Keeping Luna

by Todd Michael Haggerty

  On the evening of the third day, however, they happened upon the tablet of one of their hostages. They had wanted to check the news. There was no news. There was nothing, save one video.

  In this video, Gabriel appeared on camera and explained to every citizen of the Nation that he had disabled the Frame entirely. For everyone. Indefinitely. That video was to remain the only accessible file on every computer, civilian or military, until it was confirmed that Owen, Claire, and their daughter, Luna, had safely made their escape and were beyond the reach of National forces.

  Cameras and trackers had been disabled. Telecommunication as well.

  And he urged every citizen to remain “actively uninvolved” in this manhunt, just as Owen had done in his own brief video on Terrence’s column.

  From the time that Gabriel’s video went live, citizens began to volunteer away their automobiles upon seeing Owen approaching, simply tossing him the keys and hurrying away.

  It would have seemed noble of them, had it not been done out of self-interest. The truth was that the day-to-day lives of these people had been gravely disrupted by Gabriel’s blackout of the Frame. They could not finish the books they were halfway finished reading. There was no news to browse through with their morning coffee, and no movies to watch with their evening tea.

  Many people were unable to perform those duties of their jobs that required Frame access, and restaurants and grocers were quickly running short on food due to their inability to place new orders.

  It wasn’t more than four days into this technological drought before public opinion had shifted so drastically that citizens dared to openly declare their support for these outlaws. There were even rallies in the streets of the larger cities throughout the Nation, including the Capital. Enforcement Agents were on hand to ensure that these rallies turned violent.

  Despite this surprising lack of resistance from the population at large, Claire and Owen still made efforts to remain largely unseen. So when Claire grew tired of eating those dense brown lumps of what Owen referred to as “fuel,” and when she refused outright to get into another car with him until they had procured some real food, they opted to do their “shopping” at night, after the stores were closed.

  It proved to be so easy a task, with all of the security cameras and alarms offline, that they were both quick to agree that they also needed more clothing for the seasons to come on the other side of the wall. Their focus fell mainly on warm layers such as thermal underwear, long pants, sweatshirts, and footwear. Clothing for warmer weather was less of a concern. This far north, in these colder climes, hot summer days were truly a quality problem.

  And they would require some form of currency, they had decided. Goods for trading. Although they found it difficult to determine what sorts of things might potentially hold some intrinsic commercial value.

  Owen knew from his service abroad that the citizens in those lands beyond the broad borders of this Nation valued gold, as well as other precious metals and stones. But these materials lacked real function in this society. They were largely impractical construction materials for the things used by the citizens in their everyday lives, and they were thus hard to find.

  Those things that would always have some inherent value, they decided, were the things that there would always be a need for. Tools, utensils, kitchen accessories. Anything of solid build, and suitable for continued daily use. So they filled an extra canvas duffel with can-openers, kitchen knives, silverware, and a few pieces of stainless steel cookware. This bag would be Owen’s to bear, and he hoped it wouldn’t need bearing for too great a distance.

  They were close now.

  Already he was beginning to see signs of construction from the border renovations ahead. Heavy machinery that wasn’t currently in use could be found parked by the roadside, and the road itself was caked with mud from the broad treads of these machines.

  Just a few kilometers, thought Owen.

  He glanced over his right shoulder and onto the backseat. The contour of a woman’s body was vaguely discernible beneath a thick wool blanket, and a few blonde locks escaped this cover on one end.

  “We’re getting close, darling. I hope you’re ready.”

  Owen swung the car around a turn and onto a straightaway that ran for the better part of two kilometers. On either side of the road was a wide shoulder of coarse gravel and dirt, and beyond that a dense cover of pine. He kept on. About eight-hundred meters ahead, the nearest car pulled into the next corner and disappeared out of sight.

  “It’s gotta be close. Must be just around this corner, or maybe the next…”

  His sentence was cut short as something small thudded into his upper chest. A hole, maybe two centimeters in diameter, had appeared in the windshield before him. It was a clean hole, with a frayed border of one or two millimeters, and no spider web pattern growing away from it. A split-second later it was joined by another hole, nearly identical, about one hand-width from the first. This time the round struck Owen through the shoulder and exited into his seat.

  His hands came away from the steering wheel and his feet left the pedals as he gawked in near-disbelief at the blood running down his arm. This was a new experience for him. He had never been shot. Shot at plenty over the years, but never shot. It hurt less than he had imagined, in fact almost not at all. But everything froze within him and he felt paralyzed in the moment. His arm wouldn’t move.

  Left to its own alignment, which pulled slightly left, the car drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic, slowing gradually in fourth gear. The sound of the engine faded lower and lower until it stalled completely. The car now left the road, having slowed to a speed no greater than fifteen kilometers per hour. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, and then there was an abrupt jolt as the front left tire slammed into the shallow ditch on the outside of the shoulder.

  Finally able to convince his body to move, Owen unfastened his buckle and crawled across the passenger seat and pushed open the door. He kept his one functioning arm straight out, on display in front of him as he exited the vehicle. He stumbled into the road, walking in the same direction he had been driving.

  One hundred meters ahead, where the road swerved sharply to the left, he saw a man in full forest fatigues emerging from the cover of the trees. The man held a large rifle, an A-205, by Owen’s best estimation, and held it trained on Owen as he approached. The man was limping.

  Owen had walked about fifty meters from the crashed car when he took notice of more men appearing from the trees on either side of him. Voices were shouting at him.

  “GET DOWN, MOTHERFUCKER!”

  “DOWN ON THE GROUND!”

  Keeping his hand ahead of him, he dropped to his knees and then lowered himself onto his stomach. His good arm stretched out onto the pavement above his head, and he felt the grit beneath his palm. Everything seemed unreal, euphoric. It was a feeling he knew from combat. He worked at taking steady, deep breaths.

  His chest was tender but somehow also half-numb beneath him, and he was in some doubt as to whether his vest had actually kept him from the bullet. He turned his head onto its side and saw the men approaching. All carried handguns, save the man with the rifle who was now drawing near. Owen recognized him at once from the parking garage at Terrence’s flat.

  Kale yelled at the three men that now surrounded Owen.

  “Pin him down and stay put! I’ll take the girl.”

  He made for the car, pulling his left leg heavily behind his right.

  “Claire!” Owen yelled. He felt a boot press down on his head, but only yelled louder. “CLAIRE!”

  Kale took hold of his rifle by the strap and swung it over his shoulder, pulling a large pistol from the holster on his hip as he approached the crash. Owen continued to wail and holler behind him. Kale loved the sound of it. It was the sound of defeat. Of hopelessness. Helplessness. Despair in the jaws of fate.

  He held the pistol trained on the car with one hand while the other worked its way into a zip
pocket on his beltline, coming out with his communications earpiece. He wriggled it into place and wrapped its support brace behind his ear.

  “Sir, we’ve taken Owen. I’m now making my approach on the girl.”

  “Good, soldier. Keep the line live,” answered Geena.

  Kale pulled his left hand up under his right to brace the gun. His right eye followed the barrel to the car’s rear passenger window. While his left eye was no longer completely swollen shut, its field of vision was still limited by the heavy pressing of a thick, purple eyelid.

  He shouted out as he neared the automobile.

  “I’ve got a gun on you! Don’t move unless you want to get shot! Unless you want your baby to get shot!”

  His short steps continued until he was at the car, pointing his pistol down through the glass. He saw her wrapped beneath her blanket, the same dyed blonde hair he remembered from the car park just barely visible. He grinned, reaching for the door handle and pulling it slowly open. He spoke, his voice now low and placid.

  “You’re a bad bitch. I’ll give you that.”

  His pistol remained trained on her as his left hand reached for the woolen cover, clenching it tightly into his fist and yanking on it until her arm flopped out from beneath. Her plastic arm.

  With a firm jerk he ripped the blanket out of the car and tossed it into the dirt and the rocks behind him. There in front of him, stretched across the navy blue fabric of the backseat, lay the slender figure of a clothing store mannequin, a large melon held fast between its arm and its torso.

  “Fuck! Fuck fuck…”

  He ripped himself away from the car and turned to his men, but before a single word could leave his lips he was thrown across the road by a wall of noise and heat. His body hit the pavement, rolling and flipping with the useless, limp arms and legs of a child’s plaything into the grit of the far roadside.

  Everything went black for a time, and he wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep. Or dead. Sound gradually crept its way through his ringing ears and back into his head. The sound of crackling flames leaping and licking skyward from the upturned corpse of the exploded car. The sound of rubber tires slowly turning over the blacktop, passing between him and the burning wreckage. Gunshots. Men screaming.

  When he was at last able to pull his eyes open, he wasn’t sure whether it had been a matter of mere seconds, or minutes, or hours in the passing. The flames roared loudly from the shell of the car opposite him, and he could feel their heat on his face. He stared down the length of his broken body and saw that his legs ended in a crimson and black mess somewhere above where his knees had been.

  Struggling to tilt his head upward from where he lay, crumpled onto his side, he sought after that spot on the road where Owen had been. Owen was gone, replaced now by the forms of three lifeless bodies in army fatigues.

  Geena’s voice filled his head.

  “What’s going on, soldier?! Report! Report at once!”

  Kale ripped away the earpiece and tossed it, and managed to heave his shoulder enough to flop himself onto his back. He stared upwards, away from the rising black smoke of the fire and out into the limitless blue of a cloudless sky. And he told himself that there were stars beyond it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The old man was right. It is beautiful, Gabriel thought as he gazed out towards the harbor.

  The sky was overcast, subduing the already soft blue of the highrises and the vibrant green tones of everything that ran between them. Further off, the saltwater of the bay pulsated more than it churned, its hue caught somewhere between green and grey as it rolled softly in from larger waters.

  Hovering on the skyline were darker clouds, heavy, each carrying its share of a storm that had yet to pass. These thick hanging shrouds were balanced by a handful of broad beams that escaped the grey cover further west over the water. They shone down in patches on the more turbulent reaches of the open ocean, reminding those salty depths that they were not to be forgotten beneath whatever tempest might come to roll and roar above them.

  Gabriel reached for the side latch on the tall window he stood before. It gave some resistance, but ultimately it betrayed its own eagerness to be opened, swinging out into the mild daylight.

  He swore he could smell the squall as it gathered in the distance. It was not any one thing. It was a congregation of voices, all trying to be heard, whispering over one another in excited tones. Saltwater. The smell of the blacktop beneath a long-awaited rain. Lavender straddling the wind as it carried stubborn puffs of dandelion that refused to be grounded.

  He heard the brass handle turning behind him, and then the timid creaking of the heavy wooden door as it pushed open into council chamber. He pulled the window back to its frame but didn’t fasten the latch. Turning away from the window, he greeted Cecil and Geena with a smile that Geena could almost have mistaken for sincere if she weren’t already so convinced of its devious intention.

  As the two of them stepped into the room, their eyes fell onto the pistol that lay near the edge of the long council table, a quick step away from Gabriel’s hand.

  “A man must take precautions. Especially when his flat has so mysteriously and unexpectedly blown up.” Gabriel smiled cordially. “But I have no intention of picking up this crude tool. I don’t need to. Please, let’s sit down.”

  Gabriel sat first, leaving the gun where it was, two seats down and well out of his immediate reach. Geena and Cecil slowly seated themselves across from him.

  “Now then. Isn’t this nice?” started Gabriel. “I was just admiring our Capital, this great city, built by great men who…”

  “Let’s cut the shit, shall we?” Geena’s cold voice sliced through the air between them. “What do you have for us? Demands? Your man got away like you wanted. Do you even know what it is you want now?”

  “Well, I want to be great, of course. I want this Nation to be great.”

  “Ah,” began Cecil. “And is this not a great Nation? Tell me, Gabriel, what do you know of the outside world? What do you know of the way things were? Nothing. Your youthful idealism is clouding your vision, too busy seeing the things that you think could be to see the things that are. To see how much we have.”

  “What do we have, Counselor Cecil?”

  “We have order, young Counselor Gabriel. Every man eats. Every man works. Every man sleeps in a bed, with walls to keep out the wind and a ceiling between him and the rain. Every man learns, and knows that he plays a small part in something big. Something great. This is a great Nation. One day it will be the only Nation, and we will be able to say that this is a great world.”

  “This Nation is a lion in shackles, and every man a shell.”

  The playful smile had run away from Gabriel’s face, replaced now by a look of passionate sincerity.

  “Every man eats without tasting.

  “Every man works just enough to create more work for himself for the next day.

  “Every man sleeps in a bed, alone with his thoughts, which don’t know well enough to ask why he is alone at all. With walls to keep out the wind that might fill his sails. With a ceiling to keep him from reaching too high.

  “And every man learns just enough not to ask for more.”

  “This is cute,” said Geena, her upper lip curling slightly in disgust. “So very cute. You write poetry. That’s touching. A little heavy-handed, but touching.”

  Gabriel rose slowly and walked back over to the window, his back turned to Geena and Cecil as he began to speak once more.

  “It isn’t my charge to recite poetry. I’m paraphrasing an old friend. There will be no demands on my part, and no offers either. I called you here to bear witness with me.” He looked down at his wristwatch. It was four minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon. He smiled to himself. It was done.

  His eyes were still lost in the distance of the horizon as he talked.

  “A few minutes ago, the Frame went live again… with a few adjustments.”

  �
�Such as?” Geena probed in a mocking tone, hoping the contempt in her voice could hide her fear for the answer.

  “Transparency, Counselor Geena. And with it accountability. Every citizen of this… great Nation… has now been given access to everything. All the books we placed under restriction, and the movies. Military records from every one of our conquests over the last eighty years. Videos. A whole lot of videos. Videos from troop transport ships, for example.”

  Cecil’s eyes shot open in horror.

  “And public records,” Gabriel continued calmly. “Death records. The fates of every Reassign and Relocate. And every suicide accounted for. There were a lot of those. We wrote it all down, you know. With amazing attention to detail, really.”

  Cecil’s voice made a run at his mouth from his throat, but Gabriel stopped him short.

  “But what every citizen will first see upon logging into their accounts today are birth records. The names of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Today I give the Nation family.”

  “ARE YOU CRAZY!” screamed Geena, springing to her feet and kicking her chair backwards with her heel. “ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? THEY’LL HANG US! THEY’LL HANG ALL OF US!”

  “If we’re lucky,” muttered Cecil, his voice low and distant. His eyes rested on the pistol across the table from him.

  “And you, Cecil…” Gabriel was still facing away, but they could both hear in his voice that he was smiling as he spoke. “I found your own birth records to be exceedingly interesting. Or are you going to try and tell me that you didn’t know?”

  “Know?” Cecil asked, his robust face draining of its usual pinkish color. He fumbled at his pockets until at last he came up with a small tablet. He keyed in his password and the whole room fell terribly silent. Then a trembling came over him. His hands wavered uncontrollably.