Chapter 26- Fire and Ice
I had a hard time sleeping, I was far to disoriented to want to. The window of my room just so happened to look out over the orchard and I spent a lot of time staring at the silver light on the trees until the sky turned a dusky blue with the coming of the day. Part of me never looked back nor regretted being so bold, but the thought lingered that things might be a little strained between us with the clarity of light. He was, after all, my very proximate co-worker.
I dressed simply in jeans and a t-shirt and it sort of felt good to just be myself and not a representative of Starfleet as the mean Admiral of Academic Affairs was so quick to impress on me. Thankfully the marks of that encounter had faded, I didn't know how I would explain a black eye away to Leti. When I got downstairs, the strong and wonderful smell of freshly brewed coffee filled my nostrils and I found Leti sitting at the large kitchen table reading a PADD in the dim morning light. She smiled graciously when she saw me and invited me to sit down at the table with her. "My, you are up with the chickens!" She laughed. "Coffee?"
"Please." I smiled getting up to get it myself.
"Now you sit there! What kind of hostess would I be if I made my guests fetch their own?" She asked with a mock frown. It made me slightly uncomfortable to be waited on, I was accustomed to doing everything for myself. "Sugar or cream?" Coffee was a blank canvass that required each artist to participate. I liked my coffee a particular way and only I could manage it. Still, I thanked her when she brought a streaming cup of very bitter liquid that had a strange nutty taste. "There's just a bit of chicory in it." She noted.
I nodded not really knowing what that was and put the cup down on the saucer. "So how did your charity do?"
Her eyes lit up. "Oh, grand! We raised a lot of money thanks to Leonard. The ladies around here have always been a little taken with him on account of his bein' so handsome, but then when that whole thing happened he became a real hero and he and the crew were all over the news. Of course he never actually said much, but no matter." She paused and placed her hand on my arm with a worried expression. "Were you involved with that too?"
"No." I smiled shaking my head. "I was…very far away at the time. I didn't see any of the reports, I heard about it much later." Very, very far away and two years later….
"That's somethin'! I thought the whole galaxy knew about it. You must have been really far away. I have some of the clips, would you like to see them?" I agreed and we took our coffee to the living room where we sat on an overstuffed worn leather couch and watched the images on the huge monitor across the room. I sat on the edge of the couch with my elbows on my knees tensely. The young faces on the screen looked familiar, but they were so different from what I knew. It looked as though the video was made as they were disembarking from the ship and they were immediately seized upon by the voracious crowd that pushed and jostled them.
"They are all so traumatized." I breathed sadly. She turned to me and I gestured to the screen. "Look how wide and vacant their eyes are, they way they look without really seeing. They are all frightened and in a daze." Not surprising for a group of kids pulled straight out of the Academy to stare down death and walk away against all odds.
Jim's usually placid blue eyes were almost wild with confusion as flashes from cameras went off light a lightning storm and a sea of devices were thrust into his face to record anything that fell from his lips. Even Spock seemed barely able to deal with the barrage of inquiries. How could they have known that at that moment he was mourning his mother as well as the rest of his planet and yet they were relentless, giving no thought that he was human as well as Vulcan. Chekov was almost catatonic and muttered only in a strange mix of English and Russian. Sulu was giving a dead smile, but I knew him well enough to see that he was barely holding it together. Uhura gave only short answers and frequent glances toward Spock. Scotty was perhaps the only one that attempted to indulge the press, but even he was irritable and used a lot of Scottish slang to frustrate the reporters that followed him. And then there was McCoy.
Through it all he stood still while the world swirled around him, ignoring pleas for comments or photo ops, instead directing the flow of gurneys that streamed off the ship, occasionally checking on a patient before barking orders at the blue shirts that seemed to gravitate toward him. When one persistent reporter kept asking him to say a few words about the rescue, he whirled around with unbridled fury burning in his eyes. "People died up there! Millions!" He yelled jabbing a finger toward the sky. "And because we were lucky enough not to get our asses blown up, we are the heroes?!" He stopped the next gurney that came off the ship and grabbed the camera to pull it in close to a redshirt that had obviously perished from a massive chest wound. "That is what this is all about. This is the real cost of war." He growled shoving the camera away. As it quickly refocused, it filmed him stomping away toward Jim where he grabbed his friend by the shoulders and led him back to the ship away from the media glare. Far from protest, Jim tripped after him in a blur up the ramp as though his retinas had been burned out from the flashes and he was blind.
The next clip was of McCoy looking a little more contrite but still obviously uncomfortable with the cameras and lights. He mostly looked at the ground while the reporter asked him questions. His answers were short, vague, and delivered in a low growl. "I worry a lot about him." Leti quietly said watching her baby brother on the screen. "I know he wouldn't want to worry me with details, but I just know he has seen more than he probably should. I can see it in his eyes. Those eyes aren't the same I grew up with."
We heard the creak of a floorboard and looked to see McCoy wearing a pair of loose fitting faded jeans and a black t-shirt leaning against the doorframe looking at the screen with a sense of sickness or distain. But more than that, there was a palpable sense of sadness in his eyes. "Leti." He sighed frowning into his coffee cup as he swished the liquid around.
"Mornin' Leonard." She tried to lilt while turning the monitor off. This was obviously a discussion they have had before. "You did a good deed last night and I got quite a few inquiries about you." She teased. He shot her a sarcastic look that clearly indicated his displeasure. He padded on bare feet to a chair and plopped down with a small grunt. His hair was a wild mess but he didn't give a damn, it always looked styled even if he just rolled out of bed- in fact that was why he kept it short. Emergency calls woke him in the middle of the night more often than he wanted them to and the last thing he wanted to be bothered with was neatly combing his hair while someone lay dying two floors down. "Well, seein' as how the rest of the house is stirrin' I had better get started on breakfast. You know, Leonard, today is Sunday and…"
"No!" He cut her off with an emphatic growl. "Leti, I danced until I got blisters with all the empty headed women you could dig up last night. I smiled until my face hurt and I listened to way too many stories about where people were when they heard the news about me. Today is Sunday, but it was meant to be a day of rest, right? Then let me be."
She looked disappointed."But you haven't been to church since…"
"I turned 18." He mumbled into his cup. "God doesn't exist, Leti. I've been all over up there and I never once ran into him. In fact, all I see is evidence to the contrary. All the virulent disease and violence…"
"Leonard!" She gasped. He steadily held her gaze with an icy, unapologetic conviction. It wasn't so much that he had doubts as to a divine creator, his comments may have just confirmed her worst fears. She had the tape, she got a small taste of what he saw on a fairly regular basis. She regained her grace and approached him to place her hand gently on his shoulder. "I know y'all had business of your own to attend to, and I don't mean to be selfish but I haven't seen you in so long." His face softened and he nodded in understanding. She smiled down at him and ruffled up his hair playfully before she saw it. She frowned as she tugged at the collar of his shirt. "What's this, now?" She asked running a finger over the nape of his neck.
He shot me a look that said, 'Do not tell her the truth!' and he calmly replied, "Accident."
She leaned back to look at him skeptically. "What kind of a doctor gets burn scars? You can't fib to me, Leonard, I am a doctor too you know."
"It was an accident." I vouched swallowing back the bitter taste of a lie. "He wasn't the only one that got caught in an unexpected firestorm." Of sorts….
She traced the outline that marked him as property of the Amazon Queen and said, "Well, at least it looks like it has healed rather well. Could use some more dermal regeneration, but it doesn't look too bad." He rolled his eyes. Such was life in a house full of doctors. "Anywho, will you be back in time for Sunday dinner? Paul and the kids would love to meet you."
"Dunno." He shrugged. "I am hoping this won't take all day, but with that harpy you never know. She likes to prolong the pain as long as she can just to watch me squirm."
"For your sake I certainly hope not." She huffed crossing her arms. "That woman has been more of a pain than necrotizing fasciitis and I tell you another thing, that little girl of yours needs her daddy, it's only right that she knows you love her even if you are off in space. The way that woman uses her you'd have to wonder if she'd be better off bein' raised by wolves."
McCoy and I stood on the porch with our bellies full of biscuits and gravy and waved goodbye as she left for her church meeting. It was only 0800 and yet already it felt like it was over 100 degrees. He put his arm around me and sighed, "Are you ready to meet the Wicked Witch of the South? The Queen may have been a piece of work, but she ain't got nothing on the ex. Makes me wonder now if she was a lost member of the colony. " I chuckled and he kissed the top of my head. Rather than feeling awkward, it seemed only a natural progression. So much for strained consequences.
We borrowed a car from Leti and I was almost giddy that people still used them. As we headed back toward Atlanta, McCoy told me that combustion engines had long gone by the wayside in favor of fuel cells similar to what the Enterprise used, only smaller and they unfortunately lacked warp technology. I didn't see that as such a bad thing when I thought of all the accidents that could occur. You could be traveling along and all of a sudden intersect with another vehicle traveling at warp and you both go up in a puff of obliterated particles.
When we reached the city McCoy became even more tense, yelling at other drivers and issuing many hard glares as we sat in traffic. To be fair, the highway system had been heavily modified since the last time I had used one. Back in Chicago, the major freeways had six lanes in each direction to keep traffic flowing, but since people largely used mass transit the number of lanes had been reduced to two. Here we only had one.
I looked out the window at the buildings that constituted the city, but didn't recognize anything. I shook my head and observed, "Another city that has completely changed. I know that a lot of time has gone by, but at least in Chicago I expected to see more of the old buildings I knew. The city had always prided itself on preservation of old, historical architecture and yet only a few buildings remained."
"Nuclear holocaust will do that." He quipped tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. I looked at him astonished. He paused to take in my expression and quietly said, "Oh, you didn't know about that. Forgot."
"There was a nuclear war?" I choked out.
"World War III. Somewhere around the mid 21rst century around 600 million people died and most cities were destroyed." He raised his eyebrows and sarcastically added, "Who knows, you may have lived to see it."
"To be so lucky." I mused in horror. "But why? Money? Land? Oil?"
He shook his head no to all the usual suspects. "Eugenics."
"Eugenics." I repeated in disbelief. "Did the Nazis resurrect a fourth Reich to reestablish an Aryan race?" A desperately sick feeling stirred in the pit of my stomach.
"No. It is a long story, but essentially it starts with entire militaries being controlled by the drug trade." He glanced at me nervously as though I would have some opinion on the matter. That was nothing new: the military had been supplying drugs to soldiers since at least WWI. "And then a faction used a nuclear weapon and then further killed anyone with radiation sickness so they couldn't pass on defective or mutated genes. The back and forth went on for about 30 years until there was almost nothing left. So, what you see now had to largely be rebuilt from scratch including your former home."
"Nice." I sighed looking out the window to my right. "Good times had by all."
It took another 10 minutes to find a place to park since many streets were turned into wide pedestrian paths like you would find in Paris. She wanted him to meet her at an outdoor café and he was perplexed by this as was I; was she part of a mob or going to try and score drugs or something?
We jogged for three blocks before he slowed in front of an Italian bistro and looked over the small grouping of chairs. His jaw clenched tight and his eyes narrowed when he looked in the direction of a woman who sat alone sipping a late and filing her long fingernails. Her eyes were covered by sunglasses that seemed ridiculously large for her face and her lips were painted a shade of red that almost matched her long hair. In the bright sun, her cadaver pale skin almost shimmered and for some reason I equated her with a vampire and waited expectantly for her to burst into flame or bare her fangs at us. I could feel waves of revulsion wash off McCoy and the icy determination that she oozed. I just knew this wasn't going to be pretty and I began formulating a plan to keep it from spiraling out of control…
