Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Jean-Jacques was back on the sailboat, with his mother. A trace of a private smile across her mouth, her long, lean face up and defiant against the horizon. Just the two of them, together against the sky of the unknown. He’d been here before, with her, but not like this. Not exactly this alone. Not exactly this together.

  “Mom?” he whispered.

  Jean-Jacques’s mother turned on the boat, showing neither fear nor worry. She placed her hand on his. He felt life in it. Human touch, channeling from her hand to his.

  The Chaplain’s voice came from above the sea, repeating in melody: Honor. Sacrifice. Love. Honor. Sacrifice. Love. Honor. Sacrifice. Love.

  Honor. Sacrifice. Love.

  Then, quick as Jean-Jacques had left, he was back. Back in the meadow, in the park, in the city. The morning smelled of wet dew. Midges hovered and buzzed through the air. He was still alive. His mother was still dead.

  What in the… He couldn’t even finish the thought. He bit the inside of his mouth to feel, to ground himself through pain. What the hell had just happened? Jean-Jacques tried to focus on his bewilderment. If nothing else, that was real.

  “Remember them,” Jonah Gray told the congregation. “They remember you. Holy blood. Holy redemption.”

  * * *

  He’d been transported somewhere else, Jean-Jacques was certain of it. He’d stood on the boat. He’d smelled fish. He’d felt ocean sun. He’d touched his mother.

  But he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.

  The ceremony ended. Jonah Gray moved through the crowd, kissing hands and cheeks. Then, suddenly, he halted, tilting his head. He spun on the balls of his feet and beelined for Emmanuel.

  “My friend. You’re hurt.”

  Emmanuel lifted his sleeves and showed the knife wounds he’d sustained the night before, during the Mayday hunt. They were dark red and crusting with yellow pus and Jean-Jacques thought at least one would need stiches. Still, he became angry at his cousin. The hunts were supposed to be kept from leadership. A real soldier would’ve known better.

  “See Daven,” Jonah Gray said, pointing to the man with the burned face who’d read the poem. “He’ll tend your wounds.”

  Emmanuel did as told. Jonah Gray shifted to Jean-Jacques, who looked up to meet the taller man’s gaze. Pale clouds peered down, seeming to both study and pity him. Jean-Jacques forced himself to not look away, despite wanting to, despite something in his mind begging to.

  You’re the badass killer, he reminded himself. You’re the Volunteer.

  “Good to see you again, Corporal.” It must’ve been him at Xavier Station, after all. “Come. We have much to learn from each another.”

  Jean-Jacques followed the other man around the pond. The Chaplain’s back remained vertical, but a slight hitch in his steps slowed their pace. I should end this now, Jean-Jacques thought. And he intended to. Just as soon as he learned how his mother had been conjured.

  They reached the slope of a stream. They could speak alone here, the Chaplain said. They could speak true. The sound of the stream would keep their words from prying ears.

  “What did you think of rite?” The chanting in Jonah Gray’s voice from the ceremony had been replaced with a more floaty delivery, his words fine, even placid.

  “What you preach. How you reconcile it with what’s been going on?” Jean-Jacques meant the bombings, though any number of the Front’s recent actions could work.

  “Well.” Little waves seemed to run through Jonah Gray’s eyes. He stooped his thin frame over Jean-Jacques and pulled tight his camo jacket. “Dirty for dirty.”

  “What does that mean.”

  Jonah Gray didn’t answer. Instead he said, “I’ve watched you, you know. All of you. For weeks. All you fortunate, all you heroes. All those chosen by the cythrax. I learned Dash is the most dangerous. You don’t trust. You don’t believe. Yet you still do. A man like that can’t be managed. But he knows others need to be.”

  Jean-Jacques swallowed to wet his throat. The Chaplain had been following them?

  “That’s why you’ll join us. Your country needs you, Corporal Saint-Preux. No greater duty than that. We’re saving America from itself. In doing so—it’s not peace versus violence. It’s peace and violence.”

  There was a hard vagueness to the Mayday vision. Jean-Jacques thought listening to its leader would’ve helped with that but instead the Chaplain had only exacerbated it. Jean-Jacques realized now that that was part of the genius, part of the appeal. Mayday was a cipher, a catch-all for the furious and disenfranchised. Be against the powerful and elite. Be for equality. Be against those who benefited while you suffered. Be for the arrows of antifascism. Mayday radicalism meant everything. It meant nothing, too.

  But after opening Pandora’s box, did they have a plan? If they were right, and America was barreling toward a clash between corrupt order and upheaval—well, Jean-Jacques knew where he stood. He’d walked the war rubble of too many aftermaths to make any other choice.

  “What you preach,” he repeated, deciding to be more specific this time. “Egalitarians, you said. They kill governors?”

  Jonah Gray’s face tightened like a sling. “That wasn’t us.” Jean-Jacques shrugged but the other man persisted. “I’m serious. My men carried AR-15 rifles that night. A couple had Ruger pistols they got from God knows where. Those fire .45 caliber, though. Governor Harrah was killed with 9-mil rounds. Said so on the news.”

  He paused for a few seconds.

  “9-mil. The preferred round of police and military.”

  That’s interesting, Jean-Jacques thought. If true, that’s very interesting. Jonah Gray was still talking like a grim prophet, and Jean-Jacques didn’t think everything he was saying made sense, but some did.

  “We were promised no drama that night. A campaign mole let us into the ballroom. Said they wanted to make headlines. We sought to make an impression, and accrue some capital, too. Win-win. We were used, for ends I can only guess at.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “They’ll get theirs, Corporal. I swear that to you. No one plays Mayday twice.”

  Something else tickled at Jean-Jacques. “Chosen by the cythrax, you said.” What did that mean?

  Jonah Gray exhaled through drawn lips. This close to one another, he smelled of clean sweat and shaving cream to Jean-Jacques. He may look like a man in rags, he thought, but he ain’t living it. The Bureau would want to know that part.

  “To believe, Corporal, sometimes we must see. Do you think that you all were the first? That you all were the only?”

  The Chaplain seized Jean-Jacques by the wrist and squeezed.

  Jean-Jacques found himself in a yard of grass and pavement. A worn sky carried the plastered hint of sea in it, though he felt it more than smelled it. A low wire fence ringed the yard, and clumps of hunched men milled about in groups, talking soft, kicking at the dirt beneath them. They all wore matching yellow slickers, and so did Jean-Jacques. One man tossed a frisbee at another, who watched it land at his feet, face barren as drought.

  He’d been transported, again.

  “Gray!” A voice like an anvil sounded through the yard. “Gray, Jonah, last four: 6380. You’re due at medical in ten.”

  “Shit.” A voice behind Jean-Jacques spoke, flat and even. He recognized it as Lamar Pierre’s. “Now they got you doing procedures back-to-back. Be strong, my brother. Be strong.”

  Some sharp, primal brew of emotions filled Jean-Jacques’s chest, fear and rage and despair all swirling together in a maelstrom of the soul. He willed himself to words.

  “Just flesh and bone,” Jean-Jacques found himself saying. “Just scalpels and needles.”

  “Be strong,” Pierre repeated.

  Quick as he’d left, Jean-Jacques was back. Back in the meadow, in the park, in the city.

  “Yours?” He could only whisper to Jonah Gray about the memory. “From Block Island?”

  The Chaplain didn’t answer. Instead he walked back around the po
nd, toward the others. Jean-Jacques followed. Fascination had overtaken any other feeling he had, short-circuited any other motivation. He didn’t know what he wanted to do but he knew it wasn’t what he’d planned. The holy man began speaking of the Hero Project, a real Hero Project, one undertaken at rehabilitation colonies against the will of its subjects. Maven was one drug used on veterans with troubles at the colonies. To subdue them, for control. Cythrax had been another, an experimental substance distilled from rocks found deep in space. He pointed to the man with the burned face. “Not Vietnam. A colony.” He pointed to another man with a slope where a shoulder should have been. “Also a colony.” He pointed to a woman about Jean-Jacques’s age who had the saggy, vacant countenance of a blind person.

  “War? The colonies?” Jonah Gray asked. “What’s the difference, in the end?”

  Before he’d been released, Jonah Gray had been selected for cythrax treatments, too.

  “It’s how I summon memories,” he said. “They didn’t know, of course. Otherwise they’d never have let me out.”

  Jean-Jacques had been clocked at 460 miles per hour. He had a friend who could lift a bus and another who could teleport the length of a football field. It took a lot to impress him. The Chaplain’s power did. A man who could conjure dead people, even only for a few moments—a man like that was different. A man like that was a threat.

  “It comes from my God, but also from my enemy.” Jonah Gray seemed to know exactly what he was thinking about. “The duality of man: all things through Him.

  “This power? My own duality, I suppose.”

  The Chaplain continued his oration. Sometimes the cythrax killed at the colonies. Sometimes it scarred. Sometimes—sometimes, it did work. The man with the burned face had a small ability for healing. Another of the Mayday tribe could distort faces for short periods of time—a handy thing for a group of domestic militants. Jonah Gray had even met an escaped veteran out west who could turn objects into explosives with his hands.

  “Parlor tricks compared to you,” he said, the reverence from his sermon returning to his voice. “Compared to the Volunteers. You are us, but realized. Man beyond.”

  “But.” Jean-Jacques didn’t know what to ask so he asked for everything. “Why?”

  “Come now.” The Chaplain smiled. “I know you were infantry, young man, but must I explain everything?”

  A joke. To lighten the mood. Jean-Jacques offered a courtesy laugh. Then he asked the other man to continue. Well—as any scientist knew, subjects responded differently to experiments in captivity versus in the wild. Whatever happened in Tripoli, whoever ordered it, had listened to a scientist. Veterans with troubles with minor cythrax gifts offered those in power little. Special operations soldiers with major gifts? They offered much more.

  Jean-Jacques’s head was spinning. They’d dropped the bomb on them on purpose? There was no way. It was impossible. Command never would’ve allowed it. The military did fucked-up things, sure. But to other people. To the enemy. Not to its own. And yet… officers could be sketchy bastards. And what was the government if not a collection of officers in suits? Flowers always swore he’d never heard anyone radio Higher for the bomb.

  He was about to ask the question no one would ever answer—why did they live when so many others died?—when Emmanuel approached in a bit of a daze, holding up his forearms. The wounds were gone, mostly, dark red pus and yellow crust replaced by long pink scars that looked years old.

  “Daven’s no miracle worker,” Jonah Gray said, rubbing his fingers over Emmanuel’s scars. “But for an old warfighter, he can still impress.”

  I came here to take this man, Jean-Jacques reminded himself, one last time. He couldn’t even muster pretending anymore. He hadn’t been turned, he felt. But he had been baffled.

  Which was maybe worse.

  Jonah Gray took Jean-Jacques by both shoulders and kissed his cheek with dry lips.

  “I don’t know how long you’re with us, young hero, but I do hope it’s longer than first planned.” He patted Jean-Jacques’s chest where the teardrop hung from its chain. “We’ll meet again.” His voice turned to a hot whisper so no one else could hear. “My best to our government friends, of course.”

  Then the holy man was gone, disappearing through the crowd and into the new morning, just another homeless man wearing a combat jacket too thin and ragged for the coming winter.

  “So,” Emmanuel said, still rubbing his arms. “What you think of rite?”

  CHAPTER 19

  FOLLOWING THE GOVERNMENT doctor home proved simple enough for Sebastian. He’d scheduled the last appointment of the day, so after it, he slipped into a bathroom, went invisible, and found a seat in the employee waiting room. Eleven minutes later, just as Sebastian began to wonder how long he could stay unseen without bringing on a migraine, the doctor passed through, signing out with a wink for the administrative nurse.

  The hospital sat on a ridgeline along the river, farther uptown than Sebastian could remember ever going. It was a district for old people and rich people, which explained why the hospital was there. The government doctor lived five blocks northwest of it. He stopped for groceries then again for a glass of wine, which allowed Sebastian to switch off his power and wait outside.

  The appointment had been as bland as Sebastian expected. Nurses took his measurements, noting he’d gained four pounds and remained the same height. His blood pressure was a bit high for a man his age, but nothing extraordinary. They asked about his drinking and he modulated it as much as he thought believable. They said it was still too much. Then they drew some blood and told him to wait for the doctor.

  The doctor had come in ten minutes later, apologizing for the wait. He was youngish, about a decade older than Sebastian, a trim man with floppy hair who’d just returned from the Burning Man festival out west.

  “Third time to the playa,” the doctor said. “Changes my life every time.”

  Sebastian nodded and asked if it was true that the big California tech firms had paid off separatist militias to keep them from attacking the festival camp.

  The doctor just shrugged. “I go for the spiritual transformation,” he said. “And the tits.”

  Sebastian found it odd the government entrusted this man with big federal secrets like the health of a citizen with the superpower of invisibility, but—well, bureaucracy. Mistakes happened.

  After he finished his evening wine, the doctor walked home. Sebastian trailed a half block behind, keeping his head down, pretending to read his phone while watching the other man from the tops of his eyes. The doctor lived in an old brick high-rise with a doorman and Sebastian went invisible again before reaching the revolving door. In the elevator, the doctor looked at the space he stood in, seeming to sense a presence next to him. Seeing nothing, he snorted to himself and began picking his teeth in the reflection of the elevator door.

  It’s a good thing I’m not a creep, Sebastian thought in the elevator. I could really abuse this if I wanted to.

  At the appointment, the doctor had asked Sebastian how often he used his power. Sebastian said not often, only when he got bored and wanted to see if he still could. And in the ballroom with the Mayday Front. Because he’d needed to. Then the doctor asked how long he’d stay invisible. Sebastian thought about that. “Five minutes,” he said. “Maybe ten minutes a few times.”

  The doctor had been holding a chart in his lap. He peered into it.

  “Says here you once went twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds.”

  “Under medical observation. Killer headache for a week. So I lay off.”

  The doctor nodded. “You’re not supposed to use it at all, as I understand it.”

  Sebastian began to sputter, which made the doctor laugh.

  “Don’t let the Man get you down,” he’d said. “The playa taught me that. Power to the people!”

  Sebastian had just nodded at that, keeping his disbelief to himself. He’d spotted the camera with the blinking red dot
in the ceiling corner of the examination room minutes earlier.

  The doctor’s apartment proved austere the way only a space kept by a career bachelor with obsessive compulsions could be. The doctor took off his shoes while Sebastian drifted in behind him, like air. A large, state-of-the-art entertainment center dominated the living room, the plush carpet beneath it soft and unstained. An open floor plan gave way to a shiny marble kitchen, the stove and oven in it virgin-clean. Not a cook, Sebastian observed from the couch, feet up on a glass coffee table. The doctor opened the refrigerator to put in groceries. Sebastian glimpsed nothing in it but white wine bottles and takeout leftovers in styrofoam boxes.

  Hours earlier in the hospital, the doctor had said Sebastian looked fit as a fiddle, and wrote a special prescription for migraine medication “just in case.” He assured Sebastian that he wasn’t any more susceptible to brain aneurysms than a regular citizen was. “Live your best life,” he’d said, remnants of Burning Man philosophy splashing his words. “Any last questions?”

  Sebastian said yes, he did have one more.

  “Does anyone know why I lived yet? In Tripoli. The others… they all got the vaccine. For the bomb. But I never got a cythrax vaccine. It’s… well, it’s weird, you know? My handler thinks it’s a dumb question. But he’s just a field agent. Maybe someone like you might have an answer? I don’t want to bother the wrong people with this.”

  At that, the doctor had set down his chart. He’d cleared his throat and said he’d be right back. Then he’d left the room.

  As he’d waited for the doctor to return, feeling the blinking red dot of the camera in the ceiling and trying not to look at it, Sebastian decided to follow the other man home. Maybe the doctor would know, maybe he wouldn’t. But anything like a straight answer would require privacy.

  The doctor had applied some sort of feng shui theory to the back rooms of his apartment—art prints with Chinese characters adorning the walls, his dresser full of crisply folded blue dress shirts and dark jeans, the bookshelves in his bedroom empty minus some nature photography books. This is the most boring motherfucker alive, Sebastian thought, walking around free and visible while the doctor showered. He’d come here hoping to find… he wasn’t sure what, but something more than a grown man’s pristine loneliness. Secret files? Listen in on a phone call about the top-secret medical examination he’d just conducted? Something like that. Instead he was snooping through a stranger’s apartment like a goddamn thief.