Black Sun Rising

Chapter Twelve

Oh god, Sam thought, not me, not me, not me, don't pick me. He shrank back into the sandy floor, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head as subtly as he could. He had not been so unwilling to volunteer since his school days, standing at the side of a freezing cold playing field, hoping not to be asked to captain a team. I've got nothing to say about my "disconnections." I'm not sure I want to hear other people talk about theirs, but if it means I don't have to talk about mine, that'll do me just fine.

Much to his surprise, the first person to raise a hand was Julia Rose. He was accustomed to her looking nervous, but this was a kind of nerves he had never seen her display. Rather than looking as if she was expecting to be thrown out, this time she looked as jittery as someone meeting an idol. At Cody's prompting she got to her feet and told the group her name, then she spoke haltingly. "I, um… I don't have a long story or anything. I'd probably have to think for a little while to tell you about disconnection in my own life — I think I'm still just getting my head around the concept. But I just wanted to say, Ms. Stromer — that spoke to me. There's a lot about your story that I recognize, and… I really want to call my mom right now."

She sat down again hastily, her dark skin tinged with a deep blush, her eyes on the floor. Sara was only a little way from her, and she reached over to take Julia Rose's hand. That's twice now, Sam thought. I got the impression that Julia Rose's interest in Sara Stromer was more muckraking than hero-worshipping. Maybe I was wrong.

Others followed, sharing stories of their less proud moments. Some were common place — there were several who had realized that they seldom spoke to other people except online, or that they had forgotten their own birthdays until Facebook had reminded them. Others, such as Sara's, were a little more dramatic. Christopher Slack, a British MP still young enough to carry a layer of puppy fat that he had expected to shed after leaving Eton, told them of a long, dark night of the soul after his father had died. He had missed the funeral due to his heavy workload, then visited the grave a few days later, when he had a horrible moment of epiphany. It hit him that his father was gone and his opportunity to say goodbye had passed.

As affecting as some of the stories were, Sam found his concentration beginning to wane. There was a certain element of repetition to what he was hearing, and after a while the stories simply blurred into a mass of first-world misery. The more he heard, the more convinced he became that he had never experienced real "disconnection." Even when Trish had died, he had felt loss and loneliness and pain, but he had always known that if he had really wanted companionship, he had a couple of people who would provide it. He wasn't close to his sister, but he knew that she would never turn him away if he needed her, and there was always Paddy.

"Sam, how about you?"

Sam's whole body tensed at the sound of Cody's voice. The gaze of the room turned on him, expectant, demanding. He cleared his throat a couple of times, feeling foolish. What am I doing here again?

"Er… " Desperately he searched the recesses of his brain, searching for anything, any memory or experience that could be turned into a story that would satisfy the group. He had nothing. The closest match he had was Trish's death, and he would not twist that in order to fit in with this crowd. "I don't think I've… er, you know, when I stop and think about it, I don't think I've ever been through that — disconnection, I mean."

"What do you mean, Sam?" Cody's twangy voice was as perky as ever, but Sam thought he detected an edge of irritation. "It's really a universal experience. Don't you find that online communication and heavy workloads have taken over your life?"

Sam shook his head. "Not really. Sorry. I'm not trying to be awkward or anything — and I'm not saying my experience is typical. I'm just a bit old-fashioned, I suppose. I never really got into online communication. When I want to connect with people I tend to just go for a pint with them."

"Ah!" Cody seized on Sam's words. "But are you able to connect with them without using alcohol as a crutch?"

"I've never really tried," Sam shrugged. "It's just what we do."

"As a way of coping with how much you work?"

"Er… possibly? I don't know. For the most part I've always liked what I do, so I've never really worried too much about separating work and life."

Cody stared at Sam, torn between disbelief and a desire to start aggressively fixing him. He took a step toward him, but Sara raised a hand, stopping him in his tracks. She gave a slight shake of her head, and Cody backed down. "Well, Sam," he said, "I think those were some important realizations right there. Sometimes it takes a little while to get as far as being able to recognize your own disconnection. It's not easy. That's why this part is called friction. For some people, friction comes from working through their disconnections. For others, it's a process of learning to recognize them. Yours is going to take a little longer… " he gave Sam a grin so warm that it made him uncomfortable. "But we're here to work through it with you!"

"Sam. Sam. Sam."

At first Sam was not sure whether the sound was real or not. It reached into the edge of his dreams, pulling him out of sleep and into reality, where he found himself in pitch darkness. He waited, completely still, for the whisper to happen again.

"Sam! Are you awake?"

Nina. It was Nina's voice. They had all been asked to sleep in the tent that they had helped to build, leaving Sam to share with Nina, Purdue, Julia Rose, and Hunter, who had dragged his blanket as far from the others as possible within the contents of the cramped teepee.

"Well, I am now," Sam sighed, rolling onto his back. He tried to focus, but it was too dark.

"Do you want a cigarette?" She rattled the packet and Sam heard the comforting sound of sweet nicotine calling his name. He crawled out from under his blanket and followed Nina as they fumbled their way toward the tent flap and out onto the sand. A fat, waxing Moon cast an ethereal glow over the landscape, providing them with almost enough light to see where they were going. Nina had a light of some kind — Sam could not see what she was holding, but he could see the small pool of light cast in front of her. He walked carefully in her footsteps, eyes on the ground to avoid the treacherous roots and tumbleweed that might be hiding in the night.

She led him down to the river, far enough from the camp that they would not disturb anyone with their conversation or their secondhand smoke. "Watch out for rattlesnakes," Nina warned Sam as she opened the packet and held it out to him.

"Are they around here? Do you have a light, by the way? I didn't pick up my jacket."

"Yes, here you go." She pulled a lighter from her pocket. "I think there are snakes here. If not, there's plenty of other deadly stuff — coyotes and the like, scorpions. Don't sit on a scorpion, will you?" As she lit his cigarette, Sam noticed that the device he had assumed was a light was actually Purdue's little folding tablet.

"I thought we were supposed to hand all our gadgets in?" Sam said, taking a grateful puff.

"Fuck that," Nina settled herself on a large, flat rock by the river and pulled off her shoes to dangle her feet in the water. "It would take more than some vague nonsense about 'connection' to persuade Dave to go give minutes without this. It's his favorite toy just now." She paused, waiting for Sam to speak, and then it struck her that the topic might be a little awkward. "So what did you make of all that stuff this evening?" She reached for the first alternative subject she could think of. "I wanted to look over and see how you were taking it, but I knew if I made eye contact with you I'd end up laughing and get us both in trouble."

"What, you mean you weren't sold on all the 100 percent genuine, definitely not made up some time in the 1960s Native American mythology? You do surprise me."

"It just pisses me off," she said. "I'm not keen on the idea of making money by selling a watered-down version of someone else's culture. To be honest, I nearly balked at the whole thing when Dave invited me to join him for a Vision Quest. I came because I wanted to see whether it's possible for these things to be done with any kind of integrity or respect for the history that they're laying claim to."

Sam laughed gently. "Of course, you did. Spoken like a true history scholar, Nina."

She went quiet. It took Sam a moment to notice, because he was accustomed to lapsing into companionable silence with Nina, or breaks that occurred naturally while they both smoked. She picked up a stone from the shale bank beside them and lobbed it into the water. "Not anymore," she whispered.

Little by little, in between long drags and long silences, Nina began to tell Sam what had happened after their last encounter at the university. After Matlock's book had come out to great fanfare, it left Nina in the unenviable position of being asked about it by staff and students. Had she known about Matlock's expedition? Was it true that she had been there too? Had she worried about Matlock when he insisted on going alone into uncharted areas of the ice station in search of Nazi artifacts? Knowing that she had been a much more proactive member of the expedition party than her boss — indeed, knowing that he had actually attempted to ensure that she would not be part of the expedition — Nina had found this galling. The fact that Matlock had appropriated her research and a handful of artifacts that rightly belonged to her and Sam made things even worse.

Sam nodded. He remembered how upset she was by being done in and he still felt bad about helping Matlock with his book and causing a rift between him and Nina's possible romance. But he knew that they had put that behind them during the last collaborative journey. Still it vexed her, of course, because it was the genesis of her resentment.

"Then when my annual review came up, the bastard had the audacity to tell me that I wasn't an enthusiastic enough member of the team — as if we were ever a fucking team! That department was a nest of vipers, not a team. And he said that the department wasn't happy that I'd taken a sabbatical before Wolfenstein! Never mind that if I hadn't, he wouldn't have his precious book.

Then he had all these shitty remarks about my shooting for tenure, of course disguising his smugness under a smooth delivery, which he thought sufficed as 'advice'… " she sneered and paused for a second, then continued her rant, "Anyway, he made all sorts of irritating comments about how I'd better start toeing the line a bit more if I wanted to have a career in academia, and said that maybe once my fellowship was up I should try a different university and maybe shift my focus to something along the lines of gender theory. It wasn't such bad advice, but coming from him… I'm not going to be told that I'm not allowed to write about anything other than the role of women in the Third Reich, especially not by him. I might not have been able to stop him cheating me, but I don't have to let him patronize me into the bargain." She looked up at the sky and under her breath she added, "Wish I could introduce that fucker to Calisto… "

Sam could not help but smile at the thought of Purdue's female ex-bodyguard leaping into Matlock's office, ripping his misogynistic face off in a comic book spill of justice.

Nina's anger spent, she took a deep breath and reached down to scoop some cool water in her cupped hands. She poured it straight over her head. It cascaded down her bobbed black hair and trickled onto her pale skin, catching the moonlight. "It's so hot," she said. "How are you coping? I'm melting out here."

Sam wondered about the new position he played in the Nina game. She was so nonchalant about it all, as if she had never noticed their closeness while working on the Spear of Destiny in Purdue's sinister laboratories. Alas, Sam decided to let it go and enjoy the fact that they were at least talking, that they were once more in each other's company.

"Where's your light? Take a look at this." Sam pulled up the side of his T-shirt to show Nina the heat rash that had been developing down his left side during the course of the day.

"Ouch. Well, I don't have that, at least. I might have no job; I might have torched any prospects I had of a career in academia by telling the head of my department to go fuck himself; I might have no clue what I'm doing with my life; but I haven't got a heat rash. Have you got anything to put on that? Of course, you haven't. Try talking to Cody about it; he'll probably be able to give you something. For a man who arrived here with nothing but a small backpack, that man's got supplies for everything.

"That Hunter guy managed to get himself bitten by something while we were all down by the river — I don't know what, probably a mosquito or something — and Cody disappeared for a couple of minutes and came back with a whole range of antihistamines. Pills, creams, capsules, drowsy, nondrowsy… he must have had a dozen different kinds. Who just carries all that around with them?"

"Sounds like a hypochondriac," said Sam. "Though I must admit, I wondered where all the cooking stuff came from. They got dinner ready in no time. Must be a chest freezer stashed away under a rock or something, chock full of frozen lentil dinners. He probably buys them in bulk from some crap catering company that pads them out with floor sweepings."

"Ha, probably." Nina stubbed out her cigarette, smoked right down to the filter, and carefully tucked the butt in her pocket. She tapped gingerly at Purdue's device until it flashed up a digital clock. "Christ. It's after midnight. That's, what, about 6:00 AM back home? I still haven't adjusted. I suppose we should head back and try to get some sleep." She trailed her hand over the smooth rock. "I wish I could sleep out here without getting eaten by something or getting baked alive when the sun comes up. The tent's a bit close for my liking."

"Well, you know, I'm always game for a midnight cigarette if you need company," Sam offered. "Especially because these people don't seem to take kindly to the idea of us pumping ourselves full of toxins on their time."

Nina snorted. "Toxins." She pulled herself up and slipped her wet feet back into her shoes, grimacing at the sensation. "Next time remind me to bring a towel," she said, then led the way up the gentle slope toward the campsite.

As they approached their tent, the desert silence was broken by a sudden clash. They froze. Sam squinted in the direction the sound had come from, trying to make out what it had been. It was probably just someone dropping something, though it had sounded a little more… precise.

The sound came again, harsh and metallic, like a muffled cymbal. It was followed by a faint, rhythmic sound, like a soft but intense drum beat. Nina squeezed Sam's arm to get his attention and pointed toward the connection tent. Sure enough, a sliver of light showed through the tent flap. Sam was not sure whether it was just residual light from the dying fire, but it seemed to match the direction from which the noise had come. Together, Sam and Nina crept over to the tent, where they peered through the flap.

What they saw was the exaltation of Jefferson Daniels.