by Chris Vola
A pneumatic rush. He turns around. “You haven’t been outside in a long time, huh? Get ready for a breath of fresh air.”
Outside. The training area Thompson was talking about must be on the mountain, not in it. I’ve allowed myself to look where I’ve been told. The cameras are everywhere we work, everywhere we live. But gazing up at the concrete ceiling, I realize that there aren’t any cameras. Down the hallway, they stop about fifty feet past the cafeteria. No one’s watching. Since Billy was taken to what he thought was another wing, I always figured our three hallways were one small cog in a larger subterranean machine. If this is the exit, why is it unguarded? I let my paranoid preconceptions and Billy’s half-memories blind me. Or I was lulled by the prevailing attitude: no one wants to leave. Even if they complain about the lack of Internet porn, the agents are content. The drugs in the food (There’s something in the water cooler…) and the Monopoly-money paychecks – whether legit or not – can’t hurt morale.
It’s so easy, a quick dash timed right. After breakfast, slip out, no one notices for half an hour. A running start. Get the code from Thompson and finish the shank. Be ready for the sprint out.
Thompson pushes the door. The opposite side is a mirror image of where we’re standing – another dull concrete hallway, the same hospital lights, the same electric hum. Nothing natural, no windows.
“What,” he says, “you were expecting Apple headquarters?”
“I…uh…”
He lumbers through the doorway.
This hallway is actually much longer than the one behind us. A series of doors, all the same, no writing. Tiny camera buds protruding out of the wall a few inches below the ceiling, over the door frames. Thompson stops in front of maybe the eighth one. The red eye blinks, twitches, sizes us up.
Thompson tries to turn the stainless steel knob but it’s locked. He looks at his watch, clears his throat. “Huh,” he says, “I told them we’d be coming.” A light flashes on the camera and the door hisses. He grunts something I can’t make out.
The shock of natural light, similar to Titus’ office but stronger, warmer. Windows slope down from both sides of the high, pointed cathedral ceiling, covering the entire length of two walls, letting in the sun and revealing the brown and yellow landscape, hills and trees in endless succession. Like any computer lab at Pick-A-College University, USA. Rows of blinking Macs, facing the opposite wall, most of them manned by people in jeans and polos who could pass for former classmates, absorbed by the screens and the iPod buds in their ears. The room itself is clean, modern, but not sterile like the cafeteria. A large whiteboard with Web URLs and IP addresses scrawled in red marker. A small, Ikea-esque coffee table a couple feet to the right covered by hundreds of yellow hand towels with Pittsburg Steelers logos, the kind fans wave around, seizure-like, at baseball and football stadiums.
On the far side of the table a young man with blond hair sits in front of a laptop. Wearing designer jeans and a salmon-colored tee shirt that says What Are You Looking (f)At. Hasn’t noticed us, concentrating on his screen.
“Hey, Franco,” Thompson says. The man doesn’t hear or ignores him. Franco. Where’s Mussolini?
“Franco,” he says again. No response.
“FRANCO!”
Franco jumps out of his seat, ripping out his ear buds, almost knocking over his computer. Some of the others turn around for a moment, then go back to work like Thompson was noise in the pipes. Franco collects himself, gives Thompson a weird smirk, fixes his gel-spiked hair. Thompson rolls his eyes.
“Sorry, sorry, I thought you were coming tomorrow,” Franco says in a disarming Mickey Mouse voice. As he shakes Thompson’s hand, then mine, I see that he’s a lot younger than I thought, probably younger than me and most of the others. “So, I’m supposed to show him what.” he says, still dazed. He stares at the towels for a moment, rubs his face and snaps out of it. He turns, shakes my hand again, this time more emphatically. “OK and you’re Agent, uh…”
“X,” Thompson says, looking at me. “Somehow Franco runs this lab. If you try to forget how much of a geek-faced douchebag he is, you might just learn something.” Franco ignores Thompson, keeps nodding and grinning, blinking at robot-speed. “And keep it short. Enough for him to understand. He’s smart. We have to go to the range.”
“No problem, boss,” Franco nods as he takes me by the shoulder and leads me toward the rows of Macs. “What you’re seeing here, X,” he says, “is, well.” He motions at the computers. “Just check it.”
As I approach the row closest to where we’ve been standing I hear Thompson give the slightest groan of boredom, indifference, or an acute dislike of Franco, I’m not sure. Franco doesn’t hear it, or doesn’t care. The three activated computers in the row are manned, from left to right, by a cuter version of a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan and two guys around my age who look like they could be twins, and who, when one of them turns to stare absently at the redhead, bear such a close resemblance to a young Titus that a lump shoots up into my chest. I turn and Franco waves his spray-tanned tour guide’s hands – keep going.
On the video box, taking up most of the redhead’s screen is the doofy, fake-whitened smile of someone who appears to be the current Yankees third baseman, beaming into the camera eye. He’s sitting on a stool, holding a long, sinister, black leather object that looks like a riding crop.
The player isn’t at Yankee Stadium, even if he’s in full uniform. Looks like some kind of dank BDSM dungeon set appropriate for a porno starring pregnant midgets and/or pregnant donkeys.
Strange, but not the focal point. On at the other end of the wide-angle shot video, what’s making him nearly salivate with childlike glee, is another popular face, that of his shortstop and captain. The shortstop's not feeling the third basemen’s happy-go-lucky sentiments. Maybe because he’s shirtless, wearing nothing but a jock strap and a leather collar, his wrists shackled to a concrete wall. He’s struggling against the shackles, trying to spit out the ball gag that’s fastened to his mouth.
The third baseman slaps the riding crop lightly on his knee, looking somewhere, waiting for a cue from the cameraman or a director. When he gets the signal, he stands up, takes a few practice swings with the crop like he’s in the on-deck circle. The shortstop twists his neck to see what’s going on and his eyes widen, pure horror. He fights against the chains, his veins popping. Resistance is worthless, he slumps. Tears overflow onto his cheeks, his neck. The ball gag glistens.
The third baseman steps up behind his teammate, steps up to the plate. He taps the crop’s leather tongue lightly across the shortstop’s back a few times. He leans in, whispers something. The shortstop’s eyes bug out. The third baseman winds the crop back like it’s a bat and he’s getting ready to hit a fastball out of the park. He pulls his hands back slowly, slowly, then swings.
A millisecond before contact, the redhead pauses the video, scrolls around the screen, pulls up a few windows of what look like an editing program. She clicks her mouse a few times and something about the video shifts, maybe the brightness, maybe the focus, something in the shortstop’s expression.
I turn and Franco’s giving me the thumbs up, nodding vigorously. I move closer, until I’m almost breathing over the operators. They ignore me.
The first twin’s screen, there’s a video of a skeletal African child with a distended belly, wearing what looks like a folded and cut-up Nike tee shirt for shorts. Crouching, rooting through the dead soil, occasionally putting what look like clumps of grass and dirt into a red earthenware bowl. In the background a dilapidated grove of ancient straw huts with triangular roofs, a frightening goat whose ribs flare out more than the child’s. Your standard Feed The Children infomercial, right down to the eight-hundred number at the bottom of the box.
On the far right side of the Mac’s screen – smaller boxes, streaming similar videos of other generic starving Africans. The twin clicks his mouse a few times and all the videos stop. He moves the cursor over one of the
smaller boxes, highlights the female child inside, copies the image and pastes it into the larger screen with the first child and his bowl. The video continues with both children seeming as if they’re crouching a few yards apart in the landscape.
Nothing natural.
There aren’t any video boxes on the second twin’s screen, only a Photoshop window, an image of what looks like a newer version of my BlackBerry, some cartoon words above it. Typical pop-up.
A hand on my shoulder. “Boring, no?” Franco asks.
“I always thought those Feed The Children ads were bullshit.”
Franco nods, chuckles in machine-gun bursts – heh-heh-heh-heh. I can’t say what it is, but there’s something in his voice, in his gung-ho Ritalin-child movements, this place, that’s so repulsive. I want to leave, but he has this expectant look on his face, like I should be interested, engaged.
“Heh heh heh. Yeah.”
“But what was that other stuff? The baseball players? And the cell phone.”
Franco frowns, pats down one side of what is now a gelled faux-hawk. “Meth dudes. Surgically sculpted to fit into their roles. Then a few rounds of simple editing. In terms of why – Mega. Celeb. Blackmail…heh heh. Duh. We’re a video production company, we’ve discovered a sexually perverted tape. Two high-profile athletes whose relationship already borders on the homoerotic. Leaked YouTube footage and a shitty legal battle, not what they want. The Yankees will find it a lot easier to settle. If they ignore us, it also works. We control distribution rights.
“The BlackBerry image is an ad. Duh again. Using this specific phone model for research. The effect of different levels of radiation, population control. Uh-oh, look out for your junk! Heh heh.”
Thompson is out of focus in the background, messing with the pile of towels. He glances up, shrugs.
“Check the sterility level of customers who have used it for six months,” Franco says.
My balls tighten.
“Been developing it for a while,” he says. “The first tests were done with the two previous models of this BlackBerry. Going to do something similar with the towels Agent Thompson can’t seem to take his hands off. Implant them with…well, it’s complicated. You probably don’t care.”
Neutered by a bombardment of mindless (or mindful) radiation.
Thompson picks up a towel, blows his nose into it. He glares at Franco, who gives him the thumbs up.
“Heh heh. OK, fast version,” he says. “How we operate is based on rumors. People lack information, they rely on the information of other people. The sexual orientation of a certain politician, the fascist intentions of a certain nation, the dangerous products being sold by a certain major toy corporation, these all exist today in the open marketplace of ideas that has been almost totally relegated to the Internet – blogs, tumblrs, Twitter feeds, what-have-you. The Internet’s unparalleled credibility.”
“HEH HEH HEH!” The high-pitched squeak, I cringe. “Not stupid,” Franco grins. “Constant electronic stimulation increases brain activity. Increased brain activity is devastating to common sense.”
The redhead is now on Facebook. She pokes the twin next to her, who’s stopped cutting and pasting Africans and is now monitoring the flow of traffic on a Fox News article about the Republican boycott of a climate change bill. He takes his headphones off. Hip-hop blare. The redhead points to something on her screen, what looks like a bunch of twentysomethings at a Halloween party, a collage of red plastic cups, pouty lips, kids in blackface, Michael Jackson and Gumby costumes. They laugh. Taking a break from work? Is it work? The guy puts his headphones back on. He clicks to a different Web site.
The sea of headphones and bobbing heads, the seizure blink of pop-ups.
“Franco, thanks for that,” Thompson says, “but you’re useless and Agent X and I have shit to take care of. Let’s go, X.”
Franco nods, puts his ear buds back in, messes with his hair. “I hear you, man. We’re all busy.” The redhead clicks on a middle-aged man in a Speedo holding a Frisbie that’s attached to the mouth of a Jack Russell terrier, suspended in the air. She giggles. Thompson turns to leave. I follow.
“X?”
“Yeah?”
Franco’s sitting at the table again, laptop open. “If you want, you can have one of those towels.” He points to the pile. “A souvenir? Heh heh.”
My balls constrict and shudder. I look at Thompson, but he just shakes his head at Franco, who’s staring into his computer screen, sculpting his spikes into a perfect plume.
The door closes automatically. Back in the dim, the hospital smell.
“Sorry,” Thompson says. “He’s a little fucking creepy.”
“A little,” I repeat, relieved to be able to expel everything I’ve seen today from my brain. Wake me up when I’m back in the military wing. “Where to next?”
He shrugs. “There’s eight more labs that are all pretty much the same. The, uh, the whatisit, the focus might be different, but you get it.”
The scope of the operation. Don’t care. The only reason I’d want to look is to see if Billy is still here. But even if he is, he’d be another surgically enhanced Derek Jeter getting his ass pounded in a bondage dungeon. Better off dead, actually dead.
“Back to the wing then?” I ask, with a little too much enthusiasm.
“Not quite,” Thompson says. “I’m supposed to take you to the range, teach you how to shoot.”
The range. I forgot. “Shoot what?”
He laughs. “Jesus, X,” he shakes his head. “People.” He laughs, keeps walking when I realize something.
“Hey, Thompson,” I say, “I think I’m going to take Franco up on the towel offer.”
He scratches some flakes off his dry scalp. “You sentimental, X?” he asks. “You like listening to that fucking weirdo?”
“Thought it'd be nice to have something a little more colorful to beat off into.”
Thompson roars. “I don’t blame you. Those white sheets do get boring after a while. OK, X, go get your souvenir. I’ll be waiting.”
I nod, hurry back to the lab.
“YOU WANT YOUR hips and shoulders square to the target,” Thompson says. “Remember, don’t pull your shoulders around! Relax the arms – Let me feel that back, yeah, that’s where you need to be at, OK? Look at the target, bring the gun straight up! So now you’ve got good extension. You’ll be more consistent this way!”
The firing range is eerily dark; the only lights are suspended over the row of human-shaped targets twenty yards in front of our Plexiglas booth. The ear buds muffle everything except for the constant shock of pistol-fire from the agents practicing in the booths on either side of us, and Thompson’s shouted instructions.
Forty-five minutes and several unloaded clips, I’m getting used to the kickback, the pressured release, actually starting to enjoy myself. Like squeezing off a nut every time, Billy used to say. Getting used to the safety mechanism and the recoil was a lot easier than I thought. Thompson thinks I’m a natural at rolling the trigger, whatever that means.
“Ready,” he says, “FIRE!”
I fire off a clip in quick succession. Three hits – two in the target’s neck and one in its forehead – and three near-misses. Thompson squints at the holes.
“Not bad,” he shouts, “but you need to keep your sights straighter! That’ll be a lot more important when we start you on semi-automatics. Not bad, though, kid! Nice work.”
“We done here or what?” I ask, lowering the pistol.
“Almost,” he says as he snaps a fresh clip into his gun, clicks off the safety. “Reload!”
The agents on either side of us are doing the same. The range’s dirt floor gleams with thousands of golden shell carcasses.
A loud buzzer goes off and a red light flashes above a small door next to the line of targets.
“What’s up?” I shout.
Thompson grins. “Moving targets,” he says. “You don’t get better when you only practice on station
aries. Plus, we get to help out the kitchen staff.”
A small door next to the targets slides open and a fecal barnyard odor saturates the range. Several indistinct, grunting shapes move restlessly in a dark pen. The crack of a shovel and the scatter of hooves.
Thompson winks, raises his gun.
THE STEELERS TOWEL is made of cheap, bristled fabric that peels apart easily, giving me eight smaller strips that, even in the blackness, I can tell are all about the same width. I tie them together with tight knots, until I have one solid length of rope.
I grab the plastic ammo cartridge on the bed, then Harry’s bone. The base of it – the part that I haven’t whittled into a blade – fits snugly into the ammo cartridge, but not snugly enough. I secure one end of the rope to a spot that feels like it’s about halfway down the cartridge, wind the rope tightly around it and then the bone, just up to the part where the blade starts. I cinch off this end of the rope with a couple rubber bands I found in the cafeteria.
I stay awake, fingering the shank, staring at the black hole ceiling until the lights come on and the alarm goes off.
“YOU TOOK THE purest girls!” I scream at the two women cowering at my feet, both completely covered by matching burqas, except for the eye slits. One of them moans, clutches at my pants. I kick her firmly in the stomach. She crumples. “You took the purest girls,” I continue, “and indulged them in immoral acts for the benefit of Coalition soldiers and men from your own village!”
I rip the shopping bags out of their hands and step back, out of the floodlights. Five bullets spray into the back of one women; six or seven pierce the head of the other. They shout and cry for a second, then go silent.
17
Vola