Keeping Luna

by Todd Michael Haggerty

  A single word roared in his head. Deafening. Drowning out all other thoughts. Saturating the memory of every minute of his life. This word, overwhelming him in tumultuous repetition, made a bedlam of his mind. And though its clamor was absolute, it found only a whisper with which to leave his lips.

  “Eli. Eli.”

  Geena glared down at Cecil from where she stood.

  “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

  “Eli put you on track to take over for him. To inherit his seat,” Gabriel continued. “A gorgeous slice of nepotism from the man who aimed to rid the world of nepotism. I ran the results of your periodic testing against the criteria at the time, and you would have gone towards the social sciences on your first split. Not the military. And certainly not the officer’s track.”

  “Eli, Eli, Eli…”

  Geena threw herself onto the center of the table and kicked her legs over to the other side, picking up the pistol in her right hand. She pushed herself off the table and onto her feet with her other hand.

  Gabriel turned his head to the side, just enough to catch Geena in his periphery.

  “What are you planning to do with that, Ms. Verona? What would be the point? I think we both know you don’t…”

  Bang.

  Gabriel’s knees fell out from underneath him and he buckled onto the floor, limp and lifeless, save the subtle working of nerves in his fingertips. The window was punctured and spattered at head-level with a mist of red, accented here and there by small, viscous bits of darker crimson.

  Geena took two steps forward and was now hovering over Gabriel. After releasing two more rounds into his head where he lay, she turned to Cecil, whose mouth hung open in bewilderment.

  “Damage control,” she said coldly.

  “I’m assuming our phones are back online…” she said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her earpiece, working it into place over her ear.

  “Yes, this is Counselor Geena Verona. I need a heli on the roof of the main municipal building, and my escort detail is to meet me up there immediately. Thank you.”

  She removed the device and placed it once more into her pocket.

  “Why…” Cecil cleared his thoat. “Why shoot Gabriel? What is it you think we’ve gained by getting rid of him like that?”

  “Nothing gained, Cecil. But nothing lost either. I’m just nullifying the chance of any more of his future calamities.”

  Cecil was dumbfounded, and still fighting to make his tongue work. When he was able to put together another sentence, it wasn’t with his normal, robust voice. He was quiet. Scared.

  “He held all of the codes. The entire Frame. How is this not calamitous?”

  Geena leaned both hands onto the desk. The pistol was pressed tightly between the rich, dark wood grain and her tense right palm. She glanced at the pile of human crumpled up against the wall, and then back to Cecil.

  “What he has done cannot be undone,” she said. “Not with a code. Not with a nicely-worded essay or a cleverly staged opinion piece in the paper. He fucked us, pure and simple. He seemed to have a gift for it. And if we left him be, he would have done it again somehow.”

  “But… he was the only one who knew. What if he made it up? What if he falsified the documents?”

  “What the hell are you going on about, old man?!”

  “I mean…” he was whispering without realizing it. “I mean Eli.”

  “THIS IS THE PART THAT IS BOTHERING YOU RIGHT NOW?! YOUR FUCKING FATHER ISSUES? THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE HAVE THE PROGRAM IN THE FIRST PLACE! TO AVOID THESE SENTIMENTAL GLITCHES AND ALL THIS EMOTIONAL HORSESHIT!”

  “But Eli created the Program! He created it, justified it, sold it. And he didn’t even believe in it himself!”

  “You are a sad sight, Cecil!” She had managed to subdue the volume of her voice, but not the intensity that lived within it. “You are a fucking mess, and I’m not sure you can cut it any more. Maybe Eli didn’t believe any of it himself, but that doesn’t make him wrong. That doesn’t create a flaw in the logic of his argument. It just makes him weak. Your father was weak. And look at you… is that… are those tears in your eyes?”

  Cecil clenched his eyelids together and sobbed, sniffling his snot-filled nose as his shoulders bounced in rhythm with his crying.

  “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” she said.

  Geena straightened herself up and raised the gun.

  “I’m sorry, Cecil.

  “No…” he sobbed, looking up at her through his tears.

  “It was an honor to have learnt from you, when you were still… you. A true honor. But you’ve lost your objectivity, and you once told me that that was all we had in this line of work.”

  “No, no, no…” he raised his hands in front of him, more to block his sight of the gun than out of any hope for stopping it.

  The first shot traveled clean through his hand and shattered the left side of his jaw. Its report still hung in the echoing reverb of the vaulted ceiling as the second round pierced his neck, and then three more spiraled through his chest and the leather chair he sat in. He slumped forward and his head slammed onto the table with a loud thud.

  Geena slid the gun into the front pocket of her black dress slacks. She let out a sigh, feeling largely relieved. She unfastened the top button of her shirt, then swiveled her head and smirked down at Gabriel’s corpse.

  “Didn’t account for that, did you? You smug little shit.”

  A distant roaring sound made its way in through the small opening between the window and its frame. Voices. Hundreds of furious voices. Maybe thousands. Geena approached the window and stopped with the tips of her shoes just brushing Gabriel’s pant leg.

  She looked out past the red spatter, which had congealed on the cool glass but had not yet dried. Beyond that towering pane, seemingly every citizen in the capital had taken to the street, dressed in countless different shades of the same outfit. They were marching on the municipal facilities. Many carried weapons. Knives taken from their kitchens. Lacrosse sticks. Table legs.

  A group of no less than a dozen men and women stood in a loose circle a hundred meters from where she stood, swinging their arms and their clubs and their feet at something on the ground. The flash of a frantically waving black- and yellow-striped sleeve revealed that it was an Enforcer. A few short second later, his arm had stopped its waving.

  It’s beautiful, she thought, transfixed by the sea of carnage whose first waves were just starting their lapping and crashing on the walls of the building.

  They’ve never done this before. Never even thrown a punch out of anger, much less killed somebody. But they know how. Something deep within them knows how to kill a man. Wants to. They’ve repressed it, but it’s there.

  A stone shattered a pane of glass two windows down from where she stood, crashing into the back wall with a sharp bang. The half-trance that held her was broken. Sighing once more, she turned and walked around the table, swung the strap of her soft-shelled briefcase over her shoulder, and made for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Epilogue

  I would start by offering an apology, although it is not my intention to make excuses for myself. Nonetheless, I have come to the end of this telling and can’t escape the feeling that I have come up short.

  In truth, I was only a very small part of this tale. Those parts that I experienced firsthand I have put down to the furthest extent that my memory would allow. The bulk of this story, however, came to me through Gabriel.

  He made good on his promise of a new life for me. A new flat. A new name. And a new job. I was to be the channel through which he would bring his narrative into the world. I was to be the narrator for what has turned out to be a very dark chapter in our lives.

  On the very day that he brought me out from that dank underground gym, my head shaven roughly with a pair of electric clippers, Gabriel gave to me the code key to his personal account on the Frame. With this code key came access to every government and mi
litary report ever filed, every surveillance video ever recorded, and the details of every death or birth ever registered in the Nation.

  In addition to this, he supplied me with a mound of audio files of his own creation. Included in these files were audio streams of every one of the historic sessions he sat through with his mentor, Lamar, save the first one, which he was wholly unprepared for and thus did not take measures to record.

  Then there were surveillance feeds, such as the one that captured his last moments in this world. It is hard for me to watch, even now. But it did serve to present me with some shades of the personalities of both Geena and Cecil. Naturally, I was not actually privy to their private conversations or their interactions with Kale. So these conversations as I have presented them have been nothing more than my own imaginings and no small sum of guesswork.

  Aside from the restricted files and videos that were handed over to me, Gabriel had also made a habit of dictating his thoughts, theories, suspicions, and aimless ramblings into a microphone. The product of these untold hours was also incorporated into the bundle I received.

  All of this transpired rather quickly between Gabriel and myself, some twenty-four days prior to his fateful meeting with Geena and Cecil. But at the time of the publishing of this narrative, some four years have passed.

  Much has changed in this period, and nothing is certain.

  Nothing is safe.

  Counselor Geena Verona, now General Verona, has seized complete control of the military, despite a substantial number of deserters.

  Civil war has a daily hold on our lives.

  Rebelling forces now hold the core area of what was once our united Nation. This is to say that we control the majority of those lands that the Nation first made conquest of.

  Geena’s forces, calling themselves Earth’s Army, have been working their way inward from the perimeter of the Nation’s once expanding borders, necessarily turning their backs to the lands they once stood to conquer. The bloodshed continues to intensify with every day they further their advance towards the Capital.

  Our own army is comprised mostly of people who once merely called themselves citizens. In addition to these homegrown freedom fighters, many of those that deserted Geena’s battalions made their way inland and have been instrumental in helping with the organization and combat training of our men and women.

  But nothing is black and white, and a number of Geena’s moles also reside amongst us, intermittently perpetrating strategic acts of sabotage and violence to weaken our cause.

  I would tell you that it has taken me until now to complete my writing, but that would be untrue. I finished well over a year ago. The sad truth is that I have been fearful. I have been a coward. I have been afraid to expose myself. Afraid to make a target of myself. But the enemy draws steadily nearer, and the time has come for me to stow away my fear.

  As for Owen and Claire and their daughter, Luna… whom I still swear was the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen in my life… nothing concrete is known. The only thing we know for certain is that they made it beyond the limits of the Nation. And, as of six days ago, we know that they still live.

  Just this week, a photograph of the three of them has surfaced in the Capital, time-stamped eight months back.

  Rumors abound. The most popular is that Owen has taken personal command of some unnamed outside forces and will soon be joining our efforts towards liberation.

  For my part, in studying the photograph I am only happy to see that they wear clean clothes and appear to be well-fed. And to see that Luna is smiling. For that I will fight to my death, and I should be honored to call myself her guardian.

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