Terminal by Michaelbrent Collings
Independently published, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1091873315
Available: Paperback and Kindle edition
The fog rolls in around an isolated bus terminal, and the eleven people inside are cut off from all communication with the outside world. Although the reader knows something is watching outside, reading about the events and characters in the terminal is almost as disorienting as it must be to the characters inside, who know nothing at all. This leads to a slow beginning, as complete strangers have to meet and work out what is going on before the pace can pick up. Once it does, though, the story is gripping. A cryptic message flashed to all of them tells them that unless they can choose one person unanimously to live, everyone will die. A second message, much later, offers this food for thought: not just who most deserves to live, but who deserves to die. With the lights dimming and no way out, the group deduces that they have been trapped by alien creatures as part of a deadly experiment in human behavior.
Most of the group are strangers, although a few have a connection. In their midst are a drug dealer, an addict, a con man, a thief, a cutter, a Mary Kay saleslady, a pair of newlyweds, a grandmother, a gangbanger, a diabetic, a cop, a ticket taker (named Mary Holiday– really), a mother and daughter, and a neurodiverse computer expert named Adam S. Miles, who is referred to by his full name through the entire book. Some of these individuals have dangerous secrets, others’ are more mundane. Collings takes time with a few of the characters to show them more fully: Paul Kingsley, a cop determined not to kill; Mary Holiday, who has spent her entire life trying to make sure her daughter has a better one; Adam S. Miles, who is underestimated at the start but makes the majority of deductions and information dumps in the book; and Shelly Sherman, a Mary Kay consultant with a hidden past. Others have stories that have to be pieced together from various interactions, such as Bella Ricci and Jesus Flores, and a few are just sketched in briefly, so you don’t really have time to feel the impact when they die. I truly wasn’t sure how things were going to play out, and who was going to survive, and Collings totally blew me away with his ending,
There are a few things that really stick out in all of this. First, Collings’ handling and development of his autistic character, Adam S. Miles felt pretty respectful. It is rare to have a character with any kind of disability allowed to speak for themselves or presented as capable and independent. Yet, while other characters used ableist language to put him down, Adam S. Miles spoke up for himself. Collings also managed to avoid other disability tropes, such as making Adam an “inspirational”, “magical”, or “pitiful” character, all common stereotypes. I did feel like the upfront information on ableism and neurodiversity, while admirable, occasionally disrupted the flow of the writing. I think Collings relied on common stereotypes and tropes in developing some of his other characters (not especially surprising when he had to kill off 11 people in 327 pages) but I appreciated the care he put into Adam’s character.
Adam is also responsible for taking over a conversation about whether aliens could be responsible for the situation the characters find themselves in, listing multiple horrific experiments that humans have conducted on each other (I do want to note that while many of the examples Adam lists did occur, the summary of the Los Angeles vaccine study was misleading) to explain why aliens might do the same. I feel like this is a place where Collings is trying to hit home his message hard, of the horrors people, even ordinary people, will do to each other, simply because they can. It’s a little heavy-handed, but you’ll be right there with the people in the terminal as they beg him to stop listing off the cruelties people have inflicted on one another. It’s shortly after this, as the deadline by which they must make their choice looms closer, that the plot starts really speeding along, and the deaths start piling up.
As the story in the terminal ends, the survivor, who is typically herded into the next experimental location, short-circuits the experiment unexpectedly, and the creatures running it are left waiting for orders. Will the experimenting end? Collings exposes the true horror of what it means for humans to be subjects in a cruel experiment run by an all-powerful authority. Recommended.
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