The conversation didn’t last much longer before all of us, as though through divine selection, were marching single-file back through the darkness of Goodwin’s tunnels and off to martyrdom. The tension, previously thick enough to need a power saw to even begin cutting through, seemed to melt away as all of them reached the same point as me.
It isn’t just our lives on the line, or even those of our loved ones.
It’s anyone out there: strangers going about their business, unaware that any year or month or hour they might become Julia’s property if she lays an eye on them for too long and takes a shine to their hair color. People, like we used to be, unspoiled.
We have the chance to save them now.
Thankfully for my already inhumanly frayed nerves, we didn’t have to climb back up the invisible jungle gym of pipes and wires in the foyer walls. Goodwin, God bless him despite all the ways he indirectly fucked us over, has spent enough years in this hellscape to construct a number of conveniences for himself, one of which is a makeshift pulley system with some unused cables from the basement and a plastic cup elevator. One at a time, we piled into the lift and waited while the others on the top or bottom tugged at the secured cords in unison to make for an easy ascension.
It reminded me of the sensation of sitting in Julia’s own jerry-rigged elevator in the dollhouse I’ve spent so much of my life in as I rise up into the darkness rather than the light, a confident grimace replacing the falsified smile I normally had to craft for my ex-girlfriend’s sake. Even with the looming threat of my own end, this was infinitely preferable.
The easiest method for voiding the device, Goodwin explains, will be to log in and then attempt to activate it with our own foreign thumbprints on the scanner. After a couple of warnings, the CPU will just corrupt itself, and the whole package becomes unusable.
Reaching Julia’s closet, where the PMRD is secured in its case, is considerably trickier, although Goodwin’s familiar enough with the shadowy environment to improvise a path. After some more awkward clambering along a thin rope ladder of partially singed wires, we find ourselves above the room, sprawled in the frosted dome of the ceiling light.
Of course, we’re more vulnerable now than ever before. We can hear Julia pacing around in her bedroom below, slumping onto her bed and then rising again, and occasionally slamming her bedroom door to go on another round of searching.
She’s getting more anxious than ever. It would be a good thing for us, except for the fact that I know she’s still going to have Gina and the baby cradled in her hands. She wouldn’t part with them unless she had the three of us smeared along the bottom of her shoe, with my mark probably stretching the furthest and bloodiest.
Time is precious now, but our efforts are all going to be for naught if we can’t begin to predict Julia’s movements. She seems to have no need to enter her closet, but it’s still too risky to cross our fingers and head down. All morning we’ve heard her through the wall taking laps around the house, screwing and unscrewing grates when Ms. Coleridge isn’t nearby. Thanks to some highly unscientific estimations of our time window, we realize Julia’s probably taking the same route around the house at roughly the same pace each time, checking few enough grates that she returns to her room just under fifteen minutes later with a margin of error too small for us to be able to worry about it. We listen and wait, each counting the minutes, for three cycles just to confirm it. On the fourth, we go to work.
Putting our collective backs into it, we manage to unscrew the tinny center and, using a coil of yarn that Goodwin secures to a pipe, we slide like miniaturized firemen into the closet and down to the middle shelf, where Julia stores the PMRD’s silver briefcase behind a pile of folded jeans and shoe boxes. With some effort, we’re able to pry open the metal tangs that hold the case closed.
It stings a little having to look at the device, at least at first. I sense a flinch ripple through each of us as the silver firearm is revealed in all its demonic glory. It’s strange to see it resting here on the shelf with only a few articles of clothing guarding its capacity to corrupt the world.
Still, I’ve never had the opportunity to stand still and study it so closely for so long, and the more I look, it becomes clear that the device wasn’t constructed by an assembly line, but by a pair of practiced hands. The outer shell of the PMRD is, assuredly, one that’s seen plenty of sick love, but just as clearly, one that’s been taken apart before and put back together with the alignment slightly off, especially on a thinner strip of metal coiled around the back of the grip.
In my mind, perhaps due to the fear I used to harbor, the thing was always some gleaming, all-mighty weapon of unseen deities, like something straight out of some futuristic cyberpunk nightmare.
But it’s not. It’s just an immensely powerful computer chip with a metal husk cobbled around it.
Silently, we set to work, following through on Goodwin’s instructions. There’s not much we can do in the actual sabotaging of the PMRD, but he still needs our help getting into it. It takes all of us lifting, plus a small screwdriver head Goodwin has strapped to his back to pry the damn thing out of its space.
“All right, scrubs, I hope you were thinking on the way up here,” he whispers as the device switches on, welcoming its user with a friendly text greeting on the touch screen attached to the barrel before insisting on the input of a password. “This is something we’re gonna need to get into it. I can’t bypass this without all my gear. ”
The other two pause and glance over at me, and I think we’ve all got the same thing on our minds. No more than a moment is required to consider it.
“It’s… it’s probably me,” I mutter. It feels odd to be so sure of something, when so little of my being exists in absolutes now, but this is something I know can be counted on.
In spite of the danger and need for silence, Goodwin snorts derisively. “Fuck. Should’ve known that myself. Hold on.” He presses his fists into the neon lit touch screen, apparently just as self-assured.
J-A-C-K. The password input fades away, replaced by the bizarrely angelic glow of the main menu.
We’re in.
“God damn,” Goodwin breathes, tapping through the screens to put the PMRD into firing mode. “Guess she’s maybe not as smart as I was giving her credit for.”
“She’s got her weaknesses,” Brian says, nudging me on the back.
“All right, this should be about all we need,” Goodwin says with a final punch to the touch screen. He drags a digital slider around, allowing a new height to be chosen for the target of that impending emerald ray that stole our very existences. On the side of the barrel, I notice the white ovular pad used to confirm the identity of the handler. “It just needs an invalid thumbprint. If we trip it up a few times, it’ll shut down for good.”
Kelly sighs next to me, though I can’t say if it’s with relief for the world or gloom over the only remaining thing we can do now. I imagine it’s a mixture of both. Brian, too, looks pretty broken.
My eyes travel one last time over the body of the device, tracing across a few improperly attached panels that are only held in place by some tight soldering and screws.
In the back of my mind, I recall a few scraps of conversation here and there about the PMRD, or at least what people understand of it. The “refraction system,” they call it, already outdated and too dangerous for public use. Goodwin explaining his part in its original design and his understanding how the beams travel off mirrors designed to resist the effects of the shrink ray: probably the biggest breakthrough in the science nearly two decades ago. How this scrapped together piece is essentially all mirrors, the only way he could ensure there was nothing for Techilogic to track.
And then I see it, plain as day, and just as foolish.
I let my jaw hang slack.
“Stop,” I utter, my heart clenching in my chest. It takes a lot out of a person to make these kinds of life-altering realizations so close together.
“Why?” Goodwin grumbles, clearly just as pained over the fact that we’re essentially sealing our fates here. He’s already got his thumb on the scanner and his foot wedged into the trigger, preparing to attempt an unauthorized firing.
Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes, clearly assuming I’m trying to back out of my own grandiose sacrifice out of fear. “Jack,” she whispers gently. “It’s okay. We’re… all going to be together. You said yourself, this is-”
“…not our last chance,” I breathe, still stunned and overly paranoid about the near-impossibility of what I’ve now decided is, indeed, our true final recourse.
“What are you talking about?” Brian murmurs.
“Your… your system,” I mumble semi-incoherently at Goodwin, who’s slid off the scanner for just long enough to let me spill out my ramblings. “The mirrors.”
He blinks at me, processing and not grasping. “I told you, kid, this is the fastest way to end it. Opening it up and scrambling the mirrors could shut it down, too, if we closed off the barrel, but-”
“Not that,” I say. I step forward, sliding the screwdriver tip from Goodwin’s belt before he can react and clambering inside the case with it tucked under my arm. Pressing fingers into the back of the grip, I rap the driver head against it. “But… but the inside. Back to here.”
I know I’m not making any sense at all, and I know we don’t have the time for my wild-eyed bullshit, but I can hardly understand it myself.
The possibility that maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to die tomorrow morning.
“What?” Kelly demands desperately.
“Wait, you’re saying…” Goodwin begins, finally piecing it together himself. There’s the genius after all. He pushes me lightly out of the way, taking the screwdriver head, and leans it against the back of the grip, then holds his ear against the cold surface, testing the echo with his knuckles. His eyes bug at the insignificant metallic response.
“Can one of you please just-” Brian begs. He and Kelly have climbed into the case, too, for a closer look that doesn’t bring any further answers.
“Well, I’ll be a goddamned son of a bitch,” Goodwin musters under his breath. He turns to me. “You… you really think you’d be able to-”
“Yes.” I don’t even have to think about it, even though I don’t know for sure. My gut answers for me.
“Her. You think you’d be able to get her to-”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know her,” I say with deadly seriousness, more confident in this moment than I’ve ever been of anything in my whole life. “Better than she knows herself.”
Goodwin nods, haunted by the sight of me, and turns back to the others. “C’mon. We’re closing up now and getting out.”
“What? Why?” Kelly gasps.
“I’ll explain up there. We’ll come back tonight and get to work,” Goodwin informs her curtly, immediately setting into shutting the PMRD down and elbowing it back into its slot with some aid from Brian and I. “C’mon. Let’s get moving.”
Once we have the case shut tight and positioned on the shelf just how it was before, it’s time to make our getaway. Goodwin climbs hand-over-hand up the yarn, then once back in the top of the light, instructs us to secure the string around our waists for the trip up. With a steady effort, we’re able to hoist ourselves back into the ceiling, one at a time, and then as we huddle against the back wall he explains my idiotic concept to Brian and Kelly.
There’s not much discussion. My friends give me the same pair of questioning eyes that Goodwin did, and each believes me without any additional words. I’m not sure I deserve their trust, but at this point, I’m going to have to just do my best not to let them down.
Goodwin leads the charge back to the pulley system through the dark, which all at once takes its own distinctions, as though the shadows were carved by hand into something familiar and almost inviting. I realize I don’t fear it any longer.
Brian is the last one to come down in the cup elevator, and as it sets down on the ground, we move to help him out, but he doesn’t budge. His arms hang at his sides, and his eyes are locked to the ground. Knees wobbling, he shudders down to his haunches and slumps against the side. We rush to his side, grappling with his gelatinous limbs.
Has he lost the will at last? When we’re so close?
I’m not accepting that, and I don’t think Kelly is either.
“Brian?” Kelly whispers pointedly. “What’s wrong?”
“Faith,” Brian says after a pained pause. He bites his lip and, miraculously, smiles. It catches me off guard, and instantly silences everyone present. Even Goodwin. “Her name is Faith.”
And now we understand. He’s not giving up. Against unfathomable odds, Brian’s allowed a wisp of hope to worm its way into his heart. It’s been so long since I’ve seen such a little miracle in another person, I almost didn’t recognize it. Low as we are right now, it’s incredibly infectious.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Kelly says, putting an arm around his shoulder. The both of us spend a moment huddling closer to the new father, basking in the dim but nonetheless visible glow of humanity Brian’s tendered for us. “Like she is.”
Time is short, and we don’t have minutes to spend lying on the ground like idiotic stargazers. An eerily reverent Goodwin pulls us to our feet after a minute’s respite. Still, there’s nothing that’s been as liberating in the last emotionally tortuous day than to have someone discuss a future event as though it’s an inevitability.
As though we truly can live to see it.
Hell, I’m even starting to believe we can.
As we trek through one of Goodwin’s furrowed tunnels and approach his junk kingdom again, I can’t help but smirk a little to myself and allow my previously clenched fists to loosen just a little. It’s good that Brian said that now, because Faith is just about the only thing that’s going to deliver us from annihilation.
After all, tomorrow morning we go to war with the devil.