Expected Guests
Night had already fallen some time ago. Hours had gone by as everyone rotated in and out of watch duty. It was now pre-dawn.
The igloo was silent, all occupants fast asleep. Outside, patches of frost—half water and half chemical—clung to every surface as the veil of night had all but disappeared. Bill was faithfully perched atop the Mongoose amidst the first rays of the sun. It was poised just above the horizon, situated in such a way that the light was ducted in between orange-brown clay and lifeless-grey cloud. Rare, heavenly illumination reached him. It was a rather still and serene sight, one seldom seen by any of them being such an early hour. Normally, they'd wake up some time from now and get ready for slaving away at the factory.
This 'duty' was something Bill had definitely not been looking forward to; he was dead tired from all the waiting. But the current view was quite worth the nuisance. What was more valuable, sleep? Or this uncommon beauty on display? Bill had it in him to walk inside and wake everyone, to share this rare instant. Soon, however, it would rise higher like an ant on a string and disappear just as anything beautiful did. And everyone else would probably shun him out anyways, simply refusing to give up slumber. Indeed, Bill had the sun all to himself, even if it was just for a few moments. Maybe it made this moment all the more precious. For the time being he basked in the brilliant dawn with a steadfast smile, staring into the handy work of God.
He traced the pure-gold sphere with his smiling gaze all the way up until it passed into the clouds, out of sight.
He heard a rustling sound and then the door opened, the predictable metal-on-metal grinding noise ruining the silence around him. Bill spun around on his seat. It was Justin, always the earliest riser out of them all.
Bill's disposition hadn't changed, the smile from earlier etched on his face. "Good morning, Justin. Did you sleep any better?"
"Same as always." Justin said as he approached. "I don't feel too much like shit this morning, so that's good."
"Indeed. I feel a little better as well."
"Hopefully that shit has run its course."
Bill paid no mind to Justin's coarse language and resumed his stare ahead, the clouds now backlit by the imprisoned sun rays. "I meant to ask you…what should we do if the Kaiser's men do show up here?"
Justin simply answered, "We've got two shotguns. And a frag grenade."
"Hmm." Bill grunted, not really offering any definitive reply.
Justin knew perfectly well that Bill would not fight anyone, not even Sergei's men. Not even if they attacked Bill himself. But Justin still let Bill in on his strategy in the event they were found.
"Me and Ken will use the shotguns. I'm not sure, but he seems like he can handle a weapon. I'll probably give Chris the grenade. He seems like the most level-headed person here, besides you of course, but you're against violence so he's my only option; so Chris will be the last resort in case we all get iced."
"That's it? That's your plan?"
"Yeah. Got a better one?"
"Well…no. I'm just wondering if there is a better way to handle that type of situation."
Justin didn't reply, but still looked at Bill with a prompting gaze, half-heartedly listening. He lit up a cigarette.
"For instance," Bill continued, "you could just agree to help them since that is what you promised."
"That's the whole point; I was never going to help them. I just needed a shotgun so we could get the igloo back."
"…You really didn't think this through. One thing any man can learn, even a man without faith: never make decisions in the heat of the moment."
"There was no thinking to be done! We needed a weapon and we had to do whatever it took to get one! So what the fuck?"
"Please, Justin, calm yourself. You'll wake the others."
"Fuck it! I'll wake them up if I God damn feel like it!"
"Please, don't use the Lord's name like that."
"You know…you and all your Bible talk…it makes me wanna fuckin' punch a baby. Lord this, Jesus that. When are you gonna wake up and smell the chemicals? Jesus, your God? He fucking left this place decades ago! We are betrayed here, brother. We are beached!"
Bill was speechless. He stared back at Justin, taken back from his sudden outburst. The spiral into this bitter rage was somewhat warranted given the atrocities inherent in life on Traxus IX and all they had been through together, but to speak of God the way Justin had just done...was utterly blasphemous. Bill held his unyielding gaze on Justin for another minute, finally breaking the stare with a few blinks, surmising that Justin knew not what he had just done.
Justin spoke again, this time more civilly. "I mean...you'd think by now you'd get it, Bill. He's just gonna let us roll on and on down here until the entire universe has forgotten about us, and we ain't never getting of this planet, Bill."
"…I cannot speak with you right now. I'm going inside."
"Yeah, go inside. Pray to the Holy Spirit and get us off Traxus Nine. Ask him for a deadline too because I haven't seen any real results after all this time spent on your knees."
Bill turned the other cheek and walked back into the igloo as Chris passed him on the way out, fully awake. "What's wrong?" Chris asked.
"Justin isn't in a good mood, that's all." Bill replied.
Chris saw Justin through the open door standing in the dirt plain and looking into the sky, shoulders slumped as if thwarted by the view itself. He approached Justin's side.
"I'm not in the mood to talk, kid." Justin walked away towards the water pallet.
"Can I come with you?"
Justin stopped, turned around and was about to order Chris inside but he couldn't upon seeing the kid's face, so young, helpless and naïve. He was clueless, scared and needed someone to talk to. It shouldn't be Justin. Anyone but him. But it seemed there was no choice. Chris depended on him. Justin knew that now.
"Fine. What is it?"
Chris tagged along Justin's side like a family's lap dog, looking up at him the entire trek to the pallet. "I heard what you two were talking about. So what are we doing if the Kaiser's men show up and there are too many of them? What do we do?"
"There's only two options then: fight or submit." Justin tore open more of the cellophane wrap and grabbed some water, offloading a few bottles into Chris' arms. "And I don't plan on submitting."
"Why not? What's the worst that could happen? You give him the supplies he needs until the war is over. Then, it's back to business as usual."
"No, it doesn't work like that. Once you submit, the mouth of the monster just sinks deeper and deeper into you. Once I provide for him, he's always gonna want it. And I'm not spending the rest of my god-forsaken life as a two-bit peddler."
"Better than dying."
Justin grabbed extra water for himself and slung the tarp back over the pallet. "There's a lot of things better than dying, but working for an asshole ain't one of them. It's already bad enough here. God damn it, I shoulda never smoked that shit." Justin marched back to the front side of the igloo, laden with bottled water in his arms. Chris followed.
"So then we're fighting. And possibly dying."
"I will be. You do whatever you want."
"I can't believe this. I can't believe you're being so selfish."
"That's life, kid." Justin rounded the corner and suddenly found himself face to face with Ken. Bill stood idly by in the background near the door. "What now?"
Ken said, "What's this I hear about you getting all suicidal?"
Justin didn't answer. He simply eyed Bill beyond Ken's shoulder. "Step aside."
"No." Ken replied. "I wanna know what your plan is before they come this way."
"You already know my plan. I'm gonna stay here and kill every fuckin' one of them."
"And how do you think you're doing that? You'll be outnumbered and outgunned, holed up in this metal kill-box with no way out of it."
"He does have a point." Bill said.
"So does my dick."
Ken stepped back into Justin's view. "Just how long do you think you'll last?"
"Not how long I'll last…how long they'll last."
-
"You still haven't told any of us your plan." Ken said. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, still waiting for an answer from Justin—who was neatly stacking water bottles around the floor of the sleeping quarters. "Fine. If you're gonna make this your final resting place, we're gonna take the 'Goose and leave."
Justin kept on rearranging the state of the room as if time for spring cleaning on some other world. His face was level and cold. "You do that and I'll blast you off it."
"What?!"
"You heard me."
"Since you're sentencing yourself to certain death, what does it matter if we take the 'Goose? God damnit, tell me your fucking plan!!"
Justin wasn't perturbed in the least by Ken's anger, just kept on placing water bottles at seemingly logical intervals. "Hang on, let me finish."
Ken huffed a furious exhalation of boiled breath, and waited.
Justin carried on for another minute, not knowing, or caring that he was trying Ken's patience. He finished with the last water bottle and stood up to face Ken. "Like I told you yesterday…it's very simple."
"Justin, two shotguns and a grenade isn't gonna take care of—"
"—Shut up about shotguns! If my plan works, we won't have to use weapons against them."
"You said you were going to kill them."
"Not with shotguns or a grenade." Justin nodded over to the heater room. "With them."
Ken's eyes widened. "You can't let those things out!"
"I can, and I will."
"What about us?!"
"We'll be fine, that's what the shotguns are for."
-
"So," Justin said with a resolute smile directed to the northern plain, "Keep watching the horizon. We need to have a good amount of warning before they get here."
"Alright, Justin. But we're still doing this in shifts." Chris replied.
"That's fine, but there better not be any slacking off. You get complacent and our only shot at this is gone." Justin looked at Ken and Bill. "That goes for all of you."
Justin stepped closer to the Mongoose and handed Chris a pair of binoculars.
Chris took them from Justin and carefully performed an inspection, not really knowing what he was inspecting for. Certainly not its attributes, like fully multi-coated optics, image stabilization, and digital collimation controls. He was oblivious to the engineering behind Assisted Optics. He just made sure the eyecups and the lenses were dust free with a wipe from his undershirt.
Chris brought the binoculars to bear, jostling them over his face to obtain a comfortable spot over his eye sockets. Automatically, internal gyroscopes whined to life, steadying the image in his unsteady hands. Chris leaned over the handle bars and buttressed his weight through his bent elbows and swept the optics side to side, unaware to the fact that he could see 2000 yards out with a 500-foot field of view.
"How come we didn't use these yesterday?" he asked, not really expecting any answer.
-
"The Kaiser said, 'Two days from now'." Justin quoted.
"Guess he's not a man of his word after all." Ken offered.
Justin, Bill and Ken had gathered around Chris at the Mongoose in the death throes of the late afternoon. In a matter of two Traxus IX hours, the sun would fall below the plains and there'd be no light; the binoculars would be useless.
"Does this thing have night vision?"
"That thing is a hundred years old." Justin replied.
"Guess it was an option on this model." Chris mumbled.
"Tomorrow is another day." Bill announced.
"You're sure they won't come at night?" Chris asked.
"Visibility is very limited at night." Bill replied. "They wouldn't come at this hour if they were intent on finding Justin."
"What if they're already on their way?" Chris proposed.
No one answered him.
"Are we all done in the igloo?" Justin asked Ken.
"All ship-shape. It looks as though we'd all be in the heater room, warming up or something."
"Good. Bill, you've got first shift at sunrise. Just like this morn—"
"—Wait!" Chris shouted.
Everyone wheeled back around to the Northern plain with wide eyes. "What do you see?" Bill asked.
"It's them, it's gotta be."
"Give me those." Justin said, snatching them from Chris.
He peered into the eyecups, adjusting the collimation control to compensate for the lack of ambient light. He gave one eyecup a rotary spin to focus in…and he saw them. "Fuck me, right?"
"Heading this way?" Bill asked, hesitant to hear the answer.
"Everyone get ready!"
Chris jumped off the ATV as everyone else scrambled to their predetermined places.
It all had to go down perfect. Otherwise, they were surely dead.