Gwendy’s Final Task

39

DAY 5 ON MANY Flags.

Gwendy is almost to the cafeteria—close enough to smell freeze-dried scrambled eggs and sausage in the pleasantly filtered air of Spoke 4—when she realizes she left her red notebook back in the suite. Earlier this morning she put it down on the coffee table next to her laptop so she could type out a quick email and told herself not to forget it. But, like so many other things these days, she did forget. NG, she scolds herself, and pivots in mid-bounce like a ninja in one of the ridiculous chop-socky movies Ryan used to love so much.

Despite this little speed bump, today has been a good day. Maybe even a great day. For the first time since saying goodbye to earth’s atmosphere—who am I kidding? she thinks; for the first time in probably five or six years!—Gwendy Peterson enjoyed an uninterrupted night of sleep. She’d dreamt she was camping out with Olive Kepnes in her back yard in Castle Rock. They’d toasted marshmallows, flipped through a new issue of Teen Beat magazine (Shaun Cassidy oh God such a hunk!), and giggled about cute boys until the sun came up.

When she’d awakened, fifteen minutes before her alarm was set to go off, she felt like a brand new woman—brimming with energy and determination and, most importantly, clarity. Don’t forget hope, she’d told her reflection in the steamed-up mirror after a long, relaxing shower. Two more days and all of this madness will be over.

Gwendy is humming the theme song to The Sopranos and practically skipping down the main corridor in Spoke 1 when she runs into Dr. Glen heading in the opposite direction. When Dale looks up and sees the Senator, he flashes a grin. “Someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Absolutely, Doc. I’m a free woman. No Zoom meetings, no conference calls, no weather girl duties. Not a single thing on the schedule today. I just might crawl back into bed after breakfast and stay there for the rest of the day! So I ask you, who’s better than me?”

He raises his eyebrows as he glides past her on the tips of his toes. “I guess that would be no one, at least not up here.”

“See you at breakfast in a few,” she says, cheerfully waving a hand over her shoulder. “Just need to grab something from my room.”

“Want me to wait?”

“Nope, go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

Gwendy is still smiling when she opens the door to her suite. She takes a couple of steps inside—and freezes.

Gareth Winston is down on one knee in front of her sitting room closet. The door is open and Gwendy’s extra pressure suit has been pushed out of the way. She can see some kind of gadget—black shiny metal, not much larger than an iPhone—attached to the keypad on the safe. Several dark wires run from the base of the gadget to what looks like a small calculator with a digital read-out screen. Winston is holding the calculator thingamajig in his hands. When Gwendy bursts into the room, he drops it and scrambles to his feet, leaving the gadget to float.

“What are you doing here?” She’s pretty sure she already knows the answer. Her brain may be broken, but she’s not stupid. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Tampering with classified material is a federal offense.”

“I don’t believe I’m in any kind of trouble at all, Senator.” Winston’s eyes look nervous, but his voice never wavers.

“I guess we’ll see what Commander Lundgren has to say about that.” She turns to leave.

Rattlesnake quick (and twice as mean, she has just time to think), Winston lunges across the sitting room and grabs her arm. If Gwendy hadn’t just seen it with her own eyes, she would’ve never believed the man was capable of moving that quickly. Of course, she thinks, that’s zero-g for you. His fingers dig into her flesh as he drags her toward the center of the room and shoves her down onto the sofa. “Even if you somehow managed to get away, it would be too late by the time you got back with the others.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“You see that little black box over there?” He gestures to the gadget affixed to the safe’s keypad. “That marvel of technology is called a LockMaster 3000. It’s available to the public for not much more than the cost of a decent laptop. It usually takes no more than ten minutes to reset a four-digit combination and provide a new entry code. These Many Flags safes are a little trickier, probably because Tet is expecting some high-powered people to eventually be using the quarters up here, but in the end it’ll do the job. May take twenty minutes or even half an hour, but oh yes, it’ll get there.”

“I’d be back here a lot quicker than half an hour—and with plenty of help, too.”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully. “That’s assuming I let you go anywhere. It’s a fair assumption on your part, I suppose—as a U.S. Senator, you’re used to going wherever you want, whenever you want—but this time the assumption would be wrong. I don’t want to go all Snidely Whiplash on you, dear, but why would I set you free to roam before I get my hands on the button box? And once I do … goodness! Who knows what might happen?”

When she hears the words button box come out of Gareth’s Winston’s mouth, for a dizzying moment Gwendy thinks she may pass out. That would be a very bad idea, she thinks. That would be the end of everything.

“What do you know about the button box?”

“Some, but not enough. I’m counting on you to fill me in on the rest.”

“Never,” she says.

He smiles. “Spoken like a true movie heroine, but I think you will.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, Winston, okay? We sit and wait for your little gadget to do its thing, you take possession of the box, and then what?”

“Then you have an unfortunate accident. If the box can’t provide it, I have something that can.”

She bares her teeth in a humorless grin. “They’ll all know, Winston. My God, you have to see that. And you’ll go to prison—federal prison, not some state dump—for the rest of your life.”

“I don’t think so,” he says, shaking his head so rapidly the flesh on his cheeks jiggles back and forth like Jell-O. “Several on board suspect you’re … how shall I say this? Mentally challenged.”

“The cognitive test—”

“Sam Drinkwater and Dave Graves think you cheated somehow—that nobody could score as high as you did.”

“I’m losing my mind, but I’m still smart enough to cheat?”

Gareth snickers. “I believe you just described most of your colleagues in the House and Senate, not to mention the President himself: just smart enough to cheat. But let’s not talk politics. Let’s get back to you instead. A fatal accident would be mourned, of course—you’d be a national hero, maybe get your face on a postage stamp, not to mention a million tee-shirts—but no one would be that surprised. Not really. Cognitive issues so blatant you were forced to take a test? I wouldn’t even be surprised if some of the bigwigs at TetCorp lost their jobs as a result of it. The media will say your unsound mind should have shown up sooner, that somebody missed it. Doctor Glen will undoubtedly come in for his share of the blame.”

“I’ve sent emails,” Gwendy says, gesturing to her laptop on the coffee table. “Friends in high places back in the States know all about you, Winnie. They know you stole the combination to the security case, for one thing.”

The lizard smile disappears from Winston’s face. It’s a possibility he hasn’t considered. “Suspicion is one thing, but providing proof is quite another. And that would be nearly impossible without any witnesses.”

He pulls a small object from his pocket and holds it up for her to see. It looks like a tube of lipstick, and it’s the same weirdly vibrant green as the Chrysler from the Derry video. A cartoon green. It hurts Gwendy’s eyes to look at it.

“A good friend of mine gave this to me. No idea what it’s made of but I can tell you this: it’s virtually undetectable by modern security systems. And it’s lethal. All you have to do is point, then twist the little metal loop in the base. One spray and it turns your insides into jelly. There’s plenty of juice inside this canister to take care of the entire crew if necessary.”

“How would you get back? You gonna fly the ship home yourself?” And then before she can stop herself: “Your little blond friend teach you how to do that, too?”

Before Gwendy can react, Winston has her pinned against the back of the sofa, his meaty forearm pressing down on her throat. There’s a thunderstorm in Winston’s eyes, and for a terrifying moment Gwendy is certain he’s going to kill her right now. “How do you know about Bobby?”

“I … saw it in a dream,” she manages to get out. “You were sitting inside a car with him. A green car.”

For the first time, Winston looks unsure. And scared, that too. “Then you know enough not to fuck around with these people.” He removes his arm from her throat. “I don’t think Bobby’s his real name and I don’t think he’s human. He and his friends mean business, and so do I.” He pauses. “He’s beautiful, though. Like an angel. Except sometimes it looks like there’s something inside him, his real self, and that’s not so beautiful.” He lowers his voice. “His real self has fur.”

Sudden tears spill from Gwendy’s eyes, and she silently scolds herself for showing weakness. She lifts a trembling hand to her neck and rubs the already sore muscles. It feels like something inside of her is broken.

“If you were to kill me and the rest of the crew, you’d be stranded here. You’d die here, Winston.”

The ugly grin resurfaces on Winston’s overfed face. “Let’s just say I could hitch a ride back with my Chinese friends.”

“They would never allow …” She stops as the reality of his words hit home. “They … you … you son of a bitch, you bribed them.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a bribe.” He chuckles into his fist. “Bribes are for pikers, dear. This was an investment in their future.”

“Why are you doing this? Is it money?” Keep him talking, keep him talking.

“Don’t be foolish. I have more money than I could spend in a thousand lifetimes.”

“Then why?” Almost pleading now. “Why do you want it so badly?”

“That’s quite a story.” He glances over at the closet where the LockMaster 3000 is busy doing its thing. “But since we have time, why not?” He props his feet up on the coffee table and crosses his arms behind his head, like he’s back home in his MetLife Stadium skybox watching the Giants and the Eagles square off on a Sunday afternoon. “In October of 2024 I was in St. Louis for my father’s funeral …”