by Jacob Gowans
Not much remained in the house to make it a home, but being there made the commander nostalgic. He took them through it, room by room, and told them stories of his childhood. Albert knew many of the stories already, but the commander couldn’t remember which ones he’d already told over the years. He talked about his older sisters—twins he’d never known—who had died during the Scourge before his birth, and how his mother’s eclampsia had prevented her having more children after him.
Last, he took them to his bedroom. It shocked him when he opened the door. Everything looked exactly as it had the last time he’d been inside it thirty-two years ago: airplane wallpaper, airplane bed sheets and blankets, and fighter jet posters. Two more posters of his favorite college football team hung over his bed. His alarm clock that projected the time onto the wall was covered in dust, so were the model airplanes he’d built hanging from the ceiling. Jets and fighters and bombers, all of them were there except one, whose string dangled empty.
They never changed a thing . . . not even after our fight.
Byron cleared his throat and touched the pocket where the envelope from his father rested. “Al, Marie, I want to make you both a promise.” His face naturally assumed that mask of no emotion, but he let it fall away. He needed his son to see how much he cared. “I—I will never push you out of my life. If I ever do something that angers or offends you, please tell me. Promise me you will never let yourselves become strangers to me.”
“Dad—Dad, of course not,” Albert said. “I’d never—we’d never do that.”
“He’s right, Command—Walt—Dad. Sorry, I’m trying to get used to that. But we’ll never stop being your family.”
Commander Byron nodded and turned back to his bed. Next to it was a small dresser. In the top drawer was a long, thin book. He blew off the dust, opened it, and thumbed through the pages containing pictures of himself as a baby up until he was in high school.
“Could you both give me a moment alone?” he asked without looking back to see their faces.
Albert patted his father on the back before he and Marie left the room, closing the door softly as they exited. Byron sat on the bed, which groaned and creaked under his weight and made the smell of dust stronger. He dropped the book next to him, reached into his pocket, and removed the envelope he’d held onto for over six weeks. He held it in his hands, surveying it serenely. His hands grew sweaty and jittery. He noted the bent corners, deep creases, and the frayed edges that had come from carrying it with him for so long.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked himself aloud. He knew the answer: twenty years of pain, twenty years of wishing he hadn’t left the house when his father had ordered him out. Seeing his father again might end well, or it might reopen wounds, which would only lead to more pain. In one swift movement, he ripped open the paper and read the letter, ignoring the nervous beating in his chest.
Walter,
If this reaches you, then we were successful in removing Sammy from the airport. Our cover is gone. It will only be a matter of time before our movements are traced back to Wichita. Not even Sammy knows this, but for the last seven years we have been planning a new site. Our position right now is tenuous, probably as fragile as glass. Fortunately, one of your old friends is helping us: Susan Gow. She has been on the run for several months trying to avoid capture. As you know, she is a true saint.
“All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.” I was wrong. I am part of the resistance now to make up for those mistakes and to make you proud to be my son again. I have contributed some clever ideas, like moving the headquarters to the Wichita city office building. Please take care of yourself. Your mother wishes you to know that she misses you terribly and keeps you in her daily prayers as do I.
You are a great man, and on those things which you may regret, never look back. Once they are closed, never reopen those doors. I love you son.
Pop
36.739326, -118.289795
Byron sniffed and wiped the dust from his nose. Then he read the letter again. His parents had known danger was upon them and had acted accordingly. He saw very little chance that they were in the city during the attack, and even less chance that they’d left any trace of the activities of the resistance. He ordered his com to pinpoint the GPS coordinates at the bottom of the letter. A map came on the holo-screen and showed him a spot near the outskirts of Death Valley, a town called Bishop.
As I suspected. Fake.
The truth was hidden in code, a very simple code that Walter and his father had invented: any sentence with a comma contained the words to the code at the end. Byron read through the letter again, this time looking for commas and sentence-ending words. “Airport, site, glass, Gow, saint, building, back, and doors.” As he spoke them aloud, his com performed a second search, only this time for the keywords in the code. Scanning the results, he discovered a link detailing a small town called Glasgow with an adjacent airport in a town called Saint Marie. His father had been born in Billings, Montana, before the formation of the NWG. Glasgow would have been in Montana, too. This felt right. He called Albert and Marie back into his old room.
In less than fifteen minutes, they were in the air with new coordinates set into the navigation system. The atmosphere inside was more lively than before, with all three members of the Byron family chatting during the time it took to fly from Wichita to Glasgow. Byron’s knee bounced uncontrollably and his mind couldn’t hold a steady thought for more than a few seconds. As they approached the small town, he noted the dozens of small buildings spotting the small town’s main streets.
Which one? he asked himself.
He thought back to the letter. Certainly his father had told him. He read it once again, remembering the code. Three words caught his eye.
City office building. Sammy said the resistance headquarters was in the historical museum, not a city office building.
He researched the location of the city office building in Glasgow and directed the cruiser to the street in front of it. The scent of death was gone from the air. Sounds of birds whistling and crickets chirping were noticeable, but a strange, almost watchful stillness pervaded an otherwise peaceful, natural atmosphere. It didn’t bother Byron. He figured if his parents were indeed in Glasgow they would have some way of knowing of his arrival.
From the road, he could see large black letters above the main doors to the building that read: Glasgow Civic Center covered partly by tree branches. The three walked around the building until they came to a back entrance. Byron tried the door and found it locked. He jiggled it hard several times, then pulled out his syshée and pointed it at the lock.
“Wait a sec, Dad.” Albert put a hand on his father’s wrist.
Byron checked his safety and moved aside for his son. Albert put both hands flat on the door, one above, the other below the doorknob. Then he blasted repeatedly. The door jerked violently on its hinges, rattling metallically. When his son tried the knob again, the door opened.
“Where did you learn that?” Byron asked.
Albert winked at Marie, who covered her smirk with her fingertips. “Sammy,” they both said.
They walked into a dilapidated gymnasium. Cracks covered the wooden floor, and several of the boards had gone missing. One of the basketball hoops hung vertically, attached by only one bolt in its corner. Broken gymnastics equipment had been piled into one area and several deflated basketballs and volleyballs were gathered in another.
“Now what?” Albert asked, gazing around the room skeptically.
Byron shook his head disappointedly, starting to share his son’s line of thought. This building does not look like it can handle regular use. How can the resistance be here?
“I’m sure your dad told you what to do in the note, didn’t he?” Marie asked.
The commander looked at the note with Albert and Marie. “Not really . . . ” he stated, glancing over the contents several times.
“What do those numbers mean?” Albert ask
ed. “Are those GPS coordinates?”
“They look like it,” Marie agreed.
“They are.” Byron was about to say that they were meant to send an interceptor to a town on the border of Death Valley, when he got an idea. “But they might also be something else. Like an X.”
“As in ‘X marks the spot?’” his son asked.
Byron nodded. “The only question is what measurement do the numbers represent?”
“Meters? Centimeters?” Marie offered. “Or decimeters?”
“My father hated the metric system. He would have chosen inches—no—he would have picked feet. You guys walk thirty-six feet left and then turn right for one hundred eighteen feet. I will do the same in this direction.”
They set off with the sound of creaking wood accompanying their steps. Byron counted out his steps in a whisper, turning abruptly when he hit thirty-six. Albert and Marie, he noticed, were moving much slower. His one hundred and eighteenth step was near the far right wall on the three-point line. Carefully, he knelt down and examined the wood in a circle all around himself. After a thorough search and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he began testing the wood to see if one of the floorboards might come loose.
Methodically, in a clockwise circle, he tugged at the cracks of each plank. At every tug his heart beat a little faster, hoping that he might find something, even if only another note with new directions. Once he had completed the circle and found nothing, he stood, glancing over at Al and Marie. They were also inspecting the floorboards. Commander Byron decided to go back to the door and count his steps one more time. As he lifted his foot, he felt the board beneath him slide ever so slightly in its slot.
He stopped and turned once more. A sliver of black, masked by the paint of the black line, stared back at him. Byron wedged his fingernails into the crack and pulled. The wooden board gave way, and the commander’s heart thumped madly in his chest. Using his com as a flashlight, he inspected the area beneath the floor and found a small, sharp object. He retrieved it hastily and saw that it was a miniature F-22 Raptor—the one plane that had been missing from his bedroom collection. Attached to its underside was a microtransmitter set with a little red button in the middle of the small box.
Byron had his finger on the button, ready to push, when a loud BANG came from across the gym. He stood immediately, readying himself for action. Someone came running into the room. It was a tall man with thin gray-white hair wearing a flannel shirt and denim jeans.
“Walter?” the man shouted. “Walter, my boy?”
Tears clouded the commander’s vision, and at the same time, a lump formed in his throat. “Pop?” he croaked out and started toward the blurred image of his father.
Thomas and Walter Byron ran to each other, stopping only when the two men had embraced for the first time in nearly twenty years.
11.
Kiss
July 2086
Winning the Game with Strawberry changed life dramatically for Sammy. It seemed as if time had suddenly become twisted into a sharp vortex, causing it to speed along like lightning at some moments, then drag on as though someone had managed to capture that lightning in a glass jar at others. The hours spent in instruction and sims zoomed by, while the other hours of the day were torturous.
The day after the Game, Brickert and Natalia finally started dating. Sammy had seen this coming for weeks and figured it was about time. While he was happy for his friend, he was also jealous. Natalia was ecstatic, as she’d been trying to woo Brickert off and on for over a year. Now she occupied almost all of Brickert’s free time, including the evenings when Brickert and Sammy were supposed to be training together in the sims. This left Sammy with two options: spend time alone, or be pestered by Strawberry. Strawberry, it seemed, felt bonded to Sammy after their shared victory and saw any moment not with him as a moment wasted.
If she ran into him in the cafeteria: “Want to eat with me, Sammy?”
Or in the rec room: “Shoot some hoops, Sammy?”
And when they bumped into each other during free time on the weekend: “Feel like going on a walk, Sammy?”
Every evening, without exception, she asked Sammy to do something with her. He had few excuses since Brickert was with Natalia, and Jeffie with Kobe. Kawai couldn’t always help Sammy out because she was studying for an exam most evenings and wouldn’t be bothered. Depending on how he felt, Sammy either caved in and hung out with Strawberry, or read in his bedroom to avoid her. When he was feeling really miserable, he’d replay his last conversation with Jeffie in his mind:
It was Sunday, the day after his big win in the Game. He’d spent all day trying to talk to her, but she’d either ignored him or changed the subject. Finally, frustrated and out of options, he went into the rec room and announced in front of all the Betas that he needed to speak to her privately. The awkward silence and questioning stares that followed forced Jeffie to follow him into the exercise room where they were alone.
Jeffie stood with her arms folded, ignoring Sammy’s request to sit with him at a table.
“I’m sorry,” he finally told her. “I should have been up front with you about my decision and—and I feel bad about that.”
“You lied to me.”
“Technically I omitted information. Not lied.”
Jeffie pursed her lips and scowled, an expression Sammy found very effective at communicating her feelings.
“Seriously, if you think I lied, then you need to explain that. I never lied to you.”
“Sammy, why do you feel such a strong urge to graduate?” He noted that she hadn’t explained her accusation and counted it as a small victory. “Do you have some kind of need to grow up faster?”
“No, of course—”
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t rather stay here . . . with us!”
“Don’t you think I considered that?” he replied. “That I didn’t agonize over this choice?” In the privacy of his mind, he again heard Byron’s advice to learn to control his emotions. For some reason, it was much more difficult to do that around Jeffie.
“Not the first time you’ve failed to consider people’s feelings, you know.”
Sammy mentally gave Jeffie a very rude gesture, gritting his teeth as he did so. “That is so ironic coming from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ironic. It means—”
“I know what the word means.” A dangerous, cold tone had crept into her voice and the normally lively green light in her eyes had turned into something closer to deep permafrost.
“Good. Why don’t you take a few minutes, sit down, and figure out what I mean because I don’t feel like spelling it out for you.”
“Ha! Talk about irony! I spent the first nine months here learning how to spell things out for you.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t learn all the niceties of flirting like everyone else while I was in the Grinder, Jeff. My bad. Hard to do that when there are no girls around!”
Jeffie folded her arms even tighter and took a step forward. “Quit blaming everything on your past. If you’d had one inkling of how to act normal around a girl, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“What are you talking about?” Sammy asked, genuinely bewildered. “How does that change anything? I can’t read your mind!” He tapped on his own skull several times in frustration. “Maybe the problem isn’t me! Maybe it’s you! But I’m sure you’re too stubborn to admit that. You can’t lose anything, not even an argument!”
“That is so not true!” Jeffie shouted.
“Yes, it is!” he shouted back, matching her volume. Any desire he’d had at controlling himself was gone. “Who was the one about to kiss me in the hospital, and then who was dating Kobe when I got back? Oh . . . you! The girl who couldn’t even wait FIVE DAYS for me! Don’t tell me that any of this is my fault because that is—that is—screwed up.” He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help.
“You wouldn’t have any clue about relationships and
feelings, would you?” Her voice had changed from angry to disconcertingly calm and measured. “Sammy the robot. Ice in his veins. Doesn’t even have the balls to kiss a girl.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I could have kissed a girl while I was in Rio, but I didn’t.”
“Why not? Because she wasn’t real?”
Sammy was too angry to think about his words. He wanted to hurt Jeffie so she could feel what he’d lived with the last six weeks watching her date Kobe. “She was plenty real and way prettier than you. Oh and guess what else? When I turned her down, she didn’t run off and date the next guy in line. She actually respected my feelings. Amazing, isn’t it? Maybe I should go downstairs and make out with Strawberry while you watch, you hypocrite.”
No sooner had the words come out of his mouth that Sammy closed his eyes and cringed. In his mind, he called himself every bad word he knew. Jeffie moved to walk past him, but he blocked her path to apologize. She tried to step around him, but he blocked her again.
“GET OUT OF MY WAY!” she screamed.
“Make me!”
Jeffie uncrossed her arms and blasted him backward so hard that he had to use his own blasts to not crash into the wall. When she reached the door, he thought about apologizing until she flashed him a rude gesture without looking back. When the door closed behind her, Sammy let loose all the foul words he’d been holding in.
They hadn’t spoken a word to each other since. By the next day, Sammy regretted everything he’d said, but had no chance to apologize. Every attempt he made to speak to Jeffie was met with silence. He’d consulted with his other friends on the subject, but Natalia and Kawai’s advice was always the same. “She won’t talk to you. Don’t even try.”
Strawberry’s counsel was somewhat different. “You deserve better.” It seemed to be her favorite phrase lately. That and, “Leave her alone and get over her.” Eventually it dawned on Sammy that Strawberry’s idea of better was Strawberry.