“You were going to kill him. That’s what this has all come down to? You have to get what you want, no matter who pays the price?”
“You’re a fine one to talk. You lied to me from the start.”
“I did what I had to. You were getting close to Jenison. You had the discs.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?”
“Would you really have handed over what we wanted? Or would you have used it to get your wife back? I had to be her, Elroy. I didn’t have any choice.”
“You were gonna let Hartman chop my fingers off.”
“Yes I was. And you still would have had the discs.”
“And you’d still be a stone-cold monster.”
“This is the end of the world, Elroy!”
Her rage calms, and the silence settles between us for just a moment.
Silence consumed by the dark.
“I was right down there with you,” she finally says. “I volunteered for this operation because I knew the only way to stop those people was to think like them. I understood what was at stake and I signed up for it. That’s how wars are won in the end, Elroy. With sacrifice. Just like the colonel said.”
“So they made you look like Toni, right? They cut your face and told you how to walk the walk—to trick Hartman into giving up Resurrection. And when that didn’t work you just thumbed a ride with me.”
“They didn’t make me look like her. You made me look like her.”
“What?”
“You don’t really think there’s any kind of surgery that could make me look just like another woman, do you?”
“You do look like her. Not exactly . . . but enough.”
“That’s still in your mind, Elroy. Everything you see here is one hundred percent me.”
“That’s . . . impossible . . .”
“Hartman knew how screwed up you were. He knew the only thing you had left was the memory of her scent. And I knew you might see what he wanted you to see . . . with the right hair . . . and the right perfume . . .”
Roses and gunmetal.
The photo from the bar, still fuzzy in my mind.
Was it really just me all along?
Christ . . .
She pauses, then stiffens. “I was actually pretty amazed when you looked right at me and saw her.”
“I . . . I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.”
I was overdosed on faceless memories, my mind overworked, my brain shot to hell.
Holy shit.
“You lied right to my face,” I say. “You let me believe it, just like he did.”
“I did what I had to. In the beginning I wasn’t even sure what side you were on. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Elroy.”
“That’s what you came down here to say? That you’re sorry? That’s bullshit, too.”
“It’s not bullshit. I’m . . .”
Her voice trails off, her steel vanishing.
And she’s the broken spirit I saved, just for a moment.
“He knew who I was from the start,” she says.
“What?”
Her lips tremble, like she’s going to break down and cry all of a sudden. But she pushes through it—does what she has to do, says what she has to say.
Is any of it real?
“Hartman knew who I was working for,” she says, and her voice is weaker now. “He tortured me for weeks. Maybe it was months, I can’t remember. Made me tell him things. Kept me hovering between the real world and his world. Said they sent me in for nothing—that he was talking to the colonel all along. How do you think that made me feel?”
“Kind of like I feel right now, lady.”
She shivers again, gritting her teeth. “I was right there with you. It was my hand on the chopping block first. Before that, it was endless. Drugs and more drugs and pain on top of pain. They said they kept me around just to make them laugh. They held me down in the dark and spit in my face. I watched them torture your father.”
“You’re lying. That can’t be true.”
“Believe what you want, it doesn’t matter now. But I might have died if you hadn’t come along. I was about to give up.”
“We all give up.”
“I never knew it could happen to me. I’ve had years of training in the field. I’ve run dozens of operations where it all went by the numbers. I forgot that one slipup can cost you everything. I underestimated Hartman. Thought he was typical street scum. I thought my act had him fooled. Met him in his own nightclub and it went like clockwork. He let me think that for a long time. I thought I was getting close to finding out about Resurrection. Then he had his men tie me down and . . . and . . .”
She winces, then goes away to the darkness, just for a moment.
Hates what she sees there.
Steels herself one more time.
“. . . and when they were done . . . he shot me up with dope and told me I had to be Toni. Said it would be my punishment, and yours, too.”
“So I would give up my fingers.”
“Yes.”
Welcome to my nightmare.
A sick game, all twisted up and dumbed down in the most inhuman gutter.
“All I could see were crazy faces, mocking me,” she says. “I didn’t know what was real for a long time. My mind washed away and came back so many times. If I could describe what that felt like to you . . . if I could make you understand . . .”
“Look, just save it. I don’t need any of that from you.”
She hardens again, just enough. “You have plenty of sins to answer for yourself, Elroy Coffin. A soon as you knew I wasn’t her, you charged off and left me to die.”
“Yeah, I guess I did, huh?”
“So what’s your excuse for being a monster?”
My stomach drops when she says that.
I look deep into her—almost see her soul there. Or is it just another disguise? I remember the moment when I kissed her. That one long moment, so pure and so terrible . . . when I knew it wasn’t her, finally. There’s still traces of Toni in her face, but the mask is off now. Off for good.
I move closer to her.
She is not Toni . . . but I want her to be. I want to touch her again.
Just to make sure.
She sees the conflict steaming from me. She steps forward and puts her hand to my face. Her body jingles with gear and crackles with heavy olive leather. She is a stone killer in a black disguise, the last reincarnation of my one true love.
Or maybe she isn’t.
I don’t care.
I just want this last moment with her. And I can sense she wants it, too. She moves so close to me now, her breath hot and desperate. She stops herself. Her lips, just shy of mine. Then she bites her bottom lip slowly, softly. Beautiful and shivering, like a movie star unsure of every word she speaks. That’s not like anything my wife would have done.
She’s not Toni at all.
She backs away from me, tosses the black satchel on the floor, and she whispers:
“Saddle up, soldier. You’re coming with me.”
23
00000-23
THE LAST PERFECT DAY
There’s three ways you come at a job like this.
Three modes of attack.
This is the cowboy method.
With every goddamn cowboy they could find thrown in the mix.
I march with the other grunts to the gunship on the roof of the complex, hiding in plain sight, and I flex my legs, over and over despite the lingering pain, moving up and down in a steady rhythm as I watch the base scramble all around below me. Hundreds of men, running for their rides. The Apache helicopters, gassed and ready, powering up, their rotors and blades starting to hack away at the air, coming to life like thunder rolling across concrete. This is the biggest moment I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes. The sound of it is surreal and horrifying. Incredible.
The sun holds itself at high noon, bathing the mountains that surround us in clear, stark light. The sky, blue and spotless. N
ot one cloud up there.
This might be the last perfect day I ever see.
She sees it, too, standing with me.
The woman who wasn’t my wife.
Morales stands near us, at the front flanks of the team, nodding at her. Though my UV-glassed helmet hides my face, he knows I’m with them. He knew it all along. Not like the colonel. We’re standing at the edge of everything, he and I. Me and Heather. All of us here to see the end of the world.
That’s what everybody really wants in the end, deep inside themselves. To be there when the shit goes down. To know that we are the heroes of our own lives, that it all means something in the end, that we are righteous in the face of so many mistakes and sins.
Everyone wants to be resurrected.
A lot of us die very disappointed.
24
00000-24
RESURRECTION
01:36:00
Just under an hour and a half on the clock as we cut through the sky, the world falling away from us in a roar. Outside, hovering in the air all around us, a dozen flying machines armed with the best air-assault technology money can buy, tested in the field and ready for serious action. As I remove my helmet, Morales steps over and offers his hand, telling me his name is really Master Sergeant Geronimo Burke, Special Forces, U.S. Army. He takes a seat across from me and Heather, and they run down a checklist with the men, calling off maneuver points and weapons check. I remember some of this procedure from when I was in the army, but we never rode in a chopper. There are seven men in this compartment with us who are the core strike team, two others who are wireheads from the air force. They’re all Special Operation Command badasses, the best of the best, just like Heather said. Burke is second in command. He will order the dogfaces into action when we go to ground. Me, I’m a civilian, but Heather hooked me up with the same computer rig as the air force wireheads, which I’m carrying in the black satchel across my back. A handgun in a holster at my hip, 45-caliber Desert Eagle. Lots of stopping power. I’m wearing the same colors they are, too. The colors of our most recent wars. The colonel has no idea I’m here and he’ll be breathing fire when he finds out. Not to mention what I did to his boys back there in the cellblock—marines don’t like it when their foot soldiers are bloodied and broken by an unarmed civilian. If we make it back alive from this, they’ll probably only kill me once, along with my new best friends. They’re all doing loud clanky things with giant weapons—the kind you only get when you’re government sponsored. XM8 lightweight assault rifles. My father told me about them. They fire a hundred rounds every three seconds on auto, if you’re stupid enough to go full auto in a firefight. A little dab’ll do ya, as they say. These models look sleek and extra dangerous—they’re prototypes, modified with grenade launchers and laser sights. Three of the men wear complicated nightvision rigs on their heads, wired to tracking systemetry. Satellite relays. Burke tells me the gunships will run point to get us past the first entry area, which is a big steel slab dug into the side of a mountain six miles away from the airspace we’re in now and getting closer. Past the first entry area, a giant platform elevator drops us a mile down, below everything they’ve got, in the lowest level of the complex. We won’t see most of what they’ve built. Just the technology they put together to keep it running—and wipe out everything else, to make it one of the last cities on earth. We’ve used our satellites and infrared scanners to look right to the heart of the matter, now that I’ve told them exactly where it is. I shake Burke’s hand when he offers it again and he says there’s no hard feelings. I ask him if he would have tortured me and he says he would have, without hesitation. But we’re all on the same side now, even if it ain’t official. Heather tells me to stay low on the approach, stay in the rear. My chances will be better that way. She tells me I’m here because she owes me one—because the whole world owes me one. She says she doesn’t think I’ll last long, but if I do, she hopes I find what I’m looking for. I ask her again how the hell they plan to spin all this to the media and she says their people are already working on it. The president has been advised of everything. His staff is on the case—and everyone else’s staff, too. This is a phantom war that will never be witnessed, not by anybody. I don’t know if I believe they can pull that off. Not with this many choppers, even this far from civilization. I ask her how many guns we’ll be facing on the inside. She says she has no idea, but they’ve prepped for the worst. Right when she says that, the explosions start happening.
01:25:00
Something takes the sky and shakes it hard, and I see fire billowing just feet away from the outside of the chopper. Everybody braces themselves. The straps holding me to my seat bite hard, keeping me there. The men hold their guns close to them and their faces betray nothing. Stone cold under fire. My stomach dips and glides as we do some fast moves in the air. I see the giant flying machines on all sides of us hold steady as streaks of jagged incendiary light blow across their noses, illuminating their steel skins for just moments in the shimmering sun, creating blinding flashes. I hear slashing, ripping sounds coming at us and just missing. Another explosion, very near us. A rocket blowing up in the sky. Bombs bursting in air. I almost start to hum the national anthem. The pilot’s voice crackles over my headset, telling us it’s real hairy ahead and to hold on. We dive for the earth, dipping from side to side in a tilt-o-whirl boogie. Heather yells at the pilot to let us know how many guns he sees on infrared and the pilot yells back that it may be twenty. Fifty cals, dug in the mountain. Maybe some heat seekers. The gunships cut ahead of us and open up. The sound of their Hellfire missiles spewing from the cannons is low and thumping—exhilarating, Burke says to me. No other sound in the world like that. The sound of asskicking and name taking. The sound of America, he says. I realize finally that this guy is not Hispanic, but an Indian—the native American kind—and the irony almost kills me.
01:19:00
Outside, the war is on. Our gunships are taking no shit. The air is on fire against the sun of high noon and the endless blue sky. Even though we’re in the middle of nowhere, somebody has to be hearing all this. Somebody has to be a witness. It’s just too goddamn amazing. The enemy’s defenses are weak and we’re punching through them fast. They never expected every badass in the world to come at them, pissed off like this. The pilots all report in as they destroy the cannons set into the mountain with Sidewinders. The explosions are like low, dull godfarts down below, away from us but getting closer. The sky is clear for a few seconds before a heatseeker stings past our window and blows just behind us. One of the choppers takes a hit and goes down, the pilot yelling mayday, mayday, mayday. Another chopper near us explodes and Heather shakes her head. That could have been us, she screams into her headset. She wants that ordnance sterilized and do it now, you dumb motherfuckers. They cut loose with the whole goddamn salad bar, dropping everything on the ground below. I can feel it all in the air, as the missiles tear loose and scream for glory, their marks carefully chosen by the most sophisticated targeting systems in the world. The whole earth shakes. Hail Mary blastwaves. Flaming flotsam and jetsam everywhere, on all sides of us. We sail through it, grinding and shaking, holding steady.
01:12:00
Nothing coming at us now. We’ve lost three gunships—one in the rear, two more at the front ranks. Acceptable losses, they’ll call it. We come in low behind the six choppers that remain, toward the mountain opening. A cavern directly ahead of us, hacked out deep in the rock. Men on the ground, about sixty soldiers, all in fortified positions, firing at us with antiquated M16s and mounted 50-caliber machine guns. Old school, but heavy-duty enough to seal the deal. The front flank of our squadron takes heavy damage and they go down in flames before the second flank rips the enemy to shreds. Big bombs, real smart. I hear them suck the air out of the world, just outside, and Lucifer’s hammer slams into the earth, kicking up hell and a half. As the explosions rock us hard and flaming demons make their epic grab for all they can eat, we circle up from the mo
untain behind the rear guard and come back for another strafing approach. The cave is on fire now, and nobody’s shooting at us anymore. They make sure. The big hammer comes down again for the kill. Outside, the day goes supernova.
01:06:00
Two of the gunships left hover over the burning mountain as we follow the rear guard and land, just inside the cavern. Three choppers ahead of us. Heather nods to Burke, and he tells his men it’s time to saddle up. They all yell the word “sir” and unsnap the harnesses holding them to their chairs. Sharp metal sounds. XM8s, locked and loaded. Heather looks at me and says to stay low again. My pistol is in my hand. The other two wireheads are carrying big guns, like their buddies. I’m reminded of Alex Bennett when I look at them. Men trained for war, and trained to bust computer systems, too. I wonder what my old freckle-faced hacker pal would say if she’d lived to see this moment? Somewhere inside my head, I’m saluting her, in my own way—not like a soldier, but like the civilians she was sworn to obey and protect. Maybe this is for her, this thing I am doing now. Maybe it isn’t. Gunfire clatters from outside, as if in response.
00:59:00
I follow Burke and his men as they stream out into the cavern, and the other men do the same. Heather is a streak of black among them, moving fast and ruthless like a jungle animal. There are dead bodies all over the place, men blasted apart and screaming because they’re on fire. Some of them aim their weapons and shoot at us. The massive caliber discharges resound in the huge cave like fireworks with muscle. Two of our guys go down. Another one of us explodes on his feet, hit with the mounted 50-cal. Burke’s boys open up and it turns into a firefight. I throw myself on the ground, keeping low, just like she said, as the bullets chew up the air. The flames illuminate the half darkness in crazy, dreamlike bursts, and inside them I see shapes running and diving for cover, explosions of meat and blood. A mad dance with death. I see the kid on the mounted 50-cal whipping the giant weapon around on its swivel, trying to re-aim from his position in the dark alcove, but they turn him into dog food fast. His whole body detonates, pieces of him raining down on the thick business end of his gun, fried instantly by the superheat. Now our boys are ripping the hell out of the cavern, firing at anything that looks like an enemy, cleaning house. They’re using state-of-the-art cobalt-jacketed tracer ammunition, deep protocol stuff that cuts through solid rock, so there’s no bullet ricochets. It all bores deep into the mountain and never comes back.
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