A Variable Darkness: 13 Tales

by John McIlveen

  Franky dropped to the ground, her gun flat in front of her and accessible, as she had been trained. She removed a small device from a hip pouch and urgently whispered into it. “Active shooter Ventura and Memphis, motel second floor.”

  “Copy, F.R. Do you have visual? Verify and report back at once,” the admiral’s voice replied.

  F.R. was an acronym for a fairly new station, standing for Frontrunner. It had first been adopted six years earlier, in 2027, when it had become clear there would be no political compromise and that a bipartisan nation was a thing of the past. The rift only widened, the parties became more extreme in their agenda, and hatred had reached a level not seen since the Holocaust and Civil War, and made even worse by modern technology. There was no place to hide or to communicate without being seen or heard. Big Brother was indeed watching, terrorism was seen as the great equalizer by the extreme radicals, and sadly, protests, logical conversation, and outright pleading were hopeless. It had reached a point where the only avenue to self-preservation was to fight fire with fire.

  Franky was a second-level FR, or FR2. Once she became an FR3, she would be able to go live—citizen protection level. Schools had closed their doors for good in 2021, amidst the pandemic and post-election rise of the gun-wielding radicals. Active shooters became almost as common as students, culminating when one of the victims of a slaughter in Adelphi, Maryland, was identified as the child of a senator. All children were now web-schooled.

  FRs were to populate a distinctive military-backed force to protect civilians from an ever-increasing list of dangers, including the mostly corrupt police forces still staffed by those who hadn’t decamped, feverous mercenaries, and a small army of NRA disciples. To become an FR3 was a rite of passage, a high honor that was cause for celebration. One only became an FR3 once they had earned the full confidence of the commanders they were assigned to. Some made F3 quickly with a show of dexterity and commitment. Some were awarded F3 after displaying smarts and courage in a real-life event. Some never made F3. Franky was determined to make it by August 28—her thirteenth birthday.

  Franky again crawled alongside the Jeep, the Kevlar vest slowing her progress, but a necessity, despite this being a drill. Not wise to get too comfortable during a drill. Need to be as real-time as possible, or the unexpected variance could be fatal. Leveling her head to the ground, Franky looked beneath the vehicle, across the street toward the motel. She could partially see the first floor, but no higher.

  “Shit,” she hissed. Scanning to her left, just outside the storefront, a woman—a mother—lay prone over a small child. Blood ran from the mother’s hip and the left side of her ribcage. More ran from the child’s head to the pavement, a kill shot. Though these people were 3D laser-generated, it never failed to nauseate Franky and fill her with an abysmal sense of dread. She felt responsible.

  “Casualties. Adult woman,” she said into the small transmitter. Then she paused and added, “One child, toddler,” her voice cracking.

  More shots.

  Franky crawled toward the front of the Jeep and cautiously peered around the bumper. Fear and realization jolted her when the shooter darted across the motel’s second-floor exterior walkway, raising the assault rifle to his shoulder. He was aiming at her.

  She launched herself backward as three more rifle shots rattled the air and three red, laser-generated dots flashed on the ground inches away from her. She fired a wish-shot over the hood of the Jeep and scuttled back to the full safety of the vehicle.

  She had to be wise and shoot sparingly. Her bullets, though only laser shots, were limited to thirty, as would a FR’s lethally loaded Heckler & Koch. During drills, both FRs and shooters wore a full-body form-fitting undergarment they referred to as “onesies.” Unlike the nightwear from which they had borrowed the handle, these onesies were Lycra, infused with a laser-sensitive mesh that interacted with your firearm, which would become disabled if the Lycra onesie sensed a hit.

  She was breathless but feeling the buzz, the invigoration that came with these “games.” She spoke into the transmitter again, “Shooter, white male.” Of course, she mentally added. “Mid, maybe late-twenties. Assault weapon, too distant for identification but maybe a Vektor.”

  “Are you concealed?”

  “Affirmative, but seen and fired upon by gunman. Will attempt a takedown.”

  “Copy. Proceed with caution.”

  Franky scuttled carefully to the rear of the Jeep, hoping not to be detected. She had a plan…a double-diversion tactic she was confident would work. An old Mini Cooper was parked about twenty-five feet in front of her and the Jeep, and across the street was the store. She found a plum-sized rock on the street edge and palmed it.

  Franky’s takedown of the shooter followed in a series of unexpected occurrences and reactions but transpired in a matter of seconds. As she reared back to throw the rock at the Mini, a blue, late-model Hyundai SunVolt rounded a corner behind her, driving toward her and the shooter, who rattled off a volley of shots.

  Without knowing who was in the Hyundai, Franky scurried to the side of the Jeep, seeking cover. She reached for the transmitter but abandoned it. She’d worry about reporting later. Right now, she needed to be wise and perform efficiently.

  A quick glance over the hood revealed the shooter lining his sights with the moving vehicle. She couldn’t let him shoot.

  “Shit-shit-shit.”

  Franky launched the rock at the Mini. Whether sensing the motion or reacting to the rock-on-metal concussion, the shooter turned and fired, but Franky was already rolling to the rear of the Jeep. Quickly to her belly, she fired a shot through the storefront window, an upward trajectory aimed at the top of the pane to minimize the chance of civilian harm. The window exploded with a loud crash and an impressive display of falling computer-generated shards.

  Wasting no time on admiring the theatrics, Franky stood to see the shooter looking toward the store. Employing the rear bumper of the Jeep, gun at the ready, she raised her sights above the roofline and fired. Two red laser-dots flashed off of the roof close to her and she threw herself backward, landing behind the Jeep with a jarring impact that knocked the breath from her.

  Damn, he’s fast, she thought, forcing herself to move despite the pain. She settled her back against the Jeep’s rear bumper, not thinking about the shooter, but what she saw in that half-second before she fired—the people in the blue Hyundai as it idled past while she climbed onto the jeep. The image of the man hunched over the steering wheel, and more so of the girl in the passenger seat, her head against the side window, her lifeless eyes searching the skies as blood blossomed like a large geranium across her chest.

  Finally able to breathe, Franky lifted her gun, eased to the edge of the Jeep, and looked up to the second floor of the motel. The gunman, at the ready, aimed at Franky. She dropped back. There were no shots.

  Was his gun disabled? Had she got him? Everything had been moving fast—a whirlwind—and she wasn’t sure if she had gotten a clean shot off. He could be bluffing. She could wait it out, but that could mean more civilian casualties. She lifted the gun and waved the stock above the roof of the car.

  Nothing.

  Franky dropped back to the ground and triggered the transmitter. “Casualties. Two. Adult male, age N/A.” She envisioned the girls’ unseeing eyes and shuddered. She recognized those eyes. They looked at her every morning and evening from the bathroom mirror in her barracks. “Adolescent female,” she said. “Age, twelve.”

  Franky waited for the response. When none came, she approached the rear edge of the Jeep to check on Admiral Rancourt’s location and saw him walking toward her, rigid and swift. This was a certain sign the conflict was over, but his expression was livid, which confused and terrified Franky.

  Did I blow it? How? The thought was soul crushing. It would mean either a one-year setback or disqualification. Franky stood and waited for her commander to reach her. She had to remain silent until he spoke.

 
Admiral Rancourt stopped inches in front of Franky, his eyes drilling into hers. “What the hell happened, Francesca?” he asked, his voice elevated, but not quite yelling.

  God, she hated her formal name, and that he was using it was not a good sign. Some stiff collars in Congress felt the FRs under eighteen would be referred to by name instead of rank out of sensitivity to their ages, though the admiral often did. “But they’ll let you die in fucking battle,” her tearful mother had said the day they’d pulled her daughter from her in the immigration detention center two years earlier.

  “I took down the shooter,” said Franky, unsure to what he was alluding.

  “Fire your weapon,” Admiral Rancourt demanded.

  Franky raised the barrel to the sky and fired. Nothing happened.

  “You’re goddamn dead, Francesca. You may have hit your mark, but he hit you first.”

  The truth in his words numbed her, and although it was severely frowned upon as weakness, she felt her tears threatening. This would set her back, maybe even disqualify her, and that utterly petrified her. Nobody seemed to know what happened to disqualified FRs.

  The admiral studied her, his head slightly cocked as if listening for an air leak. “You hesitated climbing onto the car. That was your demise. Why did you hesitate, Francesca?”

  She considered her answer and then decided that anything she said would be of no help. What was the use? “The girl in the car, the image was of me. I didn’t expect it.”

  “That is no answer. You must be ready for anything at all times,” he said.

  “It’s….” Franky started to say but stopped.

  “It’s what, Francesca?”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “It’s a god-damned fight for your life and the lives of civilians. It’s a war. Nothing is fucking fair!” he bellowed. The admiral turned to walk away, and Franky saw a flash of disappointment cross his face, and she knew it was because she was one of his most hopeful FRs. Now she was his failure. Tears welled and then rolled down her cheeks.

  Admiral Rancourt stopped and turned back to say something. The red dot that appeared on the corner of his eye shocked her. There had been no sound to accompany it. As the red dot gave birth to a rivulet, Franky screamed and dropped to the ground.

  Silencer, she thought. This is no game!

  She rolled beneath the Jeep as Admiral Rancourt hit the ground like a sack of stones, his wide blank eyes staring at her like an accusation, or maybe a plea. The pain was brutal, and she knew she had at least a broken rib, maybe more, but the Kevlar jacket had saved her.

  Swallowing the agony, Franky shot out from and then retreated under the Jeep like a snapping turtle, Admiral Rancourt’s Glock 17 tightly gripped in her hand. She spun, trying to calculate the direction the shot had come from and thought, Maybe I can still make F3.

  TRIGGERS

  Nightmares have tormented me throughout my life, they are part of this darkness I live in. But for maybe the tenth time in the last two weeks, I’ve awakened from one in utter panic. I spring upright, choking on a scream and gasping away the claustrophobic ether that propels me to wakefulness. I sit with my arms wrapped around my legs, my head on my knees, trying to find logic in this recent onslaught of dreams. They are brutally menacing and mysterious, yet somehow familiar. The sweat-soaked sheets, pungent with the smell of my fear, cool beneath me. I have stopped changing them, an act that has become futile with the cyclical nightmares. Instead, I shower each morning, and at night slip between the fouled sheets, knowing what is to come, but too exhausted to fight it.

  Each night presents varying versions of the same dream. They are visions of darkness and of light. Both are terrifying, yet it is the appearance of light within the dream that awakens me; it is the light I dread most. My fear is complete yet childlike, for I am a child in these dreams. And there are others, other children like me. I haven’t seen them within these dreams, yet I know they are there. Their voices are genderless, the cautious whisperings of incomprehensible words, and, like me, they fear the arrival of light. Alternately, in the waking hours, I fear the coming of night and the need for sleep nearly as much.

  On the other nights, I do not dream. Or maybe I do, but I’m too drained to recall them.

  The clock on the nightstand tells me that it’s slightly after 4 a.m., which seems to be the calling hour for these nightmares. It is set for 5:30, and, despite the weariness that weighs on me, I know falling back to sleep will be fruitless. Not particularly wishing to return there anyway, I press the plunger.

  So I shower, dress, and sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a bagel, and the latest Lee Child novel, the latter two of which go untouched. Reading is my lifeline, but through the current string of nightmares and insomnia, we have become estranged. Not to read two or three novels a week, even simultaneously, is alien, and despite my appreciation for Mister Child’s dependably entertaining Jack Reacher series, I haven’t had the attention capacity to make it fifty pages in the last two weeks. I had fared no better with the new Walking Dead graphic novel, which lay opened and facedown on the living room couch, a position I envied.

  This fatigue does not bode well, being that I am an electrician, a profession I more fell into than chose. Nevertheless, fifteen years later, it pays the rent and keeps me fed and well stocked with books. I learned my trade from Henry Kinney, he and his wife Erica being the last in a line of foster parents and the first who wished to adopt a solemn, chronically depressed eleven-year-old son of a drug-addled mother and unknown sire.

  When I was eight, I had turned up near Rockingham Park in Salem, New Hampshire, about twelve miles from my then home in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and coincidentally, about the same distance from my now home in the refurbished mills of Haverhill.

  I had never been reported missing, nor could I tell them where I had been. I had had no answers for the Salem police, except that I was Raymond Bassett from Lawrence and my mother’s name was Nadine. Years later, I would learn that they had found my mother in her apartment, four days dead of a heroin overdose.

  For three years I disappointed a series of foster parents—four couples in total—whose hopes for an idealistic and upbeat son had been dashed by my morose disposition. The Kinneys took me in when I was eleven, and there I stayed as an only child. Maybe I fit in well because, due to an early hysterectomy, adoption was Erica’s only chance at motherhood. Or maybe it was because they were about as unexceptional as I was. In all fairness, they treated me well when no one else would and they seemed to understand my gravity. They schooled me, clothed me, and kept me safe—things my own mother and father failed to do.

  I still work for Henry Kinney. I’ve inherited his surname and if I manage to make it through these recent trials without electrocuting myself, I will be inheriting Kinney Electric once Henry retires, which he says will be soon.

  The buzzing from my cell phone on the countertop startles me: “Steve Everett” blinks on the display.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  “Well, a fine howdy-do to you, too,” says my friend. “Reading Nicholas Sparks again, are we?”

  “Funny guy. No, slept like shit.”

  “Does shit sleep?”

  “You do,” I say. I have my witty moments.

  “Who’s the funny guy now? Still having nightmares?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Same one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you should see a psych or something,” Steve says, more concerned.

  “Maybe…if it continues much longer. I’ve seen enough of them for two lifetimes.” Therapy had been mandatory until I was eighteen, voluntary (but still necessary) afterward. I’ve had a steady diet of nearly every anti-depressant the psycho-pharma industry has to offer and systematically built a befitting immunity to each.

  “You working today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Electricity plus zero sleep equals not good,” he reminds me.

  “I know. It’s a mindless job
today. Residential. New construction.” I look at the clock on the oven. Time to leave. “Need to wrap it up today. Drywallers come on Monday.”

  “Emily’s asking about you,” he says.

  I knew it was coming. Emily is a good friend to Steve and Becky; she was her maid-of-honor. She is bubbly, doe-eyed, and as cute as a kitten. After an ugly divorce from a disloyal husband and two years of healing, Steve and Becky conspired to hook us up. Emily and I dated for nearly a year, but I would never allow myself into the relationship and broke it off about four months earlier before Emily or her daughter Cassandra could become too attached to me.

  Like Steve and Becky, and like Henry and Erica, Emily holds a better assessment of me than I do of myself and she still hopes I will reconsider the relationship. I assure you, there is nothing wrong with Emily. She’s stunning in every way and would be the pride of any sane man. The problem lies in my self-worth. I’m thirty-three, never married, and childless…it isn’t rocket science.

  “She’s the ultimate catch, Ray,” Steve says. “Men would offer their kingdom and select body parts for a woman like her.”

  “That was never my argument.”

  “I love you, brother, but you’re an idiot.”

  “No argument there, either,” I say.

  “Come for dinner after work,” he says.

  “I would, guy, but I’m wiped. I need to sleep.”

  “Take a couple sleeping pills,” Steve says.

  “I might try that.”

  “Try not. Do or do not, there is no try,” Steve says in an excellent Yoda impression.

  “Okay, Fozzie Bear,” I say.

  “You get a pass on that. Call me tonight.”

  We hang up and I head to work which, despite (or due to) the tedious simplicity of the job, seems an eternity. By the time the shift is over I’m floating in a gauzy haze, a sharp pain is settling in behind my eyes, and Kyle, my apprentice, is observing me with concern.