Persistence of Vision

  ***

  It was like trying to push his eyelids up against glue. Marcus heard muffled sounds around him but couldn’t make them out. When he finally got his eyes open, the world filled him with fear, doubt, and a sadness he couldn’t explain.

  He was on the ship, and the comforting hum told him that it was whizzing through the Pacific once more. The water around them was still black, the inner lights of the ship throwing perfect reflections of them onto the glass, but the light coming from above was a slightly bluer shade. Dawn was beginning to break over the ocean.

  Three of the ship’s beds were occupied. Marcus himself was lying on the middle one. To his left Clay was laid out. Doc, Karl, and Joan were all standing around him. Their faces were tear-soaked, and Joan was holding Clay’s hand, running her thumb over the back of it.

  Nat was at the helm of the ship.

  To his right, Maggie was sleeping. David was sitting on the bed, holding her hand and staring down into her face. The way he looked at her, the way he held her hand…Marcus didn’t like it. The world was fuzzy though, and he couldn’t remember how he was supposed to react to these green-tinged feelings.

  He tried to sit up and groaned loudly. His head wasn’t ringing anymore, but it was throbbing painfully, and when he sat upright, pain lanced down his neck and across his shoulders. His spinal cord, all the way down to his coccyx, felt like it was pulsating. Pain feathered out along his nerves, making his fingers and toes feel numb.

  Karl came over as he threw his legs over the side of the cot.

  “What’s wrong with Clay?”

  Ignoring the question, Karl put a hand on his shoulder, and Marcus winced. It stung to be touched.

  “How are you feeling, Marcus? Are you okay?”

  Marcus looked up at him. “I feel like my head’s been used as an anvil, but other than that, yeah.” He twisted his neck painfully to look behind him at David. “Is she okay?”

  David nodded. “She needs to recuperate. She’ll sleep for a week. Literally. But she’s not hurt.”

  Marcus nodded, turning slowly back to Clay. There was an acorn-sized bore in Clay’s right temple. There was no blood or brain matter that Marcus could see, but the hole was black around the edge, like he’d been struck by lightning or sustained some kind of electrical burn.

  “He needs healing,” Marcus said, putting hands beside his hips to push himself up.

  “Marcus, you can’t—” Karl began.

  Marcus got to his feet, but once there the wave of nausea that swept over him was overpowering. He lurched back onto the cot, and it was all he could to keep from vomiting on Karl’s shoes.

  Karl put a firm hand on Marcus’s shoulder to keep him from standing, though Marcus had no intention of trying that again anytime soon.

  “Marcus, you don’t understand. You can’t. No one can.”

  Marcus shook his head at Karl, bewildered. He thought he knew where Karl was going with this, but he didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.

  “He has severe brain damage,” Karl said quietly. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  Marcus shook his head, not caring that it made his headache worse. “No. I can do something. I know I can.”

  “Marcus,” Doc said gently, “you know that injuries, especially brain damage, have to be healed quickly. You’ve been asleep for nearly two hours. It’s far too late.” His voice cracked.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” Marcus was shouting, but he didn’t care.

  “We tried,” Karl said. “We tried everything we could think of. Your brain was too traumatized from…linking with David. You wouldn’t wake.”

  “I don’t think it would have mattered anyway,” Doc said, wiping tears from his face. “By the time we got you back here and could think about healing, it was already too late—too much time had passed.”

  “Doc and I can both heal small things,” Karl said. “We healed his small bruises and lacerations, internal and external. There weren’t that many. Whatever caused this was white-hot. It cauterized as it destroyed.”

  “What was it?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t know if it was a physical weapon or scorching neurological energy. Joan didn’t see it. It happened too fast.”

  Marcus looked over at Joan, who was sobbing quietly

  “His body is actually functioning quite well on its own,” Karl continued. “But he’s not going to wake up.”

  Marcus lunged to his feet but succeeded only in landing on his knees beside Clay’s cot. He put his hands on either side of Clay’s face and reached out into the universe. They were right. Clay’s body was functioning as though he were just sleeping, but there was a crowbar-sized hole that started at his right temple and reached half way through his brain. There was too much missing now—too much that simply wasn’t there anymore.

  Clay would never wake up.

  Because of him. Because Marcus hadn’t been strong enough to both rescue his friends and heal them. He’d saved them—one of them—only to let the other one die. Or perhaps his failure was much earlier. He hadn’t been strong enough or smart enough or quick enough to keep himself and Maggie and Nat from being injected with the sedative. If not for that, Clay might still be alive. And who knew what condition Maggie was in?

  Marcus slumped back in defeat. The simple, pathetic truth was that they, as a team, as a rebellion, didn’t have the strength or knowledge to defeat the collectives. Each time they went in confident that they could do it, they not only failed but also found that they were far less prepared than they originally thought. Each time disaster struck and a member of the team was lost in one way or another.

  Would this war never end? He supposed that if it did, it would be with the individuals defeated and mankind forever enslaved to a collective consciousness with all the originality of the human spirit fading into mediocrity across the canyons of time.

  Marcus rested his head against his forearms and cried. Sometimes it was the only thing a man could do.