Metro

by Stephen Romano

  After that, they test him for a very long time.

  They chain him in a box with his arms and legs wrapped in manacles, then throw the box in a river, and he makes it to the surface in three minutes. They bury him alive in a wooden coffin with tear gas in his eyes and he comes up for air within an hour. They sic a pack of starving dogs on him in an enclosed concrete bunker with his hands cuffed behind his back and he makes it out alive—almost bleeds to death, but he made it.

  And that seems to be the story of our boy’s life.

  Survival, and more survival.

  He hears their brutal, punishing voices in his sleep—GET UP, NOW! THE ENEMY NEVER SLEEPS! GET THE HELL UP!—and it is the voice of God.

  Three days after he turns twenty, they make him take LSD for the first time.

  • • •

  The experience is mind altering, of course.

  Like no torture they have ever inflicted on him before.

  This is the next phase of his training, which he doesn’t understand at all—even when they tell him that his mind must be able to survive anything, just like his body must be able to survive anything.

  They are careful not to overdose him at first.

  He just gets a lab-grade quarter hit of something incredibly potent, and it still blows his brains out, but it isn’t even close to what they will give him later.

  That first night, they leave him alone with it.

  All by himself in his room, tripping balls.

  Our boy hallucinates that the man with the white hair returns in a glittering shower of gold and our boy cowers in a fetal knot on the floor, begging his father to explain why he left. He even gets a lot of answers back, but none of it makes much sense. It’s all a wave of weird sound, undulating just beneath his skin, double-amplified by his own wrecked emotions, one cascading into the next. He sees the woman who should have been his mother—the beautiful busty truthteller in pumps who proved that love was a lie—and she oozes from his eyes and hovers there and laughs at him and says he is unworthy of anything. He beats on the walls and the walls tumble down hard. He screams like a child and turns inside out, outside in.

  The next day, while he’s still coming down, they yank him from his room, put a pistol with eighteen rounds in his hands, rip the clothes from his back, and force him to run naked through a drill that almost costs him his life. Ten shooters in a concrete-walled maze, coming after him with live ammo. He scores five of them in their Kevlar target vests before his dull reflexes cost the sixth shot, the world humming and vibrating, the LSD still strong in his system, making the entire world skip and bump and slide—and the return fire hacks a piece of his shoulder off, jarring everything back into sharp, sharp focus. He scrambles behind a concrete wall while the other bastards try to nail him. Somehow manages to use his last eleven shots to score them all. He does this acting on nothing but sheer will and muscle memory and the primal power that now lives in his blood.

  Still, his masters are not pleased.

  They sit him in a room and sew him up and tell him this is not acceptable.

  You must be able to act in ANY situation, boy.

  Or you are dead.

  • • •

  For another two years, they feed him drugs.

  As they run him harder than ever.

  The tests become more brutal, as the dope becomes more intense.

  They acclimate him to the acid and the marijuana fast enough—but the various downers and amphetamines are a real problem at first. He almost loses his life three more times on the refrigerated target ranges. A bullet misses his head by just three inches and the drill sergeant in charge calls the game before the angry dogs can finish him off. It’s the first—and only—time his life will ever be saved by one of those loud, arrogant pricks.

  But soon . . .

  Sooner than they could have hoped . . .

  It all becomes a part of him.

  Like all the other lessons.

  And they teach him about dope too—put large books in front of him and show him movies and pound the truth of it all into his head. Not just the street names and scientific names and the effects produced, but where these mind-altering substances are manufactured, how it’s all moved legally and illegally. He learns about the cartels and the mid-level dealers, the stoners on campus just starting out in life and the junkies on street corners, waiting to die. They tell him he must know everything there is to know about this shit.

  It’s essential.

  Twenty-five months after he almost hallucinated his own mind out as a newbie, he walks that same concrete maze, naked, armed with only with fifteen shots, and scores every agent they send after him with optimal head shots—while on six hits of LSD.

  It’s even easier on downers.

  He just lets the rush slide through him, using it like some weird superpower that engages all his kill senses. In fact, he even needs it now.

  He’s addicted.

  An expert, educated junkie with deadly hands.

  But they say that’s okay.

  In fact, it’s perfect.

  They smile and keep on testing him, over and over.

  • • •

  He turns twenty-five and becomes a seasoned killer.

  Baptized in blood, reborn through fire, and high on dope.

  They send him as a graduate trainee on three assignments, which is when he sees the real world for the first time, firsthand, not just on TV or in books, or the many secret bases in which he’s learned his trade. He dispatches his prey with expert, programmed efficiency. The assignments are back-to-back-to-back. He snorts a headful of pure rock cocaine before he blows away a mid-level drug dealer in New York—does it cold, right from the front seat of a cab, point blank, BANG. Then he gets on and off an airplane and strangles an undercover police officer working as a call girl in Philly. He’s just on some low-grade speed when he does that. And that’s good because he has to use his hands this time, has to get dirty in an even dirtier back room off an oyster bar, but the speed powers him through and it doesn’t bother him, not even a little bit. He smokes a joint at the hotel and goes to sleep, dreaming about nothing. Then he gets on another airplane. Pops a handful of Xanax. And pops a former gangster cooling his heels on a beach in Maui, a guy who thought he was protected by the feds, and had no idea that a boy hardly out of his teens, made invincible by a near-lethal dose of hospital-grade downers, would walk right up to him and detonate his head by the seaside.

  Our boy stands in the blood of his target and looks at the sun with his pistol at his side, letting brains and sand cascade between his toes, the good rush of the dope washing over him, watching the face of Father Time ooze slowly over the horizon. He realizes in this moment that the world is so big and that it’s so easy to control everything in it. So easy to protect those who do not know as he does.

  Who do not feel as he feels.

  That’s what we do, he thinks, as he watches the sunset. We are the masters of it all. In our own way, we are God.

  He really believes that.

  He goes back to base, and they tell him he is ready for his real assignment—the thing he’s been trained for all his life. It’s the honor of honors to come up this fast, they tell him, even though it will take four more years to prepare for it. He goes into his new life without passion, without pity, without fear.

  Without love.

  • • •

  They put a series of files in front of him and give him a new identity. They tell him all about Austin. Mark Jones is going to be his name from now on.

  He never had a name before.

  Only a birthday.

  For more than twenty years, he’s answered only to November 12. Can’t even remember what they called him before that.

  Because the first few years never counted, did they?

  But now he will be
Mark, and his last name will be so common that anybody could have it. A Google search will pay out millions of random hits. No one will give two thoughts about it in a town like Austin. He will be a movie and comic-book nerd. He will smoke weed daily. He will do drugs and worship pop music from a million eclectic arteries of style and taste. He will blend right into the background of a culture that will never know his true face. He is force-fed what he has not already learned about and becomes more than an expert. He becomes a living, breathing artifact of his generation. At first, it’s a difficult task to assimilate everything—a reeducation and a culture shock more terrifying and awesome than a billion books by Hawthorne or a thousand backbreaking exercises in human endurance. Hours and hours of TV and movies. Reams and reams of lowbrow literature from the trenches of those who never had any respect for history and some who did. The exploitation films of Al Adamson and Fred Williamson and Roger Corman are semi-ignorant tripe made by men with weird personal agendas and commercial priorities, but he is trained to sense the gallows humor and escapist abandon in these works—and he grows to love them as comedic statements about life on the street and business as usual in Hollywood. It becomes hilarious and liberating to him. The weed helps some.

  And it’s not all lowbrow—some of it is amazing art. Our boy must read Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.—the pioneers who stood at the break of the new age in science and entertainment. Our boy senses the teachings of classical writers embedded within the graphic stories of Alan Moore and Frank Miller—the guys who’ve changed the face of comic books forever with bold, serious approaches and wild, hyperrealistic characters. They are the heroes of Twain and Hawthorne and Poe, reborn as superheroes with erectile dysfunction. The works of Steven Spielberg and John Hughes come in on fast-forward. Our boy must be able to quote chapter and verse from Ghostbusters and The Breakfast Club. He must know every line of dialogue spoken in George A. Romero’s Dead trilogy, and his non-horror films too, like Jack’s Wife, There’s Always Vanilla, and Knightriders. When Ed Harris screams in mad heroic frustration that he’s fighting the dragon, our boy must recognize it as a great and lasting statement about the true alienation and aloneness of man’s great quest, like the noble futility of King Arthur chasing after the Holy Grail.

  There is no Dana, only Zuul.

  Our boy is soon filled with every speck of secret knowledge these movies and books and comics can offer.

  His hyper-activated, drug-addled mind soaks it all up like a sponge.

  And as the months of his orientation roll into years, he disguises the muscle in his stomach, lets his face fill up again with the baby fat he had years ago, allows himself to evolve into the part he will play. He keeps his physical skills sharp and his forearms tight—the bosses tell him he will still need his fighting abilities one day—but he chops his hair short and gets a ring in one ear and his gut gets bigger as he parks himself in front of a television set five hours a day, absorbing tape after tape, show after show, culture after culture. He learns how Archie Bunker gave way to the Fonz, who gave way to Sam Malone, who gave way to Jerry Seinfeld—while Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison changed the way people thought about things without even knowing it. New wave and glam metal and grunge rock comes and goes and comes again. Our boy knows all the lyrics to “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by heart—and not many nerds can say that, even the hardcore guys.

  And, finally . . .

  Finally . . .

  Years later . . .

  He is ready.

  He knows everything he needs to know.

  He possesses every skill they need.

  He knows who he will be and where he is going.

  • • •

  Austin is the capital of Texas and a nexus point of pop culture and radical thinking almost entirely polarized against the conservative mind-set of its sister cities—Houston and Dallas being among the few exceptions. The rest of Texas is backwater insanity built on the bones of slaughtered Native Americans and settlers—the biggest tract of square desert footage in America, brimming with oil riches and lost in its own denial. It should be part of Mexico, but our forefathers saw differently to that. A lot of people think that it was the 1960s when all the freethinkers and radicals started to mutate the face and the heart of Austin. Truth is, the roots of all that go back much deeper, to the days when Texas gained its independence in 1836 and Congress eventually recognized the Constitution of the Republic almost ten years later—when people began to realize there was something more to life than surviving in it. Free-trade agreements and higher-learning institutions, all sponsored by Uncle Sam.

  And then there were the deals that went on under all that, behind closed doors. Youth, controlling society. And now, a hundred and fifty years later, it’s almost exactly as it was then—the city of Austin, filled with counterculture and college kids.

  And, oh, the drugs are everywhere.

  It’s one of the biggest illicit substance hot spots in the good old You-Ess-of-Ay, and has been since the start.

  Not many people know that secret, or care to look very deep into things that should be painfully obvious. And that’s where our boy is going now. Not after anybody in particular, just going there.

  Because that’s what we do.

  We’re just there.

  We become part of the scene.

  We blend in and we wait to be activated.

  This is the life you’ve waited for, he’s told, the reason your body and mind were trained so ruthlessly. You came from the worst places on earth to be this person, to be in this place. Your profile will fit the scene. You will be a small-time pot dealer in a town filled with small-time pot dealers. Nobody will ever know who or what you really are. There might not even come a day when you’re called upon—it may be years, it may be never—but you will be our eyes in that place, where nobody imagines they are being watched or wonders why they’re cursed to live as phantoms, never achieving the kind of greatness they desire. Where drug dealers and potheads and acid freaks and closet murderers bide their time, waiting for the big score.

  We watch them all.

  We wait for the moment.

  We are METRO.

  When our boy hears that acronym for the first time, he has already killed six people with his bare hands. The three from his US tour, on top of the three during basic training. One was an accident though. His refurbished hand crushed the poor guy’s larynx when he was disabling him during an escape from a maximum-security lockup drill. Our boy doesn’t fear for his own soul. He doesn’t think it’s a sin. There is no Dana, only Zuul.

  He never even wondered, up until the day they gave him his first assignment, why his family was a series of brutal martial-arts instructors and a mom and dad who left as soon as he grew to love them. So when he hears the acronym and they tell him that’s the name of the organization he works for, he doesn’t wonder what it means, but he suddenly understands what his purpose in life has always been—why all those men and women sweated and died for him. He is part of something bigger, and his is the most important part. It fills him with pride, with accomplishment—and it gives him a reason to exist. He doesn’t wonder what the acronym means because he doesn’t know it’s an acronym at first.

  That’s the whole idea, they finally tell him.

  It’s subterfuge.

  Everyone who hears the acronym thinks it’s an urban thing, transportation, cops, whatever. It’s like a magic trick, sleight of hand. Everything is a distraction. Everything we do, everything we say. Even our name.

  It stands for Multi-Endemic Tactical Reaction Operation.

  Our people are everywhere.

  We blend right in.

  Live with it.

  • • •

  At first, it all goes like clockwork.

  He gets a job at a Cajun rest
aurant on Congress, finds a house, rents it out with two sublettors taking up the slacker slack, and the years roll by. Roomies come and go, all interchangeable faces on a tape loop. He glides through the first half of his thirties. He writes stories, washes dishes, gets high, sells weed. And he kills people every now and then when nobody is looking. Three jobs come in plastic envelopes, FedExed right to his front door. First it’s a woman in Travis Heights who turns out to be running a dope ring and high-dollar hookers too. Then a sixteen-year-old kid dealing smack from his mother’s basement. And a film critic for the Austin Chronicle with heavy connects inside the local mafia scene—he has to be quietly disappeared without a trace because of his semipublic image. It makes news for three months, then quiets down when nobody ever finds the body. Becomes an urban legend, really.

  After the first three assignments, they start getting more careful about how he receives his instructions. They send guys to his work and slip him cyphered notes in public places. Special phones are mailed to secret addresses, which are way stations filled with other men and women who are just like him. He gets special calls on those special phones in the middle of the night and strange voices tell him about safe deposit boxes at post offices with special equipment in them. Sometimes they tell him to get up and run on a second’s notice. It all seems like exactly what they taught him to do. There are very few surprises. He keeps his heavier addictions at bay most of the time—but he always needs a hit of something really strong before doing a job. It plugs him deeper and deeper into the Austin drug scene. He scores eight balls of coke and sheets of blotter acid from scary dealers and keeps their names in a little notebook at home. He snorts giant rails of amphetamine-laced angel dust just seconds before hitting a mark. But those are special treats. He’s no longer the stone-cold junkie he was years ago.

  Unless he has to kill somebody.

  The conditioned response to the hard stuff amazes him still.