Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “Are you Winnifred Lee-Smith? Did you sign those orders to cancel all our contracts? Think you can just toy with our lives, you spic bitch?” The woman happened to be Latino, probably a Mexican, thought Winnie. She was also shaking all over as the big man lifted her by the front of her one-piece suit dress. When he shook her, spitting in her face, the seams ripped and she crumpled to the ground. That darted hip line might have been armor in the meeting room but it was basically paper now.

  “Easy, Shaun,” said Rifle, apparently using Shotgun’s name.

  Meanwhile, Winnie was marveling at what had just happened. Either Joshua was a better man than Winnie gave him credit for, or he hadn’t wanted these terrorists to have their way, or Shotgun had simply mistaken which table Joshua had pointed at. In any case, Winnie saw her chance, and she lunged for the door just when the other woman hit the floor and everyone was distracted. She hadn’t become senior executive of Human Resources by sitting on her butt and doing nothing.

  Winnie made it halfway out the door before she felt her bustle catch, and the back of her skirt threaten to rip. Was somebody hanging on to it? Either way the tug was enough to throw her off balance, and she crumpled against the plate glass of the door, half in and half out. She could see the dead body of the man who had been caught in the first volley, slumped and staining the carpet. When she turned, she saw six inches of wood stuck in the knot of her bustle, pinning her to the wood of the door; a crossbow quarrel, fired with pinpoint accuracy, and it had just missed the skin of her backside by a hair.

  “Winnifred Lee-Smith. At last,” said Crossbow, grinning.

  They let most of the hostages go one by one, and in that interval the terrorists slipped out the back door and into the offices of Ubique. They brought Winnie with them, hobbled and with her wrists bound in baling wire. The stuff didn’t even need to be tied. If Winnie moved her wrists, it bit into her skin and threatened to cut her open.

  “Stick to the schedule,” said Rifle to the hostages as the three terrorists dragged Winnie out the same corridor she wanted to flee out of. She had clamped a bundle of clockwork and scary glass tubes to the front door; a bomb. “One by one, every ten minutes. The door will ring an alarm, and in that window one person can leave. If you all try to leave, boom. If you miss the window, boom. Ciao!” Then she had locked the back door behind them. They had all seen what happened to Logan.

  As they dragged her through the deserted Ubique office, Winnie had time to think that perhaps she deserved everything that was happening. According to Ubique, she had done her job impeccably, and was rewarded. She had consistently sent through every file, managed every contract. She’d found a reliable contractor to handle subcontractors to go into the city and massacre the inhabitants for her client’s hopper of corpses. What happened to those people and what happened to their bodies were none of her concern. They were just pieces of paper on her immaculate clipboard to be read by her clockwork sliders and double-checked against different pieces of paper.

  Winnie muttered something, a lyric or two she had been listening to that afternoon. Maybe it was her trying to comfort herself, and it wasn’t intended for anybody else. But her captor heard it.

  “What?” said Shotgun, who was dragging her along. She stumbled, a little, and they paused.

  “Bee Oh Eee. B.O.E. The Banality of Evil,” said Winnie, shocked into the truth.

  “It’s music. The name is an acronym,” explained Rifle. “It’s like fubar.”

  “What in God’s name does that mean?” answered Winnie.

  “You don’t want to know,” said Crossbow.

  “Shut your mouth!” said Shotgun. He cuffed Winnie hard enough to draw blood from one lip. Winnie turned back to see Shotgun breathing heavily. The violence was doing something for him. Hitting a small, incapacitated woman was arousing for this enormous man. Winnie swallowed and tried to overcome her horror. Lust was something she knew, and something she could use.

  “What are you going to do to me?” asked Winnie. She tried to squeak a little, and she made sure her legs were splayed at an attractive angle. Before Shotgun could react, Crossbow hurried them along.

  “Come along now,” said Crossbow. “She’ll get her just punishment.”

  To Winnie’s surprise they didn’t go out to the vehicle steam lot, or the rail yard to escape on a train. Instead they dragged her half-stumbling along the same floor. Winnie recognized Gorvinsky’s neat handwriting on the bulletins and doorjambs. They were going on the factory floor, a span of high rafters, large bull-like machinery and vast copper tanks. In the far corner of the room, tracks in the ceiling led out to the hoppers in the train yard. One of the heavy containers stood just under it, parked with its load of fresh material. Beside it were racks of magnets holding up shining cleavers and curved boning knives. Winnie didn’t know what half the things here did, but the work floor hadn’t scared her as much as the other employees. The stockholders and supervisors never saw it at all.

  Industrial chic, they might call it, if they saw.

  Winnie hadn’t really looked at her captors properly, but now they stopped in the middle of the dark and deserted floor she could see Rifle was carrying her weapon over her shoulder and a large case in her other hand. The case was perhaps half the size of a steamer trunk, lined with durable black panels and shiny chrome corners. Rifle set her gun atop a metallic green pod and set the case on the floor.

  “Take off your clothes,” said Crossbow.

  “Why?!” Winnie’s exclamation came unwisely, but nobody rebuked her for it. Shotgun was busy blocking up the exits, with Crossbow covering him. There was nobody to leverage this situation with, no power play she could do.

  Meanwhile Rifle had opened up the case, and inside there was a neatly sorted piece of machinery that looked like a figure eight someone had tacked to a miniature calliope. There was a nook in the corner of the case that held a very recognizable steam converter, for tapping the building’s pressure. But the machine itself was a mystery until Rifle propped it up out of the case, setting three long legs into the case’s corners to stabilize it. She fitted a glass disc to one side, turning it to adjust. Then the purpose of the tangle of machinery became clear; it was a picture machine, a gramophone for the eyes. They were going to record her humiliations for posterity.

  “Take off your clothes, please,” said Crossbow.

  “He won’t say it again, you swine,” said Rifle. She gestured at the butchering equipment.

  “Come on! You’re going to make a pornograph? Here?” said Winnie.

  With a twang, a crossbow quarrel stuck fast at her feet, making her jump. Winnie immediately began to undo the clasps at her skirt, hidden under the bustle, crying “All right! All right!”

  As she felt Crossbow’s indifferent gaze on her, her eyes start to tear, but she fought it down. It was strange, really. Taking off her clothes in a room full of armed terrorists felt exactly like entertaining the succession of fat, wrinkly superiors she had had over the years. And just like that, the clothes came off a little easier.

  America hadn’t yet come to the progressive fashions of Europe, but thankfully Winnie’s outfit was sufficiently Shipster Crap to make it easy to shimmy out of. The air felt frozen as her blouse came off, and then her chest expanded as the modish corset lifted off her small breasts. Her shape immediately lost its hourglass figure. That more than anything made her feel stripped of her armor. Finally she stepped out of her leggings, and stood there shivering, hoping either Shotgun had a fetish for Orientals or Rifle was a student of Lesbos. Maybe if she entertained their sick humiliations she might just get out of this alive, but the air smelled rank and sour, and like rain before a disappointment that smell seemed a terrible portent.

  “Now climb those steps,” said Crossbow.

  Winnie turned to look where he was gesturing at the same time that Rifle found the ceiling arclights switch. White light filled the room, and momentarily the glare blinded her. She stood there, naked, covering herself and
squinting. Then the tiles came back into focus around the edges of her eyes and she saw the cast iron steps with their wheels underneath, and where it had been parked as the workmen evacuated the factory floor. Something inside Winnie still derided the slowdown; how would they meet the client’s arrival now? Damn terrorists.

  The top step of the ladder had been rolled up to the lip of the enormous tub, sat on one wall of the room like a fat, hungry frog. Two round glass portholes showed the clean porcelain interior of the tub, and some sort of dark machinery. Winnie put one foot on the bottom step and jerked back—it was cold! But at the gesturing of the terrorists, she walked all the way to the top. Winnie had no idea what the machine was for, but when she looked down at the slowly rotating chrome of gnashing blades as they spun up with an ominous rumble—she did.

  They had put her on the edge of an enormous meat grinder.

  “That’s good, stop there,” said Crossbow. “I apologize, by the way, for the nudity—”

  “To this bitch?” cried Rifle.

  “—and the picture machine. We were under the impression you were a man… but this does not change our plan, unfortunately. You did a terrible wrong and hopefully we will correct that now.”

  “Why don’t you just kill me, then?” said Winnie. She couldn’t stop watching her toes, at how close they were to the shuddering edge of the step.

  “Because then you would be a martyr,” said Crossbow, as if that was common knowledge. “No, we want you to tell everybody what you’ve been doing as you look at these horrible instruments in the eye. Then Ubique will know we mean business.”

  “Yeah. As much as I’d like to give you a good thrashing, Jack says we’re not to touch you,” complained Shotgun.

  “You’re going to use me to hit Ubique in the wallet,” said Winnie, horrified. “But… but my life might as well be over. They’re going to blacklist me from every Ubique office!” Everything she had worked for… everything she had sacrificed for… all those late nights in her superiors’ offices… Winnie could feel it all crumbling away from her like wet sand.

  “Then find something else to do,” said Rifle as she centered the glass eye of the picture machine on the grinder, an air of total indifference about her.

  “Ubique is everywhere! You’re going to turn me into a Typhoid Mary… I’ll never work again!”

  “Join the party,” said Shotgun, and leered.

  “Everyone is going to see what Ubique is up to,” finished Crossbow.

  Winnie crumpled, hanging on for dear life as the terrorists set up the picture equipment. There was a gramophone attachment to write sound on the thin black tape Rifle wound through the machine, and they spent some time wondering if the grinder was too loud. Crossbow seemed to have a prepared speech he wanted to say, and he kept gesturing with a small notebook as he debated his point. As Rifle tinkered and they bickered slightly, Winnie felt her options dwindling fast. Could she outrun their weapons? No, clearly not. What about suicide? The grinder was still running. But she had a queer idea about what happened to all the product Ubique made for their special client, and she didn’t think her suffering would end at death.

  All of a sudden the weight of what she had been doing to get ahead, to beat out all the other rats in the race, settled on her shoulders like a sack of bricks. With a start a small epiphany dawned on Winnie, and she clutched her naked shoulders, trying to make herself smaller. She gibbered incoherently. The truth that struck Winnie’s tiny frame like one of the freight trains in the quieted yard outside was this: being held at gunpoint and humiliated wasn’t any different than sucking off a few powerful people to get ahead. The terrorists had the threat of bullets but the uppity-ups had been blackmailing her life just as much—or rather, her livelihood. Without the title of senior executive of Human Resources, what was she? Just another vagrant, liable to be picked up and brought back to feed this Human Tinning Machine churning under her.

  Winnie found herself standing at the edge of the steps, her hands at her sides, when she awoke, as if from a spell. The steel had rumbled beneath her, a mesmerizing rhythm, as if the grinder were an animal that could draw prey into its maw with song. In shock, she stepped back, and realized the terrorists had turned off the grinder, and it was slowing to a stop. The break in the rhythm had interrupted her suicidal walk off the edge. She clutched at the rail, staring down at the floor far below, and the clean blades inside the grinder. Had she really…? Was it so easy to give everything up?

  That was how the terrorists decided to show her, with her knees buckled and her private parts exposed. Rifle plugged the steam converter into a port in the floor, and the wheels of the picture machine began to roll. Crossbow began to speak, away from the shot and behind the machine. Winnie didn’t catch all of it, but she got the gist of it. Something about the rights of the mercenary, and the skill of the hunter. How theirs was a specialized discipline that went all the way back to the American Revolution and the militia there. How Ubique was destroying their lives by employing heartless machines instead of thinking people. The same kind of would-be revolutionary nonsense Winnie had been getting in her mail tube for weeks, but now it was of paramount importance—or it would be, if she weren’t feeling gutted, and miles away.

  Winnie was busy gathering the pieces of herself, so when the terrorists asked her if Ubique had hired them to hunt down the blacks and the Hispanics like animals, she said, “Yes.”

  When they asked her if they were brought to this killing floor, she said, “Yes. Sometimes still twitching. The workmen have to put those down.” Rifle panned round to show one of the hoppers in the room. She took the machine off its stand, with its thick black umbilical for the steam, and went to show what was inside.

  When they asked her what happened to the bodies, Winnie said, “We put them through this big grinder. Then Gorvinsky and the others give us the full barrels. If they check out on the purity scope a long white train comes to pick them up. It only comes at midnight… it’s a scary monster and it goes from station to station when everybody’s asleep. They think everything is hunky dory!”

  “She’s gone mad,” said Rifle.

  “This is propaganda gold,” said Crossbow, who seemed to be less and less an intimidating killer for hire and more like that one fellow from college who joined all the philosophy groups. But as he admired his own handiwork, the picture was interrupted by a twist—the room filling with shrapnel, a din like a million meat grinders and the smell of burning pitch. Then a bright light filled the room from the door to the loading dock, where a dozen sharp metal stakes were ripping their way inside.

  Winnie thought the terrorists might have gotten their own deaths on tape. It sounded as if glass spiders were tearing through the place, their fragile skin crackling with gunfire. Huge spiders, spiders from Mars. Hah. That was a good one. Winnie laughed at her funny joke. She supposed she was being a voyeur of utter destruction. Winnie collapsed, tickled half to death by the absurdity of it all, and somehow managed not to see how the work floor became painted with red.

  Later, when the rescue team from the local fire brigade found her cantilevered over the carnage by the stepladder, she was still gibbering melodically to herself. The lead rescuer, a handsome fireman, draped his coat over her shoulders and slapped her awake.

  She ended up dating him later, during the endless wishful beginnings of looking for a job. The fireman was named Robert Jones Colton, and he had a fine head of punk pink hair. It wasn’t long before she found a spot as a barista, and not long after that when she decided to stay at Colton’s after theatre and coffee. Not the picture house—she had immediately said no, and Colton had been adorably apologetic. In a post-coitus sharing of thoughts, Winnie discovered the first thing she had said when they finally woke her from her stupor.

  “Oh, God, look at the work floor… How will I ever make the morning delivery now?”

  7

  Planning A Trip Is Hard

  As Vanessa Hargreaves clung to a ladder in a burle
sque in the seedier part of New York, Arturo C. Adler was negotiating with the remaining members of M.A.D. back across the pond. In a pub perhaps a fifth less shady than Stan Burgess’ pleasure palace, Arturo cringed, pulling his scalloped sleeves away from mildew and the pervasive smell of cabbage oozing from the walls. If he left, it would be the first time he quit a lock-in, which was quite unthinkable.

  “I know the blasted box is dangerous, Arturo,” the old man in the boiler suit before him was saying. “And that’s why we’re not getting caught up in this.”

  Arturo supposed Cid Tanner had a sordid history with piracy, but as Arturo was in the confidence of the matriarch of the state, albeit indirectly, he felt entitled to demand a little bending of the law. Not to mention, Arturo hadn’t taken rules very seriously since the age of five, when he discovered the rule makers kept treacle tarts in the pantry all to themselves.

  “All I want,” Arturo appealed once more, putting in every ounce of nonchalance he had in his body, “is for you to help your boss, Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves—”

  “—die in a horrible, gruesome way. No, I’m not showing you how to open the damn box.”

  “D’accord! Not opening the damn box!”

  “Cezette, stop cursing. You are a civilized lady,” Tanner reprimanded.

  “But you do, Uncle Cid!” Cezette replied.

  “I am an old fart. I am allowed to do things civilized ladies are not. At least curse in French or something; make an effort to humor me.”

  “I do not know any French curses, Uncle.”

  Cezette Louissaint calmly sipped her herbal lemonade. A casual observer might think she was completely ignoring the young chavs in the booths, but Arturo knew a fellow artiste when he saw one. She had full mastery over them. Even her casual pose was carefully crafted to be heart-stoppingly beautiful, which kept all but the bravest away. Hargreaves had taught her well. Or, she had gone through so much that young men were a piece of cake. Arturo could not help but feel it was the latter, sad though the thought was. She was far too young to start thinking about these things, and thin, from a mishandled childhood. Whatever height she ought have been was indeterminate. Arturo guessed she was somewhere in the midst of her flowering. At fourteen or fifteen, Cezette already possessed the fine sculpted cheekbones to make a great beauty at twenty.