Out of Time

by David Klass

  “If he blows up those tanks, we’ll die anyway.”

  Tom grudgingly nodded and said softly, “I don’t have a gun.”

  “Wait here for the guards who are coming,” Grant said. “Tell them where we’ve gone.” He turned and started up the rise after Mathis, moving fast.

  Tom stood by the river for a few seconds. Two shots rang out in the darkness. He found himself sprinting forward up the slope, madly disregarding the danger, wanting to help his comrades. He found Grant bending over Mathis. The security guard had been shot through the center of the forehead.

  “Throw down your guns,” a voice ordered. They saw a tall man dressed in black walking toward them, his gun held at the ready.

  Grant hesitated for a second and then quickly raised his pistol and fired off one fast shot. He grunted, his hand went to his chest, and he crumpled. Tom knelt over him and saw him die. They had never been friends, but Tom had grown to like and respect Grant, and he felt both shock and fury. He checked the carotid artery and then took the Glock from Grant’s lifeless hand as footsteps approached.

  “Tom Smith,” a familiar voice said. “You brought them here.” It wasn’t a question. “You do think like me. . . . God help you.”

  Tom glanced up and saw Green Man less than ten feet away. His right hand held his gun, and his left hand was pressed to his stomach.

  Tom stood, and they faced each other. Tom raised the Glock till it was pointed at Green Man’s face. “You just killed two good men.” He wanted very much to pull the trigger—to avenge Grant and Mathis and the other innocent adults and children whom this man had killed, and to justify Brennan’s faith in him, and because Warren Smith would have pulled the trigger with no compunction.

  But they were looking into each other’s eyes, and Tom didn’t shoot.

  “And I’m about to kill a lot more,” Green Man said. “Those tanks are set to blow in two minutes. There’s no way to stop it from happening. When they blow, this becomes hell on earth.” He grimaced in pain. “One of us has a chance to get out. And it can’t be me.” He lifted his hand from his stomach, and Tom saw the blood and the seriousness of the wound. Mathis or Grant had gutshot Green Man, and he was bleeding to death.

  “There’s no way out of here in two minutes,” Tom said.

  “There’s one.” Green Man stepped downhill, toward the river. He was slouching over, and every step was clearly agony. He pointed down at the bank. Dark metal gleamed in the moonlight. Something was anchored in the shallow water just below them. “If you make it out past the fence, there’s a motorcycle stashed by the first big tree, half a mile along.”

  Tom looked back at him and hurled the Glock far out into the Kildeer. “What’s the point? It’s doomsday. In Sweden and here and everywhere.”

  Green Man replied haltingly, in tremendous pain. “I would like to think that the people in Sweden . . . and God himself . . . built in just a little extra time, if we use it wisely.” Then his face contorted, and he sank to one knee. He gasped out, “Tom Smith, you wanted to live very much when you swam to shore from that ferry. Get going, and take this.”

  He held out something, and Tom took it from his hand. It was a cell phone, in a protective sheath. “What’s on it?”

  “A last message to my followers . . . and my kids. In case I didn’t make it. Go now.”

  Tom began walking and then running down to the water. He spotted the rebreather but didn’t know how to use it, and there was no time. He waded over to what looked like a scooter anchored in the shallows. He switched on the motor, and the two propellers started to turn. But he didn’t ride away yet. Instead, he took Green Man’s cell phone out of its sheath and pointed it up the bank.

  “Go,” Green Man told him again, and it was between a command and a plea.

  Tom used the cell phone to start filming. Green Man seemed to understand, and he rose to one knee, and then struggled slowly to his feet. Behind him, up the rise, the first tank blew. A tongue of orange flame shot out of the top of it and then it exploded in all directions, and Green Man was silhouetted by the blaze. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as if summoning his followers, and then turned and stepped toward the explosion. A second tank blew, and the ground shook, and Tom put the cell phone in its sheath and tucked it away. He grasped the two handles and turned the speed up to full.

  The motor roared, and the DPV shot out into the Kildeer, dragging Tom over gravel. Then he was speeding downriver, careening wildly off the bottom, nearly drowning till he figured out how to steer. He sucked in air when he rocketed to the surface and held his breath for minutes while the DPV roared back underwater toward the fence. Above him, the night sky was ablaze with clouds of orange and red fire while rocks that had been wrenched from rig base pits and pieces of twisted steel ripped from derricks were hurled up into the inferno’s cloud by the explosion and rained back down on the river. And the earth itself shook so that it felt very much like the world was coming to an end.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Sharon had put the kids to bed and stayed with them till they were asleep. They had separate bedrooms in the cheerful little farmhouse, but they were both very anxious and preferred to sleep in the same room. She had listened as they said their prayers and asked God to protect their father, and then she had sung to them. In Michigan, when they were younger, she used to sing them to sleep every night, but when Gus had turned ten, he had declared that he was too old for it and she had stopped. Now, somehow, it seemed fitting and comforting, and she had summoned up a few of their favorite old songs and finished with the lullaby her own mother had sung to her, “All Through the Night.”

  When they were fast asleep, she went to her own bedroom and clicked on her computer and for the hundredth time she watched the brief clip that had become the single most searched-for video in the history of the Internet. No one apparently knew who had filmed it or how it had first been posted, but it had become a worldwide sensation. She could see her husband’s agonized face clearly as he rose to his knees and then to his feet and made the sweeping gesture with his arm, inviting the world to follow him. And then he’d turned toward the inferno and taken a last brave step toward the flames as the video cut out.

  Sharon cried, as she had each time she’d watched it before that. She cried for his pain and her loneliness. She cried because he’d wanted to stop and she had made him go on, and it had cost him his life and their future. Most of all she cried for her children, who would grow up with memories of a martyr but without a father.

  But Sharon also understood that in his death, Green Man had achieved his purpose. His final letter about the grave dangers that fracking posed to the earth and especially the atmosphere had been received and published by the Washington Post and had generated a national outcry, particularly among the young. The idea of oil and gas as “safe and necessary” bridge fuels was being debated from high school clubs to the floor of the Senate. Giant companies that fracked for hundreds of billions of dollars were suddenly defending their releases of methane and other dangerous gases and facing tough questions that even the sharpest lobbyists and the most creative scientific apologists couldn’t seem to answer satisfactorily.

  Perhaps even more important, Green Man’s death and martyrdom had won him a larger-than-life status among the young who would decide the next election and the fate of the country going forward. He had become ubiquitous—his words and image were everywhere—in books, on the sides of buses, on T-shirts on college campuses. And it was no longer the image an artist had dreamed up. His real identity was known. Green Man had been Paul Sayers, and Green Man had become Mitch Farley. He had had two children and raised them in a small Michigan town, and the whole world knew that he had been married to a woman named Sharon. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security knew it also, and she would never feel completely safe again, but at the same time it made her proud.

  She dried her tears, walked to
a window, and watched the moonlight forge the links of a golden chain across the lake. She’d have to tell the kids. Gus suspected a lot. They were lonely and wanted to meet other kids and to plug into the Internet. They had to understand why the family had to keep to themselves, at least for a few years, and why they would be homeschooled and spend so much time on this farm. They needed to know why their appearances would start to be subtly changed.

  It was ironic that the whole world knew the truth except for them. But it was better that they should hear it from her. She would tell them the next morning, when they all ate breakfast together on the porch overlooking the lake. There would be tears and anger, but there would also be love and pride and a family secret that would become the glue of their special bond for decades to come, and it was the stuff of legend.

  She would have to find the strength to show them his video—seeing was believing, and the truth was always the best. Green Man had recorded last statements to them that had somehow also made it out. They needed to hear what he said to them—how much he had loved them. He had not recorded a final statement to her. He had said it to her himself, after the last time they made love, in their house in Michigan in the bed that he had carved himself from a great oak.

  Sharon trembled because she missed him so very much. It would always be like this. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe time heals all wounds and she would find peace and one day even someone else to love the way she had loved him. But she couldn’t believe that. These were the hardest hours. She pressed her cheek up against the cold glass of the sliding door. Winter was still a long way off, but the night had bite.

  She watched the moonlight on the lake and imagined him here, his strong arms around her. “We made it, Shar,” he whispered. “We turned the world, and now we have each other for forty years.” He was standing behind her so that she couldn’t see him, but she knew he was right there. She could feel his solid presence, his breaths on her hair, the heat from his body. His lips touched her neck and his hands were loosening her robe, and then he was whispering that he loved her while his hands turned her to face him.

  She turned slowly but saw only darkness. She pivoted quickly away from that yawning emptiness, back to the lake, and slid the porch door open. Three long steps took her to the edge, and she dived off the deck. She swam almost straight down to the bottom, where it was freezing and pitch dark, and she hid from the whole world at the bottom of that Canadian lake. But the moon wouldn’t let her hide for too long; it spotted her and reached out, and she reluctantly followed the beckoning light back up to the surface. She swam home along its golden chain, and dried herself off, and put on her robe. And then she went into her kids’ bedroom and lay down next to Kim, who stirred but didn’t wake. And Sharon slept with her children.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Julie watched, a bit stunned. She had seen her mother speak at meetings before, and she knew the power Ellen could exert over an audience. But as the head of the Green Center, her mother had always been a polite, responsible, and cautionary presence, a brake on the more radical activists she worked with. This morning Ellen had left them all behind—even Richard was gaping at her—and she had done it without raising her voice or calling for any specific acts of destruction or violence. But there could be no doubt that she was striking a match and holding it to tinder with every bold, profane, and incendiary sentence.

  “What I’m saying is that we as an organization can no longer afford not to embrace Green Man and everything he stood for,” Ellen told the forty employees in the Green Center’s conference room. “But it goes further than that. I’m also saying that we need to do anything and everything to carry his activist vision and agenda forward. And yes, if necessary, that means we need to fight.”

  Her co-workers were watching her, but not slumped into their usual window seats, nor stretched out on beanbag chairs sipping kombucha. They were sitting almost rigidly, nearly at attention, as if their director’s unexpected call to action had militarized this collection of hippies and dreamers into what could become the forward brigade of an undisciplined but potent army.

  Lou got a little unsteadily to his feet and smiled at her. “While I agree with a lot of what Green Man wrote and also with most of what you’re now saying, Ellen, we simply can’t condone violence. That’s never been you, and that’s also never been us.”

  “Lou, it’s not about violence,” Ellen told him. “It goes way beyond violence. But if action is called for, we can’t shy away. We need to lead and make tough choices. That’s me now, and that’s got to be us now, or we’ll be left behind and meaningless.”

  Listening, Julie was thrilled and a bit shocked to hear her mother repudiate her former caution and pacifism and stake out a new position that was even more radical than Julie’s own. And Ellen did it so easily and forcefully that Julie realized this was in fact who her mother really was, and she wasn’t transforming but actually revealing her true self. This was the young woman who had fired up rallies in San Francisco twenty years ago and gone on secret and destructive night missions with her lover and confidant.

  “Don’t you understand?” Ellen asked Lou and all of them. “Green Man’s death and the publicity it’s generated is a game changer. Our struggle has now entered a critical phase. We’re in a pitched battle to save the planet, and it’s not a distance race anymore—it’s a sprint. Sprinters can’t worry about strategy—they just have to run as fast as they fucking can for ten seconds.” Her eyes found Julie’s, and she held her daughter’s gaze as she said, “We have to throw out the rule book and not be bound by what we’ve said or done before. It’s time to forcefully lead, or we’ll lose the support of the people we need most—the next generation. They have the most to lose, and we put them in this position, so we’d better not try to stall them or bullshit them.” Julie looked back at her mother and dipped her head slightly in proud acknowledgment of Ellen’s new bluntness and passion.

  Richard stood and said, “Ellen, it’s all very well to change your tune and talk about how we now need to embrace Green Man, but the fact is, you really embraced him—”

  “That’s a part of me that I’m not going to conceal anymore,” Ellen said, cutting him off. “The whole world knows now that I was his partner twenty years ago. That’s a giant plus for us, and I intend to use that legacy to lead. We need to put his face on our main screen, and I have photographs of Paul that no one else has seen. We need to use his words as part of the Green Center’s dynamic message going forward, and I know what Paul said better than anyone. He will live through me, and he will speak through us, and together we’ll lead the way forward.”

  “That makes sense for you,” Richard said. “You’ll become a cult hero and a national figure as you plug into his legend. Given the degree of legal jeopardy you’re in right now, it’s probably a very smart strategy for you, but not for us. We do a lot of critical work here, especially right now, and we won’t be able to continue it if our center is closed and we’re all locked up. We’re in a very unique and dangerous situation here. . . .”

  Ellen smiled at him. “Richard, you’ve become so politically cautious I barely recognize you.”

  “Now, that’s not fair,” he said angrily. “I care about the work we’re doing; that needs to be finished.”

  Josie chimed in: “Ellen, you hired most of us, and you founded and built this organization and we’re grateful, but you’re now under a bit of a cloud. . . .”

  “I’m not under a cloud,” Ellen told them. “I’m under investigation by several different governmental agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. If you can’t handle having a director who may be arrested at any second, then either you have to leave or I have to leave, because that’s where we are now and it’s a strength, not a weakness, and I’m not going to back down one inch. Richard’s absolutely right: if they arrest me, they’ll make me a living martyr and I don’t think they’re quite dumb enough t
o do that. If they bust up our organization, it’ll spawn a hundred like us and trumpet our message to the world. Let’s take them on boldly, and if you don’t want me to lead that way, I’ll resign and build another organization that does.”

  Julie got up and quietly left the conference room. She hated to watch her mother under attack as the organizational politics played out. She was pretty sure Ellen would win, but in a way, she didn’t really care. It was time for the truth, and her mother was telling the truth.

  Julie walked upstairs to her mom’s office and sat looking at the photos on the wall. Many of them were pictures of her growing up, but there was a new one, right above the desk. It was a photo of Ellen and Paul Sayers, looking impossibly young in jeans, T-shirts, and boots. They were arm in arm on the deck of a small boat with cliffs in the background, and they looked happy and at peace together.

  Julie studied the photo intently. Her mother was young and beautiful, and the two of them were clearly very much in love. Julie switched on her mom’s computer and found Green Man’s final message. She had listened to it many times before, but in this office, beneath the photo of the happy young couple on the boat, Green Man’s words played with a new resonance.

  He asked for forgiveness for the innocent people he’d killed. He told his followers that if they were hearing this message, it meant that he was gone. His struggle was now their struggle, and he was sure they would win it. One day soon they would live on a sustainable earth that had been saved. Near the end of his message, he described that healing future world a little bit for them, and Julie drank in his welcome words of hope.

  Green Man ended by asking the world’s forbearance as he said a few words of very personal goodbye to his own children, who were young and didn’t yet understand why their father had vanished. His voice became intimate and taut with emotion. He said he was sorry he wouldn’t be there for them, to watch them grow up. He knew his absence would cause them great pain. But he said that he loved them dearly, and when they were older and could grasp the totality of the dire situation, he asked for their forgiveness or at least their understanding.