Earth to Earth

The Amazing Universal Disclaimer: Don’t own it. Won’t own it. Can’t own it. The end.



Author’s Note: Huge thanks go out to Yma, who betaed for me and was a great help in both the editing process and the process of easing my nerves. Thanks muchly!



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Chapter Nine: Mob Physics

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Beep. Beep. Beep.



It wasn’t a cliche hospital room. The walls weren’t stark-white, it wasn’t freezing cold, the nurses didn’t wear scrubs or filter masks, there weren’t little computer monitors with jagged glowing green lines marking off each fleeting second of a tortured life. Nothing like the ancient films that Thomas Jones loved to sneak into the restricted libraries to watch.



No, actually the hospital area was fairly comfortable -- it was spacious, warm, and had obviously been decorated by somebody’s mother.



The walls were a salmony-cream color, sponged over with dark orange for texture. They gave Vash mental images of sandstorms in the deep desert.



Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.



The only thing cliche about Sky City’s med bay was the smell. It was the same smell that permeated hospitals everywhere: the germy, greenish-yellow smell of illness overlaid with a sterilizing chemical tang and just a hint of cloying perfume. Air freshener. Worse than smog, and twice as bad because the intentions behind it were well-meaning.



And then there was the heart monitor. The incessant, softly chiming heart monitor.



Beep. Beep. Beep.



It was true that there weren’t any monitors or machines sitting around in the main areas or looming over patient’s bedsides, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They were always tucked away discreetly in control rooms and monitoring chambers, and the only sign that they existed was the soft, steady beep of a heartbeat coming from a tiny speaker near the headboard of each bed.



When the heartbeat stopped, there was nothing else after. Silence always greeted a patient’s passing. The ship’s people had seen enough of the old movies to decide that mankind had outgrown the garish trauma of announcing death to the world with a droning flatline and futile, exaggerated scenes of CPR and defibrillation.



For now, there was only the steady chime of a heartbeat, slowing with each passing minute.



Vash curled up a little closer to himself in his chair, and turned a brittle page in the ancient book he was trying to read as a distraction. The spine read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The title made him think of Wolfwood, but not in a gut-wrenching sort of way -- actually, the memories were one of the few things that had made him smile today.



Earlier, he had found an old copy of the Bible and read most of the book of Matthew. That was not one of the few things that had made him smile today. He mostly tried not to get the pages damp, but he knew the librarians were going to be upset with him when they discovered the saltwater specks marring the cover of their most well-preserved copy.



Beeeep.



Pause.



Beep. Beep. Beep.



Vash glanced over at the occupied bed next to him and watched the little hitch in the Doctor’s breathing pass and settle back into a steady rhythm.



“You don’t have to stay on my account,” Vash told the unresponsive, fragile old body. “If you have someplace better to be, then you should get going.”



Beep. Beep. Beep.



Vash shrugged and gave a sad little sigh. “If you insist,” he muttered, and went back to his book.



---------



Sky City’s inhabitants had put its empty bulk to good use over the past century, taking the equipment that was already there and expanding it until it ate up the emptiness and filled the cold metal halls with a strange, electronic kind of life. The medical bay itself was the first and largest of the spaces to be filled, but since then the chemists, biologists, anthropologists, librarians and curators had all staked out their own little pieces of dead air, their own little corners of the ship’s vast computer network.



The city’s scientists worked tirelessly to preserve a dead culture -- for three generations, delicate, decaying paper-bound books had been recorded verbatim into the computer mainframe, and shattered films had been painstakingly restored as well as anyone knew how; the black box recordings of the Great Fall had been examined and re-examined and re-recorded and played backwards and picked apart piece by piece, whisper by whisper, in some vain attempt to recapture the voices of the lost people of Earth.



Maybe it was ridiculous. Maybe it was an obsession that would fade away over the next century. A lot of information was destroyed or corrupted when the city crashed and two of the Plants died; the ship’s people were struggling to regain the level of connection they had once had with their ancestors. Maybe... maybe they’d lost too much footing.



Maybe there was nothing left to regain.



---------



Now, here’s a better cliche: a poorly lit room, tainted with the scent of stale smoke and smuggled alcohol, with the riffling sound of playing cards being shuffled blending into the background murmur of low voices. Snatches of overheard conversation announced illcontent and unease among the speakers.



“What about the guards?” “My cousin Ron couldn’t keep watch to save his life and they’ve got him on the frickin’ night shift...”



“.... coma?” “I thought he was locked up....” “Vash-san goes in and out all the time...”



“... does anyone here have a... a gun I could borrow until this blows over? I mean, I don’t want to use it, not really -- it’s just that my dad’s so sick and he’s getting older, and I worry sometimes...”



The low murmurs settled into silence when the door slid open, apprehensive eyes glancing up from under furrowed brows. No one made any kind of move, not like outsiders in the desert would have; they weren’t that barbaric, not yet. They just looked up, baleful and a little scared, prepared to cower or run or lie through their teeth, as needed.



But it was only Thomas. A little sigh of relief whispered up from the depths of the room, and everyone went back to filing their regularly scheduled complaints.



Thomas edged into the room quietly and kept his head down, knowing he wasn’t exactly the most welcome person there. Everyone knew his older brother was taking care of Vash, and although it wasn’t a source of outright resentment among his fellow psuedo-rebels, it was definitely a point of contention and not something Tom wanted to stir up trouble over. Tom’s connections to higher places made him something of an outsider here. These people were not scientists, not curators of an ancient and dying memory; they cared nothing for Earth and little for Gunsmoke itself. They were the rebellious teens, the scared parents, and the old-timers too deeply rooted to adjust to a new planetside life.



They were a mismatched bunch, really. The only thing they had in common was a niggling doubt, the seed of a terrible fear -- that maybe, just maybe, everything they knew was doomed.



The end of the world as we know it. (Some old song from a tired, crumbling world.) The end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.



Tom made his way into the back corner, where he sat down at a circular table without greeting the other four people already there. The brawny woman to his right -- maybe in her late forties, early fifties, with iron-gray hair and a frozen expression -- offered him a cigarette. He shook his head.



Today, he thought nervously, turning his plan over and over again in his head. Today I won’t be an outsider anymore.



“Hey, Tom,” said the boy across the table from him. His name was Vincent and he was younger than Tom by two years, but infinitely tougher. His family did maintenance work. Not like sweeping floors and scrubbing shelves: more like reattaching bits of the ship that fell off. Three of his four uncles had died in accidents in the past couple of months. (Maintenance work had suddenly gotten a lot harder after the crash.)



“Hey, Vince,” Tom said, keeping his voice level.



“Is something wrong? You’re here early,” asked Cynthia, peering worriedly at Tom. Cynthia was 26, the mother of two, both of whom had suffered serious injuries in the crash and one of whom had lost her vision and hearing. Outwardly, Cynthia blamed Knives for her childrens’ scars and handicaps, but most people who knew her could tell that she hadn’t quite accepted Vash’s innocence. She acted nervous, as if she were guilty about it -- but the blame was there, deep-rooted and corrosive.



She still had the sweetness and sensitivity of a mother, though. There was something universal about motherhood, just like there was something universal about hospital-smell.



Tom looked up at her and tried to give a reassuring smile. “Just a fight with Mike,” he said calmly. “Nothing big.”



“You got something?” asked Vincent, leaning on the table and tapping a chewed-up pen cap against the battered metal surface.



Tom shifted in his seat. “Coupla days ago you mentioned you wanted to get a good look at him.”



Vincent nodded, poking the pen cap between his lips and shredding it even more. He didn’t take his eyes off Tom.



“Well, I’ve snuck a look at Mike’s files on the two,” Tom plunged ahead, “and the coma thing is just a cover story.”



The older woman with the iron-gray hair nodded. “We figured that,” she said. Her name was Pam. Pam Brodsky. Her husband was one of Knives’ security guards. She tried to talk him out of the job, but they had a falling-out and he took the gun with him when he left. Now she was scared and lonely -- not that she was going to let it show anytime soon.



“Okay,” Tom assented. He shifted again. “But thing is, the file I saw was dated a few weeks ago. So he’s been awake for longer than anyone thought. But, well, the files say he’s basically a vegetable with open eyes, but I heard Mike talking to Susan Bligh from the biochem lab and she says that Vash-san says that Kn-- that the other one has amnesia.”



“Amnesia?” The last person at the table finally spoke up, making the “meeting,” as it were, official. Charlie was the backbone of the operation. Vince may have been the most expressive and radical of the bunch, and Cynthia definitely had a knack for solving internal conflict (being a lifelong veteran of sibling rivalry), but Charlie was the mortar that held their wayward stone personalities together. If not for Charlie, there wouldn’t be anything vaguely resembling organization among the psuedo-rebels. Most of the people in the dim room only came there to talk about their worries and take the edge off their fear; Charlie came there because he meant to do something about it.



He was the kind of guy that other people respected. He was the kind of guy who, with one mildly inquisitive word, made the entire table fall into expectant silence.



Tom cleared his throat, blinking water out of his stinging eyes -- he hadn’t blinked for a while. Didn’t want to look suspicious, right? Right. “Yessir,” he said, giving Charlie the honorific that no one else at the table seemed to deserve. “Well, that’s thirdhand information, but it’s what I’ve got, sir. Believe it if you want. I don’t really,” he added daringly. He hadn’t voiced many opinions before now, other than the general anti-twins sentiment shared by the masses.



Charlie nodded, curiosity assuaged for the moment. “Go on. Something else about the files.”



“The files, right. They had the watch schedule in them, sir,” Tom said, trying to look humble about what he hoped was a great breakthrough. “I copied them out. By hand, sir, ‘cause the techs would have asked questions if I’d borrowed a terminal with a scanner.”



Vince and Cynthia glanced at each other, expressions betraying their surprise. Pam looked pleased. Charlie just nodded again, and said, “Good work, kid. Anything else?”



Heartened by the positive reaction from the others, Tom gave a shifty grin and carried on speaking in a jumble of increasingly-excited words. “Well, sir, the files are old so the watch has obviously changed some by now, but I’ve been keeping an eye out and it must not have changed that much, sir, because most folks I see going down that way are right on time according to the schedule. But they’re getting lax at night, is what I’m getting at, sir. Used to be five shifts a night, so each shift would be completely awake, but now it’s down to two, and the longest chunk is all handled by that outsider girl. The big one.”



“The simpleton?” Pam said brusquely, a little bit of meanness tainting her voice. Cynthia shushed her with an offended look.



“I think she’s smarter than she puts on,” Charlie said mildly.



Pam had the decency to look contrite at that.



“So what are we saying, we’re taking out the big girl and sneaking in at night?” Vince sounded doubtful.



“Well, it was you who wanted to see him,” Pam said reproachfully.



Charlie silenced them with a gesture. “We’re saying nothing yet,” he said with finality. “It was only Vince who wanted to go at first, that’s true, but I know he’s not alone in that sentiment. Is he?”



Pam hesitated, then looked down. “Yeee-ah,” she said, drawing out the word; “I’d have a look too, if I could get it. Maybe more than just a look.” That meanness was back again, and there was a steel glint in her eyes this time.



“No violence,” Charlie said harshly. “Not yet. But we’re agreed on wanting to catch a glimpse of the devil.”



Everyone said yea, although Cynthia dragged behind and gave her assent in a troubled tone.



“Then we watch for a few more days,” Charlie said. “Get this schedule pinned. Maybe we’ll get a lucky break, or something’ll come up -- it’s been a while now, and you can feel the storm building under the surface. Something’s gotta give.”



Too true, that. Tom coughed nervously, thinking of his argument with Mike.



“Pam, see if you can talk to Ron again, hey?” Charlie ordered brusquely.



“Sure thing.”



“Cynthia, get word around to the midwives. Doctors, too, s’long as they’re ours. Vince, maintenance. They’ve got eyes in more cracks and crannies than a college kid in a strip joint. And Tom -- good work. Keep it up, kid.”



Tom flushed with pride.



Charlie stood. “For now we’ll go on with what we started. Give it a week, probably less, and then we’ll see.”



And that was the end of it. Or, as might be more accurate, the beginning.



-----------



Meryl went with Vash to the med bay every day, though more often than not she stayed outside the Doctor’s room, talking to the nurses and helping where she could. There were a good many people on the ship who were antsy to leave, to get to a town and start living a more stable planetside life. Those types tended to seek Meryl out for advice, which she was perfectly willing to give.



While Meryl talked to the ship folk, Vash continued to stay with his dying mentor, trying to convince the old man that his death would be a relief to the living, not a burden. It was no use. The Doctor was little more than a shell of flesh and sinew -- the only part of his conscious self that remained was his stubborn tenacity. Inertia held him to this existence, nothing more.



The Doctor was one of the few still breathing easy, in fact -- an unsettled quiet lurked underneath the noise of everyday life, the silence of a hundred lungs remaining perfectly still.



The people held their collective breath, and waited.



-----------



Knives woke to the sound of the door hissing shut.



His pale blue eyes shone in the dark. He kept his body perfectly still as he took in the darkness, absorbing and adjusting to it, until he could see as clearly as a cat.



Milly had gone. She’d been sitting in the chair across the room, dozing and pretending to read while she waited for Knives to fall asleep. That had been about six hours ago, by Knives’ estimate -- he was getting better with recognizing units of time, and he’d been pleased to rediscover his alarmingly accurate internal clock.



Maybe she’d gone out to use the bathroom, or switch with another guard? Knives was a little bothered by the fact that he needed to be guarded -- he was still trying to figure out what was so dangerous beyond that door that needed to be kept out, or why he was important enough to need guarding.



Knives shifted slightly, making his bedcovers whisper into the silence. For the past few days he had been feeling stronger, more energetic -- and for the first time, his restlessness was overcoming his pain. The wounds still ached, but his mind ached more -- he craved movement, action, some kind of leverage to move forward, some kind of milestone to mark the passage of time.



He shifted again, rolling onto his uninjured side, and stared across the room to Milly’s empty chair. Maybe he should call for her? He could speak now, thought haltingly, and Vash had taught him all their names.



(His own name bothered him the same way the guards did. On some deep level, he knew it had some double meaning, but he hadn’t quite made the connection and a stabbing pain shot through his head every time he thought too hard about it. He’d learned not to think much about anything anymore. The pain was unbearable, but, of course, the morbid curiosity was even more so.)



The metal floor panels were colorless in the faint moonlight. Milly liked to leave the portal-window transparent at night, so she could read by moonlight while Knives slept. The other guards always turned off the transparency when they came in.



Guards... they should have switched off by now if they were going to, and Milly didn’t take this long to go to the bathroom or to make a late-night pudding raid on the kitchen. Maybe something had happened?



The restlessness was burning now, and remaining still was almost a physical pain. Knives needed to stretch, to work his atrophied muscles, or he thought he’d go mad (and the thought of going mad was unsettling in the extreme, thought he couldn’t say why). What had Vash called this? “Stir-crazy.”



Finally, Knives moved. It was a spontaneous movement, and at first Knives had the disconcerting feeling that his body had gone out of his mind’s control. But then his bare feet were touching the cold floor and he was moving of his own volition again, standing shakily and drifting in a few unsteady baby-steps to the door.



Now what? Knives stared at the closed door, unseeing. He didn’t know what was beyond it, aside from the glimpses he’d caught when people came and went. He’d seen a hallway with bright lights (although those would be off now) and sometimes other people, staring wide-eyed into his room.



Staring at him.



This door was made to keep me in, he thought with a sickening jolt. There is no danger outside these walls. I am the danger.



Of course, he’d known that already. On some deep level, he’d always known that there was something wrong with him. But admitting it to himself was... deeply disturbing, to say the least.



And another thing he knew, deep down, when he reached out one trembling hand to touch the glowing panel beside the door, was that he was making a huge mistake.



He didn’t care.



---------



“You hate him, don’t you?”



“I --”



“He killed your family!”



“The crash --”



“He caused the crash!”



“Yes...”



“By rights, he shouldn’t exist! Plants are supposed to stay in their bulbs --”



“He’s an abomination.”



“They both are.”



“Say you hate him! How can you not, after everything?”



“But the girl hadn’t done anything, Vince!”



“She was protecting him! Just like his idiot brother.”



“She was keeping us safe from him, not --”



“What’s been going on behind that door, dammit? He’s been awake for nearly three weeks, but no one’s even told us that much. We need spies just to know when he sleeps. What else aren’t they telling us?”



“That’s all true, but Vince, the girl --”



“Shut up about her! She doesn’t matter!”



“Vince --”



“Your mother’s dead, George! You, all they found of your older brother was an arm and a foot -- and you, your cousin Lara --”



“Shut up!”



“He deserves this, goddammit -- he deserves this hate. Stop being cowards!”



And then Vincent had them, like a dozen marionettes tangled in their master’s string. He continued rousing their passion, incensing their rage, but the words themselves didn’t matter anymore. Only the red film glazing their vision mattered. That, and the fact that the devil’s prison was only two halls away.



But one still had doubts -- one held back, just for an instant, gazing down at the prone body of the woman Vincent had ambushed without warning. Her honey-brown hair covered her face. Blood trickled down the back of her neck.



Then Thomas Jones thought of his brother Mike, and all their fights and dissonance and mutual hatred, and forced himself to remember that he had new loyalties now.



He turned away from the unconscious woman and ran to catch up with the other boys.



----------



Knives drifted down the corridors like a ghost, keeping mark of his surroundings so that he could find his way back. His bare feet made a soft padding sound on the metal floor. For a few precious minutes, silent wonderment ruled his thoughts, all fear forgotten -- the architecture was so alien, so magnificent, and yet so familiar at the same time that he felt like a child in a museum. He felt tiny and insignificant in the face of so many unknowns.



Walking was not something he was accustomed to -- he’d paced his room a little, but nothing more than that. He’d only turned five corners, walked a total of maybe thirty yards, before his legs started feeling the strain. He kept moving, though, telling himself that he was trying to find Milly, although in all honesty he didn’t have the first clue where to start looking.



After a while, he realized that he had gotten turned around. With a small sigh, he admitted that he really wasn’t going to do any good by just wandering around. Besides, if Milly got back to the room and found him gone, she’d panic. He retraced his steps and started working his way back through the darkened halls.



A couple of turns away from his room, Knives heard a sound, extremely faint, besides the padding of his own feet. It was a rhythmic thudding, like footsteps, but... more than one person, and running.



And Knives knew deep down that somehow, everything had just fallen apart.



----------



It was Tom who saw Knives first, Tom who made the first move.



A glint of moving white caught the corner of his eye, and he spun around midstep, nearly knocking over the younger boy named George -- the one with the dead mother.



“Hey!” George complained, staggering before regaining his balance.



Tom pointed. George followed the path of Tom’s accusing finger, and saw a ghost of a man flitting around a corner at the end of the hall.



“It’s him!” George cried without thinking. Vince doubled back in an instant, took a single glance down the hall, and made a break for it. George was barely a split-second in following. It took the other boys a second longer to reorganize themselves, but then one of them was grabbing Tom’s shoulder and shoving him forward, and he had no choice but to run along with them or be trampled.



The sheer, crushing force of hatred surrounding him made Tom feel sick and dizzy, but he didn’t dare slow down. The boys were one body now, sharing a single vengeful spirit, and Tom was afraid of them. Afraid of himself, for being one of them. But --



All Tom knew of the next few minutes was that Vincent was screaming something and that there was a foreign body inside the net of the mob -- someone taller than the rest of them, thin and ghost-pale, with shaggy hair, colorless in the dark, that hid his face.



A faceless enemy. Just what everyone had said he would be.



Someone had produced a pocketknife. There was blood now, darker than the shadows that lined the walls -- and the faceless ghost was staggering. Tom thought he might have kicked the man in the stomach, but he wasn’t sure -- one foot was anyone’s foot at this point.



Tom’s brain was screaming at him to stop, to rethink -- this is wrong, this is wrong, this can’t possibly be right -- but it was far too late for that. He gritted his teeth, forced himself not to think at all, and fell in with the rest as they descended, a pack of wretched vultures feeding on the weak. Tom felt something wet on his face, salty. Tears or blood? He couldn’t tell. He didn’t want to know.



The faceless man was silent. Tom wished he would cry out, scream, beg, anything... if he could prove his humanity, or at least his pain, the boys might stop and take notice. But when one side was faceless and silent and the other was a powerful web of bodies sharing one collective rage, what hope was there?



Tom started waking up and smelling reality... at the exact moment that Vincent plunged the already-bloody pocketknife into Knives’ abdomen.



“Vince!” Tom yelled, horrified.



“Damn you!” Vince was shrieking into Knives’ face -- the Plant’s hair had fallen out of the way, and now Tom could see his expression: blank, uncomprehending fear.



“Vince, stop it!” Tom cried without thinking, lunging towards the enraged boy to pull him off of Knives’ unresponsive body. “He’s got amnesia, Vince, he doesn’t know who he is --”



Two of the others caught Tom around the waist and slammed him backwards, winding him completely and leaving Vincent free to twist the knife deeper into his victim’s gut.



Tom didn’t see what happened next -- bright blue stars and dark spots were busy swimming across his vision as he struggled to catch a breath. All he knew was that he heard a voice that didn’t belong to any of the boys -- a voice that seemed to echo in his skull and beat against the inside of his ears like a drum. He didn’t catch what it said.



And the next second, there was a deafening quiet, a lull in the sound of fighting that could only have been caused by a turn of the tide.



Tom’s gasps were the only sound in the split-second silence. He forced his eyes open -- and saw Knives crouching like an animal, pale mane once again (mercifully) covering his face, surrounded by a group of scared young men. The mob mentality had faded away like mist under the rising sun.



Then Knives moved, and Tom saw what had caused the sudden change. Knives’ right hand was... melting. Shifting. The fingers were elongating, spreading, becoming sharper and tangled, like thorns, like blades...



Like... knives.



Tom didn’t see Knives move again. Someone blocked his view -- the boy with the dead mother, George. And then everything was happening too fast and Tom felt so sick that he didn’t want to think anymore... until something or someone hit the back of his head and he didn’t have to think at all, because he blacked out.



The last thing that flashed across his mind was a feeling of relief.



----------



Vash awoke to Michael\'s gentle shaking. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintienece was still splayed open across his chest, but the only thing that really registered in his awareness was the bloody handprint on his white shirt where the doctor had awoken him.



He didn’t have to ask what had happened. The details didn’t matter. All that mattered was the blood, the cold panic, and the desperate, sinking knowledge that he was now engaged in a duel: the first shot had been fired, and he had lost. Knives had lost.



Vash felt like screaming, but no sound came; he felt like crying, but he feared he had become as dry as the desert itself. Instead he stood up, expression hardened, and followed Michael out of the room to see what damage had been done -- to see what footing could be regained, if any.



After he was gone, book lying forgotten in his chair, there was nothing left but the faint, distant sound of the Doc’s heart monitor.



In the end, even that fell silent.



--------

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” --Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 1861



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Next Chapter: Knives begins to remember.

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