Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Mother Mother“ by Tracy Bonham

So I thought that for IPSTD I’d truck out one of my old trunk stories. I wrote it about a year ago, and I’ve never even shopped it around. I have hopes of eventually rewriting it to make it saleable, but for now, here it is. Comments are appreciated. Be warned. It’s long.

Hayden knocked on the metal door of the meeting room timidly, then stepped back. Normally he stayed well away from the Watchers of Exile, but tonight he had no other choice. If he didn’t act now, his sister was going to die.

He smoothed his dove white jerkin nervously, aware that his intrusion would not be taken lightly. He was twelve years old, and though his experiences in the Children of the Apostles had given him the cynical and beaten outlook of an older man, he was still a child in the eyes of the Watchers.

The door slid open with a swish and suddenly a man stood before Hayden. His body was outlined by the light of a small lantern in the room behind him and shadows hid his face. “What’s wrong, Hayden?” His great bushy eyebrows drew down in a frown that made him look like a Neanderthal, though his hair was silvery and well maintained. Hayden was glad it was him and not Papa Smith who answered the door. Lithium was less dangerous than the others.

“Mercy’s really sick. We’ve got to turn around,” he said. Three days ago, Argon, the Watchers’ communications officer had announced that they’d passed the orbit of Jupiter, and with it, the last human settlement. If Mercy could be cured, she would need treatment at Ganymede.

Lithium hesitated for a long time before answering. “We can’t turn around, Hayden. Look after your sister as best as you can. All we have to do is rendezvous with Their Ark, and the Grand Masters will be able to heal her.”

“But you ordered the navigation computer to slow down and conserve fuel. How can we catch them by going slower?” Hayden’s exterior was as calm as a field after a snowfall, but inside he winced. Lithium had never hit him, but Boron had, several times, around the mouth and ears.

But nothing came. Lithium’s face was in shadow, and Hayden could hear him breathing, slow and steady. He lifted a hand, as if to put it on Hayden’s shoulder, but then looked back into the room and let it fall. “The Grand Masters are guiding Papa Smith, Hayden. We have to carry out his decrees,” he said before he shut the door.

Hayden knew that if he knocked again, he would get no answer. Instead, he made his way into the cargo bay to check on Mercy. He stopped on the threshold as he always did, pretending to adjust his jerkin to avoid showing his discomfort whenever he felt their eyes upon him.

The hold of the Space Freighter was full of empty people. All in dove white jerkins and pants, they lined the walls like refugees who’d been herded into a shipping crate and forgotten. They’d been bankers and lawyers and secretaries, but now their eyes were dead and they slumped against each other in despair. Occasionally someone would raise their head and look hopefully at the airlock, but after a few minutes they would shut their eyes and despair would pull them back into their slump. Hayden always crossed the cargo bay like he was choosing the clearest path through a field of broken glass, careful not to attract attention.

He crossed to Mercy’s cot and pushed aside the lid of an empty food crate that shielded her from the others. “How’re you doing, Merce?” he asked, but there was no response. Her breathing was slow and shallow and her pale skin looked like parchment flaking away from her face. At the start of their Journey, she’d explored every cargo bay and airlock of the Space Freighter like she was conquering a foreign land, finding all the best hiding spots in case a spontaneous game of hide-and-go-seek-broke out. Now, the slightest breeze would sweep her out of life, and there was nothing Hayden could do to stop it. He’d gone to Lithium because he’d thought that there was still something in him that hadn’t been crushed by Papa Smith. He’d gone to Lithium because the silver haired, Neanderthal-browed Watcher was their father.
#
Before Papa Smith, Lithium had been Barry Sallinger, father of two and up-and-coming executive with West Coast Development. Hayden had been eight years old and bragged to his friends that Barry attended all his little league games and had bought him a puppy named Jonah for Christmas.

But then Mom was gone.

She died of Influenza on Easter Sunday. The night after it happened, Hayden couldn’t sleep and heard his father weeping in the basement. Barry was drunk and talking to his dead wife, cursing her for leaving him. He’d turned the TV to Channel 1 so that the buzzing static would hide the sound of his sobbing. When he’d looked up and seen Hayden hiding behind a fern, he’d looked afraid, then angry.

“God doesn’t love us, Hayden,” he’d said. “We’re on our own.”

Later, that same phrase was echoed by Rev. Poe Smith, head of the Children of the Apostle, or the CHAP as the man on Channel 9 News called them, pronouncing not the acronym but the word as a whole. The first time Hayden had met Rev. Smith, he’d thought the man looked like a GI Joe doll after two minutes in the microwave. He wore a long white mustache and beard to cover deep pockmarks, and his gut was poorly concealed behind a ruffled white shirt. He was rude and stank of fish sauce, but Barry thought he was the most cunning orator since Tony Robbins. He quit his job and followed the Reverend across the country, making stops in LA, Austin, Pittsburgh, and, of all places, Providence.

“He’s not a motivational speaker, Hayden, he’s a prophet. The Real Deal. Scammers charge big bucks for their seminars. Papa Smith just charges what he needs to get by.”

In July, when Hayden finished school, Barry sold the house and packed the family into their Jeep.
“Take only what you can pack in the truck, Hayden. Leave some room for your sister. Papa Smith will take care of the rest.”

On the way to Wisconsin, Mercy, wedged between a cooler and an upside-down end table, asked what was so special about Papa Smith. The only sound in the car for minutes-that-were-hours was the steady swish of the windshield wipers driving away the rain.

“Papa Smith can take care of us, Mercy. All of us.”

“Like Mommy used to take care of us?”

“No honey, not like that.”

Mercy watched the trees fly by them through a rain streaked window, and Barry stayed quiet for a long time. Hayden nearly asked “How then, if not like that?” but he found he didn’t need to. He understood. They all missed Mom, but Barry was hurt in a different way. Rev. Smith’s speeches and plans offered a distraction to Barry, one that he’d seized on. Before, Barry had been a small part of their lives, the one that often came home from work after dark, but now he was their world, and the responsibility was slowly crushing him. Hayden could see it in the way he looked at them in the second before he left for work, as if he had remembered in one terrified instant that there were two small holes in his house into which he would have to pour attention, time, and money. It was too much for an up-and-coming executive with West Coast Development. As rushing trees gave way to the rolling hills and dairy farms of Wisconsin, Hayden watched his father drive and silently told him that he was never alone so long as Hayden and Mercy were with him.

Rev. Smith’s compound was a cluster of small buildings stitched together by covered walkways and closed circuit cameras. It looked like several dark bulges in the skyline that clustered together like frightened children, but the executive in Barry had put a spin on it, “It looks sturdy, doncha think kids?” As they drove down the rural wagon trail that had turned completely to mud in the Wisconsin rain, Hayden couldn’t help but think of Mom and how her hand on Barry’s arm would have stopped all this from happening.

Nearly from the moment he arrived on the compound, Barry fell into an endless cycle of meetings with the Watchers and Papa Smith. After every meeting, he would come home with huge schematics and star charts. Hayden often saw him pouring over thick astrophysics textbooks, running his fingertips along a line of text, then chewing his pen and grunting in understanding.

Even though it was the middle of summer, Hayden and Mercy were enrolled in the compound’s small school. It was nothing more than four rows of desks serving students from Mercy’s age all the way up to eighteen. Classes were held in the compound’s mess hall—a large building made almost entirely of poured concrete—and it heated like an oven in the Wisconsin sun. Large black flies, attracted to the sweat beading on the children’s necks, dove between them like planes in a dogfight, crawling along their necks and flying into their eyes. During reading period, the only sounds in the class was the soft squeaking of Mr. Kerr’s chalk against the board up front, and the flies’ incessant buzzing, punctuated only by an occasional slap.

Mr. Kerr was the creepiest adult Hayden had ever met. When he wasn’t teaching class, he could often be found leaning against the chain link fence of the playground surveying the children through slitted eyes. He rarely moved and never showed emotion, except when Timmy Blunt broke his arm playing on the monkey bars. The injured boy had burst into tears and cried out for his mother between sniffles. In an instant Mr. Kerr was beside him, pulling him to his feet by his broken arm. His balding forehead wrinkled like an accordion and he glared at the other children with vacant, hateful eyes. “Your mother isn’t here, Timmy. Papa Smith is. Don’t cry out to your mother. Cry out to Papa Smith.”

When Hayden told Barry about Timmy, Barry had frowned and explained that Mr. Kerr was “a little far gone”. Hayden had asked what he meant, but Barry only shook his head and went back to his plans. There was the Grand Design to think about.

The Grand Design was the name of a used Space Freighter that Mr. Kerr told Hayden to draw without ever having seen. As he was penciling in the graceful swoop of the main thrusters, Papa Smith appeared beside him, standing so close that it was hard for Hayden to draw without brushing his arm against Smith’s pant leg.

“Make it look good, boy. That’ll be our home for the next six months,” he’d said. He’d been infinitely pleased that Mr. Kerr had come up with the assignment, and he strolled about the classroom like an obese peacock, chuckling to himself and hovering for an uncomfortable amount of time next to each student. Hayden was a talented artist for his age, but when he brought the picture back to their concrete sleeping quarters and showed it to Barry, he’d simply sighed and said, “It doesn’t look like that, Hayden,” and then gone to bed.

Things at the compound were normal for a while. Hayden was two years older than Mercy, and they lived in different circles of friends. Both groups played “Great Journey”, a game that Mr. Kerr had taught them, but Hayden’s bunch made diplomatic overtures to the Grand Masters, while Mercy’s group invited them to tea.

Barry settled into life on the compound like a toad in mud. After two months, he was promoted to a Watcher and began to wear the same dove white robes that made him look like a chess piece without the board. Being a Watcher meant more time for Papa Smith to exploit the void in Barry’s heart left by the passing of Hayden’s mother and—at Smith’s urging—the void grew into a great hungry beast that lived in a corner of Barry’s chest slightly to the left of his heart. The Children of the Apostle, in turn, poured astrophysics and the Grand Design into the beast until its belly was full and it fell into a doze that allowed Barry to sleep at night. For a while, Hayden and Mercy lived quite happily in the shadow of this vicious circle, knowing that something was wrong in inside Barry but not knowing what to do.

Hayden was in the middle of reading out his essay on “What He Would Do Once He Met the Grand Masters” when it happened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dove white chess piece run past the window of the classroom to the front of the compound, then a minute later, two more men ran by, and this time Hayden could see rifles slung under their arms.

When the shouting began, Mr. Kerr immediately cut Hayden off and ordered the children to form a line by the door.

“Leave your books behind, children. We won’t be gone long.”

They’d practiced drills like this before, in case the compound ever came under attack. They were supposed to march across the yard to the church and bolt the doors. Once inside, they were to sing hymns to the Grand Masters as loud as they could so that they wouldn’t be shot by mistake.

As they crossed the fifty meters of sun scorched mud and grass, Hayden couldn’t help but look towards the crowd of men and SUVs that crowded the gate. Huge poles with satellite dishes on their tips stretched into the air, anchored at the bottom by cube vans sporting the logos of CNN, MSNBC, and Channel 9 news. Papa Smith stood like a pillar directly in front of the gate as if his mere presence could keep it closed. Barry and Mike Blunt flanked him on either side, and behind them, four Watchers eyed the reporters with disgust in their hearts and shotguns in their hands.

When the line of students began to cross to the Church, one young female reporter cried out in shock, “Oh my God, they’ve got children!” Mercy didn’t know why the reporter would call out like this, in horror and pity, and when she’d approached Hayden timidly, knowing she shouldn’t be asking, he couldn’t explain it.
“I wish Mom were here,” she told him later while they huddled on the floor of the church, listening to the steady drumbeat of circling helicopters. Barry was still outside with the other Watchers so it fell to Hayden to comfort his sister. He hugged her with all the tenderness he remembered from his mother, and they spent the rest of the day exchanging memories of Her like they were polished sea shells plucked from a sandy beach. They were united by their memories. Hayden knew that no matter how far into loneliness that Barry drifted, Hayden and Mercy would always remain a family.

Later that night, Papa Smith gave a special sermon explaining that it was the Children of the Apostle’s “togetherness” that frightened the outside world, but that soon they would leave the lower lifeforms behind and join the Grand Masters in space. When Hayden had asked Barry why the reporters should be so interested in them, he’d hesitated for a long time before answering.

“John Mally wasn’t a true Watcher, Hayden. He was a reporter. He was doing an expose for CNN.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“Nothing. They can’t do anything to us. All they can do is mock us, but we don’t care, do we?”

But Hayden did care, not because he worried that the friends he’d left behind would see him on TV and think he was a cultist, but because something inside him rejected the teachings of Papa Smith. He felt the Reverend watching the children, especially Mercy, with lecherous eyes. Once he’d summoned Hayden into his offices for one of the long, private meetings he sometimes had with students. It was only by chance that he’d met Barry on the way across the compound. When Barry found out about the meeting, he’d stared at Hayden in silent disbelief until he thought he’d done something wrong. He’d been about to apologize for doing… something… when Barry had cut him off. He knelt down beside Hayden and looked him in the eyes.

“Go back to class, Hayden. If Papa Smith ever asks you or your sister to have a private meeting with him, I want you to come and get me straight away. Don’t let anyone stop you.”

The sense of wrongness that Hayden felt in the presence of Papa Smith only intensified after John Mally went to CNN. Mr. Kerr began to teach long lessons on loyalty and the horrible punishments that the Grand Masters would inflict on Mr. Mally in the afterlife. In fact, Hayden began to hear the name “John Mally” so much that it ceased to represent a person and became, instead, a refuse pit that could snare the students if they strayed too close. When Timmy Blunt, still in a cast, asked why the Grand Masters didn’t just come to Earth and pick them up, Mr. Kerr had simply sneered and said, “That sounds like something John Mally would say.” Later, some of the bigger boys had pushed Timmy into the swings and chanted “Lazy Timmy Blunt, Mally’s little Runt”.

Papa Smith became reclusive, issuing decrees from the safety of his offices. Often, Barry was forced to lead the church services. He would appear in grey robes instead of white, with a wide purple sash tied around his waist to show that he spoke on Papa Smith’s behalf.

The church was equipped with the latest multimedia equipment, and usually the service would start with a recorded video of Papa Smith looking directly into the camera, issuing decrees like he was reading out a shopping list. Each of the Watchers was ordered to take the name of an element to confuse the “outsiders” and show the Grand Masters that they understood that their present forms were no more than common molecules.

Planning for the Great Journey would have to be accelerated, due to Mally’s meddling. Watchers began to disappear for days at a time, ferrying supplies from Antarctica Spaceport to their newly acquired Space Freighter. Church services began to be held daily, sometimes twice daily, to “ensure loyalty”. Hayden would sit in the back of the Church with Mercy, trying to ignore the pockmarks that became valleys on Papa Smith’s giant projected face. But there was nowhere to look. Smith’s eyes were so tinged with madness that Mercy asked Hayden if Papa Smith was “sick”.

Despite the disappearance of their leader, activity on the compound ratcheted up to a frantic pace. The church was put up for sale and Hayden and four other boys were conscripted into erecting a huge plywood Remark Realty sign offering the compound for sale to the highest bidder. When it was bought early, Barry rented every room of a nearby Meandering Motel, and Church members spent their last week on Earth sleeping on vibrating beds and eating continental breakfasts.

They all sat in first class of a SCRAMjet that shot them through the atmosphere to the Spaceport, and Hayden ran between the aisles, checking each row until he got a window seat. But the view was boring. Just a lot of water followed by sheets of ice. He was excited to see the Spaceport, but Boron kept them close together, herding them like cattle to gate E-13, a pathetic little grotto that held a half dozen battered plastic seats. Watchers roamed the outskirts of the little waiting room turning back any enterprising young spirit for whom the beckoning call of neon lights and screaming videoscreens was too much temptation to resist.

The shuttle that took them to the Grand Design was totally blacked out so that they couldn’t see the Space Freighter from the outside, but Mercy had climbed through a maintenance hatch and found a small monitor with an external camera. When she’d crawled back into the main area, she’d sat glumly in the plush shuttle seats, pouting that Hayden’s drawing had been so much prettier.

After the shuttle docked, Church members stumbled into the cargo hold of the freighter like they were already in the presence of the Grand Masters. Some held hands and looked around with wide eyes and tears of joy, while others started softly singing “The Exile is Upon Us”. Hayden and Mercy left the adults behind and scampered down metal corridors looking for the pilot. All they’d found was a small room near the freighter’s nose with a computer and a viewscreen.

“It’s not that kind of freighter, Hayden. All we have to do is tell the computer where we want to go and it flies us there.” Like magic, Barry—no “Lithium”—had explained between meetings.

At first, space life was boring and Hayden spent many hours playing games like “Categories” and “Rhymathon” with Mercy. The cargo hold was devoid of obstacles that would allow the children to play “Kick the Can”, and “Sardines” but much to their delight, Hayden soon discovered that the Freighter was equipped to transport perishables to the Jupiter Colonies. This, of course, allowed Hayden and Mercy to play epic games of “Tag” in the Grand Design’s air ducts. At first, the other children joined in and the Freighter echoed with the tinny thumps of kids crawling through the air conditioning. Slowly though, parents began to squeeze the fun out of the games. The air-conditioning, they pointed out, served the dual purpose of evacuating the air from the airlock. The smallest accident could mean that the Grand Masters would be picking up not only everyone on board the Grand Design, but also a couple of child-shaped popsicles floating along behind it. One-by-one the other children joined their parents on the cargo bay floor until only Hayden and Mercy were left.

It wasn’t until they’d been in space for two months that Mercy began to get sick. Hayden privately suspected that she’d been sick in her soul almost from the minute the freighter’s airlock sealed them in like zoo animals, but the physical signs didn’t show until the air started to smell like sweat and rotten food rations.

When Lithium saw Mercy stretched out on a canvas cot, her blond hair stained brown with sweat, he gave Hayden a stricken look.

“Papa Smith said we wouldn’t need medicine where we were going.” He looked nothing like the executive from West Coast Development in that moment. Hayden wanted to hug him, but Lithium had carved a zone of loneliness around him that he was afraid to penetrate. Papa Smith had nourished the ravenous belly beast that lived in Lithium’s chest and when Hayden looked in his father’s eyes, he saw Mr. Kerr looking back out.

In time, the other Church members grew tired of singing hymns and watching Papa Smith’s inspirational videos. The Journey was taking much longer than anticipated. The Grand Masters had cloaking devices, Papa Smith explained, that made them hard to detect, and until they showed themselves, the men and women in Dove White could only watch their dreams dissipate slowly into the freighter’s metal hull.

Mercy’s breathing gradually became shallower and Lithium’s visits less and less frequent, as if he was terrified of watching his daughter die. Hayden tended to his sister and silently prayed, not to the Grand Masters, but to Someone Else, that they would be saved.

On the sixtieth day, his prayers were answered.

It started with a hesitant tap on the airlock, not quite as regular as a dripping faucet. Only a few heads turned, even when the yellow light came on and they realized the airlock was cycling.

The lights in the cargo hold had long been dimmed to conserve fuel, so the officer’s flashlight cut through the shadowy hold like a laser.

“Jesus. It stinks in here,” he said before he realized that the emaciated mannequins in front of him were really people. He was young, perhaps no more than twenty three, probably doing the required two years on the Rim to pay off his student loan. He wore a timeless cop-mustache, and the hair under his helmet was shaved. Despite the look of disgust, Hayden imagined him as a wise man who would see how sick Mercy was and whisk them off to safety.

“Are you here to save us?” The words bubbled out of Hayden’s lips before he knew they were coming and he flung out his arms as if to stop them from flying across the room. Officer Mustache’s flashlight whipped up and pinned Hayden to the wall like roadkill. He looked back into the airlock to make sure his partner was following, then started across the hold towards Hayden. Mike Blunt quickly put himself between the young officer and his target, holding his hand before his eyes to block the light. “Timmy. Get Papa Smith,” he said, staring the officer right in the face.

His name was not Officer Mustache after all, but Corporal MacLean and his partner—equally young but slightly less shaved—was Patrolman Johanson. They’d thought the freighter was a derelict and had boarded purely to make sure it wasn’t some corporation’s way of disposing of harmful waste chemicals.

“You’re trespassing,” coughed Papa Smith once he’d heaved his bloated bulk out of the meeting room. Despite the heavy rationing of food, he’d grown fatter and now his belly poked out from under his buttoned down shirt and tie, so that he looked respectable and disgusting at the same time.

“What are you doing out here? There’s no record of your flight path logged with Jupiter Patrol. The only reason we even found you was because your ship sent an automatic distress call once you ran out of fuel.”
“We have plenty of fuel in the reserve tank. The call was sent by mistake.”

“I wasn’t aware that T-class freighters were equipped with reserve tanks. We can signal for a tow if you’d like…”

“No. You’re disturbing a very delicate operation here. You have to leave. Now.”

Officer MacLean’s flashlight beam swept the back of the cargo hold and stopped on the edge of Mercy’s cot. “Mind if we have a look around?” he said grimly. He pushed rudely past Papa Smith, and glared Mike Blunt out of the way.

“My God. Call for backup, Jack. We gotta get this girl to GGH. She’s nearly gone.” At that moment Hayden felt a love for the officer that he hadn’t felt since Barry had packed their things into the El Dorado. Mercy was going to be okay.

“NO!” yelled Papa Smith in a shrill voice. He looked powerless and small in the dim light of the cargo hold like he’d shrunk two sizes. “You can’t take her. You can’t take anyone. You have no authority here!”

“Sir. This girl is dying. She may not make it back to Ganymede. We’re taking her.”

“No! Religious grounds. She refuses treatment. Lithium! He’s her father!” Papa Smith went from shrieking to gloating with the speed only a madman could muster. He pointed at Lithium standing sullenly beside Smith, his thick gray eyebrows drawn low over his face. Hayden silently willed his father to run across the hold, sweep Mercy into his arms and tell Papa Smith to go to hell.

“She refuses,” Lithium mumbled quietly, though it was the belly beast that did the talking.

“He’s right. Simon, there’s nothing we can do,” said Patrolman Johanson.

“Are you her brother?” asked Officer MacLean, looking down at Hayden. Outwardly, Hayden simply nodded, but inside himself, where Papa Smith held no sway, he screamed at the mustached man. Can’t you see that he has my father under his control? It’s Lithium that refuses treatment. Barry never would.

“Now listen to me very carefully, kid,” the Officer said, kneeling next to Hayden. “He’s right. He can refuse medical treatment. But we’re police officers. All I need is evidence that a crime has been committed, and I can take your sister off this ship.” He held Hayden’s gaze longer than he should have, long enough for Hayden to get his meaning.

Hayden frantically scanned the cargo hold, hoping to spot something out of place, the most trivial thing that he could point to and say, Aha! There’s the evidence you need. But there was nothing but angry people in Dove White all staring him down and willing him to stay silent. He felt their hate like a fog that crept inside his nostrils and choked him from inside.

“C’mon, kid,” the Patrolman whispered under his breath, but it was no good. Hayden couldn’t even think of a convincing lie.

“I’m sorry,” he said more to Mercy than to MacLean.

Papa Smith stayed quiet as the two officers made their way back to airlock. They looked to either side as they passed, as if they expected the slumping, beaten creatures that crouched against empty food crates to suddenly come to their senses, leap to their feet and yell, “We’re dying out here. You’ve got to save us!” It was difficult for two Average Men to think of these living, breathing bodies not as people, but as empty husks through which Papa Smith exerted his will.

Hayden could sense Smith begin to exert that Will even before the airlock doors had closed about the two officers like the jaws of a leg hold trap. The menace started at his eyes, then moved down his pockmarked face, through shoulders grown powerful from supporting his elephantine frame on the pulpit. From there it radiated out through his fingertips and as it touched each slumping cultist, they swelled, gaining life from his hatred, until Hayden faced a cargo hold full of accusing eyes—men and women hating him for the simple crime of loving his sister.

“Put him in the closet,” said Papa Smith as if Hayden were a Thing that belonged in a closet, like a broom, except worse, because he said it with the kind of hiss that a boa constrictor makes as it’s squeezing the life out of its prey.

The “closet” was a large covered storage area down the hall from the meeting room. The scariest thing about it was the airtight seal, and you knew when you saw the hatch door blocking out the light like an eclipse that even if you were somehow transformed into the smallest breeze, you would still be trapped.
Hayden felt Lithium’s presence behind him as he walked down the small passage to the closet, following like a shadow of his former self, a great void of loneliness that pushed everyone away. Hayden turned, so that the man that was his father could see his eyes as he thumbed the panel that opened the closet.

“Dad…” Hayden trailed off. Was there any of Barry left in the pathetic creature that stood before him? Was Dad even the right moniker to use? “I’ve got to do something for Mercy before it’s too late. If you still love me, you won’t stop me.” Lithium looked sick. It was as if he had a Papa Smith devil on his shoulder commanding him to push Hayden into the closet, and he shook his head, fighting it. But Papa Smith had used the months of life in the compound to twist Lithium and turn him against his family.

“There’s nothing you can do for her, Hayden,” he said at last, as if to rationalize his actions.

“I love you, Barry,” said Hayden finally. Lithium wasn’t going to let him go. Papa Smith had seen a weakness in him, seen the hole left by the death of his wife, and used it until Lithium no longer had any will of his own. Hayden had no choice. He turned and ran down the hall towards the meeting room.

There was an air-conditioning duct against the floor, and it was this that Hayden ran for. He barreled through the doorway and skidded on the smooth metal floor. Keenly aware that at any moment Lithium could seize him from behind and drag him back to the closet, Hayden tore at the metal grating of the duct. Rusty screws, loosened by their frequent games of “Tag” turned reluctantly and suddenly Hayden was through. Lithium had still not come into the meeting room and there was no cry of alarm.

The duct was tight for Hayden and he had to pull himself along by moving his arms halfway to his chest and pushing forward with his shoulders. Every metallic thunk that echoed through the duct as he pushed was like sonar that blipped his position to anyone that cared to hear. It wasn’t long before he heard an angry shout, “He’s in the ducts”.

In his mind, Hayden could see the police cruiser outside hovering reluctantly alongside the Grand Design, powering up its thrusters, and pulling away. The thought spurred him on, sending strength to his shoulders and urgency to each push. Ahead, light lanced into the duct as a covering was pulled away and Mr. Kerr’s snarling face and vacant eyes reached towards him. Hayden’s arms were trapped but he was like a fox in its burrow, fighting for its life against an invading snake. He snarled like an animal and bit deeply into the flesh of Mr. Kerr’s hand.

And then Mr. Kerr was gone.

Through the vent, Hayden could see Barry holding Mr. Kerr against a metal bulkhead with the steady force of a tide, pressing him back, holding him down. Anger poured out of Mr. Kerr’s dead eyes and he lunged for the air duct, but Barry stood before him like an obelisk and said with a calm voice “He’s my son.” When Mr. Kerr lunged again, darting around Barry’s outstretched hand, Barry sidestepped in front of him. “He’s my son,” he said again to Mr. Kerr. It was his mantra, the solitary thought in his head, the thing that fought off Papa Smith and the belly beast. Hayden kept going, but now it was hard to crawl away when all he wanted to do was be with the man who chanted “He’s my son”. But he knew that the breath in Mercy’s lungs was like a clock that was winding down. The ticks were shallow and came infrequently, and he needed to help her before they ceased entirely.

The duct ended in a ninety degree turn so Hayden lowered himself into the airlock. All I need is evidence that a crime has been committed, and I can take your sister off this ship. It took three hard blows for Hayden to smash the blinking green button that would open the interior of the airlock, and he pulled at the manual cycle lever with burning shoulders. A fan burst into life from the duct he’d had just left, and he shivered as the air began to leave the airlock.

It happened so slowly.

He could hear screams of rage and some of fear from the ship as Church members realized what he was doing. Mike Blunt was yelling and tearing at the door, but Hayden knew there was nothing he could do. Officer Mustache would be pulling away, but he’d hesitate, hating the laws that stopped him from helping a sick little girl, and forgiving the little boy inside for not finding the evidence he needed to save them both.

Hayden felt the air being pulled from his lungs and watched the doors of the airlock as they began to slide apart. Heaven’s gates opened before him and Heaven was full of stars.
#
“I gave her 20 CCs of Opsildextrene. She’s sleeping now. There’s no sign of permanent damage, but she’ll need at least two weeks of bed rest before she’s able to start being a kid again.”

“She looked so bad on that ship. I didn’t think she’d survive the trip.”

“I heard about what you did, Officer MacLean.”

“Well, yeah. She’s gotta be a very special little girl for her brother to do what he did. At first I thought they’d spaced the boy for speaking out, so we scooped the girl before they could do the same to her. It wasn’t until we reeled in the body we realized what he’d done. He looked so serene.”

“What about the father?”

“They’re still out there. They only had enough power for two weeks of life support. It’s been four.”

Silence.

“I hope he found what he was looking for.”

“I hope so too”.