“I don’t know. But we did what they wanted so let’s get the hell out of here.”
I had stepped back onto the deck and was headed for the ladder when Wheezer called out.
“I’m going to pull the ship’s records, Bug. To see if maybe there’s something on the logs that might give us a better idea.”
I swung onto the ladder and had just begun to tell him to let the Aussies handle it when it happened. Wheezer had gone back into the main cabin and was staring at me through the broken window when he leaned over the boat’s main console to reach for the log-file chits. A second later there was a flash, a moment of curiosity as I flew backward toward the plant, and then darkness after I collided with something solid. When I eventually came around, nobody had to tell me; the chits had been rigged to blow when pulled, and nobody onboard could’ve survived that blast.
The Australians did what they could for me, but I wasn’t staying in their hospital, and grabbed my street clothes to hit the road as soon as the doctors turned their backs. I
bought five bottles of scotch on the way back to my hotel.
Wheezer’s hotel
. Although the bandages were tight around my head, blood must have soaked through; guards in the lobby stopped me and asked to see my room chit, then escorted me all the way up to make sure I was OK.
Wheezer’s things were still there. I didn’t bother with a glass and cracked open the first bottle, turning it up to let a bolus of scotch wash in, burning my throat at the same time I willed it to burn away his memory and my brain with it.
My son and wife
. There was feeling in me for Wheezer because he had watched out for me over the years and we’d shared the same missions, walked the same dirt and had both decided that the real world was for fucks, a crazy house that had mixed up what was important with what was garbage.
But nothing for my family
. You could give a guy like Wheezer the name of a Kazakh town and he’d just nod because there wasn’t any need to explain; he’d either been there during the action or had heard all about it. Bea wouldn’t have understood even if I tried to tell her why we did it. Why we’d been cursed with an addiction. Being on job was like having the shades pulled up by God so he could scream at you,
See you stupid little sacks, see what matters more than a paycheck or the day’s grocery ration
? You whored with Turkmen women because to hell with it; tomorrow might not happen. You dove into the fight because someday you might need someone else to do it for
you
. Being shown the truth like that was like having a one-way ticket to Mars, and once you stepped on board there wasn’t a return flight to the real world. Wheezer had dug that one too; he had dug it all.
His memory didn’t leave until the second bottle and after that I called an escort. At about the same time she
showed up I opened the third bottle, then paid her to get lost after figuring out I was too drunk for anything to work right, and when she shut the door, it all hit at once, the fact that Wheezer was really gone. The chair was an easy choice. It sailed through the closest window and I giggled as I leaned out over the sill, my hands gripping it as hard as they could, daring it to hurt, searching for broken glass on which to cut themselves. It took a few seconds for the chair and glass shards to shatter on the street below, and someone flipped me off so I sent out a second chair, then my empty bottles. Someone would come for me soon, I figured. With only a matter of minutes before the cops showed up, I chugged the last two bottles and began wrapping my hands, which had somehow escaped being cut. But maybe they weren’t my hands. I wanted them to hurt. Instead they were numb, as if the pair were attached to my wrists but had failed at birth to connect via nerves. How many people had
those
hands killed, anyway? Maybe it would be better to have none at all, maybe it was because of them that I couldn’t get back to the real world, the one where Bea lived.
The first cop didn’t bother with a key, and burst through the door so the frame splintered, and by then I was naked anyway, no clothing except for a new bandage around my head, fashioned from the bedsheets. He stumbled on seeing me. That was all it took. Even drunk I saw the opening and kicked him in the groin, wondering how it was that he could stand there like that when there was clearly an insane man in front of him. How could he give me such an opening? His partner came in then, and behind him I saw a team. Twenty of the bastards had gathered in the hallway, their uniforms making them look
like crossing guards instead of cops. He hit me with a nonlethal, a tiny needle that sounded like a bee when it slammed into my chest.
That pissed me off. Before I knew what I was doing I had him on the ground, and stood over his back, about to snap his neck when the rest of them boiled into my room, slamming their clubs into my neck and head, making me wonder, what had I ever done to them? They said things to me but none of it made sense, and eventually the non lethal must have grabbed hold because everything moved in slow motion and a soft glow came from their faces as they handcuffed me and wheeled me out on a gurney.
I went through the lobby like that. Naked. And laughing at a limousine that had just arrived on the street to dump a pair of newlyweds at the hotel, but then another fight broke out. Not physical, but it looked like the newlyweds were two men, guys in suits, who poked their fingers in the cops’ faces and gave them a real chewing out. It was over before I realized it. And rather than being loaded into the police van, the newlyweds threw me into the limousine.
“Sergeant Resnick?” one of them asked.
“Yeah. But I’m really tired. They hit me with a nonlethal of some kind. Can’t see straight.”
“We’re sorry to hear about your partner, Sarge.” The other one said.
“Yeah. Me too. He was the eye in the back of my head, monitored the angel, you know?” They both nodded and I tried to pull focus, which had begun to waver badly. “You two just married?”
They looked at each other. “You sure you’re OK Sarge? Maybe they hit you too hard.”
“Nah.”
“We’re not married. We came to pick you up, and have orders for you; you’ve been reassigned to Strategic Operations and promoted to lieutenant. It wasn’t supposed to happen until tomorrow but the embassy’s been keeping a close eye on things and when they heard about the cops…”
“Wow,” I said, “you guys came really fast.”
“Fast? Hell, Sarge, you held the cops off for an hour and put four in the hospital.”
There wasn’t anything to say. The words somehow registered and I did my best to make a mental note that whatever they had shot me with it didn’t mix with alcohol, had rocketed me past screwed up and into a mental time warp.
“I’ve never heard of Strategic Operations,” I finally said but they were already gone, along with the limo.
Someone wheeled me up the loading ramp onto a transport plane, and next to me the engines roared to life, spitting and whining as the rotors turned and the smell of precious kerosene-synthetic wafted over my nose, making me grin. The gurney locked to the floor and a Navy medic hovered over me. I felt a pinprick. And then he hung a saline bag, which made me feel better almost immediately, taking the edge off a headache that had appeared out of nowhere and threatened only to get worse.
“I never heard of Strategic Operations either, L-T,” he said.
“Whose an L-T?”
“You are, sir. That’s what your records say.” He showed me the flexi-tab, my name and image floating in the middle of off-green plastic. “See. Lieutenant Stanley Resnick, along with all your physical data. The rest looks classified.”
“Where are we headed?”
He shrugged. “Not my business to know.”
“Well, I’m in the shit now.”
“What do you mean?”
But I’d already started ignoring him because he was worthless. The cold air made my skin tingle, and when the aircraft started pulling take-off g’s I nearly vomited with the sensation of weight, a weight that terrified me for a moment that it would never leave, like the one I’d felt in Bea’s apartment building.
Wheezer was dead. It should have still bothered me, but the bottles I’d had in the hotel, and the scrape with police had been just the right mix to purge me of any emotion. And one other thing helped: this had to be a new mission. It’s the only reason they’d have rescued me from such a monumental screw-up, and then promoted me.
Only the high-brass thought that way.
The Subterrene War
Germline
Exogene
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by T. C. McCarthy
Excerpt from
Chimera
copyright © 2012 by T. C. McCarthy
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ISBN 978-0-316-19183-8