Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Sebastian opened a small closet door off the doctor’s bedroom and decided he’d wait for the other man to finish showering, after all.

  During the appointment, after the Burning Man conversation but before the vaccine one, the doctor had posed his own question to Sebastian. “What’s that Justice guy like?”

  “Tall,” he’d said, his normal response meant to both deflect and get a quick laugh. He’d learned that people always wanted a piece of the brave, noble Justice, and when they couldn’t have that, they wanted a piece of someone who did. Somehow, he’d become that someone.

  That hadn’t been enough for the doctor, though. He’d wanted more. So Sebastian had balked. “Media’s overplayed it,” he’d said. “We don’t know each other all that well.” Which was true, Sebastian thought, in its way. Despite all their time together, there had remained something deeply unknowable about Pete Swenson.

  Hours later in the doctor’s apartment, he understood why the other man had asked about Justice. The small closet off the bedroom proved to be a shrine to America’s greatest combat hero. A framed black-and-white photograph hung on the back wall, Pete’s outsize side silhouette overlooking some cityscape in the Mediterranean night. Unopened action figures filled a shoe rack under the photo, the bold Sniper, steadfast Dash, and nefarious Abu Abdallah all represented on the second row. The top row had been reserved for three distinct versions of Pete—raid commander Justice, mountain warfare Justice, and jungle stealth Justice. A garment rack held an adult medium costume of the Justice soldiering uniform, complete with combat boots, a hard-shell helmet, and a plastic assault rifle. Two cardboard boxes stacked upon each other contained every published issue of The Volunteers comic, even some variant covers Sebastian had never seen.

  I bet this guy even has Justice bedsheets, he thought.

  The sound of running shower water ended, and Sebastian heard the doctor whistling to himself in his bathroom. He needed to make a decision and make it now.

  He went to the kitchen, poured two glasses of wine, and waited on the doctor’s couch, visible to the world and smiling his smiliest smile. A few minutes later, the doctor walked in wearing a thermal shirt and pajama bottoms and promptly screamed.

  “Easy now. Swenson sent me,” Sebastian said, holding out a wineglass. “He needs you.”

  A total lie, of course. But what was one little fib in the pursuit of grand truth?

  “Justice?” The government doctor still seemed wary, but he accepted the wine. “Why? How?”

  Sebastian laid it out: he’d been asked by Pete to go to the doctor’s appointment. They would be watching the great Justice closely, of course, but him? The hostage kid? What did he matter? Pete wanted to know about the cythrax vaccine, and he’d looked into the doctor. “He knows you’re someone we can trust,” Sebastian said. “That you’re not like the others.”

  The doctor nodded. “I’m not,” he said. “But—even having this conversation… I could lose my clearance.”

  “We understand,” Sebastian said. “It’s why we’ve been so cloak-and-dagger.” That he’d been anything but seemed beside the point. “To protect you, and your job. But we still need your help.”

  The doctor sighed, took a swig from his wine, and rolled his lips. Sebastian saw doubt cross his face once, then pass, then again. He tilted his head.

  “You said you and Justice weren’t close.”

  “Had to say that. I saw the camera in the ceiling. I knew we weren’t alone.”

  Sebastian could feel himself having a bit of fun with it all. Not a game, he tried to remember. This is beyond for real.

  The doctor took another drink of wine, then sat on his couch next to Sebastian.

  “They told me to stick to the basics. Draw your blood so the lab can see if it’s altered at all since we saw you last. They said if you asked any tough questions, to say no change. But your vaccine question—it was so specific. I panicked. That’s why I left the exam room. Wanted to make you think I was looking into it.”

  “You looked up the answer?”

  “I mean, already kind of knew it.” The doctor rubbed at the back of his head, finished his wine, then reached for Sebastian’s. “It’s just a theory. An idea. Please stress that to Justice.”

  “ ’Course.”

  “Not my area of expertise, but a friend in NASA lives and breathes this stuff. He’s obsessed with what happened over there. My understanding is they thought they’d figured it out. They gave everyone that shot as something designed to spark powers. It didn’t work, obviously, but what was especially weird was that you lived. You hadn’t received anything. Decades of studying this, and your survival taught everybody how little we know.”

  “Okay.” The government hadn’t sacrificed a platoon of Rangers. It’d sought to create a platoon of super-Rangers. Much more reasonable. Much more in line with the America Sebastian thought he knew.

  “My friend thinks it has something to do with World War One. Turns out, you survivors all have an ancestor who fought in the trenches. In the Argonne, to be exact. Immunity to cythrax must be tied to mustard gas, somehow, and the way it remains in DNA. The Haitian kid, they’re less sure about, but—”

  “Mustard gas.” Sebastian wasn’t so much confused now as he was deeply, wildly frustrated. Why all the lies? Why all the obfuscation? “Our great-great-grandfathers got gassed like roaches a century ago. That’s what saved us.”

  “Just a theory! I can’t stress that enough!”

  It did explain why no locals or insurgents in Tripoli had survived, Sebastian thought. It made more sense than any dud vaccine ever had.

  No god above had chosen them. No training had saved them. It wasn’t probability, nor combat skill, that had delivered them from the bomb. It had been in them all along, where they’d come from, who they’d been born as.

  “You’ll tell him, right?” The doctor’s hand holding the wine was shaking, and the pitch in his voice had turned wafer-thin—it had dawned on him what he’d just shared. “Justice needs to know I’m like him. One of the good guys.”

  Sebastian got up, grabbed the wine bottle from the kitchen, and returned to the couch. He poured the doctor another glass, then started drinking straight from the bottle.

  I really do fucking hate how wine tastes, he thought.

  “So where’d you go when you left the exam room?” he asked.

  “There’s a POC listed on your file—all your files. I tried to call him but that office said he’s not in the military anymore. Then I called my supervisor and he told me to stick with the script. That’s why I came back and told you there’d been no change.”

  “That no one really knows for sure. That no one might ever know.”

  “Yeah. Listen—” The doctor reached to grab Sebastian’s shoulder, but the younger man recoiled. “I’m sorry. Telling you that was just part of the job. I hope you get it. I’m just a doctor. Just a person trying to serve our country and live his best life at the same time.”

  Despite himself, Sebastian did get it. “No judgment,” he managed. “I’m a propagandist.” They sat together on the couch for a few minutes more, Sebastian drinking slowly from the bottle, the doctor asking if a meal or drinks with Justice might be a possibility. Sebastian interrupted on a whim to ask if the doctor remembered the POC name from his file.

  “It was a lieutenant colonel,” he said. “Asian name. Tong? Tran? Trang? Something like that. Mean anything to you?”

  It didn’t.

  * * *

  Sebastian hadn’t seen Pete in a couple of days but when he returned to his apartment and found him on his couch watching TV alone in the dark, he wasn’t surprised. Chance or fate? he wondered. They’d melded together a long time ago for the superman.

  For anyone caught in his wake, too.

  Sebastian took a seat next to him to watch the final minutes of a documentary on the Battle of Ha Long Bay. “Vietnam’s Midway,” Admiral McCain called it in his memoir. “Where we salvaged victory from
the jaws of defeat and ensured the northern advance would be justified.” It was the first major battle where American generals used the International Legion, who proved themselves worthy with great ferocity. “Napoleon said that a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon,” a retired army major who’d fought at Ha Long Bay said. “I’m here to say that no one in the history of warfare fought longer or harder than my brothers in the gook horde did that day.”

  As the credits rolled over still images of mangled bodies, blown-up tanks, and other war gore, Pete turned to Sebastian.

  “Wish we still had battles like that.”

  He sounded drunk. He smelled drunk, too. Sebastian stood up and found the light switch.

  “You need to hear this,” he said. Then he told the great national hero what he’d learned, what he suspected, about Tripoli, about what Flowers had said, about what the government doctor had said, too, about their World War I ancestors and what he thought it meant and why he thought it mattered and how he thought there was more to the story, much more, and how they could find out that much more by working together and figuring out a plan.

  “Someone did this to us, and intended it,” he said, feeling the buzz of resolve in his declaration. “Just a matter of moving up the government chain until we find out who.”

  Pete had crossed his arms and was leaning back into the couch, still in TV-watching mode. His voice slurred with boredom, like he’d only been half paying attention.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The question caught Sebastian off guard. He’d prepared for all sorts of reactions but not this. “Well. Why not? For the truth.”

  “Truth?” Pete’s eyes crystallized, one hyper-black, one hyper-green, and he sat up. A new hostility blitzed his words. “I don’t fucking get you, hostage. You could be the world’s greatest spy if you wanted to. Someone who helps. Someone who protects. A bomb fell from the sky and turned us super. Turned us beyond. That’s truth. That’s the only truth that matters.”

  Pete rose and took four long steps into the kitchen. He threw a light jab through the top of the metal refrigerator. A sucking vacuum sound rushed from it and the lightbulb inside zapped out. Pete raised his fist in admiration and laughed, more to himself than anything, the fridge now framed by a hole the size of a children’s basketball.

  “This power.” Pete turned back around. “I owe it to my fallen brothers to make something of this. Soldiers die in war all the time. That’s what we’re here for. To die so that America could build the greatest army ever? An entire army with powers like ours? How is that not defending the homeland?” Pete stepped toward Sebastian like he was going to grab and shake him but stopped halfway with a sneer.

  “You’re just like the rest of them.” He finished by spitting out one last word like it was a pox. “Citizens.”

  They stood apart from one another in strained silence, one man standing tall and straight, the other hunching a bit. So, Sebastian thought. Pete had figured out Tripoli, too. Maybe had known a long time. He didn’t understand where the other man’s anger came from, but it didn’t matter. He knew he’d replay the speech in his head over and over again for days on end, and he’d do that because there’d been some legitimacy to it. People needed help, everywhere. He could help them, somewhere. He hadn’t. It’s not that he’d thought about it and chosen not to. It was worse than that, he realized.

  He’d never even considered it in the first place.

  “I don’t deserve my powers. I know that.”

  “You don’t.”

  The intensity in Pete’s voice had lessened in pitch. He cleared his throat. “Apologies if any of that—I don’t know.” Sebastian gave a half nod. “What happened to us? It happened. I didn’t sign up for it specifically but I signed up. That’s how it works. So I look forward. I believe you want to help people. You have it in you. It’s what brought you to the Near East in the first place.” Sebastian half-nodded again. He believed that, too. “Only three percent of Americans serve in the military these days. Only three percent loves America enough to fight for it. Our country needs help. Here, now. Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. And I’m here to tell you that there are public servants, combat veterans, in government just like us. People willing to do what’s necessary.”

  “I’m not following,” Sebastian said, because he wasn’t.

  “You can do incredible things, Sebastian. I want you to be a Volunteer. But not overseas. Here, in the homeland.”

  Sebastian’s head was swimming and his conversation with the government doctor seemed months old, not hours. He took a chair across from the couch because he thought Pete had more to share but instead the other man grabbed an envelope from the kitchen table and handed it to him.

  “It’d be a big change, I know, but a good one. Give you purpose. There are people—things are going to change, man. They’ll need you. We’re going back to war soon. Real soon.”

  “What people?”

  “Think all this over. It’s a lot to digest. If you’re in, we can talk details. In the meantime, read that over. It’s what people think of you, now. It’s my gift to you. It’s my charge to you, too. To do something.”

  Then Pete was gone, out and away from the apartment, and Sebastian was by himself again, alone and adrift in a world that never had made much sense to him and, he knew, probably never would, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried. Was that clarity?

  He opened the envelope.

  COMMENTS BY SPECIAL AGENT

  THEODORE P. DORSETT III

  Re: Subject Sebastian Gareth Rios

  Subject is a survivor of a botched War Department mission whose details remain classified Top Secret. Falls under the umbrella of the “Hero Project” though Bureau analysts have filed reports expressing doubts about this (see: “Black October” files, 149-774, 149-780). Subject was a nonmilitary citizen who sought return to American soil. His request was granted under the provision of a five-year observation tasked to the Bureau. Subject works communications at Homeland Authority, a position the Bureau helped him obtain. Agency reps familiar with the “Hero Project” agreed that keeping subject employed at a government agency would be ideal, as subject is impressionable and does not understand the threat he poses to others and/or the United States government.

  Subject possesses ability to turn invisible for iterations of time: the longest on record for twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds (under medical observation). Subject complains of severe headaches after utilizing this ability, which serves as an active deterrent for utilization. Subject has a minor problem with alcohol that sometimes leads to inadvertent utilization. Subject has been warned repeatedly about this.

  Subject’s medical reports reveal unstable molecules that “swell” when subject goes invisible (full medical report attached—Annex #4C). In layman’s terms, it remains possible that subject could fully disappear from common sight if he continues to utilize this ability.

  Subject’s minor problem with alcohol shows signs of developing into a chronic issue. Subject might grow out of it—subject is in his mid-twenties—but subject does match the psychological profile of someone with addiction issues. Utilization of the invisible ability increases with subject’s incidents of alcohol abuse. Subject has shown recurring signs of depression, post-traumatic stress, and social anxiety.

  Subject believes the “Hero Project” is a deception put out by the War Department. Subject believes he was the rescue target of a spec ops mission gone awry in the Barbary Coast that left thirty-plus American operators dead. Subject does not seem aware the “Hero Project” has existed in government files since 1985. Subject expressed much regret that so many operators lost their lives while rescuing him from captivity. Subject erroneously believes his rescue was the purpose of the operators’ mission (see: “Black October” files, 302-307). Subject has not been advised otherwise.

  The pages went on like that, agents writing about his life in the cold detachment of administrative-speak. S
ebastian read them all, drinking it in through his eyes like elixir: how the government had chronicled his passive liberal politics, about the anti-colony newsletter he’d signed up for, about how Sebastian had been overheard at work gatherings describing what he did for Homeland Authority as “minor acts of neocolonial propaganda.” He probably had said that, he thought, but over beers or something. Not at actual work. They’d even written a page about his family’s immigration from Bolivia, trying to figure out if there was any connection to the Communist Party. There was also a section on his personal life, his occasional successes, his many failures. “Seems likely to marry the next serious partner,” the document stated. “Which should further moderate the subject.”

  None of the information was wrong, though much of it seemed unnecessary and histrionic. Were they that worried a kid from the California suburbs would become radicalized? It all felt a tremendous violation to Sebastian. This is my life, he thought. And they make me sound like a fucking dope.

  He thought about why Pete had given him this file, and how he’d gotten it in the first place. He understood that the other man had come here to break him. Break him to build him back up. It’s what people like Pete did. Sebastian knew that.

  “I want you to be a Volunteer,” he’d said. “Here, in the homeland.”

  For who, though? It hadn’t sounded like Pete meant the government. But who else could it be, if not the state?

  As he knew he would, Sebastian spent many hours of the late night and early dark replaying in his head over and over again what Pete had said.