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He knew.
From the first time a fire broke out, starting small in - the incinerator, but it might have been the corner of the generator room, back when the compound was fully insulated and there wasn't the odd room you couldn't enter without your whiteout coat, like the out there hadn't crept in serpentine, shirts and rags stuffed beneath the door, and the only person among these overtrained in-case-of-an-emergency cattle bred for contingency, all better housebroken than anyone up in the ISS, whose legs functioned at the sight of the walls and ceiling being consumed by a house of flame to go get the extinguisher was him, he knew.
It has been three hours and twenty seven minutes and in the last ten alone MacReady's eyes have slipped four times. He's kicked in the ankle hard, each, jolts back to life with the pathetic stopmotion of a mechanical doll, only to not emote, to not breathe. Freeze-faced. Freeze-dried, whitebearded, cored. The same nonexpression. They haven't been talking. When the birthday calendar was wiped - contents hard-memorized - and replaced with who got the Playboy issues each week, his was the one nobody remembered, and he didn't volunteer it, even under point-blank questioning. Blank look, like a raccoon. Like the question didn't make sense.
Maybe it was during those three to five day stretches where he'd hole up as far away from the rest as possible, but Childs isn't, wasn't. Wasn't counting.
And for someone who wasn't counting, Childs can tell time, innate. The other one sulks in to the barracks at ridiculous hours, if he comes down from his tower at all. A fixation on high ground. That's the same, isn't it, that's why he learned how to fly one. Talking about who has the right temperament to lead, does he? Who became the first draw, who hates flying, but will always cede?
With a disappointed aspect? As though he's waiting for it to come from you as a command, not a request?
Childs means, the dull and shifty eyes of someone forced to return to civilianhood, visibly disturbed. He was in the alcohol supplies on day one and was the first to learn fermentation. He wants to suspect discharge, but he'll never ask and suspects he will not be told. Childs means hyper-pragmatism and detachment. If not discharge, some bizzaro story of how he got back to the States - one of those guys who swam to Hainan or ghosted past the Rouge by the skin of his teeth. One of the psychos pretending to limp from a broken ankle to watch his platoon roll out, get blown apart by mines they tripped and kissed, and walk in the path revealed via negativa. Stories Childs has heard, and he means that if he wasn't collecting samples that day he would've been even faster to get the fire extinguisher.
He would have brought two or three.
In doing so, proving that they are not homoousian, set himself apart as an alternate authority - but a chance never came. If he wasn't called, MacReady forced himself into scenarios and played paramilitary officer.
That shit was the worst because he was always ready for the role. Where Childs had learned to reintegrate and could relate, again, to music, rumors, spectacle, and start to predict the endings of the game show tapes he hadn't seen, it was like meanwhile MacReady fought to forswear softness, here or forever, then, or unending.
When his head slumps Childs waits to see if he'll stir himself for ten seconds, fifty-six milliseconds, then kicks him again. He can't be reduced to this. He tries to tell him as much in a moment of communion that makes his own skin crawl. No, he's already a mirror image fighting not to be. Becoming that way would be going backward. There's nothing to be jealous of in him, not least because he's the one dying faster. If their two ends of the same behavior they exhibit weren't so that one was useful and the other "disruptive", if he was out there instead of fireproofing the incinerator exterior or the generator room and heard the Norwegian for which there were books in that amorphous, burning mass behind the one who's dying faster, if anyone could repeat what they had heard, Childs tells himself this would have been over by day one (or that he, too, could have shot Clark in the head).
The cold relief flooding his heart when the communications broke down because it meant despite racking up over six cases of altercations strong enough to warrant the base being contacted, no-one could come to lift him out, and he still had a chance to win this one-sided pissing match.
And he still lost.
MacReady is not moving.
Childs' lips rip apart when he says, through ground teeth, "The, jungle," stop-start for every syllable. He shoots between themselves, starts up the same fire as the last nine.
Nothing.
"Hot. Humid. Cloy. Ing."
Nothing.
"Whistling. Through. The trees.
And. Heli. Copters. With. Subs.
Go. Back. There."
Nothing, he uses what's left of him to Fuck he can't move his arms Uses what's left of him to shift forward and grab MacReady His fingers won't move hands won't close. Uses what's left of what's left to pull him forward, dragging him through the small, embered flame as a windstorm batters their sides, pull him in. "Vines," Childs grunts, internally it's a scream, pulling the worst era of his life out from deep within, women, crying, running to be gunned down from behind, and watching his own drag those same bodies out into profound darkness at days' end, just to make someone else live, remember, stay alive, which a civilian might do. "Rice. Paddies."
It is very quiet. It is very still.
"Friendly fire."
He doesn't think he heard that. MacReady's eyes are not open. So fucking close, what is this, enough their noses brush. His eyes fall on his lips, which he hates. If he's alive,
"Friendly, fire."
he'll say it again.
"Yeah?"
But if he's human he won't sink into him as he leans in.
"I, saw," and the hissing sound of his death rattle, "--so many, times."
It would have been better to die of impalement to every atom of skin than to have MacReady's head pressed against his chest
like this.
"Right, back, home, huh."
This now is probably the only time he has ever seen MacReady smile.
and how
that in looking into the depths of these stilling eyes, he can see a boy in a backyard, an airplane held above his head as he runs from one side to the other, one side to the other.
"You made me " he starts,
until his leg jerks midway, once.
Once now for the last time Childs is irrational, but for the first time Childs lets himself be irrational, raising hell, first as a combatant, second as a civilian, third, as someone abandoned by the real world and abandoned by circumstance and having never felt for his wife and three kids back in Minnesota what he feels for this corpse, what he felt for the breathing man in general that made him start static for no reason passing him in the hallways, feeling it all with the same fierceness of survival itself, the word. No, tell me, say it, tell me. You chickenshit bitch, tell me, what kind of man, don't you dare. Shouting shit he's never heard from himself beneath the wind, I need you, I love you.
It's out. His mouth tastes like metal. Terror. Unbelieving, unhearing, it came out of his actual mouth, his mouth. But that fails to distract. Terror, and the last month's events pierce the protective membrane of shock. Terror razes his body, Hesperian. Nearest compound four thousand kilometers due east and he is in terror.
Just now, looking down.
A still face.
watches him fade
expects him all the same to walk in at full volume, sit up on his cot, stare at the wall for ten minutes
then toss and turn, an hour, before getting back up
and if Childs looked outside and joined the party of the sleepless, population two,
if he looked up there,
his tower had a light
Would you have told me what your nightmares are like.
If I asked you.
I'm sure they're the same.
What you had to say, I know what it was
I am certain that I know what it was
and I think I should've told you first
on the fourth of December
last year.