Excerpt: No Asylum

Rolling onto my side, I fall into an untroubled sleep filled with dreams of Earth and home and my friends. We’re driving buggies down the coastline, chasing the shoreline and playing the waves. The roar of the surf is so loud, it crashes with a bellow like some primordial sea monster. So loud…

Something’s wrong.

I wake just a second before the red and white emergency lights flare to life and the alarm starts to wail. The whole ship shakes with a second boom, rattling the tiles in the ceiling and sending pulses through the floor and my bunk.

The hatch flies open and my father’s in the room. “Will!”

“Dad? What’s going on?”

He’s flanked by Sal and two of the deeper crewmen dressed in brown, rifles slung over there side. The guns are nicked; there are spots where the matte black paint has flecked off to show the dull silver skin below. These are real guns, not the shiny plastic toys I’ve used in vid games a hundred times over. These guns have seen action before, killed people before even.

My father grabs my wrist, pulling me from he bunk as another tremor makes Scylla buck again. One of the ceiling tiles shakes loose, crashing to my bed where just a second ago I’d been lying. I shiver, and even my father’s arm around my shoulder can’t keep the chill at bay.

“What’s going on?” I ask again.

He shakes his head. “The ship’s under attack, but we’re going to be just fine. You hear me?”

I nod. The men with the guns are getting restless. “Senator, we need to move you to a more secure location.”

My father never takes his eyes off of me, though. “Not until we secure my son.”

“Sir—”

He whirls. This is the military in my father, now. The sight of him—even in sweatpants and an old tank top—drawn to full attention and staring down two armed deepers…it silences them without another protest. “First we secure my son.”

“Yessir.” One of the deepers nods at me. “This way, boy.”

They take me down the hall, stopping in the middle of the corridor. I look around, but there are no hatches. One of the crewmen fiddles with the paneling on the bulkhead. He pries one of the tiles loose, revealing a narrow crawlspace in the wall. It’s barely large enough for a small crate. Maybe a child could fit there, but I stare at it in disbelief.

“Get in.” The deeper prods me forward, and I stumble into the hideaway. It’s dark, even smaller than it looked, forcing me to crouch. Even then, I barely fit. I stare past the deepers, trying to meet my father’s eyes.

“Dad—”

“You’re going to be fine, Will. I’ll come get you when this is over.” He nods at me. “I promise.”

The crewman starts to slide the panel back in place.

“Wait.” I push my hand forward, against the panel before it can click into place. “What if you’re gone too long and I run out of air?”

“It’s not airtight, kid.” He pushes my hand back into the crawlspace and secures the panel.

My shoulders brush against the back wall, and my nose still touches the front panel. In vids, smugglers use places like these to hide contraband. What kind of folks did we fall in with? Are they the reason we’re being attacked?

The deeper was right, though. The crawlspace isn’t airtight. The seam between the two panels lets in a whiff of cool air and a shaft of light, too. But it’s not wide enough for me to see through. All I can do is listen.

In here, the engine’s rumbling sounds even louder than from my bunk. The vibrations pulse through the walls and floors, sending tremors through my spine and feet. But however loud its murmur, it can’t quite drown out the noises outside. The explosions are louder; the ship shakes again. And now there’s pulse fire. I know the sound from the vids, but on the Wire it sounds muted and almost cute: a dull, tsew, tsew. Not now, not in real life. Each shot sets off another explosion. BLAM! BLAM!

At first, I shake with every shot. But then there are so many of them, it’s just another background noise like the hum of the engine and my ragged breaths.
Footsteps fall like hammer blows, too many for just one person. Then…voices.

“You see him?”

“Looks clear to me.”

“Keep moving.”

The footsteps fade and disappear, replaced once more by pulsefire and screams. I wrap my arms tighter around my knees. Please let it stop. Make it stop. And that treacherous child’s voice beneath it all, I want my dad. I want to go home. I don’t know if it’s a prayer, a wish, a plea to some god too busy listening to someone else right then. Because it doesn’t stop. Blasts still shake the ship. The acrid smell of smoke still leaks in through the gaps in the panel. People outside are still shouting, still screaming, still dying.

I know they are. People don’t gurgle and moan unless they’re dying.

Somewhere along the way, I start shaking. First my legs, trembling in time with the engine’s vibrations. The quivers spread until I feel like my uncle Al, who used to have seizures if he strared too long at blinking lights. And I’m crying. I can feel the wet tracks on my cheek, stinging cold as the temp of the ship drops. Maybe the engine’s stopped.

And then, after what might have been eons in that panel, I realize. It’s quiet outside. No more pulsefire. No more death-screams or yelps for help. No booted feet running on metal floors, or shouts to fall back or press forward. I don’t know when the last explosion rocked the ship. Not for a while I think. The vibrations now come more from me than the ship, sitting here trembling against the metal bulkhead and feeling it tremble right back.

Dad will come. You just have to wait here and he’ll come. He’ll come.

But I wait. I can feel the seconds tick by just from the feel of my own pulse throbbing through my veins. He doesn’t come.

He’ll come.

He doesn’t.