Animal Theater

The Haunted Head

Sir Karl came into the mess waving his small-screen in Nelly's face. "I got proof." He said. "This morning before dawn I found the signal again and this time I recorded it. I got ninety six seconds of it before it jumped frequencies."

"Is the source local?" She asked.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure."

"Send it to me." She said. "I'll look at it today."

"You think the buttons are tracking the unit somehow?" He asked.

"I don't know. That's why we set up the scanners, it wasn't just to pick up the Mexican porn channels. Get some sleep soldier, you look like you could use it. I'll let you know what I find out." Nelly went back to her breakfast, wondering why they assigned non-tech personnel to the scanners. Her tech-crew probably needed their beauty-rest. She'd have to have give them the discipline talk again. Sir Karl was a Subcomandante so he outranked most of the dipshits whose job he was doing.

After drills Nelly made her way to the tech tent and transported Sir Karl's Pick Axe to her big-screen and ran a standard analysis. She assumed it would be some kind of garbage signal produced by space junk or a solar flare, but no, the signal he'd recorded contained a lot of information. Deciphering that information was another thing. She worked through lunch and into evening and had only gotten as far as identifying it as a Well-Armed Militia code.

She took a break for dinner and found Sir Karl sitting with his crew, eating heaping forkfuls of rehydrated chicken and rice. Nelly sat down with the boys and told Sir Karl that he'd done well. "It's an enemy transmission alright, and it's coming from this camp. Stumbling on that signal might've saved all our asses. I thought you'd like to know. If we can figure out where it's coming from I'll put your name in for commendation." His friends clapped for him and slapped him on the back. "My crew would just love to see a Subcomandante get a tech commendation."

Sir Karl laughed, but then winced as if the laughter had caused him pain. One of his crew asked if he was okay. "Yeah," he said, "I just got a splitting headache. It came on all of a sudden." He rubbed his head. "Jesus, it's bad."

"Maybe you should go to the medic." Nelly said.

He squinted at her. "Yeah," he said. He got to his feet and staggered partway across the mess before falling. He was in spasms, shaking violently on the ground as Nelly and the others at the table rushed to him. He was hacking up blood and phlegm from his nose and mouth, and Nelly saw blood coming from his ears. She looked around and didn't see anyone who outranked her, so she told everyone to clear the mess tent. If he was bleeding out from some kind of Ebola he could've already infected everyone there.

The medics put on protective gear and went into the mess. They weren't in there very long. The medical crew took the twelve people who had been there to the med tent and told them to sit and not talk to each other or touch anything in case they were infected with whatever Sir Karl had.

Outside the tent Nelly could see them carrying a special body bag designed to contain pathogens, not the typical body bag Nelly was used to seeing. After a couple of hours of wondering if they might be about to meet the same fate as Sir Karl, the head medic came in and told them that no virus, bacteria, or known bio-weapon was detected in Sir Karl and that they were all free to go. Nelly asked what had killed him. "Some kind of brain aneurysm, we're not sure." She said.

Nelly went back to the tech tent feeling drained and weak. With all the violent death she'd witnessed, death from a brain aneurysm seemed especially cruel and pointless. She'd talked to Sir Karl a little when she was training him on the scanners. He was from Arizona, but had moved to San Diego as a child. He'd been liberated from one of the corporate prisons after independence, and had come to the 512 from a propaganda unit that had been obliterated. He'd shown Nelly pictures of his adopted daughter, but she couldn't remember what the kid had looked like. She was in a Practical Ed unit down south, part of a growing number of kids who were getting an education and fighting for Pacifica at the same time. Nelly wondered how hard the kid would take the news.