by Max Barry
“Don’t alarm my prole,” Eliot said. “He wants to protect me.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking for Woolf.”
“She could be anywhere.”
“Yes. But it’s a better option than sitting in that room.” Eliot looked around. His pupils were dilated. “You used to work here. What’s a clever way out?”
“I don’t know. Can you tell this guy to stop pointing his fucking gun at me?”
“He’s finding you threatening. So am I, actually.”
“You look like you’re on drugs.”
“I’m releasing a lot of dopamine,” Eliot said. “It’s a natural high. Joel! Gun down.”
The soldier lowered his gun. He stared at Harry with baleful eyes.
“How about a laundry chute?”
“What?”
“A chute,” Eliot said, “that we slide down to a basement or some-such.”
“No. They don’t work like that. This is a hospital—we’d lose children down them.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think,” Eliot said. “You must have lost a few patients. People who snuck out somehow. It’s not Fort Knox.”
“No one . . . okay, one time a guy broke into a storage room by climbing onto the roof of the building next door. We might be able to—”
“Yes. That.” Eliot looked at the soldier. “Go cause a distraction. Shoot at nothing. Report false information. Things like that.” The man nodded and began to jog down the stairs. “This storage room, then.”
“How did you compromise that guy?”
“I know him. I used to work for the organization, you know. Storage room.”
He led Eliot through double doors. He had never liked coming here. It was the surgeons. He’d never been completely sure they really gave a shit. They seemed to enjoy challenges more than people. “So you, what, shot him in the face, pulled off his helmet, and used words?”
“Correct,” Eliot said.
He reached the storage room and tried the handle. No one had been by in the past year or so to unlock it, apparently. But he knew where the key was kept. He jogged down the corridor, pulled open the second drawer in the nurse’s station, and found it among paper clips and rubber bands. When he returned, Eliot was tugging at the door. “Quick,” Eliot said.
“I am being quick.”
“Quicker.”
He pulled open the door. He was finding the new Eliot unsettling. Somewhere in the distance was a staccato of gunfire. They waited but it wasn’t repeated.
“Joel,” said Eliot, fondly.
They entered the storeroom. The window had been fitted with new locks since the intruder but they wouldn’t be much of an impediment from this side. He peered through the glass. A short climb down to a secluded part of the roof, then a short run and leap to the roof of the pharmacy next door. He did not see any soldiers.
“The real problem is finding Woolf,” Eliot murmured in his ear. Harry flinched. He hadn’t heard him approach. Eliot looked at him. “Where is she, do you think?”
“Can you take a step back?”
“I think you know.” He tapped Harry’s forehead.
“Don’t fucking touch my head.” He began to wrestle the window out of its frame.
“This place,” Eliot said. “It brought you back to yourself. Maybe it’s having a similar effect on her. And you know her. So tell me. Where is she?”
“That plan you had before, about getting out of Broken Hill? I’m coming around on that.”
“Where,” Eliot said.
He tossed the frame to the floor and climbed up the shelves. The window was narrow but he managed to work the rifle through it and drop to the rooftop six feet below. He crouched against the wall until Eliot dropped beside him.
Eliot looked around. “This was a good idea.” He rose and ran to the edge of the roof, leaped across the gap, and landed on the tin roof of the pharmacy. Harry saw his head turn left, right. Then he stopped moving. Harry froze. Eliot crept back toward the edge, peered over, and dropped out of sight.
Harry ran after him. Halfway there, he heard Eliot bark out words in a strange, guttural tongue. When he reached the edge, he saw Eliot in the alley standing over another helmet-free soldier. This one was bald.
He tossed the rifle down and lowered himself over the edge. “I’m starting to feel like you don’t even need me.”
“Oh, I do,” said Eliot. “I don’t know where she is.” He looked at the pharmacy.
“She’s not in there. I don’t remember her ever going in there. Eliot. Eliot?”
“What?”
“You’re staring at nothing.”
“Oh,” said Eliot. “I was thinking about earplugs.”
“Is that . . . that sounds like a great idea.”
“It’s great against verbal compromise. It’s not so great for hearing someone coming up behind you with a gun. So there’s a trade-off.”
“Right.”
“I’d rather be shot than compromised, though.” He looked at Harry. “Shoot me if she manages to compromise me. Did I already say that?”
“No.”
“Well, do. I’m serious.”
The bald man said, “We’re on the third floor. We know you’re not there.”
“Thank you, Max,” said Eliot. “Harry. Where is she?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Think.”
He looked around. If he were Emily, where would he go? Somewhere near the hospital. There was a café on the other side of the block, but Emily had never liked it; she said it smelled like men. They’d usually gone to the burger joint farther down. That was actually where they’d first met. Outside of her being a patient, that was. She’d been eating and Harry had walked by with some girl, whomever he was seeing at the time, and she’d called out. He remembered thinking she was a nutcase. Why had he thought that? The card. She’d sent him a card with something crazy written on it, TO MY HERO or YOU SAVED MY LIFE, something like that. But then they’d spoken and she hadn’t seemed crazy. There had been something about her. Something bright, to which he’d responded.
“You thought of something,” Eliot said. “I see it on your face.”
He shook his head.
“Don’t hold out on me.” Eliot leaned closer. “Come on, now, Harry.”
“You are creepy as hell right now.”
“This state is temporary. I need to make the most of it. Comedown is going to be a bitch.”
“I’ll make you a deal.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I might know where she is. But if I tell you, I go in first. I get to talk to her. If it goes badly, fine. You do what you have to do. But I get five minutes.”
“Deal.” Eliot stuck out his hand.
He hesitated, suspicious. “You don’t mean that.”
“What do you want me to say?” Eliot shouted. “You’re confronting the futility of your own proposition! Shoot that guy!” This part was directed to the bald soldier, who dropped to one knee and raised the semiautomatic. Harry turned in time to see a pair of dark-suited figures at the end of the alley. Eliot grabbed his arm and then they were running.
“It’s the burger place,” Harry panted. “Right, right, circle around the block.” They rounded the corner. “Five minutes. Promise me.”
“Okay, okay,” Eliot said. “Fine.” He stopped, eyes widening at something on Harry’s gun. “Whoa, shit, fuck.”
“What?” he said. He couldn’t see the problem, and looked at Eliot, and Eliot’s pistol butt was moving very quickly toward his face. That was all he knew.
• • •
The soldiers went in and then there was a problem. Emily could tell because at first Masters emitted updates at intervals of fifteen seconds—who was where, doing what, and for how long they were expected to do it; a nonstop cataloging of physical facts that he seemed to enjoy on a deep, sexual level—then, for no reason, a whole
minute went by with no updates at all. This manifested in Plath as a series of increasingly dramatic hair corrections, and finally a question, and Masters turned his goggles toward her and said in his machine voice, “We’re trying to fix target location.”
“I thought you had target location,” Plath said. Masters did not answer. “Did we not start with target location?”
“Eliot is slippery,” Emily said.
“We are not having another Portland.” Plath directed this at Masters, but what Masters thought of it was unknowable. Emily kind of hoped Masters would become so pissed off with Plath that he would unsnag one of what had to be five or six different weapons strapped to various parts of his body and do something unspeakable with it. Yeats, Yeats, she thought, as she did at times like this. You jerk.
She rose from the table. The front glass was very dirty but she could see through it. A chopper was hovering above the hospital, but aside from this, nothing seemed to be happening.
“We’re regrouping,” said Masters. “We may have a new fix.”
“You get a fix,” said Plath. “You get a fucking fix right this second or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” Her face was flushed. Globules of sweat formed a neat line all along her hairline. She was displaying an awful lot of emotion for a poet, which made Emily think that Plath had reason to believe the consequences for failure were particularly terrible. She kept watching the road. She needed to think like Eliot. She knew him better than most. She could imagine Eliot skulking around out there, sniffing her out. That’s what he’d be thinking about. Not escape. He would be coming for her.
A black-suited soldier emerged from the crossroad and jogged toward the burger place. “Who is this guy?” she said. Nobody answered, so she tried again. “Who the fuck is this fucking guy?”
Plath came up beside her. “Speaking for myself, I don’t mind adding a little manpower to this location.”
Masters said, “We’re redrawing our zones.”
This sounded like bullshit to Emily, because if her current location had become part of Masters’s operational zone, that would have been something he would have mentioned. Soldiers moving locations: That was all he talked about. She eyed the approaching guy. “Oh,” she said. “That’s Eliot.”
“That’s . . . that’s impossible,” said Plath. But there was uncertainty in her voice. Plath was beginning to realize what Emily had known for a while: that you could not underestimate Eliot. Every time you thought you had him figured out, you didn’t. “Let’s . . . let’s get some security here, huh?” Plath reached across Emily to Masters, who may have been barking orders over his internal radio or may have been just standing there; it was impossible to tell. “Masters. Masters.”
“Unit is not responding.” Masters drew a fat pistol. “May be hostile. I advise retreat.”
Plath vanished. Emily hesitated. She really did want to face Eliot and end him. But this was not the way to do it: with Eliot in heavy body armor, filtered against compromise. There was taking a risk, and there was suicide. She turned to follow Plath, then had another thought. There was always the possibility that this was another layer of sneakiness. Eliot could have deliberately sent someone who would be spotted—the outlier, perhaps, or just a soldier he’d managed to overcome—toward the burger place from the front in order to flush her out the back. That was just the kind of thing that Eliot might do. She considered. There was a side door, leading to the dumpster. She decided to be prudent.
She pushed her way outside. The brick wall of the adjoining store faced her. This was the kind of thing Emily liked: a closeted escape route. This, right here, was her element. Then she stopped, because it occurred to her that maybe this was a problem. Maybe the last thing she wanted to do in this situation was follow her instincts, since those might be predictable to someone who knew her very well. Eliot stepped around the corner.
“Shit,” she said.
Little yellow plugs poked out of Eliot’s ears. He was holding a pistol. His eyes were wide and there was a sheen of sweat on his face that told her he had put himself into a heightened mental state. Poets could do this, if they really wanted. She had seen them do it. They talked and moved very rapidly for about an hour, then slept for days.
“Gotcha,” said Eliot.
She held up her hands. She wanted to speak, but it seemed like if she opened her mouth, he would shoot her. He would shoot her anyway, of course. That was why he was here.
They faced each other a moment. Maybe some guys would come through the door and take care of Eliot. That would be super handy.
Eliot wiggled the plugs out of his ears with his free hand. “I had to render the outlier unconscious. He couldn’t be trusted.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I blame myself for what happened. I should have stopped it.” She didn’t know what to say to that. “I have to kill you.”
She nodded. It had been like this for a while.
His fingers flexed on the pistol. “I’m sorry I didn’t teach you better.” His expression was very strange.
“Eliot,” she said.
“You have to stop.”
“Eliot.”
There were soldiers approaching. She could feel them. This idea was distressing in a way it hadn’t been a few moments ago.
“I made mistakes,” he said. Around her, soldiers boiled out of the air like ants. There was a great deal of noise and Eliot could have shot her but he didn’t and he fell down and died.
• • •
After this, she felt strange. People came and went, soldiers and poets, and sometimes they stopped to speak to her but she didn’t hear them. When they began to package Eliot, she walked to the front of the burger place and sat at a table. Occasionally someone walked by but for the most part she was alone. She began to cry. She didn’t understand why, because she had wanted Eliot dead. She had wanted that very clearly. But there was grief coming out of her anyway, spilling from her compartments, and she was reminded that not all of her wants were hers.
A shadow fell beside her. She looked up to see who was stupid enough to disturb her in this moment, and saw Yeats.
He righted a fallen chair and composed himself into it. He was wearing a beautiful dark gray suit and his hair looked fresh and bright. He was wearing sunglasses but he removed these and set them on the table, and behind them his eyes were flat.
“Oh,” she said. She felt stupid. Of course Yeats was here. She should have realized that.
“Congratulations.” He surveyed the line of dust-blown buildings across the road. “You see now why I wanted you, specifically, on Eliot.”
She didn’t reply.
“Persuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them. All this, the chasing, the guns . . .” He gestured vaguely. “These are details. What Eliot could not escape was the fact that I understood him better than he understood himself.” Plath hovered at the edge of Emily’s senses. Yeats said, “A glass of water, please. Let’s make it two.”
Once Plath had gone, Yeats shrugged his jacket and passed it to Masters, who was standing like he was planted there. “I have been visiting delegates. Not all of them agree with my new direction for the organization. Some tried to move against me. Expected, of course. Futile, since I understand them. We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.” Plath arrived with two glasses, of a kind Emily recognized from years before, and set them on the table.
“I feel bad about Eliot.”
“Yes, well,” said Yeats. “Some kind of suppressed emotional overflow, I would imagine.”
“And I’m r
emembering things.”
“Oh? Such as?”
“I came out of the ER. Through that door.” She pointed. “I went that way. People were killing each other. Because of the word. Harry came after me. He knew what I’d done. But he saved me anyway.”
“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” said Yeats. “It’s irrelevant.”
“I’m not talking to you.”
A figure was walking toward them, coming from the direction of the hospital. In the heat haze, it could have been anyone. But she had a feeling.
“Harry,” she said.
• • •
Harry peered over the edge of the roof at the street below. His head throbbed. Eliot had hit him. He had frowned at something on Harry’s rifle, and Harry had looked to see what, and woken up slumped in a doorway. Now Eliot was gone and Harry was on the roof of a furniture store, trying to see what was going on.
A few minutes ago, a soldier had walked toward the burger place, then another emerged from the front door and approached with his pistol drawn. It seemed like they were going to have a confrontation, but they stopped at three feet’s separation and stood there as if communicating telepathically. Then they both ran back to the burger place and plenty more soldiers appeared and there was gunfire. Eventually a young woman emerged and sat down at a table. He stared, because the woman was Emily.
He had begun to doubt that a little, because of Eliot. Whether she was still the same. But now everything was clear. He wriggled back from the rooftop. It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn’t need to argue for the truth. You could see it. He had almost forgotten that. He gripped the rifle and went to get Emily.
• • •
Yeats turned to look at the figure approaching them out of the heat haze. “Who?”
“The outlier, could be,” said Plath, peering out from a raised hand. The figure’s arms were extended from his sides. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Wil Parke. Looks unarmed.”
“Well, how about we shoot him?”
“On it,” said Masters. He gestured and two soldiers stepped onto the road.