Trigger Man

"Matt-Man" enjoys the photo-booth with fellow CreComms and his DC-loving girlfriend

This is it: the last off-topic blog post for the summer, but definitely not the last blog post. I want to get back to writing about comic book movie news — especially now that SO much is happening! There’s Batman V. Superman, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, and the Daredevil TV series (which is incredible). I just don’t know where to start.

But before I get back to the official stuff, I want to share just a little bit more schoolwork with y’allz.

Last Friday, I won a CCMA (Creative Communications Media Award) for a short story I wrote back in November, and I’ve had a few people ask me to share it with them since then, so I thought I’d post it here.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine, Aaron Snider, suggested we make a comic book. And, after a few brainstorming sessions, we came up with a premise and loose plot that I eventually recycled into Trigger Man, so I owe him a great thanks. On a side note, my comic book project has gotten the green light, and I’ll be developing my very first comic book this summer! I can’t wait to get started.

To all my CreComm brothers and sisters, it’s been the most challenging, and most rewarding year of my life, and I’m happy I got to share it with such great people. Here’s to being halfway through CreComm!  Now bring on the comics!

WARNING: Trigger Man is a sci-fi/horror story with foul language, sex, and gore — definitely not a bedtime story for the kiddies.

Trigger Man

By Matthew Dyck

“I’m trying to drink my coffee!”

I don’t know why I keep coming out here, especially when they’re being so loud. I try to unlock the 10-inch steel door that separates the living quarters from the silo and push on it gently so that they won’t hear me, but the pneumatic locks hiss every time I open it. Thank god for this door. It blocks out the screams and sound of flesh pummeling metal. I lean on the railing and toss my cup down into the darkness. I wait three seconds and hear a faint smash. I know that if I don’t throw myself over this railing soon, they’ll find a way down here and tear me to shreds.

“Hello!”

My voice fills the giant tube and all of its narrow limbs lined with piping, and then ricochets back to me. They seem to get even more enraged when I yell something simple and recognizable. And I can hear them gasp for breath and try to reply. It sounds like a cassette player eating tape – squeaks, and whines, and sound running backwards.

Somewhere down in that darkness there’s a broken coffee mug and James. And he’s starting to smell. 

*  *  *  *

Trigger Men (People)

            “I have to say I resent that term, trigger man,” she says.

            “Trigger person doesn’t have the same ring to it,” says James.

            She says, “fuck you” like a girl who just got her pigtails pulled. I could hear her and James fucking in the ‘DE-CON’ chamber last night.

The pill-shaped warning light covers the room in reds and blacks. It reminds me of my high school’s locker room, only much more claustrophobic, and I’m not at all excited that there’s a girl undressing next to me.

            “You don’t think it would be funny, a how-to for trigger men – sorry, trigger people?” I ask, slipping my arms through long plastic sleeves.  

            “I think no one would read it and you’d risk life imprisonment,” she says with a smirk. Chelsea is a treat after a week underground. I tell her, her optimism is my oxygen. The worst part of the job is knowing that you can’t come up for air even if you wanted to. Once you’re locked in, it takes someone on the outside to open the doors.  Sometimes, if the threat is serious, we’re down here for a month or more.

            James says my first tip should be about masturbation. “Keep it down to once, maybe twice a day,” he says. “That’ll keep you from getting too stir crazy. Any more than that and you lose your get-up-and-go.”

“I’m choosing not to respond to that,” Chelsea says, fastening her mask onto her containment suit.

“Time.”

The light turns off and we’re back in full color again. Thompson steps into the tiny chamber, a plain-looking man with three human-sized prophylactics. He yanks on our gas masks. No leaks.  

“You’re dragging your heels. You might only get a minute to get your suit on. Wake up and take it seriously.”

Thompson is a dick, but he’s spent more time underground than all three of us combined. Thompson is the only one still left from the old guard.  I hear he spent most of his career in the military before silos like these were privatized and they started contracting more civilian technicians.  James once told me that Thompson was kept here for most of ’23 during the Yokohama crisis and that’s how he knows all the best places to stash contraband. “I once saw him pull a Snickers bar out of an intake vent,” he said. I’ve heard that in training Thompson holds the record for time spent in the sensory deprivation tank. You float in an enclosed tub of water with no sound or light so you start to feel weightless and hallucinate. Some people really lose it in there after a few hours and they get cut from the program. Thompson floated in there for two days before they decided to pull him out. At least, that’s what they say.

  *  *  *  *

            After about an hour of staring into the dark, I seal the door behind me and flip the monitors on.  A few of the outside cameras are still working but I mostly just see haze.  Every once in a while there’s movement, though – a silhouette, an extra limb if you can call it that. I noticed they leave wet grooves in the ground when they come close enough. I used to be able to see Chelsea’s containment mask but it’s gone now. Maybe she took it with her. 

*  *  *  *

The moment you’ve all been training for

            Pulling the trigger is nowhere near as simple as pulling a trigger.  If it were, there wouldn’t need to be four highly trained people doing it. At the same time, you have no idea what you’re doing; you know what buttons to push and which passcodes to enter, but you’re never told exactly what kind of ‘package’ is being sent or where it’s going.  I remember floating in the deprivation tank and imagining this big red button with a glass cover over top of it.  I would reach out and smash the glass with my fist and see “Missiles Away” in flashing red letters.

            In reality, the process is unnecessarily complicated. “If all we think about is flipping the right switches and inputting the right commands into the computer, we’re less likely to think about all those people we’re killing,” James said to me once. James had a very matter-of-fact way of looking at things and it made me nervous when he spoke like that. Not because I believed what he was saying – I did. But because I was afraid that someone would hear us and we’d be fired.  The last time I saw James was just after we pulled the trigger and just before we lost contact with our people above ground. He was walking down the corridor towards the empty shaft where the missile used to be. He just kept walking and stepped over the railing like it wasn’t even there. Three seconds. I’ll never forget the sound he made.

            After that, Chelsea wasn’t the same. I’d often catch her staring out into nothing with this look of someone who’d forgotten where she was and didn’t know how to get home.  Thompson wasn’t much comfort; he would spend most of the day fiddling with instruments trying to make contact with the people above ground. He wasn’t eating or sleeping much either.  I noticed his weathered face was getting gaunter.

            “Did we fuck up?” I asked him.

           

            Of course we did

            “No, we did everything perfectly. I got confirmation before we lost communications,” he said flatly.

            He doesn’t know a goddamn thing. They left us all down here to die.

I felt myself slipping. I’d spent enough time in close-quarters with James to know what his responses would be. After he checked out, his color commentary had somehow latched onto my mind and I couldn’t seem to shake it. When you’re training to be a trigger man, no one tells you what to do after you push the button. After the button gets pushed, the manual ends. Country A is threatening Country B so you spend a week or two with your hand at the button waiting for orders and masturbating twice a day, tops. That was my job, and retirement was carving my mind down to a toothpick. 

            Plenty of time to write the manual now, asshole.

           

            After a week I started losing track of the days. I’d have to make a conscious effort to look at the clock a few times a day and imagine what it must look like above ground, but that was the problem: we had no clue what it looked like outside – we lost power to the cameras outside a few moments after we pushed the button. 

I was the one at the monitors. What do you think I saw before the power went out?

One night, Chelsea walked into the rack room and crawled into my bunk beside me.  I wanted to tell her to leave me alone, to fuck off.  I thought she was disgusting, coming on to me after James. I kept seeing him step over that railing where I like to drink my coffee in the morning. I could feel him staring back up at me.

It’s better down here than it is up there.

But when Chelsea kissed me, James stopped talking to me. And for a moment I could forget who she was and who I was, and where we were and what we were doing. I saw the light come back into her eyes for a moment and it made me want to die a little bit.

Thompson shook me awake that night and I jumped – almost cracked my skull open on the bunk above me. Chelsea grabbed at the blankets to cover herself.

“Listen to that,” Thompson whispered.

“Listen to what?” I asked. I touched my hairline and rubbed a spot of blood between my fingers. The three of us waited in silence until we heard a tumbling sound from outside. A chill rushed through my body; it was the first sound we’d heard from above ground, but it reminded me of James hitting the silo floor.

Time’s up, asshole.

“We’re going up. Put on your suits. ” Thompson said.

Life’s a gas and then you die

“They must be injured,” Thompson told us. But it didn’t make sense. They didn’t yell for help, they didn’t say anything, and the way they kept constantly banging on the upper hatch – someone sick or injured wouldn’t have the energy. They wanted to get in and I didn’t want to pop my head out and find out why. I volunteered half a dozen times to stay behind but Thompson wasn’t having it.

            When we finally managed to get the doors open, there wasn’t more than a few feet of ground in front of us before a thick wall of brown-yellow fog blocking our view. “Keep your masks on and stay away from anything sharp,” Thompson said.

No shit.

We used up the last of the duck tape wrapping our gloves to our wrists and our boots to our ankles before going out, but I still didn’t feel right. We stayed close to the door and I focused on getting the outside cameras working, which took an eternity.  Thompson made it worse by shouting hello loudly in every direction. It made me fumble with the wires and take twice as long. By the time I started seeing shadows in the fog, I was ready to piss my containment suit.

At this point I wasn’t just hearing James’ voice. I was hallucinating. I could see him plain as day, watching me, smiling. His face was changing. Sharp little worm-like protrusions were moving around reaching out of his cheeks and forehead.

Take a deep breath, he said to me.

Then I heard Chelsea scream.  Thompson rushed to her but I just stood there frozen.  She was on the ground, bleeding from her ankle.  Something had torn at her leg and her suit was letting in air. “It bit me! It bit me!” She started to hyperventilate and tear away at her mask. Thompson tried to stop her but it was too late. She took it off and started gulping in putrid yellow air until her face turned white and her insides leapt out. I felt my stomach hit my chest and I puked onto my visor, dropping to my knees.

*  *  *  *

I think I lost it for a while after that.  My memories are blurry and I can’t remember running back inside and shutting the doors, but I remember screaming until I passed out. Now I get to wait here and have a reunion with Thompson and Chelsea, or what’s left of them. Or, maybe I’ll step over the railing and drink some coffee with James.