The Last Photograph
by Wrestlr
15.
The other four Soldiers made it to the mini-van, all right, but collapsed over the course of the next hour, one by one, after the plane took off. They were still unconscious when we transferred them and our liabilities to the helicopter. The technicians had gone ape-shit over us the minute the helicopter landed back at the compound. They attached some sort of sensor to our halos. Full failure for the unconscious four. Sporadic imminent failure for Justin and me. While the medics gurneyed off the four unconscious Soldiers, the technicians berated Mick and Pedro for letting this happen. These halo prototypes were expensive, blah-blah-blah. They’d have to replace them all and didn’t have spares, blah-blah-blah. They’d need days to get replacements; they’d need days to get us back to usable condition, and that was assuming there was no permanent organic damage to our brains; days of diagnostics.
Justin and I got marched to sickbay too. We stripped off our clothes and submitted to more tests and poking. Did we feel light-headed? Dizzy? How many fingers did we see? Two, four, six—what number came next? Nauseous? Headachy? Auditory or visual hallucinations? Finally, they forced our malfunctioning haloes to shut down, which immediately lessened my headache, though it also cut off my intermittent connection to Justin. I’d been using that to help keep him calm.
The recruitment angle to the mission made sense now that we had Techno-Geek Prime back here at the base. The professional would likely be interrogated, then liquidated.
Mick was off probably making sure Prime and the professional got taken care of. I suspected he’d come by shortly to collect the clothing. I pulled the photograph of Paul and his buddies out of my pocket and stashed it under the cot mattress where I lay. I couldn’t lose it again. I’d have to find a better hiding place and soon, after Mick and the medics left us alone, someplace I could come back and retrieve it. That would be hard to do in the unfamiliar sickbay. Maybe inside the ventilation grill?
Mick hadn’t been able to knock us out with sleep mode. On the way back from the airport by helicopter, I’d seen enough to know generally which way to go and how far it was going to be. And getting to the nearest civilization was going to be a long trek. I lay back with my eyes closed, burning the images into my memory.
Justin and I had to stay in the sickbay that night. It held eight beds—my team and I occupied seven of them. The four unconscious Soldiers were attached to all sorts of monitoring devices that ran squiggles of light across the screen and occasionally made soft beeping sounds. Justin and I weren’t attached to anything. Mostly the medics ignored us after they got tired of poking at our haloes. After a while the medics disappeared entirely, the lights were dimmed halfway to mean “nighttime,” and we were alone.
I lay on my back under the sheet with my hands behind my head and stared at the ceiling in the semi-darkness.
“What’s going to happen to us?” That whisper came from Justin in the next cot.
“I don’t know,” I murmured back without looking at him. I had an idea forming. This might be my only shot.
I touched the back where the halo went into my skull. I’d felt it a hundred times.
I pushed up on the front of my halo, the part crossing my forehead. It didn’t want to move. I sat up and found a long, slim sensor doohickey on a table and used it to pry at the halo. It moved. Not much, but I could tell it was a fragment of an inch higher on my forehead. I pushed and worked at it. The progress hurt. It had been put in place and was meant to stay there.
“Holy!—What are you doing?” Justin hissed incredulously. “You can’t do that.”
Probably, like me when the haloes were working, he’d never considered getting it off.
A little further. That sucker was on tightly. A little more and it popped up over the top of my forehead. I wasn’t sure how it attached at the back. I pushed it backward. I felt a little pain and pulling at my flesh. Something popped, and it came lose in my hands. Looks like it just ... plugged into something back there. I felt under my hair. No blood. No pain. Maybe a little socket? That kind of made sense—a way to keep the parts that required precision connection into my brain separate if the external, and apparently damageable, parts needed replacement.
Justin stared at the piece of yellow metal in my hands. “Holy fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No ... Just a little when I was working it off, maybe.”
“So now what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do me!” Justin sat up and tipped his head toward me.
I pried at his halo—“Ow!” he protested when I dug at his forehead to get leverage—and after a couple of minutes I had his loose. I handed it to him. “Cool,” he said, turning it over in his hands.
“They’re not watching us. We’re not locked in. I’m thinking we get the fuck out of here?”
Justin grinned. “That’s what I thought you were gonna say. But what about your brother Paul? What about Angel and the others?”
“I saw Paul the other day. I don’t think we’re going to be able to convince him to escape with us, even if we could find him. As for the others, unfortunately, this is probably the best place for them right now. Nobody knows more about this tech and what happened to them than the people here. I’m thinking we get out and send the police or something back to raid this place. Kidnapping; human experimentation—there’s a shitload of criminal charges we can bring to make the police listen.”
No one had come by to collect our clothing. I reached for and pulled on my pants, stuffed that photo of Paul in the pocket, and reached for the rest.
I knew what Justin was going to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted a Soldier turned back into college student tagging along. But if he still retained the fighting and survival skills, he might be an asset.
Justin watched me dress. Then he reached for his clothes too. “You think we have a shot? Let’s do it.”