by Jacob Gowans
“I’m sorry to give you another thing to worry about.”
Jeffie ran her fingers through her hair. “You know what? Yeah, I worry about the war, about my family, about Brickert, but I like worrying about you. If I had nothing to do but worry about you, that’d be the best life I could hope for. And I’m never going to stop because—”
Sammy couldn’t listen to her anymore. He couldn’t sit in the car and hear her say affectionate words while he only wanted to say or do hurtful things back to her. He opened the door, jumped out, and used his blasts to prevent an injury. Jeffie slammed on the brakes. “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
“I don’t know,” he lied as he picked himself up and dusted off his pants.
“You’ve been saying that for weeks.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Liar!” Jeffie smashed her palm into the steering wheel. “You think I didn’t see what you did in Detroit to those Thirteens? Or that I don’t know everyone’s suspicions? Or that I possibly made a connection between that and you meeting with Croz? I’m not stupid, and I want to help.”
Sammy couldn’t answer. He wanted to tell Jeffie everything, about the spurts of rage he was feeling ever since Detroit, the dreams, the bedwetting. But he needed her to leave him alone. When he didn’t answer her, she said, “When you’re ready, okay?” Then she stepped on the accelerator and left him behind.
He was both glad and annoyed to be by himself. How am I supposed to think with her around? The war had to be his focus. He needed to see the end, needed a new idea. Something the committee would agree on.
Think about the war. That’s what matters.
Why’d she have to go and tell me she loves me?
Sammy tried to put the last question out of his mind, but it wouldn’t go. It kept snapping back like a rubber band. His pace quickened until he ran at full speed to the tunnel entrance to the infirmary. Cologne or no, his body odor was ripe by the time he reached Marie’s room.
Lara Byron sat on one side of the bed flanked by Al, Thomas, and Commander Byron. Jeffie sat on Marie’s other side and tried to smile when she saw Sammy. Dr. Rosmir was at the foot of the bed with his tablet, checking off diagnostic boxes while his nurse, Janna Scoble, fussed with Marie’s monitors.
When Sammy came in, everyone stared. Dr. Rosmir reached him first and offered a hand to shake, in his other he held a small device that blinked the words ANALYZING DATA. Both Lara and Thomas hugged Sammy; they didn’t seem to care that he smelled like a giant latrine. Marie cradled her little baby who slept, a peaceful expression adorned its face. All eyes flickered between the baby and the device Dr. Rosmir held.
“Boy or girl?” Sammy asked.
“A girl,” Lara whispered. “She’s so beautiful!”
“Congrats,” Sammy told Al, who looked as shabby as ever, but a genuine smile hung on his face as he watched Marie hold his daughter.
“Any name yet?”
Al shook his head. “We’re talking about that.”
Sammy nodded and looked around the room, but avoided Jeffie’s gaze.
Commander Byron’s face glowed. “I am a grandfather. Forty-eight years old and a grandfather. Still has not quite sunk in though, the reality of it all.”
Thomas patted his son on the shoulder. “I’m a great-grandfather. Wait until you get to my age. I feel like I should have more wrinkles.”
Lara rubbed Thomas’s arm with a loving grin. “You have plenty, old man.”
The device Rosmir held gave a beep, and everyone froze, eyes on him. He looked at it, grinned, and said to Al and Marie, “Congrats. You just created the first third generation Anomaly Fourteen.”
Cheers and hugs erupted. Sammy’s hand was shaken five times, even though he hadn’t done anything. Al and Marie embraced, and Al kissed her forehead. While everyone celebrated, Sammy took Dr. Rosmir aside.
“How’s Brickert doing?”
“He was awake for almost two hours this morning. I’m upgrading his prognosis to a full recovery.”
An incredible weight lifted off Sammy. Brickert was going to be all right. Hours spent by his side, reading to him, praying over him, talking to him … all worth it. “Does he remember much?” was Sammy’s second question. God, please don’t let Brickert remember. I’ll lose my best friend if he does.
“Don’t know yet. But I doubt he will.”
“He asked about you,” Janna, the nurse, mentioned.
Sammy’s mouth went dry and a lump the size of an egg grew in his throat. “What—what did he say?”
Janna shrugged. “Just asked where you were.”
Jeffie watched him closely. However, when their eyes met she immediately looked away. Rosmir glanced at the clock, then said to the Byron family, “I need to check on a few more patients. You have ten or fifteen more minutes before I kick you out so Marie and baby can get some rest.”
“You want to go see him?” Jeffie asked Sammy. “Kawai, Strawberry, and Natalia are all there.”
“Sure.”
They walked side by side to Brickert’s room. Sammy was so used to taking Jeffie’s hand that he almost did so. When his hand brushed hers, he mumbled, “Sorry.”
Jeffie rolled her eyes and opened the door.
Almost instantly Strawberry wrapped her arms around Sammy. “How have you been?” she asked him when she let him go. “Seems like I haven’t talked to you in weeks.”
“Probably because you haven’t,” Jeffie said dryly.
“I’m well,” Sammy said. “Busy. With everything going on it’s hard to find time to socialize.”
Just then, Janna Scoble came in to check on Brickert. When Sammy glanced at her, he caught Jeffie giving Strawberry the tiniest shake of the head. Sammy wondered what they were silently communicating about. Him? What had Jeffie been telling his friends? Strawberry looked back at Sammy and gave him a sisterly smile. “Try not to be a stranger. We miss you.”
“You’ll miss me even more when you’re going to school in Lyon.”
Strawberry blushed and dropped her head. Sammy realized that he was the only person she’d told about that.
“What school?” Kawai asked.
“Nothing,” Sammy said, smiling, “just a joke between us.”
Jeffie’s face told Sammy she knew he was lying, but she said nothing. Janna finished her check on Brickert and announced, “Everything looks good. Natalia, don’t forget you’re due for a check up this afternoon. Or we could do it now, if you’d rather get it over with.”
Natalia, who’d been shot and severely wounded in Detroit, still spent ample time in the infirmary with Rosmir and the nurses. She stood and said, “I’ll go now.”
Once they were gone, Kawai turned to Sammy. “Is it starting to get to you? Is that why you’re MIA all the time?”
“Is what getting to me?” Sammy asked.
“All of this.”
“If it were going to get to me, wouldn’t it have gotten to me in Rio? Or Omaha? Or a dozen other times after that?”
“Is that how it works?”
“I don’t know. Is it getting to you?” Sammy asked Kawai. “Or you, Jeffie?” He didn’t ask Berry because he already knew how she felt.
Neither girl answered.
Finally Kawai said, “You’re asked to carry more than we are.”
Brickert moaned and turned. All eyes in the room fixed on him to see if he would wake. Then he snored softly, grinned, and his breathing deepened again. Sammy let out a deep breath. “Have any of you seen the baby yet?”
“Yeah,” Strawberry said, “we looked in on her just before Jeffie left to get you.”
“She’s beautiful,” Kawai added. “Looks like Marie more than Al.”
“Does Al seem happier lately?” Strawberry asked.
Sammy shook his head. “We don’t talk much. He comes home and passes out on the couch. It doesn’t take very much to get him wasted.”
“Still can’t believe he moved out of the house,” Jeffie said glumly. “Marie
makes it sound like they’re getting divorced.”
Sammy shook his head.
“Crazy, huh?” Strawberry said.
“Everyone has a breaking point,” Kawai repeated.
“I haven’t hit any point yet,” Sammy told her. “I can’t afford to let it get to me, and neither can any of you.” He directed his last words at Jeffie. “The war isn’t over.”
“Doesn’t mean we can’t relax,” Strawberry said. “How about a party to celebrate Brickert waking up?”
Sammy’s com beeped as a message came through from Thomas.
We need to go to the tower NOW. Apparently there’s HUGE NEWS.
“I have to go,” he told them as he hurried for the door. Jeffie looked to her friends for help.
“Wait,” Strawberry said. “Does that mean no party?”
“I don’t know if I can do it. Why not wait until Brickert can come?”
“Sammy.” Her tone was stern, “You can’t do this to yourself. You need to take a break and let yourself be a kid.”
Sammy paused at the door before facing his friends again. “You guys really think we’re still kids? You’re kidding yourselves.”
In under half an hour, Sammy, Thomas, Lara, and the commander arrived at the air control tower in Saint Marie. Most of the leadership committee was present along with some new faces, most of whom Sammy vaguely recognized from his days spent in the data center sifting through information stolen from CAG data servers. In the center of the meeting table, a holo-tablet projected its information high into the air.
“Sammy!” Justice said when he entered. “Come have a look at this.”
A few people moved aside to let Sammy through. All he saw in the hologram was computer code, and as smart as he was, he had never learned the languages of computers. Two of the experts spoke in technical jargon as they pulled out and highlighted bits of text from the hologram. They both stopped when they saw Sammy.
“Hello, Samuel,” one of the experts said as she offered her hand to him. She wore a drab lab coat and a rather odd hairdo that made her look like a peacock. Sammy remembered her as one of the Tensais who’d flown in from Capitol Island with Commander Byron. “My name is Doctor Khani Nguyen. Call me Khani, though. I dislike the title of Doctor. Too many—”
“Khani, why don’t you rewind a bit and show us all what you’ve found?” Lara interrupted with an overly pleasant tone.
Khani gazed at Lara with a look of mild offense. “Certainly. Last night my team of experts stumbled across a code which we believe is linked to a possible kill switch in the CAG systems. We’re running searches for similarly worded coding to find more information.”
“A kill switch for what?” Sammy asked.
“Possibly their entire army,” Justice said.
Khani rolled her eyes. “There’s no proof of that.”
“Wait … what?” Sammy asked. “How would that work?”
“There certainly is proof,” Commander Byron argued. “We have seen Thirteens explode after capture. Not all, but some.”
Khani straightened her glasses with pursed lips. “Your theory is nonsense.”
“Yet the time stamp on this part of the code shows it was executed less than a minute before Victor Wrobel detonated during his interrogation.”
Khani snorted with derision.
“I was in the room, Khani,” the commander insisted. “I witnessed it.”
“It’s not your eyes I doubt, Commander. It’s your brain. Why would the CAG leave something this important in their databases? It should be erased. Scrubbed out of existence. They would never commit such an oversight if it was so important.”
“As you of all people should know, sometimes even the most impenetrable systems have errors.”
Another one of the data analysts spoke, though he seemed nervous about saying anything to upset Khani. “It could be we’re misinterpreting the data—”
“No,” Khani snapped. “I did not misinterpret it. That’s classic kill switch coding.”
The computer experts began arguing amongst themselves until Thomas clapped his hands together loud enough that it made Sammy’s ears hurt. “Let’s settle down, folks.” Thomas looked mainly at Khani and her team. “We need time to be sure we’re acting on good information. How long will that take?”
“Anywhere from an hour to an infinite amount of time,” Khani responded. “If there’s no more information to be mined in the data, all we have is a teaser.”
A thought struck Sammy. “What if I go straight to the source?”
“What source?” Thomas asked.
“The Hive. What if I go back?”
“Absolutely not,” Lara and Commander Byron both said.
“I’m not talking about another hike through the jungle,” Sammy clarified. “I’m saying I fly in and meet Diego.”
“He will shoot you down,” Byron said.
“He’d shoot you down, not me. He and I have a deeper understanding. A connection. Let me take a stealth cruiser tonight. I’ll be back by morning.”
The committee spent the better part of an hour arguing over Sammy’s request. Only Anna agreed that he should go. The rest obstinately refused, especially those who had accompanied Sammy to the Hive: Lorenzo Winters, Duncan Hudec, Duncan’s brother, Dave, and Nikotai. The meeting ended with him soundly losing the battle.
Sammy went home, skipping dinner. With Brickert still in the infirmary and Marie with the newborn, Sammy hoped he had the place to himself. Unfortunately Al was already on the couch, snoring loudly in his sleep. On the table near his head was a half empty bottle, its scent made the air musky and heavy. Sammy sighed.
Now what? he wondered. He could go back to the infirmary and hold the new baby. Or perhaps Brickert might be awake. Or he could wake up Al and try to talk some sense into him.
Most nights Sammy poured over maps or read through data reports for hours. He could scan those very quickly, but he often read them more than once, looking for something to give the NWG and the resistance an advantage in the war. After making preparations for the next day’s committee meetings, if he still wasn’t tired, Sammy read books—novels mostly—anything to keep from wallowing in his own thoughts.
Before leaving the meeting, he’d asked Khani Nguyen for a copy of the code for study. He wanted to try and make some sense of it, but she laughed at him. When he told her he wasn’t joking, she stared at him and then walked away without a response.
Sammy went to his bookshelf and scanned the titles written on the spines, most of them crusty and faded from years of sitting unread. He’d finished almost all of them—some to himself, others to Brickert. The ones he hadn’t read did not interest him.
For a brief instant, he thought about finding his friends and hanging out with them, but he could hear their comments in his head.
“The Great Sammy condescends to visit us lowly plebes,” Kawai or Li might say.
Or Jeffie might cozy up to him, interpreting his presence as a sign that things between them were improving. She might tell him again that she loved him.
He couldn’t tolerate hearing those words again. The idea that she, someone so perfect despite her flaws, could think she was in love with him … It’s not right.
Nothing’s right.
Sammy wanted to grab the half empty bottle of booze and smash it over Al’s face. Then he would scream at him, throw him out the door, and tell him to pull his head out of his butt, to quit screwing up his life. What did Al know about pain or problems or anything? Al didn’t have the Anomaly Thirteen. He had a beautiful wife and a new daughter; a family that loved him despite his stupidity.
Anger gathered in him like a storm, gradually building up in his chest and gut. Go away, he told the rage. Leave me alone. But it didn’t. It only grew until the bottle looked ever more inviting. He wouldn’t just smash it over Al’s head, he’d use its jagged edges to cut out his heart.
No!
Sammy went to the kitchen and splashed water on his face. H
e saw his reflection in the polished chrome, hideously distorted in the curved metal. Like me. For weeks he’d pushed everyone away. Now he wanted someone around, a friend, a group of friends. Anyone. But Sammy knew if someone were to show up, he’d just ask them to leave.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked his reflection.
On the kitchen counter near the sink was a knife stand. Sammy removed one of the knives and held it, then turned it over to let the light catch the metal. He wished he could cut it out of him, the Anomaly Thirteen. Everything would be all right. With two hands on the grip, he held it, blade pointed at his gut.
No one will miss you.
That’s not true. Byron told me he thinks of me as a son. Jeffie said she loves me.
A month ago. She doesn’t feel that way now, not after the way you treated her.
Sammy rested the tip of the blade on his navel and pressed until he felt the pressure. A creak came from the corner on the other side of his small home, and he looked up. There was nothing there but an old phonograph Thomas Byron had given him weeks ago. The resistance had only two and the other was in Thomas and Lara’s house. Thomas had loaned Sammy over a dozen vinyl records. Classics, he called them. Sammy had let both the records and the machine gather dust.
“Listen to them and tell me what you think,” Thomas had told him. “Find the ones you like, and I’ll give you more. Music will keep you sane.”
Sammy hadn’t listened to any of them. The idea was stupid, but he found himself carrying the phonograph and records into his bedroom, then thumbing through them one by one. They were old and dusty and smelled like they’d come from a thrift store, their sleeves stiff and fraying at the corners. He stopped on one that bore the face of a man with a large nose and a dark mustache. A crack ran across the paper, traveling through his eyes, but the man’s smile was so large and genuine that Sammy slid the vinyl out of its sleeve without another thought.
He stared at the record for a long time wondering why people needed things like these to play music so long ago. Thomas had never shown Sammy how to operate the machine, but he worked it out on his own after a couple minutes of fiddling. When he placed the stylus on the record and the music began to play, something happened to Sammy. His breath caught in his throat, and the soft sounds of guitars strumming stirred his soul, a ripple of waves in time with the music.