by Anthology
“Not why. How. It reminded me of that night two years ago. Hiram Banks. I saw you.”
“That was an accident.”
“So you say. But you hated him, didn’t you? Blamed him for your father’s death? Maybe you planned to kill him.”
“He wasn’t my favorite person, but I didn’t know—”
“And your mother hated him too? Maybe she put you up to it.”
“What? No! What do—”
“I was the sole witness. If we tell different stories about that night, which of us will have more credibility with a jury?”
She sank back into her chair.
“So you’re going to take care of The Leach for me, and anything else I tell you to do. Understood?”
Leopard-Print Girl nodded.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad we had this little chat.”
***
The first time Leopard-Print Girl confronted The Leach, it was on the mayor’s orders.
She flew into his compound, making what she hoped would be an impressive superhero entrance. The main reception area was spacious, with sleek modern furniture and a rust-colored carpet that looked like it would be really good at hiding bloodstains.
Leopard-Print Girl walked up to the receptionist’s desk. “Hi, I’m here to see—”
“Please have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Leopard-Print Girl took a tissue from the box on the desk and blew her nose. She appreciated the toasty warmth of the office after flying through near-freezing air at 200 mph, but the sudden temperature differential made her nose run.
The receptionist scowled at her. “Step back, please. I don’t want to catch whatever—”
“I’m not sick,” Leopard-Print Girl said. “It’s just that I flew here and—”
“Do you have an appointment?” The receptionist squirted hand sanitizer onto her palm and rubbed her hands together vigorously.
“No, but I think he may be expecting me. I’m from the mayor’s office.”
“And what is this regarding?”
“Um, extortion?”
The receptionist sighed. “Don’t you people read instructions? We stopped accepting hand-delivered cash years ago. Do you have any idea how filthy paper money is? Here.” She handed Leopard-Print Girl a card. “Wire transfer instructions are on the back. Have a nice day.”
“I’m not here to make a delivery. I need to talk to The Leach.”
“Do you have—oh, right. Let me see if I can pencil you in.” She tapped a few keys on her computer. “How does 10:30 this morning sound?”
“Um, it’s 10:38 now.”
“Yes. You’re late. I’ll have someone escort you in.”
An armed guard led Leopard-Print Girl to The Leach’s command center, which turned out to be a large office with a door in back that, according to the blueprints she’d studied, led to The Leach’s living quarters. She counted eight computer monitors spread across a variety of desks: a mahogany desk just like the mayor’s, a minimalist white desk, a standing desk, and a treadmill desk. Velvet Elvis paintings and a menagerie of stuffed animal heads adorned the walls.
The guard left Leopard-Print Girl alone with The Leach. He was sitting at the mahogany desk. His chair looked like the kind with thirty-seven adjustment points—but no control interface, because it senses the optimal settings for each individual and adjusts itself accordingly.
“Stacey tells me you’re here to ask for a payment extension.”
“You should fire her. The mayor sent me to kill you.” She paused for dramatic effect. “I’m hoping we can work out a compromise instead.”
“You can’t kill me. The countdown has already started, and only I can stop it.”
Leopard-Print Girl rolled her eyes. “Your security practices are pathetic. You shouldn’t download games from untrusted sites, and you really shouldn’t play your pirated copy of Candy Bird Sudoku Wars on the same system you use to control your superweapon. And seriously, ‘birdseed’ is too short to be a good password, and it’s in the dictionary, which is even worse. Changing the e’s to threes doesn’t help nearly as much as you seem to think.”
“You mentioned a compromise,” The Leach said.
“Basically, if you stop extorting the city, I won’t interfere with any of your other business. In fact, I can help you.”
The Leach leaned forward. “As a spy in the mayor’s office?”
“Well, no. What I’m proposing is that I help you shore up your security, and you pay me 20% of your net income.”
“You want to work for me?”
“It can’t be any worse than working for the mayor. Do you know what my primary responsibility has been for the past six weeks? Hand-delivering his daughter’s wedding invitations. Apparently a flying messenger is a status symbol.”
“That doesn’t sound—”
“The worst are the out-of-town guests. I have to take a commercial flight and then fly the last couple miles under my own power. I almost missed my mother’s funeral because my flight back from Tampa was delayed. Anyway, what do you say?”
“I say no. You can work here as an unpaid intern if you like.”
“And the annual extortion demands?”
“Are a tradition.”
She could see now that her plan wasn’t going to work. None of the plans would work. Not hers, not The Leach’s, not the mayor’s. She wasn’t cut out to be a superhero.
“Look, Leopard-Print Girl—”
“Why does everyone call me that? My name is Nicole Davis. It’s not a secret. You can’t reduce my entire identity to a single ill-advised fashion choice I made when I was trying to hold it together while my mom was dying.”
She hated being Leopard-Print Girl. She hated working for the mayor. She’d probably hate working for The Leach even more.
“Okay, let’s not get hysterical—”
“This isn’t hysteria. This is clarity.” She let out a small laugh. “That’s what they should call me. Clarity Girl. Clarity Woman. Clarity.”
***
The first time Clarity killed someone, it was a step on a path of her own devising.
She took a deep breath. And another.
She zapped The Leach.
She stepped over his lifeless body and aborted the weapon launch.
She sat in his chair. Her chair.
There was a lot she needed to do. Change the passwords and security codes. Get rid of any disloyal minions. Hire new ones. Redecorate. She’d definitely have to redecorate. Get rid of things. The stuff on the walls, some of the desks, the dead body on the floor.
She’d keep the chair, though. She liked the chair. She couldn’t remember ever feeling as comfortable as she did in that chair.
Samuel Peralta
http://www.smarturl.it/samuelperalta
Hereafter(Short story)
by Samuel Peralta
Originally published in 'Synchronic' (2014) edited by David Gatewood.
September 15, 2006
THAT AUTUMN SHE’S BACK in Toronto, staying at her mom’s place, before deployment. At Queen’s Quay Terminal, her two girlfriends go inside to grab a coffee, to stave off the late afternoon chill. She stays outside to check in, but the phone at her mom’s rings four, five, six times, and she flips her phone closed before it goes to voice mail.
There’s a soft crush of wind, and she hugs herself in her jacket. Time for that coffee. She turns, and that’s when she sees him. All in black, reminding her of Steve Jobs with his turtleneck and slacks, except didn’t Steve wear Adidas, and oh my God doesn’t he remind her of that lead in the Bryan Singer movie, and—
He collapses, crumples on the ground. She runs up the steps to him, but already he’s pulling himself up, bracing himself against the wall of the terminal building.
Just as she reaches him, he looks up, and their eyes meet. Suddenly, a feeling overcomes her: that this face is familiar, that she knows him, that they’ve met before. In his eyes there’s a similar flash of r
ecognition.
At his feet, a glimmer catches her attention, and she picks it up. A silver medallion, in the shape of a spiral nautilus, on a chain. She holds it out to him. “Yours?” she asks.
He takes it, holding her hand for just a fraction of a moment too long. “Oh God, I hope so,” he says.
They break off, both now blushing. She’s just decided she should be running off, when his knees buckle again and he hits the pavement. This time she has to pull him up and lean him against the wall herself. Nothing on his breath. Clean-shaven.
“I’m sorry,” he says, when he’s recovered. “It’s just been a long journey.”
She hesitates a bit before deciding. “Listen,” she says. “I think you need to sit down and get something to eat. Why don’t you join me and you can catch your breath? I’ll buy.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Caitlyn.”
“Sean Forrest,” he says. “Happy to meet you.”
Rotini in marinara sauce at the restaurant inside, and she’s chattering away, about the closing of The Lord of The Rings stage show at the Princess of Wales Theatre, about Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, about Spenser and the difference between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets—and wouldn’t he like to read one she’s written, which she happened to carry with her?—and when her phone rings, an hour has passed. It isn’t her mom, it’s her friends—wondering where in the world is she?
She tells them she’ll catch up with them later at the club, turns back to him, and they pick it up as if she’d never left off.
She talks about James Blunt and Kelly Clarkson, about Gilmore Girls and 24, about conspiracies and terrorists, about North Korean politics, about Middle Eastern food, about how her family makes their own tomato sauce.
He talks about rotini, about patterns in nature, about Gödel and Escher and Bach, about Rachmaninoff and Paganini, about nautilus shells and hurricanes and satellite orbits, about integer series and golden means.
Over coffee and dessert, she asks if he’ll accompany her to the Rex, the jazz bar where her friends are going that night.
“I’ve got to go home tonight,” he says. “This was supposed to be a one-time trip. But I’m thinking—” And he stops here, for what feels like a long, long time. Then: “I’m thinking that I want to make it back next year.”
“Oh no!” she says. “It’d be amazing, but I’m headed to Kandahar.”
He looks stunned, like he doesn’t know where that is.
“Afghanistan. I’m with the Canadian team at the R3 MMU. Combat operations field hospital.”
He’s still speechless.
“Oh heck, it’s only for two tours,” she says. “I’ll be back in a couple. How about we make a date for the future?”
That seems to break the trance. But what he does next is unexpected. He takes off his medallion, takes her hand, and presses it into her palm.
“Yours,” he says.
September 17, 2007
Southwest of Kandahar. Earlier that day, helicopters streamed like tremulous wasps into Zhari District, ferrying back remains from a shattered infantry battalion. Under her breath, another whispered prayer. Sometimes prayers are answered by a different god.
Behind blast walls ten feet high, at the edge of the runway of the Kandahar Airfield, the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit, or R3MMU, is an assemblage of field-deployable hospital structures, shipping containers, canvas tents, and leaking plywood buildings.
Despite this, the Canadian Forces Health Services team tasked with command of the R3MMU is on its way to the highest survival rate ever recorded for victims of war.
But Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams, in the middle of her first nine-month tour, isn’t at her regular station that night.
That week they’re short-staffed at the forward operating base at Ma’sum Ghar, so Cpl. McAdams and Cpl. Paul Francis are on temporary rotation there from R3MMU, twenty miles away.
It’s a tiny clinic on the side of a hill near Bazar-e Panjwaii township, a stopgap measure in an area without another hospital for miles, where anywhere you turn might be a roadside bomb or an improvised explosive device, where snipers are as numerous as wasps.
There’s a helipad down the dirt road, where a medevac chopper flies serious cases to the R3MMU.
The statistics here, they’re not quite as good as back at the airfield.
This is how she remembers that evening: the night air sweet, the sky bright with stars, the wind blowing warm across the desert. And then, an explosion from somewhere not far from the forward base. Minutes away.
She drops her copy of Cien Sonetos, and everyone is running to their posts. In a spray of dust, there’s an all-terrain vehicle jamming down the road, stretchers barely hanging on to the front. The gates open within seconds, and the soldiers are unloading the two casualties from the Canadian ATV.
In the cramped area, a team of about a half dozen works on the first casualty.
Cpl. McAdams and another team join Warrant Officer Ian Patrick, who’s stripped down the second man on the stretcher-table and wrapped a foil blanket around him.
The man is half-conscious, quivering, babbling something over and over. McAdams is passable in the Pashto dialect, but she can’t quite understand what he’s saying.
While they work, stabilizing his breathing, bandaging his leg, someone’s talking in the background. “IED hit. The Afghan was driving supplies for our road construction site. That other one, he’s not from here, but he’s not one of ours.”
Not Afghan. She looks again, and beneath the grit and sweat and blood the face is unmistakable. Her heart twists inside her. Leaning forward to incline her ear nearer his mouth, she understands what he’s saying—
Her name.
Work fast, fast, she tells herself. She should be detached, concentrating. Oh God, keep my hands from shaking. A chest wound, serious. Collapsed lung. Need to do an incision. She can hear gurgling as they open him up. Get a tube in, release the excess pressure.
His body is torn, ripped apart by shrapnel. Left hand amputated—the one that held her own, one year ago, for just that fraction of a second too long. One leg gone from the knee down, the other from the hip. They can’t stop the bleeding.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
At her voice, his eyes suddenly open. He sees her, and there’s recognition, and then he closes them. He doesn’t open them again.
“Medevac!” she hears herself shouting.
But it’s too late.
September 19, 2009
Honey-crisp apples, from a basket from her brother Joe, who’d served two previous tours of duty himself, and knew instinctively that for her this would mean home.
A week ago, Joe had come out to meet her at the Forces base at Trenton, after her final tour. He’d driven up in his shiny new blue Astra, and waxed eloquent about the immensity of the deal he’d gotten on it, because the company was shutting down. Everything was shutting down—car companies, hospitals, banks. She wished she could shut down.
Two and a half hours to her mother’s home in Port Credit. She’d piled everything in the back of the hatchback—everything that might remind her of the war, of comrades fallen and lost, of the horrors she’d left behind—wanting to focus only on her brother’s voice, the highway winding ahead, and home.
A half hour into the drive, she realized she’d been playing with the chain around her neck, winding it and unwinding it around her fingers. On its clasp, the silver medallion roller-coasted down to her thumb. She began to weep.
Honey-crisp apples. The one she bites into is lovely: tart and tangy. She finishes it, laces up her running shoes, and goes out the back, to the woods behind the house.
The neck-chain swings underneath her shirt. She runs.
Sean’s Canadian Forces identity disc had survived the blast. She could see it still—two rounded rectangular halves joined in a square, one half meant to be detached and sent to National Defense, etched in her mind like a gravestone:
823-509-653
&nb
sp; S P FORREST
NP O/RH/POS
CDN FORCES CDN
And on the reverse upper half:
DO NOT REMOVE
NE PAS ENLEVER
When they found that it wasn’t a genuine I-disc, someone at the med unit thought he might have been from one of the intelligence agencies, but it turned out the I-disc wasn’t even a good counterfeit. The metal was wrong, too soft, the embossing uneven across the letters. The number had been easily traceable to someone else, an I-disc splashed out for sale on eBay.
All that didn’t matter to Caitlyn. What was clear was this: he had come to find her, even if that meant going into the middle of a war zone. And now he was gone.
She runs.
The banks of the Credit River are embroidered with leaves. They crackle as she passes. The air is crisp, slightly chill as she breathes it in.
She runs.
She passes the birch at the halfway point, and pauses for a pulse check. Her heart is already pumping fast as she catches a glimpse of a man, dressed in black, standing on a promontory about fifty yards from her.
She stops, and shields her eyes from the sun. A man from out of her past.
It hits her like a defibrillator jolt, but her mind calms her down. Out of nowhere, he’d appeared before in another unlikely place, half a world away. If he was real back then, real in Kandahar—then why not right here, right now, in the middle of the woods behind her mother’s house, alive?
“Is it you?” she asks.
He comes closer. “Caitlyn,” he says.
She leans against a tree, breathing heavily. “Sean. You were dead.”
“I’m not dead. Not now.”
“But how?”
“Can I come closer?”
“How?” she shouts at him, backing off. “You’re not a ghost. I was there, two years ago. You were dead.”
He takes a breath. “I traveled into that time. And the first time we met.”
“Stay where you are.”
“I can’t,” he says, but he stops moving toward her. “I mean…that first time, when we first met—that started out as a one-time trip. But I could only come back a year later, then it had to be now, and tomorrow it will be three years from now, and five years from then…”