Future Americas

by John Helfers

  ‘‘That is my son up there.’’

  ‘‘Your son? You never had a son.’’ She leaned forward. ‘‘You don’t care about him, you don’t care about me. You only care about the fact that someone might know what was happening in your oh-so-neat little house.’’

  ‘‘You’re sick.’’ Mrs. Norris’ hands were shaking.

  ‘‘You can’t do this to someone—’’

  Sarah’s slap echoed through the gallery. The left side of Mrs. Norris’ face was on fire. She could taste blood in her mouth, and her breath came in shuddering gasps.

  ‘‘Sick?’’ Sarah whispered. She spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. ‘‘None of my art would have been possible without you.’’

  Mrs. Norris stepped back, her composure shattered. Blood was dripping from her mouth, spattering on the floorboards. Red stained her blouse and skirt. She raised her hand to her cheek and only succeeded in smearing blood on her face and her hand.

  Sarah was still spouting vile accusations, but Mrs. Norris just shook her head. When Agent Wilson walked back, Mrs. Norris turned to him. ‘‘Arrest her, she struck me. Everyone saw it.’’

  Agent Wilson nodded and stepped between her and her granddaughter. ‘‘Calm down. Mrs. Norris. I can call the local police. Do you need an ambulance?’’

  ‘‘Calm down?’’ She was spraying blood on Agent Wilson’s shirt now. ‘‘She hit me! Arrest her!’’

  Agent Wilson moved her back toward the doorway. ‘‘I’m going to take you back to the car, and I can call the police so you can make a statement.’’

  ‘‘Damn it! You are the police!’’

  ‘‘I don’t have jurisdiction to—’’

  She pushed away from him and felt her back against the glass doorway of the gallery. She looked back in and saw the ring of people staring at her.

  Not just the patrons, but her son. Still seated, he finally turned to face her with eyes as empty as the obscene pictures hanging everywhere here. The eyes bored into her throbbing, bleeding face.

  ‘‘Forget it, then. It doesn’t matter. My son—what about my son?’’

  ‘‘Mr. Norris says he is not being mistreated.’’

  She didn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘‘No—’’ ‘‘He is only working as a model.’’

  ‘‘The pictures! Look at the pictures!’’

  ‘‘—as long as no physical harm—’’

  ‘‘Look at them!’’

  Sarah stepped forward. ‘‘Go away, Grandmother.’’ ‘‘No! This is sick. It’s evil!’’

  ‘‘And, God knows, you’re an expert on the subject,’’ Sarah spat back at her.

  Mrs. Norris tried to push past Agent Wilson, but the man grabbed her arm. She looked at her son, begged with him, pleaded with him, ‘‘Tell them. Please, tell them. You’re innocent. You never hurt anyone. It’s all lies. Sick twisted lies. Tell Agent Wilson what she’s doing to you is wrong.’’

  Sarah shook her head and whispered, ‘‘Wrong? Only because the neighbors can see it.’’

  Her son stayed mute and turned away from her. ‘‘No, Billy!’’ Mrs. Norris cried, ‘‘Don’t turn away from your mother—’’

  Agent Wilson pulled her toward the door. ‘‘You need to leave, Mrs. Norris.’’ She tried to pull away from him, but he was too strong for her. The eyes of the patrons followed her, and she hated the pity she saw in them.

  Damn court orders, and damn the Attorney General’s office. What was she supposed to do? Just ignore what her son was going through? No one cared for a mother’s duty anymore. First they arrest him and take him away, then they throw her out of her son’s trial, then they stop her from confronting her granddaughter.

  Now after three years, they finally investigate the treatment of her son, and all they do is a five-minute interview. Less. In front of the woman who held him prisoner with the blessing of the courts, the same person who accused him, kept him, humiliated him and her own family . . .

  One word and he could end three years of being humiliated, publicly beaten, and raped . . .

  But, if he couldn’t speak or—and this was more likely—Agent Wilson couldn’t listen, Mrs. Norris would have to save her son without government help. She had money, and she had property overseas. She could get him out of the country, and if she faced charges for it, she would bear it.

  She was his mother, after all.

  Mrs. Norris had money, which meant she could afford private investigators. And those private investigators provided her with a file detailing her granddaughter’s movements, the layout of her suburban ranch, an illegally obtained copy of the front door key, and the security code for the alarm system.

  Mrs. Norris pulled a rented van into her granddaughter’s driveway at about eleven in the morning. She would be at some gallery or other today until at least six. By then, Mrs. Norris planned to be on a flight with her son, making their approach to Miami. A few hours after that, they should be out of the country.

  Let Sarah deal with the bureaucracy of the legal system for once. Mrs. Norris smiled when she thought that she and her son might be in the Bahamas before her granddaughter even got the police to respond.

  Mrs. Norris left the van carrying an oversized bag that contained a small, illegal, bricklike device that one of her private investigators had promised would burn out the GPS locator the court had implanted in her son’s arm. It also contained a change of clothes in her son’s size.

  Also in the bag was a gun from the same private investigator. Mrs. Norris didn’t want it, but she was scared that someone might resort to vigilantism. Her granddaughter made sure that the lies about Mrs. Norris’ son were known far and wide. People believed her granddaughter’s twisted stories, and her son might not be safe.

  I just have to get him to the airport. Then I can get rid of the gun.

  The key worked in the front door and Mrs. Norris stepped inside, quickly keying the security code into the panel by the door. She smiled when the panel beeped a green light and flashed ‘‘DISARMED’’ at her. Her heart raced, and her breath was shallow.

  She slowly walked into the darkened house. She stared at the carpet to avoid looking at the pictures on the wall. Her son’s eyes looked at her, pleading from a dozen different frames. No other pictures, no other decoration of any kind, just the photos.

  In the back, at the end of a long dark hallway, there was a bedroom whose door was locked with a dead bolt from the outside. Mrs. Norris stood in front of the door for several minutes, unable to move. She listened, and could hear breathing and movement from the other side of the door.

  Mrs. Norris reached up and turned the bolt.

  ‘‘Sarah?’’ Her son’s voice came from the room beyond.

  The door swung open and Mrs. Norris faced her son. There was nothing in the room. A bare bulb, a bare floor, the whole thing painted a stark white, includingthe window. A single twin mattress rested on a metal frame. Her son sat on the edge of the bed, dressed only in boxer shorts.

  ‘‘It’s your mother.’’ Mrs. Norris said. ‘‘I’ve come for you.’’

  He shook his head. ‘‘You aren’t supposed to be here.’’

  ‘‘We have to go; I can get you out of the country.’’ She started pulling clot
hes out of her bag: sneakers, socks, blue jeans.

  ‘‘You need to stop this.’’

  Mrs. Norris nodded vigorously. ‘‘Yes, yes. I’m putting an end to this obscenity—’’

  He grabbed her arm, violently. She jerked, dropping the bag and spilling its contents on the floor: shirt, GPS-brick, tickets, gun. . . .

  ‘‘No, Mom, you have to stop what you’re doing. Now!’’

  Her son stared at her with a hard, unyielding expression that didn’t come from the child she knew. His eyes did not belong to her quiet, well-mannered son. These were the eyes from her granddaughter’s photographs.

  ‘‘Let me go,’’ she whispered.

  ‘‘You have to leave. It is long past time for you to do anything.’’

  She reached up and touched the side of his face. ‘‘You’re my son. I can’t let you be tortured like this.’’

  ‘‘Bullshit!’’ He shoved her away and Mrs. Norris stumbled, swinging her arms for balance. Her foot found the GPS brick and her legs slipped out from under her. She landed on the ground, bruising her backside. She stared up at her son, who rose to his feet in front of her. ‘‘You can’t let me be tortured like this? Where the fuck were you forty years ago, Mom? When Dad had those long talks with me?’’

  ‘‘Please, I need to—’’

  ‘‘You need to what? Keep the family problems in the family? Don’t talk about it, and we don’t have to deal with it? Deny anything ever happened? Well, it happened, and you knew it happened.’’

  ‘‘No, you don’t understand. He was such a private man and he tried so hard to be close. He just didn’t know the right way—’’

  He turned around and slammed his fist into the wall. The sound of the plaster giving way was like breaking bone. The light above them rattled a little with the impact. ‘‘Good lord, do you even know what you’re saying? I think you might be worse than he was. At least he had the decency to kill himself—’’

  ‘‘It was the trial; he couldn’t see you go though that—’’

  He turned around, teeth bared and lips pulled back in a feral expression. The cords stood out on his neck, and he was flushed from the waist up. ‘‘No. He was just afraid that his little secret would come out during testimony. Just like you, Mom. The only inexcusable sin is getting caught. Can’t air the dirty laundry in public. How could he face his buddies at the golf club?’’

  ‘‘Stop it!’’

  He was circling around her, trembling as if he was about to explode. Mrs. Norris scooted around, so she could keep facing him. Her pulse was throbbing in her temples, and she tasted copper in her mouth. She had to stop moving when her back pressed against the bed frame.

  ‘‘The truth hurts, doesn’t it?’’

  ‘‘You don’t understand—’’

  ‘‘What’s to fucking understand?’’ He leaned down and screamed in her face. ‘‘Jesus Christ, it’s so simple. My father—your husband—raped me, once a week, for nearly ten years. I tried to tell you, but you just shut down. So, guess what, when I have a kid, I rape her. I rape her! And you know why? Because I don’t have the balls to do what she did. Because I was weak. Because I was like you.’’

  She couldn’t look at him anymore. She screwed her eyes shut. ‘‘Stop it!’’

  ‘‘What would you have done? If I did what Sarah did, if I called the cops on him? Would you have been so anxious to save me then? Or would you be more concerned about your old biddy friends gossiping about your child-molester husband?’’

  ‘‘Stop it!’’ Something was painfully digging into her thigh. She grabbed it. It was the gun.

  ‘‘I know what you would have done, Mom. You would have thrown me aside, just like your granddaughter.’’

  It began to dawn on her that this wasn’t her son anymore. Her grip tightened on the gun.

  The photograph is called ‘‘Voluntary Manslaughter.’’

  The photo is set in a richly decorated living room, in front of a sleek Frank Lloyd Wright fireplace above which are several family portraits of people smiling from behind glass and stainless steel frames. In front of the fireplace, an elderly woman wears a vintage formal dress from the early 1960s, something Jackie Kennedy would have worn. The outfit includes a pill-box hat, pearls, white gloves, and is a light coffee color in the sepia print. The blood spatters are a deep brown in contrast. The woman straddles the naked, bleeding corpse of a middle-aged man. A small trail of smoke rolls from the revolver in her hand.

  The picture is the centerpiece of Sarah’s new exhibition.

  OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE

  by Steven Mohan, Jr.

  Steve Mohan lives in Pueblo, Colorado with his wife and three children and, surprisingly, no cats. When not writing he works as a manufacturing engineer. His fiction has appeared in Interzone, Polyphony, and Paradox, among other places. His short stories have won honorable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

  HUNDREDS OF DISPLACED people filled the streets, people too poor to live anywhere else, shoved up against the line of riot cops holding Lincoln Boulevard. The very same cops that had just cleared them from their homes. The crowd crackled with anger and confusion and something else. FBI Special Agent Jason Xia sensed it as he and his partner pushed their way through the mob.

  Fear.

  Xia inhaled the thick, greasy smell of it, mostly sweat with just a trace of something else underneath: the coppery scent of blood. They were afraid—the citizens, the reporters, hell, even the cops.

  And really, who could blame them?

  Not Xia.

  He was afraid, too.

  His partner asked, ‘‘Was this what you had in mind, Xia?’’ (He pronounced it ‘‘Shaw.’’)

  Xia glanced back. Darius Jefferson was a small man with caramel skin, his skull shaved smooth. Today he was turned out in a charcoal Armani and a red silk tie. If things went bad, DJ was going to get stuck with one hell of a dry-cleaning bill.

  Xia’s gaze caught on a face in the crowd. The man was thoroughly nondescript: receding hairline, watery blue eyes framed by simple glasses, round face, dark blue jacket over a light blue shirt.

  Except something was wrong.

  The man was staring intently at him. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t shouting or cursing.

  Just staring.

  Xia met his gaze.

  If the man had looked away, Xia would have had him picked up right there, but instead he broke into a goofy smile and flashed Xia a thumbs up. So the vultures were starting to turn out to see what all the fuss was about.

  Great.

  ‘‘Damn it,’’ Xia muttered.

  About that time, the reporters put two and two together and figured out who was in charge. They started shouting questions, snapping pix.

  ‘‘Bloody parasites,’’ snarled DJ.

  ‘‘A free press is the cornerstone of a free society,’’ said Xia.

  ‘‘Says the man who suspended the First Amendment forty minutes ago,’’ muttered DJ.

  Xia shook his head. The terrorists, whoever they were, wanted coverage. Which meant he had to deny it. The warrant granted him broad emergency powers and Xia intended to use them.

  An LAPD captain stepped toward them. ‘‘We buttoned up the press and cleared out the citizens. What’s next?’’

  â
€˜â€˜We’ll take it from here, Captain,’’ said Xia.

  DJ rolled his eyes, but said nothing. He and Xia stepped through the sonic curtain the LAPD had put up and the crowd noise shut off like someone had thrown a switch. They walked west down Wilshire, their footsteps echoing in the sudden silence.

  Xia hated the New Waterfront district, a shadowy concrete canyon empty of motion and sound, save for the constant whisper of the sea lapping against asphalt.

  It reminded Xia of Shanghai in ’58, before his father got the family out.

  DJ said, ‘‘And by the way, what’s this ‘We’ll take if from here’ crap?’’

  ‘‘Darius,’’ said Xia, ‘‘something very bad is going to happen here. Would you like it to happen to just us, or would you like to take out a couple dozen cops, too?’’

  ‘‘Well, Jason,’’ said DJ, ‘‘I’m going to have to go with option (c): None of the above.’’

  Xia sighed, but didn’t answer. DJ didn’t really need an answer. He was just talking because he was nervous.

  ‘‘So what do you think this is?’’ said DJ after a moment. ‘‘Dirty bomb? Bioagent? Nanoplague?’’

  ‘‘Don’t know. All the oracle said was that someone was driving lots of media toward this part of the city.’’

  ‘‘Someone wants a show,’’ said DJ.

  Xia shrugged.

  ‘‘Think it could be a full nuke?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know, DJ. Do you think a full nuke will kill us any more dead than the other things you mentioned?’’

  ‘‘No,’’ DJ admitted.

  ‘‘Well, then?’’

  LAPD had thoughtfully tied a silver Zodiac to a streetlamp down where the ocean met the sloping surface of Wilshire. Xia untied the boat and the two men pushed it into the water and jumped in, drifting down the street.