by Ginger Booth
With many hugs Gianetti and I saw Blake and Brandy off to the IndieNews van and waved them good-bye. I tried to be just as fulsome in my farewells with the Wiehls and Caroline Drumpeter at the train station. But I was happy to wash my hands of Pittsburgh. Pretty nice town, really. But as fellow Americans, we’d drifted apart.
And Pittsburgh was less than 400 miles from Brooklyn, still a northeastern city. The ex-US spanned over 3000 miles in just the contiguous states. How much further had the rest of America drifted apart from us? Or we from them.
Chapter 28
Matthew 5:38-46, Good News Translation (GNT): You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But now I tell you: do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too. And if someone takes you to court to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. And if one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two miles. When someone asks you for something, give it to him; when someone wants to borrow something, lend it to him. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends, hate your enemies.’ But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil. Why should God reward you if you love only the people who love you?
Homecoming was strange. It gave me a whole new appreciation for how alien it must have felt for Emmett to visit me in Connecticut after months in the city during the evacuation.
We’d been gone not quite a month. But with the summer heat fled, and plenty of rain, Brooklyn had greened. The warehouse district by the ferry terminal was orderly these days. No more broken glass on the streets, no more endless conveyor belt of trash dumpsters and debris. The engineers had frowned on the ziggurats of salvaged bricks past the warehouses. A good hurricane wind could turn the loose masonry into so many airborne projectiles. So the step pyramids were now smoothed with a concrete exterior. A team of artists were busy painting a mural on the second tier wall.
But the biggest change was in the Calm Park past the pyramids. This green belt, and fifty like it around the Apple, was burial ground and memorial, the very soil built of demolished buildings and the city’s millions of dead bodies. The grass and forage plants, still tender and threadlike when we left, had grown in well, for a vivid carpet of deep emerald green, glowing in the overcast daylight. The long-awaited young trees had been installed, and brick walkways and picnic table pavilions. Workers were hammering together the stage for the local Halloween dedication event. The dust and the stench were gone. The Calm Park was becoming beautiful.
Like many, I hopped atop the knee-height brickwork wall edging the greenbelt to walk, holding Emmett’s hand while he walked along below me. I smiled. He didn’t. Halloween would soon be upon us, the day Ash Margolis had selected to finally hold a memorial service for the dead of New York, and consecrate the Calm Parks. A colossal ceremony was in the works. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Inside our mini-city, Prospect, with its huge town green, things hadn’t changed so much. The municipal water-park had closed for winter. The green was tough enough by now for grazing livestock and rowdy football games. No street-corner preachers were in evidence. But then, Emmett and his model town of Prospect never had much patience with those.
At long last, we peeled off our omnipresent guards, and stepped into the chill gloom of our brownstone entryway. “It’s good to be home,” I told Emmett with a smile. He squeezed my hand and sighed, and attempted a smile in return. His didn’t quite work.
I left the luggage for later, and continued on to say hello to our back garden. It was too cool to swim anymore. Our lonely full-grown maple tree was bare, the leaves neatly raked away for compost out in the square. But Gladys, our housekeeper, had installed a new toy behind the kitchen, in our absence.
“Emmett!” I squealed in delight. “Gladys got us a hot tub! Come on, let’s try it out!”
He stepped out of our office to look, shaking his head in dismay. “Dee, that is all kinds of not-OK. Do you know how much power it’ll take to run that?”
“I’m paying for it!” Gladys called up from her lair downstairs.
“It’s not a matter of paying for it!” Emmett objected. “It’s a waste of power!”
“I’ll join you in the hot tub, Dee,” Gladys yelled. “Just getting on my bathing suit.”
“Meet you there!” I agreed in glee. My luggage turned light as feathers as I trotted up the stairs to our bedroom to change.
Emmett sat down in the office and resumed catching up on his mountains of email. I had mountains of work to do, too, of course. But right after a grueling overnight train trip wasn’t the time to do it.
In the hot tub, Gladys caught me up on all the latest gossip and events at home. The preacher sweep was a non-event in Brooklyn and Queens, Emmett’s boroughs, though there were some ugly riots in Manhattan and the Bronx. Staten Island and Jersey-borough were somewhere in between, with orderly demonstrations against the new rules, just as orderly dispersed after a couple hours, without violence.
Voter registration was a big hit. Gladys, a public school science teacher in her past life, had volunteered to serve as a voter tester. She told me about her training, and cheerfully criticized the idiots she flunked and tutored.
I was happy for her, getting out of the house on a more professional level. She’d spent most of the starving time alone atop a twenty-story building, hiding from everyone. Her lingering agoraphobia was intense, disabling some days. It had taken persistent effort on Emmett and my part to break her out of her porcupine hostility to become friendly with us. Alternately attending Orthodox church services, and tripping our delivery men into bed, provided weird and limited social interaction outside the three of us at home. I was glad to see her branching out.
“Do you know if you’re staying yet?” Gladys asked guardedly.
I shook my head, and sank deeper into the luxurious hot swirling jets of water. “No news. We just got in the door.” That thought was a downer. I’d just gotten home, but didn’t know how long it would be home anymore. Until his final report was complete, Emmett was still a Colonel of Pennsylvania, his newly confirmed Rescos of Brooklyn and Queens reporting to Ash Margolis. We were in limbo.
The brownstone had only been home a few months, anyway. But it felt like home. Mostly, it felt like Emmett must really love me, to go so far trying to please me with this outrageous house.
“Emmett seems cold,” Gladys observed. “Rough trip. Popeye told me you were raped.” My eyebrows flew up. I had no idea Popeye knew, nor that he talked to my housekeeper. She’d lured him into bed when he visited, of course. But she did that to almost anyone unsuitable who happened along.
“I’m sorry,” she continued. “It sucks. But you get past it.”
“Do you?” I asked. “I’m different. Emmett’s weird.” I didn’t mention it, but I rather doubted the Brooklyn schoolteacher had been in the habit of yanking handymen and plumbers and hostile tattooed hackers into her bedroom for rough games before the Calm Act. Not that I judged, exactly. But Gladys still had some baggage to work out.
“Everything you go through changes you,” she said philosophically. “But life goes on. Right now, I’m safe and warm, in an awesome hot tub, with a friend. Great house, great job, great food. Chickens.” She eyed one of those in disfavor, and flicked some water at it to discourage it from coming closer. “Emmett loves you. Whatever his problem is, he’ll get over it,” she said confidently. “I just hope you’ll stay here. Because I’m selfish. I love my bosses. I love this job. I love this hot tub.” She sank into the bubbles, up over her ears.
I grinned back at her. Thoroughly overheated, I braved the chilly lap pool for ten lengths, then gratefully splashed back into the hot tub. Yes, the changes in Brooklyn were good.
; -o-
The changes in Emmett were less good. We hadn’t made love since he retrieved me from West Virginia. Not because I didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. That had never happened for us before. Or failed to happen. He owed me a date night, a romantic evening together, a talk about religion. Maybe even a marriage proposal if we managed a really nice day. We were headed in the wrong direction for that.
I refused to believe the problem was distaste for me because I’d been soiled by Canber’s rape or something. Emmett couldn’t be that unfair. He cried plenty, alone if I didn’t catch him, but in my arms when I did. But unlike his usual pattern, crying didn’t seem to get him past whatever was bothering him.
“Emmett, talk to me,” I begged him one night, as he lay beside me in bed, wrung out from crying and still miserable. “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me? Even if it’s unreasonable, just say it. Out with it.”
“I can’t talk about this with you, Dee,” he insisted. “Too much classified caught up in it.”
“Then talk to Cam. Or John Niedermeyer,” I suggested. They’d been Emmett’s room-mates and partners during that Calm Act vetting year at Leavenworth. Niedermeyer already knew about Canber.
“No!” he barked. “Sorry. No, darlin’, John wouldn’t understand. And you can’t breathe a word of any of this to Cam. He wasn’t in on…this. I don’t remember if Cam even met Canton. When they handed Cam his death angel markers, he would have filed them under NFW – no effing way.”
“Cam can kill,” I said thoughtfully. “I watched him order men executed.”
“Uh-huh, I saw the video,” Emmett said. “Of course he can kill, Dee. He’s a soldier. He also showed you his authorization afterward, didn’t he? I love Cam like a brother, but he’s a boy scout.”
“Why not Niedermeyer?”
“Can’t tell you that.” He dropped a limp hand on my head and twirled a strand of my hair. “Let it go, Dee.”
I considered him for a few minutes, propped on my elbow. “What exactly is a death angel marker?”
“Resco top secret. Dammit, Dee! I never said it. You never heard it.”
“Emmett, you have to talk because it’s tearing you apart. It’s tearing us apart. Canber and his goons kidnapped me, drugged me, raped me, tied me to a fence in tornado weather. Canber can’t steal you from me, too. I won’t let him!”
“Uh-huh,” he breathed, defeated.
I sat up, cross-legged. “I know. We need to forgive him. Both of us. An act of forgiveness, to put this behind us.”
“Huh.” He rubbed his face tiredly.
“Contact him,” I encouraged. “Arrange a video conference.”
“What?!”
-o-
“Dee insisted,” Emmett told Canber reluctantly. My recent abductor was on our huge display in the office in Brooklyn. Emmett and I each sat at our own computers, our separate desks, for this video conference. Seeing Canber’s face again didn’t bother me as much as I’d feared. I’d escaped, outsmarted him, and Emmett had rescued me. I was safe at home now. That was triumph enough to leave me feeling I was on equal standing with him.
There was no way of knowing where Canber spoke to us from. His cyber-security was at least as good as mine. He sat in another beautiful office, but not the one I visited in West Virginia. The Internet route trace said he spoke to us from nearby in Brooklyn. The pine forest visible outside the windows behind him spoke otherwise.
“And why would Dee do that?” Canber asked, eyes narrowed. One of the limitations of video conferencing is a disconnect on who someone is really looking at. But I fancied his eyes were glued to Emmett, not me.
I responded anyway. “Canber, I think you attacked me as a way to punish Emmett. You succeeded. He’s haunted. I’m haunted. I’m terrified that we can’t get past this. Maybe, if we could all forgive each other –”
“Forgive me!” Canber interrupted incredulously. “Fuck. You. Oh, that’s right – I already did.”
“Dee,” Emmett bit out, a hand held up to beg that I hold my peace. “Canton, I hate what you did to Dee. But I understand it. And I know it was partly my fault. And I hate what you’ve had to do.” He paused, started tearing up. “I’m sorry.”
Canber replied, “As I already told Dee. I don’t need your pity.”
“Uh-huh. Not pity, exactly,” Emmett said. “Just pain. Regret. We were friends once. I know why you had to become a death angel. You were good at it. If you can call that ‘good.’ And I made that worse for you. I wish… I wish there were some way for us to go back, chuck all this. Just you and me. Go camping in the Adirondacks or something. Be who we used to be again, before the Calm Act. For Dee and I to go back, when she didn’t know you existed, and I could be the hero of New York City. There is no going back.”
“No,” Canber agreed. “So what’s the point?”
Emmett sighed, and wiped his eyes. “If you want to stop, Canton. This life, for you, must truly suck. If you want to lay it down, come in from the cold. We could figure out a way to make that happen.”
That enraged Canber again. “You think what I do doesn’t matter? That this is all optional? That it’s over? You know damned well it’s not over! I should have culled New Jersey already. But it’s your fucking problem, Emmett. I won’t quietly solve it for you and let you pretend your hands are clean. You need to ask for it. Take responsibility.”
Emmett swallowed, nodded microscopically. “It matters,” he whispered. “I’m not ready to ask today. But you’re probably right. Soon.”
Ready to ask what? I wondered uneasily. Culling New Jersey sounded horrific.
“That’s why, Emmett,” Canber replied bitterly. “That’s why we set it up this way. If your goal is to care and build and help, it’s too hard to turn around and destroy. So you get to play hero while I play demon. Both whole-heartedly.”
“My heart feels pretty broken right now,” Emmett admitted. “And I can’t believe yours is all that whole either, Canton.”
“People suck,” Canton breathed. “It’s not so bad.”
Emmett nodded ever so slightly. “They suck. They can be petty and obnoxious and cruel. And then I meet someone like Dee. Or you, once. Like Ty Jefferson and the others here in New York. People who held communities together through the epidemic and the starvation. They take my breath away. They’re the heroes. I’m not. I know that. What you do… I don’t get to do what I do, without you doing what you do. I know that. And I’m sorry for that.”
The men stared at each other, out of words for the moment. I waded in again. “Maybe I don’t know what’s at stake. How hard it would be. But Canber, I thought we needed to make the offer. Two years of…doing what you do. Maybe it’s not enough, maybe it’s not over. But you’ve done enough. If you want to retire, we can make that happen. That’s what we wanted to say today.”
“She’s better than you deserve, Emmett,” Canber observed.
“Uh-huh.”
“There is no way back,” Canber said.
“Maybe a cottage in the Catskills,” I suggested. “A cabin in Vermont. Live off the land where no one knows you. I know you love natural beauty, Canber. Just like I do. Sure, people suck. But most don’t suck as bad as Uriel and Judgment.”
“The offer’s open. Old friend,” Emmett said with finality. “I won’t take over your job. I couldn’t do it. I don’t think anyone else will, either. But if you want to lay it down, we could make that happen.”
“Strangely, I believe you,” Canber replied. “The answer is no. But thank you for offering. It’s a pretty fantasy. Apology accepted. For what it’s worth, Emmett, I forgive you, too. Don’t contact me again, except on business.”
Emmett crumpled into sobs. I held him a long time, crying too. We were alright after that. Not great, still in limbo on all fronts, but at least we were facing limbo together again, as lovers.
Chapter 29
Interesting fact: The Apple Zone’s death count was millions lower than in southern California.
> For the most solemn Halloween party ever, we’d never had so many people in our house in Brooklyn. Since the Governor-General and top Rescos of Hudson presided over the ceremonies earlier, naturally they were staying in town for a planning conference afterwards. And naturally we hosted at our palatial brownstone, which could sleep all eight guests comfortably.
But then PR and IndieNews decided to broadcast same-night special coverage of the big event. Naturally my office was the local production facility due to the time crunch. Between Emmett’s, mine, and ours, we had twenty-four people in the house, mine working feverishly against a deadline, his drifting in all day as their Halloween assignments ended. My guests tended to put a damper on conversation for his guests, but at least his could retire to the bedrooms for privacy.
I stuck my head out of the office French doors into the living room and waved. “Hi, everybody! Welcome! Sorry I suck as a hostess!”
“Uh-huh,” Emmett agreed from mid–living room. “But I don’t.” This was true. Emmett was an accomplished host. I suppose being an Army officer was good training. His guests were warm and dry and fed and enjoying each other. “Broadcasting on time, darlin’?”
“Of course we are! Might still be editing when the first segment goes live. Hey, Emmett, could we all watch out here in the living room? Amiri needs to broadcast live from the office.”
“Ah, will do.” Emmett checked the time. “We’ll start setting up now.”
By the time most of my team were chased out of the office, I feared we’d be stuck standing in the back. But Emmett prepared for that. Brandy and Blake, Melinda and Martin of IndieNews got a whole small couch to themselves. Our censor, the lead Resco of Connecticut, Lt. Colonel Carlos Mora, took his daughter Maisie’s seat on our couch, and hugged her back onto his lap. Popeye likewise slipped in under Gladys, next to our fosterling Alex, then me on top of Emmett.