Hazardous Materials

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  Sormen.

  The escalator deposited Jarrod on a broad esplanade. He looked out; the expanse was rimmed by row after row of game consoles. At each one stood a target, waiting. He was about to draw his guns but stopped. He hadn’t expected them to look so human, not here in their nest. Maybe not all of them were demons. He shook his head. It didn’t matter. There were bound to be some civilian casualties. He knew that. His brother had known that. And unlike his brother, he was willing to pay the price. This rain will fall on the just and the unjust alike, Jarrod thought as he pulled out his guns. I will not weep for them. They will die heroes.

  “Demons!” Jarrod bellowed over the hubbub and din. “Demons! Your reign is at an end!” A couple of security guards turned toward him. Their faces did not flicker, did not betray scales under the probing gaze of his new eyes. Human slaves, he thought. Or traitors begging for scraps. The security slaves edged closer, fumbling for nightsticks and mace. “Stand back! My war is not with you.”

  He took aim at those his war was with. And pulled the trigger.

  Brattleboro Reporter

  OBITUARIES

  Foster, Jarrod Hanlon, 28

  Son of Moira and Simon Foster Sr., Jarrod Hanlon Foster took his own life while in custody of the New York City Police Department. Mr. Foster’s suicide came shortly after his violent confrontation with law-enforcement officers and subsequent arrest. Autopsy results show that Foster had a previously undiagnosed brain tumor, which may have triggered his sudden psychotic break.

  A graduate of NYU, Foster was living in New York and pursuing a career in graphic design. He was predeceased by his older brother, Simon Foster Jr. (b. 1983), a decorated veteran of the Afghanistan war. In addition to his parents, Foster is survived by a sister (Jill-Anne, 24). His remains have been cremated and returned to his family, who will inter them in a private ceremony. The family respectfully requests that those who knew their son remember the man he was and not the person he became in the end.

  In lieu of flowers, the Fosters request that donations be sent to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

  NINE

  As they bundled him into the back of a police cruiser, Jarrod tried to remember, to make sense of it. How he had gotten from his apartment to Times Square was still a big void in his mind. And even as he tried to pull up what had happened inside, he just felt it slip away like stones dropped in a murky lake. The people inside, they’d been, what? Gargoyles? Lizards? Some kind of aliens? It all seemed so insane to him now.

  But not then. Not as he’d stood staring down the barrels of two pistols at what he swore were shape-shifting demons bent on destroying or enslaving the human race. It didn’t seem crazy as the blood pounded hot in his head. It didn’t seem crazy when he heard his brother’s voice, and the Polybius’s, too, telling him to prepare to take aim. It didn’t seem crazy as that one strange word flashed over and over in his mind: Sormen.

  At least no one had gotten hurt. He could comfort himself with that. He’d pulled the trigger, that much he knew. It was only after they’d taken him down that he’d remembered how he’d gotten the guns. Guns—that’s a laugh, he thought. Yes, they were all laughing, eventually. After the screaming had stopped, of course, they were all laughing at the idiot shouting about demons. They were all laughing at the idiot who’d shot them—with a couple of water pistols.

  They were all laughing, except the policeman who tackled him, grinding his face into the cement floor with a nightstick firm against his neck. “All right! Game over, pal!” the policeman had shouted. “Where are the cameras?”

  Cameras? Jarrod didn’t know what to make of that. Not until he looked at his hand and the gun in it. The black paint flaking off in big chips, revealing the translucent red plastic beneath. He’d come there to shoot demons, with Ludwig’s water pistols.

  Jarrod wished he could sink further into the cruiser’s cool vinyl seat, knowing it was the most comfortable surface his backside was likely to encounter for some time. The cop in the front seat leaned back. “You that same kid they pulled off the bridge?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I said, you that same kid—”

  “I know. Just saying I was sorry.”

  “Ahh, man’s got jokes.” He twisted the ignition, and they began to roll away from the bright lights of Times Square, away from the flashing cameras and gawking tourists, away from the madness. Jarrod wondered what his reception would be like down at the station. After the riot act that detective had read to him last time, he figured there’d be a rock-hard slab waiting for him in the Tombs tonight. That would be his bed. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to share it with a rock-hard con who felt frisky.

  Maybe it’d be for the best if they did. If they locked him up for a bit, for his own good and everyone else’s. What if I’d taken that swan dive off the bridge? he thought. If I’d gotten hold of a real gun, real bullets? What was he going to do next and not remember? An eight-by-ten cell, three hots and a cot—it was starting to seem okay. Prison couldn’t be all that bad. Or maybe they’d just pitch him into the loony bin.

  “So what gives? Some kinda protest? Art stunt? Trying to get on YouTube, something like that?”

  “Something like that.” The words were dead in Jarrod’s mouth. “Look, don’t I have the right to remain silent or something?”

  The cop grumblingly clammed up, and together they rode, not exchanging another word as they cruised into the ghost town of lower Manhattan.

  “Unit Forty-two?” the radio squelched.

  “This is Forty-two, copy. Over.”

  “You are ordered to stand down. Please pull over. Over.”

  “Copy. Standing down. Over.” He hung the mike back up on its hook.

  Through the back window, Jarrod watched the cruiser’s blue and red flashers bounce off a long black limo behind them. A mountain with a flattop haircut, in a black Armani suit and sunshades, walked up to the driver’s-side door. “Agent Diamond. Homeland Security.” He handed the officer some papers. “We’ll be taking over from here.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Agent Diamond mumbled something into his suit sleeve, and another bruiser approached. They thanked the officer, then frog-marched Jarrod to the limo without a word. When they opened the door, a voice came from the dark recesses of the car. “Agent Diamond, you can uncuff Mr. Foster. I can’t see him giving us any trouble.”

  Jarrod’s hands were freed with a welcome click, and he climbed into a seat facing the back of the car. He rubbed his wrists, eyes adjusting to the darkness.

  “Here,” came the voice again. Jarrod felt something pressed into his hand, a cardboard container, cool to the touch. “Coconut water,” the man said. “Isotonic. I imagine you’re rather thirsty.”

  Jarrod was. “Thanks.” He drank almost half the contents in a single swallow. He lifted his gaze to see that the man facing him was wearing a suit similar in style to the others. But his seemed more refined, more elegant. The white line of his collar almost gleamed against his dark skin.

  “We have more.” The man gestured to a small cooler at his feet. A flickering gray light flooded the limo’s cabin as they entered the Lincoln Tunnel. “Unfortunate side effects, dehydration and increased body temperature.”

  “Side effects?” Jarrod asked. “Side effects of what?”

  “In time, Mr. Foster, in time. First, however, I believe I should introduce myself.” The man stuck out a hand for Jarrod to shake. “Agent Ross. The Division.”

  “Division? Division of what?”

  “What have you got?” Agent Ross smiled in a way that said that was all there was to know about the subject.

  “These side effects. Are they lasting?”

  “No,” he answered, again with a smile, but this one made Jarrod wonder if they wouldn’t be lasting because neither would he. “We should sort out your eyes, however.
”

  “My eyes?”

  “Yes. The Polybius units were notorious for retinal burns.”

  “Burns?”

  “Usually text but occasionally images. Again, temporary. But if you would be so kind.” Ross produced what looked like an old-fashioned pair of military binoculars and handed them to Jarrod. “Look directly at the center, please.”

  Jarrod did. All he saw was blackness. “I don’t see any—”

  Suddenly, the world exploded with a wash of colors and shapes—helixes, vortexes, fractals that seemed to spiral away into infinity and then collapse into singularities. Jarrod watched, spellbound.

  Then blackness.

  “MR. FOSTER? JARROD?” came Ross’s deep baritone from some other galaxy. “We’ve arrived.”

  The world came into focus. Jarrod saw that the car was now parked on a dirt road. Agent Ross eased open the door. “Walk with me, Jarrod.”

  “What did you do to me?”

  “We repaired your vision. Just as I told you we would. Now, please, follow me.”

  Jarrod obeyed. He could feel the towering presence of Agent Diamond and the other enforcer hard on his back as they walked toward what looked like a construction site.

  “You know, Jarrod,” Agent Ross said as they walked, “it’s not an exact science, what we were trying to do with the Polybius Project. Some minds are susceptible. Some aren’t. Just the way it goes.”

  Jarrod kicked a stray clump of freshly overturned earth. “The way what goes?”

  “The Division first started experimenting with subliminals, seriously experimenting, in the seventies. For Project Hack, it was a few frames slipped into certain prints of Taxi Driver. It worked—to a limited extent. But it was important that the right type of person was watching those exact frames. It was too hard to manage. Even if all the other vectors were in place, if a subject were to look down at his or her popcorn for the wrong second . . . there you have it. All that work for nothing. The Polybius was different. At least, it was supposed to be.”

  “What were you trying to do?”

  “This was before my time, Jarrod. I would have been in my early teens when the project went into its final phase of testing. I could have been one of those kids in that arcade, as a matter of fact. I grew up just on the other side of the river, in Alphabet City.”

  As they approached the center of the site, the cacophony of construction grew loud. Firefly rain fell in sheets from welders on the tall steel frame’s upper tiers. Agent Ross continued, “For remote sleeper operatives to be effective, we needed something that would have their eyes literally glued to the screen. Glued as if their lives depended on it. That’s where the games came in. The first Polybius units were deployed in Portland for the early phases of testing and intelligence gathering. For those units, the operating software was truncated, some of the more advanced functions omitted. Only a few fully functional models were produced.”

  “And I found one of them,” Jarrod said, shaking his head. “All that time pushing the game’s buttons—”

  “It was pushing yours.”

  “What was the point? Turn me into some kind of assassin?”

  “Almost,” Ross admitted. “But as you are aware, there were . . . glitches.”

  Jarrod’s mouth grew dry. Glitches. That’s all this was to them. That’s all he was to them, just a glitch that needed eliminating. “And who was I supposed to assassinate? A room full of kids?”

  “As I said, there were glitches. The project was scrapped for a reason.”

  Jarrod scanned the construction yard’s perimeter. It was hemmed by a twelve-foot razor-wire-topped cyclone fence. Even if he could outrun the two linebackers-in-black who hung a few paces back, he wasn’t going to get far.

  Agent Ross cleared his throat. “The entire project was pulled offline and mothballed in ’83. All the Polybius units then in circulation were decommissioned and destroyed. My predecessor believed he’d retrieved all of them. The one you found seems to have gotten loose due to a clerical error or maybe a practical joke.”

  Of course it’s a joke, Jarrod thought as they walked past a bank of heavy-duty earthmovers, one of them methodically scraping a deep hole next to the building’s bare steel skeleton. He could hear the growing rotary clank of an industrial cement mixer. “What is this place?”

  “You know, I’m not quite sure. Some kind of warehousing complex, I believe. Division subsidiaries got the construction contract, no bid, of course. Used to be a ballpark. You have my apologies, Jarrod, for what they’re worth. If we’d had the same intelligence back then, this would have been taken care of before you were born. Unfortunately, we were left with loose ends.” They stepped to the rim of the hole. Jarrod saw the cement mixer, still revolving, across the gulf. “And now it’s time to tie those loose ends up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He felt Agent Diamond’s massive hand clamp down on his shoulder as something cold and round dug into his side. “You know what he means. Any last requests?”

  At the bottom of the pit, amid a grid of steel reinforcing rods, lay the mangled remains of the Polybius console, soon to be his companion for eternity. He took a deep breath. “Got a cigarette?”

  “Sorry. Don’t smoke,” Diamond said. “Hazardous to your health.”

  “That’s funny,” Jarrod said, without smiling. “You make that up yourself?”

  “Yeah. On the way over. After I read your file. No such thing as an ex-smoker.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  Ross shrugged, as if to say Why not?

  “The demons—the ones the game said could change, could take human form—are they real?”

  Ross took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Yes, Jarrod, they are. Not in the way you think, perhaps, but yes. The Polybius conditioning was an early attempt to break through their illusions, but as you experienced . . .” Ross spread both hands palms up.

  “Glitches.”

  Ross nodded. “The man who designed it was a genius, but like most geniuses, he had his limits, and he was taken from us too soon.”

  Jarrod felt more than heard the cock of a hammer. “Wait, one more thing—”

  “Mr. Foster, there really is no need to draw this out.”

  “Please, just one more thing. What does Sormen mean?”

  Ross paused. “Do you really want to know that?”

  Jarrod nodded. If he was going into that hole, if he was going to be buried unmarked and unmourned, he was at least going to get some answers first. “I do.”

  Again, Ross shrugged. “Even demons have their masters.”

  “And that’s it.”

  Ross shook his head. “I know very little beyond that, Mr. Foster. I’m sorry.”

  Jarrod believed him. But he didn’t forgive him.

  “Agent Diamond.”

  Jarrod closed his eyes, ready for what was next, thankful that at least the dreams were over.

  A soft ping came from Ross’s belt. The man held up a finger and unclipped his phone. The conversation was hard to follow. “Ross . . . Yes. I see. In New Harbor? Fascinating. Has Kander been informed? And the ’Clave prepped for transport? . . . Outstanding.”

  There was the briefest of pauses, the only sound the steady throb in Jarrod’s head.

  “Agent Diamond,” Ross said. “Holster your weapon.”

  Jarrod felt the gun pull away from him.

  “Sector informs me that there’s been a development in the New Harbor situation.”

  “Jackson?” the other agent asked, speaking for the first time.

  “Negative. Advance agents have been able to capture and contain a living specimen. We’re being redeployed immediately. Notify the others.”

  Diamond cleared his throat. “After we liquidate the current situation, correct, Agent Ross?”

 
; “I will handle it from here. Return to the vehicle and await further instruction.”

  Diamond obeyed. So did the others.

  “What was that about?” Jarrod asked after they were alone.

  “Your demons. It appears that we’ve captured one of them.”

  “I don’t suppose I’m coming with you to see it?”

  Ross simply smiled, his teeth a perfect gleam of white. “You know . . .” He took a step forward, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jarrod. Together, they stared down at the soon-to-be-buried Polybius. “We aren’t all that different, you and I.”

  “How, exactly?” Jarrod strained every neuron to uncover the basest link between him and the impeccably dressed, imperious black man who currently held his life in his hands. He came up with two things. They were both male. And they were both standing there under the same starless sky.

  “You make a living ensuring that hazardous material is removed and dealt with.”

  “I did, anyway,” Jarrod admitted. “I never wanted that for myself, you know.”

  “Sadly, what we want for ourselves is not always in reach. But when a man signs up to do a job, he’s honor-bound to see it done. To do it well. Would you agree?”

  Jarrod had heard his own father express the same sentiment many times. Heard his grandfather say the same. Heard nearly every elder male in his family and his friends’ families offer the same advice whether they’d heeded it themselves or not. “I do, Agent Ross. For what that’s worth.”

  “Words are only worth as much as the account they’re drawn on,” Ross said, almost wistfully. “You see, Jarrod, the Polybius, in its way, contaminated you. It has made you into hazardous material.”

  “And now it’s time to dispose of that hazardous material.” Jarrod wanted to throw up. Right on Ross’s spit-shined wingtips.

  “Perhaps.” Ross folded one hand over the other, letting them both rest on his belt buckle. “Allow me to ask you a question.”

  “Shoot,” Jarrod said reflexively, and almost burst out laughing.

  “Have you ever stared at the ocean?”