Machine Of Death (34 page)

“It says ‘
FRIENDLY
FIRE
.’” Tommy heard her begin to cry. “You were three. Your father and I ignored it. When you have a little boy, combat is putting on a birthday party. You never showed any interest in the military. We saw no reason to worry until now.” 

Tommy had always left room for the possibility that some day, he would be tested, with his consent or against his will. He hadn’t expected ambivalence as a response, but his immediate sense of it was akin to a shrug. It couldn’t be changed. Why would it matter? 

He heard his mother swallow, half a continent away. “Tommy, we made mistakes with Davey. Everything we tried to do, we couldn’t—didn’t—see it coming. We failed him. I think sometimes if we’d talked to him, explained it, we could have avoided it, or at least put it off. I thought about telling you what your slip said after he died, but I didn’t want to fail you, too.”

Tommy was glad she was on the phone and not standing before him. The contemplation of violence had a twisted, calming effect. “You don’t get it, even after all this time. You didn’t fail Davey because you couldn’t save him. You failed him because you never let him live.” He paused, numb. “At least you gave me that much.” 

His mother started to speak, but Tommy buried it with a thumb of the button. She’d said enough. He didn’t want to say too much.

He turned the phone off and crawled back into bed. He considered calling Barb to talk through his newfound knowledge, and decided it could wait until after their visit to the factory. He grappled with daylight, the prediction rattling around in his head, until he abandoned sleep in favor of a late breakfast. 

Zero hour arrived in desperate darkness.

Barb, Tommy and the rest infiltrated the grounds in two places where the fence all but invited them, according to plan and unaware that prying eyes were following their movements. Soft radio calls and infrared scopes tracked them from the shadows.

Barb led Tommy and Mitch to the Assembly 2 building and through an easily-jimmied loading-dock side door. The line inside was silent, populated with machines left mid-motion when the line was stopped for the weekend. The trio walked the length of the conveyor, identifying strike points from the packaging queue all the way back to the head of the line. The room smelled of metal, solvents and sweat. Pallets of petrochemicals in drums lined the back wall. Tommy saw more of them, all part of a fresh delivery, through the doors that led to Assembly 3 in the adjacent room.

Mitch went to work on the main motor drive for the line. Tommy wired a charge further down the line, on the computer control center that coordinated activity for the length of the belts. Barb sought the thickest bundle of cabling that fed the equipment. By Tommy’s measure, they had seven minutes to finish wiring and fall back to the yard.

The authorities waited for them to begin arming explosives before moving in. The head of the government’s operation, a former Marine turned Homeland Security tactical consultant, wanted a bloodless take-down and an open-and-shut case. He envisioned a large and very public trial, something to quash grassroots protests and power his career forward.

The first shot was fired by accident in Assembly 3. Penny, caught in the beam of a flashlight, reached for her ID. She thought she’d been caught by a watchman they’d overlooked in their planning. Instead, the man was a soldier no older than Penny herself, hyped up, overstimulated in his first anti-terror deployment. He was certain she was reaching for a gun.

Roger, seeing Penny shot at close range for no reason,
did
 have a gun, and brought it to bear. The kid soldier died hard and fast. A second one, older by ten years, put out the call that he had a man down, that the terrorists were heavily armed.  He was silenced when Roger shot him in the chest.

It pivoted toward hell with jackrabbit speed. 

The bark of a gunshot made Tommy jump. The report echoed through the room, seeming to return from a half-dozen directions. He had a gun, one of several they had obtained through back-alley channels, but Barb had been specific: weapons were a last resort. If caught, surrender, with a polite warning about the explosives. “No fatalities,” was her order. 

Next door, Assembly 3 erupted in a firefight, driving Tommy to a crouch. He was moving up the line, towards the door, when hands grabbed his ankles from under the line, tripped him, dragged him down. A bullet tore into the sheet metal behind where he’d been standing. He was still fumbling for the gun when Barb put a hand over his. 

“Come on,” she whispered.

They scuttled under the line and towards cover. Several more shots echoed. Roger screamed somewhere in the darkness. The pair found Mitch crouched behind a skid of shipping boxes and joined him.

“We’re screwed,” Barb said. “They’re everywhere, and they’re not asking questions.”

“How did they know?” Tommy asked. “How could they?”

Mitch shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“Thanks for the headline,” Tommy said and cocked his pistol.

“No,” Mitch said. “They said they were going to scare us. That’s what they said. Homeland Security would arrest us and scare us straight.” He looked at Barb and Tommy. He was terrified. “That’s what the guy told me. No one was supposed to have guns. They were just going to scare us. They swore to me.”

A voice called from the darkness, demanded they throw out their weapons. Tommy stared at Mitch. The kid’s recent nervousness began to make sense. Oh, did it make sense.

“What did you do?” Barb asked.

Mitch’s face twisted, anguished. “I needed money. My kid sister got into some trouble, and had no one else to go to. My parents would’ve killed her.” His voice faltered. “They just wanted to know what we were up to. The guy who called me, he was hanging around the Deathics board. He said they figured out who we were, wanted to keep us from screwing up. They made it like a job, and I needed the extra money. There weren’t supposed to be guns.” He craned his head up from behind the stacked boxes. “You weren’t supposed to have guns!” he shouted. 

A shot crashed and Mitch ducked down, right into Tommy’s grip. Tommy shook him.

“Stupid shit! They used you!” he shouted, shoving Mitch back into the boxes. He had to stop himself from doing more. He looked at Barb. Her composure helped him focus. 

“We need to give up,” Barb said. 

Tommy realized his desire to run, to fight his way out, was naked in his expression. Barb saw and read it and shook her head. “We’d never make it,” she assured him.

He stared. Nodded. That’s why she was the boss.

“We’re coming out!” Tommy shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

He rose with care, gun hanging by the trigger guard around the thumb of his wide open hand, arms stretched overhead. Barb followed suit. Tommy heard Mitch slip away in the darkness and found it didn’t trouble him. Mitch was already dead to him. 

Tommy and Barb stepped from behind the boxes, frozen. They could hear footfalls in the darkness, glimpsed the passing of silhouettes across distant windows. They waited. A quiet, hard voice startled them from the left.

“This is for Dawes,” the voice said, and Tommy heard a gun being cocked. He turned and saw the soldier in shadow. Tommy pivoted, gun back in his grip.

Three shots overlapped in a hellish firecracker pop. The soldier fired a round that struck Barb in the arm. In turn, he received a bullet in the face from Tommy’s pistol. As Tommy’s gun barked, he felt a punch in his left shoulder. He twisted as he fell, saw the still-smoking automatic in Barb’s hand.

Tommy landed on his wound, the pain blinding. His arm went numb. 

Barb scrambled over to him, grimacing, issuing apologies under her breath. She examined him with frantic hands.

“It looks like it passed right through your shoulder,” she said. “Who’s your angel?”

“Wish I knew,” he said, ignoring his mother’s voice fighting to be heard above the din of his thoughts.

Tommy’s eyes picked Mitch out in the darkness, sandwiched between two of the nearby pallets of chemical drums, shouting obscenities, crying. He was no longer a revolutionary, instead reduced by his sins to a wounded youth. “No one uses me! I’m nobody’s Judas!” The silver detonator shimmered in his hand. Tommy saw one of their charges stuck to a 55-gallon drum. Tommy felt Barb’s gasp. They heard nearby footfalls, soldiers unawares.

Tommy rolled, shoved Barb to the floor and draped himself over her. There was nowhere to go, and no way for them to get there if there was. He had no idea if shielding her would make a difference. He didn’t care.

There was a new light in her eyes, admiration and sadness and warmth mingled in a single gaze that told him here, at the end, she wished for something different for them. 

As the room transformed into thunder and flame, Tommy was glad he’d lived to see that look.

Story by Douglas J. Lane

Illustration by Kelly Tindall

SHE
HAD
STARTED
TO
PANT
SEVERAL
HUNDRED
YARDS
EARLIER; now a small trickle of sweat was beginning to make its way down her back. She stopped, turned around. The view was majestic: meadows and hedges made a chequered pattern toward the horizon; chimneys puffed out small, dark grey clouds over farms and villages; and as always, the grass was a certain vivid, dark, and slightly translucent green, which she had associated with a particular smell since childhood—a smell of sea, of fields, and of burning coal.

The grass really is greener here
, she thought.
The greener grass of Ireland.

She waited until she had caught her breath, then turned again and continued up the hill. The footpath wound ’round crags and rocks, but had now taken her almost all the way to the little house. It had been invisible from the road, appearing to be just another patch of grey rocks. Now it had taken on the familiar appearance of Grandpa’s house: stone walls, a roof of reddish brick tiles, and the door painted in a bright colour—she recalled it as green from her last visit; today, it was a clear blue.

The door opened when she was still a few yards from the house. An old man made his way out, standing on the three steps leading down to the yard, straightening his back. He looked exactly the same as last time—five years ago, or maybe seven? She couldn’t quite remember—thin, tall, with a wisp of nearly white hair that blew whichever way the wind fancied.

She smiled at him. “Hi, Grandpa.”

He nodded at her, smiled as she came closer. “Hello, Christine. I see you’re keeping well.” His voice was clear, but not altogether strong: It sounded as if his words were going to be blown away in the wind.

“You too, Grandpa.” She hugged him, carefully: He still felt strong, but since she was twelve, she had always been afraid that one day, he would become frail and be crushed by her embrace.

“It’s been some time now. Years.” Not reproachfully, simply a statement of fact.

“I did write.”

“But now you wanted to see the old man.”

“Yes.” She looked around, saw that the wooden bench was still there—most of it grey, weathered wood, but one armrest was a dull yellow, some plastic material. She sat down on it, gingerly: Not only didn’t it creak, it felt like sitting down on a rock.

“You’re grown now. A woman.”

She laughed, briefly. “Twenty-six. Not much more than a child, to many.”

He sat down beside her, folded his hands in his lap. He was quiet, but looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to tell him why she had chosen to come.

“Grandpa James died last week. On Friday.”

He sighed, slowly. “So it goes. What of?”

“Cancer, just like it said on his slip. Nothing unusual about it. Painless, he was asleep toward the end.”

Again, a sigh. “He was a dear one, that child.”

Christine nodded. “He did tell me, the day before he fell asleep, about you, and when he was a child.”

He nodded, lost in thought. “A dear one. I’m glad you came to tell me. It’s not a thing you’d want to read about in a letter.”

She looked at him.
He knows now, doesn’t he? He knows. He knows that I know.
“Grandpa, how old are you?”

He seemed to come back into focus. His voice was stronger, less an old man’s: “Older than I care to remember. I don’t count the years anymore. No one does, after a while. You’re just grateful you saw another one.”

“I always knew you were older than Grandpa James. I always thought you were my great-grandpa. I thought everyone had just got into the habit of calling you Grandpa, that you became everyone’s Grandpa. But he said that he’d been calling you Grandpa even when he grew up.”

“The years pass by, Christine. One by one. One day at a time. You get up in the morning, you stay awake, the sun sets. I don’t count them.”

She rose, abruptly. “I still do.” She turned, opened the door into the cottage. He sat still on the bench as she went in.

The smell was the same, after all those years. A hint of coal, a hint of food cooked slowly and lovingly, a hint of damp that wouldn’t go away even in a heatwave in summer. And a lot of old paper. Old books, old letters in a desk, old newspapers in a pile by the fireplace. She had lain awake at night, when they had come visiting, and felt the smell. It felt like they did it all summer, every summer, but when she looked it up and did the sums, it couldn’t have been more than five or six summers, and probably only two weeks, possibly three. But that is the way childhoods are constructed, long afterward: you remember scattered parts, some chosen at random, some that affected you deeply, and you string them together and say “this was me growing up.” Your parents say something else, your grandparents something different still, but you stay by the story you’ve told yourself.