VISITORS

Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem has had recent appearances in the John Skipp anthology Werewolves and Shape Shifters, and in Stephen Jones’ Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels & Heavenly Hosts. His most recent book is In Concert, a collection of all his short fiction collaborations with wife Melanie Tem. In his new tale for us, Steve takes a sharp look at the collateral consequences of cryobiology.

* * * *

Marie thought the visitors’ transport from the parking lot into the sanctuary the nicest thing she’d ever ridden in. There was no road noise, the seats were more comfortable than any chair in their house, and with the windows wrapped ceiling to floor it felt as if she were floating along inside a bubble above the world. Nothing had the power to touch her here. She had known they had vehicles like this in the cities but she and Walt had lived out in the country their whole lives.

“It’s nicer than last time, isn’t it? A lot changes in five years. The world moves faster all the time.” Walt said this without looking at her. He’d kept up this not-quite-whispered monologue since they’d entered the gate: recent things he’d read about the sanctuary, things that had changed, things that looked the same but really weren’t, what the other visitors seemed like, what the other visitors must think of them. She was used to it, but she supposed other passengers might be annoyed. Walt wasn’t as good at whispering as he thought he was.

Walt himself had changed, or had just become more and more like himself, which was still change. He worried about everything until it festered, and that could be quite hard to be around. Back when they were young parents they had been sure and confident of everything, or at least pretended to be. Wasn’t that the way you had to act in front of your child?

If telling her every little thing he noticed made Walt feel better, then more power to him. He’d always been a good man—he deserved to be paid attention to.

Marie lazily gazed out at the passing scenery as if they were on vacation. She tried not to think about where they were, or why, at least for the time being. That had been her own big change these past five years, discovering you had to grab peace of mind wherever and whenever you could.

Since their last visit a bird habitat had been added, a couple of fish ponds, and everywhere you looked there were small and medium-sized animals—rabbits and deer, foxes and even a small bear—held back by a single transmitter cable. The animals couldn’t cross from their side; people couldn’t cross from theirs. Both groups, Marie supposed, believed themselves safe.

Here at the Phoenix Sanctuary the medical staff and the designers sure tried to make it seem like somewhere you’d go on vacation. Outside there were rows of palm trees, like in paradise or Hollywood; huge flower beds alternating rainbows of yellow, red, blue; people strolling down gleaming resin mahogany laminate walkways that ran web-like all over the grounds. Staff members wore bright colors matching the flowers. It was all so much like when Dorothy woke up in Oz—so past awake a body might think they were hallucinating.

“See, they’ve got picnic tables now. You can have yourself a picnic.” Walt spoke with surprised pleasure as they passed several outdoor pavilions.

“I think it’s just in this section, hon.” She tried to keep her voice soft, at the same time wishing he wouldn’t sound so enthusiastic. “For reunions, going home celebrations, that kind of thing. Happy occasions. They won’t have picnic tables where we’re going.”

“You don’t know that for sure. Besides, in the old days you might have a picnic after a funeral.” He said it sullenly, as if insisting he was right about a few things at least. “Everybody brought food. You talked about how good so-and-so’s potato salad was. You might ask them for the recipe. It brought some small comfort in a tragic situation.”

“Walt, he isn’t dead.”

“I know.” He turned and stared at her firmly. “I know—I was just making a point.”

She looked away. As they drew closer to the first stop, the low murmur between some of the passengers grew in volume and excitement level as they shared stories of family members residing here as the result of this or that fatal trauma or incurable disease, how many years they’d been visiting, what progress had been made, if the loved one was scheduled for a return home in the foreseeable future. Soon the transport was gliding to a stop. Most of the passengers exited quickly, their green-edged cards clutched in their hands, continuing to share information as to what they hoped for this visit, as they stepped out on the laminate walks, followed the imitation street signs to the various pseudo-adobe buildings sparkling pink under the hot Arizona sun. Some, like tourists, snapped on their sunglasses as if in salute.

When the transport started rolling again Marie noticed only three passengers remaining besides themselves: an elderly Hispanic woman wrapped in dark scarves hunched over in the back row, apparently praying, a thin-faced gentleman in a stylish suit who was positioned as close to the side exit door as possible, and the plump, gray-haired lady who was now in the process of changing seats, apparently in a bid to sit closer to them. She had that look about her of an eagerness to speak that filled Marie with unease, and she held a blue-edged card against her bosom. Marie felt in her pocket for her own card to make sure it was still there, but didn’t bring it out.

“My sweet Charlotte has been in that place fifteen years now, and finally today I get to bring my baby home!” She sat down, fluttering her free hand.

“That must have been a real trial for you, dear,” Marie said, patting the woman’s wobbly arm. Beside her Walt shifted with an irritated sigh, pretending to study the exotic garden sculptures they were passing.

The woman reached into her purse and Marie found herself leaning away as if she expected some sort of weapon. “Here we are together, before the heart attack,” the woman said, waving a wrinkled photograph in Marie’s face. “In better days.”

Marie received it gingerly. In the photo the woman looked much younger and more expensively dressed. Of course—you couldn’t get suspension insurance for a dog. Not yet. The dog itself—a fat mat of hair with a yellow bow affixed crookedly to the top, resting in the woman’s lap, staring out with dull mudball eyes.

“Very sweet,” Marie said, and instantly gave the photo back.

“If all goes as planned, I get to bring her home today. Her heart’s good as new, and she’s been awake three weeks with no complications, so they just have to release her. I can bring her right on the vehicle. There’ll be an attendant, of course, but that’s just precautionary. It’s our legal system, you know?”

Marie nodded hesitantly. “I’m very happy for you.”

“Why, thank you. And yourself ? How long has your little friend been in sanctuary?”

Marie gazed at the woman, wishing she hadn’t been so friendly. “Twenty years,” she replied, not knowing what else to say except the truth.

“How awful for you! That’s even worse than with my little Charlotte.”

Marie didn’t know what to do next, and Walt was staying quiet, still staring out at the scenery. Then to her relief the transport began to slow again, coming to rest alongside a long, oval building painted blue as the sky, resting like a huge egg planted halfway down in the sand. A detailed mural of dogs, cats, and birds playing together in a field of clouds dominated the wall to the right of the front door.

The woman leapt up with the well-loved picture of Charlotte in one hand, her blue-edged card raised high in the other. She rushed toward the door as it slid open, but paused as she was stepping down, twisted her head around to look at Marie. “You best hurry—you don’t want to miss your appointment!”

“We’ll be fine, dear. My husband and I are going to stay on for just a little further. You go on and have a good reunion with your pup, and we’ll see you both on the way back.”

The woman looked confused. “But this is the last stop—” And shut her mouth. She looked at the old woman still bent over praying, then at Marie. With an air of sadness she turned around and climbed off.

The transport started up again and passed on in absolute silence. It traveled several more miles through diminishing palm trees into low scrub and then very little vegetation of any kind, long stretches of gravel and industrial wire fencing, through several sharp turns and down a slight ridge before arriving at the largest of the three facilities within the sanctuary. The massive building was partially hidden behind a tall ridge of sheer rock, blending in with walls almost the same shade of gray. Marie pulled the steel-edged card out of her pocket and made herself stand.

It was an insensitive thing to say, but the words were out of Marie’s mouth before she could stop them. “See, Walt. No picnic tables.”

For all the evident progress in other areas of the sanctuary, Marie wasn’t at all surprised that the receiving room had changed little since their last trip. The best thing that might be said about it was that at least they weren’t asked to share it. One receiving room per family unit per scheduled visit. Marie found some odd comfort in the terminology—she hadn’t thought of the three of them as a “unit” in some time.

Two soft-edged tables divided the room. On the family side were eight or ten seats like toadstools permanently attached to the floor, and places on the wall where on their first visit twenty years ago (the so-called “goodbye” visit) had been the basics of an entertainment and information center, but ever since then had been blank except for a random constellation of empty cable portals and mounting holes.

The only loose object in the room was one of those colorful soft bibles with the floppy plastic pages the missionaries were always handing out, left lying on the floor like a broken toy. Marie walked over and picked it up, shook it out and laid it on top of one of the stools. She wasn’t a devout believer herself, but some things she just didn’t like to see tossed around.

The resident side of the room was empty except for the magnetic floater tracks embedded in the floor and the wide sliding door in the center of the back wall. That was where they’d bring Tommy in, guided into the room inside whatever contraption they had him in for the day. The very first time Walt and Marie had visited there’d been a scheduling mistake and the attendants had floated him into the room still in his capsule. He’d only been awake a few hours and was still impossible to talk to. His head wobbled in and out of that plastic bubble on top and Marie just kept thinking about one of her big cooking pots and her son’s head bobbing up and down in the soup froth like a carrot. They’d made sure ever since then he was at least forty-eight hours into his wake cycle when they visited.

Still, they were likely to see him affixed/strapped/contained by this or that new disturbing bit of medical/suspension/restriction-ware. His muscles had to be stimulated, his bones treated for decalcification, his cell damage repaired, his responses tested, his mind’s roots reconnected, the integrity of his information store preserved. The technology—and the terminology—changed all the time, and these prisoners were always the first to be tested with whatever new developments had been devised. Every time they came here the equipment was different, although their son the prisoner/guinea pig appeared much the same—wet, confused, and somewhat disturbed. Marie sometimes imagined she and Walt were as much the Rip Van Winkles of their family tale as their once sweet, slumbering boy.

Walt sat hunched forward on one of the stools, rubbing his hands as if to rid them of some invisible film. “Hope it’s not too long. How long was it last time, do you remember?”

“I have no idea how long it was last time.”

“In the beginning they had some video you could watch, remember? Now they don’t have anything.”

“Did you bring your reader?”

“Left it back in the truck. They allow those now?”

“Last time I checked. Try to calm yourself—it shouldn’t be too long.”

Walt snorted. “You know even if we were just visiting our pet, like that last group on the transport, we’d have it better than this. They’d have something for us to kill some time with, make us feel better. This prison brings them more income than the rest of their operations combined—it makes all that other nonsense possible. You’d think they could spend some money on the damn visiting rooms.”

“They can’t make it seem like a resort, Walt—it’s supposed to be punishment.”

“He’s being punished. We’re being punished. But we didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve been over and over it in my head, and I can’t find anything we did wrong. We deserve better.”

“I think almost everybody deserves better, sweetheart.” She walked over and sat down in front of the soft bible, picked it up and flipped it back and forth. It weighed almost nothing, and she found the gentle slapping sound of page against page to be almost pleasant. “A lot of people think it’s not right, having people like Tommy in here. You commit crimes all your life and then you get suspension—that means immortality to some people. It’s not justice—that’s the way people think.”

Walt put his face in his hands. “Then make them come on visiting day. See if they still think it’s so great.”

Marie stroked her hands over some of the pages, let her fingers skate across all the big print words and the bright pictures. Occasionally her touch would trigger something and an image would move, a movie would play. Moses parting the Red Sea. The lost and the crippled lining up to see the Healer. A faint cloud of static drifted up from the pages, the deteriorated narrative from some failing audio function. None of the pages were smooth, unblemished. She lifted the book up to better catch the light, and from faint reflections determined that every page had been scarred, scrubbed across the floor, beaten against walls and furniture, clawed with fingernails in order to destroy, or else to extract what lay trapped inside.

A hum filled the room and hidden lights flashed rapidly. The door in the back wall began to slide. Marie and Walt both stood and joined together behind the tables.

It took Marie more than a few moments to figure out what exactly she was seeing. The usual two attendants walked Tommy in. They were dressed more like medical professionals than guards, but she could see part of a shock gun poking out from the edge of the left one’s silver smock.

Stretched between them and for ten or more feet vertically appeared to be a giant bed turned up easel-like on its bottom edge, wrapped in thick layers of a white clothlike material. Peeking out of the folds near the center was Tommy’s head, soaked and dripping as if he’d just come out of his shower or bath, like when he was a boy and Marie had wrapped him up completely in the fluffiest white towels they had, patting and hugging him dry.

As the easel glided closer Marie could make out the outline of her son’s arms and legs trapped beneath the material, stretched out like a swatted insect and quivering as if attempting movement against some powerful resistance. At the bottom of the easel a variety of wires and hoses leading along the floor and back through the door snaked up into the sheets. Tommy’s head turned slightly side to side, but did not nod forward, held against the bed by some invisible means.

As this platform slowed to a stop Tommy looked down at them, his eyes squinted. His face looked grayish in spots, but his forehead and cheekbones were polished a luminescent vanilla. A number of black and red streaks near his hairline displayed the battle between skin damage and treatment.

His voice came out creaking from somewhere deep in his chest. “Who are they?”

The attendant on the left did not look at him, but said, “They’re your parents.”

Tommy’s eyes opened a little further, as if he were forcing himself to focus. “No,” he replied, and closed them.

“Tom, it’s us. Your mom and dad.” Walt had stepped forward, then past the tables.

The attendant on the right stepped in front of him, waving his hands. “Behind the table, sir.” Walt hesitantly obliged.

Tommy blinked. “You changed.”

“We get older, but it’s still us.” Marie didn’t like looking at Walt’s forced smile.

“You’re not—not who you are in my dream.” Tommy grimaced as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. He moved his head slightly, enough that Marie knew he was focused on her now. But at the moment she couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t even say hello. Walt was looking at her expectantly. She looked away.

“So, son, how are you doing?” Walt asked.

Tommy grimaced again. “I don’t. Don’t do things.”

“I mean how are you feeling?”

Tommy was suddenly staring somewhat wide-eyed. He shook his head.

“Tommy?” Marie made herself speak. “Do you know where you are, honey?”

He opened his mouth slightly, let his tongue slip out, pulled it back in. “Prison,” he mumbled. “Sleeping.”

The attendant on the right—who looked more aggressive than the other one, but maybe that was just the circumstances—spoke up. “He’s been briefed. We brief them each time we bring them back, even if it’s just for repair, neural and muscle stimulation, whatever. It’s in the literature we gave you. We tell them who they are and where they are, and what they did to get themselves here. Most of them remember it pretty quickly, in any case.”

Marie stared at the man. “I’m Tommy’s mother. Do you ever tell him he might get better, that you might come up with some kind of drug, or some kind of surgery, that will make him stop all that nonsense and then he can come home with us?”

“I’m not a doctor, ma’am. I have no idea how close they are to any of that.”

Walt stepped too far forward again, much to Marie’s dismay. The attendant waved his hand again, the fingers of his other hand moving slightly toward his weapon. “Walt, please,” she said. “Move back, honey.”

Walt turned and took a few agitated steps, then turned around again. “Are they even working on a cure?”

The attendant didn’t answer. Walt looked up at his son. “Are you sorry for what you did, son? At least tell them that—it might make a difference.”

“Walt—”

He waved her away as abruptly as the attendant had waved at him. “Just say it, son. You know you hurt all those people, and now you’re sorry about it. At least tell them that much. It’s a start. You’d been drinking a lot, drugging and such, and people got hurt, and some people killed. We’re all sorry that happened.”

“Walt, it’s not like it happened once or twice.” She was angry, but didn’t want to say too much in front of the attendants. “He’d been doing those things since age sixteen, robbing and hurting people.” She tried to keep her voice low, but she didn’t think Tommy could hear her, or care if he did. “I don’t think he really meant to hurt anyone, but that didn’t keep it from happening. That’s the truth of it. He wouldn’t or couldn’t stop.”

“I know, Marie! But they could do something about whatever’s in him making him do these things. Things are changing all the time. They can work honest-to-god miracles now. He could ride back with us one of these days.”

“The high repeaters are hard,” the attendant interrupted. “No one knows what to do with them. And people need to be protected.”

“Shut up. Just shut up,” Walt said. “I’m talking to my son.”

“Walt!”

“He doesn’t know anything, Marie. He’s just some underpaid guard. Like I don’t know my son belongs here. Like I don’t know people have to be protected.”

Marie thought Tommy was crying. Then she decided it was something like laughter. Something confused and involuntary. It was strained, and hardly out of his mouth, but it was more like laughter than anything else.

“People have things. You need,” Tommy said. “What do you do? You do what you do. Do what you have to do. Can’t help it.”

“You don’t mean that,” Walt said.

“Are you okay, Tommy?” Marie asked.

“Okay? I’m okay. You okay? Why don’t you leave so I can sleep?”

“Don’t talk to your mother that way!” Walt shouted.

“I sleep, okay? That’s what I do. All I want to do. Dreams aren’t so good, but then you sleep. The parade goes this way. You go that way.”

“You dream?” Marie asked, shocked.

“Guess it’s dream. You don’t see me walking. You don’t see me moving. You see where I am. It’s dream.”

She looked at the attendant. “Ma’am, he’s confused,” he said. “They don’t dream, not while they’re suspended.”

“Tommy, what do you dream about? Tell me, son.”

His tongue peeked out again, randomly wetting his lips. Then he clamped his eyes shut. “I sit on the bed. My house, my room. Smell something cooking. Somebody’s doing something outside the door. Making something. Building something. Can’t see. It’s something about me. I don’t know, but I keep smelling. I keep smelling, then I know it’s me cooking. They’re cooking me.”

“Ma’am, there’s no electrical activity in the brain while they’re in suspension,” the attendant said. “Did you read the literature? In the old days, we’d call them dead. You don’t dream when you’re dead.”

“Walking in my room,” Tommy continued. “I walk and the room’s so big. Did you make my room bigger? Thinking while I’m walking. I go down halls, up down stairs, in my room. But see nobody. I hear you guys outside the door. Talking. Making things. But I don’t see.”

“There is a period of time while we’re waking them. You might say while the juice is being turned back on.” The attendant sounded calm, reasonable. “He might dream then.”

“Tommy, how long do you dream? How long does it last?” she called up to him, unsuccessfully trying to control her tears.

“Always. There in the room, the whole time. You left me there, Mom. Did you forget I was there?”

“My boy says he’s been dreaming, that he’s feeling things, always! No one ever told us that!” she shouted at the attendant.

“He just thinks that, ma’am. It’s an illusion. He might dream ten, maybe fifteen minutes, tops. But you know how dreams are, it can seem like they go on for hours. It’s just his mind filling in the space, the absent time, when he wasn’t there.”

“You built something, it’s waiting for me! Why did you build it, Mom? Behind the door! Breathing, Mom!”

He appeared to be choking, tears streaming down his face. Something pinkish-gray slipped out of his mouth, trailing tendrils of viscous liquid. There was a soft alarm, and the other attendant dragged a telescoping pole out from under a corner of the easel-bed, maneuvered it near Tommy’s face. Liquids and mist enveloped Tommy’s head.

“Nothing to worry about,” the attendant she’d been talking to said. “It may look alarming, but it happens pretty often. We don’t always get every bit of the gunk out between cycles.”

Marie went over to the stools and sat down next to Walt. He was staring at the floor and didn’t look up. “I had no idea he’d be dreaming,” she said. “I never even thought of it before.”

“Remember what the guard said.” Walt stroked her back. “It’s not all the time. It’s dreams—Tommy just thinks it’s all the time.”

“What’s the difference? It doesn’t matter if it’s an illusion—he still feels it like it’s real.”

She could feel Walt slumping against her. “We thought at least he’d have a chance this way. Remember the day the sentence came down? We both thought at least some day he might be better. Then they’d give him back to us. It was just a story we told ourselves. A fairytale.”

“Ma’am, he’s getting pretty tired.” The attendant was standing over them, looking somewhat less threatening. Marie could see now that he was a sad man, who saw so many sad things every day. “I’m afraid you don’t have much visiting time left.”

Walt and Marie stood side by side, gazing up at their son. His face glistened, his eyes like two shiny marbles. He was like a huge piece of art hanging there, Marie thought, some grand work of relief sculpture, like in a museum, or hanging on the back wall of a church.

“I haven’t filled you in on all the news, son, all that’s been happening in our little backwoods town.” Walt touched her arm. She glanced at his questioning look, shook her head and continued. “There’s just been all kinds of changes. Remember how it used to take us hours to get anywhere? There’s a thing called a rail train, now—they didn’t have those when you went in. It’s like that monorail they had out of Chicago, only faster, and the train runs underneath. Now they’ve got those rails all over the Midwest and down into Texas, hanging from these huge towers so it’s like a spiderweb everywhere—in the cities they run them right by the tallest buildings—so ordinary farm people like ourselves can drive a little ways to one, and then go anywhere they want, all the way up to Alaska, and even over to Russia if we wanted, in no time at all. Last week I had a doctor’s appointment in Atlanta, and I swear I was home in time to fix your dad his dinner.”

She could see that the two attendants were uncomfortable, and Walt just stood there like he had no idea what to do. She wondered if they might lose a visit or two over this, if maybe she’d die before she could get another visit with her son, but they still let her talk, and that was the important thing.

“When you get out you can take one of those rail trains, and it’ll take you anywhere you want to go. You can walk around in China one morning, then have coffee in France. If things don’t work out in one place, then you can always move to another. Maybe you can keep ahead of the trouble that way. And you can visit us sometimes, too, if you’ve a mind to.

“And did they tell you we’ve been to other planets? They’d pretty much stopped trying back when you were sentenced, if I remember correctly. Well, now they’ve gone to lots of other worlds, a whole universe full of worlds, and they’ve found people there, too, nonhumans, and they’ve brought things back from those other worlds, and even some of those nonhumans. They’re very different from what we are, of course—some of them have the most outlandish faces! But they’re people like us, too, with feelings like us, mothers and fathers and kids. There’s this farmer down the road from some place I can’t even pronounce, and do you know that he laughs all the time, and that it sounds like a bird? And he raises these melons that are shaped like big orange diamonds, and they smell like chrysanthemums, and taste just like peach cobbler. You can have some when you get out.

“I can’t remember all there is out there, son, since you went in, and they’ve got lots more in the cities. Anything you’ve ever imagined, you can have now, everything I ever read to you from a fairytale, only better. Think about that, Tommy. That’s what we’re building for you outside your bedroom door. Dream about those things.”

The old Hispanic woman was already on the transport when they climbed on board. Walt wasn’t looking at Marie, and she couldn’t look at him either. No one official had said anything yet, but what if she had cost Walt future time with their boy?

The transport rolled away from the building with the faintest whisper. The sun had already set, and shadows were sliding across the ground as the world rapidly dimmed. She wished now the seats were less comfortable, and the bus’s engine had more noise.

After a mile or so Marie turned to her husband and asked, “Do you ever think it would have been better for him if they still did things the old way?”

“The old way?”

“When there still was a death penalty.”

“Oh, Marie, no. Not at all.”

She was quiet a few moments, then she said, “I’m glad to hear you say that.”

They lapsed into silence. It was then she became aware of a constant, breathless whisper insinuating itself everywhere in the vehicle. Then she realized it was the old woman in back, praying a little more loudly to herself.

“I keep thinking about what we used to say,” Marie said softly. “Remember when he was twelve, and he f irst started getting into trouble? Every day it was something new. We joked about it. We said maybe we could keep him in the freezer until he was an adult, thaw him out then. What kind of parents would joke like that?”

“Normal ones. Normal parents trying to keep their sense of humor, trying not to overreact to every little thing he did wrong. We had no idea what was coming at us down the line.”

“Maybe we should have overreacted. Did you ever wonder if he might have turned out better if we’d tried to be less understanding?”

He rubbed her back. “Some people might think that, but I don’t. You do your best, what else are you going to do?”

“So what were you thinking, Walt, after the visit? Be honest.”

He frowned. “To be honest I was thinking about these big cattle farms they have now down in Georgia, big factory operations. They keep the cows upright, but their brains are asleep. They milk some and they harvest some for meat, and all the time the cow’s just sleeping, dreaming whatever cows dream. I wouldn’t take nothing from that kind of animal. I want everyone I know to know that much about me.”

She patted his arm. “You were right in there—we didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You had me going,” he replied. “I thought you’d gone a little crazy. Until I realized you were just doing what you did when he was a boy—telling him a bedtime story.”

“Sometimes that’s all you can think to do,” she said.

“Where did you come up with those things?”

“I don’t know. I just thought about him waking up in the future, and what he might want to see, the kind of world that he might want to dream about. I just hope I didn’t buy us a mess of trouble.”

“The rules say you can’t tell them what’s going on outside, just a little news about the family. No rules about lying to them, as far as I can tell.”

“We’re just visitors, you know? That’s all we are to him.”

“Important visitors. But you know, after they leave home, that’s the best you can be. It’s like you’re not even in the same time zone with them. Your kids, even when you’re close to them, live their time a different way. You can’t live where they are, and you can’t travel with them.”

By the time they picked up the visitors at the pet center it was almost completely dark. The thin, neatly dressed man boarded quickly, smiling, and fell asleep almost immediately. Marie noticed he had long brown hair all over his trousers and along the openings of his coat sleeves.

Charlotte’s owner climbed aboard with her pet in her arms, followed by a stern-looking female attendant carrying a medical bag. The attendant wore a holster containing some sort of device with a long, needle-like barrel.

Charlotte’s eyes were fixed and staring. Marie thought the animal might have been sedated when it suddenly shifted its dull marbled gaze in her direction. It was then that Marie noticed the patchiness of the fur, the stretches of bright red, infected-looking hide, the faded yellow bow taped to the top of her head.

“You’re going to have to help me if that animal gets away from her,” she whispered to Walt, who hadn’t really been paying attention. “I’m afraid I’d panic and try to kick it to death.”

About then the woman nodded in recognition, but didn’t smile. Marie thought it might not mean anything—everyone was so tired.

It was dark enough when they arrived at the facility for the “temporarily deceased” (as too-clever commentators were apt to call them) that Marie could make out nothing of distant features or lights. There was some flurry of activity around one building. Marie pressed her face to the window and saw one of the ladies who’d been on the transport earlier being led to a large luxury sedan, her head bowed. She couldn’t tell if the woman was in custody, if she’d done anything wrong, or if—perhaps—she was a new widow having the worst day of her life. Like with all peeks at someone’s life through a moving window, there was no way to tell.

The last three passengers from this facility to step on board included a freshly scrubbed gentleman Marie had never seen before wearing loose-fitting trousers and shirt quite a bit like pajamas. Marie presumed the older woman boarding with him to be his wife. She thought this woman might have been on the earlier transport going into the sanctuary, one of the few who had sat quietly letting others voice their hopes and experiences. Another attendant, a tired but muscular male this time, boarded last, his eyes fixed on the woman’s fresh-faced husband.

The three sat together in the opposite row. Marie didn’t mean to stare, but this newly repaired man looked so fresh, so clean. Beside him his wife appeared ill-kept, almost slovenly. And there was something else about the husband—he looked much younger than she. Decades younger.

The transport rolled on to the parking lots through absolute darkness, a bubble floating through the night. Suddenly off in the distance dropped a series of shooting stars. Everyone turned their heads to watch, except for this newly awakened man, who Marie supposed was still preoccupied with mysteries that lay closer to home.

Copyright © 2010 Steve Rasnic Tem