Book Read Free

When the Light Lay Still

Page 9

by Charles J. Eskew


  “To start with… I’m not a psychopath. I know how this all must look, especially to you.”

  “‘Especially to me?’ You know, then. I wondered. How long have you known?” I lifted one of the larger rifles off the wall.

  “I’m only human, and the internet is still mostly free.” He chuckled and I smirked, forcing out a snort for his benefit.

  “Of all the dudes in all the—I mean, what the shit?” I said, and this time didn’t have to fake the laugh, and neither did he.

  “None of these are loaded, and I don’t carry, ever. I just think of all the things we’ve poured ourselves into, these… tools, they’re so primitive. All this time and we’re still just throwing stones at one another.”

  I nodded, because I still slipped up from time to time.

  “So, what, then? You want to make it easier? Make them kill 2.0?” I say, with less mirth this time. I just wanted to understand.

  “No, not exactly…”

  I sat on the other side of the workbench, and bit back the urge to wave a hand in front of his face.

  “How—?”

  “Does a blind man fall into this area of interest?” he finished.

  “I mean—yeah. That. I know that you can, I know that being blind doesn’t prevent you from being an engineer or—well—anything really, but why?” It was invasive to ask, and I knew that even then. The thing about Colin and I, though? We both knew bullshit and the ways to read it. So, we had an unspoken agreement to not waste time on it.

  “I like to understand how things work. It’s—I’ve never been good at people. Firearms make more sense. But there’s an… indifference to them. Everyone cares about what is done with them; nobody cares about the tools themselves. I want to make significant improvements on them. Non-lethal, mostly,” he added, and I appreciated it for what it was.

  I toyed with the anything-but-a-toy in my hand, moving it back and forth, feeling its weight and its war.

  “You’re… actually taking this rather well,” he eventually said to break the silence.

  “I don’t know how I’m taking it, really.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “I’ve never been… afraid of them, they are bits of metal and coil and plastic and they can’t do anything we won’t do ourselves, if we don’t see a human being in front of us.”

  Release the safety by pressing in the button under the hammer on its right side, as viewed with the barrel pointing forward. Pull the trigger to release the firing spring.

  “… But?” Colin prodded, and I sighed.

  “But… why?” Find the hinge pin, or the screw that is located where the lever enters the receiver. Unscrew the hinge pin and pull out the lever. “Why do we need yet another method to destroy one another? Why continue to separate the act of taking a life from the proximity of that life, literal and otherwise?”

  “It’s a semantic point, Kettle.”

  Pull out the breech bolt.

  “Is it? I think not. I think it ties to our desire, our constitutionally-backed right to take a thing that liberates us from the weight of murder. I mean… swords were pretty rad, but it’s the efficiency. It’s a moral dysmorphia. Why not remove them altogether? Why not approach enforcement in a restorative sense rather than buying into this old stagnant shit?”

  Colin, much as I could see him fight it at the corners, nearly cackled.

  “I—no, Kettle, the consideration of self is paramount. We can’t hope to spread this idea of—of compassion if we’ve never been shown it. The why of it is the protection of self, of I am important, I matter, and there’s nothing wrong in making sure that I protect that life.” He truly believed that I had been on the opposite end of that argument, I think.

  “I’m impressed, by the way,” he added, and for once wasn’t condescending. He ran a hand over the disassembled gun parts I’d laid out on the table between us. “Who taught you how to do that?”

  “The internet,” I shot back, and it wasn’t untrue.

  “Hm. So, my turn to ask… why?” he asked, sliding the pieces over to himself and beginning to reassemble the gun.

  “YOU’RE WELCOME. NOT that you thought to thank me. You really don’t see it, do you? Of course, I know what you were working on, Kettle. You have to do everything in the light, don’t you? You can’t just, oh, I don’t know, use a little goddamned subterfuge every now and again?” He was almost yelling. I wasn’t afraid, not of him—not of you, Colin—but I was fucking confused. You’d clear that up, though, wouldn’t you?

  “Where is my son, Colin?”

  “Our son, and, hey, can I just finish? Elijah is fine, he is safe, and you’ll be holding him… five minutes after I’m done speaking with you. Just chill the fuck down for a moment.”

  You motherfucking cocksweating taint-faced speck of shit-covered navel lint, I would have said, Colin, just so you know.

  In the moment, however, I raised my hands up, tightly closing my lips, and waited while you dangled our boy out there like bait.

  “Thank you. You throw the word ‘sociopath’ around a lot, Kettle. Like, I’m not the one who sat here and tried to shoot someone’s face off, jus’ sayin.”

  “It wasn’t loaded.”

  “Well, just not for you, but—you know what? Moving. Along. I know how kidnapping would make you look, Kettle. That was the whole point.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve pissed off a looot of people. People that I need to work with, for instance. They don’t know about us—not yet, anyway, though I’m sure they will soon. You posted the video on YouTube, for fucksakes, from your account!” He laughed thinly and watched me for a moment, as if waiting for me to work out what the hell he was getting at, but I only stared. Why make it easy for him?

  “I didn’t ask for any of this, Kettle. I just wanted to build. I lost everything, you saw me lose everything, and you still wanted to tell yourself we could win by their rules. Or maybe you wanted to play like we’re not all running around on borrowed time. The Brotherhood I’ve created reaches further than anyone realises. It may have got a bit out of hand in the whole… black power thing.” Colin threw up a weak fist for a moment and became the only person laughing in the room.

  “You’re starting a war, a literal race war, and you… you… just—just wrap this up, dude.” I shook my head all the way down into the palm of my hand.

  “I’m brilliant, Kettle. I defined brilliant, and I was stripped of everything, because some list of names told the world I was a threat? I was put here, though, wasn’t I? They put me here, and now they are hurrying to work with me, to put an end to their ‘thug’ problem. The quickest way to do that, of course, is have them blow each other all to hell. That’s just a bonus, though; this is a lot more precise than that. There are targets: troublemakers, loudmouth preachers, idealistic officers, and not to mention now two Judges to add to the list. Oh, also, funny enough, a five-figure salaried civil attorney who moonlights as a political activist. You should know that it’s not smart to publicly broadcast a group of police officers, just being good ol’ boys, Kettle…”

  Fuck if he wasn’t right. I knew when that video was shared to me by one of the men in it, I should have practised some level of patience. I should have taken more than a second to decide the whole world, or at least the part of the world that clicked on that YouTube vid, would be more apt to do something about what they did than I could.

  When the video was released, I didn’t hide. I put it on my account for a reason, Colin, and you would have seen that, if you weren’t so busy trying to claw your way up, up and away from it all.

  “EUSTACE FARGO’S JUDGE system is morally bankrupt,” I said, to no one in particular. I knew they were there of course, but the skin-searing lights of national news blinded me to everything.

  I was asked by the school to join a panel on the recent, frankly blatant attempt by Fargo to strongarm his way around due process. We huddled in a room to duck and cover like the academics we were, and at least
get paid for talking about things that we knew were already decided behind closed doors.

  “How so?” asked the host of the panel, some forgettable famous dude whose ‘woke’ reputation was tarnished a few years before by sexual assault. His question irked me, because his existence on a panel of people who actually gave a shit irked me. It’d meant the school, like everything else Fargo could reach by way of Gurney, was compromised. I’d been there a semester and a half and already I was picking up nicknames; granted, Aaliyah ‘Clout Collector’ Monroewas a hell of a lot better than my more permanent moniker.

  “It’s the same thing we’ve been fighting since the first, is why,” I said. “What’s worse? It’s our fault. We, the people who actually are affected by these policies, knew—we fucking knew. When Fargo used the death penalty as a loophole for his Judgesto become government sanctioned hitmen, to hop and skip over due process in 32 states, that’s when we should have fought harder.”

  After a moment of nothing, there was applause.

  As the clapping subsided, as the space between us swelled, once more, with the distance denied in epidermis, I waited for the mistake, on both sides.

  “That—If I’m being honest, sounds like more rhetoric we’ve come to expect,” he said, and the room giggled. The lights lay alive across me, snatching from the crowd their individuality, bleeding them into an amalgamated terror of all things right and white.

  “There’s nothing more dismissive, sir—or, frankly, lazy—than the label of anger, of rhetoric. I don’t know if you know this—or, well, anything—but as someone who has seen the families of those lost, who has sat and listened to their hurts, I can tell you confidently that more firepower, blood, and bodies of any hue, aren’t going to fix this country.”

  He rolled his eyes to that, and the crowd chuckled on command. They were fewer laughs this time, though, so at least that was something.

  “What is needed, then?” came a voice from the crowd. I couldn’t see you any better than I could the rest of the crowd, Colin, but I didn’t need to.

  “I’m sorry, I—I’m… I’m going to go.”

  Of course, I didn’t think of the consequences, the tweets and the blogs and the everything that would tell the world I was as empty as they’d thought all along. That all it’d taken was the right opinion on the right side to make me show my ass. They weren’t exactly wrong though, were they, Colin?

  I jogged off the stage, up the aisle and out of the auditorium, to a place I’d expected to find something other than daylight.

  “YOU MADE A deal,” I finally whispered.

  “I made a deal. They still wanted their pound of flesh, but if they hoped to get any access to my weapons after this all wraps up, we had to come to an agreement regarding my child and ex-wife,” he said, trying to place a hand over mine and proving that he hadn’t been as brilliant as he imagined. I snatched it away.

  “We were never married,” I shot, and he rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, I know, but calling you my baby momma in this getup feels too cliché.”

  “So, is this it? We take Elijah from hideout to hideout and never give him a life?” I asked, trying to appeal to something I wasn’t sure existed any more.

  “For a time. We all are making sacrifices. I’m not delusional, Kettle. I don’t expect anything from us, you and I specifically that is—not that I would mind it, of course—but when we had Elijah, we had a deal. We were in this together and would always put him before any of our shit. I can’t have you two running out there right now, not unprotected like this, and you made your choice, Kettle, and sticking it out with me for a while, until I know you’re safe, isn’t all that much to ask for.”

  I go to speak, I go to tell him every way he is wrong, for every moment I’ve known him, but then he says a word, one that brings the world bursting through the door and into my arms. I fall into my boy, on the ground and twisting across the ground. In a house full of firearms and men undeserving of their cost I can’t help but forget it all, if only for a night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “TODAY, CADETS, IS brought to you by the letter K. Anyone want to guess why?” Judge Fox shouted from the centre of the cadet circle, a large brown satchel hanging over his side. They’d been on the Marsh Pit that day, one of six ‘mini-terrains’ meant for combat training. It wasn’t half as much a pain in the ass for Ezekiel than the Sand Box or even the Sea Circle, but it didn’t come without a heavy toll on manoeuvrability.

  K is for knife training, Cadet Jones thought, glancing around the circle at the other cadets. Knowledge—bartered with the senior cadets—was the only real power at the base. Barter wasn’t permitted, of course, but permission is only a consideration if you were caught. For Cadet Jones, who worked the kitchens and could sneak sugar and spices out beneath the waistband of his uniform, it was a constant stream of what to expect in the coming classes, traded for the invaluable chance to stomach bland potatoes and boiled chicken with a bottle of sriracha. Before the Academy, he’d never expected condiments to be worth their weight in gold.

  “Knife training sir,” one of the cadets shouted out.

  “Nice. Cadet Jordan, was it?” Fox said with a chuckle. “The scum-lickers you’ll be protecting our citizens from will sometimes be too close to get your gun out, or you’ll be caught out of ammo, or a million other things you will fuck up because, tragically, we can’t bleed out all the old failures you brought here.”

  Jones and the other cadets began to unsheathe their blunted daggers from the gear belt around their waist, but stopped when Judge Fox raised a hand for them.

  “No, you little turd-nuggets. Welcome to year three; time to take off those training wheels.” Judge Fox dropped the sack to the wet ground beneath his boots and kicked it open, spilling out a pile of uniform onyx blades with silvery hilts. One by one they came and selected their freshly sharpened blades, before returning to their place in the circle.

  “We don’t get long with you maggots; or not now, at least. If Fargo had his way, we’d get a hold of you before the world dulled you down with its lies. As it is, we’ll work with you gash-sweats until we can hopefully weed a few of you out that won’t die your first year in the field. To do that, you’ll have to take risks! Are you sorry butt-brownies ready for that?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Are you ready to make yourselves the order of the world?”

  “Yes, sir!” the cadets cried.

  Considering he’d been the only cadet amongst his peers to use lethal force prior to graduating, Jones didn’t think too much of using live weapons, be it a gun or something more archaic like the blade in his hand.

  The exercise was less chaotic than Ezekiel hoped. They partnered up and ran through drills meant to quickly take down a criminal beast by non-lethal means. Ezekiel and Ocasio, per the usual, deciding to work with one another. It’d been four months since they’d first found one another in the same bed, generally Ocasio’s of course, as Ezekiel had some sort of allergy to bedding sheets, or the alien concept of ‘pillows.’

  Generally, in the night, after they finished falling into one another, there was something to see by in the darkness of their room. When the light lay still, there was something like illumination, of a truth that Ezekiel felt foolish for finding each time.

  There was Ezekiel’s mother, and he’d shed the slate face he’d held for hour after hour in the training ground, lines breaking as he spoke about her mind wandering in a concrete coffin of a home while he gambled on Fargo. There was Ocasio’s brother, who ran with a local gang in Chicago; who died so cold, so far and so unbearably heavy that even as tightly as Ezekiel’s arms were around his fidgeting body, they felt inconsequential to anything.

  Beyond the bunk though, in the sand box, or the mess hall, or the Marsh while running through drills, they were just cadets, and terrible liars.

  Judge Fox strode around each of the groups, giving them direction, or something a little less kind. Cadet Jones focused on his training p
artner, not batting an eye at the instructor, ignoring the sound of a broken finger to his left, a sliced ear to his right. Hearing the harsh cries of his peers made knowing Fox’s alphabet of arms in advance worth every trade.

  When Judge Fox passed Ezekiel and Ocasio, he’d not said a word. They relaxed, at first, but Fox’s attention returned to them again and again. He’d wander around the two, sizing them up, a kind of pleasure tucked under the ginger mustache.

  The rest of the cadets had continued, but their eyes eventually drifted away from their partners and fell over Ezekiel, Ocasio, and the Judge who stared at them so intently. The trick to the Marsh was in the footing. If a cadet could properly adapt to the sinking land, how it stole speed and balance, then it became a simple dance of precision. Though Judge Fox, knowing this, and prizing hazing above orgasms, decided it was time to see what the two could really do.

  Faster, he’d command, and they would obey. Faster. The two obeyed again. Faster! Again, they obeyed, and the knife grew closer and closer to Ocasio’s face as he lurched back to dodge, closer to his hand as he avoided Ezekiel’s disarm.

  Faster, you turtle-dicks!

  Ezekiel obeyed.

  Which isn’t to say Ocasio wouldn’t, but he didn’t have the nights sneaking out in black to train. To understand.

  To judge.

  Ocasio fell back as Cadet Jones’s feet plucked effortlessly from the sinking bog, bringing the blade up with the same speed Cadet Ocasio fell. Ocasio raised a hand over his face, and Ezekiel couldn’t help but grin as the blade stopped centimetres from Ocasio’s fingers. The cadets cheered, the rare sound jarring Jones for a moment before he reached a hand out to help Ocasio up.

  “Show-off.” Ocasio chuckled.

  “I guess K was for kiss my ass,” Jones whispered, through a smile, under everything that could take them to dust.

  “Stay down, cadet!” Fox screamed from five feet away. Ezekiel seemed to weigh the order for a moment, but ultimately returned to a stone stance, hands at his side and bunkmate slowly sinking into the muck.

 

‹ Prev