by Ted Krever
Eight
There are kids squirreling around the shed, maybe eight, nine years old. They might be stealing something—that would be okay. But they might not. They hide bomb material in sheds like that sometimes—they could be using the kids to get it or set the fuses. They use them like that sometimes too. We met a guy who was stationed in Najaf who said that happened to his outfit last week. Maybe there’s another reason—maybe they’re just playing—but we don’t know. And what you don’t know can hurt you. So our fingers are on triggers, everybody’s fingers, waiting, tense, clenched twitching. Eventually Marshall’s finger twitches and we have screaming kids with a bullet through the jaw or a broken collarbone or something. Maybe there was a reason. Maybe there wasn’t.
We’re convoying. We’re always convoying. Low stretches of stores and houses, business signs in Arabic, French and English, laundry hanging from windows and long corridors of smooth wide highway—Saddam built great roads, gotta give him that. We pass a market and everybody in the stand waves. We wave back—this is the first couple weeks, where people are still waving. I hear a noise and look the other way for just a second—when I look back, the woman behind the stand is leveling a Kalishnikov at us. The first time it was a woman, we hesitated. Hendricks took a round in the neck that time, just above the armor. Now, nobody hesitates—she takes about twenty rounds in three seconds, the blood seeping into the sand as fast as it comes out of her and then her body seeping into the ground, swallowed up like quicksand or vanishing powder.
We drive as fast as we can go. Anything, just anything, could be a bomb—garbage cans, maildrops, cardboard boxes along the road. They trigger them with alarm clocks, cell phones, garage door openers, VCR remotes. Clever shit people here, dammit. The first time we take a direct hit, we start cursing a blue streak and laughing, laughing from relief. Shit, that was big. Good baby, good baby, this Hummer is good. What nobody says but everybody thinks is We made it. But sometimes, it isn’t bombs—it’s just bullets, stray bullets, aimed bullets, who knows? This time, the big diesel rig in front of us takes five bullets in the engine and loses power and we leave him behind with a Hummer to take on personnel. We keep moving—we’ve got three more trucks to get to destination. Watch that bottle there—move that fucking VW, make him move. It’s boring and endless; beyond all the rest, the tension can kill you.
And two minutes later, the horizon erupts, end to end—the earth jumps up and down like it’s a trampoline and the world ahead is billowing smoke. The KBR truck in front took an IED and there’s a hole the size of a house in the middle of the highway. So now we’ve got to stop, stop completely, try to establish a perimeter and bag everything—all the pieces, shards of bone and bits of flesh, any speck that might have once been part of a person. Is this something? Take it. Inspecting every sliver, every fiber on the ground, carefully, thoroughly, always aware we’re stopped, stopped dead, completely in the open. They’ll shoot us, shoot at us. That’s what they do. They do it when we’re hauling sixty around the perimeter so what are they going to do now that we’re hauling zero in the middle of town, on our knees picking up the pieces? They’ll be shooting and soon. Ignore it. Keep looking. Miss nothing. Take everything that’s human, every mote that might be, anything that might once have breathed. Don’t miss one…anything. Because there’s folks at home who don’t want to be watching TV one night and see part of their kid being waved around, beaten on, burned up one last little bit more by some raghead geek on a bridge. Don’t miss a speck.
And then I was awake—breathing hard in total darkness and, after flicking the light on, in an illuminated room that meant nothing to me, that could have been anywhere in the world—anywhere other than where I’d been a second earlier. And knowing that anywhere other than that was a better place to be.
The sheets looked almost new, unused, unwrinkled, like I’d spent the night paralyzed—but they were drenched as well. I pulled the shades open and cut my fingers on the vanes as they whipped upward. Dropping below were the cliffs, rock ledges and trees pointing toward town, the town where we’d been earlier last night, where life was.
It’s the master bedroom, is what came to me slowly, the world returning to me or me to it, whatever. Max gave me the master bedroom since he wasn’t a sleeper. A family bedroom—makeup and perfume bottles on the dresser, an analog and a digital clock atop one night table and a pile of romance novels on the other, several pairs of slippers in the corner by the closet, grandchildren photos, the progression of growing up, sweeping across the wall opposite—all the tokens of intimacy, of a long life of deep ties. It was strange, eerie, more alien to me than the landscape in my nightmares. I stared out the window again, at the tiered hillside, at the third ridge down, where Max had left the Subaru just a few yards off the road—“we don’t need anybody seeing a strange car in the driveway,” he’d said–just seeking landmarks, markers, boundaries. Nothing seemed familiar. It was the real world. I was an alien everywhere.
I banged my elbow on the way out of the room, stumbling into the dresser. Five steps later, I ran right into the crawlspace door. I was sure I’d closed it the night before—it was hanging open when we came in. Damn, that hurt! The whole place was out to attack me.
“L Corp was founded six years ago, right after September 11th,” Max said, looking up from the computer as I hobbled into the living room. “The restaurant last night has more real information on their site than L Corp does.”
“Maybe they’re just from the old school,” I offered.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “The most interesting part is the blurb on ‘security solutions’—it’s buried three pages deep in the ‘Products’ section. ‘Innovative security solutions that go far beyond intelligence gathering, threat scenarios and routine digital imaging. L Corp has a track record of identifying impending threats to both physical and information assets and responding before they can become active.’”
“Sounds impressive. What’s it mean?”
“It’s jargon for ‘We figure out what’s going to happen and stop it before it does.’”
“Mmm. Mindbenders would be good at that.”
“That occurred to me,” he said coolly. He stood up. “Do me a favor, would you? I’m getting a headache trying to find an address for the security headquarters. You think you can find it?”
“I’ll do better after breakfast.”
“There’s English muffins and eggs on the table—I just finished mine.” He arched an eyebrow again. “Eat quickly.”
“Why?”
“We’re being probed again and much closer than last night. I just sent them on a wild goose chase. So I think we have about two hours grace.”
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” I told him.
“Good. But I have something to do that’ll take fifteen, maybe twenty.”
“What?”
“Visiting L Corp headquarters.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want you to get me the address.”
“What if it’s a thousand miles from here?” I asked. This made no sense, though that no longer threw me in Max’s company. “How’re you going to get there in fifteen minutes?”
“You just get me the address—actually longitude and latitude would be better. Let me worry about getting there.”
“—and back.”
“And back,” he said, attempting to reassure me, which he wasn’t much good at.
He proceeded to the center of the room, sat cross-legged on the floor and began his Ommm thing again. I wandered into the kitchen, put together my muffin and eggs and started searching the web site. Nothing came easy—eventually, I drilled down below ‘Join Us’ to where five security jobs hid beneath ‘subcontractor tasking’. All five were based in Herndon, Virginia though I couldn’t find any company telephone listing there.
“All I can get you is the town,” I told him and he held a hand up for a moment, to shush me long enough for his coma to pass.
“I’ll make do,” he said. “Just write the coordinates on a piece of paper. I’ll be gone for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. My body will be here but I won’t. If the house burns down or the IRS shows up to confiscate the place, I’ll be dead weight unless you wake me. If you have to kick or punch me a bit, that’s okay—just make sure it’s necessary, okay?”
“Whoah,” I said. “Replay that one for me. The body’ll be here but you won’t?”
“It’s called remote viewing. I’ll be at L Corp, hovering and eavesdropping, just getting the lay of the land.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to float around without a body? Can they see you?”
“They’d have to know how and they’d have to be looking for me. They’re not the KGB,” he said roughly. “Contractors talk big but their own security stinks, generally. They get complacent. I don’t know if they have anything we want but Fine works there so it seems like the next move.”
“Without a body, can you see through walls? Read the files in the vault?” It was weird even asking the question but, following everything else I’d seen, this was just another step.
“If the VP has something interesting on his desk,” he said, “I can read the top page—as long as it’s not numbers. If I want to see more, I have to convince him to turn the page. Which, strangely enough, isn’t so easy when my body’s at a distance.”
“And I’ll be able to wake you up if there’s trouble? You’re sure?”
“I don’t see why not.” This didn’t sound real conclusive.
“Has anyone tried it? Lately?”
“You’ll be fine.”
“What if they probe again? While you’re away, are you still blocking me?”
“No, I can’t. I won’t be here. Just pretend you’re someplace you were last week or last month.” He glanced at the ceiling: I could see him trying to figure out how to explain this next thought. “Consciousness is time-specific,” he told me.
“In English, please.”
“One time the Americans had a mindbender agent locked in a dark room in Maryland. His job was to describe a site he’d never seen or heard of in California. The Agency was sending a team to the location, who also had never been there—his job was to read their minds and describe what they saw. As soon as he was given the task, he performed it, including a description of a specific routine the camp personnel performed for the team’s visit.”
“Wow,” I said, not sure what this had to do with blocking. Or time-specific consciousness. Or anything else, for that matter.
“Oh, that’s not the interesting part,” Max said. “What’s interesting is that the California team got held up by bad weather. They didn’t arrive until three hours after the agent finished describing their visit.”
“Huh?” I tried to wrap my head around this but ‘huh?’ was all I got.
“All time exists at once—Einstein predicted this. So the agent locked onto the people he was supposed to track and read their impressions of the site. It’s just that they hadn’t been there yet. And the things they saw—that he reported—hadn’t happened yet.” He laughed at the expression on my face. “Tauber could’ve told you all about this—they sent him back once to meet Jesus.” At this point, he wisely gave up trying to explain. “Okay, here’s what you need to know: if you put yourself in any other place or time—back with that girl in the car last night, or in Iraq again; something so vivid you’re not just remembering but really there, these guys’ll never be able to read you, probe you, anything. They’re looking for someone who’s here, now. And you won’t be.” He stared at me for a while, waiting.
“I’ll never figure out how to do that,” I said finally.
“But you already have, Gregor,” he laughed. “That’s how you spent half your time in Florida.” I hated being called Gregor. He settled into his crouch again, humming to stir the rafters.
There were still eggs left in the kitchen. I threw another muffin in the toaster and wandered around. I wanted cereal. There were Corn Flakes in the cupboard but no milk in the fridge. We had a guy at Dave’s who ate cereal with orange juice, but he wasn’t someone I wanted to be like. We had guys who blinked uncontrollably or freaked out at loud noises or picked their skin raw. If sanity was a matter of degree, eggs and a muffin were better than cereal and orange juice, as far as I was concerned.
That’s what I was thinking when I looked out the window and saw the vans coming hard up the driveway.
“Max! Come on, Max! Time to wake up Max! Now! Now! Max, no time for sleeping. Back to the world now! Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit!!!” He was in full trance mode, of course. I pummeled his shoulders and kicked him in the back and the butt and anyplace else I could kick him without breaking anything but he wasn’t stirring. Pulling and shaking—same result. The vans were screeching to a halt now and I could hear footsteps all around the house. I left him long enough to push a kitchen cabinet up against that door—happily, it was just a few inches. I saw dark-blue jumpsuits swarming outside the windows. Happily, the windows were where the house overhung the cliff so they couldn’t reach them to get in--yet. The front of the house—the part that faced the horse runs—had a hundred little cubby-hole windows but no big plate glass you could shatter and walk through—apparently, the owners liked their privacy. But this didn’t buy me much time—they were already smashing against the door and it was making buckling noises. I had a choice: surrender out front or dive over the cliff—suddenly this didn’t seem like such a great hideout.
And then I heard a commanding voice—deep, foreign accent, powerful, someone used to being listened to—bellowing “You said he was here! Where?”
“He was here! We matched his waveform from Raleigh—100%!”
A third voice: “The other one’s here.”
“Who cares? I want Renn! Open this door, damn you!”
And then, somehow, I knew what to do. I grabbed Max under the arms and dragged him across the floor—he was like lead, the son-of-a-bitch—to the crawlspace. I shoved his body inside and checked the door twice to make sure it closed. Then I ran like a maniac to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest carving knife I could find and ducked onto the balcony.
It was a sheer drop directly below but there were trees growing from the next ledge, about six or eight feet down—something like that, I’m no good at estimating. Too far to jump, I knew that. I was getting vertigo just peeking over the edge. I mounted the table on the balcony and scrambled up onto the awning, climbing toward the top. It was a rickety old green canvas thing that barely held my weight—I could hear the aluminum arms creaking under me as I went. At the top, the awning was tied to the roof, thick rope looped through metal eyes punched into the canvas. The metal arms below ended with four screws set into wood blocks—old moldy wood, cracked and covered with flecks of old paint.
As I reached the top of the awning, I heard the crash of the front door splintering open and men kicking their way into the house. I had seconds left. I drove the knife down hard, hacking at the rope in two places, hoping I’d cut through both at roughly the same time. The cable was old and brittle—the strands flew apart with every swing of the knife. The awning sagged immediately, slumping down and forward over the edge of the balcony. I grabbed hunks of canvas and held on for all I was worth. Then I stretched my legs out and pushed off hard from the wall.
I failed science in school. Several times. I was good with words because they could be manipulated, played with—I could make them do what I wanted. Facts, natural law—those things don’t bend to the will quite so easily.
I’d visualized the awning ripping loose from the wall, catching the wind like a parachute and cushioning my fall to the treetops below, a relatively soft landing leaving me a head start running from the blue-jumpsuit crowd.
Of course, nothing remotely like that happened. I pushed hard enough to split the final strands of rope and carry the awning over the edge. One end did indeed rip out of the wood mounting. But the other held and the whole s
hrieking assembly dropped down in an arc, skittering sideways across the rock face, scraping loud as a factory, until the bottom end hit the first tree it found and stopped dead. The impact jarred me loose instantly, ripped my hands free and I fell. I had enough time in midair, the world gone slow-motion, to understand what an idiot I was even trying something this ridiculous and to blame the movies that had convinced me I had any chance of success.
And then I hit hard and the wind went completely out of me.
I’m not sure how long it was before I could think again. It couldn’t have been very long but I drifted back to consciousness, fading in as from a dream or some potent anesthesia, to treetops swaying in the updraft and the sound of voices—not words but sound, a flat kind of music, John Cage wind chimes, which must have been what Cage had in mind in the first place.
As I came to and checked above me, I realized I’d succeeded—at least partly. My hasty plan was both to get away and, crucially, to draw them after me. When I’d heard the commanding voice outside calling ‘Where is he!’ I’d realized that, as long as Max was in his coma, they couldn’t read him at all. Somehow they’d broken through his blocking, because they’d found us. But, while he was out-of-body traveling, he was in a different place, like he’d said—so he’d disappeared off their radar. Above me now, I saw ropes dropping over the side of the balcony and climbers starting to lower themselves over the edge, so the second part of my plan was succeeding.
The other part, I realized, might be a bit more complicated.
If I’d managed my soft landing in the trees, my feverish plan was to climb down and hustle over to the car, two ledges below. If I could lure the bad guys after me, Max could come to undisturbed in the crawlspace, reverse time and space and send them all packing to some other dimension for rest and recreation. Yeah, it sounds stupid now but this hope was no more outrageous than several things he’d already done and, under the circumstances, I clung to it like a raft in a hurricane.
What was—painfully—clear, though, was that the hardest part of this plan would be getting out of the tree, or maybe even just sitting up and trying to move. I was taking inventory of my body; there were parts that hurt like hell and parts I couldn’t feel at all; my suspicion was that the parts that hurt were the good ones.
I managed to roll over, just enough to take a look around—and nearly fell out of the cradle of branches I’d landed in. I managed to grab on and roll back carefully, discovering a whole new group of body parts that hurt like hell. My right ankle didn’t feel good and my cheek was all cut up from falling through pine needles—there’s a reason they call them needles—at about 700 miles an hour. It was encouraging in a sick sort of way—if they weren’t numb, they probably weren’t broken. I wasn’t a doctor, so my figuring didn’t count for much but at least I could be optimistic as long as I was in pain.
The branches sagged under me way out over the edge of the cliff—I had really misjudged the direction of my fall. It was a long drop below, acres of rock leading to the inevitable Wile E. Coyote river at the base of the cliff. If I was getting out of here—and I’d better get out before sag turned to collapse—the only way was to climb down the branch, slide downhill to the next shelf and beat the climbers to our car.
Oh yeah—and be somewhere else at the same time so they couldn’t read my mind.
The web of branches dipped with every move and the climbers were halfway to me. It’s amazing how much being in the crosshairs can motivate you. I told myself I didn’t care how much I hurt, took a deep breath and pushed down the branch, arching my back so as not to take all of them full in the crotch. With multiple contusions and the wind knocked out of me, I made it to the trunk in eight seconds, with the cradle of branches creaking and cracking but holding. I put one foot onto the branch below—the branch held and, amazingly, so did the ankle. I rolled over and carefully put the right one down—it burned like a stove but held too. After that, it was a scramble for the bottom. Needles pricked, branches stabbed, I wrenched my knees twice and my back. But I made it to the ground.
Touching down and digging my toes in, I nearly swooned from the pain shooting up my legs but I didn’t stop moving. I heard them shouting behind me, “There he is! There!” and I wondered how they could not know where I was—couldn’t they read me in the tree? I hadn’t been trying to block them.
And then I realized I had. All the time I was climbing down, I was already at the bottom. I’d seen myself all the way standing at the foot of the tree, worrying about my ankles, about getting away. Max said shift into the future and I’d done it. Now I ran towards the car, taking no precautions. If they could see me, let them follow, at least for the moment.
Just ahead, a bundle of trees, thick and tightly-placed, thrust up over the ridge, covering the view from above. When I reached that spot, I’d be out of their sight. If I could block them when I got there, putting my mind back in the rear seat of the car with Tess—she seemed plenty vivid at the moment—I could slide down between the trees to the next ledge and hopefully make it to the car before they caught up with me. I’d let them read me once I got close to the car. If I got away with it, they’d end up in a blue frenzy, following me away from the house.
I reached the tree cover and looked over the lip of the ridge at a bed of leaves and grass, moss and mountain flowers. I looked back—no one in sight—and launched myself over the edge.
Oh, this was easy—a slick incline with only a few bumps, easy on the butt and the back going down. I was going to make it—if they just missed this one move, it should be enough to give me a clear shot all the way to the car.
I felt smug for about half a second. Then I saw the man standing watching me from the ridge below—a man like none I’d ever seen before, a man I was sure hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Tall and near-anorexic, with skin like a hundred-year-old saddle and white hair to his waist, he stood wrapped in some parchment-like garment from shoulders to feet. His eyes said: Not interested. In Anything. As I approached, he lifted his arm in my direction and sparks flickered off the end of his fingers. Ohhh that couldn’t be good. I kicked at the dirt and moss in front of me, trying to stop or change direction—why I thought that would do any good, I don’t know. All it did was kick a load of dirt in his face, which turned out to be a great strategy. He twitched at the dust cloud and I twisted around, not a whole lot but just enough—the lightning bolt from his finger sizzled by my ankle and slammed into the ground right beside me. The mossy earth singed smoking hot as I went by. I hit the ledge, stood and ran.
I felt no pain now. There was no sense trying to block anything, what with his footsteps right behind me, always sounding the same distance away even though I was running and he was walking. I could hear more footsteps behind and above, some of the blueshirts having reached the shelf above and others scrambling downhill behind them. Twice, I thought about jumping to the next shelf down but, each time, a lightning bolt smashed into the edge of the path and set it burning. He’s trying to run me out of energy, I thought, run me till I can’t run anymore. It wasn’t a bad plan, except for the car being just ahead. Unless he hit me with a bolt head-on, which he didn’t seem to want to do, I was going to get there first.
I dove into the driver’s seat and reached under the dash for the wires—not that I knew any better how to hotwire a car today than yesterday but how many wires could there be? And then I heard that deep commanding foreign-accented voice echoing from the back seat. “Wouldn’t it be easier to use the key?” it said and a hand appeared, holding out the key for me. Except I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t move, not at all, not any part of me.
The man with the commanding voice—not real tall, middle-aged but muscular, piercing eyes and a goatee—opened the back door and came around to the passenger seat. He looked me over searchingly. “You murdered him, didn’t you? Renn—you cut him to pieces and threw him off the cliff.”
What was he talking about? Had someone else done it? Found him in
the crawlspace and dismembered him? And now they were going to blame it on me?
And then the man in the passenger seat smiled and I saw in his eyes that I had just told him where Max was.
~~~~