The first transmission came in the thick of night when no one was awake but JC.
He was sitting cross-legged on the living room sofa with a broken wind-up toy he had decided to fix.
Then there was an electronic hiccup and a whine of feedback, and a distant, tinny voice said, "is this-- hey, do you think it's going through?" and JC scrambled off the sofa, his legs tangling in the blanket he had spread over them, parts of the toy clinking, tingling, clattering to the floor, rolling over the boards, disappearing into cracks.
He pushed the button on the mike and at first, his voice was nothing but a squeak: "hey-- hey, who's there?"
He breathed, breathed, breathed, and nothing happened. Silence. Just the crackle of static.
"come in," he said, his voice still tight, tight, but not cracking. There was pressure behind his eyes, as if they were about to pop out. As if someone had toggled a switch and raised the pressure in the room. He remembered a film where a guy's head exploded. He couldn't remember the name of it. "this is... uh. This is the way station. Come in."
JC lay on his back in the desert.
The sky was blindingly blue, but he was wearing a pair of Ray Bans he'd found on a shelf in the storage room. They were too large for his face, and one of the lenses was a little loose, but they were good sunglasses, and he was glad he'd found them.
He thought he saw a bird fly over, a black, fluttering speck against the sun, but when he sat up and squinted, trying to focus, it was gone.
The desert made his head quiet. When the sky was so blue that he wanted to weep, and the wind was full of dust, and there was no sound but the dry rustling of the bushes and the sighs of the wind, the thoughts and memories fell dry and dead to the bottom of his mind.
He turned on his side, his scalp itching with the sand in his hair. He drew swirling shapes in the dust with a finger, and stared towards the horizon. The hardpan desert was flat and featureless in this direction; the mountains were behind him.
His gun lay heavy and comforting on his hip. He'd made a holster out of an old boot, and worn it for a week. Justin had made fun of him, called him a "cowboy, a cowboy, a spaced-out space cowboy, man." There had been nothing in Justin's face to match the chill that ran down JC's spine.
The sun beat down on him unrelentlessly. He was thirsty, but not dangerously so. There was sand in his mouth, too, but it didn't bother him. He should be looking for Justin and Lance, but he had to lie down for a while. He had to be still to savour the emptiness. Who knew what was going to happen.
Nothing happened. He had pressed the button and said "come in, come in, this is way station, come in," so many times now that it sounded like a mantra, or a Zen koan. He thought he might say it in his sleep if he ever got to sleep.
"Who are you talking to?" Lance said behind him, and he dropped the mike.
"No one," he said, putting his hands between his legs and squeezing to keep them from shaking. He had passed beyond feeling tired hours ago, and instead he was wide awake but shaky. The world had sharp corners and jagged angles everywhere. Maybe if he stayed up long enough, it would just tear itself apart, and maybe then he could go back home.
But there was nothing here but this world, where Lance was standing quietly in the room, probably still smelling like Justin. He always did. Every time JC passed Lance, he felt Justin in the air, and it was like a thousand daily paper cuts that got infected and chafed against everything he touched.
"Do you think there's anyone out there?" Lance said. He hadn't really been the same since the thing with the bad water, but he wasn't gone. Not like Justin. Just a little strange sometimes. JC saw him looking over his shoulder a lot. Maybe Justin talked about angels and demons in his sleep.
JC let that one go unanswered. He couldn't talk to Lance that much. Talking to Lance made his mouth go dry and his heart beat a frantic, thumping rhythm against the inner wall of his ribcage. He could watch, and smile, and survive, but he wasn't going to be friends.
He wanted to jump on his bike and ride out into the desert, but the radio had a hook in him now. There were voices out there. Voices he didn't know. Voices that weren't covered in shifting, amorphous memories.
"Why don't you like me?" Lance asked, and his deep voice was dripping memories, dripping years. And he didn't even know it.
JC just stared at the radio, willing it to speak to him. It just sat there, mute and obstinate. He wanted to tell Lance to stop asking stupid questions. "I do like you," he lied instead, and then, "why aren't you with Justin?"
"He was asleep," Lance said, "and dreaming, and he kicks and carries on when he dreams. He's like a puppy."
"I know," JC said numbly, and thought the desert might be the best option, radio or no radio. He stopped his hand from touching the scar on his forehead. The one he got one night in a hotel somewhere, when Justin kicked him out of the single bed and he cut his head open on the sharp corner of the bedside table. He told the press later that it was from tripping on his own feet in rehearsals. Justin had pushed him down on the bed and licked the blood off his face before they decided it was deep enough to warrant a visit to the emergency ward. When JC closed his eyes, he could still feel Justin's sharp little tongue on the raw edges of the wound. Had they fucked with him bleeding all over the bed? He couldn't remember, just like he couldn't remember what year it had been, what they had performed in concert the night before, or the lyrics to any of their songs.
He did remember telling Justin he loved him. He remembered meaning it.
The sun was dipping, and it set fast: sunk like a great glowing rock behind the mountains. Justin and Lance had been missing for three whole days. JC wondered if there were wild animals out here, or if everything was as dead as it looked. Would someone find two shrunken mummies one day, like the ones they'd found in the house behind the way station?
He thought about Justin dead, his body drying up and shrinking in the dry heat of the desert, his skin blackening, his eyes sinking into their sockets. Then he thought about Lance's body next to Justin's, maybe with skeletal arms still wrapped around Justin's chest, and he got up and started the bike again. It started perfectly. It always did.
Riding it was like escaping. It wasn't particularly fast, and he kept getting dust in his eyes, but his hair blew back from his forehead and whipped behind him, and the sound of the engine was the sound of freedom. The American dream, he thought, but it didn't mean anything anymore. He started scanning the horizon for signs of life.
"You know, you can come and sleep with us," Lance said magnanimously. He could afford being magnanimous. JC shook his head. "Justin doesn't mind," Lance said. "He likes you. He thinks you're one of the angels," and he laughed a little at 'angels', as if it was all a joke now. It wasn't a fucking joke, JC thought. Justin was gone, and Lance didn't know what it had been like before.
"Well," Lance said after a while, when JC had listened intently to the whine and rattle of the wind, and the distant hum of the static in the radio. "You know we don't mind, so. If you can't sleep. And."
He sounded concerned, and JC was almost moved to believe he was sincere. Then he wished Joey or Chris would make the same offer, because it would be easier. They were friends. Good old Joey. Good old Chris.
Lance gave up and went back to bed. JC sat frozen like a statue, pretending to be a statue, feeling like stone all the way through. The radio was silent.
He had gone to their room. A few times. Agony to lie sleepless while they snored on obliviously, twined around each other like pale, silver-shiny vines.
A different kind of agony to watch them touch. Justin had reached a whole new level of self-centeredness now that the civilised surface had been rudely scraped away, and he looked at JC with clear, guileless eyes and said, "come with us. You can come with us and look. We're beautiful," which was true and hurt like a cut, bright blaze of pain followed by numbness followed by a slowly growing ache. He should have said no, but he didn't. Lance laughed at Justin and didn't understand, shrugged and said it was okay, it'd be fun. Lance didn't have that much brains left, either, but he was coming back from the edge.
JC thought they wouldn't have minded if he'd joined in. They wouldn't have minded if threw an arm across them both later, and twined his own limbs with theirs. Instead he lay there, numb and still like a log, and when they were asleep, he crept out of the room and sat awake until the sunlight coming in through a crack in the curtains hurt his eyes. He vowed never to put himself through it again, but he'd made that vow four times already.
He did find them, and they weren't dead, but for what it all was worth, they might as well have been. He smiled at Justin, because Justin was beautiful and completely insane, but he'd already started mourning.
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