The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  The knife. The guy had dropped a knife not too far away. He remembered hearing it hit the floor. Maybe he could pivot on his upper body and find that knife with his feet, maybe kick it back this way, get his fingers on it and—what? His headache was getting worse, and it felt like his scalp was bleeding a little. What time is it? he wondered. And what’s going to happen in this room when this crazy bastard fires that mortar? The noise is going to be incredible, even with that big hole in the ceiling and roof. And won’t the recoil from that thing damage the floor? He’d gotten a quick glimpse of plywood where the base plate ought to be, but surely that wouldn’t resist the impact of a five-inch mortar firing multiple times. He heard a noise and relaxed his body, trying to feign unconsciousness. But then a stream of cold water hit him right in the face and he spluttered as he tried to catch his breath.

  He felt the man move behind him, heard that familiar humming sound. He tensed, expecting the hammer, and tried not to whimper. Instead, the man did something with the rope, and then he felt himself being pulled by the rope across the floor. He could either help by pushing with his feet or strangle, so he helped. The man dragged him for several feet and then did something with the rope. Probably securing it again, Swamp thought.

  “Stay,” the man said, quickly passing the Taser by Swamp’s right ear. Swamp didn’t move. Then he heard the man kick the knife across the floor, grunt in irritation, and then walk across the room to retrieve it. He felt the man approach again, and then his feet were free as the knife sliced through the tape. He definitely heard the knife drop, close by this time, and the man was back at his head. He felt the cold plastic snout of the Taser come to rest against his temple.

  “The knife,” the man said, his British accent less pronounced than it had been at the bank. “A meter from your feet. Once the mortar stops firing, the house is going to burn. You may go for the knife once the shooting stops. Not before, or I will hit you with this”—the Taser pressed hard into his forehead for emphasis—“set on full power this time.”

  Shit, Swamp thought, what was it set on before? He heard a strange swishing sound as the man stood up, but he couldn’t fathom it. He actually thought he could smell perfume. Then the man was moving around the room, positioning some kind of cans and moving some heavy objects. He waited, frantically trying to think of some way to prevent this, but the man had rendered him helpless. Where the hell were Bertie’s people? They knew where he’d been going. Or did they—had that message ever gotten through?

  And the cops. Where were Jake and the cops? They had this address, didn’t they? Surely Jake would have sent someone to take a look, especially since Jake had figured out that the real target might be the inauguration. But then he remembered why they hadn’t come. By now, Jake, Shad, and a thousand of their professional brethren were schlepping around town in their blue uniforms, probably directing traffic.

  He tried his bonds again, but the tape did not yield. His heart sank. There was no way to stop this thing. Well, he’d tried. He hadn’t felt so hopeless since that day at the Tidal Basin.

  Then the mortar went off.

  Heismann had put his fingers in his ears after he dropped in the first round, but he’d forgotten to bend away from the blast. His fingers weren’t nearly enough protection against the reverberation and the noise. He was actually knocked backward, as much by surprise as by the actual concussion. He scrambled back to load the second round, this time bending way over and clapping both hands over his ears, but the monster muzzle blast still boomed hard enough to make him squeeze his eyelids shut. He grabbed up the third round, positioned it over the smoking muzzle, and then focused on the muted television. The new president was taking his oath of office. The robed chief justice was reading the words out and the new president was dutifully repeating them, when suddenly a bright light flooded the picture frame and the camera jumped off its focus point and panned crazily across the ground, getting a fuzzy picture of several dozen legs and feet. Then another flash, and more jumping camera shots. He waited a couple more seconds to see if the camera would zoom out and show the whole scene, but the cameraman had apparently hit the ground, leaving the camera to its own devices. He dropped the third round in, saw it slide out of sight, bent over again, and pressed his hands against his head as tightly as he could. A third tremendous blast, only this time a large part of the ceiling fell in, raining plaster and lathe wire all over the place.

  Squinting through all the hot smoke, he grabbed the fourth round and tried to see the television, but the plaster dust and smoke were too thick. Then he caught a glimpse of the picture, in black and white now, where a different camera was panning across the portico, revealing a scene of total pandemonium. Another brilliant pulse of glaring light, and this time he actually saw the spray of white-hot shrapnel flatten the crowd of scrambling bodies, knocking over metal folding chairs as if they were made of paper.

  It was perfect: The rounds were landing exactly on target! He dropped in the fourth round, followed quickly by the fifth. By now, there was so much dust and smoke in the room, he couldn’t see very much at all, but he knew right where the rounds were, each cradled in its marble nest in a semicircle surrounding the mortar. He dropped in the sixth round, and then the seventh. He was dimly aware that there was fire now in addition to the smoke, and he was having real trouble breathing. He caught a quick glimpse of the television screen through the smoke, and he saw that the screen was alternating between black-and-white test patterns and fuzzy, jerking pictures. There was another flare of whiteness across the screen as one of the rounds slammed directly into the portico area.

  Quickly, finish it.

  The eighth round brought down the whole skylight and its frame, showering him with broken glass, but he kept right on loading and firing. The ninth round went in, followed at last by the tenth and final round. The last two seemed to cause less damage to the ceiling. He glanced up and saw why: The ceiling and a good part of the roof were totally gone, which probably accounted for the huge pile of debris that now trapped his feet. The pensioner was a white lump over in the corner of the room, but he was struggling to get loose. Good.

  He wiped the dust and glass out of his own face, took a deep breath, choked on it, and then pushed through all the debris out to the hallway, where he grabbed one of the one-gallon cans of gasoline, popped the top off the spout, and threw it down the stairwell. He could hear flames crackling in the bedroom walls behind him. The pensioner better move quickly, he thought.

  He ducked through the hole between the buildings and popped out of the closet on the other side, where he could finally get a clear breath. There he took the second can of gasoline and splashed it all over the closet and the upstairs hallway of the neighbor’s house, being careful not to spill any on himself. He threw the partially empty can back through the hole and into his own upstairs hallway. At that instant, he felt and then heard the bomb in the basement next door, a heavy double thump that shook even the walls in the woman’s apartment. But it did not blow the building to pieces. Success there, too. He grinned.

  He’d been right again: a fond farewell from Mutaib. Now he really hoped the pensioner would get out.

  He unwrapped the bath towel from around his head, stripped off her bathrobe, which was now covered in plaster dust, and dashed down the stairs. Despite the turbanned bath towel, he had a couple of small cuts on his head, and they were bleeding out of all proportion to their size. He smeared some blood across his face and forehead. He peered carefully out the front windows at the houses across the way. No open windows, but there were people standing in their doorways, gaping in the direction of the house. There was a whumping sound from upstairs as some of the gasoline caught fire. Then a police car was skidding to a stop right in front of the duplex, the cop on the passenger side opening his door before the car had even stopped, his gun drawn and a wild, horrified look on his face.

  Now. Go!

  He kicked over the third can of gasoline onto the living room rug, adjus
ted his neighbor’s now-rumpled black wig on his head, made sure his genitals were firmly pressed back into the groin pouch, and snatched open the door. He burst out onto the front steps, screaming hysterically in his best impression of a female voice. He stumbled down the front steps, bare from the waist up, breasts bouncing everywhere. He was wearing a plain white half-slip, white nylon briefs, one beige knee-high stocking, and flat leather slippers that he’d taped to the bottoms of his feet. The blood on his face and cheeks had conveniently smeared all the makeup. He ran right past the astonished cop, screaming and gesturing that there was a man up there in the other house, and that there was fire everywhere. The policeman on the driver’s side had started to open his door but then stopped, gaping at those naked bobbling breasts. Heismann tore away from the reaching hands of the first policeman and bolted across the street and into the alley, still screaming. And still running.

  He heard a second and then a third police car come screeching into the street behind him, just as there was another thumping explosion from the house. Some flaming debris shot right out into the street. He could hear the parked cars being hit by some of the debris, which meant that the police were all flat behind their cars. But by then, he was through the connecting middle alley and had dodged left into the back alley. He ran a hundred more feet to the oversized green trash can that held his clothes. Squatting down in a corner between the nearest privacy fence and its garage, he kicked off the shoes and stripped off the wig and the slip. He then jumped into suit pants, a white shirt, and a matching suit coat. Buttoning only the top button, he clipped on a tie, then put on black socks and brown leather loafers. Just then, he heard the first fire engine come blatting down the street out in front. There was another thumping explosion from inside the house, this one propelling some debris over the rooftops and into the alley, twenty feet away from him. He took a quick look up the alley, but there was no one pursuing him—yet.

  Clear. Go.

  He stood up and quickly pulled on a hat and a London Fog–style raincoat, picked up the briefcase, which contained the pensioner’s papers, and the transformation was complete. Using the slip, he wiped as much of the blood and makeup off his face as he could and then shoved it and the shoes under a stinking garbage bag in the adjacent trash can. After one more quick look around, he trotted down the alley to the next side street, wiping his face again with the sleeves of the raincoat. At the street, he slowed, turned right, and began walking east, away from the growing commotion behind him. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward to mask the breasts.

  He walked two more blocks as calmly as he could, heading to where he’d parked the minivan. Seemingly oblivious to the excited people running past him to see what had happened, he continued to wipe as much makeup and soot off his face as he could. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a thick cloud of black smoke rising above the row houses and trees and heard several more emergency vehicles converging on his street. There was an even bigger smoke cloud hovering over the Capitol precincts in the distance. Two police cars came roaring past him on the street, but the policemen inside paid him no attention. He was just a nondescript office worker, complete with briefcase, walking down the street. They saw thousands of them every day. He was invisible. And he was certainly not a hysterical naked woman.

  Five minutes later, he was driving out of the area. The column of smoke in his rearview mirror was getting bigger, not smaller. The third can of gasoline must have gone off. He surely hoped the pensioner had made it out. Roasting alive was such a hard way to go.

  Swamp was almost totally deaf by the time all ten rounds had been fired. He’d had nothing to protect his ears other than his own arms and the duct tape that was already taped around his head, and the muzzle blast from the huge five-inch mortar bounced him around like a dog under a bus. A large piece of ceiling fell on him halfway through the firing, and in his frantic attempts to seek cover, he tore off the duct tape that had been pinning his hands and arms. Still blind, he’d begun scraping at the tape on his face, but as more ceiling fragments rained down on him, he had to curl up into a ball to protect his head and face. It wasn’t until the firing stopped that he realized his arms and hands were actually free, and then he smelled fire, overlaid with the rich stink of gasoline.

  He stripped the rest of the tape off, pried open his sticky eyelids, and saw the smoking mortar still pointed up at the huge hole in the ceiling. The hole was now framed in crackling flames. He climbed painfully out of the pile of wreckage that covered the entire floor, took a deep breath, and promptly inhaled a lungful of heavy smoke, which doubled him over in a paroxysm of coughing. While he was still down, he sensed a flare of overpressure out in the hall and then felt the hot breath of a fireball flash into the room over his head and billow out the hole in the roof. A distant rumbling, crackling noise followed the fireball, and he knew he had to get out of there quickly. He couldn’t understand why the fire didn’t sound louder, until he realized what the problem was: He’d been deafened by the mortar.

  Gasping for air, he started crawling over the piles of smoldering rafters and ceiling debris, making his way toward the front window of the bedroom, which faced the street. All the glass was gone, so he poked his head out, conscious of the soundless boiling cloud of black smoke that was streaming out around his head and shoulders. He pulled his head back in. He had seen the roof of the front porch below. It was tiny, but it looked like salvation to him. He put his head through the window, took another deep breath of clean air, and then jerked his head back as the windowsill next to his cheek exploded into a shocking blur of splinters. He sat down heavily and then bounced right back up again when he realized there was no breathable air left in the room. He staggered sideways to get to the other side of the window, just in time to see another bullet come blasting in, tearing out the bottom of the windowsill and stinging his face with brick dust.

  Okay, not this window, he thought, and, ducking low, he scrambled through all the wreckage once more, kicking burning wood and debris out of the way before tripping over the mortar’s support foot and sprawling up against the back window, which had also been blown out by the muzzle blast. Most of the smoke was going up through the hole in the roof, so back here he could at least breathe without sticking his head out the window.

  Who were the shooters? And why were there shooters? Cops? He felt the floor lift and then begin to sag as something blew up downstairs. There was a much stronger stink of gasoline again. He spied a plate-size patch of plaster at his feet and reached down to pick it up as the volume of smoke grew exponentially, enough to start it boiling out the window. Holding the plaster by its edge, he slid it out into the window aperture and waited. He was hoping that in all the smoke, it would look like a face. But nobody shot at it. Either they weren’t fooled or they weren’t there. He realized he was having to hold his breath, so he dropped the plaster and risked a quick look over the lower sill. The long expanse of the back porch roof beckoned, even as he felt the floor sag behind him again and saw a ragged edge of fire come up through the center of the floor and envelop the mortar. The sagging floor was again threatening to suck him down into the fire on the floor below.

  No more time, he thought. He thrust his legs out the window, rolled over onto his stomach, winced when a wall of flame lunged at his face, and launched himself feetfirst over the sill and down onto the back porch roof. He landed hard on the metal roof, dimly aware that there were cops in the alley and still others running into the backyard. He managed to grab hold of a metal protrusion and stop his slide toward the ground, but then a gout of fire billowed out from a crack in the wall, singeing the tops of his hands. He let go involuntarily, sliding down and then dropping heavily into the yard. He landed on his feet and staggered backward, right into the arms of two uniformed policemen. They slammed him down to the ground and stuck a variety of guns into his neck and back, screaming soundlessly at him to get down, wild-eyed blood lust on all their faces.

  He went limp and closed his ey
es, momentarily grateful for the fact that he couldn’t hear them. He felt his arms being pulled roughly behind him and the cuffs going on, and then he was jerked upright, frog-marched out into the alley, and thrown into the back of a cruiser. He felt a moment of panic as the door was slammed in his face, but then he realized that, even cuffed and surrounded by hostile police, he was probably safer than he had been for several hours. They obviously thought that he was their Capitol bomber.

  Two men who looked like federal agents appeared at the windows, followed by several others, all brandishing machine pistols and staring in at him with the same furious expressions that the cops had, until one of them blinked, grabbed another agent’s arm, and pointed excitedly at Swamp, saying something Swamp couldn’t hear.

  But he knew what it meant: The man was probably Secret Service, and he’d been recognized. Now the real fun would begin.

  Connie, along with millions of viewers around the world, had watched in complete horror as an obviously unmanned television camera recorded the carnage on the west portico. The audio had been cut off right after that first flash of reddish white light, and then it had come back on for thirty seconds, filling her dining room with the screams of the dying and wounded, who were visible but out of focus in the skewed picture. Then the sound cut out again as the picture turned black and white. At one point, a black river of what had to be blood had appeared on one side of the picture, spilling down the white marble steps. Within a minute, it had grown large enough to cover all the visible steps. There was smoke boiling across the scene, and blurred figures moving in and out of the picture. Without sound, it looked like some kind of horrible documentary from World War II. Then there was a test pattern, which came up momentarily in color. But that soon disappeared and the transmission continued in black and white. The bottom half of two policemen appeared in the picture, dragging a body across the scene. As they did, the body’s right hand dropped off and lay right in the center of the picture, at which point Connie looked for the remote, her fingers scrambling for the off button.