Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  "You don't really believe that."

  I leaned forward and stabbed my own finger at Patrón's desk. "You're damned right I do. If I'd been killed in that fight, I'd be waking up again in the Amortals Project. I'd have a few less memories, but I'd be much better for the wear."

  "The other people in that room were all expendable."

  "Including my great-great-great-grandson?"

  Patrón winced at that. "If he was working with the One Resurrectionists, he wasn't your relative any more, Ronan. He was an enemy of the state. You lost him long ago."

  "Maybe I wouldn't have. Maybe I'd have had the chance to turn things around with him – if you hadn't sent in an assault team to rescue someone who, by definition, didn't need rescuing."

  "Or maybe he was just a distraction from you doing your god-damned job!" Patrón slapped his hands down on his desktop to punctuate his words.

  "I was following a lead," I said. "I didn't have many left."

  Patrón glowered at me. "You went from your partner's hospital room to stumble straight into a nest of armed insurrectionists – and you got your multiple-great-grandson killed over it. What the hell is wrong with you?"

  "I didn't pull that trigger," I said. I felt my anger at Patrón growing. How dare he try to push me around like this? "I would have traded places with him in a heartbeat."

  "And that's just the problem," Patrón said. "The Dooley I know would never have let himself get drawn into a situation like that. You're taking too many chances. You're falling right over the edge."

  His nostrils flared as he spoke. "The shrinks here tell me you're suffering from post-traumatic stress, survivor's guilt, and a general death wish. They figure the reason you're cutting everything so close to the line these days is that you want to die, permanently, and you're pissed off at Uncle Sam for refusing to let that happen."

  Patrón looked like he was doing everything he could to keep from spitting at me. He fought back adding in one more thing but couldn't help it. "You ungrateful bastard, you."

  I stared at my old friend. This, then, was the real bone of contention between us: that he'd had to work so hard to become amortal and I'd just had it handed to me.

  I'm not saying he wasn't right about the death wish. More than once I'd wished the USA would just let me die, but it had never seen fit to release me from my amortality. To be fair, I had never asked. It was one thing to die, but another entirely to demand that it be made permanent.

  I'd seen it happen before. Mostly it came from people who'd just watched their spouses or their kids pass on. They couldn't bear to go on without them, and they insisted on being removed from the Amortals Project.

  It was hard to be put into the project, but even more difficult to leave. It required a battery of tests and evaluation by a panel of psychiatrists who were all interested in cracking open your soul and hunting around inside for any flaw they thought they might be able to cure. Even then, there was a waiting period.

  Once, a CIA agent named Jeremy Wilson – a top man in line for the director's job – gave up fighting the bureaucracy and took the matter into his own hands. He showed up in Langley and started shooting every amortal he could find until the black ops team they sent in finally stopped him.

  They didn't bring him back.

  I felt my hand twitching. Maybe it was my trigger finger. I was still coming down from the adrenaline that had been pumping through me in the National Cathedral, I knew, but that didn't make me feel any more stable.

  I snarled at Patrón. "I'm sorry you had to work so hard to become an amortal, but I don't care. I didn't ask for this. I don't particularly want it."

  Patrón stood up, leaned over his desk, and snarled right back at me. "I can have that revoked. All I have to do is fire you, and it's all over: you're on your last life, Ronan."

  I pulled out my sidearm and hefted it in my hand.

  Patrón stood back and put his hands out, palms facing me. "Go ahead," he said. "You think if you shoot me, I won't remember this conversation, right? And we can just go right back to the way it used to?"

  He pointed at his eyes. "You think I'm not recording this? Every word? You think I won't find out what you've done?"

  "Shut up," I said.

  I looked down at my pistol. I'd carried a Nuzi for decades. Other agents went with fancier guns with more bells and whistles. I preferred a gun that did what it was supposed to, one that I could rely on in a fix. The more complex you made something, the more likely it was to fail.

  My life had gotten more and more complex over the years. I'd tried to keep it simple, but it had grown more complicated despite that. Legends had risen around and about me without my input. My old enemies bred new ones, foes I wasn't always sure I could comprehend. I lived in a world in which almost every person born in the same century as me was long dead – including everyone I'd ever really cared about – and I didn't much care for the few friends I had left.

  It was time to call Patrón's bluff.

  "Go ahead," I said. "Fire me. I dare you."

  Patrón gaped at me. "Are you serious? You think I won't do it?" He turned deadly serious.

  I stared into his eyes and saw the right one twitch twice. "You don't have the balls. You never did have the stomach for dirty work. You have other people do it for you. That's why you're the director and I'm still an agent."

  I held the gun up in front of me, showing it to him. "I don't mind getting my hands bloody."

  Patrón's eyes flew so wide I could see the whites all the way around them, and his face grew crimson.

  "You think you're such a hard-ass?" he said.

  He grabbed his shirt and ripped it open. The buttons went flying everywhere, tik-tik-tikking across his desk to the floor. He stabbed a finger into his chest, right over his heart.

  "Go ahead!" he shouted. "Shoot me! Right here! Right now!"

  Spittle flew from his face as he raged at me.

  "Here's your big chance," he said. "The one you've wanted for decades. Kill me, you bastard! I dare you!"

  I weighed my pistol in my hand. Then I came to a decision. I pitched the gun onto his desk. It dug a deep scratch in the polished top.

  "You pathetic wreck," I said. "You can't provoke me into killing you. And you can't fire me. I quit."

  Patrón snatched up the gun and pointed it at me. "You can't quit," he said. "I refuse to accept your resignation!"

  I turned my back on him, hoping he'd shoot me before I reached the door. He didn't.

  As I left, I looked back over my shoulder. "Consider it an indefinite leave of absence then. I've had a death in the family."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Five's funeral was about as miserable an affair as I could ever remember attending. It was as hot a day as I'd ever suffered through during a DC July. Black clouds blanketed the sky, trapping the heat in like an army blanket, and the rain that slammed down from them did absolutely nothing to cool things off.

  I had gone to Five's apartment to break the terrible news personally to Lexa and Six. They had not taken it well, which offered me some small comfort. Even if I never had the chance to properly get to know Five, at least I could see that his family had loved him deeply.

  Lexa screamed and cursed at me and even threw a glass at me. Six just sat there and stared at the wallscreen, his eyes unfocused, lost. Then he got up and held his mother and let her collapse in his arms.

  I walked out and left them alone. Times like this, family meant the most to anyone. While I technically qualified, I wasn't any closer to them than any random stranger in their building.

  I contacted Six later that night and helped guide him through the funeral arrangements. One thing about living almost two hundred years is that you spend an awful lot of time burying people much younger than you. I knew more about funerals than I'd ever hoped to learn, but it came in handy at that moment.

  Five's death shattered Lexa. She'd been happy for her husband to work in a safe job and do safe things and plan fo
r a safe retirement that both of them could enjoy together. The thought that he'd died in a gunfight and wouldn't be around for the latter part of the life they'd planned together crushed her flat.

  To his credit, Six would have stepped up without any help from me. He had plenty of backbone, and although he might have been a bit of a slacker till now, he recognized responsibility when life handed it to him, and he ran with it.

  I didn't ask to attend the funeral. I didn't think it was my place. Six headed me off on the question anyhow, requesting that I give his mother some time and space before she had to be in the same space with me again.

  She surprised us both by asking about me on the morning of the funeral. She told Six that she wanted me to attend. If I couldn't be there for most of Five's life, she at least thought I should be there to see him off.

  The funeral was held, of course, in the National Cathedral, directly above the chapel in which Five had been killed. Presiding Bishop Wilma Wrightly, the head of the entire Episcopal Church, held the ceremony herself. Because of the connection to me, a few newshounds went and recorded the event surreptitiously. I wondered if Patrón would take the time to watch it himself or assign another agent to watch it and file a report.

  Despite being on my self-imposed leave of absence, no one had bothered revoking my clearance or limiting my access to my Service-related layers. As I entered the cathedral and shook the rain off my coat, I activated my ID layer and scanned the attendees. No one came up flagged as a Secret Service agent, of course. Nor were there any federal employees in the place beside myself. Three people showed with no tags at all, which could have meant a number of things.

  They could have been undercover agents from the Service or some other federal agency. They might have been part of Five's Luddite sect – although I doubted that. It would take a lot of guts and far fewer brains to show up at the funeral of a man who'd been shot to death by federal agents, no matter how close a friend he might have been. Or they could just have been poorer folks who couldn't afford a nanoserver and had no record of priors. That was unlikely but not impossible. Seeing how well and conservatively dressed the three people in question were, my money was on federal agents.

  It disheartened me to see how few people had showed up to the funeral. In all, there were only two dozen people.

  "Where is everyone?" I said to Six in a hushed tone as I sidled up next to him in the front pew, coming in from the side near the wall. He stood between me and his mother, who sat on the aisle. She wore a black dress and veil, and she stared straight at the coffin in the transept and did not look up to greet me.

  "Dad didn't have many friends," Six said just as softly. He was as somber as I'd ever seen him, even after getting kicked out of his home. He wore a new black suit that still had a tag dangling from one wrist. I reached over and tore it off.

  "Thanks," said Six. "Dad mostly kept to himself. He didn't have any brothers or sisters, and his parents died a while ago. I think–" He cut himself off and looked away from me.

  "What?"

  "I think he had a hard time living down his name."

  I arched an eyebrow at that. "Sure, it's unusual. It's Irish. I managed just fine with it."

  Six gave me a weak smirk. "It's not the name itself," he said. "It's who had it first that makes it hard to carry. You cast a long shadow, Grandpa."

  It had been a long time since I'd thought about that. Cal had mentioned it to me after he'd gone off to college. "It's not easy being the son of a hero, Dad." And he hadn't even had to bear the name.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I suppose it's only grown longer over the years."

  "Think about it like this," said Six. "You're a hundred and eighty-two years older than me. For you, it would be something like being named Thomas Jefferson VI."

  I goggled at him. He was right. "How long have you been waiting to use that little bit of trivia?" I asked.

  The hint of a smile curled at the edges of his mouth. "Just since Dad kicked you out of our place. I was thinking about you a lot that night, and I looked up everything I could find."

  I groaned inside. "Just remember, not everything you read is true. Not even most of it."

  "I figured that," said Six. "Those rumors about you disarming a dirty bomb in Union Station had to be fake, right?"

  I didn't say anything. Six wrinkled his brow and stared at me. "Right?"

  I pointed to the bishop entering the transept. "I think the funeral's about to begin."

  Six grabbed my arm, his voice quiet and urgent. "What about the ones linking you to Heidi Klum?"

  I kept my eyes on the bishop. "I was never unfaithful to your great-great-great-great-grandmother."

  "She's been gone a long time, Grandpa."

  His eyes fell on his father's casket as the bishop's procession walked past it, and he fell silent. Colleen might have been well over a hundred years gone, but Six hadn't been without Five for even a hundred hours.

  I barely paid any attention to the actual ceremony. I'd been to far too many funerals in my time, and I was sure I could preside over one myself by this point. I kept my head bowed, and lost myself in thought, following Six's bodily cues and my own muscle memory as to when I should sit or stand. At least I didn't have to kneel.

  Speaking about Colleen made me wonder what she would have thought about all of this if she'd still been alive, somehow made amortal too. I suspect – no, I know – that she wouldn't have allowed me to drift apart from our descendants. I would have been as much a part of Five's life as I had been with Two, my first grandchild.

  I'd never retired from the Service, so I'd never played the part of the doting old man who lavishes attention on his grandchildren during his golden years. I'd avoided the golden years entirely by getting shot and revived as the first amortal. I'd gone from sixty-three years old to twenty overnight.

  That had put a horrible strain on my marriage. Colleen had never been any more self-conscious about aging than any other woman I'd known, but the fact that I was suddenly more than forty years younger than her shook her to her core.

  "Would you rather they had let me die?" I asked her once, during one of our most heated arguments.

  "Ronan did die!" she said. "You're not my husband! You're just some changeling child slipped into his casket before we could put him in the ground!"

  "If you really believe that, then why don't you leave me?" I asked. "How can you live with me? How can you pretend to be married to me if I'm not really your husband?"

  She fell into a sobbing, helpless heap. "I can't help it." She whispered to me, "I loved him so much. I can't bear the thought of him being gone."

  I knelt down next to her then and put my arm around her shoulders. She looked up finally and put a hand on my cheek. I hadn't realized it was wet with my own tears until then.

  "You may not be my husband," Colleen said. "But you're all I have left of him. And you remind me so much of him that it breaks my heart to look at you."

  I pulled my arm back, but she clung to me then. "But it hurts even worse to think of life without you. That you'd be out there living as Ronan without me while I sat here weeping for him. So stay," she said. "Please stay."

  I'd done everything I could after that to convince her that she was wrong, that I was still her husband, the man she'd fallen in love with so many years ago. I don't know if I ever convinced her, or if maybe I just needed to convince myself, but I know that many of those years were happy ones for us.

  Ten years after I first came back, we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Colleen was seventy-three years old at the time. I was the same age, although I looked thirty. She used to look at the photos of the party we held and laugh and laugh and laugh.

  The cancer came for her soon after that. It started in her ovaries, and it spread fast. By the time we found it, it had metastasized so far into her that the doctors could barely tell where the disease ended and Colleen began. Despite that, she took a long time dying. She fought for every last minute of
her life: chemo, hospitals, quacks. She did everything she could to spend every possible second with me.

  I took a leave of absence from the Service so I could nurse her through everything. Cal and his wife Kira helped out as much as they could, and their kids stopped by whenever work, classes, or their own children permitted. In the end, though, there was nothing any of us could do to stop it.

  I had tried. I pulled in every favor I had. I begged, pleaded, wheedled, threatened, charmed, and cajoled. I tried to line up amortality for her as well, but we couldn't possibly afford it. On my government salary, I couldn't even make the payment on a single month's premium for amortality insurance, especially given how sick Colleen was at the time. No one would give me a loan that would cover the payments. I had no way to ever pay it back.