“All right, people,” said Phil. “Prepare yourselves, please. Lunch is imminent.”
A sharp breeze blew off the sea, whipping Daniel’s curly locks back and out of his face. That’s better, thought Robin in his mum’s voice. Can see your eyes now. Then his dad: That ought to blow the cobwebs away, right, son?
I’m getting old, Robin thought.
“Do you want to go on the pier?” he asked Daniel, who shrugged.
“Don’t mind.”
Robin pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket. Anorak, he thought. There’s no other word for it. I’m the sort of dad who wears an anorak. He’d never quite realised before, how much he loved being that person.
“Sorry,” he said. “Probably a bit boring for you really, coming over here every weekend. Nothing much to do.”
Daniel looked at him scornfully. “Don’t be an idiot, Dad. It’s fine.”
He did seem fine, Robin thought, underneath all that teenage scowling. He allowed himself to admit, with a touch of pride, that Daniel looked happier when he was here. He was a good kid, but he had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and it frightened Robin sometimes. The world on his shoulders, that was Daniel. When he was with them it was as if he could relax in a way he couldn’t around Angela. He seemed to frown a little less, smile a little more.
We should be proud, he thought, defiantly. We’ve done everything right, Phil and I. What the hell have we ever done wrong?
Daniel darted forward suddenly, picked up a stone and skimmed it into the waves. “Phil said he’s going to show me how to skin a rabbit next weekend,” he said.
“And where does Phil plan to get a rabbit from, exactly?”
“I dunno.”
“Hmm. That’s what worries me.”
They did wander up to the pier in the end. Daniel had a half-hearted go on the amusements, before pronouncing them “a bit rubbish, really.” He’s too cool for that now, Robin thought fondly, and bought him a Coke.
“Don’t tell Phil,” he said. “He’ll have my guts for garters.”
“You don’t have to do everything he says, you know.”
“I don’t!” said Robin, stung. “I was joking. You get on with Phil, don’t you?”
“Course,” said Daniel. “He’s cool. But, you know. You’re my dad and all that.” He shrugged and leant further forward over the railing, frowning down at the grey sea.
Robin smiled around the lump in his throat. Behind them, a commotion started up as two seagulls had a scrap over an abandoned cardboard chip-tray.
Later, on the drive back to Angela’s, Daniel started telling him about the club.
“We’re organising this gig night,” he said. “You know, for fundraising. It’s gonna be really cool, we’ve got the Labrats down already. And the January Architects, even though they’re crap, but the girls like them ’cos they all fancy that Oliver bloke. Jimmy reckons he can book King Prawn, but I dunno. They’re getting pretty big now.”
“Right, good…you realise I have very little idea what you’re talking about.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “They’re bands, Dad.”
“Yeah, I got that part.”
“It’s gonna be cool,” Daniel said again. “They all want to support the cause.”
Robin winced at the phrase.
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“I dunno why you’re so against me actually having something to believe in,” said Daniel defensively.
“I’m not! It’s just…you’re still young, aren’t you? You should be out enjoying yourself. Girlfriends, whatever…”
“I know you agree with me, though. You do, don’t you? What we stand for, being against the machine and the test, all that. You believe in it, too.”
“It’s not a question of that,” said Robin tiredly. “In principle, yes, of course. I’m glad you’re thinking about this stuff. It’s just—”
“It’s wrong!” Daniel said passionately. “No one should ever know how they’re going to die. You said that! Look at Mum, what it’s done to her. It’s just—it’s fucked up and it’s wrong!”
Robin could feel Daniel’s eyes on him even while he watched the road. He knew, without having to turn round, what Daniel looked like right now. A certain light in the eyes. That note in his voice. It was this part of Daniel that he could imagine fearing. He tried not to imagine it, but he could, and he knew this because it was something that was part of him, too. It was a deeply buried something, very deep, but it was there.
“Things have got to change, Dad,” continued Daniel. “What if I went out and got that test? I’m nearly old enough. You wouldn’t want that, would you? You wouldn’t want me to know.”
“No!” said Robin, and shuddered. “No, God forbid.”
“We’re just trying to make a difference,” said Daniel. He sighed, and his voice changed, went small and muffled. “Thought you’d think that was good.”
“I do. Honestly.” Robin gripped the steering wheel. His head throbbed with a dull ache, as it had done all day, and all yesterday, too. He wondered vaguely when the headache had started, and realised he couldn’t remember.
“I just…don’t want you to get hurt. Don’t want doing something you might regret. That’s all.”
It was dusk by the time they reached Angela’s house. He saw a curtain twitch in the living room as they drew up outside. Daniel, grabbing his bag and opening the passenger door almost as soon as Robin stopped the car, seemed as eager to get back to Angela as he had been earlier to get away. Robin never took it personally. It was just the way Daniel approached everything—the same intense concentration and restlessness. It’ll be the death of him, said Robin’s mum’s voice in his head. He wished she would just be quiet.
“See you, Dad.”
“Bye. Love you.”
An eye-roll and a smile, and then he was gone. Robin sat in his car and watched the night slowly deepen to black around the haloes of street-lamps. In Daniel’s bedroom, a light went on.
On the way home, Robin drove past the street he’d accidentally turned down earlier in the day. The chip shop glowed brightly at him from the corner, but he couldn’t see any of the kids. He wondered whether they’d moved on to new haunts for the night, or whether they were still there somewhere, lurking in the shadows. Instinctively, he checked to make sure his doors were locked.
Lots of people are called Daniel.
He’d been having bad dreams lately about dark alleyways, muggings, blood. Men with knives and baseball bats. Thugs and queer-bashers. There was this boy who kept turning up, night after night. Hooded, his face in shadow. And dog-tags on a chain around his neck. Every time, Robin twisted in the boy’s grip, struggling not to get away, but to see the name he knew was marked on those tags. Because he had to know. Before…before what?
There were other dreams, too, and those dreams were worse.
He stood at the back door for a full ten minutes when he got home, his hand frozen on the latch. Through the kitchen window he could see Phil sitting at the table, tapping away at his laptop with a cup of coffee next to him, the steam rising from it in faint wisps. As Robin watched, he looked up and their eyes met. Phil hurried over and pulled open the door, concern on his face.
“Love? What’s the matter? What’s happened?”
He was reaching out for Robin, trying to pull him inside, out of the dark. The brightness and warmth of their kitchen spilled in a little pool from the open doorway, as though the house, too, were trying to embrace him. Robin tried to answer, but felt himself paralysed. Even the smallest of decisions—to move, or not to move—seemed far beyond him. When he looked down at his hands, though, he saw that they were moving, just a little. Shaking, as though with cold. They looked like someone else’s hands, he thought, not his. Someone who was very old, and very tired.
He made an effort and cleared his throat. “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said, and stepped forward into the light.
> Story by Julia Wainwright
Illustration by Marcus Thiele
FRIENDLY FIRE
THEY PULLED THE WOMAN FROM THE PADDED SEAT WITH CARE. She wasn’t the enemy. Ignorant, a buyer of the big lie, but not the root of the problem. She was somewhere north of forty. Her dark hair showed silver strands, and the beginnings of crow’s feet bracketed chestnut-colored eyes. Tommy noticed her fingertips, purple and tender. She was a Repeater. It touched a nerve.
Confusion and fear mingled on her face. “Don’t hurt me!” She wrapped an arm around herself, a reflex of protection. “Take my purse. I don’t have much.”
“We don’t want your crap,” Mitch said from behind the rubber face of Elvis Presley. He pushed past her. The silver head of a hammer, produced from inside Mitch’s overcoat, reflected a hundred mall lights. He ripped the curtain off the booth and went to work.
The hammer found its mark again and again, denting and bending and breaking the shell and guts of the machine. Pieces clattered to the floor of the booth. Slivers of paper fluttered loose, the world’s smallest victory parade.
“Run,” Tommy told the Repeater. She was transfixed by the spectacle.
“I needed to know,” she said, empty. “If it would change. If I could change it.” She rubbed a thumb over the tip of her index finger.
Tommy, hidden behind the John Lennon mask, positioned himself between her and the booth. “Go. NOW!”
The woman retreated into the mall. Tommy watched for uniforms from the same direction, waited, counted in his head. “Let’s go, Elvis!”
Mitch gave the device a final blow. It popped from its mounting and fell in a shower of sparks. A crowd of shoppers had become gawkers, but Tommy saw no heroes among them. Not for the machine.
“KNOWLEDGE IS SLAVERY!” he shouted as he and Mitch retreated. “DEATH TO THE MACHINE!”
He heard the first cry from mall security as he crossed the threshold. Outside, Barb idled the Impala in the drop-off zone, disguised as Frank Sinatra. Ol’ Blue Eyes bobbed behind the wheel, impatient. Mitch climbed in front. Tommy jumped head-first into the back through the open window. Tires squealed as he pulled his feet inside.
They drove down side roads and doubled back on their path twice. Mitch called the other teams on his cell. No one had been apprehended. Tommy scanned for signs of pursuit.
“We’re clear,” he told Barb.
“How did we do?” she asked Mitch.
“Including ours, we knocked out fifteen of them.”
It was better than they’d hoped. Tommy had expected twelve demolitions and at least one arrest. They’d all made it through unscathed, fifteen mechanical soothsayers laid low in their wake. It was a solid night’s work.
Barb dropped Mitch at the corner of Watson and Fifth. He left his mask in the glove compartment, ceded the front seat to Tommy, and was swallowed up by the night. Tommy grabbed the fake tags from over top the real ones. He stowed them under the front seat. He kissed Barb, relishing the response of her warm lips to his before she pulled back into traffic.
“Stay with me tonight?” she asked.
Tommy nodded. It had taken some getting used to, the casualness of their relationship. They had no commitment to each other outside their common cause against the machine. He was nineteen, a stew of hormones and adrenaline, and at times he wanted more than an itch-scratching lay. But while Barb would wreak havoc with him, and sleep with him, there was no romantic patter, no disposition for roses. She kept that part locked away, saying it was better that way. He didn’t debate her wisdom. Sex on a regular basis was a strong dissuader of upsetting the apple cart.
Barb rented an apartment over a detached garage. It was a cozy fit for the Impala, beside the owner’s moldering boxes and stray furniture, but the door locked and the landlord, who lived up the street, stayed out of her business. The wooden stairs up to the door creaked under their ascent. The apartment was small, well-kept. Barb liked order. It carried over to her planning of their hit-and-run attacks.
Tommy had noticed her in his Anthropology class, but they met for the first time in conversation on a website. Called “Deathics: The Ethics of the Death Machine,” it hosted an endless and often bitter debate about what the machine’s combination of technology and magic had wrought on mankind. Tommy and Barb were fellow travelers. Each had their reason to hate the device and its uncanny ability.
Tommy studied her as she undressed, tracing her delicate curves with his eyes, following the cascade of long hair about her shoulders when she undid her pony tail. The dark strands flirted with the tops of her breasts. She should have been subverting society from the pages of a fashion magazine instead of driving getaway cars. Tommy doubted that many revolutionaries looked the way she did, moved with her grace.
She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled, as if she could peer inside his head the way the machine did into blood. It was a wicked grin, a silent invitation. She took mock pains to hide her body from his view as she slid under the covers in the lamplight. She patted the bed beside her. Her skin was warm and velvety against his when he joined her. She doused the light and wrapped her legs around him.
They cuddled for a time after the sex, which had made him tingle and drained him of the remaining adrenaline from the evening, and he fell asleep to the whisper of suggestive words in his ear.
He slept and dreamed of Davey.
When Tommy was eight, his parents had sat him down in the living room and told him they were having another baby. His memories of Davey’s arrival were faint, blurred together at the edges—a lingering sense of his mother’s absence, spending the night at Aunt Ruth’s with his cousins Melanie and Sara, and then the sound of crying and the stink of dirty diapers.
By the time he turned eleven, Tommy had noticed the protective bubble his parents wrapped around Davey. Things that hadn’t been an issue for Tommy at Davey’s age were withheld from his younger brother—toys with small or moving parts; puzzles; board games. He wasn’t allowed to pick up change, or stones that fit in the palm of his hand. His parents were phobic about Davey putting things in his mouth, about him not chewing his food, about any cold that produced a cough.
One event haunted Tommy. When Davey was three, their mother flew into a frenzy of motion and sound when she noticed Davey playing with a plastic grocery bag. He was bothering no one, piling his blocks in the bag and taking them out, over and over. Ma tore the bag from Davey’s hands, sending blocks tumbling through the air. Shaking, she stood over him, screaming “NO!” as if he’d soiled the rug. A lone block clutched in his quivering hand, Davey cried with a lack of comprehension that cut Tommy to the bone.
Articulate, bright, Davey was always looking over his shoulder, petrified of running afoul of rules he couldn’t predict. The sole time he tried to explain it to Tommy ended with a long sigh and a question. “Tommy, could they love me too much?”
A week after he turned five, Davey died in his room, alone, a victim of his own curiosity. Out of sight for a few minutes, he’d taken it upon himself to explore forbidden fruit, denied him for so long and snatched from a kitchen cabinet with everyone unawares: a handful of peanuts. Anaphylactic shock was the official cause. Much later, when Tommy was in high school, his father added the missing colors to the picture. Tommy’s parents had consented to a machine test of Davey’s blood at birth. The doctor had promoted it to them as a “preventive measure.” The little slip of paper spit out as result read “SUFFOCATION”.
“We started out worrying he’d get strangled in his blankets,” his father said. “Then we focused on the size of things. We even considered allergies. He never had a problem with peanuts before.” Dad, a man of small stature bowed even lower by his younger son’s death, shrugged as if trying to loosen an unseen grip on his neck. “What good is knowing the future if you can’t do anything with the knowledge?”
They’d swallowed the poisoned punch and Davey had died from it. Even if the machine was infallible and Davey was meant to die youn
g, it enraged Tommy that his brother’s brief life could have been measures better if his parents hadn’t tried to second-guess the future.
Tommy had refused testing at every juncture from that day. He didn’t want to know what waited for him.
Barb’s story was as senseless in its tragedy, trading an innocent brother for a pragmatic father. Her dad had given up living when the machine looked into his blood and foretold “CANCER.” Even when his doctor confirmed the disease and declared it treatable, survivable for decades, Barb’s father surrendered. He didn’t want anyone to bear the burden or the uncertainty of a protracted fight. When the cancer consumed him in months, rather than the years it might have taken, Barb was galvanized against the machine’s unholy test.
After long discussions online, and the discovery that they were classmates, Tommy and Barb began to meet in the real world. More like-minded souls joined them over the course of a year. What began as a support group evolved into something else. They discovered in themselves the spirit of Berkeley, of Kent State—radicals standing against the powers that be, taking back something stolen from them, reclaiming it in ways impossible through endless debate in a chat room.
Tommy awoke to Barb shaking his shoulder. Pale pink light from the streetlamp outside gave the shadowy room a spectral glow. Tommy rubbed his eyes and groaned. Phantoms of Davey, three-year-old hand still clutching a block and quivering, receded into the corners.
“You were whimpering,” Barb said.
Tommy nodded. “Sorry. Dreams. Davey.”
He was quiet for a long time, listening to his own breathing. Barb laid a hand on his chest. “Where are you?”
“Thinking about tonight. The Repeater at the mall.”
“What about her?” Barb wrapped her arms around him and eased his head to her chest. He snuggled against her, sought solace in the sift of her fingers through his hair.
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