Now a tiny ball of worry began to form in Kendra’s stomach. Was he hurt? Was he calling from a hospital or police station? Her body tensed, and she prepared to change direction and gun the accelerator.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at home, everything’s fine. Look, Mom, I know this is going to sound weird, but … what did you do with Dad’s old stuff?”
“What? Why are you asking me about that?’
First Mom, now … Dad!? For the past seven years, CJ hadn’t referred to his father as anything but “asshole” or “cocksucker” or “psycho.” Before Kendra had a chance to hear CJ’s answer, the phone beeped and went dead. no service.
Kendra continued in the same direction but gunned the accelerator just the same, all the way up the Schuylkill Expressway, then the endless traffic lights up Broad Street and finally the hills and curves of Old York Road out to the fringes of Abington Township. Home. She didn’t bother pulling the car into the garage, leaving it parked out on the street. Something in CJ’s voice … no, everything about CJ’s voice was completely wrong. Dad’s old stuff? What was that about? Why did he suddenly want to see the few possessions his father had left behind? The thought that CJ might be drinking crossed Kendra’s mind, but his voice wasn’t slurred. If anything, it was completely clear and focused, in stark contrast to the moody grunts she usually received.
And whenever CJ did go on a binge, his heart filled with raw hate for this father, not fuzzy nostalgia.
“CJ?”
The alarm unit on the wall to the left of the door beeped insistently until Kendra keyed in the code. She closed the door behind her, locked it, then reengaged the system. It beeped again. All set.
“CJ, answer me!”
And then began the nightmare.
No CJ, not anywhere. No trace of him in his room, no tell-tale glasses or dishes in the sink. The house was exactly as Kendra had left it when she left for Old City earlier in the evening. Had CJ even called from home? The call had come from his cell, so he could be anywhere right now.
Not knowing what else to do, Kendra tried him again on her phone, but still—NO SERVICE. What was that about? She could understand a dropped call when speeding down the Schuylkill, as if a guardian angel had interfered with the signal to prevent you from sparking a twelve-car pile-up on the most dangerous road in Philadelphia. But in her own home?
Maybe she could get a better signal outside. Kendra went back to the front door and keyed in the code. Two digits in, however, her finger stopped, and hung in midair before the 6 key.
The digital readout, which usually delivered straightforward messages such as SYSTEM ENGAGED or PLEASE ENTER ACCESS CODE, now told her something else:
STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE
“The fuck?” Kendra muttered, then lowered her finger for a second before blinking hard and stabbing the 6 button anyway, followed by the 2. Which should have disengaged the system. This time, however, there was no reassuring beep. There was nothing at all, except:
KENDRA, THAT WON’T HELP.
Then:
DON’T MAKE A SOUND.
DON’T MOVE.
NOT UNTIL WE CALL YOU.
And Kendra, much to her own disgust, did exactly as she was told, staying perfectly still and silent …
… for about two seconds, before realizing fuck this and grabbing the handle of her front door. She twisted the knob, pulled. The door didn’t move, as if it had been cemented in place. What? She hadn’t put the deadbolts on when she’d come in just a minute ago …
The phone in her hand buzzed to life. There was SERVICE, suddenly. The name on the display: INCOMING CALL / CJ.
Oh thank God. She thumbed the Accept button, expecting to hear her son’s voice, maybe even hoping he’d call her Mom again.
But instead, it was someone else.
Now, four agonizing hours later, during which Kendra heard the sounds of her own house being turned against her … she was listening to the voice of her ex-husband—an accused murderer long thought to be dead. And he had the audacity to be grilling her!
“They called me and said if I left the house I was dead.”
“Who told you that? Who told you you were dead?”
“A woman. She didn’t give her name.”
“Did you call the police? Anyone at all?”
“They told me not to call anyone, or do anything else except wait.”
“Wait for what?”
There was a burst of static on the line, and then another voice came on the line. The one who’d called four hours earlier, from CJ’s phone.
The evil icy-voiced bitch queen who had her son and who claimed to have the house surrounded.
“Hey, Charlie! It’s your old pal Mann here. So good to hear your voice after all this time. Well, that magical day has finally arrived. In about thirty seconds we’re going to kill the phones, and the power, and everything else in your wife’s house. We’ve got her surrounded; I know every square inch of every house in a five-block radius. You, of all people, know how thorough we are.”
Charlie ignored the other voice.
“Kendra, where’s the boy? Where’s Seej?”
Seej: Charlie’s old nickname for CJ—See. Jay. Over time, shortened to Seej.
“Shhhh, now, Charlie, it’s rude to interrupt. You’re wasting precious seconds. Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that if I touch one hair on your family’s head, you’ll rip me apart one limb at a time … or maybe some other colorful metaphor? Well, you know, that’s just not gonna happen. Because you lost this one, Chuck. There’s not going to be any cavalry rushing in, no last-minute saves, no magic escapes. And you know what’s going to happen next?”
What should have been going through Kendra’s mind at this moment was something along the lines of:
Charlie, where the hell have you been, and why have you surfaced now? The last time we spoke it was stupid and petty conversation about a late credit card bill and I think the last word I spoke to you before disconnecting was whatever.
Or maybe:
Charlie, why didn’t you call me before tonight? Do you know how many late nights I stared at the ceiling, trying to physically will you to call me? Not to change anything or explain anything, but just to tell me what happened? Do you know how hard the not knowing was? How much it consumed me over the years, digging in deep, way past the regret and guilt and into the very core of me?
But instead Kendra thought:
Goddamn you, Charlie.
Goddamn you for doing this to us.
“What’s going to happen next is,” the ice bitch queen continued, “your family’s going to die. And there’s not a fucking thing you can do to stop me.”
If Kendra had any doubts that the voice on the other end of the line belonged to her husband, they vanished when he spoke again. Because his words were infused with a rock-hard defiance that had once been familiar to her, over a decade ago.
Charlie Hardie told the ice bitch queen, “I can stop you.”
2
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.
—Douglas Adams
Low Earth Orbit—Three Days Ago
THE TRANSMISSION WAS supposed to start at 12:30 p.m. universal time, but by 12:55 it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Hardie told himself it was just a little trouble with the signal. Someone down there was diligently working on the problem, and pretty soon he’d be seeing his family on the monitor. Just a few more minutes. They wouldn’t leave him hanging much longer, right? This was the only thing that kept him going, and they knew it. They wouldn’t mess with him like this. That would just be cruel.
After four hours of being frozen stiff, Hardie unstrapped his legs to stretch them. Starting at 1:00 p.m. UT he had a checklist of duties to perform. They had better start the transmission soon. Otherwise …
And then the transmission began.
One hundred and sixty
-six miles below, life went on.
Below, on the surface of the earth, at almost 10:00 a.m. eastern standard time, which was three hours behind universal time, Kendra was making chicken soup. Both she and Seej were fighting colds. Kendra had already taken apart the chicken and was now chopping thick carrot slices. Her furious motions made Hardie nervous—her fingers moved so quickly, chop chop chop chop chop chop chop, even though her fingers were curled under, just like you were supposed to do. Still, fingers could slip. And if something should happen …
Seej was in the living room, holding up an imaginary gun-sword thing and blasting and slashing away digital opponents on a flat screen. Hardie had no idea what the boy was playing. The last video game he could remember the kid playing, more than a decade ago, was something involving Italian plumbers and giant magic mushrooms. What the hell kind of game involved a gun and a sword? If a gun didn’t do the job, did you really need the sword to finish off the bad guy? And why slash at him with a sword if you’ve got a gun at your disposal?
Still the boy was enraptured. Nothing real, except the sick delight on his face. You could tell when he got off a particularly gory shot, because his eyes lit up in a certain way. Partly appalled, partly amused. Much as Hardie didn’t want to admit it, he looked like the kind of kid who might shoot up a school someday.
This was Charlie Hardie’s family. Right there in front of him. Flesh and blood, living their lives, struggling with their problems.
Utterly unreachable.
For the past nine months, Charlie Hardie’s life boiled down to mind-numbing routine. Open eyes. Crawl out of the harness that held him in place while he tried—and failed—to sleep. Evacuate bladder in a separate harness setup—which up here entailed a seventeen-step process. Climb over to the control panels. Check the levels, comparing the numbers against the ones in the manual, even though he knew them by heart. Stand to eat a bland meal, because sitting made his stomach hurt too much. Wash self with moistened towelettes. Do sit-ups and pedal an ergometer to get strength back. Push the same sequence of buttons again. And again. And again. A monkey could do this. But they didn’t want any old monkey.
They wanted a monkey named Charlie Hardie.
It had been a year since Charlie Hardie almost shot that nice woman in the face.
And every day in this cramped-ass satellite, Hardie thought about what life would have been like if he had shot that woman in the face. Probably would have been short. As in “a few seconds long” short—because if he’d killed that woman, her armed minions would have blasted the meat from Hardie’s bones with a dazzling array of heavy artillery. A few seconds may even be generous.
Instead Hardie had agreed to not shoot the woman in the face, and to surrender to the Cabal and pretty much do their bidding.
The Cabal … oh, they had so many names. When Hardie first encountered them, he knew them as the Accident People who worked for the Industry. Back then they’d nearly killed him … but he’d hurt them bad, too, scuttling a deal worth billions and really pissing them off. So much so that the incident (a) stole five years of Hardie’s life, and (b) stuck him in a secret prison and forced him to be the warden. Needless to say, this really pissed Hardie off. So when Hardie finally busted out he set out to destroy the three known members of Secret America—which is what the inmates in that prison called the Industry.
But when Hardie asked the nice lady he almost shot in the face what they called themselves, she chuckled and said, “Call us the Cabal.”
Hardie wanted to crack a joke like, “Kebob? As in chunks of meat on a stick?”
But it was hard to make a joke with so many guns in your face, ready to end your life in a fusillade of lead.
Oh, Hardie had tried. Just before finding himself in an unwinnable standoff, he had embarked on a mission of blood-splattered revenge. It was, to be honest, kind of a mixed bag. The first leader of the Cabal? Killed without a hitch. You might even go so far as to call that a smashing success. The second leader? Hardie thought he’d killed that son of a bitch, but it turned out that he had survived after all. Maybe. It was all kind of unclear. And the third leader?
Well, that was the nice lady he almost shot in the face but didn’t.
Which brought them to their current arrangement. In exchange for a year of indentured servitude, the Cabal promised Hardie that the slate would be wiped clean. The Cabal would not actively seek to kill Hardie, and they would not seek to send the Accident People after his estranged wife and son. That’s all Hardie wanted, of course. To have the threat of death finally removed from the heads of Kendra and Charlie Jr. So Hardie had lowered the gun and agreed to work for the Cabal.
We just want you to guard something, they said. That’s what you do, right? You guard stuff?
Yeah, Hardie said, I guard stuff.
Only they didn’t tell Hardie he’d be guarding something in freakin’ outer space.
Okay: “low earth orbit.”
Same damned thing, Hardie thought.
The very idea of it sounded insane. But the Cabal insisted that it was not only possible but practical, too. Certain things were way too valuable to keep on the surface of the earth, where they could be hacked or dug up and breached in countless ways. For as long as people had scuttled across the planet, they had been devising countless ways to steal the possessions of others. For total security, you had to remove the planet from the equation.
That required some expensive technology—but in the long run, it was not as expensive as maintaining an ultra-secure facility planet-side. Once you shot the thing up into low earth orbit, you could be assured that only organizations with the resources of the Cabal could get up there, too. And no one had the resources of the Cabal.
But you also needed a human presence, because machines, no matter how well built, could malfunction. Hence the need for a guard.
Hence the need for Charlie Hardie.
Hardie shifted his body in the cramped space near the monitor, trying to stretch his sore body, get the blood flowing. He forgot his pains, though, when he saw his family.
On screen, Kendra cracked eggs into a glass bowl to prepare the batter for French toast. Hardie was instantly hurled back in time, a decade ago, watching her do the same thing on a Sunday morning, back when she was his wife. Same glass bowl. Same stainless steel whisk. Same plug-in electric fryer on the countertop, passed down from her mother. The sight of the familiar kitchen gear made it feel like they were still married, still together.
He knew they weren’t legally married anymore. Too much time had passed. If she were smart—and Kendra was the smartest woman he knew—she would have declared him legally dead and collected an insurance payout.
Even if Hardie were somehow able to magically teleport himself down to the surface of the earth, inside that kitchen, what would she say? Their last days together, those years before all that madness in L.A., had been awkward and painful and tense. Back then, Hardie swore that if you could somehow liquefy and bottle Kendra’s angry glares, you’d have the most potent weed killer on the market. He’d ask what was wrong. Kendra’s mouth would say, Nothing, I’m fine. But her eyes would say, I hate you with every fiber of my being.
Kendra left the kitchen. The camera should have cut away to the dining room, but it didn’t. Which was strange.
Whoever was in charge of giving Hardie his daily dose of family time was usually pretty good about making sure those few minutes were worth it. Hardie couldn’t help but wonder how often the same person—male or female—watched over Kendra and the boy the rest of the day. Was it constant surveillance, or just the occasional check-in to make sure they were still alive and thus useful to the Cabal? Was this person a perv? Did he or she watch Hardie’s family in his/her spare time?
Usually Hardie couldn’t think thoughts like these—not with him trapped in low earth orbit and unable to do a thing about it.
But sometimes he spoke aloud to this mysterious Watcher, on the off-chance he or she could hear.
Which he knew was ridiculous, because this was a one-way transmission—they had stressed that during his training. We’ll be able to monitor you through various sensors, but don’t bother talking to us. And fuck you very much!
Still Hardie couldn’t resist.
“Come on.”
He spoke out loud just to reassure himself that he had a voice. He almost wished he could time travel back about a year and visit himself in that lousy secret prison and tell himself, Look, buddy, at least you’ve got people to talk to. Even if they are crazy. So enjoy it while supplies last.
Hardie would say all kinds of things to himself.
You know how screwed you are, Chuck?
Chuck. Always Chuck. Nobody in real life called him anything but Hardie, and that would have included Kendra most times. But after he was almost shot to death nearly nine years ago, the media decided that he was Unkillable Chuck. And he was up in this tin can, still alive. So he must be Chuck.
Right, Chuck?
How we doing there, Chuck?
Morning, Chuck, you big asshole.
How’d ya end up in a satellite anyway, Chuck?
There was only one way up to the satellite. You basically had to own a rocket, possess the technology to dock with the satellite, then force your way into the orbiting craft—which was not much bigger than a Honda Odyssey. But if … and this was a HUGE if … you could manage to clear all of these hurdles, then there was one last fail-safe:
Charlie Hardie would be waiting for you, ready to point and shoot.
The only entranceway—a long tube that didn’t feel much wider than a hula hoop—was lined with machine guns. If you stepped inside and Hardie pulled the dual triggers, you would be cut to ribbons, then jettisoned back the way you came, along with your intruding craft. In lots and lots of chunky, frozen pieces.
Hardie almost wished someone would try to break in, just so he’d have something interesting to do. Instead he languished inside a satellite parked 166 miles above the surface of the earth—passing over the United States, according to one monitor.
Point and Shoot Page 2