by Stephen King
No, scratch that, he remembered that last time he was happy. Watching Jacob play …
… Lee had been married once. Had a son once. Spent six years as an enlisted man in Air Force logistics at Edwards Base, dreaming of the day he’d transfer out of low-grade clerk’s activities. He wanted away from the rote routine of uniformed paper pushers. He wanted action, to reach the combat zones, kill the bad guys like his father. So Lee pushed himself, got accepted, and then finished Officer Candidate School third in his class. He could fly a Raptor or a Lightning II high above the world. He was going to be badass.
But then everything changed.
Aimee died. Jacob died.
It had been nighttime, cruising down Interstate 15 to visit her parents in San Diego. A drunk driver hit them. He came out of nowhere, absolutely nowhere, no lights on, no warning, just one moment Lee was driving their leased Corolla while Aimee and Jacob snoozed, and the next they were blindsided. All Lee could liken to the impact was that of a missile slamming into the side of their car, and he hated himself for that comparison. The Corolla was knocked through the guardrail, tumbling in lazy rolls down a ravine that sliced through the Clark Mountain range. Lee didn’t have his seatbelt on. The others did. Lee was thrown from the car with barely a scratch. The others were burned alive in the ensuing fire.
Though he survived unharmed, part of him still died. Life became that car wreck, confusing and pointless. He was evaluated as mentally unfit to fly a jet. Inexplicably though, the next week he was transferred to Nellis and assigned to fly one from behind a desk, even though military psychologists claimed it was tougher to pilot a drone than a real plane. The work was time-intensive, vigilantly staring at the same plot of earth through cameras for months on end. Watching, just watching, just another rote routine like when he worked as a logistics clerk.
It’s not the planes that are drones. We’re the drones, filling the monotony of our lives with buttons and monitors.
Lee lay in bed dreaming of Aimee and Jacob, dreaming after the accident, after the fire, of their melted stick bodies that looked as if they’d been doused in tar …
… And he knew somebody he’d like to attack. Hadn’t he been tracking that person for a long time, hunting them?
The drunk driver who rammed them off the road. Lee could fire a missile anywhere in the world. To kill the bad guys, he had only to watch and wait …
… And he watched the boy in Afghanistan play with toy soldiers. They were cheap plastic men, molded in olive green that every toy aisle in every drug store carried since toys and aisles and drug stores first came around. Even there, in that country, some sales clerk had gotten his wares dispersed all the way to the mud shack at the end of a winding footpath outside Oraza Zaghard.
Lee had played with those exact soldiers when he was a boy, and his own father played with them before him.
“Yup, same poses, same faces,” his father once said. His father died in Iraq.
The green solider frozen with a bayoneted rifle swung overhead. The solider with a deadly flame thrower. The one with a far-reaching mortar. The one with a pistol and binoculars which, though no insignia was present, was always assumed to be the unit’s officer.
Jacob, too, had played with those soldiers …
… Lee walked through the desert in Afghanistan, feeling the hot sand even through his combat boots …
No, he was in Nevada. Nellis Air Force Base. He walked through the sand of the Mojave desert …
But the mud shack was there.
So, too, was the UAV trailer, alongside, but not, like viewing two videos simultaneously …
Both screens went black …
There was something watching him.
Lee stepped to the side of the trailer, his back hugging its wall. The sky was bright, colored as pale water, colored exactly as the Afghani sky. He looked to it, searching for the drone. He blinked. He blinked again, a hundred more times. Though it wasn’t visible, he knew something was up there … somewhere, someone watching him … targeting him.
He was alone on the ground. Lee suddenly wanted to run back into the trailer where it was safe, but the next shift was already inside, door closed, locked.
He dashed across the lot, past the other trailers lined up like desks in a classroom. The red crosshairs of a target seemed to hover over each of them, but the biggest target followed himself. His squadron fired missiles like video games onto other countries, and some day those missiles would be returned.
Even now, satellites had watched him exit the trailer, knew he was the one pushing the button. Satellites, drones, cameras, eyes, all watching …
Was the boy watching him on his own monitor, inside a mud shack in Oraza Zaghard? Or was the boy inside the trailer, and Lee in Afghanistan?
UAV operators weren’t supposed to experience the same effects of post-traumatic stress as those pilots actually flying jets into global combat zones. But he grappled daily with the hazards of depression, insomnia, and anxiety.
One time, Lee had even been so unnerved by these ailments that he’d worked up the courage to approach Captain Disick outside the trailer. Back then, Disick wasn’t so overweight as he was fleshy, the way a linebacker may look: solid, but with those too-plump curves, like being swaddled in extra layers of clothing. Now Disick was just ‘fat ass-fat’ and Lee wondered how he could ever pass a fitness test. Or did it matter? After all, the future of wars was only button-pushing.
“Sir, can I ask you something?” Lee asked.
“S’up?”
“Do you … well, ever come out of there and feel like you’re losing track of where you are?”
“What?”
Lee knew Disick heard what was asked, and that he understood it, so the curt response meant he was more baffled as to why Lee would ask such a thing.
Lee tried again. “Disassociation. That’s what the doctors call it. Does it ever get to you, so you’re not sure if we’re here or still staring at another land?”
“Don’t tell me you’re ready for the shrinks already,” Disick replied. “Long enough day without dealing with your bullshit.”
Lee never told Disick about Aimee and Jacob. Maybe their relationship would have been different if he had. Maybe Disick would have understood why his co-pilot was a glum, tightlipped burnout. But Lee never told anyone about Aimee and Jacob.
Lee just rubbed his eyes, playing it cool. “Sorry, Captain. Like you said, it’s been a long day.”
“Then get some sleep. Tomorrow will be another long one.” Disick walked away, probably to pound beers at the Officers’ Club.
And now, something, someone, watched Lee from on high. He’d had this sense before, often, but it’d been growing stronger lately, slowly stronger, like zooming in and refocusing. Were they tracking him like the insurgents? Did they know of his plot? Did they know about who he wanted to attack …?
’Cause he’d found that drunk driver, hadn’t he? One push of a button, just one push, and Jerome Anderson of 3145 Wingate Ave. would be blasted to Kingdom Come. In the land of dropped bombs, could it be so inconceivable if a drone missile happened to defect and land at that very address?
Lee could not see them—you could never see the drones—they were a quarter mile high in the sky. But he knew better than anyone else, they were there, watching, waiting.
They watched everybody.
Just like Lee had watched Jerome once he returned from Chino Prison. A lousy two years was all he served, reduced vehicular manslaughter charges for the deaths of Jacob and Aimee. But Lee tracked him down with a reprogrammed missile at his fingertips.
Lee could do it. The failsafe systems were overridden, the drone armed, the target locked in. He could even find a way to blame the wayward missile on Disick. He could do it, all he had to do was push a button …
But before Lee acted, Jerome Anderson of 3145 Wingate Ave. died suddenly of circumstances unrelated to Lee’s doing, run over by another drunk driver. Lee had waited too long, the opport
unity for revenge snatched from him as unexpectedly as the lives of his family.
That was over a year ago, yet something still watched Lee.
Another day.
Lee was on duty. He sat before his bank of computers watching the same football field-sized patch of desert. Watching the same mud-brick shack of Mullah Hamid Zadran.
On this day, Lee was alert. His nerves tingled as if they caught fire. Abu Ayyub al-Husseini was en route, a target considered ‘high value,’ this being a term which always reminded Lee of video games where the Bosses were worth the most points.
Lee’s monitors flashed more images than normal, more lights blinked, numbers scuttling past. A multitude of voices filled his head, Intelligence Analysts chattering back and forth. Observe, confirm, report. They patched into a team of Information Officers inside another trailer, maybe next door to Lee, maybe on another planet. He never knew where the rest of the squad was. For security reasons.
“There he is, Bruce,” Disick said, his voice nearly in glee. “There’s al-Husseini. We’re gonna nail that bastard.”
Onscreen, a Mercedes Benz slowly drove up the winding dirt road to Zadran’s mud shack.
Colonel Brown joined the teleconference. Whenever he spoke, his voice was garbled with static, as if he spoke far, far away, in an underground bunker. Lee had never met the Colonel, but he knew that static-filled voice would haunt him the rest of his days. Colonel Brown was the great decider of who lived and who died.
Today, it was thumbs-down. Colonel Brown said, “We have a high value target arriving. Prepare to prosecute.”
An analyst added as an afterthought, “Confirm clear of civilians.”
Lee felt sick. They were going to bomb the boy’s home. He was going to bomb it, was going to be ordered to bomb it. He didn’t want to—God knew that—but he was merely a drone. A voice he barely recognized as his own replied, “Only Zadran has been observed on premises in the past hour.”
“Good,” Colonel Brown said. “Killing two bad birds with one big stone.”
Zadran stood outside the shack, talking animatedly on a cell phone. He was alone. Should have been alone. Earlier, a neighbor had driven to take away Zadran’s wife and children. The boy should have been with them … of course the UAV Predator had banked left at a moment the family entered the car, which had been on the blind side of their home, so it wasn’t certain. And heat signature didn’t do squat during the day, when the desert sand cooked hotter than the readout of anything alive. But Lee hadn’t seen anyone else since, couldn’t prove to the others anyone else since.
Military intelligence had been tracing Abu Ayyub al-Husseini for weeks. He was supposedly plotting some sort of attack, and Zadran was supposedly working with him. al-Husseini was one of the bad guys. So was Mullah Hamid Zadran.
Lee was never privy to the validity of such charges. Proof was classified on a ‘Need To Know Basis.’ And Lee didn’t need to know. He only needed to push a button when told, so someone could die on the other side of the world.
The Mercedes Benz arrived at the mud shack, and a static-filled voice ordered, “Prosecute.”
Time to push the button. Time for Lee to launch death from on high. Zadran and al-Husseini would have no warning. To them, the missile would come out of nowhere, absolutely nowhere.
Lee hesitated. A line of sweat ran down his temple, as it had when he walked in the desert.
It didn’t matter if he’d seen the boy or not in the last hour, because he knew, didn’t he, just knew something was wrong …
“Prosecute.”
This is what he trained for; there should be no emotional attachment to the enemy.
He wouldn’t do it. They’d court martial him, but he’d have a clear conscious.
“Prosecute.”
It was only a duty. Only reflex. Only rote routine. And if he didn’t bomb the target, Disick would.
Disick would enjoy it …
“Prosecute.”
“Rifle,” Lee said, and an AGM 114 Hellfire missile was set loose.
It was twenty-five seconds until ‘Splash,’ when the payload detonated. Lee had a window of time to maneuver the missile if any non-targets approached the area. But the monitors were clear, only the intended targets visible, only Zadran and al-Husseini.
The missile soared down, down, down.
Still there was time to maneuver the missile away, but no reason. He had the controls and the authority to do so, until seven seconds before impact when it turned too late.
The seven second countdown came and passed. Six seconds until impact, five—
Disick whispered the numbers in reverence, “Four, three—”
Lee knew, without knowing how, what was to happen, and it did. It happened just as he knew; the boy exited from inside the shack. The boy flew a cardboard airplane in his hand.
“Abort!”
Two-too-late, one-too-late, detonation.
A flare of white bloomed on their screens, a silent, beautiful flower.
“Where’d that kid come from,” Disick said. “I never saw him before …”
“Confirm target.” Colonel Brown’s voice came online, barely understood over the static.
“We might have got a civie,” Disick admitted.
“The boy,” Lee whispered.
Brown was silent. Static filled Lee’s ears.
“Sir, sir,” Disick asked. “What do we do?”
“Return to base, gentlemen. Good work. Target eradicated.”
“But the boy—”
“It wasn’t a boy,” Brown said. “It was a dog.”
The voice clicked away.
“You saw it,” Lee told Disick. “A dog doesn’t walk upright in sandals.”
“Colonel Brown said it was a dog, so that’s what it was.”
Disick sounded relieved, detached.
“You saw it—”
“It was a dog, First Lieutenant Lee, and I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
The use of Lee’s proper rank and name unnerved him. It made the matter official. A dog. In records, the boy would never have died, would be living, in the ruins of that mud shack forever.
He wished Disick would have instead called him ‘Bruce.’
Four sleeping pills that morning, and he dreamed between there and here.
Lee walked in the desert, sand crunching beneath his combat boots. It was rocky and hot. Some of the rocks were black and shaped like crumpled leaves, and it took a while to realize the black rocks were debris from the mud shack. He kept walking and found a single wall that still stood, precariously truncated and shorn off smooth at each side. In the center of that wall, a door hung canting from twisted hinges.
He wanted to cry, but nothing came out. It was a desolate land, a dead land, and he belonged here. He dropped his head to his chest, eyes cast to the ground. Something white glistened there like a chip of porcelain. He bent and picked it up.
A tooth. A small, perfect white tooth.
Lee’s cry had no trouble coming out now.
Another tooth lay three feet away, and Lee picked it up also. He searched the sand for more teeth, an idea forming in the back of his mind to reconstruct that which he’d destroyed.
He found fifteen. But that wasn’t all, was it? How many teeth fit inside a boy’s mouth? He seemed to remember there should be twenty …
The door in the ruined wall creaked open. Lee looked up. The boy stood there, visible within the doorframe, and this did not surprise Lee.
The boy—it—now appeared as a charred monster, a skewer of steak chunks dropped and forgotten in the broiler. Or it could have been the sculpture of a thin monkey built from wire and car parts, then sprayed matte black, though it moved like a living thing with half its bones snapped apart. There was just enough support left for the boy to walk in a feeble, lurching stumble toward Lee though, with every movement, something shifted loose under its charcoal skin, something that appeared ready to break free with a hollow crack and a poof
of ash.
It dragged its feet slowly, leaving long charcoal smears with each step like skid marks of a hot rod that’s peeled away on asphalt. That same smell of hot rod was there too, burning rubber and gasoline fumes that caused Lee to gag.
Closer it came, until halting before Lee, looking to him expectantly from hollow eye sockets. They remained this way, the child’s head upraised to him, patiently waiting. Lee held the child’s sightless gaze for ten long seconds before he could take it no more.
Lee held out his hand, opened it. The boy’s perfect teeth rested on his palm.
The child took its teeth one by one and replaced them back into the horrible gummy blackness of its mouth. One by one, the teeth resumed their place, like connecting a jigsaw puzzle. First a molar, then a canine, another molar, then an incisor, pearls in a pond of tar. There were a few missing—Lee hadn’t found them all—but by the time it was done, the boy’s perfect smile had mostly returned. It flashed that mostly-perfect smile to Lee, happy again.
The boy stumbled to a large boulder, where a melted mass of plastic army soldiers lay like green bubblegum that’s been chewed and stretched apart. The boy pulled some of the soldiers free; they were ruined, formless, like the boy, but the boy played with them.
Grating commands given from binocular-wielding officers to mortar and flamethrower-armed troops came from the boy’s throat as it played, sounding like the dry whisk of sandpaper rubbing against rough wood.
Some of the sounds were even recognizable. Boom, whisk. Pow-pow, whisk. Rat-a-tat, whisk.
Lee went to the boy …
… Only now it wasn’t a dream anymore because he and Disick were flying over Syria. Of course, Lee was still in a trailer in the Mojave Desert outside Las Vegas, but he watched over Syria.
After Oraza Zaghard, Lee and Disick had been enthusiastically congratulated. Oraza Zaghard was a success. But then the minor city of Saraqeb, located in an insurgent-filled corner of Syria, had been assigned as the newest directive of high value. They flew there post-haste to watch over another patch of desert the size of a football field.