by Seth Fried
I shook my head no and we both turned to watch as his monster ran screeching across the lobby, its tentacles vibrating and dripping slime.
OWEN shrugged. “It was only okay.”
In the foyer, some of Kirklin’s men were administering first aid to their wounded. Others were kneeling by the doorway, awaiting orders and trying to avoid the constant ping and rattle of OWEN’s fake gunfire as well as the clown’s wild charges.
Their leader was standing behind them, taking in the battle between OWEN’s projections in the lobby with the annoyed look of an intelligent man trying to make sense of something impossible. After the clown unceremoniously bit off the head of a SWAT team member, the man stepped over one of his wounded and headed out into the lobby.
His men watched as he approached OWEN’s monster. It let out a few warning shrieks, but the man continued across the lobby and eventually stepped right through it, waving his hands in front of his face as if he were clearing away a cobweb. He then paused and watched as the SWAT team disappeared.
OWEN looked disappointed.
“I was hoping it would take them a little longer to figure it out,” he said.
In the lobby the clown stepped back two paces so it was once again standing in front of the man, who looked up at it with impatience. It reached one of its tentacles down past the elastic band of its brightly colored pants and pulled out an enormous revolver. It leveled the gun at the man and pulled the trigger. Out of the barrel popped a flag bearing the USMS seal.
“Bang,” the clown said and then vanished.
Without waiting to see how Kirklin’s men would react to this strange display, OWEN and I fell farther back into the natural history exhibit, where we hid behind a diorama of taxidermied otters. With the front doors of the museum smashed open, music from the parade flooded into the building. As OWEN mulled over our next course of action he absently drummed his fingers on his knees to the Beach Boys medley coming from an approaching marching band. I strained to hear any police sirens, but there were none.
The group’s leader was issuing instructions to his men in Esperanto, which OWEN was kind enough to translate in my ear. His translations came off stilted, but it stood to reason that Kirklin’s men were new to the language and so speaking in a pidgin dialect.
“They are only images,” the man said. “Lower your weapons so they do not convince you to shoot one another again. We have lost enough colleagues.”
OWEN’s face lit up.
“Hey,” he whispered to me, “they think you’re a projection too.”
As Kirklin’s men entered the exhibit there was a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.
“I’ll create a distraction,” he said. “You look for the man carrying a blue duffel. I spotted him in the lobby. Get the bag.”
I didn’t have to ask what was in it.
“Will a distraction work?” I whispered. “They know you’re a projection.”
OWEN grinned, his features beginning to shift into another disguise.
“Exactly,” he said.
He transformed himself into a man with dark eyes and a nose that came to a delicate, birdlike point. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at myself. The resemblance was uncanny, except OWEN’s version of me looked slightly more confident than I did about running into a pack of terrorists and commandeering their explosives.
“We’ll take care of everything,” he said. “You just worry about getting the duffel.”
“We?”
He pointed to my right, where seven copies of me were crouching behind the otter diorama with us. One of them waved.
I poked my head up between two otters to get a look at the men as they moved through the hall. Their leader still had his gun holstered and was walking confidently at the head of the group with a fire axe in one hand. His men held their rifles with the barrels pointed conscientiously down and away from one another. There was a single unarmed man toward the rear whose left elbow had been bandaged with a necktie that looked soaked through with blood. In his right hand he gripped a large navy-blue duffel.
I ducked back down and was surprised to see that OWEN’s copies of me had doubled in number. I crawled to the edge of the diorama and was preparing to sprint out toward Kirklin’s men, when one of my copies stood up and let out a loud battle cry. His call was answered by other copies, who had now spread throughout the hall. Different versions of me sprang out from behind display cases of gemstones and animal skulls or rappelled down from the ceiling on black nylon ropes.
Kirklin’s men, skeptical after OWEN’s previous performance, continued to head deeper into the museum without paying any attention to this new commotion. Even as my duplicates offered up one last unanimous howl and made their charge, none of the men so much as raised a rifle.
I let a few of the projections get out in front of me before I joined the stampede, making sure to imitate their battle cry so I wouldn’t seem out of place. As the first wave of projections sailed harmlessly into Kirklin’s men, I was close behind. In the confusion of bodies, I reached through the torso of the duplicate directly in front of me and landed a hard blow on the wounded elbow of the man carrying the duffel. He cried out and I was able to pull the bag from his other hand easily.
I didn’t get far before the man started shouting, “La pakon! La pakon!”
Once I had the bag, OWEN modified his projections, so they were all holding identical bags. Some of them stood around throwing duffels back and forth as if playing a round of keep-away. Others climbed up onto stuffed bison and elk, riding them like mechanical bulls and swinging the duffels in cowboyish circles over their heads. I even saw myself waltz past wearing a tuxedo and tails, holding up a duffel bag as my partner.
OWEN’s voice spoke in my ear, telling me to take the bag farther into the museum. I tried to blend in with my doubles, but I must have been walking with too much purpose because the head of a nearby mountain lion disappeared in a spray of gunfire.
I ducked into a hallway that ended in a pair of double doors under a cloth banner that read METROPOLIS OF THE FUTURE. As I pushed through the doors OWEN turned on the exhibit’s lighting and sound systems, so that for a moment I almost thought I’d made it outside.
The model street was empty and from overhead came the ambient noise of traffic softened by the whine of electric motors. A compact street-cleaning vehicle glided toward me, its sides outfitted with ultraviolet air scrubbers the size of oil drums. OWEN instructed me to hop on the cleaner to put some distance between me and the entrance. It rushed noiselessly up the street, carrying me past storefronts advertising composting toilets and solar-powered window units. The exhibit featured 2-D projections of smiling citizens who wore sun hats and worked in vertical community gardens the size of parking garages or stood ready to feed perfectly cubed paper waste into pneumatic chutes.
The cleaner approached an alley, which OWEN told me was my stop. I hopped off and hid there, watching as Kirklin’s men entered the exhibit. A woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker and began to talk about the growing dangers of extreme weather. Corrugated storm shutters rolled down from awnings to protect storefronts and the woman’s voice instructed any patrons to open the umbrellas provided to them by their docents. An unseen sprinkler system turned on, blasting the street with rain as the voice explained that the hyperabsorbent pavement could take in over nine hundred gallons of water a minute. OWEN didn’t turn on the sprinklers over the alley so I was able to keep dry as I watched Kirklin’s agents slog through the rain. OWEN explained that he was maxing out the weather system’s wind shear to make the walk as unpleasant as possible. Thanks to OWEN there was also a velociraptor on the sidewalk just ahead of them. It was dressed as a newsie in a small rain-wilted hat and a vest. It was holding a stack of soaked newspapers in its claws and shouting loudly enough to be heard over the weather.
“Extree! Extree! USMS foils te
rrorists!”
OWEN cued an impressive flash of lightning to distract the men further, then opened a dry path leading to a utility exit and told me to get the bag out of the building. The exit opened back on the foyer, where I was surprised by one of Kirklin’s agents who must have stayed to look after his wounded colleagues. He shoved me against the wall and started to wrestle the bag of explosives away from me.
That was when I performed what I was not proud to realize was, when frightened, my preferred method of attack. I had to knee him in the crotch three times before he let go of the bag. When he finally fell to the floor, the cravenness of my approach was apparent even to OWEN, who sounded perplexed as he congratulated me on a job well done. There was a thoughtful pause before he added, “Do you need me to show you the punching animation again?”
I tried to explain myself, but OWEN interrupted me to suggest a quick sprint out into Attleman Park.
“We should be in the clear the rest of the way,” he said. “But if we run into any more of Kirklin’s guys, try to defend yourself in a way that will reflect well on the agency.”
“I don’t mean to keep doing that,” I said, jogging through the foyer. “I was scared.”
“I understand,” OWEN said. “But moving forward let’s try to keep everything above the waist. I want to be able to tell myself we’re the good guys.”
I gave OWEN my word as I fled down the museum steps. Outside, it sounded like the parade was being broken up. From Sixth Avenue there was the dull roar of a frightened crowd punctuated by the sound of police whistles.
I was well into the park when a line of MPD cruisers finally came screaming toward the museum. Soon after, Kirklin’s men emerged from the main entrance and took up defensive positions on the stairs. The cruisers all pulled to a stop at hasty angles as the men began to shoot. Officers ducked out of their cars and crouched behind them for cover before returning fire.
The terrain of the park rose slightly before sloping down to a small creek, at the head of which was a stone culvert. I stashed the bag of explosives there, then hid behind one of the park’s natural outcroppings of bedrock.
I was comforted by what I assumed to be the sound of police helicopters approaching from the south. But when they finally appeared over the park, aggressively low, I recognized them as two traffic helicopters that had previously been the property of the USMS. They were now painted black and retrofitted with machine gun turrets.
At the sight of the helicopters, the police began to scramble for better cover in the museum’s statuary garden. The helicopters hovered over the museum steps, firing on the police while also lowering rope ladders. Kirklin’s men made their way to the ladders, occasionally stopping to contribute to the suppressing fire that was keeping the police pinned down among the statues. The last one up was the squad’s leader, who turned toward the museum and gave it one last bitter look before beginning his climb. Once he was inside, the helicopters both raised their ladders and tore back down through the park.
The officers slowly came out from behind their statues and I had OWEN project a police uniform onto me so I could tell one of them about the undetonated explosives in the park. As I approached, I saw that the museum’s exterior had not escaped the firefight undamaged. Dozens of large windows were shattered and its facade was pocked with bullet holes. But it otherwise seemed to be in good shape and I was occupied with an overwhelming sense of pride, knowing that despite Kirklin’s best effort, one of the world’s finest museums was still standing.
“We did it,” I said, smiling at OWEN, who was now walking beside me, wearing a police uniform of his own.
He looked up at the building and laughed.
“I bet Kirklin is—”
He was interrupted by a loud explosion a few blocks west. Within seconds there was another explosion from the opposite side of the park and the earth shook. These were followed by a series of loud booms that were so close together they seemed to come from everywhere.
Towers of smoke began to rise up all around us in the distance. There was a roar of panic from the dispersing crowds on Sixth Avenue. The officers in front of the museum rushed about, shouting to one another and climbing into whatever cruisers were still drivable. OWEN checked the satellite imaging to tell me the locations of the explosions. His voice went soft. I thought of what Kirklin’s agent had said, the problem with us Suitland types. We never saw the big picture. The Metropolis Museum of Art, the Brandt Modern, the Montgomery, the Talmore Collection, the Motion Picture Archive, the Metropolis Science Museum, the Naymen Center, Saber Hall. All of them. Destroyed.
6 We gave an officer the location of the duffel, then headed toward Sixth Avenue. There, thousands of people were in the middle of a mass exodus, the police attempting to guide everyone away from the explosions. The crowd had pushed past the barriers, so that the entire street was flooded with spectators and performers alike. Next to me on the sidewalk a young man in a band uniform stood hugging a tuba and crying, looking up in disbelief at the dark plumes of smoke in the sky. A few sputtering floats crawled through the mob with face-painted jugglers and young women in dance costumes sitting on top like weary, ridiculous soldiers fleeing the collapse of the western front.
OWEN and I kept heading east toward the river. Everywhere people were standing in front of shops and office buildings, hugging each other or pacing or reading reports to each other from their phones. When we reached the river we found a long esplanade with benches facing out toward the water. OWEN maintained a respectful silence as I walked up to the railing and stood there for a moment, looking out over the water toward the East Side.
It was a bright day, a slight breeze coming off the water. A train was moving slowly over the Carrington Bridge. I had the sudden, irrational thought that by failing to stop Kirklin I had let my parents down, a painful and childish notion that caused me to break down and begin to weep.
When I regained my composure, OWEN gave me a hollow pat on the back and suggested we get a drink. I didn’t need convincing.
We wound up in the booth of a sports bar on 54th Street, where dozens of televisions still had their volume turned up for whatever game had been preempted by the news coverage. The bar was filled with people standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the news in silence. Everyone was holding drinks, but OWEN and I seemed to be the only ones actually drinking. I wasn’t sure whether OWEN was capable of fatigue, but the strain of the day seemed to have affected him almost as much as it had me. His usual exuberance had been replaced with an air of embarrassed frustration at having been outsmarted. Our waitress continued to bring us whiskeys without having to be asked. I would drink both, while OWEN kept refilling a projection of a glass with his flask. He occasionally grimaced as he drank, which could have been a response to the strength of that particular batch of his booze program or to the constant barrage of bad news that issued from the televisions, the bartender flipping from one channel to the next whenever there was a perceived lull in the reportage.
All told, the demolition of Metropolis’s most-loved cultural centers had taken a little over thirty minutes. Police and civilian casualties had been mercifully low and it was revealed during the coverage that many of the attackers’ methods had been nonviolent. Kirklin’s people had somehow gotten parking boots with unique locks on three hundred police cruisers, causing delays in response times throughout the city. Many other cruisers had been remotely stalled using some sort of EMP technology or else were pinned down by machine gun fire not only from the two helicopters but by individual shooters stationed on rooftops in a perimeter around the museum district. Police radios had also been unreliable throughout the attack and reporters were speculating that ultrahigh-frequency jammers had been used to disrupt police communications. When the news broke that the police were having a difficult time identifying the bodies of the men in the foyer of the Metropolis Museum of History because they didn’t have their fingerprints or
natural teeth, one anchor turned to someone off camera to make sure there wasn’t a mistake on the teleprompter.
Within hours of the attacks, Mayor Laury was shaking hands with Governor Ranklin in a joint press conference. Soon there was footage of National Guard trucks rolling down streets all throughout Metropolis and guardsmen with M16s stationed on street corners. But that wasn’t necessarily a comfort. The Guard’s presence was to be expected after such an attack, and so it was reasonable to assume that Kirklin had anticipated it. His plans up to that point had depended heavily on the element of surprise. Now that the city was finally preparing for a major attack, it seemed unlikely he would repeat himself. And yet, it seemed even less likely that he was finished terrorizing the city. The only possibility was escalation, an attack so large and outrageous it would reveal all those newly arrived soldiers to be little more than another false sense of security for Kirklin to exploit.
Between updates on the details of the attacks and police casualties, television stations were cutting away to photographs of lost Van Goghs, Rembrandts, and Caravaggios. OWEN, whom I hadn’t known to be a fan of twentieth-century art, clenched his fist when it was announced that the Modern had lost an entire retrospective on Willem de Kooning.
The only building OWEN had neglected to mention when he was looking at the satellite imagery in the park was the Metropolis Transit Museum. Even without knowing I’d hoped to see the Steam Beetle, he must have suspected I would take that loss the hardest. I tried to fight off the selfish thought that I’d missed a chance to see my father’s train. Something of my parents had been in the city and now suddenly wasn’t. But the Steam Beetle was rare, not extinct. There was still a chance I might one day get to steal a moment with it, whereas some of the actual trains at the MTM had been out of production for so long that its collection had contained the only surviving examples.
In my apartment back in Suitland there was a framed photograph of me standing in the Maywell 78, one of the safest railcars ever constructed. A museum guard took it for me, just as I had hoped I might get someone to snap a quick picture of me with the Steam Beetle. In the photo I’m standing by myself in the empty car, holding on to one of the stanchions and smiling as if I were shaking hands with the president. This was during my first trip to the city. Four days later I would spend my ninth Christmas without a family in a hostel in the West Side. I remember the guard giving me a sad look as he wound the film forward on my disposable camera and asked me if I wanted another for safety. Maybe my lonely excitement had made him feel sorry for me or maybe when he frowned he was just trying to determine whether my enthusiasm was a play of teenage irony, a mean-spirited joke on an underappreciated museum. But to me the transit museum was no less important than any of the city’s landmarks. The art museums had been repositories for artists’ attempts to address the human condition through their own flamboyant creativity, while the transit museum had been a showroom for far humbler creators, who had attempted to address the needs and vulnerabilities of people with a level-headed ingenuity. Listening to the news reports that night, I knew the general public would have traded a hundred transit museums for one lost Matisse. Already there was coverage of crews sorting through demolished museums to rescue damaged paintings, while I knew it would be weeks or even months before anyone checked if there was something left of those trains. I’d never had any illusions about the popularity of the things dearest to me.