she slipped away.

  He lived in that moment, enslaved by it, cursed to dwell within it.

  The muffled screams were growing louder, and those eyes drew closer and closer to him until he could see nothing beyond them. There was nothing beyond the bottomless blacks of those terrible eyes. And when he thought the voices could get no louder, they just pressed on higher and higher in a perpetual crescendo, consuming him.

  Owen’s eyelids flew open and he sat up abruptly. His heart was pounding within him as if it were trying to escape, and his pillow and the light blue sheets beneath him were soaked with sweat. He swore he could smell the ocean for the few seconds it took for his eyes to focus and for him to remember where he was. It wasn’t the ocean he smelled now. It was bacon, smoky and rich. It did little to stir his appetite just now.

  “You awake in there?” The voice was Claire’s and it came from the next room. “Breakfast is ready if you want any. Or I could eat yours for you.”

  He slid on some clean pants and a shirt and came out into the living room, which was married with the open kitchen. Claire sat at the glass dining table, reading the morning’s news on her tablet. She was wearing Owen’s clothes from the day before, and they rested loosely on her solid, slender frame. The plate in front of her was bare, but for a few streaks where the runny egg yolks had stuck. Across from her was another plate with bacon, three eggs and a slice of toast. Owen saw her and chuckled quietly.

  “Oh, this?” she said, tugging lightly at the front of her navy blue shirt. “They looked comfortable, and they smell nice.”

  “I’ll survive,” he replied as he sat down in front of his breakfast. “You’ve spoiled us this morning.”

  “Yes, I have. We’ll find some way to burn it off, I’m sure,” she grinned.

  They sat in silence while he ate and she read. The quiet had lost its terror over the last several weeks, and they had both learned to be comfortable with it. Neither one of them worried what the other person was thinking or bothered themselves with trying to find something to say to fill these still spaces of time.

  When he had finished eating, he placed his fork and knife onto the plate and pushed it slightly out in front of him. His eyes shifted to her, though hers remained on the tablet she was reading from.

  “You got the weather on there?”

  “Well, it says it should be nice today. Sunny with a few clouds, temperature around twenty…” She turned her head to her right and looked out, past the small raindrops that were running down the outside of the glass. The water beyond was hidden beneath an endless grey fog. “But I have my doubts.”

  She went on reading while he stared out the window into the nothingness. His elbow was resting on the table and his thumb was propped underneath his chin, the first knuckle of his index finger working its way back and forth across his closed lips as his dream revisited him.

  “Thanks for letting me stay here last night. It’s a ways back to my place.” The words fell heavily out of his mouth, low and nearly monotone, and his eyes were still fixed staring out the window into the fog.

  “Sure. But you won’t need to keep coming over so much anymore. I mean, not if you don’t want to.” She tried to sound nonchalant, but wasn’t very convincing. She slid a small, thin device, about the size and shape of a digital thermometer, across the table and towards him.

  “But the Program says, since we’re supposed to do this a few more times, that we should stay in contact. And they insist that when I’m getting round and heavy, towards the end, that I might like some help from day to day… although I’m sure I’d be fine on my own.”

  Owen picked up the device and looked down at it. There was a small window on it that framed a little, red plus sign. “Ah. So we… I mean, we…”

  “And of course you can be with others after you get back on your shots, and…”

  “No!” he nearly shouted, the single syllable impulsively rocketing out of him and resonating off the glass table and the bare walls, like a drumstick lost down onto a snare drum. He regained himself and returned to his usual low voice, although it was now operating with a greater range of tone. “I mean, I’ve never been so good with others. With anyone else, really.” He looked up into her face. “It wouldn’t be a problem for me to stay in touch.” He cleared his throat. “I want to keep seeing you.”

  She smiled, embarrassed. “I would like that.”

  “We can still climb, right? I mean, while you’re pregnant?” he asked, offering a detour from the moment.

  She laughed, and felt a little warm in the face as her own escaped laughter echoed in her ears. “Yes. And swim, and run, and lift…”

  He looked back down at the device in his hand, studying it, his hands working over the curves on each end. “So how does this thing work? How does it know?”

  Her smile stretched wider as she watched him handling it.

  “I peed on it.”

  His fingers shot open and the device fell onto the table before him. She broke out laughing as he rose slowly from his seat and picked up both their plates, looking down at what he was doing and trying to hide his own grin.

  He walked around the kitchen counter, placed the plates down into the sink, and ran a little water over them, rinsing his fingers in the stream at the same time. He turned off the faucet and leaned both of his wet hands onto the counter, looking over at her and conceding his defeat to her twisted sense of humor.

  “Ok. Ok. Ha ha. Are we climbing today, or what? Is that what you’re planning on wearing?”

  Chapter Eight

  Gabriel’s hand came up from under the covers and half-smacked him in the face as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His mouth was dry and sticky, and the taste of his own breath he found appalling.

  He rolled from his back onto his right side, and suddenly found his face inches from Lamar’s. He jumped and let out some involuntary combination of vowels, rolling onto his back once more. Regaining command of his voice, which was lethargic with the memory of booze, he grumbled. “What the hell are you doing, Lamar?”

  “HA! Me? Just having a bit of a laugh!” He sat back in the chair he had pulled over next to the bed.

  “You’re a terrible old man.”

  “I know. I know. I thought we’d get an early start today, young Gabriel. Plenty more to cover.”

  “What time is it?”

  “One in the afternoon. I guess ‘early start’ wasn’t actually the best choice of words.”

  Gabriel kneaded his closed eyes with the palms of both hands and smacked his mouth open and shut a few times. “Do you have a cat, Lamar?”

  “No,” Lamar answered, puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

  “I think something shit in my mouth while I was sleeping.”

  Lamar burst into laughter and slapped himself on his narrow thigh a few times. The laughter slowly faded out in waves and ended in a sigh.

  “Alright then. Rise and shine. Breakfast is waiting.” Lamar picked himself up from the chair, both elbow joints popping as he pushed off of the armrests, and then he hobbled his way out of the room. Gabriel marveled at the sight, thinking Lamar had never seemed so much like an old man as he did right in that moment.

  He peeled back the covers and realized that he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, all the way down to his shoes, which were still neatly tied. As he sauntered to the bedroom door, off-balance and wobbly, his head aching, he understood at once how Lamar had seemed to age overnight.

  Upon entering the large living space that the bedroom joined with, it occurred to him that he had no memory of ever walking through
here. Of course he must have, but he thought it odd not to remember a room of such grandeur. This room was spread across at least four times as much floor space as the bedroom, which itself was half the size of Gabriel’s own flat.

  The outermost walls were replaced with tall glass, which ended only about twenty centimeters from the ceiling and the floor. A low, wooden sill ran the length of the wall beneath the windows, and was bare but for a dozen squat, cloud-white candles which were spaced evenly apart.

  A large, white sofa with a very low back horseshoed its way around a mahogany-framed coffee table with a glass top. It was placed near the corner in such a manner that every seat had a view. And an incredible view it was from up here, facing west and north out over the harbor waters. The sky was overcast without being dark.

  The table was laden with platters of meats, cheeses, assorted breads and fruit and other treats, some of which Gabriel was unable to identify. He was astounded. A barrage of smells came at him, although his appetite was still unable to find him. This was by far the finest spread he had ever seen, and he couldn’t stomach the thought that it would be wasted on him, a man with no lust to eat any of it.

  As he came around the left end of the couch, near the window, Lamar rounded the other end and met him with a familiar sight.

  “Are you serious? I thought we finished it. I’m struggling with the thought of food alone, and you’re putting more scotch in front of me?”

  Lamar smiled with one side of his mouth. “There’s always more. Now trust an old man. We would have called this ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’. I know it sounds awful right now, and it will be, most certainly. But it will get you on your feet again, so to speak. Don’t worry about the food. It’s not going anywhere.” He extended his arm a little further until Gabriel accepted the glass. “Sipping will not be the best approach for you right now. Take it all in one go, and try not to breath for a bit.”