Gwendy’s Final Task

43

SPOKE 5.

They float-walk down the corridor past signs in French: LAVEZ-VOUS LES MAINS and RAMASSE TA POUBELLE and even NE PASSE FUMER, which Gwendy would have thought a no-brainer. But with the French and their Gauloises, who could tell?

There’s that steady low creaking. Gwendy has gotten used to it, but Winston, it seems, has not.

“I hate that sound. It’s like the whole place is coming apart.”

“No,” Gwendy says, “you’ll be the one tearing it apart. Tearing everything apart.”

It doesn’t even touch him. Classic narcissist, she thinks. Maybe it’s true to some degree of all mega-successful businessmen and women. God, she hopes not.

“Why did you give it to the brownie? And what did you tell him?”

The brownie, Gwendy thinks. Jesus. And he probably thinks of Jafari as the blackie.

“Because I trusted him, I told you that. As for what I told him …” She shook her head. “Can’t remember.”

This is a lie. Now she remembers everything. How hard it was to actually hand it over, for one thing. She remembers Adesh’s look of curiosity, and most of all she remembers telling him he must not touch the buttons. You may feel an urge to do just that, but you must resist it. Can you? Adesh had said yes-yes, he was quite sure he could, and because Gwendy had to trust someone, she gave him the box. Then had to resist her own almost insurmountable urge to snatch it back, cradling it to her breasts and shouting Mine! Mine! She even remembers thinking about Gollum again, and how he called the One Ring his precious.

But she had given it over.

“Well, here we are,” Winston says. He examines the sign on the door: ADESH “BUG MAN” PATEL. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. “Maybe we’ll skip the knocking part.”

Gwendy wishes, not for the first time, that the doors of the rooms, suites, and labs on the MF station had locks. But they don’t.

“You first, dear. I’m not expecting a surprise, but always safe, never sorry.”

She depresses the latch and steps inside. Soft sitar music is playing from a boombox, which is strapped to the center worktable to keep it from floating away. Some small gadget is tucked under the strap.

The second thing she sees is the last thing she expected. She told Adesh to put the button box in one of the drawers, there are at least fifty of them, but it’s right out in the open, lying on the floor of the large cage where Adesh does his insect flight experiments. She can clearly see the tiny levers on the sides, and the colored buttons lining the top. The door to the cage is standing open.

“What’s with the flies?” Winston asks. There are six or seven of them hanging motionless above the button box. “Are they dead?”

“Resting,” Gwendy says. “According to Adesh, they’ve adapted quite well to zero-g conditions.” She’s looking at the boombox and the thing on top of it. Now she understands. How Adesh could have foreseen this situation is beyond her, but yes. She understands and knows what she must do.

If she can.

“Go in there, Senator. Get the box and give it to me.”

She says, very slowly and clearly: “The fuck I will. I protected it as long as I could and as well as I could and I’m not handing it over to you or anyone. Get it yourself.”

“Very well. But I think you’ll come with me.” He grabs her by her shoulder, fingernails digging into her flesh. “Dear.”

She pretends to struggle, backing up just far enough so her butt is against the worktable with its microscope, monitors, and centrifuge. She puts a hand behind her, hoping she looks like she’s trying to hold on to the table, actually grabbing for the gadget on top of the boombox. Please God don’t let him see and don’t let me drop it, she thinks. Not that it will drop; it will float.

She almost does lose her grip, but then the controller is in her hand and pressed against the small of her back. Winston snarls and points the green tube at her. “Enough! Get in there!”

“All right. I’ll go. Just stop hurting me.”

“I’ll do more than hurt you. Get in there. You’re not running for the door, if that was in your mind.”

If he looked down he’d see she’s hiding something, a flat eight-inch rectangle that looks like a TV remote. It’s pretty obvious. But Gareth Winston’s attention is mostly focused on the thing he’s come so far to obtain. His prize. His precious.

They float into the large cage, Gwendy first. She manages to get the controller into the center pocket of her coverall while pretending to rub her hurt shoulder. Winston has slipped behind her, shoving her along.

“Over there. Against the wall.”

He gives her a hard push. Gwendy floats backward.

Please let this work. Oh God, please.

He bends down and picks up the button box. A soft sigh escapes him. To Gwendy it sounds almost sexual.

“I feel it,” he says. “It’s powerful, isn’t it?”

“Very powerful,” Gwendy agrees. The controller Adesh has left for her is just another button box, only with four buttons instead of eight. She doesn’t know which of them opens Boris’s cage, so she lays her index finger across all four and pushes them.

Winston doesn’t notice. He’s running his own finger over the buttons: light green and dark green for Asia and Africa, blue and violet for North and South America, orange for Europe and yellow for Australia. Plus the two at the ends: red for wishes that turn dark no matter how well-meant, and the black one. The Cancer Button.

Meanwhile, the buttons on the controller have opened four cages. The doors rise soundlessly. Black ants float up from one, red ants from another, cockroaches from a third. From the fourth comes Boris. Pandinus imperator. He rises, tail cocked.

“What do they do, these buttons?” Winston asks. He has forgotten Gwendy completely in his absorption. “What happens when you press them?”

“Bad things,” Gwendy says.

“And the levers on the sides? What do they d—”

“Turn around,” Gwendy says. And then, with great pleasure: “Look at me, you fat psychotic piece of shit.”

His mouth drops open in surprise. His eyes widen in their pockets of puffy flesh. He turns. Gwendy suddenly realizes that Boris may not respond to her voice, so different from Adesh Patel’s, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

She screams, “MAAR!”

She need not have worried. Boris lashes his poison-laden tail and speeds across the room, ignoring the flies in favor of a much bigger target. Winston cries out and raises a blocking hand, but in zero-g he’s far too slow. Gwendy is savagely delighted to see Boris’s stinger bury itself dead center between Winston’s eyes.

He shrieks in pain and horror as he flails at the scorpion with both hands. There’s a hole the size of a pencil point where the stinger went in. It’s dribbling blood and the flesh around it is already beginning to swell.

“Get it off me! Jesus fucking Christ GET IT OFF ME!”

Winston is batting at it with both hands. Boris disengages and avoids him easily, flicking his armored tail and zipping away. The button box floats in front of Winston, forgotten. His weapon—the Green Tube of Death, Gwendy thinks—is also floating, but the rapid batting of Winston’s hands, which continues even when Boris has cruised out of slapping range, sends it in Gwendy’s direction, lazily turning end over end.

She reaches for it.

Winston also reaches for it, but the eddy set up by Winston’s hands is in Gwendy’s favor. She snatches the tube. Winston tries to grab her ponytail and she sends it flying away from him with a shake of her head. She risks a glance down at the tube, wanting to make sure the ring end is pointed at herself. If it was the wrong way around and I blew my own guts to soup, I probably wouldn’t even have time to appreciate the irony, she thinks, at the same time ducking in slow motion to avoid Winston’s equally slo-mo roundhouse punch.

“Say goodbye to the smartass bitch, Winston.” Gwendy points the tube and twists the ring in the base.

There’s no sound. There’s no comic-book deathray. Gwendy has a moment to think it was all a bluff, and then the front of Gareth Winston’s white shirt blooms with red flowers. His eyes melt and roll down his cheeks in thick blue tears. Gray stuff begins to pour out of the empty sockets and from his nostrils. Gwendy realizes she’s looking at his liquified brains, and begins to scream.

Adesh has also left his phone, powered up, on the central worktable, and set his Smart Watch to monitor it. The crew is sitting around the mess room table, shooting the shit and drinking post-breakfast coffee, when his watch lights up. Adesh pushes the stem and they all hear Gwendy’s screams.

The screams have stopped by the time they get to the Spoke 5 etymology lab. Gwendy is backed up against a wall as far from the big enclosure as she can get, with her fisted hands pressed to her mouth and the button box in her lap. There’s a babble of exclamations.

Kathy: “What in the hell—”

Adesh, shaking his fists in the air: “You got him! He said you would!”

Jafari: “Got who?”

Dr. Glen: “Oh my dear God in heaven.”

Doc has followed Gwendy’s frozen gaze to the big cage, where the late Gareth Winston’s clothes are floating in a pool of blood and decomposing organs. His throat has been blasted open. What remains of his face looks like a wrinkled and deflated rubber mask. It’s crawling with red and black ants.

Even at this moment, Adesh is the scientific observer rather than the horrified witness. “The ants, they swam down to him! Adaptive behavior! Remarkable!”

Reggie Black leans over and loses his breakfast. Which floats around him in wet chunks. Sam Drinkwater and Dave Graves do the same. Sam manages to catch most of his ejecta, but soon it’s oozing through his cupped hands.

“Get out of here!” Kathy snaps. “Everyone out! We’re sealing this room! If he’s got some kind of Andromeda Strain-type disease—”

“He doesn’t,” Gwendy says. “His only disease was greed. And he died of it.”