by Sean Black
Post
Sean Black
About the Book
Exhausted by years of combat, and haunted by the ghosts of his past, nothing is going to stop Byron Tibor returning home to the woman he loves. But is Byron who he appears to be, and why is the American government determined to stop him?
From the blood-soaked mountains of the Hindu Kush to the glittering lights of Manhattan, via the dark underbelly of the Las Vegas Strip, POST is the story of one man's struggle to retain his humanity – before it's too late.
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For Lee
I stand across the street from our old apartment, the exhaust fumes of the early-evening traffic and the burnished gold leaves of the late fall taking me back to the time before. It’s cold. I stamp my boots on the sidewalk, trying to force warmth into my feet. A woman walking a tiny dog swaddled in a fleece sweater skirts around me. She meets my gaze, and looks away abruptly, her skull a blaze of yellow. In a city of perpetual motion, standing quietly is a suspect activity, especially when you look as I do.
I scare people. They see something in my eyes. At first I thought it was death, but it’s not. Death is a presence, and what they see in me is an absence.
The light is failing. The last of the sun turns the building’s stone front to a rich honey-gold for a few precious minutes as I wait it out. I tell myself I have come this far, and seen so much, that everything that has passed before me requires that I hold my position. I have to see her again. One last time.
‘Humanity won’t last forever. But I don’t see why we can’t enjoy being human for just a little while longer.’
Nicholas Aggar
ONE
Bank of America, Santa Monica, California
Lewis
As the man in the frayed green jacket approached her counter, Shawna Day moved her right foot toward the silent alarm button grooved into the carpet directly under her cash drawer. Although he didn’t appear to have a gun, and had made no effort to conceal his face with anything other than the ragged shadow of a beard, everything about him, from the head on a permanent swivel, to the hunched shoulders and the eyes that darted in every direction, screamed two words: bank robber.
With a textbook ‘How may I help you today?’ masking her concern, Shawna took a closer look at the man standing on the other side of the bandit screen. He was in his late twenties, although the oily blue-green fish-scale bags under his eyes made him seem older. His hair was cropped close to his skull. He turned his head slightly to the left, glancing back over his shoulder at the bank’s lone security guard. Shawna glimpsed a raised red scar running in a semi-circle around the back of his skull. He was clutching a brown manila envelope. The back of his left hand was bandaged. A brown crust of dried blood had seeped through the gauze. The sight of the blood and the dirty dressing made her stomach lurch.
‘Sir?’ she prompted, her attention switching back to the envelope. It bulged at the corners. She looked for wires. There had been a bank robber in the greater Los Angeles area who had used fake bombs in a series of cash robberies.
Over the man’s shoulder, she noticed the security guard, a doughy guy in his fifties who only ever spoke to the manager, and ate his lunch separately from the other members of staff, also watching her customer. His attention made her feel a little better about her own lurch of paranoia.
The man raised his head so that his eyes were level with hers. The corners of his lips turned upwards into a tight, forced smile that might have made her feel sorry for him had it not been for his eyes. The pupils were obsidian black voids. They flicked from one side of her face to the other, exploding and contracting over and over again, like the aperture of a camera shutter.
It was weird, bizarre, but it wasn’t enough to press the alarm. The young man was most likely on drugs, probably PCP, the least mellow of all the street drugs. But that wasn’t a matter for her. Hell, this was Santa Monica. Walk out the door and probably 75 per cent of the local population were on something: kids on Ritalin to keep them quiet; professionals on Adderall to make them more productive; housewives on Valium and Pinot Noir; boomers floating past on a gentle cloud of bud; and homeless folks, like the man facing her, who craved a little more bang for their meagre dollars.
The young man with the shutter eyes had still to speak.
‘Sir,’ Shawna said, a little more firmly, reminding herself that even with the kind of strength that came from just a dusting of PCP, he wouldn’t be able to get through the bandit screen at her, ‘there’s a line. Can you tell me how I can help you today?’
The man took a deep breath and his injured left hand dropped away, leaving the right hand clutching the bulging envelope. He closed his eyes. He opened them again, with a rush of breath that whistled over even white teeth that suggested a different life in a time past. Shawna was starting to wish that he would pull a gun because his eyes were freakier than a robbery.
A mother standing in line scolded a small boy for prodding his little sister with a chubby finger. Strapped into a stroller, the baby kicked out in frustration. The teller next to them counted out a stack of twenties for a young Asian woman. Only the security guard seemed to show any sign of interest in what was happening at window number four. Meanwhile, Shawna’s leg was beginning to cramp from hovering in the unnatural position over the alarm.
Finally, the man’s lips shaped to speak. He swallowed so hard she could see the bob of his Adam’s apple. She smiled at him, hoping to encourage a response, something, anything.
‘You’re very yellow,’ he said, in a perfectly quiet, even voice, as if it was the most natural statement in the world.
TWO
At first Shawna wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I scare you. When people are scared, they turn yellow. Y’know? Like that saying about someone being a yellow belly. “That guy’s yellow.” Right now, you’re scared.’
No, she thought, before she’d been scared. Right now she was plain old pissed off.
What a wack job. He wasn’t a bank robber, after all. He was probably just some college kid dropout who’d thought he’d wander into the bank and try to read someone’s aura. The People’s Republic of Santa Monica, she thought. You had to love it. They had it all, year round. Seventy-five-degree weather, the beach, the Pacific Ocean, palm trees, vending machines for dope, and what seemed like every crazy homeless person on the west coast, all crammed into a few square miles.
‘Yellow, huh?’ she said. ‘That’s good to know. Must be because I’m a Taurus. Now, what can I do for you today?’ She moved her foot away from the alarm, and reached down a hand to massage the burning at the back of her thigh.
‘Forget it, okay?’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’ He half turned to look at the line behind him. Then, facing her again, he held up the bulging envelope. ‘I need a safe deposit box. It said on the website that you still did them.’
‘Yes, we do. Let me just get you a form. I’ll need two types of ID also.’
The man stiffened. ‘I don’t have ID. I can pay cash, though. Twelve months up front.’
‘Sir, federal regulations require us …’
The teller next to her, a fresh-out-of-college Hispanic girl, who had been working alongside her for just a few months, shot her a sympathetic look. If you worked in a bank, you got used to people being rude to you. Even though you didn’t make the rules, informing member
s of the public there were rules and procedures to be followed somehow made you the asshole, not them. You didn’t have to like how some people acted, but you rapidly got over yourself and accepted it as part of the job. Or you looked for another, which in this economy meant you got over yourself.
Her heart beat a little faster as he reached into his jacket. ‘It’s real easy, lady. Take my cash. Take the envelope. Put it in a box. Give me a key and a number.’
She could hear him grinding his teeth as he spoke. She slackened a little as he produced a letter-sized envelope, opened it and thumbed through a greasy bundle of notes. ‘If you’d like, I’ll have the manager speak to you,’ she said.
As she began to turn away, she felt the man’s hand come from nowhere and grasp hers through the slot tray at the front of her counter. The bandage was gone. She could see the wound. It was a star-shaped mess of yellow pus and blood that covered the back of his hand. She hadn’t even been aware of him moving it. She hadn’t seen him slip it through the slot. It wasn’t there and then it was. His thumb was pinching the fleshy web between her own thumb and index finger so hard that she couldn’t move.
She tried to break free. His grip tightened. Now she was in pain. It stabbed all the way up her arm. She moved her foot, pressing down on the alarm button.
THREE
The man released her hand as quickly as he had grasped it. Now she felt foolish. For obvious reasons there was no override once the alarm had been pressed. He had grabbed her, assaulted her, but it wasn’t a robbery.
Their eyes met. Once more, his pupils shuttered wildly. ‘Why’d you do that, huh? I wasn’t going to hurt you.’
‘Why’d I do what?’ she asked, her nerves too jangled by this whole deal to call him ‘sir’. Now they were just two people, both scared, both likely in a lot of trouble.
‘You tripped the alarm,’ he said.
She couldn’t deny it. But how could he know? From her body position above the counter? That was how she’d been standing when he’d approached her.
Then she saw the gun, tucked into the waistband of his camo pants. Relief swept over her. He had a gun. He had grabbed her and he had a gun. In that moment she had shifted from someone looking to get an annoying customer into a world of trouble to a hyper-vigilant employee, a heroine even.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,’ she said, her composure returning with a rush.
He began to push the letter-sized envelope stuffed with notes through the slot. ‘Here, take it all. You can have whatever’s left over.’
He grabbed a pen from his pants pocket, his jacket riding back down to hide the butt of the gun.
The cavalry would be on its way. Outside, she could already see traffic on Pico Boulevard clearing as the automated traffic system filtered cars within a three-block radius out of the way, holding everything beyond that with a solid wall of red lights, apart from the turn lanes, which would be kept clear for the police department.
The man scribbled an email address on the back of the bigger envelope and tried to push it through to the slot to her. ‘I need you to send the box number to this email address. Nothing else. Just the number. They’ll work out where it is.’ The envelope was jammed halfway through. He shoved at it, the sides starting to rip. ‘I’m sorry if I scared you.’
She glanced down at the email address scrawled on the front of the envelope. When she looked back up she saw two dark sedans with blacked-out windows pulling up outside. Two Santa Monica Police Department patrol cars sat across the street, and the cops were trying to corral a growing crowd of gawkers. The doors of the two sedans popped open with perfect synchronicity. She counted four men getting out. It was difficult to tell them apart, although one was slightly older and wore a suit under his body armor, while the other three were dressed in military style BDUs, their pants patterned the same as those of the man in front of her, who had now pulled out the gun.
He punched it out one-handed in the direction of the bank’s security guard, who also had his weapon drawn. The four men were moving toward the door as customers scattered under desks and behind chairs or display stands, taking cover wherever they could find it. Inside the bank it was just her, the security guard and the man with the gun still on their feet. She had the bandit screen between her and the two guns but raw fear kept her feet planted where they were. It was the men who had emerged from the sedans who scared her. They moved with purpose, their features set like granite, three of them clutching assault rifles.
She watched the security guard glance over his shoulder at them as he advised the man, ‘Put it down. Before anyone gets hurt.’
The man spoke: ‘You’d better do what I say. They find you with that envelope and …’
She didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her feet felt set in concrete.
The man raised the gun so that the muzzle was no longer pointing at the security guard. He opened his mouth wide and jammed the barrel into it. His teeth clamped down on it. She watched as his index finger squeezed the trigger, the fleshy pad nearest his knuckle inching toward oblivion.
When it came, the shot made her flinch. Blood and brains spattered across the screen, inches from her face. Her hands left the envelope and flew to her face. She covered her eyes but kept them open. She heard screams but they seemed distant. A Rorschach pattern of red and grey oozed down the screen. A single fragment of white bone was embedded in the Plexiglass. She stared down the jagged ridge of bone to the man in the suit. He met her gaze. He looked from her to the body on the floor. Then his eyes settled on the envelope. Something told her that whatever was in the envelope it wasn’t anything good.
FOUR
Graves
Harry Graves took a knee next to the dead man. A voice in his earpiece asked, ‘Is it him?’ The voice belonged to Muir, the program leader. A body cam clipped to Graves’s shirt relayed everything he was looking at back to the video conference room at the program’s control facility, which sat six hundred miles east, in the Nevada desert next to Area 51.
‘Have to wait for DNA but, yeah, it’s him,’ said Graves, reaching down and peeling away the combat jacket. He unbuttoned the shirt to reveal the chest. He tapped his knuckle against the left pectoral muscle. Unless rigor had set in instantly, the sound told its own story. ‘You hear that?’ he asked the scientist.
‘Loud and clear,’ said Muir.
Subcutaneous molded body armor, the ultimate in lightweight protection for the body’s vital organs and completely undetectable to the naked eye. Because of the composite materials used, it didn’t set off metal detectors, and a TSA agent looking at a body scan would see it without actually knowing what he was looking at. Oh, and good luck shooting someone like Lewis. Hammer a round from a .45 into his chest and it was like hitting the guy with a pellet from a BB gun. The armor ran all the way down in sections to the groin (a source of much hilarity for everyone) and stopped around the top of the thighs. Only the limbs remained unprotected. The rationale was that they could be replaced with prosthetics and orthotics that would outperform normal human limb function, but major trauma to the heart or lungs, or a blood-rich area like a guy’s junk, was harder to come back from.
The room darkened suddenly as the other men in Graves’s response team supervised the placement of a huge black tarpaulin across the bank’s glass frontage. The local cops were already shepherding customers out of the building two at a time, taking their personal details and statements. That information would be fed into various criminal and intelligence databases. It was important to establish whether Lewis had been alone and who, if any of them, he had spoken to.
The envelope had already been recovered. Shawna had been removed from the scene and was proving cooperative. Graves doubted she would be a problem but all her communications would be monitored for a period of three months and she would be placed on a watch list for non-security-cleared individuals who had been exposed to highly classified material.
‘His hand?’ prompted Muir.
Graves duck-walked a couple of feet and lifted Lewis’s hand. He already knew what they would be looking at. So did Muir, but the guy was a scientist: he liked to see things with his own eyes.
The wound was in the shape of a star. Lewis would have sterilized his Gerber and used the locked blade to cut away the skin at the back of his hand.
‘We’ll change placement,’ said Muir in Graves’s ear.
He resisted the temptation to say, ‘I told you so,’ to the program leader. He had argued initially for neck rather than hand placement because it was way too easy to remove the device from the back of someone’s hand. ‘You want to look at what’s left of his head, Professor?’
‘Of course,’ said Muir.
Still squatting, Graves waddled forward a few feet so the body cam took in the remains of the man’s skull. Blood and brains had pooled on the floor. The facial features were intact: the subcutaneous molding that covered the existing facial bone structure had held everything in place. Blood had pooled at the back of the eyes, and spilled from the mouth, nose and ears, running in thick, congealing streams down the chin and onto the neck.
‘Give me a second here,’ said Graves. ‘Just want to check something.’
He reached under Lewis’s shoulder and turned him over so he could see the back of his head. As he’d suspected. Until he’d pulled the trigger, Lewis had been one smart cookie. He’d thought stuff through. He let go, and the body slumped back to the floor.
‘He really did a number on us,’ he said, as much to himself as to Muir and the team of neuroscientists, tech geeks, quants, and all-round head-scoopers the good professor had assembled out there in Nevada. That was one of the things about working for Uncle Sam: you could lure in the best of the best, even in these straitened times. It wasn’t just the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funding either. The private sector had all kinds of federal rules and regulations to follow. When your employer was the state, and the work was considered vital to national security, you were allowed a little more leeway. Anyone came along to ask any awkward questions, well, that was classified. Geek heaven.