“Colonel, you have officers downstairs.” Volt’s voice shocked me back. I fumbled for the radio, juggled it over the rail and caught it by the stub of its antenna.
“Bodies, Volt, I’ve got bodies.”
“Children?”
I forced myself to judge the lengths of severed arms and legs, to contemplate the cut of cloth and the whiskers on waxen faces.
“No children,” I said and stared at the lone corpse that had evaded the insult of quartering and then back at those in the bin, wondering what had singled him out. It was the body of a man. He wore a double-breasted, blue blazer, open to allow for his entrails to straggle across his groin and gray dress pants. His necktie was pulled half-off, the knot a tight fist. Brass buttons on his jacket reflected shiny and new. Maybe, just maybe, Hillar had made a mistake. “We’re clear.”
I stumbled toward the stairwell, listening to the clatter of boots ascending. My head was fuzzy and full of the stench and horror. I leaned on the rail, feeling the wood bend beneath my weight. The head of the first bomb squad member bobbled as he climbed the remaining steps, gun holstered, armed only with a kit and a high-powered flashlight that lit the area brilliantly. He came into view and I saw him flexing his jaw, trying to keep from gagging at the smell. His eyes stared wildly at the baited fishhooks, understanding dawning with the emptying of his guts. He vomited over the edge, his dinner ringing out against the metal bottom.
I didn’t say anything as he heaved the contents of his stomach into the storage bin. I pushed myself off the wall and headed down the steps, brushing against the officers who climbed them, some with wide open eyes—the scene was a long way from handing out speeding tickets and domestic disturbances.
In the fresh air, I drew deep breaths and gripped my knees. I hadn’t witnessed such carnage since I’d seen the bodies of my soldiers scattered over a village square, where the branches of a stunted tree burned, and would continue to burn in my mind—Never. I started toward the edge of the cars, passing the helicopter empty of Pat.
Volt looked stoic, eyes unforgiving.
“I even tugged on the goddamn fishing line,” I told him. “Still, the whole building needs to be reviewed by the bomb squad now that we know no one’s alive up there.”
“No kids, either. You’ve got us running around. More hours off the search—” He wrung his hands. “We know how much gas a school bus takes and can draw a radius of so many miles. This is too far out. These officers can’t be searching when they’re following your mysterious leads.”
“These leads are progress, Volt, and you know it.”
“Tell that to the kids.”
Flashes from a photographer flared out between gaps in the grain elevator’s boards. Their presence surprised me, Volt tempting fate by allowing forensics in without a completed inspection by the bomb squad.
“You said it yourself. We don’t have time. We need evidence now, Colonel,” he said and tapped his watch.
At each flash, I flinched. I wished I had climbed down and searched through the body parts, just to be certain.
I sat on the edge of his bumper, shutting my eyes to the scene, and rested while listening to radio chatter. It was clear that Charlie was being played in the deeps. We were into the final day where we might expect to find the children alive. Depending on conditions and how well Hillar had treated them before the diner fiasco, they could already be dead. No time remained for games. My eyes moved to the granary; perhaps inside we could find some clue to their whereabouts.
With an immense crack, the cupola exploded into fragments.
I cried out, twisted away, and threw up my arms. The billow of heat flowed past, replaced with a deeper chill. Splinters of wood rained over me, and heavy beams toppled end over end to lie charred and smoking. The body of a rat flopped to the ground before my feet.
Officers spilled out of the doors of the building, joined by a dark flood of vermin. The top half was a torch that spewed oily smoke into the black sky.
My mouth hung open. I didn’t believe what I saw.
Yells and screams filtered through cracks in the barn board sides with the smoke. Officers and agents jammed the stairwell, fighting to reach safety, crushing one another in their panic.
My hands clenched so tight that my fingernails dug deep into my palms. The excited chatter of Leica rose above the crackling wood and calls. She gripped Handso’s wrist—evidently she had been interviewing him when the bomb exploded. Volt began to move toward the elevator, but turned, perhaps realizing nothing could be done.
“No more help, not unless you give up your source,” Volt yelled. “Before you kill us all.” And he jogged closer to the heat, his arm a shield against the blaze; although I knew it must be painful. Better to be burning than near to me. My eyes teared and I didn’t know if it was due to my failure or the hot smoke. I looked at my scarred wrists and then into the flames.
Chapter 24
I’d left with the building still blanketed in fire and screams lining the air with panic. Pat had dashed to the helicopter and told me he needed to get it airborne, or I’d have to explain to the general why it was a puddle of molten metal and plastic.
From my vantage through the helicopter windscreen, the paramedics in fluorescent yellow jackets worked with burn victims, and officers tried to save their friends before the fire department arrived. The emergency beacons were soon cold stars to the glaring sun of the flames engulfing half the granary. Even clear of it, the pleasant nutty smell of burning grain mingled with the stench of burnt rat and burnt bodies. The reek clung to my memory. The same in the sands as it smelled here. I had escaped once again. I had become the shade of death that I reviled in the general, and I quaked with post-battle tremors.
The flight, already over two hours long, stretched into silence, broken only by Pat’s uncomfortable coughs.
Once at the hospital, I waited for Pat to leave the roof before striding to the edge of the building. The hospital being a relatively squat fourteen stories, I stared up through a tunnel of concrete and steel. A strong wind rushed between the skyscrapers. I perched on the ledge, feeling the air whisk across my face. My iPhone buzzed. Swaying on the lip, I ignored the call. Traffic grumbled below; a breath of time between me and a future of shattered windshields and crushed metal. I thought of nothing.
I hung.
Nothing mattered. Not life, nor death. It was absurd; not simply meaningless, but blank. An entire world deluded. A city predicated on there being a purpose to it all. The majority thought that something lay beyond, something worth fighting for. Could I believe that the toil was enough?
My phone buzzed again and again. I sighed. Annoyed that my existential angst might be interrupted by a machine with more personality and social value than any one human, especially me, I probed in my pant pocket to shut it off. I blinked at the message. It was from Morph. Who was, of course, supposed to be dead.
She wrote: Joshua Bruns said that the trouble with quotes about death is that 99.999 percent of them are made by people who are still alive. So, I’m part of the 0.001 percent.
She was one bizarre little chick.
Morph went on: Listen, don’t fixate so much on death. It doesn’t matter. When we are alive, we are not dead, and when we are dead, we are no longer alive. There is no in-between. No dying. It is the dying that most people fear.
I frowned at the screen. The message had to be some sort of delayed messaging engine, and I wondered if she meant to mother me from the afterlife. My frown faded, and I found myself smiling at it. No dying. There were some in pain or who were demented that would have to disagree; dying is easier when Deeth sticks you full of drugs, and I wondered if this euthanasia, this compassionate death, was a draw for some of the terminals. Still, I understood.
“Too messy,” Attila said.
I turned to see him standing with his arms folded across his leather vest.
“You’d make an awful splatter from this height. Maybe even take someone with you.”
“You think I’m standing on a ledge because I want to suicide?” I asked wryly. “Just checking the view.” I hopped down.
“Pat radioed in what had happened,” Attila said, brushing a stray wisp of hair back into his ponytail along with beaded sweat.
I snorted. “I don’t even know what happened.”
“Volt called too.”
A shiver traveled from my neck through my limbs. I didn’t want to hear and I was annoyed that Volt had gone over my head. Attila licked his lips. “The general didn’t say what they found.”
I brushed past Attila and threw back the metal door to the stairs leading down into the hospital. The blast of dry, cool air made me cough. I headed down the stairs, Attila following, but I didn’t go straight to see the general, I went to my rooms and the closet where I stored my boxes of personal effects. For the first time since I returned from my curtailed tour, I wanted answers. I couldn’t remember which box it would be in, so I upended them one at a time onto my cot. Attila appeared in the doorway. Gold and gems jangled over the bedspread.
“What—?” he exclaimed.
“Pretend you didn’t see this,” I told him and went on with my search. Amongst the jewelry were lockets with photos and one brass-framed picture of my mother and father, the print yellow with age, their faces in profile, looking at each other with more love than I’d ever known. My mother wore the ruby-encrusted tiara that now graced the bed. It wasn’t what I was looking for, and I tore the cardboard off the next box and dumped its contents over the precious metals and gems. Photos and relics, all that was left of three generations.
“My grandfather wasn’t military; he was a business owner, automotive parts or something. Made a fortune, which his only son inherited. It all fell to me when my parents passed on.” I paused, touching a bundle of old letters. They were the notes from my godfather. An anonymous godfather who had helped me from everything to deciding to go to West Point to teaching me the ropes of the military. I didn’t know his name, but I knew how he smelled and how he wrote with great looping pen strokes. He had been a pillar for years until the annual letters had stopped coming.
“I should have charged you more.” Attila ogled the jewelry.
“I’ve never touched it. Not a dime,” I said, shifting the letters away. “I don’t know why.” I shrugged. “Never needed it, I guess—ahaa!” Out of a collection of albums and loose photographs, I pulled a photo so drained of color that it might as well have been black and white. It was held in a tarnished silver frame. “Come see this.” Attila was already at my shoulder as I traced my fingernail across the faces of my father’s platoon. On the far left, clean-shaven and baby-faced, cap jaunty on his head, stood my father. When I looked at him, I couldn’t stop the tightening in my chest. I tapped the man on the far right. “Who do you think that is?”
Attila scratched his scalp. “Is that the general?”
I turned to him. What was going on? “How is it I came to be recruited by the prior leader of my dad’s platoon?” From my field experience I was ever wary of coincidences and this one was too big to ignore. Why had the general recruited me? Weren’t there terminals he didn’t have to fly around the world to bring aboard?
“Didn’t your dad die in Vietnam?”
“Killed by enemy mortar fire.”
“While under the general’s command,” Attila said.
“Maybe.” I wrapped the photo up in a moth-eaten headscarf.
He frowned at a large crucifix studded with emeralds on a heavy chain. “You never knew your dad.”
“I was barely a month old when he died.” I pointed at the diamond ring he was fingering. “And put that back please.”
He grinned sheepishly. “Just kidding around, estate jewelry isn’t worth as much as you would think. Bad cuts to the diamonds—” He cleared his throat. “You going to ask the general what’s going on?”
“Not yet. I want to find out what really happened first. Don’t suppose you could …” I’m not one for puppy impersonations but I gave him what I hoped was a pleading look without degrading myself.
“Your dad? He’s too long dead.” He picked up the cross and held it up to the light. “Chris, is this frigging platinum?”
I smiled at the nickname. No one called me Chris anymore, and I liked it. It was a name a friend would call me. I nodded and laughed. Attila had draped a necklace of pearls about his neck and set the tiara on his brow.
“You look like the Queen Mother,” I said, casting an eye over the treasure. He gave a little wave, which served to make him look more effeminate than the jewelry had, before I began to retrieve the items and sweep them into their respective boxes as if I gathered scrap. My mother was probably rolling over in her grave.
Shouts came from the palliative unit where Francis, Arthur, and Sundarshan resided, muffled by the thick door. I frowned, striding into the hallway and looking from Purgatory and confrontation with the general to the security door.
Another, louder cry pierced an atmosphere typically morbidly silent. I ran down the hall and drew back the security door. The usual card game hadn’t begun when I’d returned from the granary—I assumed because it was too early. The lights in the common room were dim as were the hall lights, but bright light spilled through one doorway.
“Step back from the plug, sir.”
I came into the room, taking in the same male nurse I’d seen earlier and then the situation.
Arthur stood over Gupta; the chaplain’s hands were quaking as they clutched at a thick, grey cord that ran into the wall socket.
“Will pulling that kill Gupta?” I asked the nurse quietly.
“Within a minute,” he said, not taking his eyes off Arthur.
“Arthur,” I said. “You don’t want to do this.”
“We had a deal, him and me.” His eyes rolled. “Sikhs see death and birth as the same thing, you see. This …” He held the cord up. “This is unnatural.”
I saw that on Gupta’s chest lay his kirpan, an iron bracelet, and a wooden comb.
“Arthur,” I said. But I couldn’t disagree with him. Not me.
“You can’t stop me. I’ve waited too long already.”
The nurse dove, rolled, and came up in a crouch. I blinked surprise.
“No,” I shouted.
Arthur jerked the plug. And held it aloft with a grin on his face as he chanted: “Waheguru, Waheguru.”
The nurse clawed for the plug and finally caught the cord. He yanked it from Arthur’s grip and tried to slot the prongs into the socket, bent one, and then worked it straight with his thumb.
Arthur snatched the kirpan, pulled the knife, and held it to the nurse’s throat.
“You put that in the wall, I’ll put this in your throat,” Arthur explained.
The nurse dropped the plug and took a step back. Arthur sidestepped so that he held the knife between the nurse and the wall.
The nurse threw up his hands, saying, “I quit, I can’t handle this shit,” and walked out.
Arthur grinned at me. “Waheguru.”
Attila stood speechless in his tiara and pearls.
“The fewer here to witness this, the better,” I said, and he followed me out, leaving Arthur and Gupta alone.
Attila’s humor and Arthur killing Gupta had somehow managed to help me forget about the exploding grain elevator, but my lighter mood evaporated as I stepped to the threshold of Purgatory. The scents of death struck me first and I covered my mouth as I looked at Morph laid out on the cot with a vague smile upon her lips. Pale and wrapped in white, she looked an angel. Charlie was shoved into the corner like an old couch.
“She already sent back the intel.” General Aaron stood in the doorway to the observation area and office.
I nodded slowly.
>
“Saved people from a hijacked liquid petroleum gas tanker.” He grinned as if I had been driving the tanker. “Didn’t kill anyone. Terrorists could have used the tanker as a bomb.”
“I—” I was glad for Morph. This was what she had lived for. But at the same time I recognized the accusation in his telling.
“When you were in the sands, how did the enemy set booby traps?” His eyes glinted with expectation.
“Where was the bomb located, General?” I asked.
“That was an order.” His hands clenched. “You’re the expert, the MoH. How did the enemy set traps?”
“Buried them like mines. Put them under things—”
“Like under bodies.” He smiled. “In bodies.”
The image of the eviscerated banker exploded in my mind, and I leaned against the doorframe. “Yes, bodies.”
“Nothing can be confirmed due to the extent of the damage, but it is believed that the six officers who died today did so when they shifted a body. Others will be sporting scars like yourself. No one’s giving them a Medal of Honor, though. Volt might lose his pension.”
“I don’t care about Volt’s pension,” I mumbled. Blood pounded in my ears and I had trouble focusing.
“Well, come see something you should care about.” The general disappeared behind the mirrored glass. I stood and watched myself in the reflection. Haggard and hollow eyes stared back. Gone even was the tan from the Middle East. A ghost. I was already halfway to hell, and at this point I was just waiting for someone to pull my plug.
The distance from one doorway to the next seemed interminable.
I glanced back at Morph, who was still smiling, and managed the ten stumbling steps through Purgatory to the office door. At his desk, the general held a remote and turned on the small TV with the controls.
The Terminals Page 16