FIFTEEN
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
We did pass a Russian border patrol a few miles east, probably sent to check on the gaping hole we left in their barbed wire fence. But there were three of them with only Kalashnikovs and a dog to defend their country, and, well, we had a Bat-tank. So they basically watched and pulled out their radios as we bulleted past them. I’m guessing that what happened there was something along the lines of, “Dude, I’m not paid enough for this shit.”
Dries seems confident that we’ll be “on schedule”—to quote him. He even retrieved a cigarillo from his breast pocket and is now busy slowly poisoning us under March’s disapproving eye. I don’t mind that much: there’s something familiar, almost comforting about the sweet tobacco smell tickling my nostrils, like a childhood memory maybe—except I don’t have any of those left, I remind myself bitterly.
It’s been less than half an hour since we crossed the border, and under the tracks, the ground has gotten smoother. It’s too dark outside to assess our surroundings clearly, but I’m not certain we’re on the trail anymore. The woods have thinned, and at the end of the snowy road illuminated by our headlights, I can make out some sort of field, a white plain that seems to stretch until it blends with the inky sky. There’s so many stars . . . I wonder if I’m seeing them for the first time. Was it that I never thought to look up, so numb that I was in my cage? Here, with the moon half-hidden behind distant trees, no clouds, and no light to distract my gaze, I’m spellbound, little more than a speck of dust under the infinity of the Milky Way.
I get too absorbed in my philosophical contemplation of the universe to notice the tank has stopped. March’s gentle tap on my shoulder pulls me out of my daze. “Island, we’re here.”
Here?
I nod, but to be honest, “here” is . . . nowhere. He helps me climb out of the Bat-tank, and once we’re standing at a safe distance, Isiporho arranges several loads of C-4 inside the vehicle. I watch him proceed with mild concern.
“We won’t be needing it any longer,” he explains, before pointing to the sky. “Look.”
I squint at the horizon. Surely, a dark shape is flying our way.
Isiporho grins. “Right on time.”
It’s not until I see the plane clearly that I understand that the white expanse surrounding us is in fact an abandoned airstrip, as evidenced by the presence of a crumbling control tower in the distance, leaning on a hangar I didn’t notice either because it’s slowly being devoured by the forest and buried under a layer of fresh snow.
We watch the plane touch ground effortlessly despite the powdery clouds engulfing it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, with the engine placed atop the wings like that.
Next to me, Dries runs a hand across his face. “Where did he steal a Beriev?”
Isiporho shrugs. “Dikkenek works in mysterious ways . . .”
I look up at March. “Who’s that?”
His expression softens. “One of your Facebook friends.”
Okay. I used to cultivate ties to the criminal underworld on Facebook. I let that sink in. Deeply. A question forms on my lips, that I should have asked long ago. “March . . . ” I gulp. “I’m not really a software developer, am I? Was I, like, an undercover spy?” CIA, Mossad, DGSI? I shudder at the endless list of equally frightening possibilities. Do I secretly know karate? Maybe not. I got caught by Stiles too easily for that.
Before March can answer, uncontrollable laughter erupts from . . . Dominik.
“Dominik, my boy, you vex me,” Dries grumbles.
“Sorry, baas. It’s just . . .” Aannd he’s chuckling again, prompting Isiporho to do the same.
“No,” March eventually answers. “You’re a brilliant engineer . . . with a taste for adventure.”
“Trouble,” Isiporho corrects before his gaze darts over to our tank. Something seems to catch his attention—lights on the road. Oh shit, there’s a bunch of cars driving our way. His eyebrows knit in annoyance. “Dries.”
The culprit claps his hands. “Well, lady and gentlemen, now’s the time to run.”
I’m tempted to say, “Again?” but March takes my hand and drags me before I can voice any complaint. Our little group races toward the now-stationary Beriev while, behind us, voices bark in Russian—orders for us to stay where we are, I gather. A jolt of panic makes my legs work twice as fast when I hear gunshots . . . followed by an explosion—the tank. My legs falter and stumble before I catch myself; I nearly forgot about the C-4.
In the complete chaos that ensues, I glimpse a rudimentary ladder being deployed from the plane’s side, and before I know it, March’s hands are on my butt—helping me inside, actually. I fall face-first on a blue carpet in a dubious state of cleanliness. Dries hauls me to my feet . . . and that’s when we’re attacked by the dog.
Charging down the aisle with a terrifying bark is the fattest, ugliest bulldog I’ve ever laid my eyes on. And I’m pretty sure it’ll also be the last thing I’ll ever see, until an even louder bark explodes from the general direction of the cockpit: “Andrea! Zwijg!” Andrea! Be quiet!
The cerberus freezes at Dries’s feet, its tongue dangling and drooling in a disgusting manner. Now that it’s no longer trying to kill us, I notice the creature is wearing a knit Christmas sweater. On its back, snowmen and reindeers frolic among pines, and the red wool appears on the verge of ripping from the effort of containing “Andrea’s” jelly.
I feel March’s hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be afraid; he’s not dangerous, just a little . . .”
“Stupid.” Dominik sighs, slamming the plane’s door while, in the distance, a group of Russian soldiers runs toward the plane. Apparently they won’t give up, even if the tank’s explosion set one of their cars on fire.
Dries unceremoniously drops my ass in a row of blue-lined seats. “Buckle up, little Island.”
I obey, fighting the urge to curl up when Andrea sprawls his big butt at my feet, panting heavily. I breathe a sigh of modest relief when March sits next to me. At least I have a bodyguard in case that monster tries to lick my hand. The cabin starts to vibrate, and the plane speeds up fast on the snowy tarmac, the engine’s noise covering new gunshots coming from outside. I screw my eyes shut and block it all. I don’t want to know; I’m at the end of my rope, too drained, too scared. My stomach drops as the Beriev takes off. The plane draws a wide curve above the airfield, allowing me one last glimpse of the flaming vehicles on the ground and the soldiers hurrying around them.
It dawns on me that my wish came true after all: I left Ingolvinlinna.
“Where are we going?” I ask March, after we’ve reached our cruising altitude and the engine’s noise is down to a continuous hum.
“Constanta, in Romania.” He checks the black chronograph around his wrist. “We’ll land in four hours. Dries has a friend there who might be able to help with . . . what we saw on your X-rays.”
“Is he a real doctor, this time?” When March doesn’t answer and his brow lifts in puzzlement, I explain. “If Bentsen really put that device in my head and worked for Anies, I can’t believe any kind of medical college allowed that . . .”
“Well, she started out as a promising neurosurgeon, but her license was revoked by the Norwegian Directorate of Health fifteen years ago.”
Oh God . . . Bingo. “Why?”
Lines of concern form on March’s brow. “I can’t pretend to fully understand her research but . . . she was researching neuroinhibitors, allowing her to selectively manipulate long-term memory.”
As his words sink in, I feel a tingling sensation in my neck. I know my brain is probably messing with me, converting the fear simmering in my stomach into vivid hallucinations. But I can feel the spider moving inside me, and none of the deep breaths I take through my nose help. On the armrest, March’s hand tries to take mine; I snatch it away. I don’t want anyone to touch me.
“So she was researching memory erasure, and what happened?” I snap, staring intently at my lap.
“She was supposed to target traumatic memories in a test group of mentally ill patients, but she experimented extensively on them.”
“Like she did on me,” I rasp out.
“Yes.”
“Did any of them . . . recover?”
From across the aisle, I can feel Dries’s scrutiny on me as March says softly, “I don’t know.”
I feel nothing. I don’t know if I should be scared, angry, desperate, but the moment his words register, all I experience is a form of numbness, like I’m disappearing. Running from Anies and Stiles at least had the merit of giving me some sort of immediate purpose. Back in the woods, being alive made sense because the alternative was imminent death. Now that I’m no longer in immediate danger—save for the way Andrea keeps sniffing my feet—I’m trying to think of what it means to start all over being so empty, what kind of life I’ll lead if I can never remember who I used to be, and really, I got nothing.
I look at March, and inside me something stirs. Anger. That sadness in his eyes, the way he seems to be constantly studying me, probing, waiting for some lighting strike that won’t happen: it makes me feels uncomfortable, angry, and that’s something already. A little anger is a good start, I decide, before I get up from my seat and squeeze past his legs into the aisle without meeting his gaze.
Dries watches me with a raised eyebrow. “Where are you going?”
I shrug in the cockpit’s general direction. “March said he was my Facebook friend.”
“Dikkenek?”
“Yeah, him.”
Already, March is rising from his seat. “Do you want me to take you to the cockpit?”
I ball my fists. “That’s approximately fifteen feet. I think I’ll manage, thank you.”
From the corner of my eye, I see his fingers twitch, but he doesn’t insist and lets me walk past Isiporho and Dominik toward the cockpit door. The former is apparently busy reviewing something on a laptop while the latter is getting his ass handed to him by a giant cupcake at Call of Duty: Candy War. Serves him right for surrendering to a life of crime, I cheer internally.
I catch Dries muttering behind my back to March in Afrikaans. “Gee haar ruimte . . .” Give her space . . .
Exactly. Too bad the evening’s only valuable piece of advice came from a dad with a rap sheet the size of Wikipedia.
I push the cockpit’s door carefully, and I’m immediately greeted by the smell of potato chips. I spot the empty bag, discarded on top of a dashboard that blinks and gleams in the dark with every color of the rainbow. Sprawled in the pilot’s chair is a blond giant I estimate to be in his late forties, early fifties at most. It’s probably been a while since he last sat in a barber’s chair, judging by the straw-like locks falling on his shoulders and the six-month beard.
Before I’m even through examining the colorful soccer patches on his leather jacket, Andrea drags himself to the cockpit too. The Viking welcomes him with a pat on the head and flings his hand at the free seat. “Make yourself at home.”
His accent is much stronger than that of his teammates—must be South African too. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize that he’s talking to me, not the dog, who’s settled behind his master’s seat and is now struggling to lick his own butthole.
I plop myself in the copilot seat, taking in the endless sea of clouds beneath us. “So you’re a pilot?” I ask the Facebook friend I don’t recognize and who doesn’t give any sign that he remembers me either.
“Not really.” He grunts.
I fasten my seat belt nervously. “You just took the plane?”
“Yeah.”
“Dries says you stole it.”
His lips tighten under that thick beard. “It’s Russia. You can’t steal anything here. They’re communists; they share everything.”
In that moment, I curse the devastation in my brain: I have this intuition that his story doesn’t add up, but I can’t provide any precise fact to back my point. I’m absolutely certain that Russia isn’t communist, I know that Vladimir Putin is the president, and this guy named Dmitry Medvedev acts as his right nut, but there’s a stupid hole in my memory, and I’d be incapable of explaining how I know that or precisely when communism ended in Russia. Here’s something else I’ll need to read about ASAP. Shaking my head in frustration, I resort to what I deem a shitty comeback. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t want to share the plane with you.”
A hoarse chuckle shakes Dikkenek’s frame. “I made them change their mind.”
His right hand moves to the throttle lever as he says this, and I register a whirring sound. Looking down, I discover that his hand is . . . fake, a sleek prosthetic whose fingers move with ease to flip a couple of switches on the dashboard.
When he notices the direction of my gaze, he shrugs. “Carbon fiber. All the way up to my shoulder.”
“What happened?”
He looks away from the controls to study me. I make a note that he has clear eyes—gray, or maybe blue—and that he’d better watch where we’re going. He eventually asks, “You ever been in a bare-hand fight with a capybara?”
My face bunches in confusion. “Um . . . obviously I wouldn’t remember, but I don’t think so.”
He leans back in his seat and shakes his head. “Some things you’d best forget anyway.”
I cringe. “That’s what happened? A capybara ripped your arm off? I thought they were, like, big rabbits. Super cute and debonair.”
“Nah. The arm, that’s a different story—nothing I care to remember. But capybaras, they’re vicious, you know. The males, they’re territorial. You turn your back on them, and raaaaww!” He growls, mimicking some sort of alien attack with his hands. “It’s over.”
My mouth falls open. “Over? Like they eat you? But they’re herbivores, right?”
“Herbivores, huh? Try hiking around with a ham sandwich in your backpack, and you’ll see their true colors.”
“Okay. You got attacked by an angry male capybara over a ham sandwich. Color me intrigued.”
Again he lets go of the yoke and crosses his arms over his chest, his expression somber. “It was in Peru . . .”
“Shouldn’t you be holding that?” I ask, pointing at the empty yoke now bobbling slowly in front of him.
He waves a dismissive hand. “It’s a Beriev; it flies itself. So he sees me. He’s twenty yards away, and his nose quivers. He’s picked up on the sandwich’s smell.” He points at his eyes, forming a V with his index and middle finger. “Wrinkles his nose, clicks his teeth to challenge me. That’s how I know it’s on. When they attack you, you need to get them into a headlock before they can bite.”
“So it charged at you or something?”
Dikkenek grazes the yoke with his palm, possibly preventing a future crash. “No. I was faster.”
My hand flies to clasp over my mouth in consternation.
“Preemptive strike,” he concludes soberly.
He goes on with the details of his fight, and I lose track of time, listening to his crazy tales. I decide I like Dikkenek—or rather Jan—who’s actually from Brussels, launches preemptive strikes on capybaras and alligators alike, enters his dog in polenta-eating contests in Venice—where he lives—and claims to possess an autograph of a guy named Augusto Pinochet, who was apparently a huge deal in Chile in the eighties.
When he’s finished telling me about his adventures in a Saudi prison, Jan goes silent for a while, his gaze lost in the night sky. Behind his seat, Andrea has fallen asleep.
“It’s pretty bad, right?” he says.
I’m afraid I know what he means. I slump in my seat. “March says we were Facebook friends . . . before.”
He grunts in confirmation and fishes a smartphone from his inner pocket. He swipes across the screen with his thumb and hands it to me. “I like those videos you sent me. I’m following the page now.”
I look down at the screen and nearly drop the phone. In a nondescript living room, an orange tabby wearing a duck costume is riding a Roomba. Stiles’s tabby. I swallow with difficulty. “I-I gave you that link?”
He nods. “In Venice . . . before all that shit went down at the Poseidon.”
I return the phone to Jan and bury my face in my hands, gasping for breath. I knew Stiles, before Anies took me. Was it just a coincidence, because so many people shared his videos? No. I know it’s more than that; I feel it in my bones. Jan has apparently no idea who Stiles is, but did the others tell me the entire truth? I have this intuition that Dries will dodge if I bring it up—I can’t say I trust this newly found father of mine much . . . That leaves me with the option to ask March. It’s not like he and I aren’t gonna need to talk at some point, but the very idea makes me feel like I’m holding on to a lone branch dangling above a miles-deep pit.
Jan flashes me a worried look. “You okay?”
“Yeah . . . I just . . . maybe we can talk again later,” I mumble before scrambling out of the cockpit.
In the cabin, four strangers await. Not really, but they all changed into civilian clothes, and it feels odd to see Isiporho and Dries in those impeccably cut three-piece suits. The latter is busy lecturing Dominik about his sneakers, cargo pants, and leather jacket—the sneakers appear especially problematic, since Dries keeps waving his forefinger at them and bitching in a low hiss. “Ons is nie gangsters nie . . . ” We’re not gangsters . . .
There’s a lot that could be said about that particular statement, but Dominik appears suitably penitent while, at the back of the plane, March got away with wearing a black turtleneck and dark jeans—that being said, he does wear an old-fashioned plaid blazer, and his clothes look like he spent hours ironing them. Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever seen shoes shine so bright. I’m trying to figure what he’s doing, hunched over his tray table and scrubbing something with intense concentration. Cleaning a gun.
I’m reminded of the way he cleaned the floor back at the cabin, and again he strikes me as this incredibly meticulous guy, what with his tiny brushes and spray bottles, or how he wipes the same spot of the barrel over and over, oblivious to the world around him. Over and over . . . and over. I frown, wondering if that’s how he got his shoes so shiny.
Suddenly, he looks up from his handiwork with a start, and his gaze immediately settles on me, anxious, watchful. He quickly reassembles the gun and tucks it back in his holster. The cleaning tools and products are put away in a black suitcase just as fast and he walks up to me. “Is everything all right?” he asks.
“Yeah . . . there’s something I need to show you but maybe later.”
His brow wrinkles in suspicion. “It will be another fifteen minutes until we land; perhaps you can show me now.”
My eyes dart over to Dries, who gave up on Dominik and is now observing our interaction with undisguised interest. I’d rather have this conversation privately however, especially because I have no idea where it’ll lead us . . . I shake my head. “No. It can wait. It’s not like we can do anything about it in a plane.”
March nods, his gaze lingering on my wrinkled sweatshirt and camo pants. “We’ll find you clean clothes as soon as we arrive.”
“You don’t have to . . .” I say, almost like a reflex. It’s not that I don’t need to change—although wearing dirty clothes for another day won’t kill me. The thing is, with March, there’s strings attached. I’m pretty sure that money isn’t an issue, and I could ask for whatever I need, but anything he gives me will only make me more dependent, more vulnerable around him. Until I’ve mustered the courage to clarify our situation, I don’t want to give in to the temptation of letting him pamper me. It’d be . . . wrong.
Except he’s not the type to give up easily. All but ignoring my answer, he pulls out his phone and starts typing something on the screen, his fingers flying fast on the glass. “Don’t worry about anything. Just give me a list of what you need: I’ll have Phyllis arrange a delivery at the casino.”
The casino? Is that where we’re going? Also . . . “Who’s Phyllis?”
His eyebrows jump before he composes himself, but in his eyes, the sadness returns, ever close to the surface. “She’s my assistant. She was very happy to learn that we found you, and”—he inches closer, and there’s a twitch in his shoulder, but the intent doesn’t reach his hand; he doesn’t touch me. He lowers his voice—“I’m happy too. I’m . . . so happy.”
I look down and tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. “Even if . . . it’s not . . . things are not like they used to be?”
If I only knew what “things” used to be between us. Was it casual? No, he wouldn’t have done all that crazy stuff to save a friend with benefits, would he? God, I didn’t want to have that conversation in the plane, not like this, with Dries and Isiporho watching, with nowhere to hide, no time to process any of this.
He does that thing again, where he looks at me in the eyes, and I can’t think, drowning in all that blue. “Nothing has changed for me, Island. But I know . . . I understand it’s too early for you.” His features are taut with barely concealed pain as he adds, “For you, everything probably feels . . . complicated.”
No. Complicated doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel at the moment. There’s someone else inside me, a girl listening to March, straining toward him, whose agony I feel yet can’t connect to. There’s someone else’s pain tearing me up from the inside, and I want it to stop. My vision gets a little blurry; I sniff back, and I raise my palms in a feeble attempt to put some distance between us.
March tries to pull me back to him. His voice is so soft . . . and it hurts so bad. “Island, please—”
I shake my head. “Don’t . . .”
When I try to back away, I end up bumping into Dries’s chest. “Calm down, little Island.”
I wiggle my way around him. I know he could catch me, but he doesn’t; he watches me run to the one place I seem to always end up these days.
I need to go to the bathroom.