How to Save the World

by Tam MacNeil

  “Jesus wept,” the woman whispers, “even for Cameron that’s… Jesus wept,” she says again. Then she sucks in a breath, like she’s putting away her emotions, turning on another part of her. “Are you Alex or Sean?” she asks.

  “Sean,” he whispers.

  Simone returns. She has a first aid kit the size of a small cooler. She slaps it down on the table and opens it up. “Ok,” she says. “I can cut your pant leg off, or you can take off your pants. Up to you.”

  Sean unbuckles his belt and peels the blood-soaked jeans off. It’s difficult, probably harder than it ought to be because it hurts so much, and his head is everywhere but here, and he doesn’t want to think, not now. Not yet.

  He sits back down and Simone slides her hand up the back of his leg. “Not a through and through,” she says. “Bullet’s still in there.”

  Surgery. He’s been shot before and he knows that means surgery. He nods.

  She puts her hand over the wound. Seems weird that she wouldn’t wear gloves, and seems weird that she’s just standing there like that, and then the muscles of his leg spasm and the wound hurts and it moves, moves like something’s in it, trying to get out.

  “What the fu-”

  She takes away her hand and there’s a gleam of metal embedded in the bloody mess of his thigh. She plucks it out with her fingers, the distorted remains of the bullet. He’s just getting his head together enough to finish what he started saying a minute ago, but the woman in the weird suit comes over again.

  “These two always work as a team. What happened to Alex?” she asks.

  “He’s gone, Art.” Blue-Hair says. “He was dead when we got there.”

  “Actually,” Simone says quietly. “He wasn’t.”

  “Jesus fucking wept you two.” The woman in the suit, she must be the boss. He looks up at her and finds her looking at Blue Hair. “What happened?”

  “Shot. In the shoulder.” Simone says. He doesn’t understand how she can know these things, she only saw him for a second. “The bullet tore a hole the artery. He was bleeding out. Honestly, Art, he probably didn’t have more than a few minutes left after we got there. Even if he survived the fall, the injury would have killed him.”

  He hears it, knows it ought to hurt, but doesn’t feel it. Like hail pinging off a window.

  “Thought we were going to lose this one, too,” Blue-Hair adds. “But it’s not as bad as it looks. And Simone’s good.” She grins and Simone inclines her head.

  “Mad, get him something to drink,” Art says, and Blue-Hair, Mad, nods and gets to her feet. She disappears and Art turns to him in a quiet whirring of servos. A semi-mechanical hand touches him on the shoulder and she looks him in the eye. “I’m sorry about Alex,” she says. It undoes him.

  He hasn’t cried like this since he was a child, since it still felt raw and unfair, since before Alex. All he wants to do is not be here, not be now. Nobody says anything. Simone tears open some gauze and a bandage and finishes dressing the wound in his thigh and by the time she’s done he’s got himself together again. He looks at her to say thanks and finds her looking down at his discarded pants and frowning.

  “Yeah,” she says as if he’d said anything. “You’re going need something else to wear.”

  He sits there in his underwear and blood-splattered shirt with his leg freshly bandaged and his eyes burning with salt. It’s too ridiculous. It’s too terrible. He hasn’t been alone for such a long time.

  He stares at his hands, the blood that darkens the creases of his knuckles and underlines his fingernails. Somebody puts a glass of water into his hands. He looks up and sees Mad.

  Mad doesn’t say anything, just comes to stand beside him. She leans back against the table and sighs.

  “Fuckin' sucks,” she says.

  “Yeah,” he answers. He drinks the water. It cuts through him, cold and sharp, and steadies him a little. He looks at Mad again. “Where am I?”

  “Seymour street. Hotel Mod. Sort of.” She smiles faintly. “It’s Art’s, the whole place. Sorta HQ for off the books Annex stuff.” She leans forward, clasps her hands between her knees. “It was supposed to be a rescue mission,” she says.

  He laughs. Doesn’t mean to, but it comes out anyway.

  “He must have known. He must have set us up. Cameron, I mean.” Sean looks down at the water, the way it distorts the floorboards through the bottom of the glass. “I never thought he’d kill Alex. Me? Sure. But not Alex. It must have been a mistake.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “He’ll come after me next,” he says.

  “Yeah,” she answers. “He probably will.” She sighs and then clears her throat. “We know you wanted out. We’ve been tracking you since Galway.”

  He looks at her, really looks at her for the first time. She’s young, can’t be more than nineteen or twenty. Pixie-faced, practical hair such a vivid blue that you almost don’t notice the rest of her. Clever. Easy to change. Nobody’s ever going to describe her as something other than a short woman with blue hair and it’d take twenty minutes to make her into a short woman with black hair, no problem.

  She’s still talking, voice soft and low. “We couldn’t offer you anything, you know, to get you to come in; you would never have trusted us. We were just going to take you, and offer you the choice when the dust settled. We heard that Cameron had something planned, but we didn’t know it was going to be like that.”

  He thinks about that. It’s true. He would never have believed it, would have assumed it was something Cameron had put together, some kind of crazy loyalty test, or something.

  “What is this all about?” he asks.

  “It’s the end of the world,” Mad says. “People need sharpshooters.”

  He nods.

  She smiles faintly. “Art runs the Annex. Do you know it?”

  Of course he knows it. They’re Cameron’s biggest competitor. They’re anti-mech, it was probably Annex that leaked the footage of the mech pilot that they saw in Europe.

  “You don’t like the mechs.”

  “The mechs are unnecessarily dangerous.”

  Sounds like a party line to him. He hates politics, doesn’t care about what people believe, but he’s seen the shinigami, and he’s felt them, and he’s smelled the mountains of corpses burning after an attack. They’re terrible and real and the mechs protect them all from more attacks. “You got a better way to fight the shinigami?”

  She looks up at him and smiles just a little. “Actually we do.”

  He stares at her. She shrugs. “We wanted the Fifty to help us fight the shinigami and help end the mech program.”

  He laughs, a soft sound, and he hears for himself how exhausted he is. “Well you got twenty-five. But I’ll tell you what. If you you’re working against Cameron, you can tell your boss I’m in.”

  “Not going to ask about our secret weapon or what the hell’s going to happen when it’s all over?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Really? Simple as that?”

  “Really,” he says. “Simple as that.”

  Four

  “Alex, Alex, Alex.”

  It’s Cameron’s low, disappointed voice that wakes him. The world swims into focus. He’s lying on the leather couch in Cameron’s study in the house in Kitsilano. The coffered ceilings are painted a creamy yellow and the dark wood beams that cut the ceiling into squares glow softly in low-angled sun. Cameron is standing at one of the windows, shirtsleeves rolled up, looking out at one of those shrubs with the pink flowers that’s everywhere in Vancouver.

  Alex feels thin, stretched, weak. His shoulder aches, but it doesn’t hurt like it did. He remembers, all at once, the sight of the blood pouring out of his sleeve and has a moment to think How am I not dead? Before Cameron is standing over him.

  Alex looks up. He is afraid. The man they were going to kill is standing over him, a mug of something fragrant and steaming in his hands. Cameron kneels down by the couch, face all lines
of concern. He presses the mug of tea into Alex’s hands, pushes back Alex’s hair. He shivers under the touch, half in gratitude for gentleness, half in fearful expectation.

  “Alex,” Cameron says again, that soft and disappointed voice. “Look what you got yourself into.”

  He knows he has to explain. Desperately wants to know where Sean is, if he got away, if he’s dead. “Cameron I-“

  “Shh, shh, shhh,” he says like Alex is a fussy baby. “Drink your tea.”

  He obeys. The tea’s too hot, but he has to drink it anyway before he’ll be allowed to speak, and Cameron is probably already mad, he doesn’t want to make him angrier. He gulps the tea.

  “Good boy,” Cameron says, watching him. “You’re my good boy, Alex, you always were my good boy.”

  He gulps more of the tea. Halfway down the mug now. Mint, maybe. It’s so hot it’s hard to tell.

  “Always my good boy, my favourite. Is that how this happened? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a favourite. Did it make Sean jealous?”

  He gulps more tea. It scalds all the way down but he wants to talk and he has to get to the bottom of the mug before he’ll be allowed to speak.

  “And look what he got you into? Almost got my Alex killed.” That hand, stroking back his hair again. “Tried to get my Alex to kill me,” he whispers. Alex freezes up, mug up to his mouth, his own breath echoing in the cup. “Tried to get my favourite to put a bullet right between my eyes.” That hand grips in his hair and Alex feels a thrill of terror. “You stupid, Alex?” he asks softly. He pulls Alex’s head back, not hard, but slowly and steadily with one hand, and takes the mug out of the other. “You forgetful? You forget everything you owe me? Everything I do for you?”

  Alex’s heart is pounding in his chest, the hole in his shoulder, in his neck where Cameron is pulling against the muscles.

  “You forget I don’t owe you anything? You forget you owe me everything?”

  He should talk. He should say something. Cameron is asking him questions and he needs to answer them. He wonders if this has already happened to Sean, and what this is going to be.

  “Cameron, I didn’t… I…”

  “I know,” Cameron murmurs. “I know, you’re sorry, aren’t you?”

  Tears leak out of Alex’s eyes. “Yeah,” he whispers.

  “Real sorry.”

  “Yeah. I’m real sorry.”

  Cameron’s fist in his hair doesn’t let up. “You’re lots of things, aren’t you Alex? You’re stupid and you’re sorry, what else are you?”

  Oh god, Alex thinks, head working so fast it feels like there’s an engine in there, but Cameron doesn’t usually ask this question and he doesn’t know what the answer is. Cameron pulls his hair back hard, it hurts and he tries not to yelp.

  “What else are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” he tries, desperately, knowing it’s wrong but he has to say something. “I’m stupid. I’m sorry.”

  “And?”

  Oh god, oh god, oh god. He has to answer.

  “And you’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

  It’s the way Cameron says it, like he likes it. Alex goes cold, feels it, really feels it. Last time he was in Vancouver it was awful. He doesn’t want it to be awful again. “Yes,” he whispers.

  “I scared you last time, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think I’m going to kill you now, don’t you?”

  He can hardly make the noise. “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Alex. Not you. You’re my good boy. You’re my favourite. And I’m a nice man.”

  Alex can’t stop the sob that comes out of his mouth. “I’m sorry, Cameron. It was stupid. I don’t know why we did it. I forgot. I’m stupid. I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry.”

  “Oh, you’re such a good boy,” Cameron purrs. “You’re such a good boy and I’m such a nice man. Aren’t I a nice man?”

  “Yeah,” Alex whispers. He’s not dead, and the only reason he’s alive is because Cameron likes him, Cameron is a nice man.

  “Yeah, I’m a nice man. Even though you ruined my Fifty. Even after everything I do for you. I take you in, I look after you two. You eat at my table and you sleep in the beds I pay for and what do I ask you to do? To work for me. To make me happy once in a while. You decide to pay me back with a bullet? Oh, Alex, it’s a good thing I’m a nice man. Anybody else would have you killed wouldn’t they?”

  He swallows. “Yeah.” But Cameron is a nice man. He likes Alex. He’s not going to do that. He’s not.

  “But I won’t do that to you, no. No, I’ve got something else in mind.” He smiles. Smiles like his mouth is full of poison.

  Oh god.

  “Turns out we’ve got an opening for a pilot. Turns out the DND doesn’t want to share their people, so I get to provide my own.”

  “Please,” Alex whispers. His shoulder hurts, his neck hurts, he wants to sit up. He wants to beg, maybe begging will help. He knows what happens to pilots. “Please, Cameron, I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I’m too stupid to be a pilot. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Cameron says. He thumbs Alex’s mouth. “You’re sorry and you’re stupid. But you were right about something, you know? I’m not going to let you go. You don’t just quit on me, Alex. You don’t just walk out.” That’s when Alex understands. The phones. They’d both had their phones with them when they had the conversation in the airport. And somebody had been listening. They were so stupid. They should have known.

  Cameron leans in close, mouth on Alex’s exposed neck. The hand not fisted in Alex’s hair goes down to his belt and starts to work it open. No, no, no. His stomach twists, but he knows better than to tell Cameron no after what happened last time.

  His hand in Alex’s pants, skin to skin. Alex is hardening in spite of himself. He tries not to think, not to think about anything. When Cameron tells him to get undressed, he does. Just starts to strip and is grateful when Cameron’s hand lets go of his hair. He’s standing there, naked, shivering, while Cameron undoes his own pants.

  He has a moment to look at the bandage on his shoulder. It’s a clean white square, taped in place. He wonders if they stitched it. If they’re going to have to stitch it again after this. Then Cameron is pushing him over the back of the couch. He runs a hand over Alex’s backside. “Don’t. Move.”

  The contact breaks and he hears Cameron moving around, a drawer opens and closes, a tearing condom wrapper and then he's back. Alex closes his eyes. Doesn’t move, just like he’s been told. Holds his jaw shut hard, trying not to think. He wants to know where Sean is. He wants to know if after this there will be anyone to bring him water and make it ok again. Cameron leans down close, breathing hard in his ear. “What was it Sean said?” he asks, hips hard against his hips. “Something about not letting me fuck you any more? How’s that working for you?” He whispers. “How’s that working out for you right now, you fucking bitch?”

  Alex knows when to keep his mouth shut.

  “Go clean yourself up,” Cameron says when it’s over. “You know where the bathroom is. And don’t come back until I call you. I have a meeting in half an hour.”

  Alex takes his things from the floor and clutching them, pads naked, something running down one leg, up the stairs to the bathroom his knows is on the second floor. Inside there’s a sink with a mirror over it. He checks his shoulder, finds it red and swollen but not bleeding, uses the toilet, then climbs into the shower and washes himself. He hates this, during it is always bad, but after he thinks about it, running over what happened like picking at a scab. His scalp hurts from Cameron’s grip, and the ache between his legs is awful. He checks for blood and finds none, so there’s something to be grateful for. He assesses himself. He’s gotten good at it, over the years.

  He supposes, as he washes first his hair and then works his way down, making an effort to keep the bandage on his shoulder dry, that he ought to be grateful for everything. Of course Cameron is going to punish
him. He can’t think of anyone else who would let someone live if they’d tried what he and Sean just tried. He wonders where Sean is. He wonders if maybe he got away.

  He remembers, hazily, Sean trying to lift him, and someone on his other side. He remembers the roar of the mechs, the weight of the thing that caught him as he fell. He looks down at the bruises on his leg where the huge, mechanical hand stopped his fall. They’re a livid and purple and go all the way up to his thigh. He remembers how it dragged him, and the sickening lurch of the world when he fell from the broken edge of the condo and the ground came rushing up for an instant before he was dangling, bleeding out and waiting for death, and then the way the darkness of the mech interior folded over him. He never saw what happened to Sean.

  He towels off and creeps out of the bathroom to the closet at the end of the hall. He and Sean keep a few things everywhere they spend time, and there’s a clean, pressed dress shirt and a pair of pants in the cupboard that fit. He hesitates, looking at the things that belong to Sean and for a second he considers dressing in his clothes. But Sean is taller than him, and a little broader. Nothing would fit right. And besides, that’s the kind of thing a crazy person would do, dressing in a dead friend’s clothes. And he must be dead.

  He gets dressed in the hallway and then stands silent at the top of the stairs, listening. Voices. The sounds of a few women, of Cameron and another man. Business, he thinks and turns away. All his years of working for Cameron have taught him not to take an interest in business that doesn’t concern him. It’s so much easier to pull the trigger on a political figure if you don’t know anything about him, if he or she is just an upright meat-sack with eyes.

  He prowls the house. Cameron has staff, but they’re not around right now. He doesn’t usually get to wander the house like this. He goes and looks in the library and TV room and bedrooms are tidy and quiet. In one hall, he comes to a door standing closed. He’s always been nosy, even as a kid. It used to get him into all kinds of trouble. He puts his ear to the door and listens, but there’s nothing. He cracks the door open a little and looks inside.