Talker 25 (9780062121929)

by McCune, Joshua

  That evening, as I get drunk with Lorena, we watch a news report about an unprecedented attack on the heretofore dragon-free nation of Jamaica. The Green that perpetrated the massacre was shot down by dragon jets launched from a nearby aircraft carrier. With the help of the U.S. government, the Caribbean islands are now scrambling to institute a mass blackout policy.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Melissa,” Lorena says, not for the first time.

  I thump my head against the wall. “How many people did I kill because I want to keep Sam and Dad safe?”

  “Forget about it if you can. Otherwise, drink up.”

  I cough against the burn in my throat. “Maybe it’s easier to just be another bobblehead number. Blondie Number One certainly seems to have it figured out.”

  “Gimme a break.” She shoves my shoulder. “This is what they want. You’re gonna really piss me off if you give them what they want.”

  I shove her back, a little harder. “Says the drunken whore.”

  “I am who I am. Who are you?”

  “A mass murderer. A pretty pawn. Pick your poison.”

  “Huh?”

  I fill her in on my fan website and the show they want me to do. I take a swig, snort. “The redemption of Melissa Callahan.” Another swig. “You know, my mom used to always say that there are no bad guys, only victims.”

  “Deep.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  Lorena squeezes my arm. “Don’t give them what they want, Melissa.”

  “Easy for you to say. They’re not dangling your family out there on surveillance footage.”

  “Lucky me,” she says. I start to apologize, but she interrupts. “Sorries don’t matter in the frozen suck. You just gotta survive to the next day.”

  “You’re drunk.” I shake my head. “Forget it, I’ll figure it out.”

  She taps her temple. “It’s not about in here.” She taps my chest. “It’s in here. Look, Twenty-One’s family were known insurgents. That drone video was just a scare tactic to string you along.” She sticks out her tongue at one of the cameras watching us. “They’ll fuck you up, but they won’t do anything to your family.”

  I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s a chance I have to take.

  I cannot be a victim, I cannot be a bad guy. I cannot be Talker Twenty-Five.

  I have to be Melissa Callahan.

  30

  When I inform Colonel Hanks that I won’t do the show, he pulls a weathered brochure from his desk. A vacation advertisement for a place I’ve never heard of called Fiji. “Doesn’t have a Kremlin circus, but the weather is a bit more hospitable.”

  He hands me the brochure. Based on the swimsuit styles of the models lounging in seaside hammocks, it’s over a decade old. Fiji must be one of the forgotten islands that went off the grid after the dragons showed up. With no commercial airplanes or cruise ships, nobody could get there anymore. Except the military.

  “A week in the warmth, all expenses paid,” he says.

  I set the brochure on his desk. “Sorry, too many vultures.”

  His brow furrows. “Fiji doesn’t have vultures.”

  I restrain a smile. Big Brother listens but doesn’t always hear.

  “I’m sure it does,” I say, thrilling in his confusion.

  “You have until tomorrow morning to change your mind,” the colonel says in dismissal.

  While Lester and I wait for the elevator, the colonel picks up the phone. He glances my way and gives me a look that warns me he has an ace up that starch-pressed sleeve of his.

  Unless they produce James out of thin air—an unreconditioned James—there’s no bait big enough to hook my cooperation. But I know that won’t happen. Someday soon he will show up at the cafeteria, call center, or ER, no longer the farmboy I remember. Will he even remember who I am?

  Thankfully, he’s not in the ER today.

  Lester and I suit up in our protective gear, then meet Patch and Tim at Station One. A couple minutes later, the hangar doors open, and a dimly lit Red tied to a slab is towed in via tractor.

  Even before I attempt communication with the subject, I know by the look in his eyes that he’s what Lorena calls a grandpa, an old dragon who’s ready to die because he’s sad, lonely, and tired of living in a world with invisible monsters.

  “Hello, Curik,” I say after Patch puts me into transmit mode. “My name is Melissa.”

  “Hello, Melissa,” he says right away. “This isn’t going to be painful, is it?”

  “It will hurt less if you cooperate. I’m sorry.”

  I get a CENSIR jolt for apologizing, but I don’t care.

  According to the adjacent computer screen, Curik’s responsible for hundreds of deaths in Minnesota and Michigan. I don’t know how the military determined this, but I don’t doubt that he’s killed at least a few people in his time.

  I go through the standard list of questions. Most of his answers are variations of “I don’t know.”

  “Curik, please give me the names of your dragon friends.”

  “Where do I begin?” Curik says, his words echoing from Patch’s tablet speaker. “There was Kald. He was great. Once, when we were flying over the ocean, he saw this group of dolphins. I was hungry and wanted to eat them, but he thought they were graceful, so he made me go swim with them.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Two years ago, your invisible monsters found him in the woods. He was trying to talk to a bear. He always had this way with animals, but till the end, none of them ever spoke to him. Foolish dragon.”

  “Hurry it up, Twenty-Five, we don’t have all day,” Patch says.

  “Who else?” I ask.

  Curik starts in on stories of his many friends, but I cut him off because the Mengeles don’t care about anything but their names and their death status.

  “What about your human friends?” I ask when he can’t think of any other dragons.

  “One spoke with me a few weeks ago. Scarlett Graves. She was so scared. The invisible monsters were after her. I wanted to help her. She seemed nice.”

  Scarlett Graves—that’s one of Twenty-One’s call center aliases. “Yeah, she is nice. Anybody else?”

  “No, other than you. You seem nice, too.”

  “That’s all for now, Twenty-Five,” Patch says.

  “They’re going to silence us, Curik. I’ll be back when we change stations.”

  “Could you continue to talk with me?” he asks. “I like hearing—”

  My CENSIR tightens.

  “Can I keep talking to him?” I ask Patch.

  He growls a sigh. “You have to stop sympathizing with these monsters, Twenty-Five.”

  “I’m not sympathizing. It will make him more cooperative,” I say.

  “He’s not giving us anything useful. Besides, you’re both inhibited. It won’t hear anything you say.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  He waves an impatient hand. “Fine.”

  Tim and Lester whisper roars at me, make sawing motions with their knives.

  Ignoring them, I mount the slab and sit beside Curik. He smells of rusted iron and radiates a pleasant heat . . . though in a few hours, he’ll reek of smoke and chemicals, his warmth will be to embers, and he very well might not have any wings.

  Ever since my “outburst” with Vestia, Patch has insisted on studying “the acoustic-emotional resonance of a dragon in a weakened state.” To the amusement of everybody within hearing distance, I’ve roared at more than a dozen wingless subjects. A couple brightened a smidge, according to Patch’s tablet, but none has come close to a death nova.

  If you can somehow hear me, Curik, let go. Fly into the next tomorrow as fast as you can. . . . I’m sorry about your friends. I miss mine, too. I think of Trish. I’m not sure what’s happened to her. Our town was destroyed by a stampede of Blues. Her mother died. She probably blames me—

  A buzzer goes off.

  “Twenty-Five, time to move,” Patch calls.
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  The door at the opposite end of the hangar opens; the disposal trucks enter. After All-Blacks load crates full of a Green’s body parts onto the trucks and the bloodied slab on which it was dismembered is hauled away, the remaining dragons are slid down the line to make room for the next victim. Our team follows Curik to Thermals, where he’s scheduled for a low-degree flame bath, which is one of the more pleasant experiments, at least to a dragon.

  A buzzer later, on our way to Impactions, the overhead speaker orders my team to switch places with Evelyn’s, which is rotating from Electrics to Station One for the next intake interview. A talker swap’s not abnormal—sometimes a dragon’s personality jibes better with one talker than another—but Curik and I get along well, and the Green Evelyn was working on is already dead and halfway toward decapitation via an All-Black with a large ax.

  “Be gentle with him,” I tell Evelyn. “He’s doing his best to cooperate. Sometimes he gets a little addled, but—”

  “I know how to deal with these monsters, Twenty-Five.” She smiles at the surrounding A-Bs. “Once a glowheart, always a glowheart. She probably still thinks her CENSIR’s a dragon-queen crown.”

  “Control yourself,” Lester says, grabbing my arm before I can retaliate. “It would serve you well to ignore her.”

  “It would have served me well if she’d been in the battle room instead of Claire,” I snap.

  “Families need to get along—”

  “Yeah, I know, otherwise they get hurt. Why don’t you go lecture her for a—” I break off as the hangar door opens and a silver glow suffuses the area.

  Baby. I thought she was dead. . . . I should have known better.

  Scars and gouges cover her from tail to head. Her wings are frayed and bent at awkward angles beneath the metal straps. Her glow’s a ghost of what it should be, but when her eyes find mine, she brightens. My lungs seize up, but I force myself to smile at her.

  This is the colonel’s ace in the hole.

  Two choices. Reprise my dragon-queen role and keep Baby on life support until my fifteen minutes of infamy are up, or let her die on my watch right now.

  It’s no choice at all.

  “I need to speak with Colonel Hanks.”

  31

  After a seemingly interminable plane flight, a sleepless night in a normal prison cell, and a breakfast I couldn’t bring myself to eat, I find myself back in the Fort Riley salon. Purple Shirt the tailor—in green today—and his hefty apprentice, Helga, check my measurements to ensure that the costume they’ve designed for my redemption episode will fit.

  Purple Shirt scowls. “You’re skinnier.”

  “They don’t serve burgers at the rehabilitation institute, and I don’t get much chocolate.” Purple Shirt and Helga share a phony laugh, then hurry from the room. Next up, Cosmo Kim.

  “Well, you just like to make us feel like we’re earning our money, don’t you?” She drops her bag of supplies on the floor beside my armchair, puts a warm towel over my face. “Try to relax.”

  Not a chance that’s gonna happen, because this time I know what awaits me on the other side of the makeover. Last night, Hector the director provided me with my plotline for today’s taping.

  I’m on leave from a maximum security mental hospital at the request of my psychiatrist, who believes confronting the survivors of Mason-Kline will help my rehabilitation process. Overcome with remorse by this experience, I join the A-B dragon hunters during the climactic scene, in which Frank plunges his sword through the target’s head.

  Old Man Blue. That’s the target. I figured she was killed during the Mason-Kline battle, but Hector informed me otherwise. She was wounded, near death. He intervened before she could be shipped to a dragattoir for disposal; now she’s sedated in a hangar-turned-production-studio, awaiting “a fitting execution.”

  Kim finishes her work with an hour to spare. I’m the blond, bronzed girl again. Crazier this time. Hair puffed and wild, eyes overshadowed with red, blue, and green glitter, lashes longer than spider legs.

  Purple Shirt and Helga return with a silver jumpsuit and matching slippers that remind me of something the female inmates would wear in one of those B-movie prison flicks Sam might watch when Dad’s not around. Even with me skinnier, it takes lots of squirming and sucking in to wriggle my way into it.

  I glance at myself in the mirror and snort. They’re not dressing me for redemption. They’re dressing me for slaughter.

  Helga fits my feet with matching slippers. “What’s funny?”

  “Aluminum foil isn’t this shiny.”

  She purses her lips, giving her the appearance of a blowfish. “You look wonderful.”

  I don’t argue, because I know it won’t do any good; I’m stuck in this thing, literally and figuratively. This outfit will surely go over well with my so-called fan base, but they’re not the ones I’m worried about. Facing the families of Mason-Kline’s gonna be hard enough, but now I’ve got to do it dressed like some sort of futuristic streetwalker.

  And Dad. Hector wouldn’t tell me if he’s going to show up. “When the door to the room opens, we don’t want you to know who’s coming in,” he said last night, when I begged him for the participant list. “My script paints the picture, but it’s emotional truth that brings it to life.”

  Pain, rage, hatred. That’s what they want. The families will provide their emotional truth in spades, but their wrath’s a candle flame to the inferno that would be Dad. Maybe he won’t come, though. Maybe he’s too injured.

  Or maybe he refused. As Mr. D-man loads me into the Humvee for the trip across base, that’s the hope I cling to. I can make it through everyone else. Grimace and bear it. In nae. Persevere. But, God, just don’t let Dad be there.

  When we arrive, the interview room’s empty except for Simon and the cameramen. Three rows of seats form a semicircle around a solitary chair, to which Mr. D-man shackles my hands.

  Simon shoves a tiny transceiver into my ear.

  “When I speak, I am God and you are my disciple who must do as you’re told,” Hector says through the earpiece. “We’re clear on that, right?”

  I chew at my lip. Last night, Hector mentioned a loose script that needed to be followed. The transceiver’s his safeguard to ensure story continuity and prevent any misunderstandings. Should I behave inappropriately or go off my spoon-fed lines, he will incapacitate me, sending me into spasming fits that will be attributed to my psychological instability.

  “Are we clear, Melissa?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Excellent. The party’s going to begin soon. . . . You look terrified. That’s good, but try to back it off a little bit. You’re sad afraid, not scared afraid. You don’t want to meet these people because you know the damage you’ve done, but as the show goes on, you find relief in admitting your guilt.”

  While Simon fine-tunes the camera positions, Hector continues his ridiculous coaching. I keep glancing at the door, expecting it to open any second. By the third time Hector tells me to calm down, my heart’s ready to explode. Is this what it’s like to be in the electric chair?

  The door opens. My breath catches in my throat, but it’s just Kim, here to touch up my makeup. Ignoring the stylist’s orders not to wrinkle my face, I shut my eyes tight and pray that when I open them I’ll be in my bed in Mason-Kline and the world will be halfway right again.

  “Bring them in,” Simon says. “One at a time.”

  “Open your eyes, Melissa,” Hector says. “Don’t hide from these people. You owe them your shame.”

  I obey and find a camera a few feet from me, focused dead on my face. “My shame is agreeing to this lie.”

  “Keep those opinions to yourself.”

  Karlton Smith is first. The class valedictorian the year ahead of mine. A physics genius. I had a serious crush on him. Once upon a time, I thought he might have even liked me.

  He stops in the doorway and stares at me for what feels like hours, his left eye twitching every fe
w seconds.

  “Karlton Smith’s twelve-year-old sister, Julia, died of smoke inhalation during the first wave. Her family called her Chipmunk,” Hector tells me. “They said she smiled all the time. Her cheeks would puff out, big and happy.”

  I don’t doubt it. Karlton didn’t smile much, but when he did, you couldn’t help but notice, especially if it was directed your way. As Simon’s assistant points him toward a chair in the back row, I wonder how long it will take before Karlton remembers how to smile.

  Lieutenant Mickelson’s next. The balding history teacher doesn’t crack an expression. He was always a bit bland, but now he seems completely lifeless.

  “Geoff Mickelson’s wife, Laurie, was killed outside the Walmart when the dragons stampeded,” Hector says. “It was three days before their anniversary. During Christmas break, they had planned to celebrate with a vacation to Mexico. It was going to be their honeymoon because they couldn’t afford one when they got married.”

  Lieutenant Mickelson shakes his head at me, then takes the chair beside Karlton. I’m counting them, wondering if all will be filled, when a middle-aged woman enters, her mascara already in ruins from crying.

  “How could you?” she blubbers.

  I recognize her, though I don’t know why until Hector provides her name. “Cordelia Simpson’s daughter, Cynthia, was attempting to free their horses from the barn when she was caught in the flames of a red dragon. For her senior service project, Cynthia organized a cow-pie bingo fundraiser for cancer patient Wyatt Nelson. . . .”

  I flinch at the memory. The entire community gathered at the soccer field, which had been sectioned into a massive bingo grid. Dad bought a number for both Sam and me. Pictures of a healthy Wyatt scrolled across the scoreboard. One included him playing Knights and Dragons with Sam. From his wheelchair on the sideline, Wyatt released the cow. To cheers, laughter, and a few directional prods, it plodded around the field until making its deposit.

  “. . . Wyatt died two days after the attack from burn wounds.”

  The roll call continues. Most I know by face, if not by name. For each, Hector provides a tragic story about a life cut short, families unmade.