by Stephen King
A boy and girl emerge from the main house, older, but not much more than eighteen. They look tired, the girl holding an infant in her arms, the boy grasping her arm as they approach. They must be in charge.
“This is my father,” Allie says, walking toward them.
I hold out my hand, and the boy shakes it, the girl smiling, whispering to her baby, as she bounces it up and down.
“Is this it?” I ask. “Where’s your mother, Allie, the other parents?”
I look around at the children, the red marks on their foreheads, and I understand.
“She’s not here, Daddy,” Allie says, walking back to me, grasping my hand. “There was a price to pay, the offering on the hill.”
The boy nods his head and speaks up. “There were choices to be made,” he says, “And our parents made them. The way of the old world is gone, destroyed,” he says. “This is a new beginning, a second chance.”
I take a breath, and hold my daughter’s hand. I look into the faces of the children, the way they stand close to one another, the wood, the water, the food—united in their efforts, the echo of their parent’s sacrifice branded on their skin.
“Do you have room for one more?” I ask.
The boy looks at my forehead, the red stamp, down at my daughter, and laughs.
“Of course we have room,” he says. “We’re working on the fire right now,” he says. “Gets cold around here at night,” he chuckles, “as I’m sure you know. Not as bad as the other side, but still—pretty frigid. Come rest by the ring, catch up with your daughter, we have water, food—come, sit. It’ll be dark soon.”
Allie leads me by the hand toward the bonfire, and the children follow us, laughing and asking questions, their hands on me, just a little touch here and there, making sure I’m real, something new, something familiar, and then they disperse into the woods, back to work. I am an exciting part of their day, but they know what comes at night, and to survive, there must be fire, there must be heat. We sit and talk, unable to release each other, holding hands, her climbing into my lap. Beyond the houses crops grow, the dead desert south of us gone, the fertile soil here ripe for growth, no nuclear winter, no death and disease, the mountain, perhaps, separating the living from the dead. I don’t think too hard about it—I simply hold my daughter, and breathe.
BEYOND SYMMETRY
BRUCE BOSTON
Studies have shown
that the human eye/mind
finds beauty in symmetry.
The less symmetrical
your face is,
the less beautiful you are.
The less symmetrical
your face is,
when you look in the mirror,
the image staring back at you
is not what others see
when they look at you.
That mole high
on your left cheek,
along with your crooked eye tooth,
are now on the right,
and suddenly you are left-handed
instead of right,
or vice versa.
Who is this stranger that
returns your glance
with all his parts switched around?
And as you turn away from
his questioning stare,
as he turns away from yours,
you wonder if he is suddenly
wondering as you are
about beauty and symmetry
and the world around you.
It occurs to you
that the countenance
of the moon is asymmetrical
to the extreme,
pocked and scarred
by countless violent impacts
and volcanic eruptions,
Yet still you find it beautiful.
Shows what good lighting can do.
THOSE WHO WATCH
FROM ON HIGH
ERIC J. GUIGNARD
THE BOY LOOKED UP TO THE SKY and smiled, and it seemed to Lee that the boy looked up at him, smiled at him.
The boy’s teeth were white and perfect little squares like the teeth you saw on a poster in the orthodontist’s waiting room: Trust us to make your teeth look like this! But Lee doubted this boy had ever been to an orthodontist. Lee doubted this boy had been much of anywhere, outside of a few miles from his mud-brick shack. The boy was just blessed by nature with a beautiful smile.
Lee came down closer, closer still, nearing the desert, nearing the shack. He reached for the ground. His boots made contact. He took a tentative step, then another, impossibly feeling solid earth beneath him. He began to walk. The boy wasn’t far away, and Lee watched him play. The boy rolled a ball into a skirmish line of toy soldiers, and they toppled over. He charged with a thrusting gun, dueling invisible opponents. He climbed a rock. Chased a lizard. Drew a picture in the dirt with a stick. The boy was happy, and this made Lee happy.
Lee’s son, Jacob, would have been about the same age as this boy, and it reminded him terribly of all the lives that are taken too soon. If circumstances were different, it’d be Lee in that shack in Afghanistan, playing with his son, trying to survive from one day to the next. The boy with perfect teeth was about eight years old and had two siblings that were both still infants. That was a large gap in age between the children, and Lee wondered if there had once been others. If circumstances were different, Jacob would have had siblings. If circumstances were different, Jacob would still be alive, and Aimee alive, and they’d have three children by now. Three … just like the family he watched.
“Stand by for orders.”
The voice came to him, filling his head, but he couldn’t make sense of it. The words didn’t fit with his surroundings. Lee felt the uneven ground beneath his feet, one step sinking into white sand and the next step stumbling over ancient stones. The region was so rocky that the danger of misstep loomed greater than snipers’ bullets; out here a snapped ankle could be a slow and lonely death.
Desert heat swirled against Lee, and a line of sweat ran down his temple. But the boy was close, so close … Lee wanted to run to him, touch him, tell him to take his happiness and flee everything.
“Check the angle, Bruce. We’re tracking insurgents, not sand dunes.”
Again it felt unnerving, like someone speaking in a dream, and Lee only wanted the voice to leave him alone so he could remain with the boy. Instead, the voice seemed to pull him back, seemed to lift him in the air, and the boy and his desert home fell away like a sinking marble.
“Bruce, you with me?”
The dream voice was louder, and the wasteland faded below. A computer screen coalesced over it, like overlapping frames of film. He wasn’t there. He, no, it—the Drone—was there, following the boy and his family, but he—Lee—was in a trailer on Nellis Air Force Base. He was First Lieutenant James Lee, and he was on duty.
“Bruce, report!”
Reality came back fully, and he remembered that it sucked.
He was an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles operator. Six computer monitors glowed before him, jostling for attention with moving images, scrolling feeds, changing numbers, things blinking, red, green, eighty-four, nine, radius, lock, C2, surge. It was a child’s room of toys, messy and random, too much visual stimuli going on at once. He operated half the cockpit of a remote aircraft on the other side of the world. Watching, ready to fire a missile anytime onto unknowing targets.
Lee adjusted camera #3, and the video feed panned back to widen its scope.
“Roger that, sir. Adjusting angle,” Lee replied to Disick, the other half.
“I don’t know how you made it through the academy, Bruce.”
Bruce. He hated that nickname.
Never mind he was blue-eyed with hair fair as butter, or that his family were English-settled coal miners from the Appalachians and the farthest one could get from the Orient, Lee had been christened ‘Bruce’ upon assignment to the squad, no explanation necessary. It was just funny to the rest of them. He’d grown up trappin
g and fishing, an outdoorsman before he could say da-da, yet zit-faced Captain Disick called him Bruce while coining his own unlikely nickname of ‘Hunter.’ The irony went unheeded. Disick was built soft as a wet cow pie and looked like he’d be better suited playing World of Warcraft than soldiering. Of course, in current confines video gaming skills were traits superior over machismo. Plus Disick was his commanding officer, so Lee didn’t say jack or shit back to him. They flew together which was supposed to inspire camaraderie, though Lee detested his younger co-pilot; Disick loved the power play one increase in rank held over him, and he hid behind it like a shield while picking apart Lee on a basis as punctual as cadence.
Captain Disick flipped a switch, taking over from the automated control pilot. He sat to Lee’s left less than five feet away, in front of his own bank of computers, though still speaking to Lee in a headset, never turning to face him. “Disregard and disengage. Colonel Brown just ordered we bring the craft home. The next shift can watch the hajjis sleep.”
“Affirmative, Captain,” Lee said.
“That’s ‘Hunter’,” Disick said. “Remember, Colonel Brown says it’s good for squad morale to use our code names.”
“Yes, sir.” Lee replied, deadpan.
“That was an order, Bruce.”
“Yes … Hunter.”
Time to leave.
The trailer door opened from outside. The next shift of drone operators waited to enter, faces already dull, already exhausted, the look of adult children sentenced to twelve-hour detention and dragging their feet to begin.
Lee went to the door and nodded at them, but said nothing. On the other side, the sky was bright, colored as pale water, colored exactly as the Afghani sky. He expected that once he walked out, he would see the boy’s mud home in the distance. There’d be a picture drawn in the dirt, a lizard on a rock, toy soldiers lined up in battle. There’d be someone high above observing him.
Twelve hours. He’d been on duty, staring at a patch of desert the size of a football field for twelve mind-numbing hours. His night shift began at seven p.m. and ended at seven a.m., and when Lee went into the Air Force trailer it was day and when the door was unlocked to allow him out, it was a new day. Flying over Afghanistan occurred during their day, opposite hours of Pacific Standard Time. It seemed to Lee that night no longer existed; he saw only desert sun at all times.
No wonder he couldn’t turn the visions off so easily. When you hyper-gaze too long into a television screen, the afterimage haunts you, that sense of disorientation. Though he existed here at Nellis, just north of Las Vegas, half of every day was spent in Afghanistan. Half the day he felt he existed in Afghanistan. It was not something he could easily reconcile, the here and there, every day, looking at two worlds which were so much alike, but were not.
“Christ, Bruce, move out of the way. You’re blocking our egress.”
Disick was behind him. Lee blinked and exited the trailer. Three metal steps down and he was on a cement lot. The Mojave Desert surrounded Nellis Base, glints of quartz and mica sparkling from its golden sand. Like the sky, Nevada’s desert appeared identical to Afghani desert.
We’re the same all over.
Disick plodded past, and the other operators went inside, door closed on a time lock, unable to reopen until the next shift change for security reasons. All routine. The trailer was just a souped-up shipping container, ambiguously known as a Ground Control Station. But inside it was filled with death rays and mad scientist diodes and buttons that caused people to explode.
And there were several dozen trailers here, each ready to obliterate, each part of the 29th Attack Squadron. That’s who he was attached to.
He knew somebody he’d like to attack …
Another day.
Lee flew the UAV drone far above, where air was too thin even for clouds to form. The ancient village of Oraza Zaghard sat below like a pile of ash dropped upon a beautiful quilt. Lee had once tried a Google search of the village to supplement the demographics the military supplied. Although it was highlighted on the Air Force map, he found no reference to it on the internet. The village was insignificant to the rest of the world; only those who lived there, and those who watched from on high, seemed privy to its existence.
Lee directed the cameras downward. The Multi-Spectral Targeting System streamed color video back to the Air Force trailer, and as the sensors zoomed in, so did Lee. He felt like he was soaring, then diving, straight down through the sky. Zooming in, zooming in. Afghani desert swirled around, and he moved through Sar-e Pol Province, past Oraza Zaghard, and to the mud-brick shack at the end of a winding footpath. Back to the boy …
The boy who had no name. He was only ‘Son of Mullah Hamid Zadran, suspected insurgent.’
The camera lenses were so high-powered that Lee was able to pick out the scars on the boy’s arms and the cowlicks in his hair. The camera lenses were so high-powered he felt as if he were there alongside the boy.
The family had one goat, and the boy ran to it, circling with waving arms. The goat stood there, staring plainly, then suddenly turned and darted away. The goat was too quick, and the boy could not catch it. He sat on the ground and laughed.
Lee was quicker than the boy; he reached out and caught the goat by a rope tether around its neck.
The boy looked at Lee and smiled, and Lee saw again how perfect those teeth were. The smile was honest, relieved, as if the boy expected him to be there all along, to watch over him.
Time to leave.
The trailer door opened from outside. The next shift of drone operators waited to enter.
Lee went to the door and nodded at them, but again said nothing. On the other side, the sky was bright, colored as pale water, colored exactly as the Afghani sky. It was all so familiar. He expected that once he walked out, he would see the boy’s mud home in the distance. There’d be a picture drawn in the dirt, a lizard on a rock, toy soldiers lined up in battle. There’d be someone high above observing him.
“Rifle!”
Lee vaulted to the ground, sprawling. Only he was three metal steps above cement, so rather than vaulting, it was falling, hard and fast. He hit concrete, bruising his knees and elbows, but that didn’t matter. Roll up on reflex, one hand over the back of his head, the other hand covering behind his neck.
Disick laughed.
There was no rifle, the term for incoming missile.
“Just keeping you on your toes, Bruce.”
The other operators laughed too.
“What the hell, Disick?”
“Have to live up to my nickname. I was hunting you.” He laughed again.
Lee stood, balling his hands to fists. But he didn’t react the way he wanted, instead turning his back.
Disick knew somebody high in the chain of command. That’s who watched over him. That’s how he got his Captain’s bars so young. But Disick didn’t know his ass from his double chin when it came to real hunting. It was all a video game to him.
Someday his superior by one rank would get his due.
“Lighten up, Bruce,” Disick said. “It’s only war.”
It was difficult trying to sleep during the day. The blinds of his bungalow were drawn and it was dark inside, but Lee’s brain knew the sun was up, and his body’s rhythm fluttered anxiously as if he’d grossly overslept something important. He could never grow accustomed to nocturnalism, the knowledge that it was nine in the morning outside, and he was only now trying to fall asleep, trying to get in a good eight hours before tonight’s shift began.
Eight hours … who was he kidding? He’d be lucky to get four. Lee had taken a couple sleeping pills, but those never seemed to work, instead just muddying the line between wakefulness and slumber even more.
Everything—day, night, Afghanistan, Nevada, here, there—was a blur, a series of memories of what may have occurred and hopes for what could occur, playing side-by-side, like viewing two videos simultaneously …
… Lee’s thoughts interrupted. He�
�d returned to the trailer. Disick sat next to him and said something, and Lee responded by reflex, and that was it. They fell silent, having nothing more to say for hours while stationed alongside each other.
Lee felt himself drifting. Again. His face hung slack, his mind numb, conditioned to study the target on the ground, watching, just watching. The computers around him had long ago fallen into the backdrop of his mind, filed as forgotten thoughts. He felt dull and tired like sitting inside a car on a road trip that goes on too long. Sweaty, grimy, breathing each other’s air, each other’s smells. Did Disick ever bathe? Come to think of it, when did he himself bathe? The world outside the Air Force trailer seemed dim, speeding past on simulated auto-pilot just as it did inside. He couldn’t remember much of it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed, the last time he’d slept, eaten, or felt happy.