Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  “I’m connected, son!” Pete’s voice cracked with excitement. “Intel community knows where we’re going before the generals do.”

  Jean-Jacques rolled his eyes, but thought of Tripoli again, and those specific smells of death. Their few missions after the Abu Abdallah raid had been fiascos. What could the Volunteers do that the rest of special ops couldn’t? Armored vehicles carried more than Pete could. The web of intel networks could be way more places at once than Flowers. Stealth drones moved about as quickly as he did, with way more vantage. The Volunteers? They were more than soldiers, sure. Just not the way the others believed.

  But they’d had that argument already.

  He’d barely made a dent in his beer. Pete reached for his second and looked around, as if only now taking in the environment. “Gay bar,” he said. “And Flowers says you don’t have a sense of humor.”

  “Hah.” Jean-Jacques took a long drink. It slid into his bloodstream and he felt his shoulders slump, then the rest of his body ease. Pete always wore him down, one way or another. Usually he lasted longer than half a beer but he was tired. He was also missing the clarity of life lived through night-vision green.

  Pete looked across at him with dark expectations.

  “All right,” Jean-Jacques said. “Tell me about this new enemy.”

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  Release No: NR-043-24

  TOP-SECRET MILITARY PROGRAM YIELDS SUPER RESULTS

  The War Department announced today a team of super-soldiers, melding the elite training of special operators with revolutionary technology. The Hero Project was developed by the U.S. government under the supervision of the Council of Victors. Three U.S. Army Rangers—Sergeant Peter Swenson, 25, Corporal Grady Flowers, 21, and Corporal Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux, 23—volunteered for the breakthrough program. They now possess the abilities of super-strength, teleportation, and super-speed, respectively, and will be deploying to the Mediterranean to conduct combat operations. One of their focuses will be the ongoing manhunt for Abu Abdallah, the terror chieftain and architect of the Palm Sunday attacks on Federal City.

  “It’s our great honor to serve America as warfighters,” Sergeant Swenson said. “Continuing to do so in our new capacities is a challenge we look forward to. The three of us would like to thank all involved, from the War Department to the Council of Victors to NASA. Onwards, to victory.”

  While details remain top-secret, the Hero Project utilized cythrax, a strange, malleable element discovered in rocks found in outer space by NASA. The team of super-soldiers will be known as the Volunteers, a name they chose as tribute to the fighting spirit of the all-volunteer American military. They will fall under the purview of Special Operations Command. According to a Council of Victors spokesman, there are no current plans to conduct another program.

  CHAPTER 4

  AFTER A LATE breakfast of coffee and a cold taco, Sebastian walked down the street to the basketball courts. There was an inherent fluidity to the game he’d always been drawn to, finding solace and escape in it since childhood. Though no longer in any decent physical shape, he had maintained a silky, suburban jump shot, and sometimes worked into games as a substitute. A citywide tournament was under way, though, so after watching the second half of a game between two Asian Harlem teams, he returned home.

  In front of his building, a man in rags sorted through the trash, collecting bottles. Sebastian thought he resembled the man from the subway tunnel but that wasn’t possible. What is it called when you think all homeless people look alike? Sebastian asked himself. Homeless-ist? He didn’t know.

  “Change?” the man asked Sebastian.

  “I can make you a sandwich,” Sebastian said.

  “From the ashes, holy redemption,” the man in rags said, pointing to the bottles. Sebastian figured that a no and walked up to his apartment.

  He made himself a sandwich and turned on the television. The Great Tet Raid was on again. He’d loved the movie as a kid and so had all his friends. What American boy hadn’t wanted to grow up to be the young marine captain stranded behind enemy lines, destined to save the war and someday become president? Sebastian watched until General Giap refused to flee the coming air strike, choosing instead to die in place with his men.

  “I don’t know what god you worship,” Sebastian said along with George Clooney’s square-jawed marine captain. “But He’s about to get a hell of a fighting man.”

  That marine captain was Chuck Robb, of course. Champion of the Third Way. His lone White House term had proven a rocky one, the old radicals on the left and the young hawks on the right revolting against Robb’s tenuous centrist platform. LBJ’s heroic son-in-law met the same political fate as the old man. Like many moderates of her generation, Sebastian’s mom pointed to the Palm Sunday attacks for the collapse of the two-party system, for the apparent end to American bipartisanship. It hadn’t always been like this, she said. Sebastian wasn’t sure. He wondered if the attacks had just hastened the inevitable.

  Sebastian turned off the television and went to his computer. Four emails awaited. One was spam, a chain letter imploring a return to the gold standard. He deleted that one. The second, a note from his dad. He replied to that one. The third, a newsletter from a local protest group he’d made the mistake of giving his contact info to. He supported reform in the rehabilitation colonies as much as the next liberal arts major, but these people wanted to abolish them, outright. Where would veterans with troubles go? They never answered that. The fourth email was from Britt Swenson.

  Hi. Got your email from Mia. Wanted to invite you to the Temple tonight, some great bands. Link below with directions. My brother will be there, too. And did I mention two free drink tickets???

  later,

  Britt

  Sebastian had lived in Empire City for three years, but could count on one hand the number of times he’d trekked to Gypsy Town. From his perspective, that district appealed to, and consisted of, three types of people: bohemian grime in black jeans, yuppies who played at the same on weekends, and natives too poor or stubborn to leave for the far townships. Being none of the above, he saw no reason to leave the center of might for an outpost in the fringe.

  Artists lived in that fringe, though, good ones and bad ones, real ones and posers. He’d wanted to be a writer once, and sometimes wanted to be one again. But living among a tribe charmed Sebastian much more in theory than it did in practice. He had a bourgeois heart deep down, he knew.

  An old habit seized Sebastian, and he typed Pete Swenson into the web search of his computer. He’d already read the top results. America’s First Real-Life Superhero, declared one headline. Leader of the Volunteers Opens Up, went another. Sebastian remembered that one, a long profile about how a son of privilege had lost his father in a sarin attack and turned himself into a rugged warrior. Justice Saves Ten in Benghazi! exclaimed yet another. Sebastian snorted. Justice. What a stupid code name. Some War Department clerk probably had gotten a bonus for it.

  Magazine articles and PR dispatches tumbled through his computer screen with alacrity. He’d read them all. Stories of the brave Justice, the bold Sniper, steadfast Dash, serving and saving, salvaging and sacrificing. They were the best of us, but also better than any of us. Heroes for the people, but not of them. They were super. And because they were super, they were beyond.

  He clicked an entry titled “Top-Secret Military Program Yields Super Results.” It was the press release from two years prior that had revealed the Volunteers to the world.

  The propagandist in Sebastian couldn’t help but admire the falseness of it all. No mention of Tripoli. No mention of the Rangers who died in Tripoli. No mention of Mia. No mention of him. Making it seem like the government knew how to control cythrax. Making any of it seem controlled. Even the name “Volunteers” rang hollow. Who in their right mind would choose to become a science experiment?

  Sebastian’s phone buzzed, shaking him from his speculations. “Come downstairs,” read the tex
t, from a number he didn’t recognize. Then a second text: “ASAP.”

  Fucking Dorsett, he thought. So paranoid. Still, after waiting a couple of minutes to protest the ASAP, Sebastian went downstairs.

  The door of the first-floor apartment was cracked open. Sebastian knocked once and walked in. “Yo, yo,” he said, smelling sausage and peppers. “Long time no see.”

  Special Agent Theo Dorsett III stood in his kitchen holding a rubber spatula like it was a torch. He wore a pair of dad jeans and a wrinkled polo stretching to fit his broad, compact shoulders. His skin was deep black, and his back was to the door. From there Sebastian could tell the food was winning. Even Dorsett’s posture looked like a question mark.

  “I’m impressed.” Sebastian took a seat at the kitchen table. He spotted an open cooking manual propped up against the stove. “Smells good in here.”

  “That it does, that it does. Hungry?” Dorsett’s voice carried a breeze of Carolina coast in it, something he could turn off as needed. Sebastian figured the Bureau had weather ladies who taught agents how to do that, but the one time he’d mentioned his theory, Dorsett had just laughed at him.

  “I’m good.” Sebastian wasn’t sure what to make of Dorsett cooking for himself, other than it being a sign that his wife wasn’t soon returning. “Already ate. Thanks, though.”

  “Do you, hoss.” Dorsett shoveled the sausage and peppers from the pan onto a plate and took a seat. Sebastian got up from the table and turned off the stove’s burner. Dorsett just shrugged, rubbed at his fade, and began eating. Sebastian sat back down.

  “So.” Sebastian didn’t know where to begin. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his handler for three weeks. “How’s my favorite special agent?”

  “Cut the shit,” Dorsett said between bites of food. Sebastian thought he was chewing longer than necessary, possibly because he hadn’t seasoned the meal with anything but cooking oil, but kept that to himself. “You went invisible last night. People see that, man. They call the police. Come on. You know better.”

  “Oh. Damn. I’m sorry.” Sebastian rubbed at his neck. Dorsett stared at him with hard, dark eyes until he continued. “Too much drink, that’s all.”

  Dorsett kept staring at him. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” Sebastian asked.

  “Jesus, man. It’s Sunday. You miss church?” Whatever authority Dorsett had lost at the stove had been regained. He struck Sebastian as the type of man rarely at ease. Something about the way his eyes were always studying the edges of a room. “Pull it together. You ain’t gonna have me around forever.”

  Sebastian wasn’t sure he agreed with that—the handlers had an “indefinite” assignment, as far as he knew—but he didn’t feel like talking about the future, so he didn’t. The best way to prove to the Bureau that he no longer needed a handler was not using his power. And he’d just reset that clock to zero.

  Dorsett grunted and shook his head. “My fault for not being around.” Then, after another bite of food, “Should be available more going forward.”

  “Cool,” Sebastian said while thinking otherwise, because of what “available” probably meant. The Dorsetts had uncoupled, recoupled, and then re-uncoupled over the past eight months. Dorsett only talked about it at the bar; the few times Sebastian had mentioned Anita in the bright of day had yielded only long, seizuring pauses. In the neon of night, over beers, they could be friends. Sebastian didn’t have many of those anymore. Anywhere else, at any other time, he and Dorsett were something else.

  Sebastian watched Dorsett finish his meal in silence. He almost brought up the Volunteers twice, but held his tongue. Of course Dorsett knows about them being here, he thought. Even a truant special agent would be aware.

  Dorsett rose to put his dish in the sink and did something with his eyebrows that made Sebastian think they were done. Sebastian had his hand on the door handle when Dorsett asked, “Bar tonight? There’s a Knights game on TV.”

  Sebastian prided himself on never lying, or trying not to, at least, so like a lot of people like that, he was adept at the art of omission. So he just said, “Can’t, got a thing.”

  “Another night, then,” Dorsett said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Another night.”

  * * *

  As dusk spilled through his window blinds, Sebastian rummaged through his bedroom for an old tin box. He could’ve sworn he’d last seen it on his dresser, next to a stack of The Volunteers comics. Sebastian found the writing in the issues middling—what else to expect from the War Department–funded military-publishing complex?—but the art was dazzling. In fact, on his to-do list, he’d added “Apply for Comic Book Job” some months ago. There it remained, preserved and intact from any threat of a strikethrough.

  Sebastian found the tin box behind the hamper, in a pair of jeans that didn’t pass the smell test. It had the red dragon of Wales on it, a souvenir from a family trip. He opened it and transferred a few blue Valiums to his pocket, just in case. He didn’t think they’d expired yet. Then Sebastian slipped on a plain green tee and a pair of skateboarding shoes he thought weren’t too out of trend and left for Gypsy Town. He was feeling a bit like a crusader, socially dogged and culturally ignorant.

  How different can it be? he asked himself. It’s still Empire City. Sort of.

  At the station, Sebastian approached a fare card machine. He missed being able to buy subway tokens from bored transit employees, but times had changed. The machine answered him in Japanese. He’d pressed the wrong button. The machine kept answering in Japanese. Through trial and error, he eventually replenished his card. The line for the body scanners was longer than he’d have preferred, but he only waited for ten minutes. No tourists to foul things up, Sebastian thought. Praise the Trinity.

  The subway car was crowded and smelled of human stink and Sebastian kept his back against the door but kept getting in the way of people getting on and off and it annoyed them, and him, too. He felt his senses flaring up again, so he concentrated on breathing and focused, as much as he could, on being normal. This is democracy in motion, he told himself. Savor it. He thought of the subway bombing from the year before that’d killed eleven people and would’ve killed more if not for the off-duty cop, but that wasn’t helping anything so he stopped. His ears popped as the subway passed under the river and a girl with bug eyes and popsicle lips bumped into him and looked up at him like it wasn’t her fault, even though she’d been the one moving. Sebastian gripped his sunglasses and aimed them at the girl, making a hushed laser-beam sound. The bug eyes got buggier and the girl smiled wide. Despite himself, Sebastian smiled, too.

  He got off at the fourth stop in Gypsy Town; deep enough into the district, but not that deep. The station seemed grungy to his eyes, and not in a quaint way. The walls were cracking, the concrete platforms dirty, the bums more deadbeat Beat than artful dodger. The scent of sour piss filled his nostrils and he thought whomever it belonged to needed to drink more water. The subway clattered down the tunnel like a horse on the trail, pushing farther into the city’s outlands. Sebastian stood alone on the platform and fingered the pills in his pocket, considering turning back. Dorsett only drank at a couple of places. He’d be easy enough to track down.

  Sebastian was nervous, and embarrassed because of it. You drove into a fucking war zone in a fucking Audi, he reminded himself. You’re no pussy. He found stairs and climbed them.

  Stoplights and muddy stars exposed a more volatile sort of energy than across the river, as if the streets themselves had drank too much caffeine. Bars and delis and sidewalk vendors snapped with aggressive gladness. People yelled and people moved, but with an aimlessness Sebastian couldn’t reason with. He hurried past them, knowing no other way to walk. He found himself not swallowed up in a sea of fringed vests and black jeans and wallet chains, as expected, but just part of another noisy crowd, as common and loud as any other. He walked half a block, then turned around after realizing he’d been going the wrong way.

  “Me Want Wonder.” H
e passed over a philosophizing Cookie Monster stenciled into the sidewalk. “Om nom nom nom.”

  In front of a grocery store, a young man around high school age was trying to hand out pamphlets. People parted around him like shadows under a flashlight. He wore the uniform of a suburban prep—lightweight collared shirt with rolled-up sleeves and madras-pattern shorts—and a powder-blue baseball cap.

  An ultra, Sebastian thought. They’re even here now!

  “Hello, sir. Have you helped the homeland today?” the high schooler said to Sebastian, holding out a pamphlet. The cap carried the standard ultra slogan FREEDOM BEAST, though there were variations.

  “Last name is Rios.” Sebastian drew out the last syllable and pushed past the young ultra and his pamphlet, reminding himself that even a quick punch to the gut would qualify as assaulting a minor. “You wouldn’t want me.”

  Sebastian then blew a kiss to the kid, who recoiled. He knew he should be above messing with a teenager. And yet.

  The ultras had made a lot of noise about cleaving its white supremacist wing over the past few years, but Sebastian figured that didn’t matter to the disciples with the pamphlets. He knew it didn’t matter to him. Whatever they were claiming to be at the moment—a service organization, a political action committee, just a good ol’ fashioned group of nationalist expression—Sebastian doubted it would ever appeal to him. “Freedom Beast.” That meant supporting the state no matter what (for its rule-of-law members) but also defying the state as often as possible (for its libertarian members). It was all rather mystifying.

  Their loudest position centered on a return to military conscription and eliminating the International Legion. They believed that would result in two things: less foreign intervention and stricter immigration. Sebastian agreed vaguely with the first, though it was hard for him to imagine that world. Only the oldest of the old radicals talked of an America like that. He found the second racist, and not in any playful, ironic way. Say what you would about the Legion’s methods, but it granted citizenship to its fighters. That was important, Sebastian thought. Kept fresh the American dream.