by Gary Gibson
The older man spoke again. “Sir, I should advise you that your wife is wanted on suspicion of treason. Under the current emergency legislation we are required to bring you too in for questioning. Get your jacket or anything else you think you may need, but we don’t have time to fuck around. I’ll give you one minute to get yourself ready.”
Kendrick remembered that the kitchen door at the back of the house was still open. He had a brief fantasy of making a break for it out through the back door and losing himself in the narrow alleyways between the houses.
“My daughter’s at the care centre,” he said numbly.
“That’s all right, sir,” said the older guy. “We’ve already sent someone to pick her up.”
And then Kendrick realized just how bad things were.
A few minutes later Kendrick allowed himself to be thrust into the back of a van bearing military markings. He was not handcuffed, but a steel-mesh grille separated him from the two other men. Surprisingly enough, he realized that he wasn’t even particularly scared. Somewhere along the line, somebody had clearly made a terrible mistake. Everything would work out fine in the end, and he’d come home – and one day he’d even laugh about it.
Thoughts like these circled through his mind like a kind of mantra. But, every now and then, he looked down and saw his hands clenching, pain stabbing in his wrists as the muscles flexed spasmodically. He had to keep his wits about him, whatever happened.
The younger soldier leant forward in the passenger seat and switched on a radio. There was a wheel in the front of the vehicle, giving the option of manual control. Kendrick favoured a manual drive himself, even though it was a lot more expensive and you wound up with a bigger battery drain: he preferred having control over his driving, enjoyed the ability to make split-second decisions and choose to drive down one road rather than the other. You didn’t get that advantage with programmable destinations.
The hands of the man in the driver’s seat weren’t on the wheel, though. The truck was driving itself, blindly slipping along on its tarmac ribbon. Popular music rattled out of hidden speakers, synthesized shamanpop chants over a three-quarter beat, heavy on the bass. The music faded and an obviously digitized voice began speaking, reading the news. Something about Los Angeles . . .
Kendrick moved closer to the grille, listening as words like “President Wilber”, “terrible tragedy” and “holocaust” caught his ear, although the radio volume was down too low for him to hear well. Although the engine was silent there was a light drumming of winter rain on the roof of the truck that made it hard to pick out what the voice was saying. He caught more phrases: “. . . scene of this terrible national disaster”, and “. . . nation in mourning”.
He remembered now how he’d been unable that morning to get his subscription eepsheet newsfeeds to update properly. What the hell was going on?
“Hey,” he said – and then louder, when neither of the two men in the front responded: “Hey!”
The “driver” – the older one – glanced over his shoulder with a bored expression. “What?”
“On the radio – what are they saying? What happened?”
The man smiled grimly. “Maybe you can tell us.”
After what felt like a few hours, they took a sudden turn-off onto a long and dusty road leading into distant hills. They were far outside the city now, and Kendrick had been discovering there were almost as many different forms of panic as there were Eskimo words for snow. He’d done numb panic, angry panic – when the older of his two captors had threatened to stop the van and beat the shit out of him if he didn’t shut up – and despairing panic, which took up most of his time and convinced him that he was being taken off to be shot on some desolate highway, like the unwitting protagonist of a Kafka novel.
Now he was just waiting to see what happened next. With the growing sound of jet planes overhead, he surmised that they were approaching some kind of military airbase. The van pulled in suddenly to a wide expanse of grey tarmac. The back doors were yanked open and Kendrick was lifted down, blinking, into bright afternoon sunlight, the air still fresh from the recent rain. His captors kept one hand each firmly on his shoulders.
He could see long low sheds of brick and corrugated iron, while ranks of jeeps stood parked between white lines painted on concrete. He looked up to see a helicopter rapidly descending on the far side of one of the sheds. The whole place was filled with the sound of men and machinery on the move: soldiers were everywhere, but Kendrick was fascinated to see other people in civilian dress standing beside vans identical to the one he had been brought in.
His guards guided him into one of the sheds. He saw long tables set up inside, and yet more civilians waiting silently. Somehow, seeing others here gave him comfort. They were all seated on rows of cheap plastic chairs at the rear end of the shed, under the eyes of perhaps half a dozen soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders. These guns didn’t have the bulbous snub-nosed muzzles that characterized the electric stun weapons used by civilian police, so Kendrick could only assume they were the kind that fired real bullets.
With a terrible shock, Kendrick understood for the first time that if he tried to escape they would probably shoot him. As insights went, it was profoundly depressing. While his two guards marched him over to join the rest of the civilians, he glanced over at the long tables nearby. Rows of soldiers sat behind them, each with a gridcom terminal and eepsheet within reach. They were engaged in interviewing a male or female civilian, behind each of whom stood another armed serviceman or servicewoman.
They came to a halt in front of a soldier who ticked off Kendrick’s name on a clipboard. Then he was guided to a vacant seat. Nobody seated around him looked at all happy to be there, except for one elderly individual who was grinning like a fool.
Taking the seat next to him, Kendrick felt a tingle of familiarity. He eyed the people around him surreptitiously. They were a mixed bunch, mostly in their thirties or older, although there were a couple too obviously young even to be out of their teens. Some were black, some were white, some Hispanic, some looked poor, others rich, and about the only things they appeared to have in common were their worried expressions.
With armed guards hovering just a few feet away, they didn’t talk much – understandably.
Suddenly the old man turned to Kendrick with a smile. “How are you doing?”
Kendrick nodded back, but he wasn’t in a mood for conversation.
The old man awaited a response for a few moments, then shrugged and looked away again.
Every now and then, somebody else, looking as confused and distraught as Kendrick must have done, was marched in and seated among them. When one started to argue, Kendrick listened carefully to the response from the soldier with the clipboard: he said that emergency martial laws had been enforced until the threat to the nation could be assessed.
When the argument started to look like it was getting heated, another soldier stepped forward with his rifle raised. The implicit threat sent a cold chill through Kendrick.
He turned his attention back to the interviewing tables. Whenever they finished questioning someone, that individual would be escorted off through a door at the opposite end of the building.
Again, he couldn’t see that any of them had anything particularly in common: they could have been housewives, doctors, petrol-pump attendants, anything.
Kendrick clasped his knees, his head filled with thoughts of his wife and his daughter Sam. He hadn’t eaten in hours – usually he picked up breakfast on his way to work – but even though it must have been edging towards late afternoon he still didn’t feel at all hungry.
“Thing is, we were right,” a voice next to him said unexpectedly. Kendrick turned to find his elderly neighbour staring at him with bright, alert eyes.
“Sorry?”
“Sorry is the last thing you should be. Name’s Marco. How you doing?”
“Kendrick Gallmon,” he replied automatically.
“Not that guy writes for the Washington Free Press?” the other asked, his eyebrows raised. Kendrick nodded in reply. In any circumstances but these, it would have been nice to have his name recognized. Outside of Washington, and whoever subscribed to the Press’s eepsheet newsfeed, generally nobody knew who he was.
“I read your column every week,” said Marco. “Pretty critical of Wilber, aren’t you?”
“Any other time in history, he’d be given psychiatric treatment for preaching the end of the world. Instead, we vote him in as President. I think you could say I was critical, yes. But who was right about what?”
“Sorry?”
“You said ‘we were right’. Right about what?”
“About the crackdown. After this morning, over on the West Coast.”
Kendrick stared back, his face blank.
“Ohh.” Marco nodded gently. “You haven’t heard, have you?”
“I heard something on the radio.” As they continued talking in quiet whispers, Kendrick studied Marco more closely: a deeply lined face with a strong jaw, and clear blue eyes that danced with intelligence. The hair stood up in a white shock from the top of his head. Given his apparent age, he was dressed in reasonably current fashion, and he gave the impression of caring about his appearance. The more Kendrick considered him, the more he started to look familiar.
“Marco?” he said at last. “I know you: Frederic Marco, the writer. You wrote The Contortionist.” It was a book he’d read over one long, languid summer in his teens.
“Listen,” said Marco impatiently. “You didn’t hear what happened in LA?”
“Los Angeles? What’s happened to it?”
“What’s happened is that it isn’t there any more,” hissed Marco, his grin not faltering for a second. “Can you imagine that? No more Sunset Boulevard, no more Beverly Hills, no more Venice Beach . . . I liked Venice Beach, but now it’s all gone.” He nodded his head wonderingly. “Imagine that.”
“But what happened?” asked Kendrick, a sick feeling spreading through his stomach.
“Got nuked,” said Marco, and his smile faltered briefly. “Probably by film critics.” The grin resurfaced.
“Nuked?” It was such an outrageous-sounding piece of news, but somehow Kendrick believed it. All it needed was for him to cast his mind back over what had happened to him over the past few hours to see how serious things might be. No more Los Angeles? Feeling like he was performing a part in some movie, as if this were all play-acting, he asked, “Who?”
Marco shrugged. “Beats me. Take your pick of suspects. It won’t be the Chinese, not after the way they fell apart. That leaves pretty much any political or religious group with a grudge, or perhaps terrorists, or any other random bunch of crazies you care to pick. But to get back to my original point, we were right – people like you and I – about what was going to happen to this country once the shit really hit the fan.”
All the while more people were being escorted into the shed, and more led away. Marco continued. “This country’s been going to hell for such a long time, nothing’s going to change that now. People starving in this country, diseases we thought long gone being reintroduced ten times stronger, the climate all changed and the Gulf Stream fucked, four localized nuclear wars in Asia – just count ’em.” He held up one fist and, pushing up four fingers, pointed at them in turn. “Four! And the environmental disasters leaving millions dead in the Midwest. We’re sailing down the river towards the sharp rocks, but still acting like everything’s going to be fine. Wilber being elected President is the icing on the cake – or the death stroke, maybe.”
Marco leaned in a little closer. “Frankly, Kendrick, we’re fucked, and somebody just hammered the last nail into the coffin. Ain’t none of us here going to get out of this mess alive.”
Kendrick bristled. “That’s just paranoia.”
“Look, listen to me,” said Marco, placing a hand on his shoulder. Kendrick felt uncomfortable at the unexpected intimacy of the gesture. “You’re a journalist, and people with jobs like yours are only secure so long as what you’re doing isn’t seen to be against the national interest. President Wilber gets to decide what the national interest is. That means right now the national interest is rounding up everybody who could have any kind of connection, however vague, with anyone whom Wilber deems an enemy of the state, whether real or imagined. You and me, that might make a twisted kind of sense, but look at some of these other people.” Marco gestured around him with a swivel of his neck. “Ordinary people, not terrorists. But maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or voted for the wrong people, or had the bad luck just to be related to the wrong person.” Marco’s voice had taken on a certain urgency.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“What I’m saying, Kendrick, is I’m seventy-six years old. I’ve had a long life, and I’ve been very good at making enemies. In some way or other, all of us here, without even knowing it, have made ourselves somebody’s enemy. I always said life in this country was a losing battle, because it’s always the guys with the guns who win. That’s why I’m doing what I’m about to do. It’s important that you understand. That you remember, for me, if you ever get out of this.”
Kendrick felt sudden heat rising in his face. He watched as Marco stood up, drawing the attention of the several guards observing them all keenly.
“Marco, for Christ’s sake—” Kendrick grabbed at the old man’s sleeve as he abruptly stood also. But Marco shook him off with surprising energy and started moving away between the rows of chairs. The others around them watched this sudden development with interest, astonishment or, more frequently, fear.
Cursing under his breath, Kendrick stood and stepped quickly after the old man, grabbing his sleeve again before he had gone more than a few steps. One of the soldiers headed towards them.
“What the hell are you trying to prove?” Kendrick hissed.
Marco turned his calm grey-eyed stare on him. “I am taking decisive action, which is a phrase President Wilber likes to use a lot. We both know men like him only get elected under the most extreme circumstances, and this country is currently under some very extreme circumstances indeed.”
The soldier stepped forward and placed a hand on Marco’s chest. Kendrick wouldn’t have put him at more than seventeen or eighteen. A thin fuzz coating his cheeks made him appear even younger.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to take your seat again.” The words were directed also at Kendrick.
“Fuck you,” Marco replied loudly and decisively, the words reverberating in the confines of the shed. The uniformed boy faltered. “I’ve not been charged. I haven’t done anything. Neither has anyone else here. So, fuck you.”
Another soldier stepped over, this one older, his uniform decorated with a sergeant’s stripes. He dismissed the first soldier with a nod of his head.
“I’m going to ask both of you to return to your seats and wait for your interviews.” He pointed one meaty hand at the chairs they had just vacated. “You’re under military jurisdiction as long as you’re here. That means now.”
Something remarkable happened then. Marco raised his hands to shoulder height, putting a grin on his face, a parody of surrender. The sergeant’s face relaxed a little. Kendrick was looking at the sergeant, which was why he didn’t see Marco suddenly pull one of his arms back and throw it forward, punching the sergeant hard in the face.
The soldier reeled back, looking more surprised than hurt. Marco sprinted past them both with remarkable agility, clearly heading for the nearest exit. Kendrick started forward again, not sure exactly what he intended to do but nonetheless feeling driven to do something, when he felt a hand grab him roughly.
He spun round, just in time to see another soldier swing his hand around in an arc, his pistol held grip outwards in a motion that connected with the side of Kendrick’s head. Kendrick spun round, crumpling to the ground, flecks of darkness dancing across his vision.
&nb
sp; He retched, staring through a forest of chair legs. Somewhere very close a woman screamed. As he pulled himself up onto his knees, he saw the sergeant whom Marco had punched standing with legs planted firmly apart, his pistol gripped firmly between two fists and pointed directly at Kendrick’s head.
This was how Kendrick remembered what happened next.
Marco, framed by sunlight, visible beyond the island of chairs . . . the soldier who had pistol-whipped Kendrick yelling incoherently . . . Marco, far more agile than Kendrick might ever have suspected, now just a few metres from the exit. And then a deafening explosion that, in Kendrick’s memory, went on and on for ever.
He had stood up on trembling legs to see Marco lying in a crumpled silent heap, one arm stretched out so that the slanting light from beyond the exit was touching it. People around Kendrick stared on in unbelieving horror, like lambs who were catching their first glimpse of the slaughterhouse.
A few months later, Kendrick could only wish that he’d had as much sense and courage as Marco.
14 October 2096
Edinburgh
Kendrick woke to bright morning light. He mumbled a word to the windowscreen and a series of numerals appeared as grey shadows superimposed on the opaque glass.
He should leave before Caroline woke, he thought. He hauled himself up from the thin sheets she’d given him and padded barefoot into the kitchen before he became aware that she’d already left.
The door to her bedroom lay open and he peeked inside. Very gone. One dream in particular had been astonishingly vivid and, strangely uncertain how much of it actually had been a dream, he re-entered the living room.
He’d dreamed that he had opened his eyes to see Caroline standing just beyond the couch he lay on. In the dream, the windowscreen was no longer opaque: pale moonlight outlined her naked form, and her head tilted back to stare beyond the slate rooftops of the city.