Do It Again (the Country Doctor Remix)

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(the incurable wound)

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She’s the woman who can’t die.

Wow, hell of an intro there, right? I mean, really, who can’t die? I refuse to believe her—thought she had balls though, telling that much of a lie. But Christ on a cracker, she’d have to be nuts to say that sort of thing.

She tells me this, and I raise the gun to her head and laugh—because crazies are the only fun I have on this job anymore—as I pull the trigger. And thirty seconds later, she stands up, spits out the bullet and wipes the blood off of her temple.

“Oh, shit,” I say. She laughs hollowly.

“You got that right, kid.”

---

Her name is Linda Daniels, or so she says. Something in her eyes tell her that this name has as much hold on her as death does, though, so I hesitate to use it. She has nice lips, and her hair is the color of copper.

“So, soldier, where am I?”

I raise an eyebrow at her, but she shrugs. “I travel a lot. And don’t bother saying you’re sorry for the shooting thing, either.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

“Good.”

She stares at me with an empty stare, and I tell her. “You’re on the planet Yorricko—the original settlers had a bit of a thing for Shakespeare here—and you’re currently in the custody,” I say, clapping handcuffs on her as she keeps staring, “of the Fifth Empire of the Allied Human Forces.”

The woman rolls her eyes and snorts.

“And are all of your orders to shoot on sight of a person?”

I tie a rope to the cuffs and begin to drag her back to base. “That’s even if you are a person. Orders are shoot to kill in this zone—all the civilians know this, and if you don’t, we assume you’re not native and therefore you die. Got it?”

“Kind of failed at the ‘shoot to kill’ thing though, right?”

I look back at the woman that I’m dragging behind me. Her tone is mocking, but her eyes are still hollow.

Then I shoot her five more times, just to make sure.

Thirty seconds later, she’s up and spitting out bullets like there’s no tomorrow. God damn.

“Are you satisfied, kiddo? And I liked this shirt, thanks very much.”

Now I sit down on the soft grass, hands folded in front of me. She stays standing, staring at the green landscape all around us. It’s pretty on Yorricko—not as beautiful as the original Earth that I’ve seen on holos, but the original settlers 5000 years ago thought it was close enough, apparently.

As if hearing my thoughts, she sighs. “Not as beautiful as Earth,” she says, casually stomping on my hands and pulling the rope from them as she kicks my gun away.

Ow. Ow ow ow.

“How long have you been on this planet, soldier?”

I look up from my throbbing hands, seeing a terrifying smile grow across her face. And suddenly, I feel very, very scared—well, even more than I had been before.

“All your life, right? Pity.”

Then she grabs my shaking hands, and something rips us away from the green grass of Yorricko.

---

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god.

My hands don’t hurt anymore. What?

She’s holding me by the shoulders, and her empty eyes stare into mine.

“Where am I?” Gotta stay cool, gotta remember my training. Oh god.

“You, Rufe O’Connor, are at my place.”

She moves away from me, and gestures towards the smoking plains in front of us. It’s a horrible palette of greys and browns and reds and an overwhelming stench of death. I vomit, and something like sadness and amusement flickers in those tired eyes.

“Don’t barf on my carpet, you fuck.”

I kneel on the ground, and groan as she sits next to me and looks at my voided stomach contents with something that passes for interest.

“We’re on Earth,” she says, and presses a finger to my lips before I can protest the falseness of her statement. “Those holos—those kiddy pictures—they’re outdated. No human has visited Earth in at least 2000 years. And honestly, who’d want to? Look at it. Breathe it in—oh wait, you’ve done that already.” She flings a hand out, gesturing to the dead land. “But you people only remember it how you want to, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, ‘you people’? And how’d you know my name?”

She pauses, and smiles softly. I feel a shiver run down my spine and into the ground, and I know she can tell. Her smile grows a fraction of an inch wider.

“So human. I know everything, Corporal Rufe O’Connor. You’re not special; I’m just that smart.”

I want to protest this, but her eyes turn on mine again and I shake at the deadness in them. Her scowl is fierce.

“You just want to go home, to cry to your mom and dad’s graves and tell them of your sins, to try to gain your absolution from a dead man and woman. And in the end, you won’t even mean it—because you’ll keep walking through life with your eyes closed, Corporal Rufe O’Connor, and you’ll keep hurting others and yourself, and there’s nothing you can do because you can’t even begin to forgive yourself.”

And then her face is calm, nearly beatific. “So human, I said. And that’s,” she said, hopping up quickly, “why I need you, kid.” She reaches a hand down and takes mine into her own.

What?

She pulls a face, and slowly breathes out a gust of air.

The landscape around me changes with a howling suddenness that leaves me breathless. There are high purple mountains in the distance, wreathed with wispy clouds that promise wind. The grass around me is green with a pleasant infestation of daisies, and I can see a forest at the foothills of the mountains.

The woman bends down and plucks a flower from the ground. “This is how I—Earth is supposed to be,” she says, holding the flower to my nose.

It smells like corpses. The woman breathes in heavily and the beautiful landscape vanishes, her eyes full of longing. “There’s only so much I can show you, of course, but you get the idea?”

I vomit again, and she wrinkles her nose. “You’re a shitty guest, Corporal.”

“You’re a shitty hostess,” I groan, clutching my stomach. Then I do something decidedly un-masculine: I faint.

---

She considers him now, this tiny human upon her burnt skin.

His face is pleasant, and his mind is not. While his skin is unblemished and fair—like the colonial settlers of old that left her—his thoughts are dark and resentful, full of rage and pain and fear. So human, though: there’s curiosity and daring and danger and far behind it all is a tiny, tiny flicker of hope.

Good. It is this hope she needs, this hope that will bring her back to life from the dead crust that she is.

She had wondered what sort of man would save her. Apparently it’s the man who would kill her six times over.

---

“Wake up, kid.”

I open my eyes, and the woman is crouched in front of me, her skinny spindle limbs all folded into themselves. Her eyes still stare at me, wide with study.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a person here.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Where am I? Who the fuck are you? Take me home!”

She raises an eyebrow and something in her dead eyes softens as she cups my cheek with a hand.

“You poor child,” she whispers, long bony fingers caressing my face, “you are.”

I want to smack her hand away, but I’m frozen in place by her eyes. They’re a dark brown color, and something in them is pleading with me to listen to her.

“Tell me where I am,” I say. My voice shakes for the first time in years.

---

The child wants to know. Tell him? Yes.

So she does. She tells him the tale of a planet that loved its children, but whose children left it to die after too many wars. She tells him the tale of a lonely woman, born of the planet, doomed to walk the sky until she found the one who could bring her people home. She tells him the tale of a lonely soldier who has grown to hate it all, but still keeps a spark of hope buried deep beneath many layers.

She tells him what has been, and what will be. And what he will do. What he must do.

He doesn’t believe a word she says.

---

Well, that’s official. She’s fucking nuts. What’s worse, she’s fucking powerful and fucking nuts.

Shit. How the hell am I supposed to get out of this? Gotta get away from her, then find some way off of this godforsaken planet. The Fifth Empire has spaceports on every planet—this shithole can’t be any different.

I snake my wire out of my pocket, and she blinks when I wrap it around her neck and pull, tight. Her head falls off and I would vomit again, but I haven’t got anything in my stomach anymore. Instead, I run straight away from her in a sprint. I don’t know if she’ll stay dead this time—bullets didn’t seem to take, but maybe a beheading will.

Her blood drips down my cheek and uniform, and a bony fist punches me in the temple. I go down like a lead weight in water and once again she’s standing over me with hollow eyes. A faint red line on her neck fades away as I stare.

“I told you, I can’t die.”

“How’d you get in front of me?”

“I know everything. Simple method of matter displacement, Corporal,” she say, taking my hand in a fierce grip and hauls me onto my feet. “Stop running. You can’t really escape me. There aren’t any working space ports on Earth now, either.” She doesn’t let go of my hand.

“Prove it,” I spit at her, trying to rip my hand away from her stony grip. It doesn’t work, and something rips us away from the dying plain.

---

She can see him wandering around the defunct spaceport now, kicking the walls to be sure that they’re real. One of the walls he kicks crumbles down and he’s almost taken out by a piece of rubble. Whoops.

She’s standing next to him now, and something in his face has changed with the fear that he tried not to show earlier.

“All of your empires, all of your pettiness—it’s all in the stars now, and the planet has no children. Squabble as they might, they’re still my—erm, the planet’s children. She wants them back. She needs them back so she doesn’t die. Or so that I can. Still not sure about that part. The one thing I don’t know, you could say.”

He plops down on a piece of concrete, his uniform still stained with her blood. “And you want me to bring humanity back—back here, to this hellhole—just because you say a planet’s unhappy? Do you realize how impossible that is? Or how fucking crazy you are?”

She shrugs. “It’s gotta happen. I’ll help, however I can.”

“And what makes you think I can get humans back here? Who would want to be here?”

“You did, once.”

“Yeah, but that was before..” he trails off, gesturing around at the destruction and death and overwhelming stench. “Before I saw how it was. Anyways, the Fifth Empire has banned all travel to Earth—for ‘keeping the planet enclosed in memory’ they always said.”

“A world can’t exist in memory alone, you dumbass. It’s got to be held, got to be loved—like one of the Old Earth love songs about a woman or something.” She stares at him as she speaks, her face blank. “Gotta be recognized as her own thing, her own entity. Not just a place for people to stay.”

She blinks. “I’m getting a bit maudlin, hm?”

The man nods, and the look on his face is still doubtful, but his eyes shine with something unrecognizable. “So you’re saying the planet’s alive? How is that even possible?”

She snorts, and the deeper consciousness inside her laughs long and hard.

---

A year passes. She drags him around the universe with her, finding the farthest reaches and pockets of humanity, preaching at them to come back, come back to where you belong. Come home.

Some listen. Most don’t.

As they rip across the emptiness of space, she tells him stories. Tales of a young planet and a young, copper-haired woman who walked hand-in-hand with the world, never aging, never dying. And for a while (a very long while), she had been happy. But then the children of Earth left her, and she was stuck with a dying planet. Tells the Corporal tales of the birth of humans, of their brilliance and cruelty and love.

Another year passes. He starts to talk to the people they’re visiting, telling them brilliant falsehoods (that soon won’t be, he secretly hopes) about the beautiful planet they’ve left behind, telling them to come back, come back to where we belong. Come home, back to Earth. Our home is dying without us there to love it.

Most listen. Only some don’t.

As they rip across the emptiness of space, he tells her stories. Tales of a soldier and his quick ascension through the ranks because of a ruthlessness rarely seen in such a young man, and of a boy who lost his parents too early and had to cling to warm dreams and cold waking in order to survive. He had seen such horrors, so early; he had had nothing else.

Another year passes. He never stops trying (and failing, much to her bemusement) to kill her, and she never stops staring at him with hollow eyes. He calls it love. She calls it stupid.

---

We’re back on Earth, and she’s the one vomiting this time.

She brushes me off when I try to help her up, and she pats the ground after she’s voided her stomach contents. “Sorry,” she says to the ground.

The ground.

It’s green. And there are daisies. I smell one. It doesn’t stink of corpses.

She grins at me, one of those terrifying smiles that I’ve grown to fear and love all at the same time. Then she grabs me by the collars of my now very-stained uniform and kisses me.

Oh this is nice it’s only taken her a year to catch on oh wait just a second. “You taste like barf, for god’s sake.”

“Don’t I though?” That dazzling smile is filling my vision and I feel a bit shellshocked. “It’s working, Corporal Rufe O’Connor,” she says, leaping away from me, “and we did it. We did it we did it we did it. She’s living again, she’s living and breathing and generally being just marvelous!”

I hear shouts in the distance. There are dark shapes waving their arms welcomingly, and she actually laughs, laughs, and yells to me about people living here, actual people!

Then she trips and smashes her head on a rock, and I let out a bark of laughter myself.

Well. Haven’t seen her go like that before. I’ll have a good chance to make fun of her, this strange, spindly-limbed woman that I love.

I meander my way over to her, and crouch down, ready to see her hollow eyes flicker back to life. They do, but she looks at me with a wide, shocked stare, the whites of her eyes red with broken blood vessels.

“I’m dying,” she says simply. “Granted, if I were human, I wouldn’t be talking right now, but I’ve got to give you people something, don’t I?”

“You can’t die,” I say, lifting her head gently. I can see her brain. I’ve seen it before, but something seems so much more real about this. Her blood, so familiar to me, coats the entire right side of her scalp.

“And yet I am, dumbass. I told you, years ago, this was the one thing that I didn’t know. Guess we’re finding out now.”

“You can’t die,” I say again. Oh, you idiot. You’re repeating yourself.

“You idiot. You’re repeating yourself. I am dying, and it’s about damn time, too.” She sees me shake my head, and gently puts a hand on my cheek. Her face is pale and bloody. “But I can’t, because you still need me? Selfish, selfish boy.”

“Shut up. The people over there, they’re coming this way. They’ll have doctors or something, and they can fix you up.”

“Dear god, be quiet. I’m quite ready to go.” She attempts to roll her eyes, but the movement makes her groan in pain.

She doesn’t talk any more for a while, but she opens her eyes again eventually. “Corporal?”

“Yes?” My voice is shaking and I’m willing myself not to cry.

“That absolution that you were looking for. You saved the planet with only the dream of a world by your side. I think you’ve gotten it.”

And before I can ask what she means, her hollow eyes close and she stops breathing. I wait the requisite thirty seconds, and thirty seconds more, and thirty seconds more. Thirty minutes more. More and more and more. She’s dead, and when I say this out loud a warm wind blows across my face and the daisies in the field ripple across my sight. The sun is shining on clouds that promise storms in the hills. The air is electric with the thriving beauty of the plains and the stark danger of the far-away mountains.

She is dead, but she has never been more alive.

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(is that I am human)

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end of do it again (the country doctor remix).

comes from too much kafka and too much idle time.