Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  Shelley wore a groove deeper into the carpet. Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “What?!” Smooth, Mandy. Or as Jeffrey used to say, an incredible lack of smooth.

  Her daughter didn’t round on her as she’d expected. Instead, she came to a halt by Jeffrey’s feet and stared him in the eye. A look that would make most people cower.

  “Who the hell are you? Someone shot Clarice because of you. They attacked my home and my— and here.”

  Her daughter couldn’t even call her “mother.” Strength, Mandy. Sit up straight. Eyes clear. You will get through this.

  “And where the hell were you last night? Clarice and I were in the guest rooms. You sure weren’t on the couch.”

  Ah. There it was. She could save Jeffrey this bit of the tirade, but he shushed her before she could say, “He was with me.” Shelley already knew that. It explained why she hadn’t been there at the start of the attack. She’d gone down to sit with her beloved helicopter, which had saved all of their lives.

  Jeff stopped massaging her foot. He folded his hands in his lap as if he were completely at ease and not the target of her daughter’s fearsome ire.

  “I’m a chef.”

  “No! Don’t give me that horseshit line. Special Operations Forces doesn’t hunt chefs. They hunt terrorists. They carry out clandestine strategic missions in foreign countries at the orders of the government. They don’t poison people on national television.”

  Jeff inspected his bandaged feet for a long moment, then spoke very softly.

  “I was once someone else.” He began to look at Shelley, but turned away. He returned his inspection to his feet instead.

  “Someone your Uncle Phillip knew. Knew better than I knew myself.” This time he almost looked at Mandy, but again, didn’t. “Better than you knew me as well.”

  She knew he and Phillip had been in some wild scrapes in college and some nasty ones in Vietnam, but he and Mandy had been lovers for three years. Her daughter had grown from two to five with Jeff a daily part of Shelley’s life, and her own. EMS was founded right here, in this room. And it had taken off like a rocket. She’d ridden it skyward, the most exciting project she’d ever done. Those first three years were probably the three happiest years she’d ever had.

  That was the strangest thing. She’d almost said yes to Jeffrey’s marriage proposal, she’d actually been opening her mouth to accept, when he’d added that one simple requirement.

  And she’d given up happiness to stay.

  CHAPTER 101

  “I was a scientist. A chemist like Phillip.” I miss you, Mr. Wall Tall Peterson. Miss you like a hole in my heart. A piece of me gone missing. That was perhaps the cruelest joke. Having Crazy Phillip back in his life, but only for one single, too-short night in his apartment. Jeff glanced at the rumpled armchair by the window, wishing desperately to see his old friend crashed out in it.

  “We were chemistry-botany double majors actually. We were the only two on campus crazy enough to do that. I hadn’t planned on it, I’d started out in sociology or some silly thing. Your uncle had a way of persuading you.”

  That prompted a ghost of a smile from Shelley. He remembered Shelley as such a smiling, happy girl. Somewhere she’d lost that. And he suspected that if he thought about it hard, he’d know why. He tried to close that door and continue his story.

  “It turned out that I had a knack for it. Better than Phillip in some ways. Those two files of Phillip’s were spin-offs of some of my original research. I didn’t see that global warming was on the way, though all the signs were there, but I certainly saw droughts and the need to deal with them. My parents were both Oklahoma Dust Bowl children, brushed back to the East Coast their forbearers had left generations before.”

  Here it was. The secret he’d thought buried when he left EMS.

  “I developed something else.” And it made him sick to think about it.

  But Phillip’s file was lost. The story was safe to tell now, as he’d never agree to recreate his own research.

  “The biggest problem in the Dust Bowl was, no big surprise, dust. The parched, overworked soil wouldn’t stay in place long enough for new plants to take root and tack it down.”

  Mandy was looking at him strangely. “But they’ve created soil sealers. Spray it down, mix it in, and you have a dust-free helipad. Use more of it and you get a durable walkway without paving. They did that for the Italy Winter Olympics in 2006. The pathways are still there.”

  They were, and they’d given Jeff the chills even though they were little more than digging plastic into the soil.

  “Acrylic polymers. Read about those.” Couldn’t help himself. He’d been terrified that some other bright, overeager college punk would follow the same route he had and reach the same deadly conclusions. Jeff prayed daily that his invention was an unrepeatable stroke of bad luck and not merely an unusual application of science available to anyone.

  “Acrylics are handy in the right places. Twenty-year seal. Nice. Of course, once deep sealed, it’s dead soil until you strip it off and cart it away.” And thankfully it had turned out to be down an entirely different path than his own research.

  “I was working with the soil-air interface environment itself. I wanted to lock the soil in place. A spray-down application that could be performed on a wide-field area. It would still allow air, nutrient, bacterial life-cycle interchange, but the soil would bond to itself. Stay put.”

  “And it worked?” Mandy asked quietly.

  “Too well. Sometimes when you are hunting for the perfect cure, you accidentally create the perfect disease. I’m sure that the CDC has caches of things that make smallpox and ebola look timid. I created the ultimate weapon.”

  “When?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  He turned to face her and tears burned hot streams down his face.

  “The week before I left EMS—and left the two of you behind forever.”

  CHAPTER 102

  “The two of us?” The words slipped out before Shelley could stop them. “You left the two of us?”

  Jeff Davis nodded. Tears slid silently down his cheeks. He didn’t even appear to be aware of them.

  “But I don’t remember you.”

  He nodded once more and brushed at this face. He looked down at his wet fingers in surprise, but he spoke to her.

  “Do you have your day pack?”

  A chill slid up her spine as she went upstairs to retrieve it, returned to a bedroom she didn’t remember. But she did remember the two of them standing ten stories underground at the edge of what was perhaps the oddest swimming pool in existence.

  “Where did you get that bear?” he had demanded. He’d refused to make any effort to save himself until he knew. And he did know, before she’d answered. He’d needed to know if she remembered.

  But she hadn’t.

  When she returned to the living room, they still sat there. Unmoving. Unchanged. She unrolled the crystal statuette from the shirt she’d wrapped around it until it was once again exposed, glittering in the morning sun which shone through the windows.

  “Where did I get this bear?”

  He held out his left hand flat. She placed it in his palm. He covered it with his right hand cupped over it.

  He peeked beneath his right hand, just a little sliver of a view for himself alone. Then looked up at Shelley. Peeked again. Teased her. He was teasing her as if she were still a little girl. Then, like the magician he’d been, he lifted his right hand with a quick flourish and exposed the wonder of crystal to a little girl. She could picture the gesture, the long-fingered revelation. Her mother’s fingers weren’t long. Fine, but not long.

  She sat down on the floor so that her legs would not collapse out from under her. She took the bear and cradled it to her chest.

  “Why did you leave us?”

&n
bsp; He reached out and took her mother’s hand, held it like a man who’d always been at her side. She slid her hand beneath his and wrapped her fingers about his thumb, two hands melded together like they’d never been apart.

  “Because my research succeeded. If I’d failed, I’d probably still be here. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for that simple difference. For the lost years. For all of it.”

  “Succeeded at what?”

  “I created a natural polymerizing agent. A biological trigger that was a perfect soil plasticizer. One that worked without destroying the top microlayer ecosystem. I could spray it over a field and they’d never have another dust storm. I could spray the same agent combined with an herbicide admixture and they would never grow another crop again. Not a tree. Not grass. Not weeds. I created the perfect defoliant. And the US military would have spread it all over a country like Vietnam given the chance. So would fifty other governments given their chance.”

  “Vietnam’s a beautiful country. I used to get in trouble going AWOL because I loved hitchhiking up and down the coast, meeting the people, living on the beaches. I was going to go back there for my next season of cooking shows.”

  Shelley looked at him, really looked. And didn’t remember him. But she remembered the feel of him. Remembered the man who was always trying to make her laugh. She’d thought it was Uncle Phillip, but it wasn’t. It was Jeffrey Davis.

  She turned her attention to her mother.

  “And you let him go?!”

  CHAPTER 103

  Mandy startled back at the verbal slap.

  “I— He—Damn it! A man comes to you. A man you love. A man your daughter loves. But he’s full of himself. Not the sort you’d ever expect to settle down. He’s moody, romantic, cranky, and foolish. Then he gives your daughter the perfect gift, a mother-and-daughter bear. And he proposes marriage.”

  “Mother and daughter. I always thought it was father and daughter.” Shelley glanced down at crystal.

  Mandy looked at Jeff. It was a gut punch to both of them.

  “I hated you for my not having a father.”

  How was Mandy supposed to answer that? Shelley knew her father was a college fling. He’d graduated and moved on before she knew she was pregnant. He’d been living with a girl in Seattle by the time she’d found him. He eventually married the Seattle girl. Mandy had never told him; it was better that way.

  “I’m not your father, Shelley.” Jeff’s voice was soft as breezes. “But I wish to God I had been your stepfather. I came that close.” He nodded toward the bear.

  Shelley remained cross-legged on the floor, the bear cradled between hands resting in her lap.

  “So what was wrong with him? Why did you say no?”

  Mandy could still see them, the younger them. Her sitting exactly where she was at this moment. He on one knee before her. “Yes,” so close to her lips.

  “What is the one thing you love to do most in the world, Ashlyn?” Her daughter started at the use of her given name.

  “Flying.”

  She’d gotten her glider license at fourteen, and her helicopter and fixed-wing licenses at sixteen; the earliest ages allowed by the FAA. She’d been beyond “a natural.” Ashlyn had been gifted.

  And it had scared the mother in her to death. She’d never been a happy flier. And then when her daughter had joined the Air Force . . . It was the last fight they’d ever had, the last time they’d spoken. Ashlyn had flown from her, that very day, that hour, and never turned back. The worst part was that her daughter was as stubborn as she was. They’d never found a way to talk about it.

  “Suppose, for a moment, you’d been flying just a few years. Had just flown your first military helicopter. Phillip sent me pictures. It was . . . you were, you are amazing.” She had every photo Phillip had ever sent her of her daughter’s military career. She’d made Phillip give Ashlyn the proceeds from a dozen of his patents so that she could set up her training center. Mandy had given her the Comanche, through Phillip, always through Phillip, but she’d had to do what she could for her daughter. It was what a mother did. By then she’d been connected enough to have the only Comanche YAH-66 military version ever begun, finished just for her daughter.

  “I was in that same place. EMS was rolling. I was no scientist but I was a natural administrator. My helping to organize Jeff and Phillip’s projects quickly led to being director over fifty scientists. They were all working on projects I was guiding, developing, planning. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever done. And I’m good at it, really good.”

  “And then on bended knee . . .” Jeff cut her off. Or saved her from having to finish it alone. Jeff squeezed her hand.

  “. . . your beau insists that you leave it all. Maybe he even bribes your daughter with a gift that she loves.” He nodded toward the bear still nestled in Ashlyn’s hands then turned to face her.

  “Gave you a hell of a choice, didn’t I?” A slow smile of wisdom gained the hard way.

  “Choice from hell, more like.” And the decision had burned at her soul for years. “You probably don’t remember, Shelley, but I think you started hating me the day Jeffrey left. I moved EMS headquarters the very next day to get away from all the memories here. I didn’t know I’d be itinerant for the next three decades avoiding the corporate and government gangsters. If I’d known how hard it would be—”

  She swallowed hard and glanced at Ashlyn.

  “If I’d known that it would eventually cost me my daughter, I’d have gone with you, Jeff.” That was it. She could say no more. Her throat was closed. The tears— The tears she’d held back for all those years burned relentless tracks down her face.

  Shelley—no, Ashlyn set the bear carefully in front of her crossed legs and looked down at it. Perhaps to hide her own face as her hair cascaded down like a curtain. It was tough when you learned your mother was a person too. Fallible, vulnerable, faced with hard choices, and not always making the right ones.

  “Holy shit!”

  CHAPTER 104

  “What?” Shelley jerked her face up to look at Jeffrey. Was it possible to explain how many things were wrong? Even to herself?

  Jeffrey was laughing aloud. Laughing at her.

  “What!?” She needed to hit something and hit it hard. Jeffrey had just jumped to the top of her list in a single step.

  “You don’t remember me, right?” He was still laughing though less loudly.

  “Except the hand trick,” she mimicked the polar bear presentation.

  “Try this.” He leaned forward with a smile. “Find the blocks, Ashlyn. Go find ‘em in the fire.”

  She spun around. There. Right there in the hearth.

  Jeff was laughing behind her. Laughing not at her, but at a specific memory rediscovered.

  “Phillip was right. I truly am a Blockhead. With a capital ‘B’.”

  She crawled to the hearth, it was only a few feet away. She hooked her pinkie in the little hole in the bottom corner of the outermost hearthstone and pulled. The whole stone slid forward silently on ball bearings.

  There were her blocks. She’d missed them after that first move when her mother could never find them. It was because they’d never been taken from Shelley’s hidey hole to pack, the one Jeff had made for her. Behind the blocks was a thick file. It shouldn’t be there in her secret space, but it was. It had the symbol of an EMS priority crashcode on the outside of the folder: a light-bulb shining over a man’s head, except the bulb was an Earth. A perfect, blue and white earth.

  A note had been scrawled across the front. “For the blockhead.”

  She handed it to him, and couldn’t help smiling as he burst out laughing and then tilted it for Mandy to see.

  Then he sobered and took a deep breath before opening the file. He shuddered as he looked inside. His face went gray.

  “Shit! It still exists.”r />
  “Burn it!” She and her mother shouted in unison.

  “There’s a letter.”

  Shelley could see it was in Phillip’s scrawl.

  CHAPTER 105

  Hello Mr. Cheffie,

  If you’re reading this, then the news is not good on my behalf. If someone else is reading this we’re both dead, so to hell with them.

  Did you like my little swap out? Thought you’d appreciate the password on your old herbicide studies. Had to get you thinking about blocks again, but figured they’d grab a copy of my files if they grabbed the Blackberry. Worked too, if you’re reading this. It’s strange, writing from the grave. It provides a certain latitude of scholarly attitude that I shall resist indulging in because, I fear, time is short.

  Poor Amanda has probably been scrambling, looking for the leak. How did they find us after all these years? Sorry, Amanda, the leak was me. If I’m dead, then it was even more dangerous than I feared.

  I leaked our existence to a conspiracy theorist, conspiracy fanatic actually, who saw EMS ghosts around every corner. It was time to draw a line. Now is a time that the world needs our help and we must truly discern our enemies from our friends. Our enemies were a little more powerful than I anticipated, hence all the subterfuge to get the old Blockhead back to the file.

  Jeffie, you may wonder why I was back in the military. Colonel Peterson, there’s a laugh. I know it made my little sister the pacifist completely nuts. I rejoined the day after I read your old research, swiped a copy from right under your nose when I saw you shredding all your work during your last night at EMS. I am, was (past tense if you’re reading this) the military’s expert on herbicide research and soil plasticizers. I wanted to have my ear as close to the ground as possible on this just in case they turned up your research. They didn’t. The only copy, and I made bloody sure of that, is the one you’re holding in your hands.