Keeping Luna

by Todd Michael Haggerty

  They made for the car parked in space 4012, and Owen crouched down to allow for Terrence to clumsily place his thumb over the door scanner. The locks rolled over and Owen flopped Terrence across the back seat before tossing everyone’s baggage into the rear hold. Claire seated herself in the front passenger seat, and Luna’s sobs turned to soft cooing as she gazed up at her mother.

  Claire turned now to Owen as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.

  “Why didn’t you just shoot him?! You were quick enough to put one in that man’s stomach upstairs, but here this maniac has me by the throat… and poor little Luna… Was he right? Are you out of shots?”

  “Rounds.”

  “Not the time for a vocabulary lesson, Owen!”

  “No. Not completely out yet. I’ve got one…” He drew the pistol from his pocket and clicked off the safety. “But we needed to save it.” He raised the gun up and pressed it firmly against the narrow section of frame between his window and the windshield.

  Claire cringed, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing her left ear into her shoulder. She pulled the infant into her and covered its one exposed ear with her hand.

  Owen squeezed the trigger and the car rang with a loud pop.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “So what are you telling me, soldier? I know you’re not telling me that you had them and you let them go! I know you aren’t telling me that!”

  “Sir, I think it’s entirely possible that…” Kale spit a mouthful of blood onto the concrete beside him. “…in retrospect, sir, perhaps we ought to have factored the girl a little more… substantially… into the equation.”

  Kale’s voice emanated from the speaker on the bureau. He sounded remarkably changed, lethargic, as he struggled to speak out of the swollen pulp of his face without biting down on his own mangled tongue. Every S was a slurred mess, and his Bs and Ps were unconvincing as he wasn’t entirely able to press his lips together.

  He leaned to his side where he sat, bracing himself with a palm on the cold floor, and released another mouthful. From their seats, Cecil in the tall-backed chair behind his desk and Geena in the plush armchair opposite him, they could clearly distinguish the sounds of splashing and spattering into what sounded like a small puddle.

  “You should have seen her, sir,” Kale continued. “I mean, I’ve seen some shit… some vengeful women… but this… this was… and I do apologize for the way I’m speaking, but she caught me with a chunk of tongue between my teeth.”

  “Kale,” Cecil started, having now gathered a touch of calm. “Have we employed the services of the wrong man? Are you not up to this task?”

  “I absolutely am, sir. And I’m not a man to repeat mistakes. But at the moment I’m staring down at the handle of a rather large kitchen knife sticking out the side of my leg. It’s just gonna need flushing and stitching, and then I can pick up from where I left off. So if you could just send a wagon my way…”

  “Why are you not dead?!” Geena screamed at the small speaker on the desk. “Maybe we should send a gunhand your way instead! And get someone capable on this task, which you seem so unequipped to perform!”

  Cecil held up a hand to Geena.

  “Kale,” he began, “Do you understand how this works? All of it, I mean?” He was waving his arms around as he spoke to illustrate the vast nature of his topic. “Society, I mean? Do you grasp how it is managed? How we hold it all together?

  “Fear, soldier. Fear is the tool for the job.

  “There was a time when a man had to go to work to earn the money to buy his meals, to pay for his residence and the clothes on his back. His incentive was money. No work. No money. But the people of our great Nation do not have this incentive to drive them to go to work when they’re supposed to. But they do go. They do work. Because somewhere deep in the back of their minds, they know that it would be unsafe not to. We have never told them this, but they seem to understand it.

  “When friends and acquaintances vanish overnight, never to be seen or heard from again, it plants the seed of fear in the mind of the citizen. He wonders what they did to get themselves disappeared, and subconsciously he feels that it must have been a punishment for one thing or another… even if this is not what we tell him.

  “Our enforcement agents fortify this fear with random, frequent, and generally brutish ID checks on the streets. They equip our citizens with the thought that they are being watched. Monitored. Evaluated.

  “So right now, when a chaser has failed at his post, and all too publicly… when we have fugitives posting videos, making celebrities of themselves and going visibly unpunished for their transgressions… what do you think goes through the heads of our feeble-minded citizens? What do you think happens to that fear that we so desperately need?”

  Cecil paused and breathed heavily through a half-congested nose. Kale waited silently for him to continue.

  “Ok, Kale. Say I send you this wagon, and say you get started on your way again… what can I expect of you? What can you tell me at this point that will inspire some minute degree of confidence on my part?”

  “Sir, I am all but certain that I know where they will cross. It is certainly the spot I would choose, anyhow. A section of the border that is currently under renovation, alive with construction crews, and a bit of a chaotic mess in comparison to the rest of the wall. Owen might change his course, zig and zag, but I don’t imagine that his destination will ever change.

  “It should take them at least a week of steady driving, probably longer considering their need to frequently charge up or commandeer cars. I can get there within about five days and set up ahead of them.”

  Cecil raised an eyebrow at Geena and then spoke once more.

  “Tell us about the reporter, Kale. What was his role here? Accomplice? Hostage?”

  “Sir, if I may ask, would that in any way change his fate?”

  “Likely not, but I like to have the full picture… a feel for the canvas before I start making my own strokes.”

  “To be honest, sir, I’m not sure what his role is. I hit him first and pretty well removed him from the equation immediately. But they did pick him up and take him with them, which I suppose says a lot in itself.”

  “Mmm. Yes yes. I thought as much. He has some history with the girl, although I’m sure you knew that, seeing as you managed to find them there. A wagon will find you shortly, Kale. I don’t expect there’s a need to explain what will become of you should you fail us again?”

  “No, sir. Thank you for this opportunity to serve.”

  Cecil leaned forward and pressed the small red button on the speaker, terminating the conversation. He turned his attention to Geena.

  “And what does my pupil make of all this? Tell me how you would proceed.”

  Geena shifted her eyes from Cecil to the large monitor screen on his desk and then back to Cecil again.

  “I say we watch it one more time to make sure we aren’t missing anything,” she said, motioning towards the screen. “Then we choose our course of action, which I’m hoping will be fast and direct and immediate this time. Waiting for things to develop hasn’t exactly been working out in our favor.”

  Cecil sighed a small puff of laughter out of his nose.

  “No, it hasn’t,” he said. “Let’s give it another spin.”

  He sighed again and reached for the mouse. Click. There on the monitor appeared Owen, staring back at them.

  “This is a warning to the citizens of this Nation,” Owen began. “By now I expect you have all read the bulletin concerning me and my woman and our child. It’s not my intention to deny any of the things you have been told. I AM a dangerous man. We ARE desperate people. We have done bad things to good people, and we won’t hesitate to put you on your back if you meddle.

  “You have been told that we are criminals, and this is true. We have taken our child, which belongs to the Nation by law. We do not accept this law, and we will not tolerate any attempts to uphold it. Be it a soldier c
arrying out his orders, or a citizen calling in a sighting, we will do whatever it takes to protect ourselves and our daughter, and we will do so in good conscience.

  “This law is not right. You can go ahead and recite any bit of text you like, repeat any of the mindless mantras that justify it. You can tell yourself that the Program is necessary, that our society would crumble without it. You can claim that our allegiance must be sworn solely to our Nation, which has always provided for us all that we need, and that the very nature of family makes this sort of absolute fidelity impossible.

  “You can say these things and you will not be wrong. Anything can be justified if looked at from the right angle, and if spoken with just the right words. You can speak these words. You can rationalize. You can argue that the structure of family is harmful to society as a whole.

  “But find for yourself one of our childless mothers. Hold her by the hand. Look her in the eye and ask her to tell you that she is not a victim. Ask her to tell you that her maternal instincts are flawed, that she was wrong for ever wanting to keep her son. To keep her daughter.

  “Ask her to tell you that it was for her own good that she gave up the child that grew within her for forty weeks. The child that fluttered at first in her belly like a handful of butterflies. The child that later kicked and pressed with feet and hands, knees and elbows, ass and head. The child that had hiccups that she could feel inside her. The child she suffered hour after hour to deliver, that caused her to swell with milk that would never fill its belly.

  “Ask her to tell you that she isn’t broken.

  “I feel it now. I understand. I have held my daughter and I will never let her go. Her name is Luna, and I will choke the life out of any man or woman that tries to take her from me.

  “I regret only that we have to run. This will be the first time in my life that I will have left some bit of duty unresolved. I apologize to my employer. I wish I could have told you everything, Junior. But that was a chance I couldn’t take. And now I fear I have left you exposed.

  “They are coming for you. I have heard it with my own ears. They will come, and you must be prepared. And I cannot stress enough that you must continue with your training. There is no time for a break. And you know what I would tell you were I there to do so. Work harder. Work harder.

  “Take care of yourself, Gabriel.

  “And as for the rest of you out there, take care of yourselves. Stay the fuck out of our way.”

  Cecil’s elbow rested upon his desk, and his sticky brow had slipped into the palm of his hand without his realization as he listened to Owen’s address. As the video once more came to its end, he raised his head to his protégé.

  “Well? Do we see things any clearer now?”

  Geena looked puzzled. She studied a spot on the hardwood floor as she worked something over, her eyebrows pressing down at her distant eyes. Finally she spoke, though unable to shake from her face the evidence of her agitated thoughts.

  “There are a few things that stand out. A few questions,” she started. “Why? Why does he not refute any of the things that we said he did? The extreme abuse of the midwife? Her rape? The torturous death of that unlucky man in his apartment?”

  “Yes yes. Why, indeed?” Cecil’s voice had grown animated, as though he were working over a riddle that he found particularly engrossing. This was to be genuine discourse. A conversation. Geena was asking all of the questions he had at first asked himself, and this would save him the discomfort of feeling like a lecturer.

  “Why do you think?” he probed.

  “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t really suit his purpose to confute those stories. He makes a point of coming off as dangerous. He aims to intimidate. The scarier he makes himself, the less likely someone will pick up their phone in the event they should see him.”

  “Yes yes. You’re on to part of it. But you also misread the man. This Owen fellow is not the same as our chaser. Our Kale operates much like a pocket calculator. You feed him information, a list of circumstances, your expectations, and he comes up with a pure solution, uninhibited by feelings, or opinions, or pity.

  “Owen, on the other hand… well, he gets bothered. Make no mistake, he is very upset that you offed that fellow the two of them took hostage; that you violated that young lady. But he knows better than to call us out on it.

  “What good would it do him to say that he didn’t rape her? What’s done is done. If he said that any of it were untrue, then it would only serve to open up a new line of inquiry. People would start asking her questions, and before you know it we would be disappearing her onto a boat and off into the deep salty. From his standpoint, one out of two beats zero for two, and there is no reason to jeopardize this girl another time.”

  “The virtuous hero,” Geena grinned so that one of her canine teeth showed beneath her lip. “Breaks my little heart.”

  They shared a crude smile. If ever Cecil had admired a woman, it was this young thing before him. She was reptilian. Calculating. Cold. Perfect.

  “Did anything else catch you?” he asked.

  “That bit at the end where he talks to Gabriel. He abandons his audience and talks straight at Gabriel. And he warns him… but how would he…”

  “I would wager that, were we to revisit that man’s flat… this Roberto fellow who so tragically met his end at the hands of these two depraved fugitives…”

  “We would find a bug,” she finished his thought, once more helping Cecil to feel less like a man speaking from a lectern.

  “But there is something more there,” she continued. “Something between the lines. I think there is a message in there that we are missing.”

  “Can I tell you what I find odd?” Cecil’s curiosity was painted across his brow. “Owen says that he wishes he could have told Gabriel what he was planning.”

  “Yeah? And…”

  “Well, Gabriel was already helping these two well before this video was published. It hasn’t been the girl’s doing, all the problems we’re having with surveillance. All cams and tracker beacons have been disabled, as you know, but not by her doing. It was someone with a higher clearance than any of my own people have, a higher clearance than even I possess.”

  “What?!” Geena snapped. “How long have you been sitting on that little gem?!”

  “About two hours now.”

  “Two hours?! Two hours! You’ve known for two hours and you still haven’t made a move? Go snatch that little shit out of his hole and hold him over the fucking flames!”

  “I was waiting on you,” said Cecil, calm as ever.

  “What the fuck does this have to do with me?!”

  “Everything.” He smiled. “I’m scraping this hot mess off of my plate and onto yours. You are directing this operation now. Every aspect of it.”

  Geena was stunned, and more than a little irritated.

  “So this is your solution?” she snarled. “Things go sideways and you make your problem into my problem, and then turn your back?”

  “Oh I won’t be turning away from anything,” he said sternly. “You will still report to me. I am still your superior, and you will always do well to remember that. I’m just curious to see how you handle things because one day things will need handling. This ship will need steering, and I won’t be around to steer it. Now remove that bitch tone from your voice when addressing me and do your fucking job.”

  He slid a small black device across the table to her.

  “That’s a direct line to the team that’s camped out on Gabriel’s flat,” he said with a small nod.

  Without hesitation, Geena picked up the transceiver from where it lay on the dark polished wood and depressed the large button on its side. She held it a few hand-widths from her face and spoke.

  “This is Counselor Geena Verona, and I am now taking charge of this horseshit operation.”

  A few seconds passed before a man’s voice, deep and scratchy, came through the speaker on the broad face of the device.

  “
…Yes sir, Counselor. We have been briefed about your command and are currently awaiting your orders.”

  “Move in. Make it fast, but take him alive. And try to keep him away from any computers, tablets, phones, or any other electronic devices. You will keep this line open the whole time, and when he is in your custody, I expect verbal confirmation. Then you will deliver him directly to me. Is that all clear, soldier?”

  “Crystal clear, sir.”

  Geena lay the transceiver back onto the desk in front of her and listened as the first man quietly gave his team their orders. There was some rustling as they got themselves equipped. She watched the second hand on her wrist watch making its revolution as she waited, as was now a firm habit left over from her days as an efficiency officer in the military wing of this administrative building. At just shy of ninety seconds, the man’s voice once again came through the speaker, this time in a whisper.

  “We’re now taking the door…”

  There was a loud crashing sound as the door to Gabriel’s flat was blasted off its hinges, and then the loud barking of four men as the team penetrated the residence.

  “Bedroom, clear!”

  “Bathroom, clear!”

  “Main space, clear!”

  “Checking closet… Clear!”

  “Miss Counselor, sir, this flat is empty!”

  “WHAT?!” Geena snatched the transceiver up and screamed into it, infuriated. “What do you mean empty?! You had one job! ONE FUCKING JOB!”

  “Yes sir. We watched him go in and he never came out again.”

  “What about visitors, you nitwit?! Has there been anyone else in or out?”

  “Just a woman, blonde. She left on the first day. We figured she was a professional. An escort.”

  “YOU FUCKING IDIOTS! HE’S GAY! GAY!!! HOW DID YOU NEVER MENTION ANY OF THIS TO US?!”