Maker Messiah

by Ed Miracle

  Last night, the news had featured two Indonesian policemen beating a man with long-handled canes, while a third dragged the guy’s wife from their plywood hovel and machine-gunned their Powerpod. Worse scenes followed, from Russia, China, and the Middle East. Tonight, American mayhem was on display. Thirteen killed in Chicago food riots. A Powerpod dealer lynched by West Virginia vigilantes. A civilian and a Federal Agent shot dead during a Maker enforcement operation in Arizona.

  “My God,” Nick said. “Turn it off.” He angled toward the bedroom.

  Not in my country, dammit. Not here.

  He’d seen killings, nasty ones in Bosnia, but never American-on-American, never rank sectarian murder on U.S. soil. These he could not abide. Jack Washburn could have prevented this if he’d acted sooner.

  Yvonne was knitting, not watching.

  He returned and switched channels to a political site where multiple “speedometers” clocked the winds of opinion blowing through the Internet. America’s political wings, left, right, and weird, were lobbing invectives at each other. Conservatives blamed liberals, and vice versa, while a pair of commentators traded fatuous remarks about the chirons crawling beneath each meter. A new one in the corner, weak at seven percent, challenged the others, denouncing all of them as incumbents and proclaiming an ancient motto: “Live free or die.” Its label said Freemaker.

  Nick grunted. He muted the TV and paced the room, swirling his snifter of Maker’s Mark. The way things were going, he would have to switch brands. A ridiculous concern compared to riots and killings, though rooted in the same source, Philip goddamn Machen.

  As he drew near her, Yvonne frowned at the liquor. She patted a silky jade cushion.

  “Sit with me, Nicholas?”

  “People just don’t grasp the enormity of the man’s treachery,” he said. “The greatest democratic nation on Earth is crumbling around them, and they don’t get it. He is destroying America while the world wrings their hands and cries, Oh my. Nobody is stopping him.”

  He swirled the whiskey and sipped.

  “Jack Washburn wasted a whole week getting Makers banned, two more to begin enforcing the ban, and Congress still hasn’t outlawed Powerpods. Selena Gilmar has the Democrats believing they can ride Powerpods all the way to the White House if they can just delay banning them for a few more weeks. California’s even got a referendum to legalize private Makers. I ask you, who is winning?”

  Yvonne offered a shrug and patted the cushion. Again he ignored her and shuffled away.

  “That secular messiah business, that opened a few eyes, but the media still treat him like Robin Hood riding a Jeep through Africa, like some kind of prophet.

  “He told the world what was going to happen and, by God, it’s happening. Makers are giving everybody the means to drop out, and mass unemployment forces them to do it. Commerce Department is going to report 58% unemployment on Monday. So his economic independence isn’t a path to utopia. It’s a damned lie. If we don’t stop that man, America is going to collapse into a shell of its former self—a union of no states, a nation of micro-communities, isolated islands of barely-organized yokels, surrounded by zones of chaos. When governments fail, the gangs and warlords take over, and my campaign donors are screaming about losing their fortunes. Philip Machen says he’s enabled freedom and self-reliance, but what approaches is not a passing swoon of the economy but a permanent retreat of civilization.”

  He was lecturing and couldn’t help it. He sucked his amber solace, inhaled its vapors deeply into his lungs.

  “The ministers and the rabbis, they saw right away what was at stake, but Jack . . . he’s a good man, Yvonne. I warned him this isn’t just a terrorist stunt, a shock from which we can recover and retaliate. No. Makers sprout tumors—drugs and guns and unemployment. They ignore property rights, undermine law and order. They’re not salvation machines, they’re anarchy pods. And those hand-wringers in the media haven’t figured it out, yet. Philip Machen is evil, Yvonne, as evil as that bastard from Afghanistan.”

  “If you mean Osama bin Laden, he was Saudi.”

  Heat flared on his scalp. Only Yvonne’s deep and abiding dignity prevented him from shouting, Who cares where they come from?

  “One of them crashes airplanes into our buildings. The other destroys our money, our industries, our markets. When Makers bring down the government, which of these guys will have done more damage? Killing three thousand innocent people is heinous, but toppling every advanced nation will destroy much more, probably kill more. America is under attack, I tell you, and so far we have no traction against it.”

  Yvonne patted her cushion to no avail.

  “Vice President Fletcher—that jerk. He’s daft as Gilmar, trying to have it both ways with his stupid chastity belts. If he spoils my nomination next month, our party deserves to lose the election.

  “I told Jack we need an unequivocal public demonstration that Pods and Makers are deadly. We need to shock the people into abandoning them. I told him Machen’s power and influence hang by one slender thread. We need only to cut that thread, and everything he has done will collapse.” He paced closer, let her capture his hand.

  “I know you will do the right thing, Nicholas. You always do.”

  He stopped to marvel at the adoration beaming up at him, as it had thirty-two years ago. Do you, Yvonne Slavinskaya, take this man? To this day he could not fathom his incredible luck, that this delicate flower, his prima ballerina, had ever desired Captain Nicholas T. Brayley, U.S. Army. He shook his head.

  “Don’t they realize, these foot-draggers, what they are forcing us to do? If we don’t assert full authority—and soon—the anarchy and the violence will spread.” He gestured to the screen. “We have six weeks before the nominating convention, and they are forcing us to make powerful decisions, Yvonne. Dreadful decisions.”

  “Not a war?”

  “To prevent one.” He swallowed and stared at the clouds of destruction overhead. “There are moments in battle when a commander must strike at once. Debate the wisdom of it later. In order to prevail. The more I think about it, the more I feel that such a moment is here.”

  Yvonne stood and tugged him into her orbit, pressed her thighs against his. Her silken touch, the floral scent of her hair, flooded him with yearnings and inflamed his outrage.

  “The Lord will provide,” she whispered.

  He set down his empty glass. “The Lord expects us to show some spine.”

  She nuzzled him. “You will do the right thing, Nicholas. You always do.”

  He kissed her head and reveled in it. Then he cast his anguish into the warm currents of her dark Slovakian eyes.

  “We must,” he said. “We will.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Livermore, California. Sunday, June 7

  Day Fifty

  A week later, Everett Aboud was mixing gray powder in a wooden trough the size of a mattress. Twenty-seven shovelfuls of fine Olympia sand, nine of Portland cement, three of fireclay. Chop the mix with a hoe, wet it with water, and blend the paste. Between mixing and delivering this mortar, he stacked cinder blocks to either side of Bobby’s and Jesse’s boots, up on the scaffold, as they laid the walls for Jesse’s new slaughterhouse. They planned to stop around three o’clock before the heat grew oppressive.

  “It’s called shelf life,” Jesse was saying. “Everything wears out, rusts or rots at the same rate as before. You can’t live on copied stuff indefinitely because things still spoil. So any day now, fresh food is going to be a serious form of wealth, and guess who’s got plenty of that?” He nudged Bobby.

  Helping Jesse had smoothed things with Bobby, who grumbled about the charters Everett was flying around Northern California —three so far—and deflected some of Bobby’s wild anxieties. Working long hours side-by-side had drawn them together again, so quitting General Johnson’s shoe store had been a good choice. It pleased Bobby that Everett wouldn’t be selling any more Powerpods. Now, if he could land a few more charters,
the world might once again feel round.

  At one-thirty-five, as he rinsed the mixing box for their next batch, his Cambiar rattled.

  “Everett, I need you.” Marcy only called him when she needed something. “We gotta beat the helicopters.”

  He turned aside, lowered his voice. “What helicopters?”

  “Massive explosion, down by Coalinga. Traffic reporters saw it from Fresno, forty miles away. They say there’s a mushroom cloud. We gotta get down there before we get locked out.”

  Everett glanced to the mound of tarpaulins baking nearby, then to the mortar-encrusted scaffold behind him. If he left now, Bobby would be pissed.

  “This is gonna cost you,” he said.

  “I’ll pay, I’ll pay. I’m on the Dublin Grade. I’ll be there in five.”

  He broke the connection and pocketed his phone. To Jesse and Bobby, he said, “I have to go,” then strode away without explaining. Bobby whined but didn’t follow him. Jesse said nothing.

  Twenty minutes later, from the front seat of Glamorous Glennis, Marcy complained, “Can’t we go faster?”

  “Two-hundred-twenty knots,” he said. “The wings come off at two-fifty.” This was not true, but he didn’t want to explain speed buffets. Or discuss radioactivity. If she didn’t bring it up, neither would he. Because the risk would bond them, he hoped.

  The haze filling the Great Valley grew thicker as they raced south, and soon it obscured the grasslands below them. He reduced speed and descended while Marcy readied her video camera.

  At the edge of his navigation screen, a red icon blinked. An emergency NOTAM, a notice to airmen, from the Fresno Flight Service Station. When he touched it, a window appeared. “Emergency: All civil aircraft aloft between Stockton and Bakersfield are directed to land ASAP and remain grounded. Civil departures from Emergency Area forbidden until further notice. All aircraft must observe Exclusion Zone thirty miles radius around Coalinga, California, to flight level 40, until further notice.”

  “Read your display,” he said. “We are six miles from that exclusion zone.”

  “We didn’t get the message,” she said, “Broken radio or something.”

  “Watch for strobe lights,” he said. “We are not the only ones out here.”

  They passed low over a molasses-colored tank nested near an oil well. A dirt road ran from the tank and disappeared into thick knuckles of yellow grass. Abruptly, the grass turned black, and Everett slowed even more. Before he could shut the vents, an ash-bucket stink blew into the cockpit. Marcy was recording, narrating softly to her camera as they sailed over three blackened lumps and a thousand smoldering doughnuts.

  “Cows?” she guessed.

  “And pies.” His Nav display showed Interstate 5 ahead, and there it was—a thin silver line bisecting the soup. No mushroom cloud, just smoke in every direction. Everett banked, followed the vacant freeway southward, and descended. They crossed a lone pickup truck, charred and collapsed on its axles, tires burned off. Then a car and a van, dead in their lanes, incinerated.

  “There it is,” Marcy said. “The rest stop.”

  From a flat zone on the right, black snags poked upward like sharpened fingers. Carbonized vehicles, eight or ten of them, rested on smoldering rims in the parking lot. Between them, a collapsed and roofless ruin that must have been the toilets. Where a lawn should be, there lay bodies, charred and twisted. The grim tableau swept by and disappeared in their wake.

  “Go back,” Marcy said. She tapped a red dot on her Cambiar. “Center of the blast,” she said, holding up the image. “They cut off the satellite views, but somebody snapped this first. Those ruins are ground zero.”

  “Hang on,” he said, and he banked sharply. He idled the engine and dropped full flaps. Which pitched them forward, slowed them to a crawl, and hunched the nose like a sniffing hound.

  “We’re crashing,” Marcy shrieked.

  Everett held 35 knots at 200 feet, dragging Glamorous through hot, stinky smoke. When the rest area reappeared, he circled on a whisper of thrust. They tiptoed like aerial burglars for two rotations, while Marcy recorded the devastation. This time the bodies had limbs. And hairless, skeletal heads.

  Everett swallowed. Those were people down there, seven at least. Men and women—please, no children—and their demise did not look accidental. Somebody did this to them. Ashes filled his mouth and demanded he spit. Instead, he swallowed his anger and leveled off.

  “You want another pass?”

  Marcy’s elegant head wobbled no. “Let’s go home.”

  He powered up, raised the flaps, and turned for Livermore, 130 miles north. They hadn’t gone two miles when Marcy twisted in her seat.

  “Go back. We have to land.” She waved her Cambiar. “They are calling it a bomb, a weapon of mass destruction. But there’s no crater, Everett. Why is ground zero not vaporized? Why is everything burned but not exploded? We need to prove what happened.”

  “Maybe it’s not ground zero.”

  “We need to prove this thing was nuclear, Everett. Or not.”

  “Okay, but that rest area is a crime scene. We can’t mess with it. I’ll put us down on the freeway. That should be close enough.” And maybe not so radioactive.

  He descended in a turn. As the soot-streaked pavement rushed to meet them, he teased Glamorous level, and she settled gently. They touched with grit swirling from her wingtips. Everett killed the engine and braked with care to minimize the junk her fanjet was ingesting. When GG rumbled to a stop, he released her canopy and got out.

  “Careful,” he said.

  Marcy stepped to the ground clutching an empty sandwich bag.

  “Here,” she said. She gave him a painter’s mask, a gauzy paper shell with rubber band straps. She slipped a second one over her nose and mouth. “Better than nothing.”

  “Thanks.”

  She passed her camera to him, and he steadied himself, recorded her strolling to the edge of the pavement. Roadblocks were probably stopping any traffic, but someone might slip through, crazy-scared or just crazy, and run them down.

  Marcy composed herself.

  “I’m Marcy Johnson. Today is Sunday, June seventh, and I am standing on Interstate 5, just one hundred yards from ground zero, a few miles from Coalinga, California.” She indicated the rise behind her, saying it was the rest stop where the explosion occurred. Everett widened the view, then narrowed it again as she stooped to whisk debris into her sandwich bag. She motioned for him to focus on her Cambiar, which displayed the date, time, latitude, and longitude. She wrote these on the bag and sealed it.

  “While it is too soon to say what caused this devastation, a laboratory analysis of our sample should determine what happened here today. I am Marcy Johnson for WebNews.” She waited three seconds for Everett to close the shot, then bounded to the plane.

  A glint at the edge of the road caught his eye, a squashed soda can, which he plucked for a souvenir.

  Marcy dropped her sample into her backpack and was peeling a foil pouch when a rhythmic patter-patter came from the sky. Everett snatched her towelette.

  “Get in,” he said.

  Her annoyance switched to alarm as the patter-patter became a wop-wop.

  “Get in,” he ordered. He pressed her down, hopped into his seat and started the engine. With one hand he shut the canopy, with the other, he opened the throttle.

  If that helicopter caught them on the ground, it could squat ahead and trap them. A shadow passed overhead, left-to-right, and he craned to follow it. GG’s turbofan roared mightily, but the big white chopper was turning.

  “They see us,” he said. Without her headset, Marcy could not hear him.

  A blunt-nosed Huey arced toward them until, at 150 knots, Everett hauled the stick into his lap and launched Glamorous Glennis. The chopper closed the gap but passed beneath them. It was a CalFire Helitack machine, not the police or the military, and it would never catch them now. Everett rode the jetwash straight up, whooshing to 18,000 feet in
just three minutes. Any other day, this would have been a yeehaw moment.

  Marcy fumbled her headset into place but said nothing. When Everett leveled off and angled north, he told her to put on her oxygen. He peeled off his paper mask and exchanged it for a real one.

  “Are they gone?” she asked.

  “No, but we are.”

  He squinted in the high-altitude glare, alone with his thoughts. Above the smoke now, he contemplated those blackened figures on the knoll. The more he swallowed, the more he needed to swallow. Nausea, thick and yeasty, churned in his stomach like a clot of grief. Which was nothing compared to flames-on-skin, hair igniting, throats seared shut, eyeballs bursting in their sockets. How they must have screamed, those poor, poor people.

  Who could do such a thing? What are their names? We need to tell the world those people were murdered.

  Marcy was working, not crying. She removed her headset, took up her Cambiar, and placed a series of calls. In twenty minutes, she had reached a chemistry professor and made arrangements.

  They passed over Livermore and skirted Mt. Diablo, continued north to a reservoir hidden in the hills behind Orinda. They couldn’t land where they might be arrested, so the chemist had suggested a meadow in Briones Regional Park, at the foot of the dam. They could land there, the man said, and Everett did. In dry, knee-high grass that whipped GG’s wings as she settled into it.

  He left the engine running while a lanky, sunburned, white guy jounced toward them on a mountain bike. The cyclist wore a two-cartridge filter mask and dismounted with a military-style Geiger counter in one hand. Any clicking it made was masked by engine noise, but he read the meter and shouted, “You are contaminated. Throw away your clothes and take a shower right away.” He seemed concerned, but not afraid.