A little of everything in this story. Salt & pepper, shaken, not stirred. I quit at 21 pages as I found a good stopping off point, and I need a few hours to reload the battery and play a few notes. So…it’s unfinished. Still, I think there’s some entertainment value in this one, a good dose of sunshine for a winter weekend. Have fun.

+++++

Straight On ‘Til Morning

Not sure I remember too much about actually graduating from high school, but I do remember the summer after. Those first three months after – when I could finally say something like ‘Free at last, free at last, God Almighty – free at last!’ – and not feel like a complete idiot. Of course, only an idiot would think that – but suddenly life, and everything about it, felt so different. The idea that the drudgery of school was somehow over and done with, that life would be smooth sailing ahead, all clear skies and fair winds over the stern rail – forever. And I think it was the certainty I felt that seemed so entrancing. That everything going forward would just be – better. Better than the last four months had been, anyway.

There was only one cloud on my horizon, and she was, or so I’d thought, behind me.

Her name was Jen – Jennifer, and we’d broken up midyear, in December – though I didn’t quite know it at the time.

I’d gone to Colorado for Christmas break, that ritual parole from boarding school purgatory I looked forward to – beginning some time in September – and I said goodbye to Jen knowing full well that when I got back to campus life would resume right where we’d left off. She was going to the Caribbean to meet her father – sailing, I think, was the original plan, but of course she met someone. A kid from St Paul’s over in Concord, and they, presumably, fell in love. By the time we got back to campus there was nothing left to say; I could see it in her eyes, just as I had seen it with my own. As soon as I saw them, as a matter of fact, I knew we were done.

Boarding schools – or more to the point, co-ed boarding schools in the 60s – were seething caldrons of hormones, stirred constantly by needful, fragile egos. They’re living plays about small town life writ small, with a cast of characters that included a collection of beady-eyed con-men and more than a few cheating housewives, the lid screwed down tight by underpaid staff who would rather have been somewhere, anywhere else. From the moment you arrived in the Fall until the moment you left in early summer, there are two things you thought about: why did my parents send me here; and when was all this bullshit going to be over and done with.

Of course, there was an easy remedy not so easily had. For boys, nirvana lay just across the quad – in the girl’s dorms. The Holy Land, the Forbidden Zone – and images of Steve McQueen sliding out of a dimly lit tunnel and onto that drab motorcycle in The Great Escape ought to come to mind right about now – this was where our teenaged salvation lay. Just a few hundred yards away, supposedly just out of reach. We, of course, saw each other in class and at meals, and for those who kept up their grades, during ‘study hall’ in the library after the evening meal, yet sooner or later we all discovered the secret routes out of our dorms – and into their’s.

Jen and I had hooked up early in our junior year and we’d been ‘an item’ ever since. We were inseparable, I thought. We ate together, and on weekends I’d sit on a sofa in the commons room with her head on my lap while we read Milton and Vonnegut together. When it was warm at night we’d sneak out to the fields on the other side of Greenfield’s Road, and some nights we’d even take a moment to look up at the stars. After a year together I was sure I’d discovered the gossamer contours of forever, my very own womb with a view, but things change.

The prospect of a summer apart was shattering, and we parted that spring vowing to write every day. I cheated. I wrote two, sometimes three letters a day – though usually at night – and in just a few weeks I started getting a couple a day from Jen. I’d look at the postmark, from Galveston, Texas, rip the letter open and start reading.

We had it, I think you could say, bad.

That summer was my third flying, and I was working on my multi-engine rating that June, so was in ground school most mornings and flying at least two to three hours a week – more on the weekends with my father. When time came for me to make my first extended solo cross country flight, the choice of destinations was easy, and obvious. Galveston, Texas, here I come!

I made the flight in an old Beech Travel Air, an old if reliable twin engined airplane, too well equipped for what it was, and I left Addison Airport, on the north side of Dallas, around midday. Heading almost due south, I skirted Austin and San Antonio, leaving them to the west of my line, and I arced west of the Houston area and slipped on into Galveston before two. Before the really big thunderstorms formed, in other words. So as soon as I had the Beech tied down I called my instructor, then my father, telling them that big storms were moving in and that I’d fly back the next morning.

“Good call,” said my flight instructor.

“Well, did you pack any goddamn rubbers?” my father snorted. Which was, all in all, odd – as I shouldn’t have needed to pack anything for a day trip. It was, I’m trying to say, hard to pull one over on my old man.

And yes, Jen was waiting for me in the parking lot by the little terminal.

With her father, by the way.

He was a professor of gynecology at the medical school in Galveston, and I’d met him in passing at Parent’s Day that last October. We’d hit it off, and he’d been impressed I was so committed to flying – and at such an early age, I guess. He, of course, wanted to see the Beechcraft so I walked them out to the flight line and gave them the nickel tour, and had to explain that I couldn’t take them up for a ride as I hadn’t taken my check-ride yet. He seemed satisfied that I was a responsible young man after that, then we hopped in his Cadillac and drove into town. He had a house not far from the seawall, maybe a block in, and I remember the lawn was half grass and half white sand. I’d never seen anything like it. Galveston seemed a city perched on the ragged edge of survival, one hurricane away from oblivion, and the muddy water in the Gulf looked anything but inviting.

“Blows in from the beach,” Dr Flesh said as I looked at the yard. Oh, yes, that was his name. Harry Flesh – I kid you not. He tried to talk me into medical school later that evening, too. “You should think about, Spud. There are a lot of openings in gynecology, despite all the hairy situations you can find yourself in.”

And as if right on cue, Jen rolled her eyes. She’d heard it all before, I guessed.

Yet I laughed until I cried. And I think I was his new best friend after that.

He took us out to dinner that night, a seafood place named Gaido’s, and I think that was the first time I’d ever eaten over a pound of butter with dinner. Everything was slathered in butter, or drowning in bubbling vats of butter, and in my plate of sautéed lump crabmeat the poor critters were doing the backstroke through oceans of silky, golden butter. He left us alone on the back porch after we got back to their place, and I guess that was the first time I’d noticed there was no Mrs Flesh.

“She died a couple of years ago,” Jen told me, but she was evasive around that memory.

“Oh? What happened? Did she get sick?”

She shook her head, looked away. “No. She was murdered.”

I don’t think I said a word.

“She was up in Houston. They found her in a hotel room.”

“Found her?”

“Maybe a day after it happened. She’d picked up some man and gone to this hotel downtown, and he killed her. Took everything from her purse, which was how they caught the guy.”

“Jesus,” I whispered.

“That’s when my dad decided to send me away to school.”

“Were you close? With your mother, I mean.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, and her voice flat, dull – and barren.

“How’s did your old man deal with it?”

“He doesn’t. He goes to school, he teaches class. He comes home then eats dinner and goes to sleep. Then he gets up and does it all over again.”

And that’s all we said about it. She fell asleep with her head on my lap, and I rubbed her head until I too found sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and she was gone; I passed her room on the way to the bathroom and heard her crying in her bedroom. When I walked back to my sofa I saw Dr Flesh walking around, down to the kitchen, tying his necktie as he went about making coffee – yet for some reason it looked like he was working on a gallows’s noose to me.

I tried to sleep after that, but found myself thinking about one of Dickens’ characters, old Thomas Gradgrind, and I woke up later that morning with Jen by my side – like nothing bad had ever happened. Dr Flesh swung by after his morning class and took us out for breakfast, yet all he wanted to talk about was airplanes. So, we talked airplanes, then we drove back to the airport and they looked on as I made my pre-flight walk-around, then Jen ran out and kissed me, told me that she loved me, and that her father did too, then she ran to the car.

Dr Flesh watched as I started the Beechcraft, and I saw him on my takeoff roll, still standing there behind a little chain-linked fence, staring at me as I flew away.

I went down to Galveston a few more times that summer, but took the old Texas Chief down the next two times. Dr Flesh always seemed happy to see me, and he stayed up late with us one night and talked about his one passion – sailing. And the next day he took us down to his boat, a huge wooden schooner built in Maine before the war, and he told me if I wanted the next time I came down he’d take us out.

I was fascinated by this man now. He seemed a walking contradiction, and very unlike my own father. Studious in the extreme, yet adventurous. Rather than spend his time off walking a golf course, he was getting his boat ready for an extended trip to the Caribbean, and as he led me around her innards I could see the pride in his accomplishment shining through. I was envious, in the way someone clueless about boats is envious.

The last time I went to Galveston that summer I flew down early on a Saturday morning, and when they met me at the airport I took them out onto the ramp and helped Jen into the backseat, then I went up and asked Dr Flesh to follow me up the wing once I was seated. When they were buckled-in I started the engines and taxied out to the end of the runway, and I was feeling a little smug by that point, too. We took off and I turned to the northwest, and the doc asked where we were going.

“Get something to eat,” I said, grinning.

“Oh. How far?”

“Couple of hours. Each way.”

“Oh.”

The place was at once legendary – and yet almost mythical. A ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, there was a grass ‘airstrip’ by the main building – and nothing else. No way in, and no way out – unless, that is, it had wings. We circled the field once and I checked the air-sock, then settled into a long final and touched down gently – as I knew my old man was watching – then taxied up to the ranch house. There were a half dozen or so aircraft there already, and Jen was perplexed.

“What is this place,” she asked.

“What place?” I asked.

“This place!” she asked, now clearly pissed.

“This Place Does Not Exist,” I said, then the doc got out and walked down the wing – his bladder about to burst – then I got out and helped Jen down to the ground.

“What do you mean it doesn’t exist?” she groused.

“Just that. This Place Does Not Exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“You asked me it’s name. I told you.”

“You mean it’s called…This Place Does Not Exist?”

“You catch on fast, for a girl.” She could hit pretty hard, too, for a girl. “Better cover your ears,” I said when we were down on the ground.

“What? Why…”

But is was already too late. The silver P-51D roared by about twenty feet off the grass – then went into a ballistic climb, the old Rolls-Royce Merlin popping as my father chopped the throttle into his wing-over.

“Is that your father?” the doc asked, and I nodded as I watched my old man crab into an impossibly steep descent. He popped the gears at the very last moment and flared, touched down so gently it made my heart leap, and I kept them back until he taxied up next to the Travel Air and cut the engine. I helped him tie the Mustang down, then we went over and I introduced my dad to Jen and her father. At one point he looked at his watch and then to the east.

“You expecting company?” Dr Flesh asked.

My father nodded, and pointed. “Yes. There he is.”

“Who is it? Bill?” I asked.

Again, he just nodded, and a minute later a mint B-17 flew over, then circled and landed. We watched as the Alice From Dallas taxied up to the Mustang on two engines, then we tied that beast down too.

And then all of us went inside and had the very best steak in Texas.

+++++

When I got back to Massachusetts that September I could tell something had changed. Jen was a little more reserved in public, and downright quiet when it was just the two of us, and she didn’t want to talk about it, either.

And she didn’t, at least not for a week or so.

We were walking out of chapel one Sunday morning and she told me her father was sick.

“Sick?” I asked. “How sick?”

“Cancer of some kind. He told me…” she gasped, “…maybe…next summer.”

I stared at her for the longest time, then we both started to cry.

+++++

My dad traded in the old Travel Air for a new Baron, and he flew the doc up for Parent’s Weekend in early October. Even though Jen had made me promise to not let on I knew anything about the doc’s illness, I found it hard not to stare when I first saw him that Saturday morning. The skin on his wrists and hands was a little yellow, the skin around his eyes was a little darker than I remembered, and maybe the eyes were deeper set, too – yet he was his same, boisterous self.

“Spud! Howya doin’!” he yelled from across the quad.

“Doc!” I called back – as I jogged over to take his hand.

But he wasn’t havin’ any of that. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into a hug, a great big bear slapping hug, and after he pounded me on the back a few times he pushed me back gently and looked at me. “You ain’t eatin’ enough, Spud. You gonna up and blow away.”

“Maybe we can fly down for a steak,” I said, grinning.

“Naw. I’m taking Sirius out next week. Bound for Mexico, Grand Cayman and the British Virgins by Christmas. Wish you could come – it’s gonna be a slice.”

“I know, sir. I’m envious.”

The three watched me in a soccer game a little later, then there was a great lunch scheduled and we all sat together, reminisced about airplanes and steaks, and while Jen was certainly there – she was somewhere else, too. Someplace far away, and I couldn’t help thinking she was in a hotel room, in Houston, looking at her mother.

+++++

And it was the same between us after Parent’s weekend. The same, but different, like she was someplace else. We were still close, she was affectionate, but she had slipped away – to I knew not where. She flew down to Grand Cayman for Thanksgiving and came back wearing bruised, dented armor, and she withdrew behind hollow plates of cold withered iron after that, hiding from me now, lest the truth be known. The three weeks between vacations should have been all about prepping for exams – and the coming break – but I was consumed by her retreat.

We hopped the shuttle to Logan in silence, and when we parted at the airport she barely said “Bye” before she slipped into the crowd.

And, I don’t know, maybe I knew we were done right then and there. Maybe I knew she’d find someone else down on those crystalline seas – where everything was the polar opposite of Massachusetts in late autumn. Snow had been late in coming that year, and we’d taken endless walks around campus in the interregnum, walks under leaden skies among black trees and dead leaves. And her eyes, always bright and so full of life, had changed by then. They were dull now, gray and dull, and when we held hands her skin was like ice.

So, I met my parents in Aspen. Dad had bought a lot out on Woody Creek, and he was meeting with a local architect that week, and we all went down to the office and looked at the renderings – and we oohed over this detail and that – then dad looked over the details and signed on the dotted line. We’d have our house late next summer, early autumn latest, and happy as larks we skipped out into the snow and walked over to the little park in the middle of town and had crepes made right there in a little rolling cart. We looked around and could see our future, and I could see my father’s eyes just then as we ate and brushed snow off each others shoulders. I could see him looking at me, measuring me. And he never once asked about Jen or the doc.

My mother and I were not close. We never were, and it just kind of worked out that way. To me it always felt like she resented my coming into her world, like I was an inconvenience. I always wondered what I cost her in physical terms – in the beginning, anyway, let alone the mounting cost over the years.

She’d gone to Hollywood right out of college, and yes, she’d made a couple of movies – but she had a problem with bourbon and that problem only grew out there. She’d met my father at Harvard and they married before he went off to the war, but my father was a pilot – and he wasn’t a drinker. They grew apart in time, because, I think, he had trouble with her drinking, and we, my father and I, came together in the vacuum their drift created. We flew together, we played tennis, we went to Red River, north of Taos, and learned to ski – together – while my mother enjoyed her memories of Hollywood with bourbon and orange juice. No other activity seemed to suit her, or so she told me once, and the whole Aspen thing had begun to weigh heavily on her by that afternoon – so she ate her crepe in silence and refused to smile at the future. I think now, as I look back on those days, that if I’d taken her hand that day I’d have found skin as cold as ice – as cold as Jen’s had been.

And now, as I think back on those two women’s lives, I look at the choices they made and see two kindred spirits, two troubled souls crashing through life – heedless to the damage they left in their wake. More troubling still, I look back from fifty years on and in Jen I see I’d unwittingly found an almost perfect clone of my mother. Easy to see now, from the comfort of another life, but what troubles me is simply this: was there no element of chance – and therefore nothing accidental – in our coming together? Were we drawn to one another through some innate genetic predisposition, something written in our code, if you will? What else could have taken us so close to the edge of the abyss?

+++++

I was waiting at the gate in Boston. Waiting for Jen to come off the plane from Miami. I saw her walking hand-in-hand with a blond headed guy, a long-haired freak, and they kissed once, passionately I might add, before they split and went their separate ways. Then she turned and saw me standing there, and I think she smiled just a bit, before she turned and walked off to the baggage claim.

I did not follow her.

I was devastated, but I did not follow her.

I did not sit by her on the shuttle back to campus. I did not sit by her at dinner that night, nor by her in classes that next week. I did grow dark and despondent, and alarmingly so, I think. My roommate asked probing questions and my house mother came and talked to me, asked if I was feeling okay, if there was anything she could do to help.

There wasn’t, I said. And I think she understood. I think everyone on campus understood.

But high school is high school, and teenagers are just that and simply so. As Jen’s new friend went to a school in nearby Concord, New Hampshire, he drove over on weekends and they went out to lunch and I watched and knew we’d run into the end of that particular future. I subsequently tried out for the ski team and blew out my leg in our first race; when I got back to campus my right leg was in a massive cast and that put an end to skiing for a while. Dad showed up the next day and we sat by a roaring fireplace in a nearby inn and we talked about life and women and all the confounding choices people make, then we talked about Aspen and skiing and all was right with our little world again.

He barely mentioned Jen that day, yet he had brought bad news about the doc.

He was back in Galveston, sicker than hell and the word my dad had was that he wouldn’t make it another month. And his boat, the Sirius, had been, in effect, abandoned somewhere in the BVI.

“I called him last week. Offered to buy the boat,” my father said. “What do you think?”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I just hate to see something of value go to waste.”

“What would you do with it?”

“Sail it up to Maine, I think, then get her fixed up and sold.”

Yes, Maine. That made sense. My mother was from Maine – Camden, Maine, a mill town on Penobscot Bay; lots of boat builders, wealthy people from Boston coming up – looking for a nice schooner. And if there was one thing in life my mother enjoyed, it was sailing.

My father was looking to make a few repairs of his own, I think I saw. Fix things before rot settled into the wood.

“So? What do you think? Feel like sailing up to Maine this summer?”

+++++

A few days later I was sitting in study hall when a girl came over and sat across from me. I knew her, of course; we’d known each other for three and a half years, but I didn’t know her well. Her name was Mary Ann Oberon, and she was from Louisiana, her family Acadian French. She was dark haired and dark eyed and she had the brightest soul, the kindest heart of anyone on campus, and everyone loved her kindness of spirit. She wanted to become a physician, and everyone knew she would. She was, I think everyone know, meant to be a healer.

And she had come to sit by me that night with purpose in her eyes. She had come to heal me.

And she did, too. It took her, maybe, a half hour to complete the job.

“What’d you do to your leg,” she asked.

“I tripped, on my stupidity.”

She laughed. “And?”

“I’ve been skiing a couple of times, so of course thought I’d enjoy racing.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I said, right when I started sliding into the trees.”

“What are you reading?”

“Celestial Navigation.”

“Oh – going sailing?”

“This summer, yes. I think so.”

“I love sailing.”

“Oh?”

“We sail all summer, up in Maine. Have since I can remember.”

“My parents have. Not me.”

“You’re the flyer, right?”

“Yup.”

“Not much difference between sailing and flying,” she said. “Both involve wings, both involve navigating difficult currents, avoiding rocks and other hard things. It’s all just Time Speed and Distance.”

I looked at her like I was looking at a kindred spirit – which of course she was.

Study hall was up and it was time to head back to our dorms, and she asked me to walk with her. She stopped at one point and pulled me close, looked me in the eye. “I’ve been wanting to do this for ages,” she said, and she pulled my face to hers and let slip the wettest, most tongue-laden kiss in the history of kissing, and it was like an electric charge went off in my feet and roared up my legs like a three alarm blaze. By the time it hit my face I was all conflagration, all crazy emotion lit up and out of control.

She pulled away a moment later and looked into my eyes, and I think she wiped a tear from my face. “You needed that,” she said, and then she kissed the tip of my nose. “And you may not know it yet, but you need me, too.” Then she skipped off to her house, leaving me breathless and completely confused – almost unsure of my footing. Which was, I think, her point, the strategy behind the moment – but even so, not really a nice thing to do to someone in an almost three foot long cast on a snowy sidewalk.

+++++

So within days Mary Ann and I started sitting next to one another at meals, and in class. She helped me with latin, I helped her with calculus. We held hands, looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and soon I was curled up beside her – with my head in her lap, with her fingers drawing little arcs through my hair. She always wore black tights and I loved to tickle behind her knees while she twirled-away through my hair, I loved the way she giggled and whispered “stop it!” And I remember turning over once and looking up into her eyes.

“I love you,” I told her one snowy February afternoon.

“I know,” she said, then she smiled and leaned forward and bit my ear. “I love you to, smart ass,” she whispered.

And that, in a nutshell, was Mary Ann. All warm and cuddly, everything wrapped in layers of impenetrable joy. And the thing is, I could see she was perfect for me, that we’d make a good team, and that we’d be happy together – forever.

Which was, of course, why I knew we’d never last.

+++++

Jen came and sat next to us a few weeks later, and she looked at Mary Ann with something akin to regret in her eyes, then she turned to me. “I’m flying home tomorrow,” she said. “Dad wants you to come, too. I think your father is arranging things with the Dean’s office this morning.”

“How is he?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I think he wants to say goodbye.”

Then she got up and walked away.

And I could it in Mary Ann’s eyes. The fear. I would be out of reach, out of her control – so the story in her eyes was a simple one: was love enough to keep me in her stable orbit?

+++++

When we got on the shuttle the next morning she looked bright, almost happy.

“Is your boyfriend going to meet us at the airport?” I asked.

She shook her head. “We broke up a few days ago.”

“Oh.” And I saw Mary Ann in my mind’s eye one moment, my mother the next.

Yin and yang. Opposites pulling me to their uncertain orbits, Jen a distant supernova on verge of collapse, her imploding gravity threatening to consume everything. We boarded a shiny new Delta 727 and flew to Dallas, and dad was waiting for us on the general aviation ramp at Love Field in his Baron. He helped Jen aboard, then sent me up next.

“What?” I said, suddenly concerned by the tired note I picked up in his voice.

“You take the left seat. I don’t feel like flying today.”

So, I taxied out to 13 Right – with two Braniff 707s ahead and a Delta DC9 just behind the Baron, and I’d have felt a little like a flea on an elephant’s ass if I hadn’t been so nervous about flying for the first time in months. Dad ignored me completely, of course; he turned and talked with Jen all the way out to the end of the taxiway, left me to it. I had to leave a lot of room ahead for the 707s; their jet-wash – even from a few hundred feet – was making the Baron tremble like a leaf in a gale, but then it was our turn.

“Baron triple two niner five, you’re clear for take-off. Be aware of heavy wake turbulence and contact departure on one one eight decimal two five.”

“Two niner five, wake turbulence, departure eighteen twenty-five.” I finished the run-up and pulled onto the active, looked at the clock and made my countdown – then advanced the throttles and started watching the gauges as we ran down the runway. We rotated well before the area where the 707s had, and I slipped south immediately to put more distance between the Baron and all that roiled air, then confirmed our flight plan with departure control. There were already heavy storms near Waco, my father said, and that’s why our flight plan was taking east towards Lufkin. I was reading the NOTAMs and looking over the weather when I felt her hand on my shoulder, then in my hair.

I turned, looked at her.

“You belong up here, Spud. You know that, don’t you?”

“And where do you belong, Jennifer?”

And I think I saw my father look at me for a moment, then he turned and looked out beyond the wing – at the towering anvil-headed thunderstorms brewing over central Texas.

And Jen looked me in the eye. “I belong to you.”

I turned back to the instruments, of course, tried to focus for a moment – until dad tapped my leg.

“My airplane,” he said.

“Your airplane,” I recited, then I turned to look at her again. “I don’t get you, Jen. Not one little bit.”

“You don’t have to Spud. Just understand what is. Okay?”

And dad started whistling that little ditty John Wayne did at the end of The High and The Mighty, and he had the biggest shit-eating grin on his face just then. He saw me looking and turned away, and I could tell he was trying his hardest not to laugh – and then the dam broke. He laughed so hard I thought the door was going to burst off it’s hinges, then I started laughing too.

“Uh, I hate to ask,” Jen said. “But who’s flying the airplane right now?”

Which only made things worse. Thank God for autopilots, right?

+++++

We declared VFR near Beaumont and I arced out over the Gulf and made a straight in approach to runway 36, and once we were on the ramp Dad had the ground crew tie the Baron down and gas her up, then he went off to rent a car. We drove to the hospital in silence, the enormity of the looming confrontation no longer something in a distant future – the moment was on us now, and we parked, went up to his room flying low and slow.

Which was quite unnecessary, as it turned out. The Doc was going to die, that much was certain, but he was going to go out with a bang.

“Which one of you brought the goddam dancin’ girls?” he asked as we came in the room.

“Uh, that slipped my mind, Harry,” my father said.

“Well, dammit, go get a bunch of red headed gals with hairy pussies. I feel like eating something red today!”

And Jen stepped into view.

“Well, shit,” Harry said sheepishly. “How you doin’, muffin? You fly down with this raggedy lookin’ bunch?”

Harry’s skin was deep orange that afternoon; he was in liver failure and the cancer had metastasized throughout his gut and chest, but if he was in pain it wasn’t showing just then. Jen went to him and held onto his arm, looked in his eyes and started crying.

“What’s the matter, muffin?”

“Oh, Daddy,” she whispered, and he looked up at my father, shook his head just a little.

“Let’s go find us a few dancin’ girls, Spud,” my father said, and we went and stood in the bustling corridor for a while, let the world walk on by while they talked, and we looked at one another for a long time. I guess, without saying a word to one another, we were thinking ahead. About, maybe, the day we’d have such a conversation. I guess most fathers and sons eventually do, but we’d never crossed that bridge before.

She came out a minute later, then asked me – and only me – to go in. “He wants to talk to you, Spud,” she said, and I went to her and held her when our tears came. After a while she whispered “Go…” in my ear, and I went.

The doc was quiet now, more subdued as I came in, and he looked at me as I closed the door and walked to his side.

“Don’t be afraid of all this shit,” he said, sweeping his hand around at all the IVs and instruments. “It ain’t gonna bite you, and neither am I.”

“Yessir.”

“Spud? I’m glad I got to know, even if it was just for a little bit. I’m gonna miss you, miss watchin’ you grow up.”

“Yessir. I know what you mean.”

“What are you going to do about Jennifer?”

“Sir?”

“Jennifer. What the hell are you going to do about that girl?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You want some advice?”

“Yessir, I guess.”

“Get away from her, son. She’s just like her mother, in every way. She’ll make your life a living hell, and try to tear your world apart every chance she gets. And all the while she’ll tell you how much she loves you, how you mean everything in the world to her.”

“Sir?”

“That blond haired freak, as you call him? Over Christmas? That’s just a taste of what she has in store for you, so you think carefully about what you want out of life. Okay, Spud? ‘Cause she’ll suck the life right out of you.”

“Sir, why are you telling me this?”

“Because I happen to love you, kid. I never had a boy, never had a son, and I’ve come to look at you that way. Sorry, but there it is. Now, don’t start cryin’ – I’ve had enough cryin’ to last two goddamn lifetimes. Jen’s mother was nothin’ but one heartache after another, and Jen’s turnin’ out just like her. Nothin’ I can do about it, never has been, and that’s just the way it is.”

“Yessir.”

“I’m leavin’ everything to her, by the way, everything but Sirius. She’s yours, and a little money to help you look after her until you’re on your feet.”

“Sir?”

“The boat, Spud. She’s yours now. You take her and follow your heart – straight on ‘til morning – and you see what there is to see out there. I wanted to and can’t, so it’s your turn. I want you to go out there and live, and when I see you next time you can tell me what you found.” He held out his hand just then, and looked up at me. “This is goodbye, Spud. No tears, and none of that other bullshit, just think about what I said, and take care of her as best you can.”

“Yessir.”

“Go now, Spud. Please, and send Jen and your father in, would you?”

I had a hard time leaving, couldn’t let go of his hand, you see. A pause, a sigh passed between us, then he smiled and we let go. I nodded my head once, then turned and left that room, passed them in the hall on my way outside, told them to go in.

I went outside and watched billowing, anvil-headed monsters forming north of Houston, lightning flickering in their gray bellies, and some time later my father came out and joined me.

“He’s gone,” he said quietly, and I looked at him.

“What? So fast?”

“Morphine,” my father said, looking down at the ground. “I think he’d had enough.”

“Jesus.”

Jen came out a few minutes later and she walked up to my dad and hugged him for the longest time. Somehow, for whatever reason, the Doc and my father had become friends over the past half year, really close friends, and Jen grounded herself in that sudden reality. I suspect the Doc told her how he felt, maybe even what he wanted of them both, but if so that remained something between them, and that something remained unspoken, and unbroken – for many years to come.

But his last words to me lingered. What did he mean by “take care of her as best you can?” Jen? The boat? Both of them?

+++++

We were his family by then, the three of us, and we concluded his business, had his friends over to the house after services at the local temple, then the three of us got in the Baron and flew to Springfield, Massachusetts. We drove up 91 and to the Inn in near silence, lost in our respective thoughts, I guess, and we had a last supper together. There wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said by then, and we talked about sailing one last time.

My mom and dad wanted to make the trip, but Jen still wasn’t sure.

Because she still didn’t know where she stood with me.

Because, perhaps, I didn’t exactly know how I felt about her.

Yet I was pretty sure how I felt about Mary Ann, and I thought that strange – in a way. Strange, in a way I didn’t quite understand yet.

+++++

So, graduation. The big change. When you go from having no control over your fate, to having about ninety-nine percent control – even if all control is an illusion.

In other words, there comes a point where you own all your fuck-ups, and that time usually comes about two days after graduating from high school. Before you graduate, you can at least pretend to blame everything bad on your parents, and hell, who knows, maybe there are a few times when people actually believe you when you try.

But probably fewer times than you think.

Anyway, I got home, to our old house on Belclaire in Highland Park, and surveyed life as I knew it.

College was next, but I’d been rejected by Harvard and Stanford, my two favorites, and I’d been wait-listed by Dartmouth, my third choice – so that one was a ‘maybe’ but it was already June so time wasn’t on my side. Columbia was a go, and so was NYU, but the idea of living on an island surrounded by eight million New Yorkers made me ill. That left two schools in California in contention: Claremont College near LA, and UC Berkeley. I chose Berkeley.

And right about now I need to re-introduce you to my roommate that last year in Purgatory. A kid named Paul Anderson, and I’ve left him out of the story up to now for no good reason other than he didn’t play that big a role in my life until I came back from Christmas break – when I found that Jen had moved-on to the blond headed freak. Paul was an interesting sort. Almost inert, like a gas at low temperature – before it changes – Paul had the demeanor of, well, a rock. Perhaps even the Rock of Gibraltar. He was solid. And not just physically so, though come to think of it he was built like a brick shit-house and went on to play linebacker at USC. No, Paul was a rock of a totally different texture.

Paul played the guitar – when he wasn’t reading Socrates or bench-pressing Volkswagens – and he wrote his own music, his own lyrics, as well. And interestingly enough, his stuff was good. Real good. That October Jen and I had gone down to Boston to hear him play, where he was approached by a couple of record producers – and he of course turned them down, walked away from all that nonsense – because it wasn’t in his plan. He like music, he told me once, because it kept him centered, kept him focused on what WAS important.

For Paul Anderson, medicine was important. He was like a heat-seeking missile, locked on and closing fast, when it came to medicine. He eschewed team sports, especially sports that embodied conflict, and took up skiing and rock climbing – and he was Hell with bow and arrow. He was, too, the most compassionate human being I’d known up to that point, and a genuine empath, as well. So, the picture you should have in mind is a huge, Zen rock, climbing mountains and playing his guitar when he reached the summit. Maybe shooting the moon with a arrow, and hitting it dead-center.

That fall, one night when he was playing coffee houses in Cambridge, he met a girl. She was a ‘cliffie, a senior at Radcliffe College, and her name was Sara Keaton. She was a brilliant musician, and she fell in love with Paul’s playing and struck up a conversation with him during a break that evening.

We were with him at the table just then – Jen and myself – and I watched as she approached. Dark eyed beauty, I said to myself, locked on and tracking, and she lasered in our table and sat down by Jen. Paul looked at her and smiled – and it was like he’d been waiting for her all his life.

“Who wrote that last song?” she asked Paul.

“I did.”

“The lyric, too?”

He nodded his head.

“Are you, like, into Byron?”

He nodded his head – again.

And that was all there was to it. That simple exchange was all it took. Like a couple of eagles, they met in flight and mated – for life. No hysterics, no fireworks – they just met and connected: end of story. I say this fifty years on – as Godfather to their three kids. Okay?

The point of all this, and there is one, concerns yours truly when I got back from Christmas break, when the reality of Jen’s breaking up began to sink in. I think I mentioned I was despondent, that my housemother tried to intervene? I think Paul saw what was going down long before I did – and he’d just been waiting for Jen to cut me up into little pieces and send me to a sushi bar.

Around October we were sitting around after lights out, sitting in the dark, looking at a storm coming up the Connecticut River Valley, and I could see a little New York Central passenger train across the valley, headed south towards Springfield. “Wish I was on that train,” I said.

“Where would you go?”

“Away from this fuckhole.”

“Fuckhole? Man, this is about the nicest place in the world. Why would you want to get away from here?”

“Sometimes I just can’t stand it here…”

He sighed, then he was quiet for a while, but I could tell he was thinking of the best way to put me out of my misery. “Spud, what do you hope to accomplish by going out with the most vicious, manipulative cunt in the entire universe?”

I was too stunned to answer. “Paul? Did you just say the word ‘cunt’?”

“Yeah, she’s a manipulative cunt. What about it?”

“I’ve never heard you swear before. I may faint.”

“Don’t deflect the question, asswipe. Try answering one – for a change.”

“You know, I was thinking about it over the summer. I realized how much like my mother she is…”

“Oh, God no. You’re not going to blame it all on Freud, are you?”

“I don’t think I’m trying to blame anything on anyone – or anything, Paul. I just realized how much like my mother she is.”

“You’re saying your mother is a scheming, manipulative cunt?”

“You really think Jen is manipulative?”

“Jesus H Christ, Spud! She’s Lady Fucking MacBeth – only with really nice teeth!”

“Paul? You said another cuss word. Are we having an epiphany?”

“No, but you’re going to…when I throw your skinny ass through that window.”

Which gets back to returning from Christmas break, and how I was coming apart at the seams – after the breakup. He asked me questions about Jen a few nights after our return, asked me about my feelings – now that Jen was out of the picture, so to speak. I think I sounded more depressed than I realized, because my house-mother came in the next evening and talked to me, and then there was that ill-chosen race and my father coming up to check on me. Yeah. I think it was because Paul was seriously concerned about me, like maybe he thought I was about to do something stupid.

Well, I did. I joined the ski team. And while it was stupid, I’m not sure it was that stupid. But here’s the thing. He was taking organic chemistry. So was Mary Ann. And guess who was whose lab partner? Reckon he talked to her about me? Or could it be she had been asking about me? And after dad left Mary Ann waltzed into my life.

Hey, what are friends for, right?

So, yeah, we graduated. Jen got into Rice, said she’d decided to stay near home. Paul, like I mentioned, was going to USC – on an archery scholarship that was going to pick up about a third of his tuition. I should mention that during his second day on campus a football coach took one look at him and asked him to try out for the team.

“I don’t want to do anything that will compromise my studies,” Paul told me he said to the coach.

When the coach assured him it wouldn’t he suited up and went down to the practice field, and two hours later he had a full scholarship. Four years later he was drafted by the Detroit Lions, but turned it all down to go to med school at UCLA. He asked Sara to be his wife at Disneyland after his second Rose Bowl appearence, while they were on the It’s a Small World After All ride. She said yes, by the way, but you already knew that.

And I flew down to the British Virgins and had Sirius put back in the water, while Mom and Dad came down a few days later. I could tell things were strained between them, and Dad told me this was probably their last chance to patch things up, to hold things together.

“Who are you holding things together for, Dad?”

“You, I guess.”

“You think it makes me happy to see you guys miserable?”

“I don’t know, Spud. I can’t give up on her. She’ll always be the love of my life.”

“I think if you’re miserable you ought to find out why, then do something about it.”

“Maybe that’s why we’re here,” he said, smiling. “By the way, is Jen coming?”

“Nope. She told me she’s decided Galveston is where she wants to be.”

“Can’t say I blame her. She’s had a rough year.”

“Yes, she has,”  I said as I looked at my mother, still lithe – still athletically inclined – and still morbidly depressed. She was the walking contradiction in our lives – she looked like a marathon runner who’d just lost the most important race of her life – and had decided to commit seppuku. Perhaps, my father and I used to say in jest, she was just waiting for us to lay out the ritual mats and hand her the knife.

I say that because my mother was, and always had been, the laziest human being ever to walk the face of the earth. Father enabled this behavior by surrounding her with housekeepers as soon as he figured out her routine – which was simple even after casual observation. She slept til noon, drank a glass of orange juice then went for a run. Usually ten miles, give or take. She’d come home, shower, then go to the country club for a strenuous afternoon playing bridge, though occasionally she’d play tennis – but no matter which she started in on her bourbon and orange juice around two in the afternoon – then she’d meet up with father in the evening for some serious drinking.

Absent from this routine is, of course, any mention of her son – and taking care of same. This was not in her game plan, and I say this with little regret and no remorse in my heart. I thought then and I still do think that spending more time with her would have been a poisonous venture with a dubious outcome, and my father apparently thought so too, which was why I was shipped off to my first private boarding school, this one in Massachusetts, as well, when I was eight years old. So I was, in effect, raised by a succession of headmasters and house mothers, all who I’ll happily admit did a much better job raising me than my mother would have, even if she’d been so inclined.

So, I lived for vacations, from time off from school, because that’s when I got to spend time with my father. And though he taught me to play golf and tennis, he also introduced me to his one true love: flying. And so with vacations, that added up to about four months a year. We made good use of that time, too.

Because he knew the score, understood what had broken down in our lives, and he felt awful about it. No, he felt guilty as Hell about it. He overcompensated be doting on me, by indulging my desire to grow up too fast, to not do the things other kids my age were doing. I had four different ratings, pilot-speak for something akin to merit badges in the Boy Scouts, before I got my learner’s permit to drive a car. I had no need for a car, or to drive. I was tucked away in western Massachusetts nine months out of the year – with no cars allowed – or at home with father. Note I do not say home with mother. By the time I was a senior in high school she was with Jack Daniels every waking moment of her life, and if she wasn’t walking around drunk, it was because she was asleep.

If you think I hated her, you’d be way wide of the mark. Neither did I pity her. I simply did not understand her. Why she’d chosen to live her life this way. She’d had every material advantage a human being could ask for: a powerful, monied family, a truly superior education, and she married a man with equal amounts of brains and ambition. She’d had it made since she was in diapers, and yet she had simply turned her back on it all and disappeared into the darkness.

Yet I looked at her now – looking at Sirius – and I saw something like magic come alive in her eyes. She walked the length of her down on the dock, her hand caressing the mahogany rail as she walked along, putting her head down on the wood and sighting her lines. When she got to the stem, the very point of the bow, she leapt – cat-like – across the five foot chasm and her foot caught the bobstay, her hand the bow-rail, and she pirouetted up on deck like some kind of able seaman right out of Nelson’s fleet off the Nile.

I was stunned.

My father only smiled.

“So, who else did you talk into making this little trip?” he asked.

“Paul’s here, his girlfriend too. She’s cooked on boats before, has a lot of sailing under her belt.”

“And?”

“Mary Ann Oberon. I don’t think you’ve met her yet.”

“Ah. The girl you’ve been hiding from us. She must be something special.”

Mother was walking aft along the rail, positively radiant I might add, and she sighted up the shrouds, fiddled with a turnbuckle and asked where the rigger’s tape was.

“The what?” I replied.

She ignored me and looked ashore. “Is there a good marine supply store around here?”

I pointed and she nodded her head, then continued her inspection.

“If there’s one thing your mother knows, it’s boats,” my father said as we watched her disappear down below. “She practically grew up on her grandfather’s yachts, raced old J-Class monsters before the war.”

I was, of course, clueless about all this. After she married my father she turned away from all things Maine, even sailing, and how vowed – if only to herself – to never go back. And she hadn’t. And now I could plainly see the repercussions of that oath. When she turned her back on the sea she had simply begun to come undone.

Now she came up the aft companionway – dragging Mary Ann up the steps behind her.

“Who’s this?” she demanded to know. “And why is she in your stateroom!?”

“Ah, mother, this is Mary Ann, the love of my life. Mary Ann, welcome to the family.”

And with that my mother turned to Mary Ann and looked her over – from stem to stern, if you will – and then pronounced her fit enough. For what, I had no idea – but then my mother hugged my girlfriend and that ice was broken. “Anyone else down there I need to know about?”

“Paul and Sara are bunked forward, but they’re in town right now.”

“So, five staterooms?” she asked.

“Six, if you include the pipe berths in the stem.”

“Let’s not,” she said sarcastically. “So, you’re all the way aft, and Paul and his girl are forward?”

“Aye, skipper.”

“The biggest stateroom is by the forward mast. Why haven’t you taken that one?”

“I thought you two should have it,” I said.

She considered that for a moment, then let it go – with Mary Ann watching all this warily, as one might a rattlesnake that’d just slipped into the dining room – during Thanksgiving dinner.

“Sara’s at the farmer’s market,” Mary Ann tossed-in helpfully. “Said she’s going to make some kind of curry tonight.”

My mother smiled. “That should be interesting,” she sighed.

Interesting wasn’t the half of it. Sara and Mary Ann cooked while my mother interrogated Paul. “What do you know about sailing?” she began, which led to an endless series of questions and drills, knot-tying demonstrations and verbal floggings. And Paul, poor, stoic Paul, didn’t know what to make of my mother – didn’t know what had hit him. I’d rarely mentioned her existence at school, if only because I barely knew her myself – and wouldn’t have known a polite way to describe her perpetual drunkenness. We were both meeting a creature that had been caged out of sight for twenty years, and who had just regained her freedom. It was a stunning, startling metamorphosis, and even my father was a little amused by her performance.

For she still was, as I mentioned previously, an actress.

A good one.

And if you didn’t understand that one true thing about her, you might have taken her a bit too seriously.

And that my father would not let us do. He knew her acts, all her routines, and had had them down pat for almost thirty years. But he had never, I repeat never, been sailing with her, and what we were proposing to do, in three months, was almost monumental in scope.

We were going to take Sirius from the British Virgins west along the Venezuelan coast to the San Blas Islands, then through the Panama Canal. From there the objective was San Francisco, but because of south setting currents along the Pacific coast of North and Central America, we planned to sail west from Panama to Hawaii, then arc east to the Golden Gate. We planned on two months, two weeks at sea, leaving us just a few weeks margin before school started.

Dad and I had almost no sea time, Paul a bit more, while, oddly enough, the girls were all accomplished sailors – so we had a little role reversal thing going on, which was interesting – and mother seemed to be coming into her own as the skipper of my little menagerie.

That said, we planned to spend the next two days stowing provisions while mother went about completing her inspection, then – barring the unexpected – we’d push off on Friday from Saba Rock, Virgin Gorda, bound for Aruba – a not quite 600 mile run to the south-southwest. Another 650 miles the San Blas Islands, where we planned to spend a few days, then an overnight at the canal for measurements and fees – then a day or so to transit, then, once in the Pacific we’d dash for Honolulu, a 5000 mile, twenty one day sprint, before turning to San Francisco, another 2200 mile, ten day grind – into the wind.

And the Doc had spent tons getting her ready, too. She was as well equipped as any sailboat could be, in 1965, anyway. Which meant we had two really good sextants onboard, a couple of VHF radios, a Ham rig as well as an ADF/VOR set which would have been more appropriate in Dad’s Baron. We laid in supplies and stowed everything safely out of harm’s way, and we spent that Thursday before departure going over our duties and responsibilities while on watch. With hurricane season breathing down our neck, mindful we couldn’t make excuses and postpone our departure even a day, we went ashore for one last meal on dry land that evening.

And I hasten to add that my mother had not consumed one drop of alcohol since her arrival. Take that as you will, but she wasn’t even sneaking a snort after midnight, and it was beginning to show. Alcohol is addictive, and alcohol withdrawal is real. She was becoming grumpy, occasionally grouchy, then downright mean, and as my father had cued us in we did our best to help her along. She stopped eating, until we forced her to eat – something, anything – but it turned out the only thing she wanted to eat was –  my father.

They would disappear down below every few hours and we’d hear them giggling and carrying on, and it was contagious. Paul and Sara would disappear as soon as my parents got back in the sunshine, then Mary Ann and I would have a go, and pretty soon I imagined we’d be bounding across the Spanish Main fucking our brains out every few hours. It was a happy, if inconceivably naïve vision of what waited for us.

For you see, when we got back to the Sirius later that night, there was a new duffel bag on deck.

And there was Jen, sitting in the cockpit – waiting for me.

+++++

One of the, shall we say, benefits of mother’s alcohol withdrawal was insomnia. She could not sleep, and did not even want to try after the first few attempts. Her motor ran until it stopped, then she conked out for a few hours and was soon up for another twenty hours. When she got too grumpy she took father below and cleaned his clock for a half hour and then all was right with her world – for a few hours, anyway.

And to set the matter straight, they weren’t old, not then and not ever. They graduated from Harvard, well, she from Radcliffe, in 1941, so they were not yet fifty years old, and they were both strong, active people. I say this by way of re-introducing Jennifer back into our midst, and as the last crew member to join the Sirius on her voyage of discovery.

Because my mother took one look at Jen and shook her head. “What are you doing here?” my mother asked.

“This was my father’s dream,” Jen answered, and I’d have to say with more than a little defiance in her voice, “and I’m going to be a part of this.”

Even in the dark I could see Mary Ann glowing, perhaps I should say radiating, fierce heat. Anger? Rage – murderous rage – was seething, all banked down and seething – in her eyes. Paul, bless his heart, walked right on by with Sara in hand and they disappeared to their forepeak stateroom – shutting the stateroom door behind them as they went.

My father of course went to Jen and picked her up, hugged the snot out of her and kissed her on the forehead – so of course my mother grabbed him by the nuts and dragged him to their stateroom. They were quiet about it, but I feel sure she got him off repeatedly, for an hour later we heard cries of ‘Enough, woman! It’s chapped half to death…you’re going to kill me if you keep this up!’

And Mary Ann had the grace to leave me with Jen in the cockpit.

And then we were alone, under the stars and alone in the deepest night of our lives. I went and sat next to her, and she leaned into me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I understand,” I had the temerity to say.

“Do you?”

“I loved him too.”

“And I still love you,” she whispered. “I’m not going to do a thing to break up what you have with Mary Ann, but I still love you. And I always will.”

I could forgive you for thinking I was naïve enough to believe her, but I had my doubts. It was impossible not to after the Doc’s parting words, and especially not after the blond headed freak episode, so I stood and picked up her duffel and carried it to a stateroom on the far side of my parent’s, and showed her where to stow her foul weather gear and sea boots – then I said goodnight and went aft to Mary Ann.

Who was beyond seething now. She was in full melt-down mode, livid tears falling freely in an uncertain gravity that now seemed too heavy, too laden with grievous expectation.

And I laid her down, smothered her tears with a blanket of kisses, then I looked into her eyes. “There is nothing that girl could ever do to change the way I feel about you, and I’m going to spend every waking moment of my life loving you, so stop it. Just stop it, right now.”

And the strangest thing happened.

She did.

I had flipped the right switch, for her – and for me. I declared the truth, and she knew I was telling the truth – and that was the end of that. We made love and went to sleep; the next thing I knew sunlight was streaming in port lights and I smelled bacon frying in the galley. I went on deck and helped Paul with the sails, and with Dad standing at the chart table we cast off lines and motored into the well-marked channel. Once we were off the eastern, lee shore of Virgin Gorda we hoisted sail and we were off. Off like a herd of turtles, as my father used to say.

We, and I mean all of us, Jen included, ate Sara’s breakfast in the cockpit – and in the freshening sea air my mother wolfed down her plate – and asked for more.

I looked at my father – who simply smiled and winked at me – and I shook my head, wondering what lay under the building clouds just ahead.

(C)2017 adrian leverkuhn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | adrianleverkuhnwrites7@gmail.com | Yes, this is Part I, and yes, as always, it’s just fiction. I’ll be working on a conclusion over the next few days – so stay tuned, and thanks for reading along.

Playing a few notes Saturday late, the wood stove roaring away, a song came to me. The words that followed are here, now, for you to ponder. It’s a short, short story, 17 pages I think, and it might take you ten minutes to read. It’s self contained, no dangling conclusions, just a tidy little smile for an ending. Hope you enjoy.

+++++

St Louis & Royal

When I think about that day I remember thunderstorms in the distance, and thinking it was very warm for December. Which, I suppose, it was – but New Orleans is New Orleans, and it is what it is: hot and humid most of the year, punctuated by a few months in winter when it gets sort of warm and humid. Christmas vacation had just started and my parents had flown me down to spend ten days with, ostensibly, them. I’d flown from the upper midwest, Wisconsin, to be somewhat more precise, from a military school not far from Milwaukee. I was fifteen, not that my age made much difference to events as they unfolded – but I could be wrong about that.

My parents had a suite on the top floor of the Royal Orleans Hotel for the duration, and they had me warehoused in a little room by the service elevator two floors below. I remember the room because it had a nice view of the street below, of Royal Street, and it’s intersection with St Louis Street. When I arrived, on a florid-orange Boeing 720 from Chicago – by way of Kansas City, Oklahoma City and Dallas – it was late morning and I was dressed for snow. I was, you see, still in uniform and looked like a Marine, albeit a fifteen year old marine, in my dress blues and white hat. My father was supposed to meet me at the gate, which was kind of the thing you did back in 1965, but I had little confidence he’d actually show up.

And, true to form, he wasn’t there.

I had one bag checked and made my way to the baggage claim and waited for my bag and, presumably, my father to arrive. Still – and again, this wasn’t a total surprise – after a few minutes I realized he was going to be a no-show – again, so I started to look for the way out to a taxi stand – when I saw her standing beside me.

“Goose?” she asked, looking me in the eye.

Now I need to step back for a moment and reinforce the nature of the sudden dilemma I found myself in. Recall, if you will, the following: me, aka, the poor, stupid kid, was locked up in a military school. I was fifteen, therefore what little mind I had was testosterone-addled and, so, due to my age I was little more than a moron. Finally, please consider the nature of the girl by my side. Blazing red hair, deepest brown eyes and skin so white you might have considered it blindingly so – were it not for the pale freckles that dappled her cheeks and nose. She reminded me of a teenaged Olivia de Havilland – you know, the doe-eyed Melanie from Gone With the Wind. She was, in other words, seriously good looking, or, as my father might have said, very easy on the eyes.

All of which does absolutely nothing to explain my response to her rather simple question.

Staring at her like, I assume, any moron might, I asked: “Are you married yet?”

She shook her head, startled, I think, by the absolute inanity of my reply, then tried again. “Goose? I can hardly recognize you… Is that really you in that silly uniform?”

“Goose. Yes. It’s me.” Let’s just ignore I was acting just like one, too, for the time being, anyway. She was smiling – at me – which I considered a lovelier experience than anything in all my previous fifteen years – if only because I knew that smile so well, and I knew what was behind the smile.

“Goodness!” she said. “You’re growing up fast! Your mom and dad are still at the country club, and he asked if I could swing by and pick you up.”

“How nice of him,” and I think I might have added, “to not abandon me at the airport.”

And she laughed, then looked at my uniform and scowled. “I hope you brought something else to wear…”

“Yes, by golly, I think I did.”

“A swimming suit, I hope?”

I shook my head, thinking of Christmas carols and mistletoe and the utter incongruity of the question. “Are you serious?”

That seemed to rattle her cage and her scowl deepened a bit more. “Well, maybe Rickie has a spare.”

“Rickie?”

“You know – little brother? You do remember him, don’t you? Or have you been hit in the head recently?”

“Yes, of course I remember him, but when did you start calling him Rickie?”

She shrugged. “He keeps talking about when you two built that model of the Titanic together.”

“How appropriate,” I said, and who knows, maybe I even smiled. “When was that, by the way?”

“Two summers ago!” she said, now acting exasperated. “Don’t you remember anything?”

And yes, clearly I did, but by this point it was too much fun yanking her chain. Still, I remembered that week two summers before very well. We were in Mexico City; we’d all flown down for one of my cousin’s wedding – and it was then that I’d seen Claire in a bathing suit for the first time. And yes, I seemed to recall building the Titanic too, and even that wedding, but the whole bathing suit thing had been, well, a primal moment.

“Oh yes,” I finally said, but I was suddenly thinking about her brother. He had been trying on girl’s shoes at the reception, walking around in them, then had asked my mother to put lipstick on his lips. As uncomfortable as the memory was, I remembered most of all going into a bathroom and finding him with a pair of woman’s panties stuffed under his nose, masturbating furiously – and yet I had no absolutely idea what he was up to – seriously, I kid you not. I was twelve, if I remember correctly, and I was, therefore, clueless about such things. Hell, I still was – at 15. Military school is not the place to send your kid if you want them to become sexually aware creatures. Military school is about repression and control, not expanding self-awareness, and I was, need I repeat myself, a moron when it came to all things human – like intuition. And yet, I suddenly wanted, and more than anything else in the world, to NOT wear that kid’s swimming suit. Maybe he was contagious…

“He’s really looking forward to seeing you again,” she said, smiling beatifically. “He’s been looking forward to your coming for weeks.”

“Ah,” I think I might have said, if a bit noncommittally – an image of him in heels floating in my mind’s eye…

“So…you only have one bag?”

I smiled, nodded in the affirmative. “Yup. I pack efficiently.” For the life of me, I have no idea why I said that.

“Well then,” she said, looking at me almost cross-eyed, “let’s go.”

Claire was then – almost – seventeen years old – going on twenty-five, if you know what I mean – and she had the type of body seen in renaissance paintings of the Madonna, which is to say that by today’s standards she was, well, plump. By 1960s standards, however, she was seriously cute, smooth curves in all the right places, and her legs reflected a potent athleticism all her own. She was New Orleans royalty, too, needless to say, and dressed like it in a white dress with big green and white magnolia blossoms printed all over the thing, white tights and little white flats – so her coppery hair literally blazed in fiery contrast.

Can you tell I was smitten? I mean – totally off the charts smitten? Of course I’m not sure it takes a whole lot to get a fifteen year old boy worked up, but she had done it, and had been doing it for years. Hell, she’d been driving me crazy all my life.

But could you even call it love – at fifteen? I thought so, but then again, I had been locked away in a military school for a year and a half – with zero contact between members of the opposite sex allowed – so that might have had something to do with the cascade of emotion I experienced walking beside her out to her car. Her car! – at sixteen, driving a silver Corvette Stingray – yet that car only made her seem more remote just then, even more inaccessible – and even more desirable.

I didn’t know the whole story back then, only bits and pieces, but her father had flown with mine during the war, and they’d come home best friends. As war receded from their lives they remained, for some reason, as close – if not closer – than ever, and as a result we traveled to New Orleans several times a year. Still, there’s was a friendship from afar, and as close as we were we only saw them a couple of times a year. Always lots of emotion, especially when we reunited, so as kids we had been primed to be close to one another.

And the Collins family owned several restaurants around New Orleans, all of them Very Big Deals, all very famous, their chefs celebrated as the best in New Orleans, so I grew up around that sort of thing – both at home and when we visited. I say at home because my mother was very impressed by all that nonsense, and she tried to incorporate an appreciation of fine dining into our lives at home – perhaps because she had grown up, barefoot I think, on a farm in dust bowl Oklahoma. She had finally made it into the big leagues, I guess, and wanted everyone to know it by the table she set. We were a military family, by the way, yet we didn’t move often. I’d spent the first few years of my life near Cape Hatteras, then we moved to California, just north of San Diego, so in my mind I was a California kid.

Ah, yes. Have you ever ridden in a seriously hot car with a gorgeous girl behind the wheel? Windows down, her skirt wafting in the slipstream, thighs so smooth and white you forgot where you were? I swear I’d never seen legs as gorgeous, and just looking at them I could feel my heart racing, my hands starting to shake. I know, it’s that whole fifteen thing, testosterone poisoning and all that, but seriously…those few moments are as vivid now as they were on that faraway day. She talked about Christmas, about the tree set up in their living room and the millions of presents all around it, and about her parents and mine playing golf out in Metairie. She asked me about school, wanted to know what it was like being locked up with several hundred boys and marching around like toy soldiers, then told me she was taking me to the hotel, and I was supposed to change clothes there – then she’d take me out to the country club.

And at one point while we were driving along she looked at me – and I guess I was still focused on those creamy white thighs – because when I looked up at her – she was looking at me with this odd expression on her face. And the look we exchanged just then? Oh…the feeling in the air between us! We had, literally, known each other all our lives, and in a way I’d considered her something almost like family – until that moment, anyway. Something changed between us just then, in that one split second. Some fundamental alteration of our orbits, some vital understanding of ourselves – a bit of knowledge you might call eternal, almost primal – had changed. She knew it, and so did I – and the next few minutes passed in silence – as we tried to come to terms with this unsteady new terrain.

She already had the key to my room and led me there after she parked on the street, then she opened the door – and put the key in her purse – as I carried my bag inside the room.

“Why don’t you take a shower now,” I remember her saying at one point, but I consciously unpacked my bag and put everything in drawers and closets – and she watched me as I did all that, never saying a word but staring at me like I had gone mad. Then, when I was finished she said: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so obsessively neat and organized in all my life. Have you always been like this?”

“You ever been to military school?”

She shook her head, looked at me while biting her lower lip – a little coquettishly. “You going to take a shower?” she said an eternity later – though she was still grinning.

“Yup.” I took some clothes into the bathroom and shut the door, turned on the water, the cold water I feel sure, and cleaned up. After I dressed I went out, saw her standing by the room’s lone window looking down the street.

“Look,” she said, “you can see the restaurant from here.” That place was our touchstone, where our lives had first come together, where her life was grounded, I assumed.

I went and stood next to her – and I swear I felt like spontaneous combustion was a distinct possibility as I looked out that window with her by my side – then she turned to me.

“You get cuter every year,” she whispered – and the pressure in my head grew so intense I thought my eyes were about to pop out of my head.

“Do I?”

She nodded, bit her lip again.

“You should see you the way I see you,” I whispered.

“Oh? How do you see me?”

“I’ll never love anyone the way I love you right now.”

She turned serious, nodded her head. “I think I’ve loved you since I was three years old. Your mother taught me how to diaper a baby – with you.”

And now look, I know…this is not how your usual romantic conversation usually starts, but we weren’t your typical star-crossed teenagers, either. We were, really, anything but. We were, rather, like the Titanic – steaming through the night unawares…and her brother had helped me build the damn thing!

I may have sighed, but she stepped close and kissed me before I could say anything else.

And she kissed me just once, though very softly, on the lips.

And then she turned back to the window, looked at all the people on the sidewalks below. Then she took my hand and leaned into me. We stood there for a while, looking at St Louis and Royal below, looking at the world passing us by – wondering, perhaps, when it was going to be our turn – but I turned then and kissed the top of her head. Affectionately, I think, is the word– perhaps brotherly, but that was the wrong note and she turned into me forcefully, and we looked at one another deeply for a while, and time stopped when we kissed that next time – and her kiss was not tentative, or sisterly. She broke away a few minutes later and I remember the look in her eyes: feral, animal-like, at once predator and pray, and I was at once mesmerized – and very nearly terrified. I’d never seen anything so powerful in my life, and I knew all that energy was directed at me. No, into me. I felt powerless as I floated within those eyes, dreaming impossible things, trying to breathe – and finding it harder and harder to do.

“We’d better go,” she said, and I nodded.

“Right,” I think I said, but in truth I’m not sure I was capable of speech yet.

Then the phone rang. I went and picked it up, her that voice.

“Dad?” I said to the voice on the other end of my line.

“Goose? How the Hell are you? Have a good flight? Golly, it’s sure good to hear your voice!”

“No, sir, no problems. How was the course?”

“Good. Grass is a little dry, but other than that, pretty decent. Say, we’re at the house now, so come on out when you can.”

He rang off and I turned to Claire.

She was still looking at me, her breathing very deep now, her eyes barely focused.

“I don’t want to leave yet,” she said.

“Okay.” I went back to her, into her arms, and I kissed an ear, felt glued to her.

“Have you done it yet?” she whispered, and I could tell she was shaking.

I shook my head, and maybe I was trembling a little myself.

“Good.” She walked over and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me, then she flipped her shoes off, still looking at me as I came to her.

I think we left to drive out to her parent’s place two hours later, and we were very different people than we had been just a few hours earlier.

+++++

Her brother Rickie was, oh, how do I say this? Different than the last time I’d seen him.

He was very feminine now. Can I say that and just leave you hanging there?

Hell, when I saw him I thought a new sister had just popped-up in their family, and no one was making the even the slightest effort to editorialize his appearance. He was almost a girl now, and I found the whole thing shocking, disconcerting, and to my fifteen year old self I felt way out of my depth, not to mention being – suddenly – very confused. I’d always known Richard, or Rickie, was a little different, but we’d thrown the football for days on end, talking football all the while, and we’d spent hours and hours together building all kinds of models – from Spitfires and Messerschmitts to, yes, our very own Titanic. We were the same age so there had always been this expectation we would, and should, spend time together – so we had – and over the years we had spent enough time together to know one another well enough. In truth I thought I knew him well enough to understand some pretty important things about his life, yet I’d never seen this coming.

Or hadn’t I?

The fascination with girls? Not them, but their things? The panties in the bathroom? His mother doting all over him, his father always ignoring him.

And now he was wearing clothes that seemed almost androgynous. Not quite male, yet somehow not quite female – and this at a time in my life when I had no idea there were such variations in human sexual identity. By that I simply mean I had not a clue there was such a thing as homosexuality, let alone all the other labels we now throw around so carelessly. Rickie had, therefore, gone from the realm of the comfortably known deep into a place I knew nothing about. I saw the kid I threw the football with in my mind’s eye, then with open eyes saw someone completely different.

And Claire looked at me looking at him, measuring me, I think, sizing me up. Wondering what I was going to do, perhaps, or say.

“Hey, Richard,” I said as I came into the living room. “How’re you doing, Amigo?” We’d started calling each other ‘Amigo’ down in Mexico City, and when I said that he brightened, ran into my arms and hugged me. I put my arms around him and hugged him too, and a collective sigh seemed to drift from our extended family into the evening. I went over and hugged Claire’s mother, Sarah Collins, then shook hands with her father, Dean, then went over and to hug my parents.

“Uh, we’re getting a little too old for that stuff now, Goose,” my father said as I walked up. He held out his right hand and I took it.

“Yessir,” I said, feeling almost compelled to salute.

“Goose, if you shake my hand,” my mother said, “I’ll just cry!” – and everyone laughed. Everyone, that is, but Rickie. I looked at him a moment later and he was looking at my father, and I could see he trying very hard not to cry.

+++++

We went to dinner at their restaurant at St Louis and Royal later that evening, and I sat between Claire and Rickie, my parents across from me, and their was a familiarity about the arrangement that was at once comfortable – yet surreal. The old dining room with it’s dark oak walls and deep red accents, the waiters I’d known since I was old enough to walk, even the aromas wafting about all seemed steeped in fond memory, at once latent and manifest, memory that had accompanied me all my life. Yet now I felt trapped, felt there was nowhere to go, no place to hide as contradictory impulses hovered all around me. Claire was there, as she had for a dozen Christmas Eve dinners, yet so too was Rickie, but who was he now? His proximity was unnerving, unsettling, and instead of warm and comfortable I felt on edge.

Run, I thought, or wait and see what developed. Flight or flight…it’s always the same.

Yet everywhere around me I felt Claire’s lingering presence. As she had just a few hours before – we were together now. We were the same, yet different. And I realized that’s how my world felt now: the same, yet different. Very different.

I was in love. And something was wrong with Rickie.

I was in love with Claire. And she was in love with me. Not the make-believe, pretend bullshit we talked about in the dorm back at school in the middle of the night. No, to me this felt like real love, the forever kind of love that hits hard, more like an instinctual drive at fifteen. I was gripped by this thing, and yet I knew I was the one who couldn’t let go. What the Hell was this all about?

And Rickie sat beside me, as close as he dared, trying to get a sense of what had happened between Claire and I. I think he was as unsettled by our appearance as my father was, but it was Dean Collins that interested me most. He stared at Claire from time to time, and I could tell he was lost in contradiction, and his appetite was off.

Dinner had, of course, been ordered months ahead of time, as it was every year: Oysters Bienville and lobster bisque and several whole roasted geese, truly a feast of epic proportions – as it was in the beginning, I guess – yet from time to time I felt her hand on my thigh, drawing little electric circles with fingernails, playfully getting closer than close, and once I saw Rickie looking down, and then he smiled at me. Like he understood, like he had known all about us from the beginning of time. Like he was in on an inside joke – and I wasn’t, not yet.

It was like, when he saw her doing that with her fingers, he realized all was right in his little corner of the universe. All was as it should be. Except it wasn’t. Not even close.

He tapped me on the shoulder at one point and leaned close, bid me to lean closer still, then he whispered in my ear. I remember the feeling, how he got so close his lips were tickling my ear, and then he sighed, told me he loved me more than anything in the world, and that he always would.

I’m not sure what I looked like, but a moment later my mother asked if I was feeling alright. I shook my head and excused myself, then headed aft through the labyrinth of private dining rooms to the restrooms. And a moment later I felt him coming up behind me, trying to catch up.

“Goose. Wait up,” he said, and suddenly the last place I wanted to be was alone with him in a bathroom, so I ducked into a large green dining room, one reserved for real royalty, and he followed me in, shut the door behind us. Then Claire came in, too, almost out of breath – and she locked the door behind us.

“What’s going on with you two?” she asked.

I shook my head, turned away.

“I told him how I feel about him,” her brother said.

“Oh,” she said, and I could hear it her voice. Then she looked at me, a million questions in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know what’s going on here. And I don’t know how to feel right now.”

“I just wanted you to know, Goose,” he said, tears now forming in his eyes, “because you’ve always been my best friend, and this is, after all, Christmas.”

“Christmas?” I cried. “What has Christmas got to do with this?”

Claire nodded her head. “Oh,” she sighed. “I get it.”

“Do you?” Rickie said, looking right at me.

“Sure. We’ve spent almost every Christmas together. Since we were kids.”

“I look forward to Christmas, every year,” Richard said, nodding his head, “because that’s when we’re together, the three of us. And I love it when we’re together, I love this feeling more than anything else in the world.”

I turned and looked at him.

“That’s all I meant, Goose. Really. It just came out wrong.”

I was not convinced. No, not at all, but we went back to the table together and finished our very special dinner, but when I looked at Richard, Rickie, I could see a light had gone from his eyes, that I had done something terrible to him – and that I really didn’t understand any of it. Claire seemed sympathetic to us both, maybe my mother did too, but it was the look in my father’s eyes that unsettled me most of all. He looked at me, then Rickie, and I could see his jaw working.

Never a good sign, if you know what I mean.

And I saw Dean Collins looking at Claire as we left, and the sorrow in his eyes was the most barren landscape I’d ever seen in my life.

+++++

We rode back to the hotel together in silence, my parents and I, and the silent routine continued in the elevator. I said goodnight when my floor came, and I looked at my father as the door closed and knew this night was far from over. I walked down to my room and realized I didn’t have the key – but the door was open, the lights on inside – and despite very real misgivings I went inside.

She was waiting for me, of course.

“My father will be down here in a second,” I said, yet she didn’t move. She looked at me, love manifest in her every breath, but she just looked right into my eyes.

“I know,” was, in fact, all she said – and those two words came out as a whispered plea.

And true to form, Brigadier General Amos Wainwright, USMC, came strolling into the room a minute later.

And when he saw Claire, he came to a shuddering halt.

“What are you doing here, young lady?”

“Waiting to talk to you, sir,” she said.

There was pure electricity in the air now, pregnant expectation hanging in the air, apparent.

“Indeed,” he said. “Well, you have the floor, so fire away.”

“Your son is not a homosexual,” she said, and I could see my old man visibly relax.

“Oh? What was all that with your brother at the table? Or,” he almost sneered, “should I say – your sister.”

“What?” I cried. “What do you mean, sister?”

And then the three of us sat. We sat and talked for hours, and for the second time that day I knew my understanding of life had been altered forever. We talked about the facts of life, variations as my father understood them, then variations as Claire understood them. We came to crossroads and impossible canyons, and we worked our to an understanding. A complete understanding, I think my father hoped, but as it so often was in the beginning, he was wrong. We weren’t even close. Yet.

And before my father left us in the night, he did a very funny thing.

He called room service, had a bottle of champagne brought to my room. He tipped the waiter, opened the bottle and set it back in the ice, then looked at us and winked. “Don’t forget,” he said, “we’re opening presents at eight.” Then he left us, shut the door on his way out and I looked at Claire.

“I think he’s celebrating,” she said, “the fact that you’re not in love with Rickie.”

“I think I am too,” I managed to say.

She smiled, then looked at me for a long while. “Would you know if you were?”

“What? In love with your brother?”

“She’s not my brother anymore, remember?”

“I know, I know…it’s just going to take me time to make the switch, you know?”

“It’s taken all of us a long time.”

“That’s not what he meant, was it?” I asked. “At dinner, I mean, when he said that.”

She shook her head. “No. She loves you, just like I love you.”

I remember swallowing hard, thinking about all the implications of those words. “You know what the hardest thing was – about today?”

She shook her head, grinned.

“Well, the easiest thing was realizing that I love you, but it was the hardest thing too.”

“Oh? How so?”

“I think I’ve wanted to love you all my life. Then it just happened, all this,” I said, sweeping the room with my hands, “and now I can’t believe this day really happened. Like maybe it was all a dream.”

“I know.” She looked at me then, an odd look in her eyes. “Do you think this is really real?”

“What do you mean?”

“Today. That what we did was real. That it really happened?”

“It sure felt real.”

She nodded her head. “Good. It did to me too.”

“I’ve never had this stuff before,” I said, lifting the glass of gold bubbles to my nose. “You know, I think I know the reason why.”

She giggled. “It’s not so bad. Once you get used to it.”

We talked through the night, talked about life and what we wanted. All the things we’d never talked about before, and sometime before the sun came up we finished the bottle, then we showered again and drove out to Metairie. And I never wanted to get used to this. Never take her – or this feeling that had come to us – for granted.

+++++

There’s always been something enchanted about our Christmas mornings, something beyond all the presents and flurries of wrapping paper scattered about the floor. Something about the all-knowing gaze of our parents watching us, about that moment, I guess, when we could forget about the day-to-day grind of school for a moment and reach out with our other, more generous selves. And I think I felt that way for the very last time that Christmas morning.

I spent that morning, at least in part, watching Claire, but I watched Richard too. Fragile, resolute Richard. Rickie, my friend. The kid I threw the football with, who helped me build model airplanes. The kid who had reached out to me the night before, the kid who’d had to cover his tracks when I pushed his love away, out of sight, out of mind.

We, the kids, had never exchanged presents before, if only because our parents loaded the tree with more than enough to go around, but that morning Rickie went to the tree and pulled out a present and brought it to me.

“From me,” he said, and I looked at him for a moment.

“Thanks, Amigo,” I said, then I opened it and found a book about the Battle of Britain inside. I opened the book and found the inscription I knew he’d written, and I turned the words over carefully in my mind. ‘For all the battles yet to come,’ he’d written, then, ‘I’ll always love you, my bestest Amigo.’

Claire came over and read the inscription, then she squeezed my shoulder, nodded at a package on the carpet by my side, so I picked it up. It was from me, and oddly enough to Rickie, and when I looked up at her she smiled, nodded at her brother. I got up and walked over, handed him the package and he looked up, surprised, then tore it open.

He’d always loved art, and he had become a somewhat gifted painter over the last few years, so ‘my book’ from The Art Institute of Chicago was a hit – but then he turned to the inscription and read ‘my’ words. He dropped the book and flew into my arms, kissed me once on the cheek then ran back to his book and carried it over for Claire to look at. She of course sat by me so I could look at it while she read…

There was an old Polaroid of the three of us taped inside, taken when Rickie and I were, perhaps, three years old. We were sitting in a wading pool somewhere in Canada – at the Banff Springs Hotel, I think –and you could tell there was something special between the three of us, something special about the way we smiled, a secret kind of smile, as if only we knew what was hiding in those lips. ‘To my bestest Amigo’ was inscribed, and though I had a hard time remembering when we’d first started saying that to each other, it had been going on for a long, long time. We had always been the ‘bestest,’ hadn’t we? Joined at the heart, somewhere along the way.

A chef from one of Dean’s restaurants was whipping up something in the kitchen, so the parents went off to the living room and drank coffee while the three of us went out back and looked at all the stuff we’d just gotten our hands on. Dad had given me a couple of Perry Como records, Mom a bottle of Bay Rum cologne, the little glass bottle wrapped in straw. Dean Collins, on the other hand, had given me a fancy Italian 20 gauge over/under shotgun – and I had to (guiltily, no doubt) wonder about the prescience of his choice – or, perhaps, the word I needed was irony. It was a gorgeous thing, and he made noises about wanting to go bird hunting with me and my father some day soon, but now – sitting out on their patio with books in hand –and a shotgun across my lap – my feelings felt oddly disconnected from the moment.

Watching Claire, and her father, the night before had left me unsettled, then talking through the night about all the things I didn’t know or understand about our world had left me wandering in the dark. I was groping my way through this morning, more attuned to the people around me than was the norm, for me, anyway. And shotguns aside, there was something about Dean Collins and his smug restauranteur act that was weighing heavily on my day.

Rickie excused himself and went inside, leaving Claire and I alone on the patio, and when she came over and sat by me I reached into a pocket and pulled out a band-aid.

“Gotta cut?” she asked.

“Nope. Could I see your left hand, please.”

I unwrapped the band-aid and she gave me her hand; I put the bandage around the third finger and looked her in the eye. “I know this is stupid, and I know I’m young enough to know better, but this is all I’ve got right now. Would you marry me?”

I think she was speechless. I think she had good reason to be speechless, then she just nodded her head. “Yes,” she said, “if you’re sure that’s what you really want.”

“I know I’m sure. What about you?”

“Since I was three. Yes.”

And just then I saw my father standing in their living room, looking through a window at the two of us, and I’d never seen a smile on his face quite like the one I did just then. It was an all-knowing smile, full of worldly understanding yet almost condescending – like he’d expected no less of me than such a vapid display of immaturity. He stared at us for a minute longer, then disappeared, and Claire kissed me on the cheek. Rickie opened a window up in his bedroom just above us, then he leaned out and asked me to come up for a minute.

“Just you, okay?” he added.

“Okay.”

I almost remembered the way to his room, and after one false start found it and went on in. There was a girl sitting on the bed, a really very pretty girl, then I saw it was Richard – my bestest Amigo Rickie. I stared open-mouthed for a moment, at his legs in stockings and garters, his high heels and makeup understated, almost classy. He looked satisfied with my reaction, too.

“Are you growing breasts?” I asked.

He nodded his head. “This is who I really am, Goose,” he said, still looking at my face, still gauging my reaction. “Just so you know.”

Speechless, I nodded my head.

“Am I as cute as Claire? To you, I mean?”

“Rickie, no one’s as cute as Claire. To anyone.”

He nodded his head. “You really do love her, don’t you?”

“Yup. I think I always have.”

“I know you have.”

“So, what’s this all about, Richard?”

“You’d better call me Rebecca from now on. It’ll be official soon enough, anyway.”

“Rebecca?”

“Yes. I’ve always loved that name.”

“You really want this?”

“Not a question of wants and needs,” he sighed. “It’s just who I am.”

“Well, who’s going to build models with me now?” I asked, smiling.

“Me. You let anyone else help and you’ll need a doctor to get my foot out of your ass.” He looked at me for a minute, hesitated, then said “Claire didn’t come home last night. Was she with you?”

“She was with me and my dad. We had a long talk last night.”

“About?”

“About how stupid I can be sometimes.”

“Oh. I’ve had that one with my dad, too. She told me a while ago she hoped you’d come around.”

“Come around?”

“To see just how much she loves you.”

“Oh.”

“Do you?”

“I do.”

“You know, since we were in Mexico all I’ve wanted is for the three of us to be together.”

“How so?”

“Just that. I don’t think I could ever be happy unless you were both with me.”

I looked at him, wondered where he was going with this. “What do you mean?”

“Just that.”

“Don’t you want someone of your own to love?”

“No, not really. I’ll always have the two of you, so why would I need anyone else?” And he smiled then, a smile I’ll never forget. Not an innocent smile – and almost, but not quite sinister, his was rather an all-knowing smile – like he alone was in on one of the universe’s most obscure secrets. Or jokes.

So, feeling very uncomfortable, I nodded and left his room, walked downstairs and back out on the porch – all while trying to get the image of him sitting up there out of my mind. I sat for a while, by myself, then went in and ate lunch in silence. Claire and Rickie sat across from me, and I sat between my parents. I rode back to the hotel with them after lunch, and went up to my room while Mom and Dad retreated to the comfort of golf on the television set. A few hours later I heard a knock on my door, and got up to open it, yet I checked the peephole first.

Paranoid?

Nah…

And Claire was out there, looking very lonely in the distorted, fisheye perspective of the cheap lens, and I grew lost in that moment – didn’t quite know what to do. In the end I opened the door and she darted inside, went to a chair by the window and sat – and I could tell she’d been crying – for a long time.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, though I could guess.

“What did Rickie tell you?” she said, her eyes now swirling maelstroms.

I told her. Everything he’d said when I was up in his room, then: “Why do you think he wants the two of us to himself?”

She looked away, and I knew.

“Has he done something to you?”

Again, she refused to even look at me.

“You said something yesterday, that you’d never done it before. Is that true?”

She closed her eyes, shook her head.

“Could you tell me how it happened?”

I saw just the slightest, most imperceptible shake of her head.

“Do you love me? I mean, really love me?”

“Yes,” she whispered, but she started crying. Lost, and crying in the dark…looking for someone to love.

“That’s all that matters, isn’t it?” I squeezed into the chair beside her and we held one another for the longest time – until I heard another little knock on the door. She tensed as I stood, then I walked over and looked through the peephole, saw my father standing in the fishbowl and opened the door just a bit.

“Your mother’s gone to visit Jack Daniels,” he sighed, despairing of her alcoholism one more time. “I was going to go down and walk Bourbon Street for a while, and wondered if you’d like to come along.” He tried to look into the room but didn’t force the issue, then he added: “Both of you, of course.”

I turned and looked at Claire, who nodded her head.

“Yeah, Dad. How ‘bout we meet you in the lobby – in just a minute?”

“I’ll wait by the elevators. Take your time.”

“Okay,” I said – knowing that ‘take your time’ meant ‘move it – on the double time!” so I helped Claire get her eyes back in shape and grabbed a coat, then we walked down to the elevators.

Dad took one look at her eyes and shook his head, but we rode down to the lobby in silence. Once out on Royal we found a slate gray sky and a cold mist waiting, and I took my jacket off, put it around her shoulders – and I found dad trying to do the same – but he looked at me and just nodded his approval, then we walked off together, disappeared into the jostling crowd. He led us to a small, quiet club off Jackson Square, and we went inside – drawn by the music, I suspect. Mellow jazz, dark and moody greeted us as we took a table, and a waitress came over and Dad ordered a bottle of something – and three glasses.

“Now what the devil is going on with you two?” he said.

I looked at her. She looked at me and nodded, and I told him what I knew. He shook his head here and there, wrinkled his nose in disgust when I got to the point where I laid out what I’d surmised was going on with Rickie, then he looked at her carefully.

“Claire, I need to know, right now,” he said, looking her in the eye, “is this the God’s honest truth?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, looking him in the eye.

“How long has this been going on?”

“A while.”

“Nope, not good enough,” he said. “I need to know the truth, the whole truth.”

She looked at him, or tried to, anyway. “Right after Mexico,” she managed to say.

“Does your father know?”

And she looked away then, started crying openly. She tried to speak a minute later, but was choked up – and had nowhere left to go.

“Claire, what are you trying to tell me?”

“My father,” she gasped, then she broke down completely and he got up, went around to her and held her.

“What is it, baby,” he said. “What about your father?”

And she whispered in his ear.

And my father turned to stone. Magmatic stone, white-hot and seething. The waitress came to the table and my father poured one massive drink, then he drilled it down in one go – all this with one hand, mind you – while he cradled that girl to his breast and held on to her for dear life.

I knew the look in his eye. I pitied the Japanese that came upon him when he had that look in his eye, then the North Koreans and now, apparently, the North Vietnamese were about to get a dose of him, as well. I couldn’t even imagine what she’d told him, but she’d rattled the foundations of Hell, and I knew all Hell was about to break loose, too.

“Goose, pour yourself one. Just one. We’ve got to get this girl back to your room, then you and I have got a few things we need to tend to.”

“Yessir.”

“Darlin’? You want a snort?”

“No, sir.”

We went back out into the night and walked to the hotel in the mist, and I took her upstairs while he got a taxi, and when I came downstairs he was waiting for me. We drove in silence out to Metairie, and when we got to the Collins house he asked the Cabbie to wait, gave him a twenty then we walked up to the door.

Dean came on the second ring.

“Well, what brings you two…?”

“One question, Dean,” my father said, and Collins could see the molten fury in my father’s eyes. “Just how long have you been fucking your daughter?”

“I…what?”

“No bullshit, Collins. I’ve been with your daughter for the past two hours, and I’ve been all ears. You tell me the truth right now and you just might live to see the dawn. Lie to me just one more time and I’m going to tear you a new ass.”

We listened as the beaten old man spoke for a minute or so, then my father turned in disgust and was about to walk away – but he turned back and let slip a left that caught Collins under the left eye. He recoiled through the closed front door – blowing the door off it’s hinges – and my father followed him inside, throwing him through doors and walls and over tables for about fifteen minutes – until the police came, anyway.

They were going to arrest my old man, until a captain showed up and listened to my father’s explanation – and looked at his DoD identification.

All the Collins family restaurants closed a few weeks later, though they reopened soon enough – with Dean Collins still in charge. Richard stayed with his mother after the divorce, though he did indeed become Rebecca somewhere along the way.

I went back to Wisconsin, of course, while my parents moved to Washington, D.C., after dad was posted to the Pentagon – something to do with running the air war in Vietnam, I think I heard once.

Claire? She moved to D.C. and lived with my parents, and a year and a half later she graduated, went to Notre Dame – where she studied chemistry, of all things, before going to medical school in San Francisco. I assumed she liked the certainties of chemical bonds over the frailties of familial ties, but I wasn’t sure. We wrote letters to one another from time to time, but we seemed destined to drift apart after that night. I think life became too painful for all of us, especially my father. She never saw her father again, of course, and didn’t go to the funeral after his suicide, and she wouldn’t see her mother if Rickie was anywhere around.

Or so I heard, once. I was, you see, completely out of the picture by that point.

I ended up in school at UC Berkeley, got there just in time to get tear-gassed a couple of times, and I studied just enough to get nowhere so joined the Navy – which pissed off my old man no end, but I made it through OCS and learned to fly – which, I think, kind of made him happy. I did my five and came home, got a job with TWA and started thinking about what might come next. Still, being a moron, I was clueless. I’d never put two and two together.

I called my dad one Sunday afternoon after I moved to Boston and asked about Claire. He gave me her number and I called. A week later I had a some time off so flew back to San Francisco, and she said she’d meet me at the gate.

It was a bluebirds day when I arrived, a pure San Francisco special. Fog out beyond the Golden Gate, air so clear over the bay it seemed you could see forever. I was flying the right seat those days, and it took a while to clean up and leave the airplane. I’d explained what was up to my captain and he smiled, wished me good luck then went to dispatch to sort out all the paperwork, leaving me to walk up the Jetway, wondering if she would show up.

I, of course, didn’t recognize her. Clueless and moron, by this point, ought to be words that come to mind.

“Goose?” she asked. “Is that you? I can barely recognize you in that silly uniform!”

And, so, I was staring at her like, I assume, any moron might, but all I could think to ask was: “Are you married yet?”

And she held up her left hand.

Around the third finger I saw a nasty old band-aid – and beyond, her smile.

“No,” she said, “not yet.”

And for just the third time in my life, I knew she had changed my course forever.

(C)2017 | adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is, of course, pure fiction. all person(s), character(s), and organization(s) portrayed are simply fictitious, and do not in any way represent any real person or organization.

Sitting with my six o’clock coffee, Heidi at my feet, and I’m too tired of snow to even talk about it anymore. There’s no end in sight…it just keeps falling. We have forecasts for sun and still it keeps falling.

So, a WIP of sorts today, going back to Dallas and to those wacky, cop-killing ninjas I introduced in Predator a year or so ago (over at LIT). This part of the story begins a few months later, so if you haven’t read the original, I’d suggest you give that old effort a try before starting this new one, as I don’t think this tale will make any sense at all without those other character details semi-fresh in your mind. Without giving too much of the plans for this story away, the idea is to incorporate elements from the Seattle story developed in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Things could get messy. Fun, even.

But, unfortunately, this post is but a single chapter in an evolving story, and it leaves you hanging at the end. Sorry. I hate doing that, really I do, but juggling several stories at the same time precludes posting huge ‘Mr Christian’ style arcs with real frequency. Besides, posting snippets and reading comments helps get a sense of what’s good, and not so good, about a new story. So, yes, I really do pay close attention to comments and emails.

Anyway, happy reading.

+++++

Predator II: Black Shadows, Shadows Dancing

She sat at her desk, listening to the man drone on about his wife. About how the wretched woman just didn’t understand him. How she never wanted to have sex anymore. How life had become totally empty, devoid of all meaning, all happiness.

She looked at this little maggot and wanted to laugh. ‘Have you looked in a mirror lately, you fat slob,’ she wanted to say. ‘Who’d want to fuck you? Who the hell would want to understand your pathetic, empty life? Jerking off to porn in the basement at two in the morning? Not even having the balls to jerk off in her face? Hiding in the shadows, afraid of your own shadow – all the shadows in your life…?’

“Well, Mr Peterson,” she said after she’d listened to about as much as she could, “it looks like our hour’s about up. I’d like you to reflect on some of the strategies we discussed today, and keep writing in your journal.”

“Okay. How do you think I’m doing?”

“Fine, Mr Peterson. Just fine.”

“How many more sessions do we have?”

She looked at her appointment app, scanned his court-ordered sentence. “Another eight weeks ‘til your next mandated evaluation. Then I make my report to the court.”

“You think I’ll do okay?”

“I can’t discuss these matters with you, Mr Peterson. You know that, so please don’t make me remind you again.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Now, it’s time for you to leave. I’ll see you next Friday, at ten.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

He even walked like a worm, she thought as he stood and made ready to leave, but he turned and looked at her – tried to look at her, anyway – but she was behind her desk and so denied him the view he sought.

He’d been sneaking down in the middle of the night to jerk off to online porn for years, then one night his wife came down – quietly – and caught him in the act. She belittled him for days after, until one evening he couldn’t take it anymore. After a long string of insults he snapped, and he pushed his wife against the wall and screamed at her. He’d fallen to the floor, crying, and she’d called the police.

Domestic violence wasn’t tolerated in this city, Judge Thornton Thomas told him at one point during his sentencing, and in addition to the twenty-five hundred dollar fine – as well as all court costs – he’d been sentenced to six months of psychiatric counseling – again, at his own expense. And then, of course, his wife had filed for divorce, so now he was living in a flop-house near a warehouse district by the airport. He could at least walk to work these days, flipping burgers at a nearby fast food place, which was a good thing – as he’d lost his car after being fired from his job.

But now he was infatuated with this psychiatrist – Dana Devlin – and her endlessly long legs. She usually left her office just after their session, and he knew this because he waited and watched for her, and a limo would usually be waiting for her just outside her office building. It would whisk her to TV studios downtown, where she had a syndicated noon-time call-in self-help program, where she would discuss issues surrounding domestic violence and substance abuse – with a nationwide audience. He liked to watch her as she left the building, liked the feeling of hiding and watching her surreptitiously, but he loved looking at her long legs and high heels most of all.

So he was waiting for her downstairs this morning, behind some trees not far away, and he watched her as she walked out, watched her legs as she turned and climbed into the limo, and he relished that one fleeting moment most of all – when, with one leg remained outstretched her skirt rose up, revealing stocking tops and garters. He shuddered when he caught that glimpse this morning, wanted to crawl home and turn on his laptop.

But no, not today. Today he wanted to see more, so he caught the bus downtown – with a smile on his very happy face.

+++++

“Yes,” Devlin said to the camera, “bi-polar disorder has become, I’m afraid, a too-broad definition, a catch-all phrase being used to justify all manner of inexcusable behavior. Like a doctor’s note to get you out of gym, it’s become almost trendy, and now, today, people are calling themselves bi-polar without any sort of formal diagnosis, thinking their swings in mood can be excused away with a shrug and a smile – and a hastily contrived diagnosis. So, the point I’m trying to make is simply this, if someone is indeed bi-polar, they need medication, they need treatment, and that won’t happen without seeking help from a qualified medical professional. Absent that, people need to stop self-diagnosing the problem, and applying labels they simply do not understand.”

“Okay,” the show’s host said, “this has been The Help Desk, with Dr Dana Devlin. This is Dick Durban, and we’ll be back next week with a frank examination at post-pubescent bed-wetting, and what you can do to move on from suffering the consequences of this humiliating nighttime scourge.”

The lights dimmed and Devlin unclipped her mic and set it on the desk in front of her, then leaned over and thanked Durban.

“You coming tonight?” she asked.

“Oh, wouldn’t miss it,” he said, smiling.

“Good,” she said, then she left the studio, stopped off at the gym before going out for the evening. She did not, apparently, notice she was being followed as she went inside.

+++++

He had been planning this night all week, and now it was time. He was going to follow her, wait until she was alone then take her. He’d been looking on from afar for too long, he told himself, and she had given him the courage he’d need to see this night through. He was sitting in the back of the taxi he’d called when she came out, and it fell in behind her Mercedes as it took off from the gym.

+++++

They had been waiting until night fell, and perhaps a half hour after the sun set a rope dropped noiselessly from the roof, and two shadows slipped through the night and into Peterson’s grimy little room.

They left a half hour later, the contents of his computer downloaded onto a card.

+++++

He looked up as a jet roared by just overhead, and barely made it in a back door without being caught; he followed the driving beat of the music down into an obscure basement and slipped unnoticed to the back of the room, his heart racing as he looked at the action on the floor. He saw her down there, dressed in latex and PVC – everything black, everything shiny, almost wet looking – even the huge phallus she had just strapped-on was shiny-wet and black.

Then he saw the judge – his judge – down there on the floor, strapped down to a high bench. She was whipping him – savagely, too, he thought – then she moved between the jurist’s splayed legs and planted her strap-on over his anus – and plunged-in – then began mercilessly pounding the man’s ass. When he cried-out in pain she only whipped him more fiercely.

He pulled out his phone, slipped it into video mode and began recording, and after just a few minutes he slipped back out of the building and disappeared into the night.

Shadows within shadows watched his movements, and one broke off and retraced his steps into the building, into the basement. She came out a few minutes later and her team disappeared into waiting shadows.

+++++

The next week, at his scheduled therapy session, she noticed he was looking at her differently – almost leering at her, she thought.

“What would you like to talk about today, Mr Peterson,” she started, unsure of his mood.

“I’d like you to call me Pete.”

She smiled. “Oh? Why?”

“First, could you tell me the difference between love and lust?”

She seemed amused at this new line of thought. “What’s on your mind today?”

“It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I’ve been thinking about what might be different between the two.”

“Well, what do you think the difference is?”

“That’s not my question, Dana.”

“I’ve told you before, Mr Peterson, I’d prefer that you refer to me by my title.”

“I really don’t care what you want me to call you, Dana. I would like you to tell me the difference between love and lust.”

She looked into his eyes and unconsciously crossed her arms over her lap, then caught herself and sighed. “The difference, you say?”

“Yes. How are they different?”

“Well, love is about continuity, about seeking permanence in your life, while lust is all about the moment, impulses and needs. I’d say lust is more about impermanence, instant gratification, while love is about long term fulfillment. Now, Pete, what’s this all about?”

“I’d like to show you something, and I wonder if you could conjure up a definition of hypocrisy out of your black hat.” He stood, took out his phone and came close to her desk, turned it on and opened up the video player. He put the phone on her desk and pressed play…

She leaned over, picked the phone up and watched the images unfold; her hands began to shake, a line of perspiration formed on her brow. When the recording stopped he took the phone and returned to his chair.

“Interesting,” she said. “So. You’ve been following me.”

“No, I’ve had a private detective following you and Thornton.”

She smiled at his bluff. “What do you want?”

“Right now? Right now, I want to fuck you in the ass. When I’m finished I want a letter from you making all this go away. A week from now, I want to read about that fucking judge’s resignation from the bench, and it better be front page news.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all. And I’m assuming you think I’m a moron. That I haven’t taken precautions to make sure this video shows up all over the internet if something happens to me. I could disappear, you know, or men in white coats could show up at work, throw me to the ground and put me in a straight-jacket, take me to the funny farm. Just let me tell you if anything like that happens to me, you and the judge are going viral. Youtube city, if you get my drift, and that’ll be just for starters.”

“And if we comply?”

“I hit delete.”

“Simple as that, huh? And we get to trust you, that you won’t publish?”

“Simple as that.”

The shadows listened intently now, confirming all their recording devices had good signal.

Devlin turned in her chair, hit a button and all the drapes in her office closed, the lights dimmed.

“Pete?”

“Yes?”

“Take off your clothes, Pete. And from now on, when you answer me, you’ll say only ‘yes, mistress,’ or ‘no, mistress.’ Is that understood?”

“Sorry, but no. I’m not playing that game with you.”

“Pete? Please? Just play along a little, would you? Make it easy for me?”

“Well…”

“Pete? Get your clothes off, then I need you to come over and lick my legs, suck my toes.”

“Uh…well…if you insist…”

“Oh, Pete…I had no idea your cock was SO big…”

And still the shadows listened.

+++++

He wasn’t exactly sure, but to him it almost looked as if someone had been in his room. Nothing too out of place – not exactly – but just enough, and he had to admit he hadn’t counted on this. He went to his laptop and opened it up, and everything – seemed – okay… So why this feeling?

He saw a shadow, or thought he did, and he turned, looked out the window –

“What the fuck!” he screamed. “Who the fuck are you?!”

It, what ever it was, looked like a giant, black owl – like something out of one of those Whitley Strieber books he’d used to read.

An alien, he said to himself, now sure someone, or something, had been in his room – and suddenly he rubbed the back of his head again and again – for he had been sure, once, that he’d been abducted, and that they’d implanted something in his skull.

Now, the more he thought about it, the more aliens made sense. Who else could have told Molly he was in the basement? How else could he have run into a psychiatrist as warped as Devlin, a judge as twisted as Thornton? They had to be in on it, all of them, and he bet they had been, for years, from the beginning.

That spot on his head was itching now, and he was sure he could feel it getting hot. They had to be transmitting now, transmitting instructions to him. Again. That’s why it was getting hot – that had to be the reason. He felt the room spinning, his eyeballs starting to itch – and he wanted to scratch them out of his head – because the noise was getting so loud now, the voices so insistent…

+++++

“What the fuck’s going on with him now?” one of the shadows said.

“I don’t think he took his meds this morning,” another one said.

Yet another laughed.

“No, I’m serious,” the second one said. “I don’t think he took anything, and two of them are anti-psychotics.”

“Too bad for him,” the first said. “Look, he’s going to whack-off again!”

“I can’t fucking believe this guy. It’s like anything sets him off.”

“This is like the third time so far today…”

“Did you see the recording from her office?”

“No. What about it?”

“He popped her in the can, then blew a load all over her face. He made her lick the shit off his dick after.”

“That woman has no pride.”

“I think she’s desperate.”

“You’d have to be fucking desperate to let that cretin anywhere near your asshole.”

“You should’ve seen what was on his hard drives.”

“I don’t want to know. Did the committee reach a decision?”

“Yes. He made the list, too.”

“Well, one more won’t make much difference, I guess.”

“No, it won’t.”

They had been in the basement earlier that day, and the team had epoxied all the windows shut, then had placed shaped charges in the ceiling, taped to a dozen 20 pound LPG tanks. No, it wouldn’t matter at all…

+++++

She had invited Pete to tonight’s event – “just to show you there are no hard feelings!” – and she’d picked him up a little before eight, driven him to the warehouse. A jet taking off from Love Field flew by just overhead as she got out of her Mercedes, and he followed her to the front door, then past the security guard beside the basement stairs. She led him downstairs to the main playroom and told him to make himself comfortable while she changed into her play clothes, or so she called them. He looked around, didn’t see Thornton anywhere, and for some reason that bothered him. Someone handed him a drink and he tossed it down, then walked over and looked at a girl being sodomized by someone in a gorilla suit…but no, he was pretty sure it was an alien on top of the girl…then the room started to spin, he felt like he was about to suffocate – then the room went dark.

+++++

They’d watched as Thornton and Devlin tied him down to a bench, then as someone gave him an injection. He’d begun to come around after that, but he was gagged now, and they couldn’t make out more than a few words that Devlin and Thornton were saying.

Soon Thornton walked over to Peterson, and they noted he had a large cordless drill in his hand; the judge put the drill above Peterson’s ear and pulled the trigger…

“You know,” one of the shadows said, “I really don’t want to watch this…”

“So, hit the detonator – whenever you’re ready.”

+++++

“Southwest 227, taxi to position and hold.”

“227”

“227, clear for take off. Contact departure one two two niner and good night.”

“227, two-two-niner. Rolling.”

“Give me ninety eight percent.”

“Ninety eight.”

“Helluva crosswind tonight.”

“Yup. Passing eighty. One-ten. EP at ninety eight. V-one – and rotate!”

“Positive rate, gear up.”

“Gear up…what the hell was that?!”

“Uh, Southwest 227, this is the Tower. Looks like a large explosion under you at this time. Lot’s of flame and airborne debris.”

“Tower, 227, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! We’ve lost number two engine, lost primary hydraulics, and we’re getting fire alarms from the cargo deck. We’re gonna try a right turn, try for runway three six.”

“227, say souls on board.”

“48, Tower. We’re three eight zero A-G-L, have about 5–5 percent on number one, can’t hold a climb at this weight.”

“Roger, 227, emergency services notified.”

“What the hell was that?,” the Captain said. “Did ATC say they saw an explosion?”

“I think so. Felt like a large IED.”

“Hit the APU, deploy the RAT.”

“Got it.”

“Might as well start dumping fuel, too. Okay, I’ve got Harry Hines and Mockingbird, I’m going to line up off them. Start reading off the radar altimeter, would you?”

“2-7-0 feet, gears still down and three green, flaps at twenty. Now 2-5-0 AGL, rate of descent is 3-5-0 feet per…”

“Landing gears are going to come right off at this weight.”

“Now 2-1-0 feet, speed 1-7-7, rate of descent now 400. Looks like Denton Drive in about a quarter mile.”

The computer chimed: “Minimums, minimums!”

“This is gonna be close, Mike.” The Captain keyed the intercom, her voice calm now: “Flight attendants, brace for impact.”

“Over Denton, now 1-1-0 feet, speed 1-5-5.”

“Mike…? I think we’re gonna make it…”

“You got it, Captain.”

“Crosswind’s a headwind now – good – okay, over the threshold.”

The computer began talking again: “Fifty – forty – thirty – retard – retard!” She felt the main gears hit, was going for reverse thrust when she felt the entire aircraft lurched – hard – to the left…

Which happened when the left main gear failed – which then blew through the top of the wing. The wing tanks ruptured, vaporizing thousands of pound of jet fuel – which then ignited. The left engine nacelle dug into the runway, causing an immediate, violent yaw to the left, and the right main gear collapsed. The main spar failed next, then the entire right wing separated from the fuselage. Eight fire trucks began chasing the flaming wreck down the runway, spraying thick white foam on everything. When the wreck ground to a stop, doors and slides opened, dozens of dazed people tumbled to the ground and were soon coated in thick white goo.

First responders from all over North Texas converged on Love Field, while the FBI’s counter-terrorism task force was convened in Washington D.C. Survivors walked down the runway, some fell to the ground as soon as they cleared the flaming hulk. Off duty police and fire investigators all over the city heard their beepers go off, and families turned on their TVs, trying to figure out what that huge explosion was…

And Ben Acheson looked at his phone, rolled out of bed, showered and kissed Genie on the forehead, then got in his Yukon, drove across town to Love Field. The Duke was already there, walking around the wreckage on the runway, looking tired and very put-out.

“Took you long enough to get here, Meathead,” Dickinson said, glowering.

“Bring any donuts?”

“Couple dozen,” The Duke growled. “Back seat.”

“What happened?”

“Warehouse, over off Cedar Springs, blew up. Well, I mean was blown up. Powerful stuff. Jet was taking off, got hit by debris, force of the blast wave apparently did most of the damage.”

“So the warehouse was the target?”

“Yup. Firefighters still working it. As soon as they’re done we’ll move in. We’ll have lead, I assume FBI will back us up – unless terrorism is the initial conclusion, anyway.”

Acheson grumbled.

“How’s Genie? Still liking school?”

“It’s tough. Tougher than she expected.”

“Miss the Bureau yet?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Good. World needs more doctors, not a bunch of cops.”

“World need both, Duke. Nothin’s ever gonna change that equation.”

Dickinson grumbled, then his hand unit crackled. “700, are you still on scene at Love?”

“700, 10/4.”

“700, Fire Department would like someone from CID on scene at this time.”

“700, 741 code five.”

“Code five at 2310.”

“It’s gonna be a long night, Ben.”

“Glad you got two dozen. Nexium ain’t working anymore.”

They drove over to Cedar Springs, then down Manor Way to the burning building and got out, walked over to the Fire Department’s Mobile Command Unit; the Chief was waiting for them: “You come from Love?” the fireman asked.

“Yessir.” Dickinson knew it was rare for the FD’s chief to be out on a call like this – unless something way out of the ordinary was suspected. “What’ve you found so far?”

“HE residue everywhere, on everything. On the remaining structure, all over the debris field.”

“C4?”

“Maybe. Maybe something more exotic.”

“FBI here yet?”

“Nope. Thought I’d let you handle that. And, well, we’ve no way of telling if there’s any unexploded ordnance in there.”

“That’s nice. Who do you think – FBI, or Army?”

The chief shrugged. “FBI ought to be able to handle it; Army might be better equipped.”

“Okay,” Dickinson said as he turned to Acheson – but he was across the street, walking towards a dumpster, so he took out his hand unit and called dispatch: “700, notify SAC/Dallas he’s needed at this location, advise we’ll need an EOD team here code three, and FD thinks Army may by better equipped for this one. Have Traffic shut-down on Cedar Springs from Mockingbird to Inwood, and we may need to evacuate apartment buildings in the area.”

“700, 10/4 at 2335. Did you want us to notify 100?”

“Ah, 700, this is 100,” the Chief of Police said, “code five your twenty.”

“100, code five at 2336.”

“700 received.”

“2336.”

Dickinson looked at Acheson, who was looking around the area, then across the street.

“Oh, no,” Acheson whispered. “Not again.”

But The Duke could tell the boy’d seen something, and Acheson walked across the street up to the trash dumpster in a parking lot, and now Dickinson could see the envelope taped to the side of the dumpster. He watched Ben pull it free, open it up, then look up and around the area again. “Fuck-a-doodle-do,” The Duke whistled, waiting for Acheson to walk back, but he knew in his gut already.

They were back and it was happening again – and tonight was just the opening salvo. “Oh Carol,” Dickinson sighed, “what have you done to us now – what have you gotten me into?”

He turned, walked over to the charred, smoldering building, and looked down into the shattered basement. Many bodies were recognizable, though they too were charred, while other’s had simply been blown apart, then the nature of the facility came into sharp relief. Racks, benches, a viewing area, all of it, he’d seen all of it before, and more than once over the years.

He felt Ben walk up, felt him staring down into the pits of Hell.

“It’s them,” he said at last.

“I know,” The Duke sighed. He turned, looked at the package in Acheson’s hand. “Well?”

“A couple of discs, list of names, of the people down there. A brief synopsis of why they took them out.”

“The names. Give me that list.” Acheson handed it over and Dickinson read down the list, then whistled again. “Fuck-a-doddle-do…”

“Yup. Three judges, and look at the last name, on the second page.”

“Oh, no.”

“He was officially running, so we’ll have to notify the Secret Service. Oh, and there’s this,” Ben said, handing the Post-it note to Dickinson.

“Where was this?”

“Windshield of your car, under the wiper.”

“Figures.” He read the note, whistled again. “Copies already sent to the Morning News, and to CNN. Well, that’s another big fly in the ointment.”

“No way to make the names on that list go away.”

“You know, Ben. They’re always one step ahead of us. Here, out west too.”

“We’re penetrated, at every level.”

“I know. Carol. She told me she was done with them.”

“Go on the assumption she isn’t. I would, anyway.”

“Do you think that’s why she expressed interest? In me, I mean?”

“Possible, but doubtful. I know her pretty well, and if she did something like that it would be way out of character. Still, I don’t know what motivated her to join that organization in the first place.”

“Neither do I…”

“Captain?” one of the Fire Departments unit commanders said, jogging over. “Could y’all take a look at something?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Over here, sir.” He led them to the edge, pointed with his flashlight at a large, 1500 pound gas cylinder. “Any idea what that is on top of that tank?”

Dickinson looked at for a moment, then he turned to everyone within earshot – “Everyone out of here, NOW!” – then he turned to Acheson, grabbed him by the arm and began pulling him away from the edge. “Detonator – countdown timer…”

They were almost to their cars when the device let go, and the concussive wave knocked them both from their feet – hurled them through the air – and both landed in the street. Their clothes scorched, the skin on the backs of their heads burned badly, they turned in time to see a wall of flame racing from the original crater…

“Well, there goes all the evidence,” The Duke said a minute later, picking himself off the asphalt. “Looks like they gave us just enough of a glimpse to substantiate their allegations.”

“Like you said, sir. Always one step ahead.”

The Duke was feeling the back of his head, not liking what he felt, then out of the blue he turned and looked at the raging ruins. “When your basic assumptions prove wrong, it’s time to challenge all your assumptions.”

“Sir?”

“It’s time to go on the offensive, Ben.”

+++++

“So, what do we know so far?” Special Agent in Charge Red Gibbons asked.

“First on my list,” Dickinson began, “the airplane appears to be collateral damage, not an intended target.”

“You mean – they actually fucked up?” Gibbons said, chuckling dryly. “That’s a first.”

“Yup. Maybe. Next up, the building was targeted because that’s where these people were meeting up. Records show an entity called Argosy Partners have been renting the space for a few years. They were, before they rented this one, meeting out near White Rock Lake, in a private home.”

“Who’s home?” Gibbons asked.

“Thornton’s,” Acheson said. He’d dug up that information earlier this morning.

“This is a fucking nightmare,” Gibbons said. “We’ve got a US Senator, three local congressmen, two local and one federal judge down in that crater…”

“Not to mention a dozen local big-shots,” Dickinson added. “That TV shrink and her co-host, the CEO of SimCON, and well, we’ve yet to ID a half dozen bodies that aren’t even on the list.”

Gibbons shook his head. “I heard they found a head…with a drill-bit stuck in the side of his skull. That true?”

“Yessir,” Deke Slayton said. “The bit is drilled in, wasn’t blow-in during the explosion.”

“Fuck, those were some strange-rangers,” Gibbons sighed.

“I doubt this was entertainment, sir,” Acheson replied.

“Go on,” the SAC said, “let’s have it. The unvarnished version.”

“Probably retribution. Someone crossed them, so they took him out.”

“Retribution, huh?” Gibbons said, then he started writing on a notepad. “Okay, what else?”

“The charges, sir,” Acheson said. “One of the firemen ID’ed the detonators we saw as a so-called ‘shaped charge’ – and in case…”

“I know what those are, Ben. So, some sophisticated firepower, not available on the street, not easily cobbled together in a basement.”

“Stolen, would be my guess,” Dickinson interjected. “From a weapons lab, or a nuclear storage facility.”

“Oh, well, let’s kick it up a notch. Weapons from a nuclear facility, and all of sudden these chicks go to the top of the FBI’s most wanted.”

“It’s not going to be that easy,”Acheson sighed.

“Why not?”

“Well, first, look around this room. Not one woman in here. Next, we’re having the room swept for bugs, and have been – for months. For all intents and purposes this has become a ‘woman free zone’ – and simply because we have no idea who’s on the inside, working for them.”

“So? What does that mean?”

“Well, for one thing, this could easily ramp up into some sort of civil war. Look how rapidly their movement, hell, their ideology, has spread. What we first thought was a series of copy-cat crimes turned out to be well-coordinated by a national organization. They’re taking out scumbags right now, but what happens if this is a first move on more political targets?”

“You don’t think,” Dickinson said, “that last night wasn’t a political act?”

“I don’t think we have enough information on hand,” Acheson said, “to make that call. Not yet, anyway. It’s certainly a possibility, though.”

“You know,” Gibbons said, his voice uncertain now, “there’ve been several BDSM groups, mainly on the west coast, that have merged their activities into political action, mainly by bringing prominent business and political leaders into their operations. We’ve been working in Seattle, trying to get one such group under control, for over a year. We lost a couple of agents, and Seattle PD lost a few two, including an AC.”

“That was one of the last cases Genie was working on before she accepted the slot at Southwestern.”

“I know,” Gibbons said, looking away. “I wish she was still with us. I have a feeling we could use her insight.”

“You know,” The Duke said, “I remember reading about that Seattle thing. Seems to me the ‘ninjas’ were part of some BDSM group’s hierarchy.”

Gibbons looked around the room. “Okay, what I’m going to tell you has got to stay in this room, but that mess is a lot more complicated than we’ve previously let on.”

“Oh?” Dickinson said.

“It wasn’t just law enforcement that was compromised. Legislators, judges, prosecutors…even people in broadcasting and newspapers…all either compromised or actively taking part in the group’s organization.”

“You’re saying that this group had infiltrated almost all levels of government, and had, in effect, neutralized people in media?”

Gibbons nodded his head. “Yup. Reporters to owners, papers and television stations.”

“So,” Acheson sighed, “why do I get the feeling you haven’t gotten to the bad part yet?”

“Because I haven’t gotten to the bad part yet.”

“Swell,” The Duke said, reaching for a donut.

“Could I have one of those?” Gibbons said, eyeing the dwindling supply.

“Help yourself, Red. Ben, you haven’t eaten this morning, so for God’s sake, eat a donut – before you bleed out.”

“Yessir. So. What’s the bad part?”

“We’re picking up chatter inside FBI headquarters now; we may be infiltrated. Furthermore, it appears that a few members of congress may be compromised, and a few White House staffers, as well.”

“You’re saying,” The Duke said quietly, “that the federal government may have been compromised in some way by this group? The group in Seattle?”

Acheson jumped in before the SAC could respond: “But what if there’s no operational difference between the Seattle group and the one operating here? What if it’s just one organization?”

“Why go after a BDSM group, if that’s the case,” Gibbons asked.

“I don’t know. Competing objectives? Or maybe this group didn’t have anything to do with the Seattle group. Friends in need, that kind of thing.”

“That’s interesting, Ben,” The Duke said. “About competing objectives, I mean, and that makes a certain kind of sense. Once an organization gets big enough, especially one with political objectives, that group will begin to fracture internally as sub-groups form, as competing interests vie for supremacy. What if this group, the one taken out last night, wasn’t simply a group of perverts – and I say that advisedly. Recall, if you will, that they went after pedophiles last time, and that drug runner too. And we’ve been operating under the assumption that taking out sexual deviants is still there primary objective.”

“But, what if it’s not?” Ben asked.

“Exactly,” The Duke sighed.

“Going after a bunch of politicians and judges is a helluva way to make your point,” Gibbons said.

“Not if this was an intramural skirmish of some sort,” The Duke said softly, “or not if this is an internal power struggle. This could be a message, to us, and to any other internal factions watching.”

“Wait a minute,” Acheson said, suddenly agitated. “This group in Seattle? You said it’s a BDSM group, but was it an all female group?”

“No,” Gibbons said, the point suddenly hitting home, “it’s not – or wasn’t.”

“So, two possibilities,” Ben said quietly. “The first; this has always been one group, and now it’s splintering due to internal dissent. Or the other possibility: there are multiple groups, but they came together through a marriage of convenience, and now there’s a power struggle underway.”

“That might explain,” Dickinson said, “the targeting last night. Assuming members of this group, or faction, had come into conflict with the.”

“Uh,”Gibbons said, coughing on a bit of donut, “well, can we just call them – the Ninjas – for now?”

The Duke shrugged. “They’re not ninjas, Red. They’re radicals subverting the system to achieve an agenda, in effect radicalizing a distinct segment of the population to undermine the rule of law, preying on those gullible enough to think there’s no other way to effect change.”

“Okay, predators,” Red said. “Let’s just call ‘em Predators.”

“No, I don’t think so,” The Duke said, shaking his head.

“Why not?”

Ben sighed: “Because we’re objectifying their actions, projecting motives we may not fully understand, and until we do calling them anything is premature.”

“All their handwritten notes to us have been signed ‘– C’, haven’t they?” Gibbons said. “Who do you think that is?”

“My guess,” Ben said quickly, “is Committee?”

“Okay,” Red said, “so we call them The Committee.”

Ben barely looked at Dickinson, tried not to feel guilty for such a brazen lie, but he’d spoken to protect her, to protect The Duke – and his relationship with her. “So, what’s the next step?”

“What about your vector theory,” Gibbons asked. “Does the location of this latest attack fit along the axis of the earlier string of murders?”

“It’s close to Love Field,” Ben said, “where we found the victim in the parking garage, but even this close it’s several hundred yards off the other established vector.”

“They’re not going to try that again,” The Duke said. “We were getting close a couple of times, probably too close for comfort…”

“And you’re assuming they want to play games with us,” Ben added. “Last night was different. Last night was a statement. When that list hits the Morning News and CNN, the lid is going to be blown right into orbit, and there’s not going to be any way to deny the group’s existence after that. Within a week, the talking heads will be putting two and two together, talking about nothing else. And if there’s a second incident? Or if this ‘Committee’ releases a manifesto of some sort? Hell, it’s going to hit the fan big-time, and open warfare won’t be far off.”

“Ben, turn up the TV, there’s something on CNN right now…”

All eyes turned to flat screen, to a hotel on fire, apparently burning furiously, out of control – yet one wing of the building was simply gone, like it had been blown away…

“Yes, Wolf, officials here at the scene believe this was caused by an explosion of some sort, a large explosion, but they’re not speculating at all about the cause…”

The helicopter circling overhead pulled back, and the motel’s tall highway sign came into view: ‘Manor House Lodge’ it read, and Ben felt a chill run down his spine.

“Manor House?” he sighed. “Manor House? – OF COURSE!”

“Ben? What the devil…?”

“Manor House!” he said, this time loudly. “And last night, the explosion was on Manor Way. If these are linked, well then, this isn’t a coincidence…”

The intercom crackled, and a voice from dispatch entered the room: “Anyone down there?”

“Dickinson here,” he replied.

“Patrolman out on a call advises he’s got a signal one, wants CID and a CSU code two.”

“Okay, where is it,” Dickinson said, nodding to Acheson it would be his call.

“Hotel out on Central. The Manor House, off Royal Lane.”

Everyone’s eyes went to Acheson – who only seemed to smile.

+++++

They drove out Central in a tight convoy: CID, the FBI, multiple Crime Scene Unit vans, but The Duke rode with Acheson, let him drive while he thought. “Why a murder there? Why this morning?”

Acheson shook his head. “Not even an hour after the explosion in Maryland? It doesn’t make sense, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“It’s to draw us in.”

“What? Why?”

“Shit!” Ben said as he picked up the radio’s mic. “741, notify units on Central to begin an immediate evacuation of buildings around their location, get EOD units to the area, notify fire and rescue to respond…”

“You don’t think…?”

“If last night was an announcement, a change in strategy, not just tactics…”

They were two miles away just then, when they felt more then heard a deep ‘woomp’ rolling through the air.

“Oh-sweet-Jesus,” Dickinson said when he saw the explosion further out Central, just as their Tahoe passed under Northwest Highway. “700,” he said into the mic, “large explosion, vicinity Central and Royal.”

They heard dispatch calling the patrol units already on scene – and none responded. More calls, more silence, then an avalanche of units responding to the scene checked in.

Dickinson pulled out his cell, called the chief’s office: “Chief, you got this stuff on the radio?”

“No, I’ve been in a meeting.”

“Large explosion, officers already on the scene not responding. Looks similar to the thing in Maryland.”

“What thing in Maryland?”

“Turn on CNN, get caught up. We’ll get a command post set up somewhere on Royal, and you’d better think about getting out here, getting a statement ready for the press.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“The ninjas are back. Nationwide, would be my guess. And they just declared war.”

+++++

News helicopters were still circling overhead three hours later, and while both Acheson and Dickinson had been up for over thirty hours they could see no end in sight. Ten officers down, six dead, four in the burn unit at Parkland, and more than sixty bodies found in the hotel – and in three nearby buildings that collapsed in the primary blast. One person tried to flee the scene and her car had been wired; as soon as she hit the ignition she – and everything within a hundred meter radius – was vaporized.

Reports came in that attacks similar to this one, as well as the one in Maryland, had been discovered, and possibly thwarted, but by late morning three more occurred – one in Atlanta, the next in Phoenix, and the third in Tacoma – and each blast occurred in a facility that had the word ‘manor’ in either the place-name or the address.

There was now, literally, nothing else on the news – on any channel – and as letters taking credit for the attacks began showing up at major broadcasters and newspapers, the group’s objectives were being splattered over the airwaves – and the ‘net – at a breakneck pace.

Acheson and Dickinson walked the rubble after firefighters secured the scene, and it didn’t take them long. A large bedroom, far from the lobby on the second floor, hadn’t been completely destroyed by either the blast or the subsequent fires, and they found the shattered remains of a young boy, dead, tied to the four corners of the bed. He had been tortured, sexually, and apparently for an extended period of time, according to the initial forensic examination conducted on scene. The boy’s rectum had been savaged, and more than a pint of semen remained in his lower colon. ID, driver’s licenses and credit cards, had established that the pastor of a local, politically very active Baptist church was one of the pedophiles, and the other was Clive Thornton, brother of one of the judges found in the aftermath of the first blast on Manor Way.

And before CID or the FBI could confirm these identities, let alone finish their reports, news outlets on the national level were broadcasting not only who was at the Manor House Lodge in Dallas, but what they had been doing to deserve retribution – complete with audio – and video – of their actions. By nightfall, people around the country had begun to doubt the integrity of their leaders as never before, and a great, shuddering sigh of anxiety could be felt all across the land.

+++++

“How bad is it?” a dour Genie Delaney said when she saw Ben walk in the door.

Acheson just shook his head, looked at her books stacked on the dining room table, noted the silent kitchen and groaned his way to the shower. He looked at his watch before he took it off and almost stumbled into the shower, trying to do the math in his head. Fifteen hours until he had to be out at DFW, fifteen hours until the next flight to Paris – then two days away from this Hell. Two days of – room service, two days of endless sleep.

Then what? Two days off. Then two days downtown, two more days of this never-ending Hell. Genie, ass-deep in her studies, to wrung-out to do even the simplest household chores, nail-biting anxiety as exam after exam rolled over her like waves breaking in a hurricane – and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for her but try to help maintain some semblance of order around the house.

At least she wasn’t a slob, he thought as the hot water pounded the back of his neck. He put his arms out, leaned forward and let the water hit his lower back, then he felt a little blast of cool air. She was beside him then, then in front of him, on her knees. He felt her mouth engulf his need, felt her arms encircling his thighs and he moved into the zone, relaxing completely. How many days had it been, he wondered, but soon that calculus didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, nothing at all, only the smooth, easy rhythm that came so naturally to her.

He stood, moaned, put his hands behind her head and added his motion to hers, but then she picked up her pace. He felt her fingernails on the insides of his thighs, the water running down his legs, the electric flutters building in his gut…

“I’m close,” he said, and she picked up the pace. Swirling tongue, jackhammer rhythm, so much need – “I’m coming…” he managed to say, but still she kept up her driving pace…

He slipped into the clouds and rain, felt the world dissolve, heard her sharp intake of breath as his cum screamed release. Her head swirled now, creating a waterfall of new, overwhelming sensation and he felt his knees buckling, felt her swallowing, then bobbing for every last drop.

She came up to him a moment later, rinsed her face in the spray then nestled into his neck, holding him tightly.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“I couldn’t help it, Spud. You looked like you needed it – almost as much as I did.”

He looked into her eyes, felt himself adrift on her ocean of love, basking in the light of her…

And he saw a red laser’s beam dancing across the back of the shower – and turned – saw a woman dressed all in black, standing in the doorway from the bedroom.

“What is it,” he heard Genie ask.

“I think we’re having company for dinner.”

+++++

“That was sweet,” the woman said.

They were in the bedroom now, all curtains drawn, and there were five of them standing by the doors and windows – all dressed in black, all carrying H&K MP5s. All looked very focused, and more than a little menacing.

“Thanks,” Ben said. “If I’d known I was giving a performance I might have lasted a little longer, gone for a classier exit.” He was staring at the woman, memorizing her features: maybe fifty years old, sandy blond hair, very fit, hazel eyes and straight teeth. Maybe 5’5”, 120 pounds, and her feet were small, almost tiny. And her eyes: clear, intelligent, cool and calculating. Adversarial – predatory.

The woman smiled, just a little, then moved towards the door, shut it and locked it. “Sit down,” she commanded.

They sat. “Whatever you say,” he didn’t need to add. “Uh, to what do we owe this little visit?”

“Your conference, this morning.”

“So, you’re listening-in still?”

“You’re on the right track,” the woman said, smiling broadly now, “and that surprised me.”

“That your group has gone political? All terrorist acts are political – so why should it surprise you that we came to that conclusion?”

“I wasn’t sure. Not after the airliner.”

“Collateral damage?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, sighing. “Unfortunate timing.”

“Well, it certainly got a lot of attention.”

“Not the kind we want.”

“What do you want? Why are you here?”

She opened a case, took out a large manilla envelope and handed it to him. “I’d like you to read this tonight, pass it on to your superiors if you deem it interesting.”

“You could have slipped this under the door mat. You haven’t answered my question: why are you here, now? This evening, in my house?”

“I wanted to meet you.”

“Oh?”

“And I wanted to tell you that as much as I admire you, and what you do, if you get too close I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt you by killing her,” she said, pointing to Genie. “She won’t be able to hide, so think about what I’m saying.”

“You can’t expect me to not do my job?”

“I suppose I could simply tell you to quit the reserves, go fly full time, but the truth is, Ben, I admire your tenacity, your sudden flashes of insight. And I want…no, I need a worthy adversary.”

“Well then, logically, you think I’ll get too close, eventually. So, logically, you want me to succeed, and you want to kill Genie.”

“No. No I don’t.” She looked him in the eye, then stepped close, leaned over and kissed him, hard, on the lips. She slipped her tongue between his, reached down and pulled on his cock, then she stood over him, a look of triumph in her eyes. “No, Ben, I don’t want you to get to – close.” Then woman laughed a little, then the group simply walked out of the room and into the gathering night.

“Jesus,” Genie said, letting out a breath too long held, “what the fuck was that all about?”

“I have no clue,” he said, now shaking inside. “I felt like a cobra had coiled around me, uh, my neck when she did that.”

“Well, you must have liked it.”

He could feel it now, his cock standing straight up again. “Oh, no.”

“At least she didn’t give you a blow job,” but Delaney was shook up, felt like she’d lost all control over her destiny, indeed, her life – and now she desperately wanted to reassert some measure of what she’d just lost. “Still, you have to admit,” she said as she leaned over and put her hand around his hard-on, “it’s a nice cock. Not too big, certainly not too small, a little on the fat side – but that’s a good thing,” she said as she took it in her mouth. She ran her mouth up and down slowly a few times, then disengaged. “But, I think he’s been neglected, that he wants to come home,” she said as she straddled him.

“Here, let me…”

“Nope,” she sighed, willing herself to retake control. “No hands,” she said as she pushed him down. She lay on top of him with her legs inside his, and she clamped down with her thighs, moved up slowly, pulling the head of his cock in tightly against her lips, then she slipped down even more slowly, letting the head part her lips just a little – and she did this for several minutes, until they were both shaking with more immediate needs. She concentrated on the feeling of his cock between her thighs, grazing her lips, then – using her legs she pushed his legs together, still slowly grinding his need into hers, and then she rose until she was poised over his belly. She had the angle she needed now, and she backed a little, pushed his cock straight up, then she rose again and felt her lips parting, his tip entering – and she hovered there, wanting this feeling of anticipation to last forever. She circled their sudden need from on high, like a raptor among clouds, then she plunged, took him all in – and the room filled with the light of glorious release.

+++++

“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what was that all about?” he sighed as she lay beside him.

“I don’t know? Maybe I was so afraid of dying, then so glad to be alive? I saw her kiss you, saw her kissing you forever, like she wants you, and I wanted you – while I can still have you.”

The woman was watching the live video feed from inside an agency van, watching Ben and Genie and the aftermath of their encounter, and she leaned over, turned up the volume.

“You think she wants me?”

“Did you hear what she said, about needing an adversary? Oh, yes, she needs you, Ben, needs you big time. That’s what she was saying. Killing me will, in her mind, only make you more available. You’ll be crushed after she kills me, but then she’ll pull you back out of yourself, back out into life among the living – her living. In the beginning, she’ll be your tormentor, then she’ll become your savior. In her mind, she’ll redeem both your sins and hers by claiming, and reclaiming, you.”

She listened to Delaney’s words and wanted to deny the truth she heard, but she too had been a profiler, and like Delaney had been with the FBI for years, before she moved to the NSA. She too was capable of extraordinary empathy, prone to sudden flashes of brilliant insight, but not where her own feelings were concerned – so as the girl’s words rocked her she knew they may well be true. The feeling in her gut when she saw him come out of the shower, the way his towel didn’t quite cover certain parts? She had wanted to fuck him like she had never wanted fuck anyone before, and yet she’d felt herself coming undone when she was near him, then felt the need to run from her feelings before they overwhelmed her. There had been more to tell him, instructions to relay, and now she’d have to contact him again.

She wasn’t used to making mistakes of this sort, and the idea bothered her. She finished changing clothes as she watched them talk, and by the time the van drove out onto the private jet ramp at Love Field she was ready to play her part again. The dutiful Assistant Director sent by her president to ascertain the political fallout of the attacks in Dallas.

She hated the President, and all his blatant, corrupt hypocrisies – but he had been so useful. Until now, anyway. Now she had to deal with his treachery, his slip-ups, and she was sure his usefulness was at an end.

+++++

“Duke?”

“Yeah, Ben.”

“They just made contact.”

“Who?”

“They did. Their leader, I think.”

“In person?”

“They came inside the house, five of them, all heavily armed. The station is compromised, they’re listening to everything we say. I’d assume they’re listening to us right now.”

“Interesting. Were their faces covered?”

“Not the leader, but we need to talk. Echo all right with you?”

Dickinson seemed to hesitate. “It may be a while.”

“Carol?” Ben asked, sensing trouble in The Duke’s voice.

“Yup. Can it wait ‘til morning?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Right. Gimme an hour.”

Acheson hung up the phone, turned to Genie. “Something’s not right.”

“With what? Dickinson?”

“Yup. Are you sure that was her?”

“I am. It took me a minute, but I know who she is.”

“And she must know you know.”

“Safe assumption,” Genie said.

“So you really are in danger.”

She walked over to the window, looked out into the back yard. “I don’t like this weather. It’s unsettled, the clouds are moving too fast.”

He joined her, put his arms around her and held her close. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“You can try. At least you can try.”

He felt a tremble pass between them, like insatiable need coming to an untimely end. “Come on. We’d better get some clothes on…”

“You don’t want to go naked?”

“Somehow I don’t think that’ll work out very well.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I know, but you still love me, don’t you?”

She turned, fell into his arms. “‘Til the end of time, Spud. ‘Til the end of time.”

+++++

It was called Flippen Park these days, but for ages it had been known as Echo Park, so-called after the little Renaissance-Romanesque gazebo in the park that produced a surreal echo effect, and the park surrounding the gazebo, though small, made for a nice place to walk, and talk, while keeping an eye out for someone listening, or watching. Ben and Genie were standing not far from the gazebo when they saw a Highland Park patrol car drive by, the officer inside staring at them as she passed, then Dickinson’s car turned on Versailles from Lomo Alto. He pulled to a stop behind Delaney’s personal car and watched the patrol car make a u-turn and drive by again.

The officer stopped her car and got out, hands on her service pistol, and walked up to Dickinson’s window.

“Good evening,” the officer said. “This is a residential neighborhood, what are you doing here?”

“I’m with Dallas, captain in CID. Badge is in my back left pocket.”

“Slowly,” she said, her hand on the holstered SIG. He took it out and handed it to her, and she flipped it open, looked at the badge and ID, then handed it back to him.

“I’m meeting them,” Dickinson said, pointing to Acheson and Delaney, and he thought he saw her smile.

“Okay,” the officer said, a little too casually. “Y’all be careful out there.”

“Yeah, you too.” He watched the patrol car leave, but it went a block up Versailles and turned off it’s lights, the girl obviously watching them, so he got out and walked across the park to Ben and Genie.

“What was that all about,” Ben asked.

“I hate to say this, but I’d guess she’s with them. So, what’s this all about?”

“The woman who came to the house,” Delaney began, “the woman Ben and I assume is this group’s leader, is Sara Rutherford. She was with the FBI, worked as a profiler in DC for fifteen years, but she moved over to NSA about ten years ago. Right before I started with the Bureau.”

Dickinson whistled. “Fuck-a-doodle-do.” He looked up at the overcast sky, and they all turned when lightning lit the sky a few miles away. “You think she knows you know?”

“Absolutely,” Delaney said.

“So that was part of the message. What was the other part?”

“This,” Ben said, holding out the envelope “and she told me if we get too close they’ll kill her.”

The Duke nodded his head, seemed to draw inward on himself. “When Carol got in this evening she seemed different. Unaffectionate, all business. Then she said pretty much the same thing to me: if we get too close she’d kill me.”

“She what?” Benn said, clearly alarmed now.

“I told her she’d better leave, and she just laughed. ‘Not a chance,’ she said. I guess the implication’s are clear enough. We’re penetrated, and compromised. So. What’s in the envelope?”

“A manifesto, of sorts. A declaration of war, I think you could say, but the gist of it is simple enough. Rights are never given, they’re earned, usually through blood sacrifice. The civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement were all shams, and women have banded together to take what is rightfully theirs. They’ve been gathering intel for years on who’s a friend, and who is the enemy. They’ll be taking out their enemies over the next few weeks.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Dickinson sighed. “I’d hate to be a Republican right about now.”

“I don’t think this is about party affiliation,” Delaney added, a hard, brittle edge in her voice. “I think this is about revenge, and retribution, and that’s going to cross party lines.”

“I think so, too,” Ben added. “There’s more than enough anger out there to turn this into a full-blown civil war, and enough military and law enforcement in their ranks to make them a more than credible force.”

“All those pedophile murders,” Dickinson said, suddenly thinking about last summer, “were just training exercises. Perfecting tactics, working out the kinks in their command and control network.”

“I think they’ve moved beyond that now,” Delaney said. “The problem is how do we…”

“Genie,” The Duke said, “there ain’t no ‘we’ in this deal at all. You’re in medical school now…”

“And they just put me in the crosshairs, too, Duke,” she shot back. “You think I’m going to wait around until someone decides to shoot me in the back of the head?”

He seemed taken aback by that – for a moment, anyway – then he nodded his head. “I hadn’t thought about it quite like that, but I think your finishing school is a higher priority.” He sighed, turned to Acheson: “Ben, I think you ought to turn in your notice, turn your back on the department, focus on your flying and getting a family started. There’s no telling how bad this is going to get, let alone who’s going to get hurt, or how bad. This isn’t the time or the place for heroics.”

The lightning was getting close now, the thunder growing louder, more insistent, and Acheson held out his right hand. “Okay, Duke,” he said. “We’ll be seeing you.” They turned and walked to Genie’s car, and The Duke walked back to his. The girl in the patrol car a block away took out a rarely used cell phone and hit a speed dial number, and reported what she’d seen.

The drone overhead had captured both the audio and video, so while her report was redundant, almost superfluous, AD Rutherford was glad to have another layer of confirmation. With Acheson now out of the way, and with Dickinson completely compromised, North Texas was no longer a concern.

Only four more cities to go, she told herself, and they’d move on the Federal Reserve, but first, she decided now, it was time to neutralize the President. All she needed was a well-placed lie – and gravity would take care of the rest.

(C)2017 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is a work of fiction, and no persons developed/portrayed in this story are real.

One of those late night musings…I thought ‘what if I could write a five paragraph story?’

Well, I can’t.

At least, not quite.

So, what follows is a five part story – of sorts – but without a comfortable narrative framework, even by my miserly standards. I looked at different turning points, looked at making the various arcs more complete, but somehow arrived at the end and liked what I saw. Hope you do to.

So…a new ‘story’ – kind of version 1.0, if you know what I mean.

+++++

Sketches of a Night

I     The Cop

He left Homicide a little after midnight, turned east on 51^st and headed towards the lake, for his apartment off South University. He rubbed his eyes, tried to wipe away the burn that had come with working thirty hours straight, then he yawned, pinched away a lacrimal tear as he pulled up to the red light at Cottage Grove. He yawned again, shook his head, saw something moving beyond the shadowy pools of light ahead, moving off to the right through heavy snow – “Drexel Square, at this time of night? In this weather?” – he said aloud, and he squinted, tried to see through the fat, heavy flakes now drifting on the roadway .

Then…

…he picked up the radio’s mic and switched to the main department frequency…

“4120.”

“4120, go ahead.

“4120, show me back in service at 51^st and Cottage Grove, four male-blacks attacking another subject, no description at this time.”

“4120, at zero-zero-twenty-two hours. 4120, will you need back-up?”

“4120, 10-4. Could you also roll paramedics at this time?”

“4120, at zero-zero-twenty-three hours.” Several units checked en route, but none were close.

Captain of Detectives Burt Redmaine punched the accelerator and jumped the curb, drove up onto the slippery grass and chased the group down, and he put his reds and blues on as he neared the four assailants. They had a small, light complected boy pinned to the snowy turf, and one of the kids, a black kid about 18 years old, had a knife out. Redmaine bailed out of the Ford Explorer with his Sig P-220 drawn, yelled “Hands where I can see ‘em!”

The kids laughed, and one of the teens reached in his jacket; he went from focusing on four suspects to one, flinched when brightness flared, then Redmaine squeezed off a round; the Remington 45ACP SJHP hitting the armed kid center mass. The boy crumpled, fell to the snow – while the three remaining kids looked stunned, hesitated, then took off to the south. He ran up to the suspect and checked carotids for a pulse, felt nothing and scuttled across the snow to the victim, now writhing just a few feet away. He found deep cuts on the kid’s forearms and hands – classic defensive wounds – as well as a deep laceration across the boy’s gut – but he stood, his senses suddenly on full alert.

One of the other kids, the kid with the knife, was running for him, the knife in his hand cocked overhead, and Redmaine coiled into a Weaver stance, quickly aimed then shouted: “Stop, or I’m putting you down!”

The kid seemed to slow, but Redmaine saw bloodlust in the kid’s eyes, a pulsing, grim determination, the eagerness to kill, and at five yards he fired once. The heavy, slow moving bullet hit the kid in the neck, and at such close range the impact was devastating. As the boy staggered backwards under the impact, his all but severed head kept moving forward – then let go and flew through the air, landing just a few feet from the writhing kid’s body.

Pistol still up and at the ready, he turned and swept the scene, then jogged back to the Explorer’s radio. “4120, signal thirty three, repeat three-three, shots fired, two suspects down, two fleeing on foot down Bowen, for Drexel. Both male, black, approximately 18, six feet, one fifty, Suspect One wearing red sweatpants and a gold hooded sweatshirt, Suspect Two solid navy or black sweats, white stripes down the arms and legs. Victim on the scene with multiple stab wounds, expedite EMS Code 3.” He grabbed the first aid kit from the back of the Ford and ran back to the victim, checked the kid’s pulse, made a rough count of heartbeats, guessed it was over one-fifty so knew he was bleeding out. He ripped open a pouch of coagulant and dumped it on the belly wound, then dug out a surgical pad and covered the laceration, applied as much pressure as he dared.

He looked up, swept his horizon again, checked the shadows, cocked his head – but all he heard now was an avalanche of sirens headed down 51^st  and in from the lake.

“Did you get ‘em?” the boy asked, his voice almost lost in the darkness.

He turned, looked down at the kid. “Howya doin’, sport?” Redmaine said, trying not to sound alarmed, then: “Yeah, I got ‘em.”

“I think they got me, too,” the boy sighed, then he just stopped breathing. Redmaine ripped open the kid’s shirt and placed his hands over the sternum and began compressions, then rescue breathing, alternating as best he could in the howling wind and driving snow. A patrol car jumped the curb a moment later, and two officers joined him by the boy’s side, helped administer CPR as a steady stream of back-up arrived. Within minutes paramedics had the kid in the box and they rolled down Cottage Grove for the ER at the University of Chicago Medicine, leaving Redmaine almost breathless as the adrenaline rush began to fade…

“Burt? Where’s all that blood coming from?”

“What? What blood?”

“Blood, on your arm? Are you bleeding, man?”

He felt light headed, fumbled with his jacket. He’d never seen, let alone felt the single round the first kid fired at him, and he pushed at the the pulpy wound now, the wet mass coming as a complete surprise to him. It was suddenly very bright out, and he felt dizzy, then he too lost consciousness and fell to the snow.

II     The Librarian

Hector Ramirez opened the door for her, as he did almost every night, and let her in as the snow swirled around their feet, then he pulled the heavy door shut and followed her up the stairs. They lived on the same floor, worked the same shift downtown so took the same bus home every night – and they had for years – yet he still didn’t know her name. And it almost didn’t matter anymore.

He only knew she was beautiful, and there were times when he – simply – lusted over her. She was, perhaps, three steps ahead of him on the stairs, yet all he was aware of was her legs. Trim yet muscular and perfectly shaped, he looked forward to these few moments on the stairs more than anything else in his day – simply because of her legs. Some nights he wanted to reach out and touch their perfect skin – and he could see himself in his mind’s eye holding them, kissing them, running his hands up their glorious nakedness.

But not tonight.

No, something was different tonight. She had always been aloof for days, but tonight something was off. Now, tonight, she was glacial, all slow-moving ice, crumbling before his eyes under the onslaught of time and slow, grinding pressure. Her movements were light, too light, yet slower than slow, and at first he thought she was giving him more time to admire her legs, but her hands, reaching for the cold metal railing, seemed unsteady, grasping, almost lost in time.

“Are you alright, Ma’am?” he said at one point, and his voice seemed to snap her out of it; she quickly finished walking up to the third floor and disappeared down the corridor to her apartment, and he watched after her for a moment, suddenly feeling anything but lust.

No, now he felt concern. Concern for her, for her wellbeing, and the realization struck him as – almost – funny. ‘Why should I?’ he said to himself. ‘She’s never said a word to me, in almost fifteen years! Why should I care about that lonely woman’s life?’

She went in the door and shut it behind her, turned on the light-switch.

Nothing happened.

She walked over to a lamp and turned it on, and it’s feeble glow tried to chase away the shadows – but failed. She walked through the living room to her bedroom door and went inside the cold, dark room, and she took off her clothes, hung her coat and dress on hangers in the closet and put her undies in the hamper, then she took her shower – all to get ready for him.

When she was clean she dried herself off, perfumed her special places then put on his favorite lingerie. She felt herself down there, felt her need, then walked down to his bedroom door.

Which was, as it always was, standing open just a few inches. The light was off, as it always was, and she just barely stuck her head in the door.

Her son was on top of the sheets tonight, and his naked body glowed in the ambient light of the falling snow coursing through the sheer drapes. Her eyes went to his waiting erection, standing strong and tall now, ready for her, waiting – and she slipped into the room, sat on the foot of the bed looking at him pretending to sleep.

Still not saying a word she moved up between his legs and she saw his eyes open, saw the smile on his face, and she moved over him, took him in her mouth. She heard the sharp intake of breath, his sudden need now completely overwhelming, and she grasped the base of his cock as she began pounding him mercilessly with her mouth. This first assault was her favorite – because he had been waiting for this moment all day and just couldn’t last.

She picked up her pace, swirling her tongue over his head, feeling the pressure build on the back of her throat, then she heard his whispered pleas and this excited her most of all. She gripped the base of his cock, dug her fingernails into his skin as she picked up her pace yet again, and she felt his orgasm run up his legs into his gut, then his sudden, overwhelming release hit her. She gagged as the pressure of his release ran down her throat and she reveled in her mastery of this need they shared. She swallowed and swallowed and still he came, filling her mouth completely until his cum ran down her chin, and then they drifted – together – through time, to their special place.

And yet, she never took him from her mouth. Instead, she simply swirled her tongue around his head, kneaded his strength with her hands, and when he was completely hard again she slid up between his legs until her nether lips were poised over his pulsing need. She lowered herself slowly now, willing this moment to last the longest, until her lips and tight, bristly hair touched his glans. She moved as slowly as she could, yet she pushed down on him, forcing her lips apart, grating his skin with her coarse pubic mat, and when she felt him stiffen – again – she smiled at her mastery of his need.

She kept this up for some time, drawing out their anticipation as long as possible…

Ramirez was walking by her apartment just then, walking down to the Super’s office, and he heard her. It was impossible not to hear her…

‘Moaning? Is she moaning?’ He almost laughed, felt like a fool as he walked by, then he got to the office and knocked on the door.

“Come on in,” he heard, so he turned the knob and went inside. “Hector? What’s wrong? The sink again?”

“Yes, Mr Carlisle. I did as you say, try the drain cleaner, just like you say, but there is brown stuff coming up now, and it smells pretty bad.”

“Is it flowing?”

“Yessir, pretty bad. The sink, she is about half full now.”

“Okay. Let’s take a look.”

They walked down to Ramirez’s apartment, but both stopped outside of her apartment, listened to the moans coming through the door.

“That’s odd,” Carlisle said. “She doesn’t usually entertain men…”

“She wasn’t right coming home. No sir, she moving pretty slow.”

“Do you think she’s ill?”

“I don’t know…could be. She was slow, real slow, coming up the stairs.”

The Super went to the door, knocked gently. “Mrs Simmons? Are you alright?”

The moaning continued, seemed to grow in intensity.

“Mrs Simmons?”

Still only moans.

“Mrs Simmons, I’m concerned for your safety, and I’m coming in now.” He turned to Ramirez. “Hector, come in with me, please, but stay behind me.”

“Si, Señor Carlisle.”

Carlisle tried the door, found it unlocked and turned the knob. He stepped inside and a frigid blast hit him in the face; he saw his breath in the dark, icy air, and he walked towards sounds coming from the small bedroom on the far side of the living room. The door was ajar, and pale blue light seeped into the hallway – and they heard laughter, faraway, the laughter of a small boy.

“Mrs Simmons?” Carlisle said as he stood outside the room. “Are you in there?”

Moans, and the boy’s laughter greeted his question, and as Carlisle opened the door he heard sirens in the distance.

She was face down on the bed, writhing in ecstasy, her hands inside her thighs as an unseen lover made love to her. The two men looked at one another, and Carlisle shrugged.

“Something ain’t right, señor. We better call, het her some help…”

III     The Physician

He walked around the living room, dusting off his memories and taking them out for a spin one more time, looking at pictures of his wife – and their life – together. He came to his favorite, of her on their wedding day thirty four years ago this month, and he looked at her green eyes, her red hair aglow like a smoldering fire among copper coated trees. He stopped and looked in those eyes and he could feel the same breathlessness he’d always felt with her. The same devotion, the same sense of timelessness, almost weightlessness that came with the inrushing love he would always feel for her.

“I think it’s time, Sara,” he said to the image. “Time for me to come home.”

He walked over to the glass wall and looked down on the city, was surprised to find it was snowing so hard and wondered why.

“Life goes on, I suspect, no matter what we expect will happen when death comes.”

He sighed, thought back on his day. The sharp, jolting pain in his groin, like a hot spasm shooting from his testicles up his spine. Taking his morning shower, feeling his left testicle – hard as a rock in the hot water, sudden icy dread shooting through his normal morning thoughts, pushing everything else from consciousness. The early morning to call to Charlotte, his internist, getting her service instead. She called a few minutes later and he explained his concerns, described what he’d felt.

“Gene, come on down as soon as you can; I’ll draw for HCG, LDH-1 and AFP, get a complete panel as well as an ultrasound.” Charlotte Atwood wasn’t simply a colleague, she was a friend, and had been since their first year together at Pritzker. Of equal importance, she and Sara had been best friends – since high school, at least. If there was one person who could see him through this transition, it was Charlotte, and he felt confident as he drove in to the Medical Center.

Then he thought of Judy, his sister. “I wonder where she is today?” he asked the emptiness. “I wonder why we lost touch?” He missed her, missed watching her watch Sara, and he smiled as he recalled talking to his wife about his sister.

“She loves you so much,” he remembered saying once – when her death wasn’t far away.

“Try to understand her, Gene. She’s all you’ll have, and she’s so alone in the world.”

“I never understood why she couldn’t move on.”

“Don’t you?”

His blood work was loaded with tumor markers, the initial ultrasound showed his both testicles completely compromised, all the cord as well, and the radiologist expressed concern for his prostate too, and scheduled him for a STAT MRI. Once the IV was established and a HOCON dye injected, he felt the tray sliding into the tube, the tech advising him to “hold your breath,” then “breathe out slowly” for the next forty five minutes. He dressed and walked up to Atwood’s office feeling absolutely terrified by all these inrushing uncertainties.

“Looks like the retroperitoneal nodes are enlarged, Gene. I’ve talked to Rohrbacher, and he’s wiped his slate, will do you tomorrow morning at seven. Check in at five thirty, nothing to eat after five this evening.”

“I know the drill.”

“I know you do, Gene, but there’s a first time for everything.”

He shook his head slightly and sighed. “I sat in this chair three years ago when you diagnosed Sara, and I was there all the way.”

“It’s not the same, Gene. It’s you…”

“I beg to differ, Charlotte. Your words hit me that morning every bit as hard as they did her.”

“That’s because you’re a total empath, Gene, not to mention the best neurosurgeon in the city.”

“No sunshine up the ass today, okay, Charlotte? You think a dissection looks likely, don’t you?”

She nodded her head. “Yup.”

“Damn.”

“I hate to be blunt, but have you been getting any lately?”

He shook his head. “Last time was with Sara.”

“Gene? Why? You can’t go on living like this…you’ve got to move on…”

“Charlotte…don’t go there. I can’t, and I won’t.”

Atwood sighed, shook her head again. “I know, Gene. I miss her too.”

His eyes watered, he looked away. “Don’t do this to me, Charlotte. Not today.”

She opened a desk drawer, took out a sample box of Viagra and tossed it on the desk.

“What the Hell is that for?” he said, looking at the box with something akin to contempt in his eyes.

“Tonight.”

“What about tonight?”

“Gene, I want you to go out and get laid tonight. Have an early dinner, then go out and get yourself well and truly laid.”

He’d laughed at her then, but he’d picked up the box and put it in his jacket pocket.

Because he knew the score. He knew that with a full retroperitoneal dissection, with all the lymph nodes systematically dissected from his gut, massive nerve damage was assured, and loss of normal sexual function was all but assured, too.

And he reminded her that he hadn’t asked a woman out on a date since 1975, the year he’d asked Sara out on their first date, “and anyway, I was never any good at the whole dating thing.”

“It doesn’t matter, Gene. Go to a bar. Hell, go online, find a goddamn escort – whatever! Just pop your cork, have some fun.”

Because, she didn’t have to say, this was going to be the last time – so make it a night to remember.

So, he’d texted Judy then gone home and packed a bag for the hospital, then rummaged around in the freezer until he dug up an old lasagna that wasn’t too far past it’s ‘expired’ date. He’d tried to watch the evening news but found he suddenly didn’t give a damn about the world, then heavy snow moved in, started falling heavily as the clock moved inexorably towards midnight.

And in that instant he recalled what it had felt like, that first time with Sara. How he’d slipped his penis in her vagina to tentatively, and how – in a blinding flash – the all-enveloping warmth of her body had completely transformed everything he knew about the soul – and what it meant to be human. He’d lasted, perhaps, thirty seconds before he ‘popped his cork’ that first time – as Atwood had called it just a few hours before – but oh, those thirty seconds! How transformative those precious moments had become to him. And to them both, he had to admit.

He looked at his watch, then at his coat – with the little box of Viagra still safely ensconced in an inner pocket – and then he went to their bedroom. He sat on her side of the bed, opened a drawer in her bedside table and pulled out the letter.

The letter he’d discovered one day when he was cleaning up her belongings after she passed. A letter from Judy, a letter professing undying love, dated a few years before she became sick. A letter describing just a few precious moments, details so intimate he’d cried. He remembered the sense of betrayal he’d felt when he found the letter, but then, ultimately, how he’d come to an understanding of his own shortcomings as a lover, and as a husband. He had been consumed with work for years, with completing his Fellowship, and the first time he read the letter he realized how much he’d neglected them both, and how much he’d missed their life together as a result.

He had put the letter back that day, put it back where he found it, and he never mentioned finding it to either of them, if only because, in no small measure, she had upheld her part of the bargain. She had been available to him, always, was ready to talk any time day or night, or to offer a shoulder, and she had remained his very best friend until the day she passed. What more, he asked, could you ask of a marriage, and from a friend.

He reread the letter, then took it to the kitchen and put it in the trash, picked up his car keys and coat and walked to the elevator; a few minutes later he was out in the snow, his Tesla Model S tracking through the slushy muck down State Street. He wandered aimlessly, turned here and there, not paying attention to much more than the traffic, and the heavily falling snow. After a while he pulled into a service station and filled the tank, went inside and got a bottle of water, and when he sat behind the wheel he fished out the Viagra and looked at the box, then rolled down the window and tossed it into a garbage can before he drove back into the night. Perhaps ten minutes later he saw a pink sign ahead, a chain store, an adult bookstore and he laughed.

“Why the fuck not?” he said as he turned into the parking lot, and he parked, walked to the door, stamping the snow off his boots as he stepped inside.

His eyes turned to saucers as he took in the mesmerizing displays around the vast room, the toys and dolls and racks upon racks of videos and magazines catering to every conceivable kink, then along the back wall he saw a neon sign: Video Arcade. “What the fuck?”

He walked to the front counter, waited until the girl working there turned to him.

“What’s in there,” he asked, pointing to the arcade. “Movies?”

The girl snorted derisively. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“What’s it cost?”

“You buy a card, load it with cash and put it in the slot. It subtracts the dollar amount based on how long you stay inside.”

“How much is enough?”

“Depends on how long you wanna cruise.”

“Cruise?”

“How long you wanna watch.”

He pulled out his wallet and gave her a fifty, and she smirked. “All on the card?”

“Sure. Why the hell not…?”

“Your money, Dad.” She handed him the card and he walked to the entrance and went inside…

…And his senses were overwhelmed with smells of tobacco, urine and, he assumed, old cum, with rancid undertones of stale disinfectant crawling up his skin. His first impulse was to run, but curiosity soon got the better of him and he walked through the maze like corridors, pausing to look at the offerings outside each ‘cabin,’ eventually settling on one that had a good mix of interesting women on it’s display. He walked inside and shut the door, then looked at the cum-splattered seat and turned around, walked back into the maze.

He came to another and went inside, sat on the relatively clean seat and was getting ready to put the card in the reader when he noticed a circular opening in the wall by his side – and moments later a genuinely huge penis – black and dripping pre-cum – poked through the opening. He grabbed the card from the reader and bolted from the cabin, clearly terrified.

Yet he walked deeper into the maze, and now he saw men lining the way, each looking at him knowingly, each man sizing up his need, then, near the back wall he saw to girls – one with his back to him, the other obliquely facing his way.

And it was the girl with her back to him that first caught his eye. Something about her hair, and the shape of her legs, seemed to scream ‘Sara!’ to him, yet he was unaware he was staring until the girl facing him looked him in the eye, then leaned close to her companion and whispered in her ear.

Then this other girl turned and looked at him, and when he saw her face he felt engulfed by waves of fire – and ice.

She looked like Sara. His Sara. Maybe not exactly, but close enough to startle him, yet it was the girl’s legs that held his mind’s eye – as if he had suddenly been gripped in a vice and the paws had clamped down on his soul. He took a deep breath and was about to turn away – when she began walking his way.

“You wanna go in a cabin together?” she asked.

He squinted a little, nodded his head. “Sure,” he said, though his voice was little more than a coarse whisper now.

“This one, in the corner,” she said, “costs a little more, but it’s bigger – there’s more room to spread out.”

“Okay.”

She led him to the door and then stepped inside, waiting for him.

He felt control of his life was turning away just then, spinning from his grasp as he looked at her standing there, then he held his breath and stepped inside. She locked the door behind him, then she turned and faced him.

“You a cop?”

He shook his head. “No. Are you?”

She snorted at that. “You look kind of nervous – ever done this before?”

He shook his head again, barely managed to whisper “No” – then she looked at him again, all the more closely this time.

“You alright?” she asked.

“No.”

“No?”

“You look,” he tried to say, but his voice caught and he tried to clear his throat. “You look like my wife.”

“And she’s home right now, isn’t she…waiting up for you?”

He looked away, looked lost as he said “She’s dead,” and she saw there was something in his eyes that looked more than lost.

“Oh, look, I’m sorry. Maybe this is too weird for you right now?”

“Everything is too weird for me right now,” he said, then he looked into her eyes. “What’s your name?”

“What would you like my name to be?”

“Sara.”

“Okay, Sara it is. What’s your name?”

“Gene. Gene Parker.”

“Well, Gene, you wanna put the card in the slot, then we can talk about what you wanna do tonight.” He put the card in the reader and the screen came alive, revealing a menu of different videos, and she asked what he was interested in watching.

“You choose, Sara.”

The screen filled with images of a girl giving an older man a blowjob, and his eyes locked on the screen, at the easy motion and the flood of memory that came for him.

“You want to do something like this, Gene”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s gonna be twenty. Can you handle that?”

He nodded his head.

“I need it up front.”

He took his wallet from inside his jacket and opened it up, pulled a one hundred dollar bill from it and handed it to her.

Her eyes wide, she wondered what was happening, if this old man was drunk, or stoned.

He looked into her eyes again: “Would you like more?”

She shook her head. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Sara, would you kiss me now?”

“Gene, for a hundred bucks I’ll kiss your ass up one side and down the other, and I’ll do it all night long, too.”

“Once, gently, on the lips would help right now.”

She leaned into him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him – gently – on the lips, and when she pulled back from him she saw he was crying, so she leaned into him again and kissed his tears away, held him close.

“You sure you want to do this, Gene Parker?”

“I need to, yes. Please.”

And he felt her undoing his belt buckle, unbuttoning his trousers, pushing them down to his ankles. She was on her knees in the next instant and took him in her mouth, buried his eight inches and he felt her tickling his sack with her tongue, then he felt his knees buckling, an intense fire erupting from the small of his back and within seconds he came.

He heard a gentle snorting gasp as she took him in her mouth, and he was vaguely aware he was letting slip one of the largest orgasms in human history – but she kept at it, kept swallowing his seed as she jacked his cock with her mouth. A minute later she stood, gasping, and he saw he’d wrecked her face. There were huge, milky-long ropes of cum dangling from her lips and chin – and her eyes were watering…

“Oh my God,” he whispered, “what have I done?”

“I don’t know,” the girl whispered, trying not to laugh, “but could you do it again?”

“What?”

“Oh fuck me,” she said. “That was the most intense cum I’ve ever experienced. How long has it been?”

“Been?”

“Since you came?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Three years, maybe?”

“Three…years?” she sighed, still picking at the ropy mess hanging from her chin. “No wonder!”

“Oh, God…I’m sorry…”

“Sorry? Don’t be…it’s like, well, my job…”

“Your job?” The words struck him as beyond odd, then he looked at this girl more closely. She didn’t look like Sara, not at all. Her hair, her legs, nothing at all. He had simply objectified her to the point he couldn’t see her humanity anymore. No, she wasn’t human anymore, not in those first few moments; she had become, rather, a receptacle for his lust – and, perhaps – his hopes and dreams of all that’d been, all he was about to lose.

He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it to her. “Here, you might have a go at it with this,” he said as he looked at her more closely. The bones of her wrist, the loose skin under her eyes, the yellow-gray teeth – all the classic signs. Malnourished and mineral deficient, this kid was, for all intents and purposes, starving to death. In the dead of winter. In one of the richest cities in the richest country on this planet. Hoping to give some old man a blowjob so she could eat, or more likely, buy drugs. “How old are you?” he asked.

She finished wiping away his semen and looked up at him, then she shrugged. “Old enough to know better, I guess.”

He nodded his head. “Want something to eat?”

She laughed, gently. “I think I just had a thousand calorie protein shake, mister. Know what I mean?”

“Doctor.”

“You a doc?”

He nodded his head. “I’d like to talk some more. With you. Matter of fact I need to talk to you. Badly, I guess you could say.”

She looked at him, measuring the need she saw in his eyes against the new hundred dollar bill in her pocketbook. “Yeah, okay. There’s a diner down the street.”

“Look,” he said suddenly, the words unchecked, coming out of nowhere, “I want to thank you. You have no idea how much I needed you just then.”

She chuckled again. “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea…” she said, thinking of the surging blast of cum she’d just gagged down.

And he laughed too, and maybe this was the first time he’d really felt like laughing in…years. “I see what you mean.” He left the card in the slot and opened the door, let her out and she looked around, saw her friend was ‘engaged’ and turned to him.

“Look, you don’t have to feel guilty, don’t need to take me out.”

He looked her in the eye. “I know. Come on, let’s go.” He held out his hand, and she looked at it for a moment, shook her head then took it.

She directed him to an all-night diner down on 51^st, and he had to pull off the road once when an armada of police cars thundered by, lights and sirens blaring, then he pulled into the diner’s lot and scrambled to her door, helped her out, then held her hand all the way inside the diner.

The lights were brighter here, there was no place to hide. He looked at her skin after they sat, saw the ground-in dirt behind her ears, under her nails and he didn’t need to ask. She was a shelter girl, living in shelters when there was room, hanging out in arcades like the one he’d found her in when there wasn’t. He’d read the articles, seen the news stories, and he’d thought so little of people like her at the time he’d simply forgotten about them.

‘But isn’t that always the way?’ he asked himself. ‘Human misery goes unnoticed, even when we’re surrounded by it?’ – and still he watched her, watched her hands and eyes, sorting out the clues…

“Let’s go wash up?” he asked after they ordered, while looking at the crusty remnants of his need on her face, and when they got back to the table their coffees and ice water were waiting.

He tried not to stare while she ate, but once again it was obvious she hadn’t had much to eat in a long time – but then the need to talk, to tell her about things became overwhelming.

“That was my last time,” he said – out of the blue.

“Your last time for what?”

“Sex.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I’m…I’ve got cancer, having an operation this morning. When it’s over, so is sex.”

He didn’t know what he expected, but she just looked down just a little, nodded her head slowly – then he realized this girl, of all the girls he might have met up this night, understood that life didn’t always hand you what you expected – or what you thought you deserved.

But then she looked up brightly: “Sex doesn’t always have to be about having an orgasm, you know? There are other things…”

“Yeah, I suppose so, but it’s a big change. Expectations, I guess, and all that.”

She nodded her head. “A big one. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel.”

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re alone?”

He nodded his head. “Three years now.”

“Sara? You called me Sara? She was your wife?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What did she do?”

“Pediatrician.”

“My dad was a shrink,” she said. “He was fucking a bunch of his patients, got caught and killed himself.”

He grimaced, shook his head. “Your mom?”

“She lives somewhere out on the west coast; California, I think.”

“Where do you live now?”

And when she looked away, she answered that question with her silence. “What about you?” she asked. “Where do you live?”

“Downtown. On State Street.”

“You live alone, I guess? I mean, all the time?”

“Yes. Since she passed.”

“You know, what we just did…that’s not sex, not really.”

“I know, without love…”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh.”

“You want to go to your place?” She looked at him as he looked down at his watch…“What time do you have to be there?”

“Five-thirty, but look, you don’t have…”

“I know I don’t have to. But maybe I want…no, maybe I need to. Know what I mean?”

“Okay. How was that omelet?”

“Pretty good. You tasted better, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Really?”

She leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially: “I loved the way you taste.”

It was his turn to smile, and he looked in her eyes again. “You’re lovely, you know?”

She sat back, looked at him carefully. “No, I don’t know. In fact, I think you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me.”

He looked away, looked for a way out of her dilemma. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

She shook her head. “Look, can we leave? I don’t want to waste any time right now.”

“Sure,” he said, then: “Waste time?”

“Your time. Our time.”

“Oh.”

They were driving back in on 51^st Street a few minutes later; cops directed them around a big mess at Cottage Grove, and a few minutes later they pulled into his building’s garage. He got her door again and they went up to his place, and her eyes went wide when she stepped inside this other world.

“Wow…” was about all she said.

“Could I get you anything? Something to drink, maybe?”

“Could I, maybe, take a shower?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and he led her back to their bedroom, now – suddenly – very self-conscious, very aware he’d just taken a young girl into his home, a stranger, one quite possibly looking to take advantage of the situation, but as he led her into the bathroom he looked at her again, looked at the fragility he felt under her skin, deep within her soul, and he helped her out of her skirt and top, looked at her garters and stockings and seedy hooker heels, her almost translucent white skin, and he felt that same overwhelming attraction to her he’d felt in the diner – and before, in that awful place.

“I don’t think anyone has ever looked at me the way you do,” she said.

“The way I do?”

“Men look at – women like me – like they look at any other toy they want. Something to use, then throw away when they’re done. You don’t, and I don’t get it.”

“You are so beautiful it hurts,” he said. “I just want to scoop you up and hold you tight, and the way you make me feel…well, it happened to me only once before, many years ago.”

“Was Sara the only woman you’ve been with?”

He shrugged. “One girl, in high school, but really…Sara and I were together since grade school.”

“That’s it?”

“Yup.”

“And now me? I’m big number three?”

“That’s about the size of things.”

“Jesus,” she sighed inwardly, her voice barely audible.

“Here, let me get the water,” he said as he stepped into the shower.

“That looks like a tennis court!” she giggled. “How many shower heads does that thing have?”

He shrugged.

“Take your clothes off,” she said, reaching for his belt again, and she helped him out of his clothes, then they stepped under the water together.

“Too hot?” he asked.

“Oh, God no. It feels great…”

He took a washcloth and lathered it up with hot, soapy water, then he bathed her, starting at her neck, then working his way down slowly. When he got to her belly he saw the caesarian scar and looked at it for a moment, then he put more soap on the washcloth and started down her legs. He pushed her thighs open a little so he could wash between her legs, then he turned her around and started down her back.

He noticed all the bruises then, where men had held her down, he assumed, while they pushed their need down her throat, and he came up close to her then, from behind, and he put his arms around her and kissed her neck and shoulders before he continued bathing her. There were more bruises down her back, but it was worst of all down her thighs. It looked like someone had beaten her there and he wanted to turn away, to look anywhere but where that reality took him…

But he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t look away now, and not ever again. There simply wasn’t time for that now.

“Under the water,” he said gently when he stood again, and he shampooed her hair gently for the longest time, then rinsed her hair while he massaged her temples, smiling when he felt her relax, letting her lean into his chest while he rubbed her shoulders and upper arms – then he reached for his electric toothbrush and loaded it, then turned to her.

“You’re going to brush my teeth, too?”

“I’m going to brush your teeth, too. Open up.” And he brushed them gently, indeed, she felt almost lovingly, then he said “Rinse,” and when she had he held her close again and rubbed the small of her back.

She looked up at him then, the water running off her face, and she looked at his lips, then his eyes. “What are you doing to me?” she whispered.

“Sh-h-h,” he sighed.

“I’m falling in love with you.”

“Good.” She squeezed him tightly as that word rolled off his tongue, and he felt a shudder run through her body. “Are you okay?” he asked.

She laughed a little. “I just came,” she whispered in his ear.

“You…what?”

“When you said ‘good’ – I came – just a little.”

He cupped his hand under her chin and lifted her lips to his and he kissed her, gently at first, then more passionately – and he felt the tremors again, in her knees this time – and when they passed he turned off the water, stepped out and dried himself quickly, then he took a fresh, warm towel from the rack and helped her out. He dried her slowly, carefully, massaged his warmth into her before he led her to their bed.

He laid her gently out and began kissing the tops of her feet, then her ankles and behind the knees, then inside her thighs. She parted for him and he went to her lips, gently, then he probed inward, finding her spots. Her breathing came more deeply now, her trembling more insistent, and he felt her hands on his head willing him deeper. He felt her feet on his back, then her thighs clamped his face as real orgasm took root – and he sucked her clit, ran his tongue into her as deeply as he could.

She was bucking in the next instant, her hands slamming the mattress, grasping the sheets, her head thrashing from side to side and wails of “Oh my God, oh my God!” filled the air as she lost herself completely. She filled his mouth and still he hammered her clit, still she thrashed.

“Okay…” she gasped. “Enough, or I’m going pee all over the bed!”

He let her down gently, then nibbled up her tummy to her breasts, moved slowly to her neck again – then her lips – kissing every inch of her, suddenly loving everything about his girl. He held himself up above her and looked into her eyes. “Close them,” he said. “Close you eyes.” And when she had he leaned close and gently tickled her eyelashes with his tongue, felt the trembling start again and he kissed her, deeply.

“I want you to cum inside of me now,” she said, and he felt her legs part, then felt them encircling his waist. He guided the tip to her lips and lingered there, sliding through her bristly warmth until he entered her, then he moved slowly, deeply, until she settled into his groove. He marveled at the way her body moved with his, how deeply attuned she seemed to his movement, then he leaned back a bit and took her legs and moved them to his chest, her feet by his face, and he pushed more deeply now – until he found a new rhythm – and once again she settled into the new beat. He kissed her ankles, then the tops of her feet and the effect on her was instantaneous: she trembled anew, her back arcing to meet his thrusts and the fire started in his groin just then, moved to his back, then he was coming. Kissing her feet, driving in as deeply as he could, his gut full of molten uncertainty, the pleasure in his mind the only certainty left in this new world.

“What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly, quietly, and when he came to her he saw the question in her eyes.

“It kind of hurts, in the small of my back?”

“Is that because…?”

“Yup.”

She was up and leaned into him in an instant, her arms around him, reaching for him – wanting to hold onto him – then she saw the sweat pouring from his face and she knelt with him, supporting his weight against her own.

“Oh, God no,” she whispered, “please don’t take him from me. Not again…”

He felt her, felt her need, then felt his need too. “I’m not going to leave you. Not now, not yet.”

She was kissing his chest, trying to hide her tears, and he heard her whispering over and over – “Oh my God, what have you done to me.”

And he wondered what God had done – to them both.

IV     The Nurse

She didn’t like working nights, but with flu season in full force she’d been called in to work that shift three times this week – still, Debbie Euclid knew working Oncology was tough no matter what time of day. That’s why she’d trained for this work, and it wasn’t just the physical challenge; no, the emotional effects of working this floor were the toughest in the medical world – and that’s why she’d chosen to specialize in oncological care more than twenty years ago.

She was sitting at a console that looked more like a starship’s flight-deck than a nurses station, with banks of monitors in front of her that tied her to the vital signs of twenty resting patients. She worked on notes at the top of the hour, then walked the floor, checking each patient in her wing, adjusting medications, asking questions – answering them, too – and it never failed to impress her how much people wanted to talk in the middle of the night.

She’d heard the sirens two hours ago, then the Code Blue, but this was the new normal more often than not these days. Gang activity was out of control just a few blocks from here, teenagers with Uzis and nothing better to do were killing each other left and right, and anyone who got in their way, indiscriminately, carelessly, risked death too, and the University of Chicago’s ER was often closest to the front lines in this new war. So, it hadn’t taken long for tonight’s story to make it’s way up the floors, and she’d listened, of course, as she always did, then shook her head and finished making notes while she tried to forget it all, all the ugliness, all the anger. Then she moved out onto the floor.

She moved from room to room, checking IVs for the most part, turning down the volume on TVs after people fell asleep, then she came to a new patient…

“Norma Fairchild,” Euclid read from the chart aloud. “Okay, what’s your story, Norma?” She read through the notes, making mental notes here and there: admitted yesterday afternoon, Stage IV stomach cancer, metastasis to liver and lungs. Primary oncologist wanted her on hospice care at home, but there wasn’t anyone ‘at home’ to help take care of her. There would be no heroics for Norma Fairchild, and there was nothing heroic about what was going to happen to Norma Fairchild over the next couple of days. Her fate was sealed, time both an ally – and her enemy – and now only the night loomed for this woman.

She opened the door and went in, saw the patient sitting up in bed watching television, and the woman looked at her as she came in, then turned back to the screen, apparently engrossed. Euclid walked in, saw the story still unfolding on the street, and listened to the announcer…

“Jason, the word we’re getting is that the victim, a juvenile, got out of a car and the four gang members began taunting him, apparently about being gay, about turning tricks with men cruising the alley in cars behind this Walgreen’s,” the reporter said, pointing at the store on Cottage Grove. “From there, the victim tried to run away, crossing 51^st Street, running to Drexel Square with the four gang members attacking the boy with knives as he ran. And that’s when Captain Redmaine saw them, and tried to intervene.”

“Judy, the word we’re getting is that the victim is white, and the gang members are all African-American? Can you confirm that?”

“Yes, Jason, I’ve heard that from officers on the scene, and we can see two bodies from where we’re standing. They’re both black.”

“Okay, and, well, thanks to our Judy Miller on the scene with that update. As you know, Captain Redmaine succumbed to his injuries about an hour ago, and we have word that both the mayor and Superintendent Johnston will be making statements within the hour…”

Fairchild turned down the volume, looked at her nurse. “You look angry, dear. What is it?”

“Oh, nothing. How are feeling, Mrs Fairchild?”

“Pissed off.”

“What? Why?”

“All that anger. All this hate. It’s ruining this city, ruining our world.”

Euclid nodded. “It sure is.”

“My husband was with the department for thirty years. I’m not sure what he’d have to say about his city now.”

“My brother was too,” Euclid said. “He was killed three years ago.”

“On duty?”

“Yes.”

They looked at one another, each instantly sympathetic to the other’s need. “I suppose you see this all the time here.”

“Almost every night. Sometimes several times a night.”

“Too much hate,” Fairchild said, shaking her head.

“There’s no respect anymore, for anything.”

“What do you think your brother would say? Now? About tonight?”

“You know, that’s a good question. I think,” Euclid said, looking out the window, “he’d be angry that things are still the same, maybe even worse. That things haven’t changed, I guess.”

Fairchild nodded. “I taught English in Oak Park for thirty years, and I retired twenty years ago – but still go in and substitute teach. I’ve seen it in the kids, the way things have changed over the past fifty years, and you’re right. There’s no respect anymore, there’s just money and the power that money confers. Nobody wants to study, nobody wants to know the difference between right and wrong, and nobody wants to look at the world and ask why. Why do things have to be this way? Why can’t we change things? The way things are falling apart, who knows how much longer we’ll last?”

Euclid watched the woman’s vitals as she listened, then decided to cut this talk short. “Oh, you know, I reckon the squeaky wheel gets the grease…the world will just keep on turning no matter what happens, or what we want to happen. Now, could you tell me, on a scale of one to ten, where your pain is right now?”

V     The Pilot

“American 1-8-6, Chicago Approach. You’re number three to land, runway 2-8 Charlie, currently CAT III, winds light and variable, viz below minimums in heavy snow. Hold at BURKE, 12 thousand.”

“8-6 Heavy to BURKE 12 for 2-8 Charlie, acknowledge CAT III.”

“Uh, 8-6 Heavy, we have a temp localizer frequency of one-zero-eight-decimal-seven-five, not the niner-five on current published approach plates.”

“8-6 Heavy, seven five, not niner five on the localizer.”

“Nice of ‘em to tell us,” Captain Judy Parker said. “Double check the freqs, would you?”

“Got it,” her First Officer said.

“8-6 Heavy, turn right to 2-7-3, descend and maintain niner-thousand feet.”

“8-6 Heavy, right 2-7-3 to niner,” Parker replied, then to her FO: “You get the new missed approach entered?”

“Got it.”

“Double check the DMEs.”

“108.75, check.”

“8-6 Heavy, report passing LNDUH.”

“Flaps seven,” she commanded, then: “8-6 Heavy at LNDUH.”

“Okay 8-6, no further transmissions necessary, contact tower on 1-2-0-decimal-7-5 when you’re on the ground. Visibility now less than 100 feet, one foot of snow on runway. Good night.”

“8-6 Heavy, night.”

“I got the freqs,” her FO said.

“Flaps twenty.”

“Twenty, passing MEMAW at five, speed 1-7-7.”

“Flaps thirty.”

“Thirty.”

“Gear down,” she commanded. The autoland system had the 777, but she kept her hands on the yoke while she scanned the instruments on her panel, looking through the windshield just once at all in flying muck.

“Three down and green,” the FO said.

“Gimme 40. Landing lights.”

“Flaps forty. I got glow.”

“Okay…”

The flight management computer began talking now: “Two hundred, minimums. One eighty. One fifty. One ten. Eighty, sixty…retard, retard,” and she watched as the autothrottle reset, then she moved her right hand to the quadrant, and when she felt the mains hit she moved the thrust levers to reverse, put her toes on the brakes, then her left hand to the nose-gear paddle while she retracted the spoilers with her right.

“Just another day in paradise,” the FO said.

“Must be a foot of ice under this snow,” she said as she looked, then double checked the tower frequency was entered. “American 8-6 Heavy, I think we can make P-1.”

“Roger 8-6, right on Papa 1 approved, then right on Papa to Double Echo. No traffic at this time.”

“Papa double echo,” she replied. When the trip-Seven’s speed was down to ten she gently began her turn off the runway. “I can’t see shit,” she said. “Turn off those mains, leave the strobes.”

“Captain?”

“I got the perimeter lights…too much glare…”

“Mains off, strobes on.”

She made the turn onto the main east west taxi-way and peered up over the glare-screen, then back towards the left wingtip. “There must be two feet down there now. Okay, put the mains back on.”

“I can’t see the terminal.”

“We should be crossing P4 now. See anything?”

“Negative.”

“Uh, Tower, 8-6 heavy, we’re not seeing any signs out here.”

“8-6 Heavy, I have you one hundred feet from Papa-four.”

“Okay, 8-6, give us a shout when we’re coming up on Tango.”

“8-6 Heavy, you’re passing Papa-four, now 4-0-0 feet to Tango, 7-0-0 feet to Foxtrot.”

“Roger.”

“8-6, you’re passing Tango.”

“Got it. You might want to pass along to OPS they’ve got a couple of feet on the ground now.”

“8-6 Heavy, passing Foxtrot, Double Echo now 4-0-0 feet. OPS is sending out a truck to guide you in…they’ll meet you at Double Echo.”

“8-6 Heavy, okay, we’ll hold at Double Echo.”

“This is surreal,” her FO said as he looked back over his shoulder. “I can’t see the wingtip, maybe just a little green glow, and the strobes. There most be a foot of snow on the wing.”

“You ever flown into Sheremetyevo?”

“No ma’am, and this white boy don’t want to, neither.”

She laughed. “Okay, I think I got the truck.”

“8-6 Heavy, just F-Y-I, the airport is closed at this time. Y’all are the last bird down for a while.”

“8-6, thanks for sticking in there with us. Looks like depth is a meter now.”

“They just measured five feet at the threshold on nine left.”

“Daddy, I wanna go home,” she said, and she heard controllers laughing in the background.

“You got your stuff ready to go?” her FO asked.

“Yeah. Thanks, Paul,” she said as she taxied up to the gate.

“You beat feet. I’ll get it, and tell Gene that Peggy and I will be praying for him.”

“Brakes set, engine one to idle, APU confirmed on. You sure?”

“I’ve done it before. Now get out of here before they shut down the highways!”

She retracted her seat while she undid her harness, then hopped out of the left seat, pausing to kiss her FO on the cheek.

“Hey, that’s an unapproved ground maneuver!” he said, laughing, but she was already out the door and gone.

She saw the customs entrance ahead and, thankfully, a very short line. The crew lines were closed this hour of the morning, and she picked the shortest queue, then put her flight bag down on the slick tile floor and pushed it along with her foot while she pulled out her iPhone. She woke it up, found Gene’s number and hit send.

“Judy? That you?”

“Gene? Where the hell are you?”

“‘Bout halfway to the hospital, still on State.”

“Listen, I got your text this morning…can you tell me what the fuck’s going on?”

“Ah, Judy, I’ve got a friend with me right now? Susan, say hello to Judy. Judy, say hello to Susan.”

“Hello, Susan.”

“Hello, Judy.”

“Uh, Judy, I met Susan about four hours ago. I decided I loved her about about two hours ago, and I hope you’ll come to the wedding.”

“Gene?”

“Yes, Judy.”

“It’s not nice to fuck with your little sister’s head, okay, Gene? Now, what the hell’s going on?”

“Where are you?”

“Customs.”

“Well, I’m checking in at five thirty, operation isn’t scheduled ‘til seven, so you should make it in with time to spare. A cutter named Rohrbacher is doing the procedure, and Charlotte can fill you in if I miss you. Where’re you coming in from, anyway?”

“Beijing.”

“Bring any fortune cookies?”

“Gene? You’re not going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Not on the phone, kid.”

“Oh, God.”

“Not on the phone, okay, Judy?”

“Oh sweet Jesus, just tell me it’s not cancer.”

“I can’t do that, kid. Glad you could make it, though. Hope you end up loving Susan half as much as I do,” he said as he broke the connection.

“You love me?” Sara/Susan said. “You told your sister you love me? And that you met me four hours ago?”

“I did. I did, Susan, because I do.”

“I don’t believe this is happening to me.”

“It’s happening to us. Believe it.”

“I don’t believe this is happening, period.”

“It happened, as in it has happened. I full well to expect to wake up and find this was all a dream, but for now, right now, I feel like a lucky man, a very lucky man.”

“How’s the pain now?”

“To be honest, I’ve felt better.”

“You’re sweating again.”

“It’s called diaphoresis. It’s also no big deal.”

“And you’re as white as a ghost.”

“That’s a little bit bigger deal – I’m also getting light headed. Do you know how to drive?”

“Not really.”

He slowed down, opened an App on the dashboard, then started speaking. “I am having a medical emergency.”

“Okay, Dr Parker,” the Tesla’s computer said. “Can you state a preferred destination, or should I choose the nearest medical facility?” the computer said.

“University of Chicago Medicine, 5-8-4-1 South Maryland.”

“To initiate autodrive, clearly state “CONFIRM” at the next prompt. Is this a medical emergency, and do you want to initiate autodrive?”

“Confirm.”

“Thank you, Dr Parker. I’ll take it from here.”

He let go of the wheel, took his foot off the accelerator and leaned back, took a deep breath.

“I love your car, too,” Susan said as she took his right hand in hers. She kissed his fingers one by one, then held his hand to her face, watched as he closed his eyes, as he took a series of long, deep breaths. “I think I see it,” she said a few minutes later and he opened his eyes, looked around, tried to get his bearings then saw the computer was taking them right to the ER entrance. It pulled up to the ambulance entrance and a police officer came up to warn them away, then ran inside to get help.

“I think we made it,” she said.

“I think I’m signing you up for Driver’s Ed next week,” he said, trying not to laugh as another wave of fire swept through his groin.

+++++

She was mad now.

The line at the taxi queue was longer than long, and very few new taxis were coming in so she went to the attendant and told them she needed to get to the University Medical Center – in a hurry.

“Right over there,” the attendant said.

“What?”

“Right there; so far three of you are headed there, and the next taxi that comes in is going there.”

“Oh, okay…thanks.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“No, my brother is going in for surgery in an hour or so.”

“Okay, well…here it comes.”

She turned, saw a huge yellow SUV headed for the taxi line and she stepped to the curb; a daffy looking woman and a brooding young man followed her and they all stepped inside as soon as the Suburban crunched to a stop.

“All of you going to University Medicine?” the driver said.

“Yes,” came their hurried replies.

“This snow is out of control,” the driver advised, “so it could take an hour, depending on how well the plows are keeping up,” then he turned around and looked at Parker’s captain’s uniform. “You just come in through this?”

“Yup.”

“Over the lake?”

“Yes, 28C, CAT III.”

He nodded. “I think about a foot has fallen in the last hour, haven’t seen it this bad since ’98.”

“Taxiways were drifting,” Parker said. “A couple of feet already. Getting worse, fast.”

“Excuse me,” the daffy looking woman said, “but were you on the Beijing flight?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Were you one of the flight attendants?”

“No, Ma’am,” Parker sighed – as the Suburban pulled out into the snow.

“Oh? But…”

“Lady,” the driver said, “four stripes on the sleeve means captain. This was the captain of your flight.”

“Seriously? Well, I never…”

Parker looked out into the night, at misty yellow pools cast by the sodium highway lighting, and she guessed horizontal visibility was down to less than a hundred feet – and she could see there were very deep drifts forming along the sides of the roadway. Wreckers were pulling cars from ditches, and within a mile they passed an ambulance and several fire trucks at the scene of a really fiery accident, and yet there weren’t many plows out.

“How long has it been snowing like this?” she asked the driver.

“All day, but the hard stuff started falling around midnight. Maybe two feet during the day, but it really picked up in the last hour. I heard they just closed the airport.”

“Right after we landed,” she said.

“Really?” the woman said. “Is that normal?”

“It is – when this much snow falls this fast,” Parker said. “Doesn’t really happen that often, but when it does there’s nothing else they can do.”

“Why’s that?”

“It ain’t real good, lady,” the driver said, “when airplanes slide off the runway into snow drifts.”

“Oh yes…I see…” the lady said.

“It’s also dangerous if too much snow loads up on the wing during the approach,” Parker added.

“I wanted to ask…it seemed real rough for a while, maybe five hours before we landed. Do you know what that was all about, Captain?”

Parker smiled. “Yes, Ma’am. That would have been Mount McKinley, when we crossed the Alaska Range. Always a little choppy around there.”

“Well, I nearly lost it.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” the brooding man said. He’d been silent so far, content to just look out the window, but Parker guessed he was looking – angrily – at unwelcome memories.

“Were you on the same plane with us?” daffy woman asked the brooding man.

The man ignored her for a moment, continued to look out the window, then said: “Yes.”

“Uh-oh,” the driver said. “Looks like highway patrol ahead, lanes closed.” He started punching buttons on the GPS display

Parker leaned around the driver’s headrest and peered into the snowy gloom, saw four lanes funneled into one just head, and a mass of pulsing strobes further on – and she cursed: “Well, Goddamn it to Hell,” she spat as she looked at her watch.

“What’s wrong?” the daffy woman asked.

“My brother. He’s going into surgery soon. I wanted to be there, before.”

“When’s he scheduled?” the driver asked.

“Seven, I think.”

“So, my guess is they’ll sedate him at six thirty,” he said, looking at the clock on the dash. “We’ll be there about six, six-ten.”

“With all this mess?”

“Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll get you there in time.”

She smiled, leaned forward and touched his shoulder: “Thanks.”

“Want me to call the OR? See what’s going on?”

“Could you?”

“Sure, my wife works there. What’s his name?”

“Gene Parker. He’s a neurosurgeon on-staff there.”

The driver turned slightly and looked at her. “You kidding? Doctor Gene’s your brother?”

“Yes. Why? You know him?”

The driver chuckled: “Our kid had a cyst, something called an arachnoid cyst, and Doctor Gene took it out. Mary, my wife, is a scrub nurse there, and she think’s he’s the best doc at UC.” He turned to his phone controls on the Suburban’s central display and touched a number, then began talking through a headset while he exited the highway for surface streets. Once he was off the highway he took off at breakneck speeds, heading east towards the lake.

“You say your brother is a doctor?” the daffy woman asked. “A neurosurgeon?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“My mother’s there right now, in oncology. They called me a few days ago. Told me to come if I wanted to see her again, before she…, well, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “It’s a difficult time, I know.” Parker almost wanted to laugh at her understatement, but she held herself in check, tried to get hold of her own anxieties. “What were you doing in Beijing?”

“Oh, my husband works there,” the daffy woman twittered, “for a semi-conductor company. I’ve been teaching at a school there, and I do love the people so.”

“Oh? What do you teach?”

“English for the most part,” she giggled, “but piano, also.”

“Sounds interesting,” Parker said – turning away.

“It’s a very different culture,” the woman said. “A fascinating place.”

“You can say that again,” the brooding man said, overwhelming bitterness in his voice.

“You work there too,” the daffy woman said.

“State Department. I work in the embassy.”

“Oh, I see. Do you have someone in the hospital?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I had an email from my mother’s landlord when we landed. Said the paramedics had taken her to the hospital.”

“You don’t know what’s wrong?”

He turned away from the question, turned away from memories of his mother, then he sighed. “She’s fragile, I think. She has been since my father left.”

“Are you all she has?”

He nodded in the gathering silence. “Yes.”

“It’s nice she has you then, has someone who cares.”

He wanted to vomit at the irony in the woman’s words but shook away the feeling, turned and looked out the window again. As the SUV passed amber pools of light he caught brief snippets of his own reflection in the glass, little glimpses into the eyes of a stranger.

‘Is that me in there,’ he asked when they stopped at the next traffic light.

‘But who the hell is ‘me’? Just an echo – of her?’ He stared into his reflection – and he saw her eyes waiting for him in the shadows. Her eyes, her lips, her hand – wrapped around his penis. Her mouth, coaxing, teasing, devouring him – and he wanted to run as more waves of conflicting emotion broke over his soul. Betrayal, always betrayal, yet he always felt sorry for his father at times like this. Sorry, for his father’s apathy, for the way his father turned a blind eye to them both and, in the end, left him alone – to grow up with her. Of course he’d never know all the answers, not now, just as he was sure his father never really knew what was going on when they were all together. Now he was dead and gone, and the only person he had left, his only link to that most unusable past, was his mother.

Frantic calls from her co-workers over the past few weeks had alerted him that something had finally snapped, that she was losing contact with reality. He thought of that dingy little apartment, that horrid room he’d lived in during high school, her nightly visits never far from his mind’s eye, and he felt himself tensing again and again as he swayed between needing to see her, and wanting to never see her again.

But now he wondered what had happened to her – when she’d been a kid. Who’d abused her? How long did it go on for? What secrets had she carried along the way, tried to bury – with no success? Who haunted her days, and nights, and why had she always been silent about the demons chasing her through the night? Why – and what – had happened to her?

Because, he realized, whatever happened hadn’t just happened to him. Something – no –someone must have abused her, and he’d been thinking about that all the way from Beijing. He wasn’t ‘the’ victim; no, he was just one in an long, perhaps endless, series of victims – yet even that realization hadn’t make his ambivalence for her any less searing. No, she’d had the opportunity to end the cycle, and had chosen not to. He had the opportunity now, and he would. He had chosen to never marry, to never have kids, and that was all the result of her choices, and yet he accepted his own choice was the price he’d have to pay to end this cycle of repeating Hell. Only now, the closer he got to the hospital the more acute his anxiety grew, the less sure he felt about all their choices.

‘I really don’t want to see her,’ his inner demon said. ‘Not ever again.’

“But you have to,” he whispered, almost as if he was praying. “If you don’t, you’ll lose your humanity – and her’s, too.”

He remembered the last time he’d seen her. Sitting trancelike in the shower, curled up in a fetal ball, staring into the darkness of her waking life, watching the demon-dance – her eyes focused on things now far away and long ago. This was her own secret Hell, and he had watched her choices push-in from all around, push-in until nothing was left but the demons, and then her tears came. He remembered turning off the water, trying to help her stand, only then she’d reached out, tried to grasp his pants, to take them off – and he’d let her fall, then run from that accursed place. He hadn’t seen her in over a year now…and all he saw when he thought of her were those grasping hands, clawing for their release.

‘And I hate her. I’ll always hate her,’ he said as the memory washed away on the flood.

“You can’t give in to hatred. It will consume you, blind you to everything there is about life that’s good and beautiful. It will blind you to her pain, and your need.”

Then he heard the driver talking to the pilot…

“They’re already running about a half hour behind,” the old man said, “and I let ‘em know we’re inbound. They won’t take him in before you have a chance to talk with him.”

“Thank you so much,” Parker said as she looked at her watch, now clearly relieved. They were on 51^st Street now, and they turned right on Cottage Grove and she saw a couple of cops walking in the snow off to her left, and wondered what they were up to, what could be so important in an empty, snowy field, then she saw the hospital looming through the snow, behind the first tendrils of dawn – the sky all swirling snow streaked yellowy-gray. Then she saw his red Tesla parked near the ER entrance and wanted to smile – but it still hurt too much inside for all that.

Why had it all fallen apart, she wondered? They’d always been close, the three of them, together. Gene and Sara, as far back as middle school, yet a few years before Sara got sick they had drifted apart. Why? Was it inertia? Are people, even close friends, simply destined to drift apart, like stars adrift in an ever expanding – and always dying – universe? Or was our gravity too weak, she wondered, to overcome the spinning inertia of all our broken dreams.

She missed Sara, and had loved her at least as much as Gene ever had, even if differently. They’d been in the same grade, a year behind Gene, and Sara had lived just a few doors down so had always been there, had always been a part of their lives. The awkward Jewish kid, the total brain. The ugly duckling who’d blossomed into something truly rare and gorgeous, and Gene had loved her from the start.

But so too had she.

‘God, I loved her,’ she sighed, quickly wiping a sudden, secret tear from her eye. Sara had been the only girl who had ever truly understood her – even the deepest depths of her heart’s most obscure desires. Sara knew just how she felt, knew what she’d wanted, and Sara had never rejected her. They’d become friends, best friends, and once she even thought Gene understood the contours of their need – but there’d always been the wall, never once breached, keeping all their most precious secrets intact. So she’d had her other lovers over the years, but never the one that mattered most. Gene had been Sara’s one true love – and maybe that was why the tides had finally pulled them apart – but as much as she’d always loved her brother she had to admit that now, especially now, her brother was all she had left of Sara. He was the only person left in the world that she could talk to – about the one person she had ever really loved. But she knew even with him there were limits – there was that wall to maintain. Still, maybe it was time…?

Because while both of them had been so gifted, so utterly brilliant, Gene would always be the pure ‘innocent abroad’ – so he might understand her need. He was the little boy who had always accepted love without question, and who gave as freely of his own. And he always would, she knew, because that was his nature – and she thought of his words on the phone. “Four hours,” she said to herself, the name Susan rolling over and over in her mind, then: “What has he gone and done now?”

The Suburban pulled up to the main entrance, and three people paid up and danced out into the swirling snow – lost in wonder of the day ahead.

(C) 2017 Adrian Leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com

addendum: Colorado has broken snowfall totals for January dating back a hundred years. We’ve had about, and I say this advisedly due to difficulties measuring drifting snow, ten feet of snow in the last two weeks. Mammoth Mtn in the Sierras has had over 200 inches in the past EIGHT DAYS. Someone tell me what the Dickens is going on?

I cleared the decks this morning, early, and just went up to check levels. Two feet of new white crud in a little over two hours. At this rate we’re doomed…and Bing Crosby, I’m coming’ for you. Your ass is grass.

So, in the interim I have devised a new concept in health clubs. Join up, then come up and shovel snow for ten hours a day; we guarantee you’ll lose weight, lots of weight. Limited time only, free membership for next two months, come on up and shovel to your heart’s content, or until you have a heart attack – whichever comes first. We guarantee results! I think this concept will take off soon, so be the first on your block to sign up! So…shovel your way to the abs of your dreams! Women will crave you! You’ll be the envy of every man at your old, obsolete gym! And after I sell this fucking igloo and move to Costa Rica, you can have the franchise rights – gratis!!!

Adios, muchachos! And Happy Shoveling!

A new story to help bring in the New Year.

Stumbled across the idea for this story last week, talking with a neighbor and his wife. This is kind of tongue in cheek, a not too serious look at changing keys in the middle of a song.

I’ll have a few parting thoughts after the story, so read on!

Customer Service

+++++

In the still of the night

As I gaze from my window

At the moon in its flight

My thoughts all stray to you

In the still of the night

All the world is in slumber

All the times without number

Darling when I say to you

Do you love me, as I love you

Are you my life to be, my dream come true

Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight

Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill

In the chill, still, of the night

Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill

In the chill, still, of the night

In the Still of the Night | Cole Porter

+++++

“Customer Service, this is Tracy,” the woman answering the phone said, “how can I help you this evening.”

“Yes, well, I was just down at your store and I think I left a bag of groceries on the check-out stand. Could you check for me, please?”

“Could I have your name, please?”

“Eunice. Eunice Gibson. I was there about an hour ago.”

“Yes, Mrs Gibson, I have your bag here at the customer service desk, just inside the main entrance.”

“Look, there was some butter and yogurt in the bag…”

“Yes, ma’am, I put your perishables in our ‘fridge, and both your bag and the stuff in the ‘fridge are labeled with your name on them – in case I’m not here when you come by.”

“Thank you so much. Is this Tracy?”

“Yes, ma’am, and I’ll be here ‘til six this evening.”

“Well, thank you Tracy. If I can get a ride, I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

“Do you need a ride?”

“I don’t drive anymore, Tracy,” the woman said. “Too old and too stupid for all that nonsense, I suppose.”

“Well, if it can wait ‘til six, I could drop your things off on my way home?”

There was silence on the line for a moment – like the woman was hovering above the plains of a vast indecision – then she said: “You wouldn’t mind, Tracy?”

“Not at all, Mrs Gibson. We have your address on file as 233 Maple Avenue; I assume that hasn’t changed?”

“No, no it hasn’t.”

“Alright, I should see you some time after six, probably around six-thirty.”

“Thank you, Tracy. I appreciate this, I really do.”

“You’re certainly welcome, Mrs Gibson, and I’ll see you soon.” Tomberlin put the phone in it’s cradle and turned to a customer just walking up to her desk. She knew him, and his two daughters, had known him since high school, and she could tell something was wrong; even his girls looked out of sorts. “Can I help you, Tom?”

Tom Stoddard’s eyes were watery, and he looked way beyond out of sorts – he looked genuinely depressed, or worse. “I bought these shrimp last night,” he said angrily, slapping a receipt down on the counter, “and they smell like ammonia – mixed with a healthy dose of dog turds.” Tomberlin couldn’t help it – she grinned, started to giggle, and this seemed to anger the Stoddard even more. “Look, Tracy, I don’t happen to think this is all that funny…”

“I’m sorry, Tom, it’s just that I’ve never heard that particular odor described, well, so perfectly…”

“Okay, but what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, what would you like me to do about it?”

“What?”

“Well, Tom, we can refund the purchase price, cash or store credit, or I’ll get the department head over here and you can go with her and find some fresh shrimp. Your choice.”

“That’s it? No paperwork to fill out, no ‘wait two weeks while we process your complaint?’”

“Simple as that, Tom – no muss, no fuss.”

“I’ll be dipped,” Stoddard said. “Well, guess I’d still like some shrimp…”

Tomberlin nodded her head, picked up the phone and called the seafood counter, told the manager what was going on. “Tom, if you and the girls could just wait over here,” she said, pointing to a spot out of the main line, “someone from seafood will be right up, and I’m so sorry this happened…”

“Certainly not your fault, Tracy. Thanks for helping me sort this out.”

“My pleasure.”

She helped the next woman in line buy a few lottery tickets, waved “bye!” when the seafood manager led Tom and his girls away, then she noticed ‘him’ in the checkout line across from her desk.

But then again, almost everyone in the store noticed him. They always did.

He was Hollywood royalty – or had been, anyway, once upon a time. He’d retired, written his memoirs and discovered he liked writing – and had been writing ever since. Three novels – all about movie studio treachery, torrid, behind the scenes love affairs, and an occasional murder thrown in for spice – and now he was seemingly more famous than ever. He lived on a ranch outside of town these days, but all kinds of Hollywood types came up on weekends to visit him; just now he had finished checking out and looked her way, smiled and came over to her desk.

“Howya doin’, Tracy?”

“Robert! Fine…so nice to see you!”

He smiled. “You still get off at seven?”

“Six tonight.”

“Wondered if you’d like to go out to a movie?”

“You know, a customer left a bag of groceries and I was going to run them over when I get off.”

“You still taking the bus home?”

“Yup.”

He shook his head. “Nope. Not tonight. I’ll be out front at six-o-five.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Tracy, the only thing I mind is you won’t marry me.”

“Robert?”

“Yes, Tracy?”

“If you asked, I missed it,” she said, grinning. This was there long-established routine, and he feigned memory problems next, then muttered his way out the front door, out into the snow…

“You know,” Wilma Brinson said, leaning on the counter, “one of these days you ought to say yes. Just to see what he does, ya know?”

“I’m way to old for him, Wilma.”

“Really? Aren’t you fifty something?”

She laughed. “I sure am, Wilma. Thanks for reminding me.”

“How old d’you think he is?”

“I don’t know,” she lied.

“You two look so good together.”

“Wilma, that man would look good with a dancing prairie dog turd.”

The woman screeched, her laughter sounding almost like a low-flying jet airliner as she walked back to her cash register, and Tomberlin just sighed and turned away. She helped a few more customers then closed her register and cleaned up her cubby, then got Gibson’s groceries together and clocked-out before heading out the door.

She wondered if the bus would be running on time, but no, there he was, in his cinnamon brown Range Rover, looking just like a freshly-minted Hollywood matinee idol. Sunglasses, sheepskin gloves, salt-n-pepper hair freshly groomed. And it would smell – overpoweringly so – of Bay Rum cologne when she opened the door, too.

He was out his door and and jogged round to get her’s, and she squinted, rubbed her eyes when the cologne washed out of the Rover’s interior – the flood almost knocking her over.

He took her hand and helped her up, then closed the door behind her and walked around. “So. Where to?”

“Maple Avenue, down by the old courthouse.”

“Okay. Nice neighborhood.”

“Eunice Gibson. Her husband represented the district in Washington for more than thirty years.”

“Morris Gibson? I didn’t know his wife was still here…I thought she moved back to Georgetown after the funeral.”

“You knew him?”

“Not well, but I gave some money to his campaign when I bought the ranch. He helped me with some water rights issues.”

“Well, let me warn you…she’s still a real firecracker.”

“Oh?”

“Says what’s on her mind. Has a sharp mind, too, in case you were wondering.”

He pulled onto Main and drove through slushy ruts in the wet snow, and she thought he seemed preoccupied. “How’re you doing, Bob? I mean really. Not the bullshit version.”

“Tracy! I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use colorful language before! What’s come over you?”

“Arthritis.”

He laughed, almost whispered “I hear that” – and with more than a little understanding. “What’s the street number?”

“233”

“Ah, better turn here.” He flipped on his turn signal and the Rover slipped in the slush a little – then the traction control system dug in and he powered gently through the turn. “Think it’s gonna get cold tonight,” he said, his voice a little rattled from the skid. “I mean, think you could make it through a seven o’clock movie?”

“Doubtful, but I’m willing to try. What do you have in mind?”

“New Woody Allen flick at the Odeon.”

“Oh, God.”

“What? You don’t like Woody?”

“I can take him – in small doses. Midnight in Paris was good, though.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I thought so too. Just quirky enough to be interesting. Did you like Back To The Future?”

“I liked Michael J Fox.”

“Yup. You’re a chick.”

“So glad you noticed.”

“I noticed, Tracy. Long time ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Here’s Maple; make a left.”

Turn signal on, he paused for traffic then turned.

“It’s the big one, there, on the left,” she said.

“Now that’s a house,” Robert said, turning into the drive. “They don’t build ‘em like that anymore. Mind of I go up with you?”

“No, not at all.”

He parked and set the brake, then came around to her door. “Slippery as eel-snot out here,” he didn’t need to say, then “Be careful” as he took her hand and helped her out into the cold.

She stepped gingerly to the sidewalk, waited for him to close the car door, then they walked up together and stood on the porch, rang the bell and waited.

She was coming down the grand staircase a moment later, but two steps from the bottom she caught her shoe on the runner and started to fall.

“Oh, no…” they heard through the glass, and each watched helplessly as the woman – arms outstretched – fell to the hardwood floor.

He watched her left arm buckle under the impact, her face bounce off the floor, and tried the door. “Locked” he cried, exasperated, and in one smooth motion he stepped back and literally kicked the front door off it’s hinges – then rushed into the house. He got to her side, put his hand on her shoulder: “Mrs Gibson? Can you hear me?”

“Eunice?” Tomberlin said gently. “Are you alright?”

“Well goddamn, sunovabiscuit!” Gibson said, though her voice was detached, almost a distant moan. “My arm hurts.”

He repositioned himself, helped Gibson roll over and sit up; “Oh, Hell’s bells,” he said when he saw blood pouring from her broken nose. “Tracy? Kitchen towel, or even some paper towels?”

“Got it.”

“What’s wrong now?” Gibson said, then she looked up, saw that face kneeling over her and gasped. “Are you…?”

“Robert Rankin, ma’am,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Well, goddamn!” she cried. “Here I’ve been, wanting to meet you for something like twenty years, and when I finally do I have to go and fall on my face!” She looked like she wanted to laugh, then she shook once, and started to cry – just as Tomberlin arrived with several towels, one damp with tap water.

“Here,” Rankin said as he took the moist towel, “let’s see if we can’t clean this up a little bit.” He worked on her solicitously, cooing reassuringly as he cleaned the blood off Gibson’s face and neck. When he finished he dried her carefully, slowly, then reached for her arm, gently ran a finger to the spreading bruise he saw under the distorted skin near her left elbow. “That arms broken,” he said at once, then: “Looks like you’re going to the hospital tonight, young lady.”

“What?”

He held a finger about a foot in front of her nose and moved it from side to side: “Ma’am, follow this finger as it moves, and he watched her eyes jerk erratically as she tried to follow, but he put that hand in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, dialed 911.

“Yes,” he said when the operator answered, “I’m at the Gibson residence, 233 Maple Avenue, and Mrs Gibson has fallen, broken her left arm and possibly her skull. Yes, we’ll stand-by right here. Okay, about five minutes, and I’ll stay on the line ‘til they arrive.”

“Oh God,” Eunice said, beginning to swoon. “I don’t feel right.”

He was by her side again, held on to her and let her down to the floor gently as she passed out, then he picked up his phone again: “Ma’am, better tell those paramedics to step on it; she just lost consciousness.”

They heard the siren moments later, then saw pulsing red and blue strobes racing down the street. Firemen and paramedics scrambled up the walk and into the house and swarmed over the woman, and less than a minute passed before they had her on a gurney and carried her from the house.

“Tracy? You better go with them,” he said, looking at the splintered front door. “I’m going to get this door secured, then I’ll be along and meet you at the ER.”

“Okay, Bob.”

He stood, helped her up. “You know what, darlin’? You’re top-shelf. I mean that…none better.”

She looked at him, nodded her head, but she’d seen it in his eyes from the beginning. The empathy, the pure compassion, the willingness to help, to give. And she was pretty sure he’d just fallen in love with Eunice Gibson. “Thanks, Bob. I’ll see you there,” she said, then she turned and jogged down to the ambulance and stood by the open back door.

He watched her standing out there, snow falling on her shoulders, and he was pretty sure he’d just fallen impossibly in love with the girl. He took out his phone again and called his ranch foreman.

“Bert? You busy? I’m in town, 233 Maple, at a friends. She fell down the stairs as we got here and I kicked in the front door…” He listened for a moment, then: “Yup, one of those old Victorians. Door must be four feet wide, nine tall, looks like solid mahogany planking with a big oval window set in it. What was that carpenter’s name? Higgins? – that’s the one. Look, give him a call, would you? – get him over here as soon as possible. I need to run to the ER. Fine…fine. I’ll stand by ‘til you get here. Yup, the Rover’s out front. ‘Kay…seeya in a few.”

He moved around the entry, cleaned up spatters of blood from the floor – and the bigger splinters of wood, too, then he saw the groceries and ran the bag into the kitchen, put stuff in the ‘fridge before he went out to the porch and waited.

His foreman’s Suburban pulled up a few minutes later, and they lifted the door into place to help keep heat in. “What about Higgins?” he asked. “Did you get hold of him?”

“Yessir. He lives out on the north side of town, snow’s getting’ deep but he should be here in a few minutes.”

“Could you hold down the fort here for a while?”

“No problem.”

“Thanks, Bert. Look, as soon as I know what’s going on I’ll give you a call.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. You better get going before the roads get too deep.”

+++++

He sat looking across at Tracy, at the calm serenity in her eyes, wondering where such reserves of strength came from, then he looked down at the menu on the table. “I’ve never been here before,” he said at last. “Have you?”

“A few times. It’s diner food, but Donny has become a sort of local institution. Lots of grease and runny eggs, but the chicken fried steak is famous. People come from all over for his cream gravy.”

They’d just left the ER, after the docs took Eunice to surgery to repair her fractured humerus, and when he’d realized the lateness of the hour he thought they’d better grab some chow before everything closed down for the night. This old diner was on the edge of downtown, across from the old railroad station, and it stayed open late year-round.

“Well,” he sighed, “any port in a storm.”

“You should have been a doctor,” she said, looking him squarely in the eye.

“Yeah, probably so, but it was the little things, like failing algebra – twice – that interfered with my application to medical school.”

“Yeah,” she smiled, “I guess that would do it.”

“I meant what I said, Tracy. You know, the whole top-shelf thing.”

“Oh, well, I wish I knew what that meant?”

“They way you didn’t panic, they way you seem to care about people…”

“Hey, that’s my job…good ole customer service, reporting for duty.”

“No, Tracy, that’s not it. There’s something different about you, the way you wrap yourself around people. You care, and it’s not an act; I could feel it as I watched you around Gibson.”

“I could say the same thing about you, Bob. You’re decisive, you know? Most people would’ve looked on helplessly, maybe called 911, but not you. You didn’t hesitate, not for an instant – you saw what needed to be done and did it. That’s actually pretty rare, when you get right down to it.”

“I doubt that…”

“I don’t. I grew up here, but went to a college in Boise. I didn’t graduate; decided to move to New York City, got a job with TWA…”

“You were a stewardess?”

“Yup. For twenty five years.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Anyway. I’d been flying for a couple of years when I was involved in an accident…”

“A crash?”

“Uh-huh. In Rome. A 707 taking off, lost an engine – I mean it literally blew apart, knocked out the hydraulic systems and the wing went into what’s called an asymmetric configuration. We weren’t quite airborne yet, so the aircraft began, well, almost cartwheeling – but sideways – down the runway. Anyway, what I remember most about the whole thing was how people reacted when the aircraft came to a stop. A few people, a couple of men, a woman I remember, kept it together and helped, but most people simply panicked…or froze up like a deer caught in headlights”

“I remember that one; did many people make it out?”

“Less than half,” she said – her eyes watering. “There were sixty three survivors…”

“Jesus…”

“I remember the captain, during those first few moments, most of all. He was hurt, real bad as it turned out, but he secured what he could in the cockpit and came out, helped get people out the galley door and onto the slide. He pushed me out, too,” she said, pulling down the sleeve on her sweater, revealing old burn scars that, she said, covered her back and left shoulder, “just in time.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got out, but was very badly burned. He died a few days later, of internal injuries.”

“So, what’s this got to do with this evening?”

“You’re one of those people, Robert. One of those who help people find their way out of the chaos.”

He looked at the easy grace in her eyes, then looked away quickly and shrugged. “I don’t know…maybe. What about you? What kind of person are you?”

“I know who I am.”

“I think I fell in love with you tonight.”

She shook her head. “No you didn’t. You fell in love with her.”

He seemed surprised, but didn’t say anything for a while, then a waitress came to their booth and asked what they wanted.

“I hear the CFS is pretty good here,” Rankin said, but when he looked up the girl was staring at him.

“Are you that actor?” the girl asked.

“Well, I’m an actor,” he said uneasily, “or, well, I was once, anyway.”

The girl turned around and called out to the cook behind the counter, “Donny! It’s him!” The cook smiled and waved, and Rankin waved back. “So, yeah, the chicken fried steak is our specialty. We make our own cream gravy, too.”

“Mashed, or fried?” he asked.

“Both, and we got hash browns, too.”

“Tracy? What’ll it be?”

“Chef salad, please. With Italian, on the side.”

Rankin smiled. “Guess I’ll try the steak, with hash browns.”

“Wet or dry.”

“Oh, well…wet as hell, please.”

“Yessir!”

“Oh, what’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Becky, Mr Rankin.”

“Nice to  meet you, Becky.”

“Do you ever get tired of it?” she asked as they watched the girl walk away.

“No, not really. It would be worse, I guess, if all the attention stopped.”

She nodded her head. “Understandable.”

“So, you kept flying after the accident?”

“Yup, ‘til I retired.”

“Where’d you live?”

“Boston, a little place on the North Side, above an Italian bakery. It was heaven.”

“Why’d you move back here? Parents?”

“That’s right. What about you? Why Idaho?”

“Far enough away, but close enough, too, I guess. I couldn’t stand LA any longer, but I still need to go there from time to time. So, what makes you think I like her?”

“The look in your eyes when she lost consciousness.”

“But – I was thinking about you. So, what does that tell you?”

“I’m not your type, Robert. I’d bore you to tears.”

“How so?”

“I’ve seen the world, and I wasn’t all that impressed. I like staying at home now, curling up with a good book by the fireplace at night, and I like taking care of customers at work.”

“And you like living by yourself?”

“I do.”

“Never get lonely?”

“My dad’s dogs keep me grounded. And taking care of him can be a chore.”

“How old is he now?”

“Eighty-something. He’s old school, ranching’s in his blood.”

“Does he still run cattle?”

“A few. Not as many as you do, though. Maybe a thousand head.”

“I’ve wanted to meet him, ya know? Just to shoot the shit.”

“Go out and do it, then; most mornings he’s out running hay, but he’s usually in by noon.”

“I reckon. Winter’s are tough out here.”

She shrugged. “I guess. Do you write all the time now, or go out and work the fields?”

“A little of both, but Bert runs things. I think I just get in the way when I go out there.”

“Is that the way you want things to be?”

He chuckled. “You know, Tracy, I grew up in Brooklyn. What I know about ranching wouldn’t fill that coffee cup.”

“Well, Bert’s a top hand. You’re in good hands.”

“You know him?”

She nodded her head. “A little. We dated all through high school.”

He looked at her then, a hard, penetrating gaze. “Oh?”

“We were going to get married. He wanted to work for my dad in the worst way back then.” She sighed, looked back through stacks of memories. “I guess everyone wanted to work for my dad, the kids who wanted to stay here, anyway. I figured out early on I didn’t want to. I wanted all the bright lights, the faraway places, so I left.”

“How long have you been back?”

“Not quite five years.”

“I’m sixty two years old, Tracy. Sixty two, and I’m tired of living out on that ranch by myself. Tired of the superficial types in California. I want a woman to wake up next to me in the morning, to help me write, to think. I think you’re that woman, Tracy.”

“I wish I was, Bob. I really do.”

“Could we date a while?”

She looked at him, smiled. “Why?”

“Because I like being around you, Tracy. You make me feel good inside.”

“We’ve known each other a few years. Why are you asking now?”

“Because I’ve known you a few years,” he said, smiling, then his eyes fell. “You’re not seeing someone else, are you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Is it Bert?”

She almost laughed. “Oh, God no.”

“You’re not into, like, women, are you?”

She burst out laughing, an eye-watering, rip-snorting laugh, then took a sip of water while she wiped her eyes with a napkin. “Oh, Jesus, Robert…you’re such a – guy!”

“What?”

“If she’s not attracted to me, she must be a dyke…!”

He looked crestfallen. “You’re not attracted to me?”

“I told you – you’re attracted to Eunice Gibson. You just don’t know it yet.”

“I don’t get it, Tracy. Why do you think that?”

“You’d be good for each other. She’s a real prime mover, Robert. You want someone to help shape your world? You won’t find any better woman around here to help you do that.”

“I…I just…”

“And there’s something else,” she added.

“Oh? What?”

“She needs you, too. Badly.”

“Who do you need, Tracy?”

“Ah…here comes your steak,” she said, and when Becky put the overflowing platter down on his placemat he gasped. “Jiminy Cricket! I wanted a steak, not the whole goddamn cow!”

“This is the small order, Mr Rankin,” the waitress said, perplexed.

“You mean…there’s a bigger one than this?”

“Yessir, but you got to ask for it.”

“Holy smokes. This is enough for three people…”

The girl smiled. “Can I get you anything else?”

“Tums? Rolaids? A cardiologist?”

“At the check-out counter, Rob,” Tracy said.

“Thank God. Well, no, this oughta do, for now.” Becky walked off, grinning in triumph.

“Most of the ranchers around here would send that back,” Tracy said. “Too small.”

“I know. You can work up an appetite out there.”

They ate in silence for a while, then he came up for air. “You know, this is the real deal,” he sighed, letting his belt out a notch.

“Donny’s a good cook.”

“You know him too, I suppose?”

“High school. Two years behind me. He went into the Navy, cooked on a carrier for twenty years, or so he tells it.”

“Well, he can cook a mean chicken fried steak, that’s for sure.”

“He’d love to hear that.”

Rankin looked at her, at the way she said it and he nodded his head, then picked up his phone when it chirped. “Yo, Bert, how’s it lookin’?” He listened for a minute, then: “Sounds good. Did you cut him a check?” Pause. “Alright, just have him bring it by the house in the morning; I’d like to talk to him about building some more bookcases in the study, and some stuff downstairs. Yeah. That’ll be fine.”

“What was that all about?” Tracy asked.

“Had Bert get Ronnie Higgins out to fix that door. He couldn’t match the stain, so’ll have to get back over to refinish the wood in the morning.”

She nodded, “That was nice of you.”

“That door is priceless, and I knocked the hell out of it. Solid mahogany, too. Don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

“They don’t make a lot of things like that any more, I guess?”

“No. Reckon that’s true.”

“That’s what I like about living here. I think people appreciate what we had, what we still have, and they’re not willing to let go just yet – simply in the name of progress, anyway.”

“And I’m not from here, am I? I’m the rich outsider.”

“You do like to reduce things down to a framework you understand, don’t you?”

“But that’s it, isn’t it?”

“No, not really. Look, Bob, I like my life, don’t really want to change anything right now. I’m comfortable, and I’m with people all day long, so I’m not lonely. I help them, do things for them, and when I get home I just want to lean back and wrap up in my cocoon. I don’t want, or need, anyone to take care of…”

“What if I wanted to take care of you?”

She laughed, because he still didn’t get it. “You want a woman to take care of, go back to California, or get a dog? The women around here are pretty self-reliant.”

“What does that mean?”

“Another word for someone who wants to be taken care of is lazy. Not many lazy folk left around here. They tend to move to the city, get on disability, or welfare. Life’s hard out here.”

“I see.”

“People are different, Bob, out here. Self-reliance isn’t just some tag-line from a John Wayne movie. People live it, because there’s no one else you can count on when the chips are down. There’s yourself, and maybe family, if you’re lucky, anyway. You can afford a foremen like Bert, and to hire people to get what you want done, but that’s not really the way life is out here. It’s not the way I grew up.”

“Sounds like you resent me – in a way.”

“No, I just can’t relate to you, the way you live. And I don’t feel like I need to live that way. Like I said, I’m comfortable – with where I am in life. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, or that I don’t want to go out to a movie with you every now and then. I does mean I don’t think we’d be a good fit. I think you’d be unhappy with me after a few weeks.”

“How’s your salad?”

“You know? Not bad. You gonna make it through that side of beef?”

He nodded, then shook his head. “No way. One more bite and I’m off for a triple by-pass.”

“They’ll box it up, if you like.”

“Can I drop you at home?”

“Could you? Not sure I want to wait for the bus this time of night, not out in that snow…”

+++++

She was behind the customer service desk the morning when Tom came in again.

“Tom? Did the shrimp work out last night?”

“Hmm, oh, they were fine. I just wanted to apologize for yesterday. I was rude, and there’s no need for that.”

“You look sad, Tom. What’s up?” His wife had passed a year ago, ovarian cancer, and he’d had a hard time ever since, and his girls were still off on holiday, hanging protectively behind their father.

“My dog,” he said, his eyes watering. “Had to put her down night before last.”

“Oh, Tom,” she said, taking his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

He started crying, and she motioned to a floor manager to watch her desk, then came out and walked with the girls over to the Starbucks in the far corner of the store. She sat him down, waited for the darkness to run it’s course.

“Which dog? Lucy?” she said a while later.

“That’s right.”

“She was one of Brigit’s, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah…”

She pulled out her phone, dialed her father’s landline.

“Dad? You mentioned Sally was going to have a litter? Oh, she did? Yeah? Well, Tom Stoddard’s here. Yup, that’s right – Lucy, one of Brigit’s. She passed last night. Oh? Okay. He’s having a tough time – yeah, with me at the store right now. Okay, I’ll tell him. Thanks, Dad.”

“What was that all about?” Stoddard said.

“Dad kept a couple of girls from Brigit’s last litter; one of those had a litter last week, and Dad’s got three females not spoken for.”

The change was instantaneous, and complete – even his girls looked excited. “One of Brigit’s granddaughters? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. He mentioned he’s got one that looks like a clone of Lucy – think you could run out and and take a look?”

He stood, made as if to run for the door but stopped. He grabbed Tracy by the waist and pulled her close, kissed her on the lips – then sprinted for the front door. “Thanks!” he yelled, just as the three of them cleared the door on their way out to the parking lot.

“Your welcome,” Tracy whispered, as she made her way back to the customer service desk.

+++++

Rankin and the carpenter, Ron Higgins, finished looking over the repairs to the Gibson house’s door, and he thanked the man for his work then walked through knee deep snow down to his Rover. Checking his phone, he made a few calls then drove the few blocks to the hospital and walked to Gibson’s room. A knock on the door, a cheery “come on in,” so he slipped in quietly, peeking his head around the door before he stepped fully into the room.

“Hello,” he said, looking at Gibson’s bruised, raccoon-like eyes.

“Hello, yourself.”

“I just wanted to drop by, see how you’re doing. Also, I’ve had a carpenter over to fix your front door.”

“My front…why?”

“I’m afraid I kicked it off it’s hinges when you fell, made quite a mess of things.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. The way you hit the floor, well, I was afraid you’d really done some damage and I guess that got the adrenaline flowing.”

“I guess I should be grateful you were there. I shudder to think what might have happened had no one seen me fall.”

“Well, we got your groceries put up, so you should be in good shape once you get home.”

“My, my. So, you were with Tracy?”

“I was at the store, she told me she needed to drop some things off at your house after she got off, and as it was snowing pretty good I offered to drive her over.”

“That was sweet of you. Damsels in distress? Is that your thing, Mr Rankin?”

He laughed. “Not hardly.”

“Are you two dating?”

Again he laughed, though he shook his head this time. “Not hardly.”

“Tracy’s a nice girl, but she’s been different since she got back. Not quite herself.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Hard to put my finger exactly on what I’m getting at. I’d say she’s more resigned to her fate than she was before she left. Like she’s seen death, and is waiting for it to come for her.”

He stared blankly at the woman, wondered how much she knew about Tracy’s accident. “Do you know her well?” he finally asked.

“I used to, yes. Quite well. Her mother was a close friend, and I watched Tracy grow up over the years. Her father was always one of the big movers and shakers in the valley, I guess you’ve figured out by now, so big things were always expected of her.”

“Oh?”

“In another age, perhaps, she would have understood these expectations, moved to secure her family’s legacy. As it was, she became the rebel. The loud music, the late night parties, and she developed a reputation, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I suppose I don’t,” he said, suddenly despising this sanctimonious woman.

“Oh, she became quite the little slut, then she was – poof – gone. First to Boise, then off to New York City and jetting around the world all the time. Her mother was quite embarrassed by the whole thing.”

“I see.” He looked down at his watch and sighed. “Well, I just wanted to drop by, tell you about the door. It has a fresh coat of varnish on the inside; too cold now to tackle the exterior, but we’ll get it come springtime.” He turned and moved to leave – “If I can lend a hand with the door, give me a shout.”

“Thank you, Robert.”

“Good day,” he said as he left the room, and he shivered when he was out of view, felt like he’d been cornered in that room by a rattlesnake – though he’d heard just enough to wonder what the hell was really going on with Tracy Tomberlin.

‘What is it,” he wondered to himself, “about this girl that’s so captivating? She’s just cute as any gal in Hollywood I’ve ever known, but that’s not it. No…there’s something deeper going on, like  she’s found some kind of inner peace.’ He thought about books he’d read about finding such a place, notably Hesse’s Siddhartha and Ullman’s And Not To Yield, but they were no help. No, she was an enigma, hiding behind that desk helping people – when it was she who more than likely needed help.

His help.

And he was as suddenly determined to get to the bottom of all this.

He picked up his phone, found the number for the Tomberlin ranch and called, spoke with her father. A few minutes later he was headed south out of town, heading into the unknown. Searching, he knew, for what might prove, in the end, to be completely unknowable – yet he felt powerless to ignore the call he heard from this woman – powerless to ignore the hold she already had on his heart.

+++++

Deke Tomberlin put the phone in it’s cradle and chuckled.

“What the devil is that girl up to now?” he sighed. First Tom Stoddard in full blown grief over the passing of that dog, now Rankin, that silly actor – who everyone in town said was in lust with his daughter. Everyone said he’d been after her for months – to no avail – and he wondered why.

He felt her on his thigh just then – and reached down to scratch behind her ears.

Sadie moaned, looked up with grateful eyes and let him scratch away, then he patted his thigh, bid her to come up on his lap – and she wasted no time springing up. She put her paws on either side of his neck and looked him in the eye, reading his mood, then she put her face on his right shoulder and sighed.

“I think you hate this snow about as much as I do, don’t you, girl?” He cupped her head and scratched for a while longer, then ran his hands down to her shoulder and felt the lingering wound.

He’d gone into the hay barn two weeks ago to load the wagon and a rattler had struck out at him, but Sadie had intercepted the strike in midair. Yet somehow the rattler recovered, for a moment, anyway, and managed to get off a weak, ill-timed blow – and Sadie had taken a few drops of venom in a shallow wound. He’d killed the snake, stuffed a couple of Benedryl under her tongue and loaded her in the pickup, then gotten her to the vet’s office in record time, and while the wound turned black a few days later, the vet debrided the area and pronounced her fit as a fiddle.

And of course, that’s when Sally went into labor.

Now he had seven Springer pups writhing around in their whelping box, in addition to Sally, Sadie and Max. He’d decided to keep a male this time, as Max was getting on now, so he had three males and three females to find good homes for. Tom Stoddard was a natural – and as the man’s two daughters had loved Lucy more than anyone could have hoped, he had reason to think he’d be a good match once again.

He looked up, saw Stoddard’s old Ford coming up the drive and put Sadie down.

“Come on, girl. Company’s comin’,” he said as he walked over to the entry off the kitchen mudroom. He layered up: two sweaters and a heavy jacket, then walked out into the swirling snow – Sadie by his side, a stately, calming presence.

Stoddard stopped behind his pickup and got out, the girls followed and Sadie walked over and sniffed the strangers’ ankles, her stumpy tail barely moving. A few sniffs and the tail started beating away, then she fell in beside Deke as he came over to shake hands.

“Sorry to hear about Lucy. What got her, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Kidney failure, came out of nowhere.”

Deke nodded. “Thirteen years, about right,” he sighed. “You think you’re ready for a pup?”

“I think without another pup around the house I’ll up and die, Zeke. The girls graduate this summer, and I’m going to be alone for the first time in thirty years.”

“Well, I reckon puppies are cheaper than women. Still, have you considered finding a wife, giving that whole thing a go again?”

“Nope. Never will. Just couldn’t, you know. Jill was the love of my life, and I’m not going to sully her memory by taking another woman into my life.”

“Oh?”

“Well, lookin’ around this place, I sure don’t see a new woman around here…”

“Nope, but then again, I’m almost eighty. Sarah was seventy five when she passed. You’re what? Not even fifty? You’ve got twenty five years until you’re where we were when Sarah got sick. That’s a lot of livin’ you’ve yet to get around to. You might want to give that some thought, you know.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Deke noticed the girls looking at their father just then, the concern in their eyes, and he wondered what they thought. “Well, you wanna stand out here and freeze our asses off, or head over to the Hilton.”

“The Hilton?”

“The puppy shed,” Deke said, winking at the girls.

They all laughed. “Lead the way, Deke.”

The ‘Hilton’ was the newest, and arguably the nicest, building on the property. Tiled floors and walls, central heat and air conditioning, there were kennels for ten dogs, two tiled whelping boxes and facilities to wash and dry dogs of all size, and another larger room off the main to handle bovine emergencies. They walked in, shook snow from their clothes and boots, then sidled over to the nearest whelping box.

Sally lay curled on the floor, seven squirming puppies sucking away on her breast.

“See that one, second from the top?”

“Yup.”

“If that one’s not a near twin of your Lucy, I don’t know what is.”

Stoddard leaned close, looked at the pup. When he stood up there was tears in his eyes, but Deke was watching Rankin’s Range Rover as it pulled up to the main house. “You stay here a minute. That Rankin fella just pulled up.”

“The actor?”

“Yup.”

“He still after Tracy?”

“Yup. Mind if I bring him in here?”

“Hell yes, but do it anyway.”

They laughed as Deke put his coat on again and walked out into the howling storm.

Sally was looking up at Stoddard when he turned back to the litter; she seemed to be measuring him against memory for a while, then she lay her head back down and closed her eyes. The door opened a moment later, and a wave of icy air surged into the room – Sally looked up and yawned, then plopped her head down again, clearly annoyed with the universe.

“What’s this?” Rankin said as he came over and looked down at the brood. “Springers?”

“Yup. And Robert, this is Tom Stoddard. Tom? Robert.”

The two shook hands, and Stoddard introduced his two daughters. “This is June, and this is Judy,” he said.

“Twins?” Rankin asked.

“That’s right,” Stoddard said. “They graduate this year.”

“Ever taken drama class?” Rankin asked.

“Last year,” June said. “It was real fun.”

“Think you’d like acting?”

“Oh, yeah,” the girls said in unison, and he laughed, then he looked at the two Springer females: “Are these two sisters?” Rankin asked Deke.

“Yes, that’s right. You like dogs, Mr Rankin?”

“Been a while, but yes. Damn, they’re gorgeous…”

“Yup. We’ve been breeding Springers out here since right before the second world war. Good field dogs, not bad with cattle, too.”

“You hunt with ‘em?”

“Yup. Lots of pheasant, even a few quail along the creek beds.”

“Lots of rattlers, too, I imagine.”

“Yup. Lots of rattlers.”

“Ever lose one?”

“What? To a rattler?”

“Yes.”

“No. A couple of close calls, but Springers are about as quick on their feet as any breed out there. Sadie here got hit a few weeks ago, didn’t you girl.”

“In this snow?”

Deke and Stoddard just chuckled. “They hay-up this time of year, Mr Rankin,” Stoddard said. “That hay barn of yours has at least fifty rattlers in it right now, unless Bert has put some cats in there at night.”

“Is that what they’re for?”

“You got any snake-proof boots?” Deke asked, pulling up a leg on his khakis.

“No? What brand are those?”

“Danner snake-proof boots. They’ll last you more than a few years; good in mud, too.”

“Wonder if Amazon has them?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Deke said, frowning. “I reckon Phil down at the dry goods store has your size, though. So, what could I do for you today, Mr Rankin?”

“It’s Bob, please.”

“Okay, Bob. What’s on your mind?”

“I wanted to talk to you about…uh…what about these pups? Are they for sale?”

“Sometimes.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know, Bob, I tend to look at Springers as being about two steps higher than most humans on the evolutionary scale. My pups go to people I know, and trust, to not only take care of them, but who know a little bit about love, too.”

“Oh? And, so, what’s the punch line?”

“I don’t know you, Bob. You’ve been my neighbor for five years, and I don’t know you. Now, is there anything else you need to get off your chest?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Tracy?”

“Oh? What about?”

“I’ve just heard a few things, things that don’t sit well with me, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.”

“You ask her yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, her life’s her business, not mine. You have something you want to know, I suggest you ask her first. If she doesn’t want to talk about it, then I’d guess it’s probably none of your business, too.”

“I see.”

“There’re a lot of busybodies in this life,” Stoddard said, “and more than a few in town, too. I doubt there’s one among ‘em that can tell the difference between a good apple, and a rotten one.”

“Bob,” Tomberlin added, walking towards the door, “there’s another way of lookin’ at Tracy.”

“Oh?”

“Kind of an old saying, and you may have run across it before, and it goes something like this: if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t womp it’s ass every time it hops.”

“I don’t get it,” Rankin said. “What’s that got to do with…”

“Some folks never do, Bob. Some folks just can’t learn from their mistakes. They keep askin’ ‘what if’ and ‘why me’ until their ass falls off…”

+++++

His house was something else. At least that’s what folks who came up from LA said.

All made of logs and milled pine, with granite here and there, his home was fifteen thousand square feet of pure sybaritic bliss – every convenience known to man woven into a tapestry of excess that had, frankly, bothered him when he contracted for it’s construction. The guest wing alone had five bedrooms, five baths, it’s own indoor swimming pool – as well as a small gym – while his side of the house was even more extravagantly appointed. The kitchen would have been ample for a small restaurant, and he had over five hundred bottles in his cellar.

So what, he said.

He’d been married once, thirty years ago, though they’d not had children, so he was it – the end of the line. There was no one in line to pass the torch to, no one waiting to take over after he was gone, and he looked around this monstrosity, and he’d been wondering what would become of it after he was gone. It would go on the  market, he assumed, and some tech mogul in Silicon Valley would scoop it up – it was, after all, less than hour from Sun Valley – and that would be it. There’d be parties out on the flagstone terrace by the pool and people would talk about how this had been built by that actor, ole What’s-his-name, and people would look around blankly, wondering who the hell ole What’s-his-name was – before tossing down another Campari and soda.

So, maybe that’s why he’d done what he’d done. Why he’d begun thinking about the day after tomorrow more and more.

He looked across the valley at the Tomberlin spread, at lights glowing in the little ranch house. Why had he not been over to Deke’s house before? Why hadn’t he introduced himself? Maybe he figured that, being an outside, he wouldn’t have been welcome? But no, that didn’t ring true – yet that’s what he’d made of his life out here. He was alone, and he was an outsider – and a few months ago that had begun to bother him…more than bother him.

He picked up his phone, called Bert, his foreman.

“Bert? Can you come up to the house? I just want to bend your ear about a few things. Sure, come on in, door’s open.” He walked to the kitchen, poured another scotch and water and walked out to the living room, warmed himself by the fire for a minute, then went and sat at the piano. He started winding his way through Cole Porter’s Night and Day, then drifted into Begin the Beguine, his melancholy mood inflecting the progression of notes with an unnatural, sleepy beat.

“That’s nice,” he heard Bert say a few minutes later, and he turned around a little at the voice.

“Go fix yourself a drink, Amigo.”

“Yessir.”

He sighed, worked his way into In The Still Of The Night, lost inside the music for the moment, then he heard Bert sit down by the fireplace and stopped. “Enough of that nonsense,” he said as he picked up his scotch and went to the sofa.

“Bert? What am I gonna do with this place? When I’m gone, I mean.”

“You won’t need to worry about that for a while, will you, sir?”

“No, I reckon not just now, but it’s been bothering me.”

“You need to find a good woman, have a couple of kids.”

“Plenty of women out there, Bert. Few of ‘em are worth a damn, especially when it comes to someone my age.”

“You still thinkin’ about Tracy?”

“Night and Day, Bert.”

“Damn. She too old for all that.”

“I think that’s what she said, just last night – as a matter of fact.”

“Oh? Well, she probably thinks you need a woman who could have some kids with you.”

“I did everything but get down on one knee, Bert. Asked her to move out here, told her she’d make me happy.”

“You ask what might make her happy?”

“Can’t ever get her to open up about things like that.”

“That’s Tracy. Still waters and all.”

“You dated? In high school?”

“Guess she told you that?”

“Yup. Has she always been this way?”

“No sir, not always.”

“Did something happen?”

Bert looked away, took a long pull from his drink. “Not my place to say, sir.”

He looked at his foreman, appreciated his integrity. “Okay.”

Bert relaxed, looked at Rankin. “There’s not an evil bone in that girl’s body, sir. I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt her.”

“Does she know how you feel?”

He laughed a little. “Only since second grade, sir.”

“Oh, so this is a new romance, huh?” he asked, laughing too.

“I’m not in love with her now, sir. Got over most of that by the time she moved to New York, but she’s one of those people you just can’t shake, not completely.”

“I can understand that. Let me ask you something, Bert. I visited Mrs Gibson in the hospital this morning, and she as much as called Tracy a slut, at least back then. You know what that’s all about?”

He nodded his head, took another pull from his drink. “Yup, sure do.”

“Something that happened in high school?”

Again, Bert nodded his head. “Yessir.”

“And it’s not your place to say? Is that about the size of it?”

“Mr Gibson. I think he tried something. Tracy left after that.”

“I see. And Mrs Gibson? She had something to do with her leaving?”

“Yessir.”

“Figures. Uh, Bert, about a month ago I revised my will. Assuming nothing changes, if I die tomorrow the ranch goes to you…”

“Sir? No…”

“Bert, shut up and listen, will you?”

“Yessir.”

“I don’t talk about shit like this often, and this’ll be the only time you hear this from me. Like I said, I don’t have any family, any kids, and, well, over the past couple of years you’ve become like a son to me. You’re about the only person I trust, and the only person I’ve respected more than you, well, he’s been gone a while. I don’t want this place to go to some city-slicker, but neither do I want you to get a hold of this place and sell it off. I want you to keep it, work it the way you have for me, build it up into something special, something worth passing on.”

“I don’t know what to say, sir.”

“Well then, don’t say anything. Just don’t start calling me ‘Dad’ – or some such bullshit, alright?”

“You ready for a refill, sir?”

“Yup. Maybe one more.”

When he came back a minute later he looked at Bert again. “What about you? You dating anyone now?”

“Yessir. A gal at the bank, for a few months now.”

“Looking serious?”

Bert nodded his head. “I hope so.”

“She’s special?”

“Solid, sir. Not a mean bone in her body.”

“Ah. Like Tracy.”

“There isn’t anyone like Tracy, sir.”

“No, there isn’t. There sure isn’t. Well, why don’t the two of you come up to the house for dinner this Friday? I’ve been wanting to ask a few folks for dinner, and that might be fun. Sound like a plan?”

“Yessir. She’d love that, been a big fan of yours for years.”

“Good. I’ll look forward to seeing you both. Say around seven?”

“Yessir. Thank you sir.”

+++++

He looked across at the Tomberlin spread again, ignoring his scotch, his hands hovering over the keyboard – and he turned, reached for his phone. He pulled up Tomberlin’s number and called it again, waited for him to answer.

“Deke? Bob Rankin again, across the way. How’re you this evening?”

“Fine, Bob. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, it seems Bert has a new lady friend and I’m going to have a little dinner for them here at the house this Friday. I wondered if you’d like to come over for supper, maybe have a scotch or two around the fireplace.”

“This Friday, you say?”

“Yes. We’re going to meet up here around seven.”

“You know, that sounds good to me. Count me in.”

“That fella out there today, Stoddard? Could you call him and give him the invite, those two girls, too?”

“I will. But you’re sure you want the girls to come?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“Never more, Deke.”

“We’ll see you Friday night, then. ‘Night.”

“Good night, Deke.”

He rang off, looked at his phone again, and pulled up her number. He hit send, and crossed his fingers.

“Hello,” he heard her voice say and his heart skipped a beat.

“Tracy?”

“Robert?”

“I need a date Friday night. You free?”

“A date?”

“I’m having a little wing-ding here for Bert and his new gal. I have a feeling things are getting serious between them, and, well, I just wanted to throw a party for them. I’ve invited your father and a few of his friends, but it just wouldn’t be complete without you here. So yes, I’d like you to be my date.”

“Who’s cooking?”

“Why, me of course.”

“You?”

“I do know how to cook, Tracy.”

She giggled. “I’m sure you do, Robert. Look, I’m off Friday – can I help?”

“Sure. I was going to the store around nine, pick up what I need then. Could I swing by and pick you up?”

He heard her thinking, calculating, then: “Nine sounds good, Bob. I’ll be out front, nine sharp.”

“And I’ll be there, at eight fifty nine.”

“Thanks, Bob, seeya then.”

“Night.” He rang off, pulled up his contacts and dialed another number. “Matt? Bob Rankin here. I wonder if you’re free this Friday night. I’m having a few friends over, and you might liven things up a bit.”

“Well, I, uh…”

“I think they’ve got about 2 feet of new powder at the Roundhouse, in case you want to head up for a few runs.”

“I’ve got to be in London on Monday.”

“You can catch the five thirty out of LAX on BA.”

“You still have the Falcon?”

“Can you manage to find your way to Santa Monica? About ten Friday morning?”

“Look, this isn’t for a bunch of Hollywood bozos, is it?”

“Nope. Locals, ranchers for the most part.”

“Oh, well, that sounds fun. Count me in. So, ten o’clock, Friday, Santa Monica?”

“Be there, or be square.”

“Oh, mind of I bring a friend?”

“Hell, no. Bring two.”

“Ben’s in town too. Can he come?”

“I don’t know, can he?”

“Okay, Bob,” Matt said, laughing, “sounds good.”

“Night.”

He pulled out his wallet, looked at the receipt from the diner last night, found the phone number and called.

“Donny’s Diner, this is Becky.”

“Becky? Bob Rankin. I think you served me the biggest chicken fried steak in human history last night…”

“Yes! Robert Rankin! How are you?”

“I’m still full. Uh, look, about that guy, Donny? Is that the fella behind the grill who waved at me last night?”

“Yes, that was him.”

“If he’s there, think I could talk to him?”

“Sure, hang on.” She heard her calling his name, whispering ‘It’s Robert Rankin, for you!’ – then he heard all kinds of commotion as the man ran for the phone.

“Hello! Mr Rankin?”

“Donny, I was wondering what you and your gals were doing Friday night? I’m having a party out here…”

“Oh, gee, I’m sorry Mr Rankin, but we don’t do catering.”

“Well, gee, I was going to ask if y’all wanted to come out for a party I’m throwin’ for my foreman…”

“For Bert?”

“Yup.”

“You don’t want me to cook?”

“Not unless you want to. I was planning on cooking.”

“Well hell, I’d do anything for Bert. How ‘bout me and the girls come out and just lend a hand.”

“How ‘bout y’all come out around seven and have dinner, take the night off? How many folks can I count on?”

“Five alright, Mr Rankin?”

“You got a wife?”

“Six, then. Is that okay?”

“Okay, that’s Donny, party of six?” They both laughed. “See you then, Donny.”

“Yessir, and thank you, sir!”

“Night.”

He looked at his phone, at the time, then thought about the next call long and hard. “Every fire needs fuel,” he sighed, then he pulled up the hospital’s number and entered the number. “Eunice Gibson, please,” he said to the operator, then he waited, listening to the ring on speaker.

“Hello?”

“Mrs Gibson, this is Rob Rankin. I just wanted to see how you’re doing this evening?”

“Why Mr Rankin! I’m fine, just fine. Thanks for calling…”

“So? How’re they treating you? Letting you out anytime soon?”

“Tomorrow morning, I think. Assuming I can, well, I…”

“I understand, Mrs Gibson.”

“Eunice. Please, call me Eunice.”

“Well, Eunice, assuming you feel up to it, I’m having a few friends over Friday night, kind of a dinner for my foreman and his gal.”

“You mean Bert?”

“Yes ma’am. Dinner, cocktails, some music, and I wondered if you’d feel up to coming out?”

“Well, Robert, I’d love to. I hate to ask, but I may need a ride.”

“I’ll have someone pick you up around six-thirty. Think that’ll work out?”

“A quick question? Shall I dress for a casual event?”

“Eunice, might you dress a little more seductively than that?”

“What?”

“You’re a most attractive woman, Eunice. I’d love to see the effect you have on some of the guests that will be here.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, I see,” she cooed.

“Eunice? See you Friday.” He rang off and called his housekeeper, then his pilot, and filled them in, then picked up his scotch and walked back to his Steinway. “Yup, it’s a Cole Porter kind of night,” he said as he started in on In The Still of the Night again, but he shifted keys – from major to minor – and he liked this new vibe. He tossed a little Brazilian beat into the flow and shook it up a bit, and with his eyes closed he swayed in the new rhythm – a little smile coming to life as his fingers danced through the night.

+++++

“You’ve never been out to the house?” he asked Tracy as she climbed up in the Rover. He waited until she was buckled in, then closed her door and walked around.

“No,” she said, though he knew she didn’t need to say why.

“Oh, well. I talked to the grocery manager yesterday and ordered most of the things I think we’ll need. She said to just come on in and they’d help load things up, but I thought we’d make a walk-through first, maybe pick up a few things – just in case.”

“Okay. Do you have a list of things you’re making?”

“Not really. Thought I’d shoot for something between Oscar Meyer hot dogs and The Four Seasons.”

She laughed. “My dad thinks hot dogs are the best thing on earth. What did you order?”

“A couple of beef tenders, some shrimp and lump crab meat for starters, stuff for a caesar salad, and I’m going to make a couple of bourbon-fudge-pecan pies.”

“You are – going to bake pies?”

“I am.”

“Do you, uh, like to cook?”

“I do.”

“Do you like being deliberately vague?”

“Yup.”

“I see.”

“Good.”

She laughed, shook her head and looked out the window as the Rover pulled into the store’s parking lot. “It feels like I just left this place,” she sighed, her breath frosting the glass.

“Maybe because you did?”

“Yup.”

“Maybe you need to take some time off. I mean real time, not just a day here – a day there.”

“Not on my paycheck, I don’t.”

“I can imagine.”

She looked at him then: “Can you?”

“I worked in restaurants and clubs in New York City for years, then moved out to LA and did it again for a few more years. I was in my thirties before I made a real buck, so yeah, I know where you’re at.” He pulled into a space near the front, set the brake and came around for her door.

“You know, you don’t have to get my door. I’m a big girl, can manage that by myself.”

“Oh? Well, yes I do have to. Sorry, but I’d hate myself if I didn’t.”

“Well programed, aren’t you?”

“You have no idea. I have a biological need to worship women.”

“All women?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, well, glad I’m nothing special.”

He held her as she got out, but he didn’t let go of her hand just yet; neither did he say a word. Instead, he simply looked into her eyes…

And, unaccountably, she felt herself going weak in the knees.

“Come on,” he said after he finally let go of her hand. “Lots to do, not a lot of time to do it all.”

‘Now what the hell was that all about?’ she said to herself as she fell in beside him. They got a cart and walked the aisles; she pointed out a few things her father liked and he picked up a couple of cases of Budweiser longnecks.

“Funny, I wouldn’t have taken you for a beer drinker?”

“Funny? Well, you don’t know me all that well, do you?”

An assistant manager was waiting for them at the customer service desk and he settled the bill, then a couple of kids rolled carts out to the Rover and he helped them load it, then he gave each a twenty. They smiled, said thanks, and he walked around, opened her door.

“That was nice,” she said. “Ostentatious, but nice.”

“I give ‘em something every time I have a big load like this. I think it’s fair, not an empty gesture.”

“I didn’t say empty…”

“‘Ostentatious’ is empty, Tracy. I’m not into either.”

“What are you into?”

“Do unto others, if you know what I mean.”

He helped her up, then stood in the Rover’s open door. “You okay?” he said at last.

“Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, the hard part comes next.”

“Let’s go, then.”

They drove out in silence, and Tracy felt a sudden tension building between them as she watched the town slip by. When they got out to the house he backed into the garage, and it took them a half hour to get everything unloaded and put away in the kitchen. When they were finished he asked if she’d like a tour of the house.

“A tour? By any chance, do you sell tickets?”

“Haven’t had much call. So, wanna take a look around?”

“Sure, lead on, oh master of mine.”

“You’re impossible,” he smiled. “But I guess you know that.”

“Yes, it’s something I’ve been working on – for years.”

“Well, practice makes perfect.” He took her to the guest wing first, showed her a room, then the pool and the gym, then he backtracked to his side of the house, took her to his bedroom.

“Wow, this is almost like a monastic cell, only bigger,” she said as she walked in. “Not what I expected.” There was a small library off the main room, four walls lined floor to ceiling with books, and with a single overstuffed chair on the slate floor – flanked by a reading table and two lamps. “You like to read, I take it?”

“I do, but it’s a risk nowadays.”

“A risk?”

“Yes. I find, when I’m writing, anyway, that quite often I imitate styles of the author I happen to be reading at the time. Sometimes I think it’s an unconscious process, other times I’m not so sure.”

“Who’s your favorite author?”

“The one I happen to be reading at the moment.”

She laughed at that. “If you had to pick one book in here as your favorite, which would it be?”

He walked over to a shelf, more like a case, really, and this case had a locked glass door protecting the books inside; he entered a code, opening the case, and he pulled out a book and handed it to her.

“Meditations? Marcus Aurelius? I remember the name.”

“Just another old, dead white guy.”

“Patronizing, aren’t we?”

“Sorry. Succeeded Hadrian in Rome, colloquially known as ‘the Philosopher King.’ Richard Harris played him in Gladiator.”

“Ah. Killed by his son?”

“Possibly, but I’d almost say that version is conjecture. Anyway, the empire hit the skids after his death, dissolved into decadence and corruption.”

“Kind of like America, huh?”

“There are parallels, but more differences than similarities. Personally, I’d say we have a way to go to equal the Romans, at least as far as out-and-out debauchery is concerned.”

“Not if you listen to my Dad. The second coming is at hand, at least in his worldview, it is.”

“Lot of people feel that way. Did he go to college?”

“Yup. Dartmouth.”

“So, he’s not stupid. Why do you think he feels that way?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Do you? Feel that way, I mean?”

“Nope; simplistic answers to complex problems lead to dead ends. Anyway, you can get out to the deck from here, and there’s a soaking pool…”

“What’s that room over there?” she asked, pointing to a door off the bedroom.

“My special room,” he said, grinning.

“Special? How so,” she said as she walked over to the door. She tried the knob, found it locked. “Don’t tell me…it’s your dungeon…like in that Fifty Shades movie…”

He chuckled at that. “Kind of, but not quite,” he said as he came over. “You want to see? I mean, really, really want to see what’s in there?”

“Sure,” she said, her voice sounding anything but.

He entered a code and the door clicked; he pushed it open and walked inside, and lights came on automatically as he entered the room.

There were shelves everywhere, several rows of shelves along two sides of the room and more freestanding in the middle of the room, and she walked over, looked at the contents arrayed neatly on them. “Models?”

“Yup. Airplanes, but mainly trains, for the most part, and buildings too.”

“Buildings?”

“Yup. I make stuff over here, on this desk,” he said as he led her to the back of the room. There was a twenty story building under “construction” on a worktable that stretched along two sides of the room, and a couple of railway passenger cars scattered in pieces along another portion of the tabletop.

“You build model trains?”

“You want to see?”

“Yes,” she said, now very curious indeed, and he led her over to a small door set between two shelves; it was unlocked and he turned on more lights, led her down a small stairway. He turned on more lights and he heard her gasp… “Good grief!? Is that New York City?”

“Yup. Circa 1940.”

She looked over a model of the city, guessing there must have been at least a hundred skyscrapers in view, and literally hundreds of smaller buildings everywhere she looked. There were elevated railways between tenement buildings, long passenger trains pulling out of tunnels, heading for bridges or other tunnels that led out of the city, and she looked at a street scene – an open air market of some sort, detailed right down to horse-drawn vegetable carts and sides of beef being carried into ice-houses.

“Bob…this is incredible. How long have you been working on this?”

“Hard to say. Some of the buildings I started on when I was in grade school, some of the trains, too, but I just kept collecting as I went along, waiting until I had a place where I could build all these things, and then put it all together.”

She kept walking around, looking at little nooks and crannies…

“Some of these scenes are really quite funny. Almost comical.”

“Meant to be. Some are scenes out of my childhood, others are more like wishful thinking. A child’s wishful dreaming. Everything you see is a memory.”

“So…this is like revisiting your childhood?”

“No, not ‘like’, not at all. It IS my childhood. I come down here to turn off the real world, to get away from all the noise. I bask in memory’s glow, lose myself for hours on end – in what was.”

“And what should be?”

“Nope. Not that kind of escape. I’m not rebelling against all the changes that have taken place during my life. Hell, I’m really pretty happy with most of what’s happened, but…what’s that old saying? Don’t sweat the things you can’t change?”

“It’s taken me a long time to get there, Robert.”

“What? Accepting change?”

“Yeah. In a way.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Is there someplace we could sit for a minute?”

“Sure,” he said as he led her around a corner to a small sitting area – that overlooked Central Park.

“This really is incredible. You’ve got to bring Dad down here…he’ll flip out.”

“I will.”

“So. Let me see if I have enough courage to talk about this stuff.”

“Tracy? If you don’t feel comfortable talking to me, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“What?”

“Just that, Tracy. If you don’t feel you can trust me, don’t. Another old saying: when you feel doubt, there is no doubt.”

She nodded her head again. “Can I, well, can I trust you, Robert?”

“With your life, Tracy.”

She nodded her head. “I thought you might say that.”

“Oh?”

“After the other night. You talk like someone obsessed, or in love.”

“Pretty much the same thing, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Have you ever been in love, Tracy?”

“Once.”

“And? Was it an obsession?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so – at least I didn’t then.”

“And now?”

“Sometimes I think it became something like that, for a while, anyway.”

“What changed?”

“He was a pilot, for the airline. But he was in the reserves, was called up for Desert Storm.” He saw her lips quivering, an eyelid tremling, and he knew she was close to the edge.

“He was killed?”

She nodded her head – just a little – then looked away. “It was stupid. He was in Frankfurt, and his jet lost power on take off. Crashed a few miles from the airport, ejected, broke his neck. Died a few days later.”

“And what are you not telling me?”

“We were engaged. I was pregnant.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“I tried to kill myself.”

He just looked at her, willing her to go on, to let it all out, but she was looking at the floor now, trembling like a leaf.

And he went to her, pulled her up into his arms and held her, held her as the wave broke. He cupped her head, stroked her hair, whispered in her ear.

She nodded, tried to pull herself together.

“The baby?” he asked.

“She passed. I miscarried, and she just left. Things fell apart.”

“You continued to work?”

“For the most part. I went back to school, thought about getting my degree. I stayed in Boston, ‘til Mom got sick.”

“Mind of I ask you a question?”

She looked up at him, her eyes a reddened estuary of tears, and he took a handkerchief out and dabbed her eyes and cheeks – then, without thinking, he kissed her once, gently, on the forehead.

She looked at him still, her eyes almost at peace now. “Why do you think you love me, Robert? You don’t even know me?”

“It’s the way I feel when I look in your eyes,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I don’t need to know you, Tracy. What I need most is, well, that I want to get to know you. I want to spend the rest of life getting to know you. Does that make sense?”

“Not really. What if you don’t like what you find?”

“That’s the gamble, isn’t it?”

“You were married once, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel the same way about her?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never felt the way I do when I’m around you.”

“You think…do you think you really love me?”

“If love is wanting to be with you, to take care of you, to let you take care of me, to spend every waking moment of every day with you by my side, and for the rest of my life, then yes, Tracy, I’m in love with you.”

“Did you say you wanted to get married?”

“I did.”

“Would you mind asking my dad tonight?”

“Ask him what?”

“Ask for my hand, things like that.”

“Did I miss something?”

“Yup. I think I just said yes, somewhere in there, anyway.”

He laughed. “Tracy?”

“Yes.”

“When you’re sure, let me know.”

“I’m sure, Robert.”

“Wait’ll you spend a day with me in the kitchen before you say that.” His phone chirped and he dug it out of his pocket, saw Bert on the line and hit the button. “Bert?”

“Yessir. Did you say they’re coming into Friedman?”

“Yup. Got a text a few minutes ago; they’re east of Mountain Home, in their descent, so running about fifteen minutes late.”

“Okay. I’m here now; should I just run ‘em out to the house?”

“Unless they want to grab a few runs.”

“You have everything you need for tonight?”

“Yup. Tracy and I ran by the store this morning.”

“Oh? How’d that go?”

“Fine. Let me know when they’re down, what they want to do.”

“Yessir.”

“Later.”

“Is Bert picking up someone?”

“A couple of friends coming to dinner.”

“Hollywood friends?”

“Yup.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yup.”

“Do you like stirring the pot, or are you just sadistic?”

“I’ll let you know.” He stood and helped her up, but he held her by both hands and looked into her eyes again. “You think, maybe in time, you could love me?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Guess I deserved that one.”

“Yup, you do.”

“Mind if I tell you that I love you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh?”

“You have to kiss me first, and not one of those brotherly kisses on the forehead. I mean…”

He was on her in an instant, and when she came up for air a few minutes later she looked at his lips for the longest time, then into his eyes: “If you tell me you love me right now, you better goddamn well mean it…”

He leaned in, bit her ear gently before he whispered – and a moment later she had him down and pinned to the floor. She was staring into his eyes just then, then she took off first her sweater, then her blouse, before she started doing things – weird and wonderful things – with her mouth and hands.

He was laying still a few minutes later, looking at her drifting by his side, and he could just see the part of Brooklyn he’d recreated on the layout just above her head, the little street where he grew up, where once upon a time he’d dreamed a dream that had felt a little like this moment, and he was pretty sure just then that dreams could come true, with hard work, and a little luck, anyway.

“Don’t ever leave me, Tracy,” he said softly, and while he didn’t want to sound like he was pleading, he knew that’s exactly what he was doing.

Because sooner or later, that’s what every woman he’d ever known ended up doing, and he knew he wouldn’t survive if it happened again.

+++++

Everyone was in the living room – except Matt and Ben, and Eunice Gibson. They were en route from Sun Valley, with Bert and Maria driving them after a quick stop to pick up Eunice on the way.

Deke and Tom Stoddard were over by the window, looking out over the valley to the Tomberlin ranch across the way, while Tom’s twin daughters were behind the piano, playing a hunt ‘n peck rendition of Chopsticks. Donny and his wife, as well as all the diner’s waitresses, were gathered in a corner, looking around the living room in wide-eyed wonder, while Bill Higgins, the carpenter who’d fixed Gibson’s door, was with his wife in Rankin’s study, with notepad and tape measure, taking measurements for new bookcases. They returned to the living room a few minutes before seven, just as Bert’s Suburban hove into view, charging up the drive ahead of a cloud of swirling snow.

Rankin and Tracy were in the kitchen, getting ready to set out huge bowls of iced shrimp and cocktail sauce, as well as sautéed crab canapés on sourdough toast, so, when Bert and his girlfriend Maria came in they started setting stuff out on the bar that separated the kitchen spaces from the living room. Matt and Ben followed a moment later, still dressed in their ski clothes, and a sudden hush fell over Donny’s waitresses and Stoddard’s girls. Hushed whispers and nervous giggles ensued, words like The Martian and Batman drifted across the room while they walked over to Rankin and gave him a hug.

“Ah, my favorite yankees,” Rankin said –

“Ah, our favorite cowboy,” they said.

“Need to shower?”

“Nah,” Matt said. “I enjoy smelling like a goat.” Ben, however, was already headed for the shower. He, of course, liked to brag about showering three times a day, so Robert wasn’t too surprised.

Then Eunice Gibson walked in, and he was surprised.

She was wearing an outrageously sexy LBD, complete with black stockings and sky high heeled pumps. He looked admiringly at her legs – while she looked past him at Tracy Tomberlin – and the look she saw in her eyes was like watching liquid ice coalesce to form rigid daggers of hate.

Tracy, on the other hand, had just laid out a platter of canapés and was turning to look for Bert and Maria – when she saw Gibson. Her face turned red, her lip started quivering – again – then she turned and looked at Rankin, molten fury beginning to boil to the surface.

Rankin looked at the platters on the bar and decided to lay out more shrimp, then went over to Gibson. “Eunice? Let me take your coat,” he said as he leaned over and kissed her cheek, whispering in her ear: “You look absolutely divine! I could eat you up right here!”

She absolutely glowed when he took her coat, and as she walked over to Tracy she seemed to float in the afterglow of a personal victory.

“Good evening, Tracy,” Gibson smiled.

“Eunice! You’re looking, well, much better than I expected. How’s your arm?”

“Ah, the joys of oxycontin. I can’t remember anything ever hurting as bad as this.”

“Did they have to put a plate in?”

“Yes,” she said, holding up the black fiberglass cast. “Six weeks in this moronic thing…at least…”

“My, how fashionable. I’ve never seen a black cast before.”

“It is, isn’t it? I think so too.”

“Eunice?” Rankin said as he got back to the kitchen. “What can I fix you – that goes well with morphine, anyway?”

“How about a scotch and soda, minus the scotch?”

“Comin’ right up.” He went and poured her a Perrier, garnished it with lime and took it to her. “Do you know Tom Stoddard?” he asked.

“You know, we’ve never met,” she said, and he took her by the good arm and led across the room, to Stoddard – and Deke Tomberlin. Deke turned and looked at Gibson – and his face turned to pure admiration.

“Deke, Tom? May I acquaint you with Eunice Gibson? And if she doesn’t have the best goddamn legs in the valley, y’all need to go get your eyes checked.”

He turned and left the three of them in open-mouthed speechlessness, smiled and winked when he saw Tracy staring at him.

“I see you’re not going to be content to just stir the pot tonight,” she whispered when he got back to the kitchen. “You’re gonna toss in a few sticks of dynamite too, aren’t you?”

“Why, Tracy? What makes you say such a thing? Oh well, time for me to tickle the ivories,” he said as he walked over to the Steinway.

“You play?” she asked as he came up to the twins – who were staring up at him now in wonder.

“Were you that actor,” June Stoddard asked as he asked to take the seat.

“I was, yes,” he said, “but that was a long time ago. Are you taking piano lessons?”

“Yes,” they said in unison. “Do you play?”

“A little. Do you know Cole Porter?”

“Does he teach piano?”

“You know, I think he did. How about the Moody Blues?”

They both shook their heads and he started a soft rendering of Are You Sitting Comfortably, singing in a remarkably clear tenor. By the time he let Merlin cast his spell they were hooked, and Donny’s waitresses and wife came over and stood around the piano, mesmerized by the song – and his voice. Tracy watched as Eunice turned and looked at Robert, and she too walked over, with Deke and Stoddard following her like Pointers on the scent.

‘He’s playing at Merlin tonight,’ Tracy thought, ‘and he’s playing with fire, too.’

He finished Comfortably, then launched into Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick out of You, doing his best to sing Porter’s lyrics – and not Mel Brooks’ somewhat less appropriate version – which happened to be his favorite, then Ben came in and watched him before sitting by his side.

“Can you take it from here, Ben?” – and he saw that all the women were almost drooling now –

“You feeling like this is a Cole Porter kind of night, Bob?”

“You know it, Ben.”

Who of course started in on My Heart Belongs to Daddy – while he looked at the twins.

“Let’s go check on those tenderloins,” Rankin said to Tracy as they made for the kitchen, then, after he grabbed some tongs, on out to the deck. He lifted the lid on the smoker, checked the meat with a thermometer. “Another ten minutes at this temp,” he said, then he checked the foil packets full of roasting vegetables. “About ready for the finishing touch,” he sighed as he poured a mixture of melted butter, soy, lemon and grated ginger into the steaming bags.

He shut the lid and turned to her. “Do you know, you have the most incredible eyes in the universe?”

“Do I?”

He leaned forward and ran his tongue along her eyelashes – and the shiver that ran down her spine nearly caused her knees to buckle – then he kissed her – once, and deeply – on the lips.

“You do that again,” she purred, “and I’m going to have to clean your clock again.”

“Promises, promises,” he sighed – before he kissed her again.

“You’re playing with fire tonight, Robert.”

“I’m running low on matches; think you could…”

“Light your fire?” she smiled. “Count on it, bucko.”

“I am. Say, did you know that oxycontin releases inhibitions?”

“Robert? No. Whatever is it you’re…NO? Listen, I don’t like her, but…”

“My guess is her husband, the congressman, tried to put some moves on you back in high school. And she’s been trying to put you in your place ever since.”

Tracy looked at him, her eyes full of questions. “Who told you?”

“No one. I was visiting her the other day, and among other things she called you a slut.”

“She – WHAT?”

“So, who do you think’s hornier? Your father, or Tom Stoddard?”

“Robert? What are you going to do?”

He leaned over and whispered in her ear again, and she turned bright red, then burst out laughing.

+++++

Ben was in the middle of Anything Goes when Matt came in, and when one of the waitresses sidled up next to him, Ben drifted into Let’s Fall in Love. She was kind of cute, Robert saw, and he observed Matt had noticed, too. He caught Eunice’s eye and motioned her to come to the kitchen.

“You’re looking pale, Eunice. How’s the medicine holding up?”

“It hurts, Bob. What should I do?”

“Has it been four hours yet?”

She looked at the clock on the refrigerator door. “Is that time correct?”

“Yup.”

“Four hours in about twenty minutes. Should I wait?”

“Hell yes, but we’ll be sitting down for dinner then, and taking that stuff with food ought to help prevent stomach upset.”

“Oh, thank you for keeping an eye on me.”

“My pleasure.”

“You really like my legs?” she asked, but he was looking at Tracy just then – talking with her father by the fireplace.

“Do I like your legs?” he asked. “Are you kidding? If I was twenty years younger, darlin’, I’d like to help you curl your toes.”

She brightened, turned beet red. “Anytime you want to try, just let me know.”

“Really?”

“Um-hmm,” she cooed.

“What’s with Deke? That man’s been staring at your legs ever since you walked in the room.”

“Oh? Has he?”

“Has he? Eunice, the man’s drooling. I mean positively drooling, every time he looks at you.”

She turned and looked at him; Deke was standing next to Stoddard now, staring at her legs.

“See what I mean?”

She did. And she was now an even brighter shade of red, too.

“Well, I’ve got to get our dinner off the grill right now, but how ‘bout I put you next to him at dinner? Think you could, well, handle that?”

She turned and looked at him, her eyes a sleepy kind of sexy – then she licked her lips.

“Yes, Eunice. I think I’m getting green with envy.”

“Good,” she said, then she turned and went back to the living room.

Tracy met him at the smoker. “Mission accomplished,” she said. “I think he’s about ready to explode, matter of fact. How was she?”

“Like a piranha. A hungry piranha.”

“Oh, God. My poor father.”

“Are you kidding? They’re going to be perfect together.”

“Uh, you’d better remind Matt those girls are seventeen.”

“Eighteen, last month.”

“You checked?”

“Of course. Matt’s a good friend. Besides, he’s getting ready to cast a movie next month, and he needs twins. Girls, as a matter of fact. And guess what, they took drama last year.”

“You mean, you planned this?”

“Of course not. What makes you say that?” he said, lifting the lid to the grill, the air filling with dense, hot smoke.

+++++

“Damnit all, Mr Rankin,” Donny said from the far end of the table, “this is the best goddamn steak I’ve ever had in my life. What’s your secret?”

“I plug the tenders with garlic, then let them sit in a marinade of orange zest, soy, honey and ginger. Once the tenders are on the fire, grind a bunch of fresh peppercorn all over everything. Smoke until the meat hits 165, and that’s it. Deke? How’s yours? Too well done?”

“No sir. This is the perfect steak. Hope you don’t mind if I borrow your recipe, though.”

Tine, one of Donny’s waitresses was sitting beside Tom Stoddard, and she apparently had matters well in hand, while Matt was talking to the twins about his next project. Ben was talking to Bert about the merits of mixing alfalfa with summer grasses, though Eunice had barely touched her filet – she seemed preoccupied with something under the table, and Deke seemed a little preoccupied, too.

Indeed, Deke wiped a line of perspiration from his brow, his eyes crossed a little.

“Deke, you pull a muscle this afternoon,” Rankin asked.

“Oh, Bob, you have no idea.”

“I hate it when things stiffen up after the sun goes down.”

“Do you?” he grimaced. “Well, I know just how you feel.”

“Yes, well, the trick is to just let things go, try not to hold back.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, just stretch out that leg – then let her fly, maybe give it a little rub to get the circulation going again.”

“Oh, God…”

“Eunice? Think you could help him massage that out?”

“Certainly, Bob. Deke, where’s it hurt?”

“Oh, GAWD!”

“Tom? How’s your steak?”

“Just great.”

“You know, there’s a big hot tub out back. Maybe you could take the twins out there, relax for a while before you go home.”

“Wish we could, but we didn’t bring bathing suits…”

“Matt, could you show ‘em where I keep the spare bathing suits?”

“Dad? Could we come too?”

“There’s plenty of room,” Rankin said. “Enough for a dozen or so, anyway,” he said as he handed Eunice a spare napkin. Deke’s eyes were hooded over now, his breathing deep, while Eunice looked around the room, smiling and contented. “Eunice? How’s that arm? Feel like a swim?”

“Hmm?”

“Want to sit in the hot tub for a while? Or would you like some dessert?”

“If you’ve made those bourbon-pecan pies,” Matt said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Well, I’d better get to slicing,” Rankin said. “Donny, can you give me a hand?” They walked to the kitchen, and Tracy did as well.

“I’d say mission accomplished, one more time,” she said as she got some dessert plates out from the cupboard.

“Yes, a sticky situation.”

“What is?” Donny said.

“How’s that wife of your’s, Donny?”

“Hmm? Oh, fine. What can I do here?”

“Could you slice a few pies?”

“Sure could.”

“Great. I always make a mess of it. What do you think? Think your wife would like some time in the tub?”

“I dunno…I think she’s had to much to drink?”

“Ah, well, maybe she could just dip her toes?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Hell, no,” Rankin said as he took the first few slices out to the table. “I just asked her,” he said when he came back to the kitchen, “and I think she’s ready.”

“Ready?”

“For some hot tub fun, Donny!” he added as he and Tracy carried the last plates out to the table. ‘Yup,’ he said to himself as he looked at Eunice, ‘things are heating up nicely…’ He looked around the table as he sat, and said, “Well, bon appetite, y’all…dig in!”

Donny’s wife chimed-in first: “This is so good!”

“It’s the pecans,” Rankin said. “Have to soak ‘em for a few hours in bourbon, then I take ’em out and roll ‘em in honey. That seals in the bourbon, helps give it a little kick. Eunice, you be careful now.”

“If it was baked, there’s no more alcohol,” she said knowingly. “Not enough to hurt, anyway.” She took a bite, and sighed. “This is heavenly. Where’d you get this recipe?”

“Oh, I just looked at a few and combined the best of this, a little of that. You like it?”

“It’s so rich, but so light,” she said.

“Just like you, darlin’,” he said, and he watched her turn red again. Deke seemed to look up at that, his eyes taking on a possessive note, and Rankin smiled. “Deke, think you can convince Eunice to hit the hot tub?”

“Well, I don’t know about that…”

“Dad? Robert’s got something downstairs you really need to see.”

“Oh, no,” Matt said, grinning. “We’ve lost Robert for the night.”

“What’s that?” Deke said.

“Come on, Robert, let’s show him…”

“Show him what?” Eunice said. “Can I come, too?”

“Yes, Eunice,” Rankin said, “I think you need to come.”

“Ooh, goody. I love a surprise!”

Rankin stood. “Matt? Think you can herd all these people down to the hot tub?”

“Sure. Is the pool heat on?”

“The indoor pool is set at 85, the outdoor at 75.”

“Splendid!”

“Y’all have fun. Eunice…Deke, follow me.” He led them to the main staircase and down to the train room, then he opened the door…

And the room filled with the deep rumble of a locomotive, a conductor calling out “All aboard!” Then across the room a headlight came on, then all the windows in the passenger cars lit up – and all New York City’s lights came on, then her street lights . The sounds of people on sidewalks, cars and trucks rumbling down streets, and the room shook as the 20^th Century Limited pulled out of Grand Central Terminal…

Deke and Eunice, even Tracy – who’d never seen the display come fully to life – looked on in awe. Street cars ran, subways crossed town on an elevated line, and Long Island Railway commuters crossed bridges over the East River.

“My God in heaven,” Deke muttered as he came over. “You built all this?”

“Yup,” Rankin said, his eyes full of pride. “Started when I was seven years old.”

“This is impossible!” Deke added, his eyes taking on a faraway, searching look. “I always wanted to do something like this…”

“Come with me,” Rankin said, and he led Deke and Eunice to the next phase of the project in the next room. The bare bones of the next expansion had been formed in this room, but nothing was visible aside from markings where future tracks would be placed.

“What is all this?” Deke asked when the scope of the project became apparent.

“Three main lines will leave New York, come through here on their way to Chicago, over there. In the next room, down here,” he said as he walked across to the far room, “the lines will continue, on to San Francisco and LA.” He turned on the lights in the last room, revealing another bare bones layout – though the Rocky Mountains were complete, and all of the track had been laid. “So, I was wondering. What I need, Deke, is another set of hands. Interested?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I need help. Wanna come over, anytime you feel like it, of course, and help out?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yup.”

“Well, hell yes, I’d like to help out!”

“Outstanding! Well, look, there’s something I need to ask you.”

“About Eunice? Are you interested in her?”

“Are you?”

“Well,” Deke began, “I didn’t think so a few hours ago, but right now, well, I’m not so sure.”

“I think you two look good together.”

“You do?”

“Yup. But I need to ask you about Tracy.”

“Tracy? What about Tracy?”

“Well, she wanted me to ask you, well, for permission, for us to get married.”

“She what? Oh, did you ask her?”

“I did.”

“And she said yes?”

“She did.”

He looked away, wiped a tear then turned back. “Well, Robert, you have my permission. When? When do you think you’ll tie the knot?”

“Soon as we can, I reckon. No time like the present,” he said as he looked at this room full of his past – and maybe his future, too.

“No, I reckon not,” Deke said, clearly thinking about that woman in the other room.

“So, what about the hot tub, sir.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think I ought to get on home.”

“Well, Eunice needs a ride, in case you want to take her – into town.”

“Does she, now?”

“That’s a fact.”

“Hmm.”

They walked back to New York City, to Tracy and Eunice still standing trackside – looking at men’s obsessions and laughing at the folly of it all, perhaps – but looking in awe nonetheless at what had been accomplished – so far.

And Eunice looked at Deke as he came to her: “Deke, what about you ‘n me? Want to hit the hot tub?”

“I was thinkin’ I’d drive you home now, Eunice.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, before it gets too late.”

“Oh. Well, alright. Let me go get my things.”

They all walked upstairs together, and while Rankin helped Eunice on with her coat he leaned close and whispered in her ear. She smiled, kissed him in the cheek, and Deke walked her out to his truck. They watched him drive down to the main road into town, but he didn’t turn that way. No, he turned to the other way, and drove on to his house, and Tracy turned to him just then and smiled.

“I’m curious,” she said. “Did you have all this planned out?”

“Who? Me?”

“Yes, you?”

“Well, one more more piece of the puzzle I want to help into place.”

“Oh?”

“Those girls.”

“Tom’s girls?”

“Yup.”

“Is that why you invited…”

“Yup.”

“I didn’t want to ask, but what did you say to Dad in the other room?”

“Oh, I told him I could use some help. With the next phase of the railroad.”

“Oh.”

He smiled. “And I asked him about us.”

She turned to him, looked into his eyes. “And?”

“Oh, all he seemed to want to know was when and where.”

“When and where?”

“Where we’re going to do it.”

“Ah. Well, we’re going to do it in there,” she said, pointing to his bedroom, “right now. I think he’s going to miss this performance.”

“I reckon we better tend to our guests first, don’t you think?”

“They can manage for a little while.”

“Oh, well, okay – if you think so.”

+++++

He went out to the pool deck a while later, saw Matt and Ben still talking to the twins, this time with Tom listening carefully, so he walked into the hot tub grotto and found Donny and his group sipping wine with Ronnie Higgins and his wife. He walked over and dangled his legs in the water, and noticed they were all staring at him now.

“How’s your evening been?” he asked.

“Just something else, Mr Rankin,” Donny said.

“Like some kind of dream,” Donny’s wife added.

“Oh? Well, I hope this isn’t the last time I see you all out here. Matter of fact, Tracy and I have decided to get married, and we’ll probably have some kind of reception here. I hope you know you’re all invited, but we’ll get invitations to you soon.”

There were congratulations, invitations to come to the diner – “Anytime! Anytime at all!” – and Rankin basked in their glow for a while, then walked out to see how things were going with the twins.

“So, what do think, Matt? Find them an agent yet?”

“Yup.”

“I thought they’d be perfect for the parts,” he added. “You too, I take it?”

“Yup.”

“Tom, once you get to know Matt a little better, you’ll see he can speak more than one syllable at a time.”

“Yup. Figured that one a while ago. Plays it pretty close to his vest.”

“He does at that. If it gets too late, Tom, just bunk out in one of the spare bedrooms.”

“Thanks, Mr Rankin. Appreciate your hospitality.”

“My name’s Bob, Tom. Ben, I’m off to bed. Think you can shut things down?”

“Yup.”

“God, it’s catching.”

“Yup,” all five of them said.

“Monsters…I’ve created monsters…” he said as he trudged off to the kitchen, then back to his bedroom. She was still there, waiting, and he’d never felt happier.

So, let’s speak of endings.

Right after graduation the twins, the twins flew to Boston and started on Matt and Ben’s latest movie, about two girls – twins, of course – at Boston College in the sixties. Tom Stoddard was nervous as hell when he watched them leave, but he busied himself training his new pup, Lucille, for the coming bird season. Tina, the waitress from Donny’s place, started spending nights once the girls left, and Tom started putting on weight. Too many chicken fried steaks, he said.

Becky, another gal from the diner, moved into one of the spare bedrooms at Rankin’s place. She still worked evenings at the diner, but worked mornings at Robert’s helping clean house. She’d developed a crush on him, a bad one, and was biding her time, waiting for an opening. Who knows, she thought from time to time, maybe she’d have to make an opening?

Eunice Gibson? Oh, where do we start?

She developed an oral fixation. And Deke had never been happier.

Most days he finished up work in time for lunch, then he showered and drove over to Robert’s. He was concentrating on the western lines in the far room, modeling the Feather River run the California Zephyr made on it’s way into Oakland, and when he finished up what he was working on he’d get in his truck and drive into town, where he’d find Eunice – upstairs in garters and stockings and heels – ready and waiting.

Robert got his snake proof boots at the dry goods store, and had an early breakfast most days at Donny’s. When he walked the sidewalks downtown, the locals said ‘Howdy’ when he passed, and he finally began to feel like he belonged.

And Tracy still worked the customer service desk, still took care of people who needed taking care of, which is why, of course, she decided to marry Robert Rankin. They set a date for next Christmas, and she could hardly wait. She still had her apartment, of course, but she spent most nights at his place, and she didn’t care if people talked.

One night, when she was over at her father’s after work, he was sitting at the piano playing In the Still of the Night once again, and he remembered that night. The night he’d decided to change keys, the night he shifted from a major key, to a minor. The same music, but different. The same life, yet nothing like it was.

Just a little shift. So funny. So unexpected.

He looked across the valley, looked at the Tomberlin ranch and smiled as he played, then he felt a gentle tugging on his socks and reached down, picked up the little Springer and held her close.

(C) 2016 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is a work of fiction, and although there are slight inferences to a few real world characters sprinkled about, these references in no way represent any events, real or otherwise. hope you enjoyed.

+++++

So, celebrities and model railroads. You’ve heard of Rod Stewart, I reckon?

Yes, that Rod Steward. Maggie May and all that…

Turns out he’s into the hobby. And not in a small way. His efforts formed the basis of Rob Rankin’s obsession in the story.

He said of this article in Model Railroader that it meant more to him to be in this magazine than in any other fan or music magazine. Odd, don’t you think?

Kind of interesting, nevertheless. The effort fills the third floor of his house in Beverly Hills.

Anyway, I worked on this tale thinking about the various keys of life, and how we need to change up from time to time, shake things up a little.

So…Happy New Year! Keep warm and drive safe.

And we’ll see you next year. Thanks for reading along.

Aa

(image: Lightning Over Colorado, Joe Randall, APOD)

So, well, uh, it’s beginning to feel a lot like…

a) Christmas   b) winter   c) just cold as hell   d) all of these

…up here on the mountain. Zero degrees F last night, of course with blowing snow and 60mph winds. Nice sunbathing weather, I assume, for penguins – and those with a loose grip on reality.

A few new books on the bookshelf came in recently, a few you might want to consider as this winter blows in. “The Nicene Heresy – Christendom and War: Reverence and Critique” by Blasé Bonpane, a priest of all things, with an interesting take on Just War theory. “At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others” by Sarah Bakewell, concerning the origins of post-war liberation movements. Food for thought, anyway. Both available on Amazon, or at your “local bookseller” (if there remains such a thing).

Prozac deprived James Howard Kunstler, over at his “Clusterfuck” blog, provided an entertaining read this morning, as did the always entertaining  Chris Hedges, over at Truthdig. Hell, I think they may both be severely Prozac deprived, but their thoughts on current events are certainly off the main trail of current journalistic practice, and therefore worth a look from time to time.

Which brings us to the main subject of this post, Politically Incorrect Thought and the tolerance (or lack thereof) of viewpoints different than one’s own. This would seem to be an issue of greater relevance now than at any time in my somewhat long life.

We have Native American protesters in North Dakota being hit with water cannons while protesting drilling and pipeline construction in and around their land(s), and we have the Klan staging a Trump Victory Parade in North Carolina, yet once again it’s Yeats to the rescue:

Image: Ruslan Merzlyakov August 7, 2016  Road E4, Umeå, Sweden | space weather.com

Those blue critters in the image above are known as noctilucent clouds, and while rare they’re becoming more prevalent. The image below is kind of meaningful, once you understand the significance of these things.

At any rate, food for thought, and they sure are pretty to look at.

Later

Aa

This story first appeared on LIT in 2009, titled then as The Man From God Only Knows. My very first attempt at constructing a dystopian world within the SciFi genre, I thought it had a few points to make, maybe even a few relevant themes to consider. Well, a few of those points resonate more now than they did a few years back, and I thought it time for another visit.

The basic framework remains but the story goes off on a few new tangents, so I think it’s worth a read again. This is about 63 or so pages, typed out on the screen, anyway. I trimmed a lot of fat from the narrative, about 15 pages overall, so it should read a little “tighter” than before.

+++++

BlackWatch

Come away, come away, death, 

And in sad cypress let me be laid. 

Fly away, fly away, breath; 

I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, 

O, prepare it! 

My part of death, no one so true 

Did share it.

 William Shakespeare  Twelfth Night

+++++

Prelude: What has gone before

In the immediate prelude to the First Secession War, politicians from both parties in the United States turned away from long held positions of prosecuting wars against terrorists and their fellow travelers. Collapsing infrastructure led to deteriorating conditions in all major cities, food riots became commonplace after years of crop failures, while ever-accelerating income inequality – coupled with decades of deceit from politicians in both parties – produced an atmosphere of desperation within the American population. Long, contentious experience with overcrowded prisons filled beyond capacity with minorities – and this only a few years after Trump’s tough new drug laws were introduced – coupled with the fractious Islamist ascendency that exploded throughout American cities when further policies extreme policies were introduced – all but doomed America to civil war. The First Secession War began, innocently enough, when cities on the east and west coast effectively seceded from the Union, leaving moderate politicians in both parties helpless and at a loss to halt their precipitous slide in democratic polls. When open hostilities broke out between military forces allied with one faction or another, America appeared on the verge of collapse.

With it’s military divided, conservative factions in America turned to Russia for help, while neoliberal factions on the east coast turned to NATO forces. Western states turned to China, and then Japan for assistance and, sensing the time was right, North Korea struck the Pacific Northwest with nuclear weapons. Over the next day and a half, several more nuclear exchanges occurred, most concentrated in the Middle East, but one huge, sustained exchange occurred between India and Pakistan, rendering life on the sub-continent virtually extinct.

Another more problematic exchange occurred between Russian and Chinese forces, leaving Russia decimated and coastal China a radioactive wasteland. Interestingly, the former United States was hardly affected, save for the destruction around Puget Sound and northwest Oregon, yet all vestiges of the once mighty American political structure had by then been swept away. With air transportation systems in ruins, and without railroads to aid in reconstruction, the cohesive network of American cities and states disintegrated, and the remaining citizenry resettled into small, sustainable agrarian communities. Life began to take on medieval qualities, but life continued.

After the collapse of America, or the so-called First Republic, neoconservative parties made huge gains in the elections of the early 2150s, and the leader of the newly formed Social-Continental Party defeated the liberalist National Front – just as cities were recovering and beginning to trade once again. On a platform of reuniting the former states, implementing agrarian reform as well as new rounds of ‘get tough’ laws against drug use and immigration, neoconservatives swept aside liberal opposition groups and returned to power with their broadest electoral mandate in nearly thirty years.

Religious blocs within the Social-Continentals began orchestrating severe new policies, first mandating that all citizens attend services, and then by mandating all non-Christian religious practice be state controlled. A second religious undercurrent came to pass during this period: a gender-based differentiation of religious practice, with patriarchal and matriarchal branches splitting from each other, leading to escalating gender based conflict within the remaining small communities. These actions and reactions led, almost immediately, to the Second Secession War – and this time North America did not escape widespread destruction.

One other force became inescapable during the latter half of the twenty-first century. The long denied, oft maligned effects of so-called climate change. After the Paris Accords were gutted in 2018, after drilling for oil and mining for coal resumed on a scale never before seen, global temperature increased at a steady pace – until 2055, that is. Then the climate tipped, and temperatures increased dramatically. Agricultural output fell by 85% with five years and the earth’s population dropped from two billion to just a few hundred million. By 2210 there remained perhaps ten million people in the land formerly known as the United States, and most of these people lived in northern, somewhat cooler mountainous regions, and only four much smaller coastal city-states remained: the New York-Boston ‘mega-plex’, Houston, Saint Franciscus – and of course, Los Angeles, now known as Saint Angeles. Most trade between continents was conducted through these cities – by sailing ship – and regional political power was centered in these cities, as well.

And these city-states became the locus of military power in the Second Republic, and they banded together with city-states in Europe and Japan to create a new world order based – primarily – on a new religious order that fused Christian and Buddhist teachings. This new religious order grew increasingly militaristic over time, and gender segregation became a much more prominent feature of daily life.

With order restored after the Second Secession War, the first round of Social-Continental Reforms, the so-called Neo-Justinian Corupus Iurus Civilis II, delivered great power into the hands of Law Enforcement. By-passing the courts, police officers on the street were given the power to place any person suspected of being in the Northern Tier illegally into one of several rebuilt detention facilities. Little was said at the time, though it was widely understood: those so detained would never be released, and in fact would never be seen or heard from again. The facilities so created soon became known as Manzanars, though the meaning of the name was obscure, and their ranks swelled with tens of thousands from the ‘Southern Tier,’ lands once called Central and South America, people caught fleeing their own famines and drug wars. Rumor had it that most of those incarcerated died from forced labor, but reporting on conditions inside Manzanars was forbidden after the first feeble attempts by frightened reporters were met with calls to disband the media.

The second element of the first round of reforms was more controversial from the start: police officers were given the power to summarily execute any person found in possession of or using any form of illegal narcotics, along with broad new powers to search for these compounds.

Drug use fell precipitously the first few months after the reforms went into effect, after the ‘extra-judicial’ killings began, and the number of people caught trying to sneak into the Northern Tier dropped to a trickle as well. Social-Continental politicians sneered at their liberal brethren, corporate journalists soon lauded the neoconservatives for rescuing the new republic and reestablishing law and order, but soon rumors surfaced that the police were using their broad new powers to intimidate or eliminate anti-reform opposition leaders – and perhaps not coincidentally, more than a few liberal politicians. Still, over time not even a complacent media could ignore these new developments, for people were disappearing at an alarming rate.

Nervous Social-Continental politicians rushed through a third set of reforms; these simply modified existing code to include an element of due process, but a new class of law enforcement officer was created in the process: the Justinian, and though nominally police officers, Justinians had to complete more thorough legal training before their final appointment. The Justinian’s job was to go to the scene of all crimes and verify that any arrests made were valid – before certifying a suspect for summary execution or, in rare instances, internment. And there was one other stipulation attached to the creation of the Justinians: all would be biologically female.

And with this one simple twist of fate, a tale comes to mind…

+++++

BlackWatch

Aurelius Krül-son sat behind an arcing row of tables in the front row of a small classroom; he yawned – wiped a smeary tear from his cheek – while other cadets filed-in and took their assigned seats in the room. A fresh spasm tore through muscles deep in his neck and he rubbed taut cords of tortured tissue until the pain subsided, then shook his head again as another yawn came. He put his hand out and grabbed the edge of the table as he winced through another spasm, this one deep in his back, between his shoulder blades. He felt awful, wanted more than anything in the world to go back to the dormitory and sleep for at least a week, but that was not to be, not with Codex exams less than a week away. He shook his head to clear away the fog, and wished once again the academy’s PT instructors would back-off from the endless spate of late-night runs.

He opened his notebook – Institute issued and graded weekly for neatness – and took out a couple of pencils from the attaché case that lay by his feet on the concrete floor. Other cadets did the same as the clock rolled around to 2000 hours, then a door beside the whiteboard opened and the week’s instructor – one they had never seen before – walked into the classroom.

Krül-son caught his breath when he saw her, for he was quite certain he’d never seen so desirable a woman – and desire was a very tricky thing.

The instructor was very short, not particularly slender but by no means overweight, yet she exuded an obvious self-confidence that was positively attractive; more important and certainly more to the point, he thought she was sexy, conscientiously sexy, like she enjoyed projecting authority through an overt appearance of sexuality – and that made her a very rare bird indeed. She walked to the podium before the class and laid out her materials on an adjoining table – slowly, quietly, her every move exuding authority – then she grabbed a marker, strode over to the whiteboard and began writing:

‘Sinn August-dottir; District Attorney’s Office; Law of Search and Seizure I.’ Her words on the board, like her persona, were carefully structured and precise; the lettering and punctuation left by her fine-boned hand was clipped and neat, and full of purpose. At first all Krül-son noticed was the curve of her hips and legs, but soon the wedding band on the third finger of her left hand caught his attention, yet even so his eyes wandered back over her exciting lines.

She turned to the class and nodded to someone in the rear of the room; Krül-son dared not turn around – and it was in any event quite unnecessary. The Commandant of the Saint Angeles Regional Police Academy would be standing back there in her immaculately starched whites, checking to see how this latest class of rookie police officers responded to their new instructor. The commandant would, as was her custom, leave after the first few minutes of class; meanwhile, the instructor took up a remote and lowered a screen on the wall behind her and began reading off the highlights of what she planned to cover during this first morning’s session.

Krül-son diligently began copying every word she said, ignoring the wedding band he saw on her left hand as best he could, all the while trying to wipe away his impure thoughts by writing down the rigorous rules of procedure that dripped like warm honey from the instructor’s icy lips.

+++++

Lunch was always the same: protoplast steak and soy-carb noodles, a four ounce cup of enhanced water, three supplemental capsules of hormones and an iodine tab. Krül-son sat at his assigned table, in his assigned seat; he looked up from his tray from time to time and squinted at the clock on the far wall, then at radiation probes mounted on the rooms three small windows. Everything in the dining room was white – the harshest white imaginable: the walls were white; the clock on the wall, the tile on the floor; everywhere he looked it was as if all the world was afloat on a sea of endless white – aside from the radiation probes. These were bright yellow, lined with green and red, and everyone, everyone cast a wary eye on these displays at least once during lunch.

Everyone in the room – every cadet, every instructor and administrator, every radiation tech – was dressed in the same blistering white, and all but one person in the dining hall had pure white skin. The sole exception was Misogi Shibata, an exchange cadet from Kyoto, the largest remaining city-state in the Asiana Confederation. Misogi’s skin was perhaps a bit darker than his own – if it was at all – but it was her shocking silver hair that commanded the most attention. Radiation, he’d heard, was the cause, but she was startlingly beautiful, despite the color of her hair – and the radiation burns on her arms. For some reason the latest regeneration sprays had great difficulty repairing neutron-irradiated flesh, but there was nothing anyone could do about that, was there?

Halfway through the meal he looked up and noticed Sinn August-dottir walking into the room with the commandant, and to Krül-son she seemed almost grimly determined to keep a private joke to herself – for as long as possible. The two women walked through the crowded main dining room and on into the private dining room reserved for high ranking staff and important visitors, and his eyes followed her path through the room.

‘Naturally,’ thought Krül-son, though his eyes retained the mesmerizing image of her legs, the soft arcing lifts of her hair, the grim twinkle in her eyes – and so he couldn’t simply ignore the fluttering butterflies in his gut.

“What did you say?” Pol Dänae-son asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” Krül-son said defensively. “Not a word.”

“I beg to differ. You said ‘naturally’ – and I heard it quite distinctly.”

“I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming again.”

Dänae-son shook his head while he snorted. “Your daydreams are as tired as your eyes, Aurie,” Pol said consolingly.

“I am tired,” Krül-son whispered defensively as he tried to stifle another eye-watering yawn. “I feel like I haven’t slept in days.”

“Perhaps that’s because you haven’t slept in days. If you’ll think about it for a moment, you might recall none of us has.”

“I wonder if they are making us tired for a reason,” Aerrik Aerrik-son asked.

“To what end?” Gregor Tarkus-son replied defensively.

“I don’t know. To see how we handle stress, perhaps.” Aerrik-son shot back, his eyes bloodshot, his food untouched. “I can’t imagine, but why get us up the middle of the day for a run, then to class on an empty stomach?”

They all turned back to their bioplast steaks, sipped at their water, savoring the precious liquid. Moments passed in silence, each afraid to contemplate the possibilities that lay behind Aerrik-son’s question.

“I think Aurie has the hots for our new instructor!” Dänae-son chimed in from out of nowhere.

“What!?” Krül-son jerked away from the insinuation. “No way!”

The other cadets chuckled, smiled at Aurelius for a moment. Tarkus-son looked at the clock, mentioned the time; they rose and took their trays to be recycled and formed-up for prayer, then turned to the flag and saluted as they recited the simple pledge of allegiance:

‘I pledge my life to God, and to the Republic He hath founded;

His Word lighteth the path to Justice, as He guides us to Life Everlasting.’

They broke formation and walked across the blistering concrete to the classroom building.

Krül-son found he could not take his eyes off the instructor all afternoon; her words seemed to hold him and caress him even though plainly there was nothing at all personal about the law of search and seizure. When her legs appeared briefly from behind the table he craned his head and took in the shape of them, fought to control the stiffness that grew from his belly, that threatened to spread through his body like a wildfire.

At one point he flinched when Dänae-son’s elbow slammed into his ribs; he jerked to attention only to find that the instructor – along with everyone else in the classroom – was looking at him. There was understanding in her eyes, but something else was there as well. What was it? Mirth? Sorrow? Pity?

She walked from behind the instructor’s table and stood before him.

“What are you looking at so intently, Cadet?” she said.

Krül-son struggled to contain his embarrassment – the Flames of Hell ready and waiting to engulf him – as he fought to maintain the presence of mind he knew was being measured – by those watching on monitors far from this room.

“I ask your pardon,” Krül-son began, “but I was lost for a moment.”

“Lost?” she replied.

“Yes. So sorry.” He looked down at his notes, dreading what must surely come.

“How so?”

“You said that when a citizen is in the public eye there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. But what about things that may not be visible?”

“Such as?”

“Perhaps something not so readily apparent. Some device inside a coat pocket, say, or inside a backpack? You are saying we have the right to search inside these items as well?”

“Of course! Any container or article of clothing which might reasonably be used to conceal prohibited items may be searched – when in public! Were you not paying attention?”

“Yes, Instructor, I was. But are you saying that probable cause to search is overridden when there is no reasonable expectation of privacy? That when a citizen is in public we may search them at any time, without cause, for any reason? In effect… for no reason at all?”

“Effectively, yes, that is so.” Her eyes bore into his.

“Oh.” He was fascinated by the complex emotions that swirled inside her words.

“Oh?” she said dismissively – as she walked back to her place before the entire class. “Oh? Is this not clear to you?” Hands on hips, she stood now and looked around the room – commanding all eyes on her. “This provision was at the very heart of the First Reforms. If you’ll recall your basic history, the fourth amendment of the original constitution, by mandating a prohibition against all ‘unreasonable search and seizures,’ effectively made it impossible for the police to do their jobs. Lawlessness, terrorism and runaway drug use ensued, society fractured when promiscuity became the public norm, when immorality replaced God as the focus of civic life and duty. God’s punishment was swift and vast, was it not?”

There were murmured assents around the room. No one doubted His wrath – one glance at the nearest radiation monitor was all that was needed.

“Well,” she said, looking directly into Krül-son’s eyes, “I am glad I was able to clear that up for you.” She smiled at him – and for some reason a shiver ran down his spine.

+++++

The weekend’s ‘ride-alongs’ were posted before dinner Frietag evening, and Krül-son moaned inwardly when he saw he had been assigned to ride with the instructor from the DAs office. He had been stunned, as all the cadets in his class had been, when they heard later that morning, at their evening meal, that Sinn August-dottir was not simply an instructor. No, she was a Justinian, and cadets were – almost – never allowed to ride with, let alone talk to, a Justinian one-on-one, and he wondered why he had been singled-out. He ate that morning in silence, while his table-mates regarded him with a wariness that bordered on awe.

They had two hours of free-time after dinner on Frietags, and the cadets from Krül-son’s pod usually gathered under the commons patio dome to gripe and commiserate with one another; they arrived that evening exhausted and with four ounce bottles of water hoarded over the week, ready to talk. They sat in silence for a while, watched the sun rising, and though each longed for bed the need to talk, to vent all the stress that had built during the long week was overwhelming. The nervousness each felt regarding Krül-son’s scheduled ride-along was all too readily apparent, as well, and they worried for him.

The four of them sat side-by-side, their backs resting on the patio wall, each apparently lost in thought as the crimson sun rose above an indistinct, dusty horizon. There was not a tree in sight, for none remained in these latitudes – anywhere. Indeed, the academy had been built on land that had once been verdant parkland, trees and a lake in the center of Los Angeles! Now, in every direction one looked there remained only a landscape of decay, a city that lay in ruins, a majestic city that even now was being consumed by the shifting seas of a vast, inrushing desert. The sun rose into an almost perpetually cloudless sky; only a thin veil of permanent hi-altitude smog remained, a veil of increasing ammonia and sulphuric acid. That poisonous veil, however, kept people from being roasted alive if they remained out in daylight too long, assuming, that is, their radiation filters remained effective.

And though all were in their late-teens and early twenties, none could remember a time when things had been different…

Krül-son looked at the reflective domes being built over the more affluent sections of the city and wondered when the poorer sections would be covered. Far across the valley he could just make out the entrance to one of the new underground cities being carved from the guts of the Santa Monica Mountains north of the city wall, but how many would live there? Would it be habitable in time? In the end, would people really want to move underground?

“You know,” Dänae-son said, “I think I understand the reasoning behind the Reforms as well as any of us, but it makes me uncomfortable to be able to disrupt lives so arbitrarily.”

“I know what you mean,” Aerriksson said, “but there really hasn’t been an effective alternative. Besides, who would advocate a return to the old ways?”

Each of them shuddered; they had been born and come of age with only the memories of their elders to guide them. Memories of endless ‘depression’ that chased scarce resources, then the secession movement and internal revolution that killed-off the First Republic. No one wanted to see a return to the anarchy that swept the land then, as drug cartels pushed deeper into the homeland, as first police officers then National Guard units were swept aside by a drug-crazed tide of rapists and blood-thirsty immigrants. Only full-scale military intervention at home had restored order, and the remaining people had been more than happy to sweep aside the remnants of a wholly ineffectual government, and then the First Secession War began.

Great cities disappeared in that war, as did an estimated seven billion people. A brief ‘nuclear winter’ almost wiped out all life on the planet’s surface, and in time it was discovered that the brief atomic war had thrown giga-tons of irradiated particulate matter into the atmosphere, and three centuries of industrial pollution had somehow been trapped in all strata of atmosphere by an engulfing layer of radiation. With no trees to scrub the air, no oceans to act as a heat sink, new cycles of planetary decay and realignment settled in

“Sometimes I think of quitting,” Tarkus-son said after a long pause.

“But, what would you do?” Krül-son asked, looking – incredulously – at his pod-mate.

“I don’t know. Perhaps go north. I hear there are still trees near the arctic circle, and water in streams. And farms…I have heard there are farms on the pains. Perhaps one could find work there, on a farm?”

“And I have heard we are not welcome,” Dänae-son replied, lost to the irony in his words. “They built a wall some time ago, even taller than our own. Besides, how would you travel so far north?”

“I don’t know. It was only a thought.”

“Some thoughts are best kept to one’s self, Greggor.”

“I know, Pol, I know; but this does not seem like such a good way to live.”

“It is what it is,” Aerikksonn said. “And soon it will be your job to protect this way of life.”

Krül-son felt uncomfortable with the way this conversation was drifting, wanted to change the subject: “The Codex exam next week will be miserable.”

“Why?” Pol said. “We’ve been studying the material for a month now; do you expect it to be so hard?”

“Alright, wise-ass…” Aerrik-son cut in, “… what does section 21.03 describe, and what is the range of punishment?”

“Section 21.03,” Pol said as he turned to his pod-mate. “Theft of Water from Public or Private Land. The actor, with wanton disregard for the public good, intentionally, knowingly or recklessly appropriates water from any source, either man-made or natural, for his or her own use. Punishment: less than one liter, 500 credits and 500 days detention; more than one liter but less than ten liters, forfeiture of all property, twenty years detention; ten liters or more will be adjudicated on site by Justinian, the range of possible sentences imposed may include summary execution if deemed warranted by the Justinian and approved by the Tribonian.”

The other three clapped in unison: “Bravo! Well done!” – yet Aurelius sat quietly, wondered what he might do, really, if he had to report someone for taking water – knowing that person was desperate, facing death, and that the state might put the poor soul to death. It was a no-win situation, wasn’t it?

Yet life these days was, he thought, a no-win situation. Even insurrection seemed futile, then he thought of the instructor’s legs again – and he smiled.

+++++

“See! Watch Tarkus-son’s movements!” the Commandant said as she bent over the screen. Sinn August-dottir leaned too and watched the four cadets as they talked on the patio.

“You doubt his loyalty?” Sinn said.

“I have watched him at First Prayers. His eyes wander, like his thoughts!”

Sinn pursed her lips. “We have seen this before. Many cadets become distracted after so long at the Institute. What makes you think this time is different?”

The Commandant leaned back in her chair. “Did you not hear him speak of fleeing to the North? Is that not enough?”

“What is your recommendation?”

“Public opinion is waning again; respect for the Police is falling too.”

“Yes, we know that.”

“Perhaps if an officer were to die, was to be killed, in the line of duty?”

“I take it you mean a cadet? Perhaps during one of the coming training exercises?”

“While searching a house for drugs? Yes. That would be ideal.”

“I will take this to the Tribonian, perhaps Montag morning. But I feel we should run this by the SenatusConsulta.”

The Commandant reached back and rubbed her neck. “That would be a mistake, a terrible mistake, Sinn. This must be kept away from all eyes, all prying eyes.” She twisted her neck from side to side, rubbed a spot below her right ear.

“Are you alright?” Sinn asked.

“Yes. Yes, but…”

“You would like me to stay with you tonight?”

The Commandant stood. “Would you?”

Sinn stood, turned and began unbuttoning the other woman’s tunic. Soon her hands ranged over taut breasts and firm stomach before sliding her mouth down into the moist warmth that had been waiting, oh-so-patiently, for this coming together all week.

+++++

Thor Bergtor-son, the region’s senior Tribonian, looked at the cadet files once again, then at the new video feed from the Institute. As the regions highest law enforcement officer, no one exceeded his authority – other than the region’s two senators – and they only if acting in concert. He read one of the files, then looked at the commandant on his monitor; she had never been able to keep her lust in check, and that one simple fact more than any other had always hindered her police work – and her administrative judgment. And he had never once suspected August-dottir would be the sort to philander whilst on duty. He knew her eccentricities, knew them only too well, but what he saw now was clearly a dereliction of duty. He watched the two women writhing on the bed, the Commandant’s face buried between Sinn’s legs, yet he felt almost nothing – just the faintest echoes of memory. All the Republic’s Tribonia, all by edict male, accepted ritual castration as a condition of appointment; only male members of the Senate escaped that fate. Now, after listening to the intercepts of their conversation, Bergtor-son wondered if the two really were acting alone, if they really planned to keep him out of the loop. He turned up the volume on the feed and listened to their frenzied passion.

He shook his head as he watched them. “Such hypocrisy,” he sighed, then he picked up Tarkus-son’s file and flipped through the pages once again: the boy had seemed most promising during his interviews but over the past year his faith had waned, his judgment had matured too quickly for the indoctrinations to take hold. The boy’s father had been a teacher, a professor of philosophy, before disappearing when the lad was just six years old, but even that brief exposure to the virus of reason had been enough to pollute the poor boy’s soul. Still, he had tested well, and his psych-profile raised no serious issues. Most cadets accepted their training without reservation; somehow young Greggor had slipped through clutching fingers and was even now drifting from their reach.

Such a pity, he thought, the boy’s life would end this way. Lost to a premature move, a pawn sacrificed in a much greater game.

The dilemma Bergtor-son faced was simple: while he had known for some time the academy’s staff, the commandant especially, would try to subvert his authority, now he had a decision to make. Sit back and watch as events unfolded, to allow the Commandant’s plan to be carried out unfettered, or take this as a serious threat to his authority and intervene now? And should he save the boy, or sacrifice him? The implications of his choice…but, what was this he saw?

“No!” Bergtor-son sat up in his chair, looked at the written transcript of the women’s conversation as it flowed onto an adjacent screen.

“I see you have chosen,” The Commandant said. “It is a nice ring.”

“I am getting old. I can put this off no longer.”

“Why Krül-son? DNA?”

“Yes. We will make good children, and he seems interested in me. I suspect he will mate most enthusiastically.”

“I dare say; perhaps too enthusiastically! Perhaps he will want to remain as the child’s father? Does he know yet?”

“No. I will tell him soon.”

The Commandant smiled. “Ah, brilliant. Yes, that would neutralize the Tribonian completely, wouldn’t it? He – in effect, none of them – would be allowed to testify against you.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

Tribonian Bergtor-son sat back in awe, laughed at the audacity of the plan for a very long time, then opened an encrypted link on his monitor. His fingers danced across the screen as he keyed-in the classified code on the computer, then he waited for the connection to secure.

He did not wait long.

“Active Three.” a mechanical voice, detached and sounding very far-away, answered.

“It is Bergtor-son.”

“Yes, Tribonian. We have seen it.”

“Any projections?

“Yes, Tribonian.”

“Recommendation?”

“No change, Tribonian. Implementation as planned.”

“Very well.” Bergtor-son closed the connection and sat back in his chair, then steepled his fingers just under his chin while he quietly regarded the Commandant and August-dottir. He watched for quite some time, lost in their passion, and he quietly reflected on his own youth, his own such stirrings long ago, before government surgeons had removed his lust so efficiently. He remembered Tarkus-son’s file and flipped through to the boy’s photograph.

“A pity,” he said quietly as he shut the file. “Such a waste.”

+++++

Thorsten Weblen-son sat behind a white duraplast desk in the squad briefing-room reading through yesterday’s incident reports. As usual, all offenses had happened during hours of maximum darkness; it had been too hot for sustained human activity during daylight hours for decades. Evening temperatures rarely fell into the 120s, and daytime highs for the past three “summer” months had averaged f/152 degrees. Now, in mid-December, daytime temperatures hovered in the high-130s.

The greatest problem facing the region now was, oddly enough, water temperature. Currents off the coast were warming much faster than modeled and operating efficiencies at the regions desalinization plants had fallen dramatically as a result. Pipelines from the plants to regional distribution centers were being hacked into, people were stealing water and damaging critical infrastructure. Weblen-son’s precinct was now in charge of all interdiction efforts along the southern California water distribution network; over three hundred thousand liters had been lost in just the past few days, and over ten meters of pipeline seriously damaged.

“Oh, great!” Weblen-son moaned when he read four rookies from the Academy were scheduled for ride-alongs this weekend. Then he read that that two Justinians were taking the cadets in tow, and that a cadet Tarkus-son was to ride the next two weekends. Now he was annoyed.

“Shit! Just what I need!” He read that a Cadet Krül-son would be riding with the Justinian Sinn August-dottir, and he whistled when he read that.

“Hey Sarge, what’s wrong?” a patrolman asked as he walked in and took his seat at one of the briefing tables.

Weblen-son looked up, graded the man’s sparkling uniform in his mind and nodded before speaking. “Rookies tonight. Tomorrow, too.”

“Fuck.”

“Want one?”

“Fuck, uh, no sir.”

“You know, Zimmer-son, we need to work on your language skills.”

“Fuckin’ a, sarge.”

Weblen-son shook his head and groaned, examined the uniform of each officer as they filed into the room – while he continued to flip through the previous watch commander’s notes. He called roll at 1720 hours, then asked for volunteers to handle the two unassigned cadets: Deirdre Gravvis-dottir took Pol Dänae-son and Avi-Shmoll Peres-son put his hand up to take Aerrik Aerrik-son. That settled, he called the dispatch office and summoned the rookies to come listen while he finished the rest of his briefing.

What really gave them away as rookies, Weblen-son thought as he watched them enter, were their pristine attaché cases; old-timer’s cases were scuffed and dinged, corners had long ago been worn smooth by years of abuse. Some were adorned with stickers and cartoon characters, others were clean and orderly; all had been beaten down by exigent crimes and high speed chases. The rookie’s cases, in sharp contrast, gleamed.

“Dänae-son! You’re in C-79 with Gravvis,” Weblen-son called out as the cadets took a seat. “Aerrik-son! In C-82 with Avi. Greggor Tarkus-son? You’ll start with me tonight, then your Justinian will take over when she arrives.” – and when he consciously omitted calling out Krül-son’s assigned partner a few of the old timer’s faces bunched-up, their eyes narrowed to razor-thin slits. Something, they knew, was amiss…

Weblen-son read out the offenses that had occurred the night before – a handful of burglaries, two water mains tapped, the usual crap – before handing out the night’s patrol patterns and call signs…

“Can any of you slime-ball rookies tell me why we shift call signs?”

Greggor Tarkus-son’s hand shot up.

“Go ahead, rook.”

“Frequencies are monitored, patrol patterns are analyzed and exploited.”

“And who are you, rook?”

“Tarkus-son, Greggor, sir.”

“Okay, relax Greggor. Good answer. You feel up to keeping the shift log tonight?”

“Yes, sir!”

Weblen-son laughed this time: “Rook, you need to chill.”

“Sir!”

The old sergeant shook his head while he passed out memory cards with updated codes that would be fed into each officer’s patrol computer; these would in turn be fed into patrol car terminals – and then into each officer’s helmet-radio.

Sinn August-dottir walked into the room without warning; Weblen-son ignored the instant hush that fell over the room and kept on passing out the cards, and he barely made eye-contact with her while she passed by on her way to Krül-son’s seat – yet every other pair of eyes in the room tracked her every movement. She sat next to Aurelius and sighed, tried not to smile – while Weblen-son fumed.

“Alright, mes chères petites larves!” he bellowed, “Let’s hit the road – and keep a close eye on your partner’s back!”

Chairs scraped back in thunderous unison and sixty gray uniformed officers, along with four white-uniformed cadets, stood and rumbled from the room.

The sergeant watched Sinn August-dottir closely as she walked by – rather the way a woodsman might keep an eye on a rattlesnake slithering-by – just out of striking distance; she looked his way just once and they barely made eye contact, but she held him in her eyes in that moment, then just barely smiled as she walked from the room.

Cold fingers of hate and dread ran down Weblen-son’s spine; he tried to shake off the feeling but unseen forces lingered with her passing.

“No good can come of this day,” he sighed. He looked at the temperature and radiation readings, then shook his head. He bent over and picked up his own very battered briefcase and looked at it, wondered how long it would last – before it all came undone.

+++++

She had one of the new patrol cars; the thing ran on pressurized hydrogen and was rumored to be very fast indeed – speeds of thirty five kph on the ground and almost twice that in the air had been reported and Krül-son didn’t doubt that for a moment as he took in the car’s stealthy black lines. Of course that was nothing compared to the hydro-carbon fueled vehicles of the First Republic, but those vehicles lived now only in museums – and in prohibited holos.

“Do you want to drive tonight?” Sinn August-dottir said.

Aurie tried to keep his excitement under control. “May I?”

She tossed him the keys and he dropped into the seat behind the stick. “Of course. You’re flight qualified now, aren’t you?” she asked as she settled-in behind him.

“Yes, Justinian. I passed the final exam three weeks ago.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Imagine that? Let’s head to Westside.”

“Surface streets, Justinian?”

“For now.”

His arm on the center console, he pushed forward on the stick; the patrol car accelerated smoothly away from the station while Sinn slid a memory card into the computer and checked into service. He could see the Westside Dome far away across the valley, the ocean glittering beyond. The sun was just above the western horizon, but even now the car’s deeply polarized canopy and windows were needed for protection, and Aurelius could not yet see one soul stirring on the blistering streets.

No, not yet. But that would change – in an hour.

+++++

A dark room. Hundreds of large glass tables, the surface of each alive with images and data flowing in a non-stop stream of information. Behind each table, a man, each almost identical to the next, each dressed in black spandex, the only visible accoutrement metal sensors grafted to the sides of their bald heads.

These men no longer consider themselves human – not in the strictest sense of the word. These hybrids hold themselves apart from the rest of humanity, as if their origin and purpose is a closely held secret – which, of course, it is. No one outside the room knew when or where, or even how these men were ‘created,’ and few would have dared ask if they could. Indeed, no one outside this facility completely understood what it was these men did – or why they did the things they did.

And these men had no names – or even precious little concept of identity – yet for all intents and purposes they are still human. Even if just barely so, for they understood human emotion as a data construct, as data that streamed into their minds, and they interpreted simple emotions on their own. Complex emotions, on the other hand, became a group exercise, and the complex interactions of crowds could consume their combined abilities for minutes.

More odd still, these men had no practical memory of dealing with other humans. Their understanding of – and reaction to – the interplay of complex human emotion was entirely a heuristic construct. As if they had been cut off from their humanity, their memory, their past.

The men in this room, one of seven such rooms hidden around the planet, monitored all human communication, all the time. Sensors located literally everywhere vacuumed data from the remaining people on earth, and generic computers pre-filtered the data-stream, sending only the most questionable content to them. Their minds were constantly filled with incoming data, and they evaluated the information stream, mapped responses and contemplated contingencies. Data highlighted as suspicious or threatening was instantly seen by a team of senior tacticians, yet even so, all the men were engaged, always, sifting through data for patterns that might reveal a beginning. One certain type of beginning.

These collectives were known, by the few who knew of their existence, as The BlackWatch. Few were known to have left these facilities, yet those few who did never returned. Those so lost are almost instantly replaced by another nearly identical man, yet there was no singular or collective sense of loss when this happened, indeed, there was no awareness at all.

One was intently watching the video feed from inside a police car, listening to the conversation between a young man and an older woman. His grey eyes danced through the data, ‘looking’ for relevant information, his brain processing information a trillion times faster than the most powerful supercomputers of the First Republic, and his brain discarded irrelevant information as quickly as new information appeared. When something particularly noteworthy registered his eyes tended to blink rapidly, but he is unaware of this activity and would not have understood what it meant even had he been aware.

He pulled in another stream and began sifting through new data from a nearby police car, then he tapped into surveillance cameras all over the area these two units were patrolling. Images of a broken city began flashing across the screen until a scene with three well-armed men filled a small sub-screen. He focused on this image and for a moment it enlarged instantly – and all his sensors began picking the images apart. He began by comparing the faces in the image with images of known criminals and and operatives and he identified each within milliseconds. With barely a conscious thought, within seconds this information appeared in a sub-screen on Tribonian Bergtor-son’s desk – and then on the displays of every other Tribonia in the republic.

A new set of images flashed of this Watcher’s screen – he picked up new feeds of the men, the cameras he tapped into closer to the action now, and he noted they were inserting ammunition into automatic weapons common in the First Republic; those weapons had been illegal for more than a hundred years, yet somehow there are still thousands in private hands. The Watcher sensed imminent danger and he displayed a map of the city on a large screen for all to see, then he overlaid the armed men and all police cars in the area. Other watchers stopped what they were doing and paused their own streams and looked at the central display for a moment; several blinked rapidly and returned to their streams. New data streamed into and out of the room at a furious pace now, eyes darting from image to image, from page to page, at surreal speeds.

Many of the Watchers were smiling now, as new information poured out into the hive, though they did not understand why.

Just then one of the Watcher’s streams arced away into the night sky, to the stars in fact, yet this Watcher’s face remained as impassive as any other’s.

Because, for the very first time in any Watcher’s existence, he felt fear, his own fear, perhaps – and for a time, perhaps a second, maybe less – he simply did not understand what real fear meant.

+++++

Deirdre Gravvis-dottir and Pol Dänae-son drove through vacant streets in the city’s westside, their eyes fixed on lengthening shadows left by the setting sun. People would be coming out of the shadows now, leaving their underground shelters and coming out as temperatures fell, the sun no longer considered a lethal predator. The outside temperature was still in the one-twenties, though it would probably fall close to f/110 by midnight, yet already some of the more desperate souls were gathering to begin foraging for food and water. The early worm gets the bird, or so the saying on the street went.

A heavily armed man ran across the street a hundred yards ahead and disappeared in shadow behind an old telecomm building.

People did not run in this heat unless they really had to.

“Son of a bitch!” Gravvis-dottir yelled. “Did you see the size of that gun?”

“Yah!” Pol squirmed in his seat, suddenly feeling very exposed out here on the street. The air cars were only lightly armored, not designed to withstand assault by First Republic-style M60s. “Shouldn’t we call for back-up?”

Gravvis-dottir stopped the car, scanned her display.

“Something’s not right,” she sighed.

Pol looked down the street but some part of his mind was screaming ‘danger’ as he looked to his left – he saw movement in the dissolving shadows, movement, coming his way.

“Oh shit,” he said.

+++++

The Watcher looked down into his glass desktop; permutations of probable outcomes flashed across one screen while an overhead image of the street filled another. He focused on the men in the shadows, analyzed the image to determine the make and caliber weapon each possessed and began sorting records to determine who’s men were moving first, if their actions and motives were a part of this plan.

And that was important. Were they simply criminals? If so he would move on. But if not…

Could it be?

He sent the large infra-red image to The Wall, and several other Watchers were now focused on there, centered on the air car stopped in the middle of Westwood Boulevard; red cross-hairs flashed where armed men were hidden, police were indicated as solid blue stars. Several ‘reds’ were ahead of the police car, but many more were converging in shadows from the rear and along both sides. There were now twenty armed men identified as threats by the first Watcher, and all were slowly taking up positions around the police car.

‘These are not criminals,’ the first Watcher thought, and this impulse burst into the network, interrupted the work of hundreds of other Watchers around the planet; within a moment all Watcher’s attention, everywhere, was focused on the evolving scene.

They watched, eyes blinking rapidly now, as they processed images of hundreds of rounds being fired into the police car.

As if something or someone far away had thrown a switch in his head, the first Watcher broke his connection and stood. He blinked rapidly as the feed pouring into his mind broke off, then stopped.

Then he turned and walked from the room. This new feeling, this thing called fear, was overwhelming, and as he fell to his knees, as his breathing came in ragged gasps now, he knew he could not fail.

“Not this time,” he sighed. “Not again.”

+++++

Krül-son and August-dottir heard only one plaintive cry for help over the radio net, then silence. An emergency transponder activated, indicating an officer was dying, or dead, and automatically sending the location to EMS…

“Go!” Sinn shouted, pointing at the screen when the data began streaming onto her car’s central monitor.

Without thinking Aurie hit the thrusters and the car shot a hundred feet into the air and arced towards what, decades ago, had been called Westwood. He looked down at the data screen and noted at least a dozen other cars en route and he smiled, felt comfort in this communal response, this ‘brothers-in-arms’ feeling that swept through his soul. He saw the old university ahead and cut back power; they were less than a mile out now and were by-far the closet unit to the scene.

“Do you want me to proceed, Justinian?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” she replied caustically.

“It could be a trap, or an ambush, Justinian.”

“Of course it is, you idiot! It is our job nonetheless, regardless of lies in wait. Follow procedure and proceed.”

“Yes, Justinian.”

Airborne, this newest generation air car could travel at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour; per standard operating procedure Krül-son swept in low over the scene at maximum speed and let the car’s sensors record images, then he banked the car into a hard climbing turn and studied the images that danced across his central display. These images were sent to all other responding units automatically, and simultaneously, so it was no surprise when the shift sergeant came on the patrol circuit and began ordering deployments around the scene.

Krül-son was ordered to orbit the scene at maximum altitude and protect the Justinian, unless or until she was called for. When the car reached its maximum cruising altitude of four thousand feet he flipped on the autopilot and commanded the car to orbit while he studied images that cycled across the display.

He saw the air car on the ground was almost unrecognizable: twisted metal frame, shattered carbon-fiber panels, pock-marked lexan, drifting smoke…the two bodies no longer recognizable as human, and he struggled to read the car number. He thought of Greggor’s face, his expressed desire to leave the academy, then the command circuit burst into life…

“All units, area appears clear at this time. Deploy in Zone 232 and we’ll walk in.”

New images came in as other cars overflew the scene; soon it was confirmed who had been killed and Aurie closed his eyes for a moment, fought back tears when he thought of Pol’s easy laugh and dedication to the state.

“Are you alright, Cadet?” he heard Sinn August-dottir ask.

Did he detect compassion in her voice? Was that mocking sarcasm he heard?

“Yes, Justinian. He was my friend.” He directed his attention to the flight controls and increased the turn angle; as the car banked hard he looked down on the scene as the other responding officers landed and began their walk through the shadows towards the shattered police car. But… something caught his eye…

“Justinian! There, by the large building on the corner…”

“I see it! Hover and illuminate!” She switched her headset to transmit: “All units, hostiles on the ground converging on your position, transmitting coordinates – now!”

Krül-son leveled the air-car and set the search-beam to maximum intensity, then centered it on the moving shadows. The central display revealed several men running, but just then one turned and aimed something seemingly right at his face. The display flared as brilliant light overwhelmed the sensor, and Krül-son’s reaction was instantaneous: he banked hard and dove for the surface as the shoulder launched surface to air missile crossed the distance in less than the time it took his eyes to blink.

+++++

The Watcher rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, then he delicately fingered the plates grafted to the sides of his skull; they hurt some days more than others, especially when he was off the grid, but now they throbbed insistently, like someone or something was trying to kick him – inside his head. He blinked his eyes rapidly again, as if the motion itself might somehow clear the pain; when that failed he checked his flight instruments on the central screen and increased altitude another two thousand feet. His craft, a small transport salvaged from the First Republic, was leaving the airspace of a region that had once been called the Alps, from a country once known as Switzerland; the jet would take him across the deserted remnants of inland Europe and onward across the receding waters of the dying Atlantic.

Looking down, he saw a thin necklace of light delineating the coastline from exposed seabed; most all remaining human population had resettled around the world’s coastlines as evaporative effects sapped the oceans, as sea levels subsided, then receded, and concentrations of light were densest around the desalinization plants that maintained civilization now. Once the planet’s jet-streams drifted north – and remained firmly anchored there, rainfall – and, indeed, almost all variation in weather, was a conspicuous feature of extreme northern and southern latitudes, those regions ‘higher’ than fifty five degrees north and seventy degrees south. What agricultural production remained was centered above those latitudes, which had effectively made the countries once known as Canada and Russia the world’s breadbaskets; of more immediate importance, these two regions had proven inadequate to sustain the estimated one hundred and twenty million people that remained on the planet. Then even those production levels fell as the climate inexorably warmed. Trapped on a dying planet, the population that lay below the Watcher as he arced over the coastline had perhaps another five years before it faced extinction. What other, calamitous choices would they face?

He knew of just one, and he tried not to think about it just now.

+++++

“What are you doing! Stop…this…now…”

Krül-son pulled the car out of the brutal 4g turn and leveled out, then raced between the rooftops of burned-out industrial buildings; the missile had lost lock-on and was searching for them in the dark sky above, trying to find some tell-tale infrared signature to lock-on to. He throttled back and settled onto a deserted street and turned off the car’s systems, then looked up at the blazing exhaust of the missile until it went out – and its self-destruct circuit activated.

“That was good flying, Cadet,” Sinn August-dottir said, her voice just now beginning to shake. ‘As good as I’ve ever seen,’ she said to herself, impressed.

“Thank you, Justinian. I was concerned for your safety.”

“Noted. I think you can reactivate power now.”

Krül-son looked at the threat receiver – it was silent now – then he turned on a single battery and turned on the car’s computer. A query instantly flashed on his screen: “Status?”

“Nominal,” he typed on the tiny keypad. “Resuming flight after restart.”

“10/4” flashed on the screen.

Krül-son began the engine re-start procedure and turned systems on one by one; the fuel-cell was low and they would need hydrogen soon. “We should refuel, Justinian.”

“Noted. Proceed.”

Shadows moved between buildings to his right, but there was not yet enough air pressure to effect a re-start.

“Justinian…?”

“I see them.”

They were both focused on the shadows to their right…so focused they failed to see the men who walked up to the left side of the air-car. One of the men tapped on the window and Krül-son jumped, turned toward the noise.

One man stood there smiling at him, three others had their weapons leveled at Justinian Sinn August-dottir.

The smiling man made a cutting motion across his neck and Krül-son reached for the emergency transponder; the smiling man’s pistol leveled at Aurie’s face, and just then he noticed the smiling man had odd looking metal plates grafted on the side of his bald head.

“Justinian? I…”

“Open the canopy, Cadet.”

Krül-son motioned to the smiling man that he was going to release the canopy; the man nodded and stepped back fractionally while motors lifted the canopy. Hot air, dense with steaming hydrocarbons, flooded the cockpit; soon the smell of unwashed humans washed over him as well.

“Your weapons,” one of the other men said. “Now.”

When they had handed them over Sinn and Aurie were helped from the car; one of the men came forward with a bundle of plastic explosives and began rigging a booby-trap in the cockpit. Another came up behind Krül-son and placed a black sack over his head; he felt his hands being restrained after that, then the crunching of tires on gravel and the high-pitched whirring of an electric motor. He was lifted onto, he assumed, the back of the electric car, then forced down harshly and tied to something cold and hard.

He felt the car lurch and accelerate quietly, and only then did he realize he was alone. The Justinian was not with him, his failure complete, and he wondered if backup would arrive in time to save her.

+++++

The Watcher was high over the Atlantic while he watched these events unfold and it was during this encounter that he first saw one of his brethren, another one of the Watchers that had left years ago, and he knew his intuition had been correct all along.

“Our disappearances are not random,” he said aloud, and these were among the first words he had spoken in more than three decades. “Things are not,” the Watcher said as he got used to the sound of his own voice again, “quite what they seem.”

+++++

He felt the little electric car drop, as if they had suddenly come upon a steeply inclined ramp; his body slid painfully across a metal ridge as the car listed into a sharp left-hand curve, and the pressure did not let up for several minutes. His ears popped once, then again, the air at one point suddenly grew cool and damp and he began to shiver. He felt sure he had dropped several hundred feet on a spiral ramp when he felt the transition to level again, and whatever surface they were on was smooth as glass. The car stopped once and he heard the muffled voices of people several feet away, then the car lurched again and resumed its journey.

After what seemed like hours the car slowed, the whirring electric motor droned to a stop and he was wrapped in sudden, ringing silence. The air was, however, a little warmer now, and he heard the clatter of heavy construction somewhere not too far away.

Hands gently lifted him from the flatbed of the car, he felt someone tugging at the black cloth hood that covered his face and he winced from the sudden brightness that seared his eyes. It was bright here, wherever here was, yet it was so much cooler than the city! His eyes watered and someone gently wiped the tears from his face.

Krül-son blinked, tried to clear his eyes.

He stood within the center of a small group – several men, one woman – and as they regarded him quietly one of the men stepped forward and snipped off the nylon band that secured his hands behind his back. He rubbed his wrists, shook his hands to wake them from their cold sleep.

A man – another with metal plates grafted to the side of his skull – stepped forward and extended his right hand. Krül-son looked at the man, at the extended hand, and took the man’s hand in his. Then the man handed him his sidearm.

Krül-son looked at all the people around him, and they at him; they were unarmed, he noticed, and they regarded him casually as he took the pistol in his hand. What was this? A test? He holstered the weapon and snapped it in place.

The woman stepped closer now, and she regarded him with kind eyes for a moment. It was as if she was deciding not just what to say, but how to say it. At length she held out her hand and took him in tow: “Come with me,” she said, her voice full of quiet authority. In an instant it hit him: he had seen her before, yet it had been a long time ago.

Only then did Aurie Krül-son take note of his surroundings: he was in a smallish space hollowed from living rock, the “ceiling” mere inches from the top of his head, the way beneath his feet was smooth, polished stone. The walls were just roughly finished, yet still looked neat and clean, and the way ahead was lined with OLEDs that filled the space with brilliant white light.

The woman held his hand and they walked briskly down the corridor; he turned his head once and was startled to find they were alone – the other men had remained by the electric car. He could see them talking, gesturing at the road he must have taken, but why had they had left him armed, and alone, with this woman? That made no sense! How could these people consider him friendly when they had just killed two of his comrades? When they had just tried to shoot him down?

They walked for perhaps ten minutes through the rock until the woman stopped beside a heavy metal door set in the rock; she put her thumb to a green scanner and the panel flashed briefly, she entered a code and the door slid quietly into the rock. She led him into another very small room, the door closed abruptly behind him; another door was set in the opposing wall yet this one did not open.

“Your ears may hurt,” the woman said. “Move your mouth like this.” Aurie watched as she opened her mouth wide and moved her jaw from side to side, then she pressed another button and he winced as sudden pain pierced the inside of his head…

“What the…” he managed to get out, then the second door opened and the pain subsided fractionally. A silver railway car of some sort filled the next room, which was itself little more than a simple unadorned platform hollowed from stone. He stepped forward and looked down at the tracks and was surprised to see nothing but smooth stone. “Where are the rails?” he asked.

“Mag-Lev, in the walls.” the woman said as they walked along the platform to the waiting car’s door. As if Mag-Lev meant anything to him, he thought. “Much faster than rails allowed. Let’s go, we have a schedule to keep!”

“What?”

She led him into the single car and again held her thumb to a scanner; doors sealing both platform and car hissed shut simultaneously. She led him to a deeply cushioned seat in the empty car and motioned for him to sit. He stood and, his mouth still working to ease the pressure in his head, observed the empty car could easily hold twenty people in such seats, and could still accommodate a lot of cargo.

“Quickly!” she said. “You will want to be sitting when it starts.”

There was nothing subtle about the cars motion; it accelerated fiercely down the dark tunnel, pushing him back firmly into the seat’s deep padding.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what this is all about? Or where we’re going?” he said after what seemed like several minutes had passed.

She smiled at him in that moment, held him in her eyes and he saw the love and concern that played across them.

“Not a chance,” she said as she took his hand in hers; she gave it a gentle squeeze before she spoke again: “This is way too much fun.”

+++++

Very few elements of the GPS constellation remained in orbit after the Second Secession War, and precise navigation over long distances was almost impossible by older methods such as celestial as the dense, smog-laden upper atmosphere no longer afforded reliable seeing. Dead reckoning tracks were less than useless for high altitude great circle routes over the pole – such as it now was – and even long range radio aids to navigation such as Loran were no longer reliable enough to present a viable option.

The Watcher’s aircraft, a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet now more than a hundred years old, was one of the few aircraft remaining that had a working inertial navigation system, and as such the Falcon was capable of near pinpoint navigational accuracy – as long as the balky old gyros held out. He looked at the panel, at the old Bendix FGS-70 flight director that had first seen service in the earliest jumbo jets of the 1960s, with something akin to wonder in his eyes: there was not one facility left in the world, not one capable of manufacturing equipment of this complexity, nor with such precision. What had humanity done to itself? he asked.

‘We walked on the moon, and now we hide in the rocks, afraid of the light.’ So much had been lost to the fleeting comforts of fundamentalist extremism, and the schism that had rendered civilization into two camps.

And like so many other things, the Watcher knew he was materially a living remnant of that collapse. He thought that he too was a product of First Republic technology, a vast military experiment into human/machine engineering to develop ever faster arrays of super-computers, and as such he embodied all that was evil to the extremists who ruled the scattered remnants of humanity.

He looked at the curved horizon, at the thriving agricultural settlements in northern Iceland off his left wing, and wondered when the verdant valleys between Greenland’s eastern mountain ranges would appear over the nose of the jet, and found it hard to remember a time when these places had been almost uninhabitable due to extreme cold. The Asiana Federation now farmed most of Greenland, of course, but there were scattered reports they had recently sent fishing boats back to sea in far Arctic regions – and with not one catch reported. He looked at the fuel cells in the cabin, at his remaining flight time while he wondered about the implications of the seas now devoid of life.

The Watcher was slow to take note of the changes coming over him. He had been disconnected from the grid for several hours now, and with each passing minute those neural impulses the Others called feelings – emotions – were gradually coming back to him. Normally his mind was full of the networked responsibilities he had been assigned as an integral part of the grid; now he looked down at his hands and saw them for what they were: flesh and blood, muscle and bone. Human. He was human, not integrated circuitry and binary code. He had no idea where or how he had learned to fly, only that he knew how to – instinctively – and the idea vaguely troubled him. As the looming mass of Greenland approached he suddenly remembered flying was something he’d learned to do years before – indeed, he found he recognized everything – even the shape of the mountain ranges dead ahead…yet nothing made sense absent memory, and now all memory was a huge black gulf, a frozen window locked outside of time – and he was on the outside, trying to get in.

Disconnected from the grid, memory began to flood unchecked, emotions came pouring into his mind without pattern or purpose. He panicked as he struggled with the concept of mortality, with death, and his mind tried to jump back to the safety of the network – but there was no connection out here. His eyes began blinking rapidly now, his breathing became shallow and rapid. The Falcon was on autopilot now, and without that aid – so complete was the Watcher’s disorientation – the jet would have crashed long ago. He fought to control the chaos that threatened to completely overwhelm him, and knew he was losing…

…when a shadow passed over cockpit – and he ducked instinctively. He struggled to hold his fear in check, then turned and looked out beyond the left wingtip. His eyes fluttered, his heart hammered inside his chest…

“This is not possible,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “This cannot be…”

Another aircraft hung off his wingtip, but whatever the thing was it looked like nothing he had ever seen or heard of before. The craft was grayish-black and shaped something like a manta-ray, except of course it wasn’t alive at all. He saw the pilot of the other craft and his mind reeled – it was as if his entire understanding of the universe had suddenly come unhinged…

‘Why don’t I know what this is?’ the voice in his voice said. ‘I’ve seen these things somewhere…but where?’

It was like looking in a distant mirror, only this reflection moved of it’s own volition.

The other pilot was waving his hands, holding up a microphone; still the Watcher looked at this reflection, still he tried to deny the reality that hung motionless off his wingtip.

More motion…

The reflection was holding up a piece of paper.

There was writing on it. “117.5” was scrawled boldly in bright red ink; instinctively the Watcher understood and turned to the radio console under the windshield and adjusted the primary to that frequency. He keyed his microphone: “Unidentified aircraft,” the Watcher said unsteadily, “state your name and purpose.”

The reflection was wiping his eyes! What? Was the man crying? Or laughing?

“I repeat! Unidentified aircraft, state your purpose!”

He saw the man bring the microphone to his mouth, saw him key the microphone, heard the other man struggling to compose himself…

“Dad? Dad, is that you? It’s me! Jamie!”

+++++

Tribonian Thor Bergtor-son drummed his fingers on the duraplast desktop while he listened to Justinian Sinn August-dottir as she finished her preliminary report; he tried to keep his sense of irony in-check while he watched the ring on her left hand glimmer in gauzy light, and wondered who she’d set her sights on next…

“To conclude, Tribonian, the armed force simply disappeared as quickly as it appeared. We were unable to track the tire-prints of their vehicle after a few blocks…”

“Why don’t you state the obvious, Justinian. This new group is well organized, much more so than any other group we have encountered before.”

“Yes, but as you say, the point is obvious, Tribonian. What is less obvious is why they took Aurelius Krül-son, and not me. I would think capturing a Justinian would be a high priority for any resistance group…”

“Resistance?! You think these people are so inclined? That resistance is their purpose?”

“It is a possibility we must consider. They evidenced cohesive small unit tactics and excellent coordination.”

“Military?”

“Hard to say with certainty, Tribonian. I would say that is the most likely possibility, however.”

“I had hoped we eliminated that threat twenty years ago.”

“Yes, I know, but some estimates conclude that many thousands disappeared when the First Republic collapsed. These personnel have never been adequately accounted for, and they could have been training all this time…”

“I understand. Anything to add?”

“A pity we had no warning,” Sinn August-dottir said slowly. She looked directly at her superior while she spoke, and the Tribonian concentrated on meeting her eyes, revealing nothing. He dared not allow her to compromise his connection to either the BlackWatch, or the Galts.

“Yes. As you say, a pity.” He looked at her with cold, detached eyes: “How do you plan on conducting the rest of your investigation?”

She outlined her plan: to search all the buildings in a one mile radius, to question every man, woman and child in the area, to follow all leads they developed until they found the cadet and carried his captors before God’s servants.

“You will keep me informed, I take it, Justinian? As your investigation proceeds?”

“Yes, Tribonian.”

He toggled the screen and severed the holo, leaned back in his chair and laughed for a very long time.

+++++

Aerrik Aerrik-son sat with his head down; he tried not to stare at the two empty chairs beside his table in the dining room, but every so often his eyes drifted to them and that same cold pressure returned to his chest. Pol – dead and buried now – and Aurie gone too, probably dead, if first reports were to be believed. And all within a few minutes.

Was life really so fragile? So meaningless?

Greggor Tarkus-son did not outwardly appear as distressed as Aerrik but his gut burned with virulent intensity as his mind drifted back to the sight Pol’s mutilated, bullet-riddled body. He knew well ahead of time the attack would be bad, knew Pol’s death would by ugly, and deliberately so, but once it had been discovered that Pol was one of the informers planted by a Senatus committee looking to ferret out potential infiltrators within the Institute, the BlackWatch had decided to act. Greggor knew it was only a matter of time until his activities were discovered; he had dropped off the information to his controller and understood it would only be a short time until an operation was mounted to plug the leak. What was a surprise, however, was word of Aurie’s disappearance. He’d had no clue that was in the works, and no idea why that had been deemed necessary.

“How are you two doing tonight?”

Greggor looked up, saw the Commandant, saw the concern in her eyes; he shrugged noncommittally before standing: “I am better, Commandant.”

“Stay seated, please,” she said before Aerrik could push back in his chair. “May I join you?”

“Please,” Greggor said, but she sat in Aurie’s chair and he winced.

“You four were very close. We know that. Is there anything I can do?”

Aerrik looked away – it was as if a vital spark had been snuffed from his life and he had been set adrift.

“Is it possible for us to be assigned to assist in the investigation, Commandant?”

She shrugged. “With over four months before graduation? I think not, but I can see to it that you spend weekends in that division.”

“Thank you, Commandant.”

“Aerrik?” the Commandant said softly while she looked at the boy.

He looked up, his eyes a wasteland of grief. “Commandant?”

“Would you like to speak to a priest?”

He looked away, tried not to meet her eyes.

“Aerrik?”

“I’ll be alright, Commandant.”

“I might believe that if you were eating your food, but this is two days now, Aerrik, and not a bite.”

“I am taking the supplements, Commandant. I cannot hold down my food.”

“I see. Is there blood in your stool?”

“Yes, Commandant.”

She sighed, stood to get up from the chair. “Very well, come with me. We shall go to the clinic.”

They stood and walked from the table; the other cadets in the dining room looked at Aerrik as he followed the Commandant from the room, then all eyes turned on Greggor. There was confusion in many of the eyes he saw, and he wondered if he had been compromised – and then Aerrik’s words entered consciousness.

“Oh, no,” Greggor just barely moaned the words. Of course! No appetite, bloody stool: radiation poisoning. He started to cry, so he didn’t see all the other cadets turn back to their meals and resume eating.

+++++

The Mag-Lev car stopped in a huge natural cavern; the air seemed almost icy when Aurie and the silent woman disembarked. Milky stalactites graced the high ceiling as far as he could see, while tunnels – apparently new ones – disappeared at odd angles everywhere he looked. And there were structures in here! Houses, small to be sure, but houses! He heard a dog barking, a baby crying – and wondered where they were. And the light was dim here, and growing more so by the minute. Were they losing power?

“Come,” the woman said. “We have a long walk and the sun is going down.”

“Excuse me? Did you say the sun?”

“Yes. The light fades. The sun goes down.”

Now Aurie was confused. Was she stupid? Trying to be cute? Could it be that this woman thought he was the ignorant one – but how could the sun set inside a cavern?

‘And why does she seem so familiar?’

They came to another metal door, this one manned by someone in uniform; when they passed this guard they walked down yet another metal tunnel, and to another vehicle of some sort. This one was narrow, was barely tall enough inside for Aurie to remain upright, and almost every seat was taken. The people seated there regarded him curiously, like he was something far removed from the routine of their lives.

“Sit! Quickly now, and put on your seatbelt.”

Almost as soon as he looked-up from his lap he felt movement, slow, deliberate, and far below the clunking of heavy metal on metal. A turbine-like noise, perhaps some kind of engine spooling up, became apparent. A chime, a flashing light:

“Please put your head back, and your arms on the rests by your side,” an unseen voice said.

“What is this?!” Aurelius Krül-son said, his voice quivering now, his every sense filling with total dread, his brain screaming some kind of primeval warning.

The woman put her hand on his for a moment: “Look out the window,” she said, her voice full of expectation.

The noise rose to a thundering roar just before Aurie was pushed back in his seat by an unbelievably powerful force. He just managed to turn his head in time to see the subterranean darkness give way to brilliant sunshine as the rocket left earth. Barren mountains fell away almost instantly and within moments he could see the curvature of the earth, and the pale beige ring of atmosphere still keeping the icy vacuum of space away. The noise stopped, the landscape below grew greener, lakes appeared – and even patches of snow – snow! – remained on the northern slope of some of the taller mountains. Then, after less than ten minutes aloft, the craft was descending.

He felt the woman’s hand searching for his again, and he turned to look at her.

“Where are we going?” he said. “Where are you taking me?”

“Home,” the woman said. “I’m taking you home.”

+++++

The dark manta-shaped aircraft slipped a little ahead and the Watcher tucked into close formation off it’s right wingtip like he had done it a thousand times before – and, he was beginning to think, perhaps he had. The line between memory and reality was very indistinct now – he simply couldn’t understand how or why his body knew what it did. Conscious memory played no role: if some flight parameter needed attention he was on it – without a moment’s pause or the slightest hesitation. He knew. He understood. He had no idea why.

And what of the man in the other aircraft?

‘How could I be his father?’ the Watcher said.

“Repeat that?”

The Watcher shook his head, scanned the instruments. “What makes you think I’m your father?”

“Dad, not to evade the question, but we need to keep radio silence as we close on the coast.”

“Of…Greenland?! Why?”

“It’s not called Greenland anymore, Dad. Just keep on me. Once we leave the west coast we’ll alter course to, uh, a little, uh, to the right.”

“What?”

“You can fall off a little, Dad. We’ve got a long way to go. And don’t worry. It’ll all start coming back soon.”

“What?”

But the frequency was silent now, the sun high overhead as the two aircraft flew over jagged mountains and fertile valleys. Fifteen minutes later they left the safety of land again, sun glittered off Baffin Bay seven miles below and scattered clouds not far above the ocean’s surface cast deep black shadows on the sea. Then the radio came alive for a moment:

“Dad, course change in ten seconds.”

The Watcher flipped off the autopilot with his thumb, cued-on the other aircraft’s aileron movement to begin his turn; they settled on 310 degrees and he set the heading bug and toggled the autopilot on again. Another hour and he could just make out sunlight glittering off Hudson’s Bay a little to the right of their present course. He scanned the instruments, staggered under the onslaught of so much memory coming back so suddenly. Everything now looked familiar! Why the delay?

James Bay? Is he leading me to James Bay? Why?!

“How you doing, Dad?”

“I’ve got about two hours left before I’ll need to find a Texaco station.”

“A what?”

“Fuel.”

“Copy. We’re about six hundred out.”

“Shit. I could use a double Whopper with cheese about now.”

“A what?”

“Uh, Burger King? Ever heard of Burger King?”

“Negative.”

“Fuck.”

“Roger that. Take it that was some kind of hamburger place?”

“Affirmative.”

“Don’t sweat it then, pops. Mom’ll fix you up in no time!”

“Mom?” A swirling kaleidoscope of images filled the Watcher’s mind. “Sarah?”

“Roger that, pops.”

“Fuck.”

“That ain’t the half of it, Dad. Not even close.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ll find out in a little bit.”

“Fuck.”

+++++

The Commandant paced back and forth in her office, hands behind her back, chin almost on her chest, and her crisp white uniform seemed so heavily starched the fabric might crack at any moment. Her lips bunched up from time to time and she wrinkled her nose constantly – as if she’d passed through a particularly vile odor. There had been rumors throughout the night that Justinian Sinn’s investigation had literally uncovered something of significant importance; indeed, the implications were life-altering – if the rumors were true. She had been waiting for a report from the field for over three hours, pacing back forth all the while, and now she was beyond aggravated.

The sun was high in the morning sky, and for some reason it seemed unnaturally bright. Of course temperatures were climbing to unheard of levels, and to make matters worse it was long past her bedtime. The Institute’s cadets had been asleep for hours and she was exhausted, but she knew sleep would never come until these rumors were dealt with. She walked to the window and looked at the sun once again: not yet noon and already151 degrees. If there was a reactor failure, and the power failed?

Without air conditioning, what would they do?

Die, she said to herself. Quickly, and horribly.

She increased the polarization of her office windows and pushed another button, retracted the metal solar-shutters, looked through the slits at the amber-haze and roiling thermals that filtered her view of the city. Two air-cars approached; one broke off for the city while the other slowed, banked into a hard right turn and circled to bleed off speed. It was Sinn’s car, she saw, and the Commandant smiled as it settled into a hanger just a few meters from her window. The canopy opened as the hanger doors wheezed shut and she watched as Sinn August-dottir climbed out of the car and darted into the air conditioning; she frowned once again at the consequences of so much heat, so early.

A moment later Sinn walked into the Commandant’s room.

“I’ve never felt such heat, Nyx,” the Justinian said as she made her way to the chair. “It was 150 degrees in the air over Rampart and the park, and this by 0930!”

The commandant nodded her head but ignored the implications. “Work progresses on schedule, or so I have heard. The mountains will be ready in time, and we will survive.” She turned around and looked at the Justinian. “What have you found? Tell me.”

“A tunnel, of sorts.”

“A tunnel?”

“Perhaps more a passageway.”

“And? What is so interesting about this tunnel?”

“We went down three hundred paces, came to a sealed door, more like a bank’s vault. Very heavy, impossible to open without codes. Sensors watched us all the way down.”

“You think you were being watched?”

“Cameras moved as we moved, Commandant. Yes, we were watched.”

“And codes, you say.”

“There were retina scanners and finger-pads, Commandant.”

“Who knows of this?”

“Myself and Commander Weblen-son, and the three officers with us.”

“No more?”

“No, Commandant.”

“Have you told the Tribonian?”

“No, Commandant; just Weblen-son and the other three know of this.” Sinn looked at Nyx, wondered what the other woman – for years her mentor – was thinking. “Can we not trust him?”

The Commandant shook her head, lost in thought. “No. I think not.”

That revelation shook the Justinian: “Why not?”

“I’m not sure. Just a feeling.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ Call it a woman’s intuition. It may be that simple, but I feel like he knows something, like he’s keeping an important secret from us.”

Sinn nodded. “Yes. I too have felt that.”

“And perhaps for quite some time.” The Commandant looked at Sinn, at the downward cast of her face, the sorrow that had only recently etched deep lines around her eyes. “I see you have taken the ring off. What do you plan to do now?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“You look sad. I did not think you liked the boy so.”

“Yes. Neither did I. There was something about him, Nyx, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Some deeper purpose in his eyes, and I suspect that was what attracted me most.”

The Commandant watched Sinn August-dottir, watched her soft eyes and her delicate fingers steeple as she talked, as the younger woman became almost entranced — lost perhaps, as if in prayer. She moved to Sinn’s side and stroked her hair — a maternal impulse to be sure, but an impulse as confused as any the Commandant had endured in recent years. She loved Sinn completely but struggled with this most evil of impulses — the Church regarded such union as heresy, as reason for excommunication and even banishment. She shuddered at the thought; images of others so castigated remained with her from her own time on the force. Bodies withered from relentless radiation, some falling to cancers caused by localized radiation from power plants shattered during the resource wars. Most of the basin was a wasteland now, a wasteland of truly biblical proportions.

Yet all biblical prophecy had come to pass, hadn’t it?

Those non-believers who claimed what had happened was little more than self-fulfilling prophecy had been deluded, and ultimately purged from the Body of Christ. What was left had been sanctified, cleansed in the baptismal fount of war and re-birth…

“Was he one of the Taken?” the Commandant heard Sinn ask, and she stopped running her fingers through the girl’s hair – for a brief moment. They rarely spoke of such things even now, rarely acknowledged the truth of what had been done in the aftermath of the Second Secession War, but the Commandant felt she owed Sinn at least this small measure of truth.

“Yes. He was.”

“Oh, dear God, no…” Sinn whispered.

“Perhaps that is the strength you recognized in the boy.”

“Commandant, could it be that was why he was taken, and I was not?”

The thought seemed to hit the Commandant like a blow to the gut; it very nearly took her breath away and she walked to her desk, opened a file on her computer and studied its contents. The consequences of failing to act now might well be catastrophic; the boy had been abducted a week ago, and if his abduction was not an accident there was no telling how deep this went.

Yes, she said as she read the files, the time had come; she had to – they had to act now – there were no more alternatives. Act now, and act with the full fury of God behind their actions.

She looked at the link at the bottom of the page one last time before touching it, before summoning a full emergency plenary of the Senatus and the Church, and she wondered with awe in her heart just what might come from all the force she was summoning, ready to unleash on the Unbelievers one last time.

+++++

The Watcher’s name had once been Thomas Stormgren, and so it was again.

Reunited with his wife and two boys, the nightmare of the past fifteen years was over; the final phase of a plan almost twenty years in the making was beginning to take shape. Surgery to remove the implants had been painful but regeneration sprays had healed the wounds inside of three days; memory still flooded into consciousness causing short periods of anomie – and these bouts were always followed by severe agitation – but slowly elements of his earlier life were drawing into sharper focus.

After the First Resource War, and long before the ascendance of Church Elders to total power, before the creation of the SenatusConsultus and implementation of the Corupus Iurus Civilis II, select members of the military from around the world had been recruited to join a new organization. Membership was limited to those few who had not fallen yet into the radical new evangelicalism, and these military leaders had been summoned by scientists and engineers to discuss a radical idea, a plan to save a last remnant of reason from the coming dark ages. Resources were diverted, the first layers of infrastructure planned and built. Even as resource wars broke out and raged, even as the First Republic and member states of the European Union fell to increasingly radical right wing forces, and even as civilization itself began to fail under the weight of devastating population increases and catastrophic climatic collapse, the self-proclaimed BlackWatch organization funneled more and more resources into the implementation of this daring plan.

The earth was, scientists explained, doomed – at least as far as continued human habitation on the planet’s surface was concerned. Plans to move underground would, they reasoned, fail – due to the same reasons life failed on the surface: population pressure and dwindling resources managed by the superstitious and those consumed by other mysticisms. An underground civilization would become as Hobbes and Malthus predicted; life would become nasty, brutish and short and renewed population pressure in a finite space would ensure final extinction. Life on earth could be extended perhaps fifty years by moving underground, but the end would be the same. There had to be another way to keep humanity alive, and to keep the flame of reason burning.

And this other way had come from a most unexpected place.

NASAs Planet Finder Telescopes, the first series launched in the 2020s, had revealed scores of worlds within 50 light years, and many seemed likely candidates for further research; of these a few dozen had been revealed – by spectroscopic analysis – to possibly be hospitable to carbon-based life. A second, more powerful series of telescopes was launched in the 2030s, and one of these had been successful in resolving three of these planets in extraordinary detail, detail sufficient to conclude that human life might have a chance of surviving on one, or possibly all three. They each had oceans and land masses filled with snow-capped peaks, rivers and forests and grasslands. None showed signs of an advanced, industrialized civilization.

Then came the neoconservative resurgence of the 2050s, and the rise of the so-called American Ayatollahs, then states seceding from the union – all happening as the climate began heating at unprecedented rates and crops began failing globally. Local conflicts between impacted states spilled into regional wars, emerging superpowers were pulled by treaty obligations into protecting failing client states, and then exchanges of nuclear weapons followed. At the same time, civil wars raged within militaries around the world as the forces of evangelism, suddenly emboldened by their resurgence, began to purge non-believers from their ranks. At that point the BlackWatch organization began moving into prepositioned sanctuaries, but many could not move fast enough to protect their families.

Perversely, children of these warriors were seized not as hostages but to seed a new generation of evangelical soldier, and these children had been collected, whenever possible, after their parents were killed. But others were simply abducted and their parent’s killed, and most of these children were raised in monastic orders, indoctrinated in the ways and beliefs of a new world order, raised to protect Christian society until cities could be built under the earth. Perhaps by then, the thinking went, these Christian warriors would be ready to rule the Underworld in His name.

The BlackWatch, of course, tapped into the surveillance organs of these new state organizations, slipped agents into the framework of power around the world. Resistance fighters, most former military, were re-tasked and re-armed, then turned loose to harass local governments, and all these activities were coordinated by hundreds of men, fathers for the most part, who had been surgically augmented to interface with networked super-computers around the world.

In the end there was little said or done by the SenatusConsultus that was not monitored by the BlackWatch; indeed, most human activity on the surface was eventually fed into their sprawling network. In time the BlackWatch realized there was little need to interfere in the affairs of the mystics; they were rapidly imploding, taking with them most of the earth’s remaining population, yet over time their aim became more compassionate. The BlackWatch wanted to help manage civilization’s collapse – to minimize human suffering, and to preserve a nucleus of people, people who would journey to the stars in search of a new home.

And yet Thomas Stormgren, the Watcher, remembered everything he had ever experienced while connected to the network.

Everything.

And he remembered just learning about a project the SenatusConsultus had long been rumored to be working on. Something that had to do with turning the earth into a star, so that humanity could spread out on solar winds – and grow even closer to God.

+++++

Aurelius Krül-son’s birth name was Austin Stormgren, and he was Thomas’ youngest son. His mother, Sarah, escaped with his brother James into the BlackWatch network when the first great purge began; she had almost managed to get to Austin before the military police arrived at the base school, but looked on helplessly as all the children on the base were taken into “protective custody” – no reason given, no reports of their whereabouts attainable. She knew enough about the BlackWatch to trust them when they told her they would be able to monitor her son, to look out for him. Though heartbroken, she had resumed work as an engineer for Lockheed-Martin in their newest facility, located in the cold, hard granite five hundred feet beneath the vast Hydro-Quebec facilities near Chisasibi, Canada. She was able to watch intermittent video feeds of his progress through school, though more often than not these tended to depress her severely for days on end.

As hard as it had been for Sarah Stormgren to lose this vital contact with her son, when Thomas volunteered to move to The Magic Mountain, the so-called Human-Hybrid Super Computer facility located under an old sanitarium outside of Davos, Switzerland, she had been completely devastated. Thomas had the intellect for this work and, quite suddenly, vast amounts of time on his hands. With no pressing need for pilots, he began analyzing tactical and strategic options. What active military was left of the First Republic had been concentrated in the hands of US Navy submariners, and all had effectively made it under the protective aegis of the BlackWatch. New bases were built for the old subs, and while they rarely went on patrol, their missiles were constantly upgraded. And ready for use.

But on what?

One of the SenatusConsultus’ first decrees was to eliminate all military and police who refused to take the new oath of allegiance; this had the unintended consequence of driving the few undecided officers and enlisted men into covert service for the BlackWatch. By further SenatusConsultus decree, those high-ranking officers that remained, and who wished to serve government in a high-ranking capacity, had to either submit to chemical castration or join a monastic order and work under those conditions. Most of the men that chose to submit were, oddly enough, already members of the BlackWatch, and so the series of infiltrations that took place over the coming years were in a way pre-ordained.

The SenatusConsultus, at first composed of fearful old men and ambitious young women, grew increasingly leery of letting these retired military men serve in any capacity unless neutered; the First Reforms enshrined this trend by concentrating power in the hands of people who knew well the Evils of Testosterone. The only men in the SenatusConsultus were, in consequence and predictably, chemically castrated; only later was it required that they possess a degree from the new military-theological seminary in Bethlehem.

Ironically, it was at this time that women in the SenatusConsultus began experimenting with the use of testosterone, and with quite unexpected results. These women soon became territorial and predatory; they fast developed a lust for power that soon grew to heights once seen only in members of the First Republic’s senate, and a fair amount of sexual predation was rumored to have been concealed by Justinians guarding the SenatusConsultus proper in New Jerusalem. Gender identity issues surfaced during this period as well, particularly within the Justinian class, as women were increasingly attracted to one another. As testosterone use soared, predation on underage children, particularly young girls, become more and more prevalent among members of the SenaturConsultus, to the point that these children were put on display as symbols of status. The use of prohibited toys was rumored to be out of control, as well.

It was also during this period that the use of illegal, mostly homemade narcotics skyrocketed. Psychobiologists had long known there was a connection between a propensity to experience religious euphoria and the various addictive disorders associated with narcotics use; academics studying this phenomenon had concluded decades before that areas in the brain that governed religious euphoria were indeed the same regions of the brain stimulated by narcotics, especially hallucinogenics – and not coincidentally this area of the brain mediated chemical dependence and addiction.

With the global environment collapsing, more and more people turned away from this painful new reality and fled inward; people either sought explanation and comfort through religious experience or fell into a landscape of narcotics induced delusion. Human productivity fell precipitously, apathy became the norm until new varieties of religious experience emerged as a practical solution to the problem of narcotics addiction. New cycles of dependence emerged as despairing people lurched from religious to chemically induced states of euphoria, with ever stronger doses of each needed to quell such misery.

With the draconian penalties imposed by the First Reforms, religion finally began replacing narcotics use on a vast scale; some critics implied that, in effect, one addiction had been replaced with another, more socially desirable addiction. But a further benefit emerged, one with more immediate consequences: people addicted to narcotics had for centuries proven to be very hard to control; yet as had been discovered near the end of the First Republic, those subsumed to religious mysticism and irrationalism were much more docile and far easier to manipulate for political gain. The SenatusConsultus was able to consolidate power globally after that effect was taken into consideration, and with only token resistance.

The BlackWatch, not coincidentally, elevated reason to the status of religion and banned traditional religious expression. The practical result of this edict was shocking and almost immediate: depression and suicide rates skyrocketed within months, social cohesiveness declined and apathy increased. Clearly, without some sense of greater Purpose the human animal withered and degenerated into chaos — or Hell, depending on your point of view. The social engineers counseling the BlackWatch were stunned by this finding and had no ready explanation, and no solution to offer.

It was during this transformative period that the last Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope put in orbit made its final and most shocking discovery, and this event bound together members of the BlackWatch as nothing ever had.

For you see, the orbital telescope had found, and this quite by accident as it turned out, a sailing vessel – seemingly adrift – in a sea of stars.

+++++

Thomas Stormgren shook his head, steepled his fingers reflexively while he listened – his two boys Jamie and Austin had a plan for getting all the remaining BlackWatch operatives out of Los Angeles, and while their idea had merit the proposed operation seemed more than risky. Now that the entryway to the Mag-Lev tunnel had been discovered, getting their people out of the region had become a high priority, and it would simply be a matter of days until enemy forces crushed each successive barrier and gained the Mag-Lev platform. The most likely result: the BlackWatch would lose physical contact with the west coast, and all their agents in the region would be lost. There simply wasn’t time to construct a new access-way, or divert the other resources needed to get these people out, but as is usually the case in such instances, the effort had suddenly taken on hues of a moral imperative.

And yet, Stormgren wasn’t so sure there wasn’t a girl behind Austin’s thinking. That Justinian. When he watched his son talk about Sinn, a veil slipped over the boy’s eyes. Attraction? Probably? Political utility? Maybe. But…was the kid simply horny as hell?

Yup. Definitely. So his thinking wasn’t quite clear, was it? More like testosterone addled…but even so, he had to listen…

“That’s why we go in daylight, Dad,” Austin said. “In and out, a fast pick-up. Three transports, four at the most.”

“You say that like three or four transport aircraft will suddenly grow out of this rock! Austin, the SkunkWorks will have to modify existing vehicles, and that could take weeks.” Thomas looked at his son – until a week ago he had been just a fleeting memory – and he hated himself for the pain he saw in his boy’s eyes. “Son, we just don’t have weeks. Hell, we may not even have days. The surveillance cams showed them moving heavy equipment down to the area around the ramp last night. They’ll move on it soon. We just…we’re simply running out of time!”

“Can’t we just blow the access tunnel? Keep them from getting to the platform?”

“And then what, Austin! Come on, think it through! How would you move our people down to the platform – and get them out?”

“That’s not my point, Dad. Simply denying access to the secret is the point. Once the Senatus knows the BlackWatch have developed the infrastructure to move people in and out of one city, they’ll make the next leap, that all their cities have been compromised, and then what? They found this one using fairly primitive sonar equipment; how long before the others are discovered?”

“Believe or not, son, we thought about that once upon a time.”

“And?”

Thomas chimed in now. “Defensive measures were included in their construction.”

“Like?” Jamie asked.

“Chemical weapons, for one.”

“Dad, you’ve got to be kidding! That’s insane!”

Thomas nodded. “I agree, but the option’s there if needed. The second option is only partly in place. We prepositioned arms for a large assault force near each platform, including a couple of tracked vehicles with mini-guns, vehicles designed to operate in the tunnels…”

“But you said…”

“…that they’d breech the platform soon. Yeah, I know. That’s the problem. We’d have to move on that option within hours.” Thomas paused, looked at his fingers again. “There is one final solution. We send a car down to the platform – with an armed warhead.”

“What?!” Cried Austin.

“Dad?” James said, noting that his little brother had started shaking. “What about the old airport, the one by the beach? Do they still use it?”

“The old LAX? Yeah, it’s still there. Maybe three or four shuttle flights in and out every month, but remember, the city’s biggest desalinization plant is about a mile south of it. Heavily fortified airspace, lots of cops and militia, lots of missile batteries.”

“What if we could get all our people to assemble nearby? Couldn’t we take one of the First Republic jets, maybe with a small assault force to secure the runway, make a fast pick-up and get out before they knew we’d been there?”

Stormgren shook his head. “I remember the security in the area. I know where every camera is, how many security people they have, even response times and patrol patterns…”

“How could you possibly know that, Dad?” Austin sighed.

Jamie put his hand on his brother’s shoulder, shook his head when they made eye contact.

“Oh. I forgot, Dad. Sorry.”

“No problem.” Thomas looked away; why was being a part of the so-called Hive so stigmatized? He felt it, though, everywhere he went. Like he was different now, that his in-depth knowledge made him suspect. But his older boy looked excited now, aggressive and excited. “Jamie, you look like you’re about to bust…what are you thinking?”

“A diversion, Dad. Focus their attention elsewhere while we slip into LAX.”

“The tunnel?” Thomas Stormgren said as a grin stretched across his face, or…perhaps something bigger?

“Why not?”

“We’d have to pick up about forty people, Jamie. At least that many. And it’ll probably be a hot pick-up.” A hot L-Z…? Wasn’t that what he used to call it. He looked at his boys, looked at them the way all father’s look at sons about to venture in harm’s way. Pride and fear. Pride and… “Now what, Austin?!”

“Well, if we go that route, I want to get Sinn.”

“I know you do, son. Have you thought of the risks involved?”

He sighed, looked dejected. “Oh, I know it won’t work. She’d be hard to lure in, let alone capture. Then she’d be a nightmare, trying to escape.”

Thomas Stormgren looked at Austin. What was the boy thinking? What was so important about this girl?

“Dad,” Jamie interrupted his thinking again. “About forty, you think?”

“Uh-huh. You have something in mind?”

James Stormgren smiled. It turned out he did – but first, Thomas decided to discuss this – with the BlackWatch, and an old friend.

+++++

While Tribonian Thor Bergtor-son listened to Stormgren, he grew increasingly aware of the predicament he was in – he and all the other BlackWatch secreted in the city. Getting Austin/Aurelius back to Chisasibi in time had been a priority, and a fitting gift for his old friend, but no one had planned on losing the Mag-Lev so soon as a consequence. Now, with the Emissary’s departure only weeks away, all their plans, and most developed carefully over the last five years, would have to be revamped.

Of most immediate importance?

Could new escape routes to the airport be developed – in the time they had left? All their lines of support could be exposed at any minute; security could be compromised at any level, and this meant the end of the line for the BlackWatch on the west coast. And that meant 40 men and women would be sacrificed to poor planning. His poor planning.

No, he had to come up with something. Some sort of diversion, something that would cause confusion from Rome to Jerusalem to Los Angeles. But what…?

The Watchers in Davos, Bergtor-son knew, were collating information, developing a workable plan based on probabilities and expected outcomes, but no plan was ever perfect, and outcomes were almost never what you expected them to be. Still, he had learned the Watchers liked the initial framework developed by James Stormgren and were busily refining the concept, so he had to accept that this plan – or something close to it – would land on his desk within hours, and he’d have to implement it quickly.

It was time, he knew, to activate his escape network. It was time to move the next pawn into place.

And time to take their queen.

+++++

“Who is that?” the Commandant asked. “Is he here in the city?”

She and Sinn were watching the video of an intercept, a private commlink playing on Tribonian Bertorson’s desktop monitor, but the audio was encrypted and could not be hacked, so they had no way to know what was being said.

“There is no exact match on file but the computer has developed probabilities. The most likely match is a man named Thomas Stormgren…”

“What!” the Commandant jumped up so suddenly she almost knocked her chair over. Her voice grew old and sinister: “Stormgren? Here in the city?”

“There’s no way of knowing that, Commandant.” Sinn had learned from hard experience to back-off when the Commandant spoke this way. She looked like a snake, a snake coiled to strike, and anyone in her way could get killed.

“The boy you like. Krül-son.” The Commandant’s eyes were dark now, dark with banked-down flames.

“What of him?”

“That was his birth name. Stormgren. Austin Stormgren.” The Commandant looked at the screen, then at the Justinian. The young girl looked sure of herself, of her facts anyway. But what else did she know?

“Then, Commandant, we know a link exists between this man Stormgren and the Tribonian, and if so, there is a link between the Tribonian and the attack on our officers.”

The Commandant nodded, her eyes narrowed to glowing slits. “If you are correct, our government has been compromised at every level.”

“Why do you say…”

“Think of it, Sinn!” the Commandant said as she slammed her hand down on the desktop. “The highest law enforcement officer in the region is linked to this tunnel! But what is this tunnel? Where does it lead? But then of even more importance, we must assume that these people have been using this facility for quite some time, to move people and supplies in and out of the city. First Republic supplies, I would assume?”

“Yes, Commandant. Autopsy recovered bullets from .223 caliber rifles, common in that era’s weaponry. Probably M-16s, or M4s.”

“Of course. But what of this boy? What if, as you suspect, he was part of this plan from the beginning? What would this mean? What have we missed? And who would be capable of such a plan?” The Commandant bunched her lips, her eyes burned now, burned with hatred. “I must go to the Council of Elders in Jerusalem.”

“What of the Senatus?”

“They may well be compromised,” the commandant said as she called up another screen, typed on her glass desktop and waited for the results to stream onto the main wall-screen. “I will need to leave tonight.”

“What of the Tribonian, Commandant?”

“He must not be alerted. Begin reinforcing our positions around the tunnel, surround the access-way and prepare a major assault on the facility for tomorrow evening. We will move on the Tribonian at the same time. I should return from New Jerusalem by late afternoon, and I want to be here to supervise that bastard’s interrogation.”

A cold chill ran down the Justinian’s spine when she saw the look of cold evil in the woman’s eyes. No, she wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, not then…

+++++

A Watcher processes intercepts streaming in from Los Angeles and passes these latest bits on to the group.

Plans are adjusted, probabilities and outcomes recomputed. A new strategy develops even as they monitor the Senatus’ plans, and the weapon they ready to deploy

Eyes blink rapidly now, and under a mountain in central Switzerland there is understanding that the end is near…and that there is no turning back from the chosen course.

+++++

As ground troops mass around a hastily drawn perimeter in the scorched remains of west-side Los Angeles, an air car hovers above a concealed access-way. It lies within piles of rubble, astride the crumbled façade of an abandoned auto dealership. The pilot concentrates on the scene below; the Justinian behind him is talking to Tribonian Bergtor-son, who nominally presides over such operations from the Judicial Ministry downtown.

“Permission to commence, Tribonian?”

“Permission granted, Justinian Sinn. I wish you success, and please, be careful.”

“Thank you, Tribonian.” She changed frequency, looked at the teams gathered below. “Marmot One, commence operation; Marmot Two, you are ordered to stand-by positions!” Then, on a separate frequency: “Blowback, prepare to go on my signal.”

“Blowback, roger.”

Men in gray move first and they are observed on screens around the world running down the once-secret ramp, this first team races to set their explosive charges around the vault door. A minute later they are seen running back up the ramp, taking cover beside the ruins. The Justinian’s air-car increases altitude and backs away from the site as one of the men below begins the countdown.

Sensors in the car record the explosion, and the blast is felt by people more than fifteen miles away, though the Justinian is first to see the result of this explosion with her eyes.

The earth shudders, then the outlines of a crater, more than a hundred meters wide, forms around the auto dealership – and all the ruins immediately around it. The earth heaves once – then settles with a deep sigh, and fires break out amidst scattered piles of wood and old automobile tires; Sinn sees the twisted remains of the vault door through cascades of falling earth, and rough outlines of the tunnel emerge through roiling smoke and rubble, still falling back into the earth. The pilot drops lower, hits the area with flood-lights and trains the intense beam down the tunnel.

“Goddamn!” Sinn August-dottir shouts on the command circuit. “Goddamn-it all to Hell!”

“Justinian! What is it? What do you see?”

Through the clearing smoke – about a hundred yards further down the tunnel – she can just make-out another vault door, and this one appears larger than the first, and somehow she knows this one will be much stronger, much more difficult to pierce.

“There’s another vault down there! Get another charge ready!”

“Yes, Justinian, but what about the crater walls, and the tunnel? Will we need to shore up the walls first?”

“There isn’t time…move your men, now!”

The Justinian’s air car hovered over the scene while the first group ran back down into the earth – but a moment later these men come tumbling out of the tunnel – coughing and rubbing their eyes. The Justinian looked at her monitor, saw blood coming out of one of the men’s mouth and nose.

“Goddamn-goddamn-goddamn! They are using gas!” the Justinian screamed on the command circuit. “Chemical protection suits, NOW!”

Then there is another explosion.

This one is deep inside the earth, and massive. Alarms inside the air car are howling, the pilot struggling for control. Radiation alarms begin pinging, then screaming for attention, and the Justinian see’s the outlines of a new crater form on her display. It is miles across, impossible to tell from this altitude, but she knows a nuclear warhead has just been detonated under the city.

She turns and looks at the entrance to the caves under the Santa Monica Mountains, where the future city waits for completeion, where her future resides. It is impossible for her eyes to take in, to understand, but the mountain range seems to leap up into the sky a few meters, then settle in on itself.

And then the San Andreas fault let’s go, one last time.

+++++

The Commandant had just re-boarded her jet in New Jerusalem – what was once called Avignon, in a country known for a time as France – and the data-link on her computer went active as the jet taxied to the active runway. She enabled the link, watched video of the operation back home as it streamed onto her monitor, and as she watched she opened a link to monitor the command circuit.

“Justinian!” she hears one voice among many as the chatter dies down, “radiation monitors are off the scale!”

She watches helplessly as Sinn’s air car begins spinning violently, as EMP devastates the cars fly-by-war controls and other systems, and with her heart full of black hatred, she watches as wounded men stagger around during the earthquakes. It will be hours, at least, before medical teams can get to the scene, before all their injured can be evacuated from the debris-field.

Then another circuit comes alive. “Commandant, the council has approved Crimson Eye. We will execute in 24 hours.”

“Understood,” she says, but she is not prepared to believe such a thing could finally really happen. She switches frequency again, to the command circuit in Saint Angeles, hoping to hear Sinn’s voice, but she knows this is a pointless gesture. Indeed, all is lost now, and she thinks that perhaps it’s better to have died in combat, without knowing what comes next.

+++++

The air car settled on the beach, near the point where Sunset Boulevard once joined the Pacific Coast Highway. Her pilot seemed shaken but was otherwise uninjured, and the Justinian helped him restart systems, then changed frequency on her comms panel, linked to her men gathered on the fifth floor of the Judicial Ministry:

“Operation Blowback, you are Case Green, repeat green, go for green,” she said over the encrypted link.

“Blowback is green,” she heard in reply, and a dozen commandos began their assault of Tribonian Bergtor-son’s office – with heavy force. Doors are blown from their hinges, windows shatter and books scatter to the floor. The commandos enter the Tribonian’s inner office, and…

“…Justinian, this is Blowback, negative contact, repeat, negative contact…”

“Affirmative. Proceed to secondary.” Sinn shakes, then screams in frustration: “Goddamn!”

Then she hears the commandant’s voice on the circuit and looks up to see her perplexed face on the screen.

“Justinian! What has happened?”

“He wasn’t there! But he was five minutes ago, and the office was surrounded!”

“We are compromised, Justinian. Assume all communications are monitored!”

“But, how…”

“Do the best you can! Stick to the plan, try to get him into custody. I am en route now.”

Red lights began flashing on Sinn’s central display, new data streamed onto the screen and she began to tremble as the picture began to take shape in her mind.

“Commandant, are you receiving this new data from Rampart?”

“No? What is happening?”

“Commandant, there have been attacks at desalinization plants all over the region, and the Institute reports gunfire within several dorm-pods. Central Division has been bombed and heavy casualties are reported.”

“Bombed? What do you mean, bombed? An aircraft?”

“No Commandant, first reports indicate IEDs of some sort, perhaps car-bombs.”

“I fear the End Times are upon us now, Justinian. We must pray together, soon.”

Perplexed now, the Justinian looked at another screen. The Commandant’s ETA was three hours, and that meant…

“The sun will have been up for an hour,” Sinn sighed, and the pilot came on line.

“Pardon, Justinian, did you say something?”

She changed frequency back to the primary command net.

“Status! Can anyone tell me what progress we are making?!” she yelled.

“Justinian!” It was a man’s voice. He sounded tired, overwhelmed.

“Commander Weblen-son! What is happening there?”

“The men were suiting-up; another charge being prepared when the detonation occurred. There is no longer any need, Justinian. The facility, whatever it was, is gone.”

“Very well; get your men out of the area as quickly as you can.”

“Yes, Justinian.”

+++++

Thorsten Weblen-son smiled. He had positioned their best troops, those most loyal to the Commandant, around the access-way and had totally committed them to this operation. And while the Commandant’s best troops were so occupied, he had quite deliberately left key points around the city unguarded. Would the device be big enough, he wondered?

It was a bold plan. Would it work?

“Snowbird 2, Snowbird 2, this is Streetsweeper.”

Streetsweeper! The Tribonian! He had escaped!

“Streetsweeper,” Weblen-son said into the small transceiver he had placed over his right ear. “Streetsweeper, Snowbird 2, go ahead.”

“I’m proceeding to secondary now. ETA ten. Final ETA is three hours, four minutes.”

“Copy three hours four. Ten mike to Songbird.”

“Roger. Advise after.”

“Roger, out.”

He turned to the Lieutenant by his side. “Is there anyone left?”

“Yes, Commander,” the commando said, still breathing heavily. “The tunnel area is gone, the men nearest too, but there are about twenty men climbing up the debris field, from parts of the area not so heavily affected.”

“The charges are in place?”

“Yessir.”

“Go ahead, then. We might as well get this over with.”

The second detonation wasn’t nearly as large as the first. Anti-personnel fragmentation charges would spray the crater with shrapnel, killing the remaining men climbing through the debris, yet Weblen-son was a mile away from the blast, and the earth shook so violently he was knocked from his feet.

Something wasn’t right. The device shouldn’t have caused this much damage, and he looked towards the west, saw a small mushroom cloud fanning out over the west side of the city. A small, tactical yield warhead, he guessed, but radiation levels would spike all over the basin with this latest blast.

He called the Justinian, but his calls were met with silence, so he turned to his men. “We must leave, quickly.”

+++++

Reports were coming in from all over the city. Car bombs, truck bombs, snipers hitting key facilities – and all within moments of one another! And the Tribonian! Where had he gone? How had he had disappeared – without a trace?! And the Commandant! She looked almost catatonic after the second, low-yield device, but this was not the time to lose your mind! Sinn August-dottir watched silently as she saw the spreading cloud…

“Pilot, move us away from the cloud, head towards the desalinization plant by the airport. There may be an attempt there.”

She looked down at the ruins of the city as the pilot began the turn, then it was as if time stopped for a moment. Her eyes wavered, the ground seemed to turn from a solid to a plasma within the span of one heartbeat, then the earth gave up a violent shudder. Smoke began pouring from cracks that seemed to materialize out of nowhere, then she looked down on lava erupting from within the cracks, lava that appeared without warning, radiating from somewhere deep within the earth – like slow-moving cracks across a window.

Radiation alarms flashed, warning alarms sounded and the air-car slammed into impossible turbulence.

“Climb!” she shouted. “Thermal currents! Climb faster!”

+++++

Thorsten Weblen-son and his men seemed beyond shock – the second detonation had been unexpected, and he didn’t know where it had come from, but the seismic activity was completely unexpected. Then the sound…?

A low rumble, so low he felt it in his bones, so intense he thought it was affecting his heartbeat, then the air pressure changed and it became hard to breathe.

The pavement cracking, parts of the street ahead bending – bending, goddamnit! – then steam pouring out of the fissures. One opened up in front of him and two of his team stumbled, fell inside. They rest ran to the edge and tried to look inside – but it was almost like fire leapt up and licked at them…then a wave of molten earth hissed from the crack and began bubbling down the street, and they had to backtrack, run a few blocks inland to get around the lava, but he saw another flow ahead, and more to the east so they turned and headed towards the beach. They were a mile from the airport when he heard the Justinian on the COMM-link.

“Commander! Situation report!”

“Justinian! You are alive! Where are you?”

“Over the sea. There is volcanic activity near the mountains, but it seems to lessen to the south. Where are you?”

“Moving to higher ground, but I don’t know where we are. The visibility here is impossible, and our NAV systems are unreliable.”

“We lost power, but we’re airborne, heading for the airport. Do you think you can meet me there, before the sun rises?”

“Yes, Justinian, we will make the attempt. If we can get our bearings… If not, we will have to seek shelter.”

“Understood, and good luck.”

He turned and looked seaward, saw her air car about a mile away and closing with their position on the beach.

“Can you get a lock?” he turned and asked one of his men. The man had a shoulder launched surface to air missile launcher and held it up to the sky.

“Positive lock, Commander.”

“Take her out, but disarm the warhead.”

Seconds later the missile leapt from the launcher and streaked towards the Justinian’s air car; it jinked and dove towards the sea but this was a First Republic launcher, and escape was impossible. The disarmed missile hit the Justinian’s air car beneath the exhaust ports, and they watched ejection seats blossom from the tumbling wreckage.

They were too low, he saw, for the chutes to arm and open, and he watched them slam into the water perhaps 500 meters from where they stood.

They’d not have to contend with the Justinian again, and perhaps not the Commandant or her troops! He looked at the sea, then at his watch. ‘So much to do,’ he thought. ‘We might just make it out of here after all!’

“Snowbird 2, Streetsweeper, Songbird is down. Repeat, Songbird is down.”

“Roger. Ascertain if she can still sing.”

“Snowbird 2 understood, out.” Well, that part had gone easily enough, Weblen-son thought. Now it was time for the fun part. He looked to the east, for the first hint of sunrise. They’d come from the east too, he knew, but now he’d have to try and get the Justinian.

His lieutenant looked at him. “Ready, sir? Or would you like to leave her?”

“No, I don’t think so. She may be able to talk.” He turned towards the smoke coming from, presumably, where the Justinian’s air-car had slammed into the water and he sighed. “Well, let’s go see if she made it.”

+++++

Austin Stormgren sat in the jump-seat behind his brother and another pilot in the cockpit of a remarkably old Boeing airliner, a 737-500, as Jamie called it. The poor thing was slower than molasses, capable of about one-tenth the Mach 10 speed the latest SCRAM-jet shuttles could achieve. Both the BlackWatch and high-ranking ConIsmus operatives normally used high speed shuttles to cover long distances, and this thing felt like a trolley car. And the cockpit smelled like nothing Austin had ever run into in his life. Coffee and body-odor stood out, but Jamie said the real stench came from tobacco. Tobacco! That stuff was legendary! But despite its slow speed, this old bird had one special trick up her sleeve that made her unique in all the world – and uniquely suited to this mission.

She had been the sole flying test bed for a next-generation electro-optical camouflage system when the First Secession War broke out. Austin didn’t understand it – basically sensors read light from the relevant angle and realigned molecules in a crystalline substrate applied to the surface features of the aircraft – and like a chameleon, the aircraft – from a distance at least – for all intents and purposes disappeared from view. The illusion broke down rapidly when you got within a quarter mile or so of the aircraft, but with Jamie’s plan that would be enough. Or so they hoped.

He leaned forward and looked out the cockpit window: he could see the wing flexing but it looked weird. They were miles above the desert floor but even in the early dawn light he could see desert features on top of the wing. The image shimmered and adjusted as the aircraft flew over a small mountain range; the wing looked more like a pile of boulders for a moment, then shimmered again into something new. He watched as Jamie looked at a screen full of radar data coming from who-only-knew – probably Davos, for all Austin knew – then spoke into the intercom.

“Target entering atmosphere. We should pick them up on their bleed, say within ten minutes, and expect landing another ten minutes after that.”

“Roger that,” came the metallic reply.

“I got time to pee?” Austin asked.

“Yeah. Fuck, I need to drain the main vein too. Jennie, take the airplane.”

“My airplane,” the co-pilot said.

“Come on,” Jamie said as he crawled and contorted his way out of the left-hand seat. “Fuck, feels good to stretch for a second. Ah!”

They walked back into the cramped aisle by the forward galley and the main entry; Jamie opened the bi-fold door to the tiny restroom and fired away, talking all the while about what a funky airplane the 737 was, how solidly built it was and how easy it was to fly, then he backed out and motioned: “Your turn.”

“Not much on privacy, are you?”

“No such thing, living inside a fucking rock, but you get used to it. Anyway, you’d better get used to it, too, at least if you’re serious about making it onto The Emissary. There aren’t that many open slots left, you know.”

“I’ll make it.” Austin leaned into the room and held his nose while he pee’d. He popped out after thirty seconds and gasped for air. “My God in Heaven! It really stinks in there!”

“Yeah? Seventy year old crap’ll do it every time. Remember, this bird ain’t no spring chicken.” He patted a wall affectionately, looked around at the interior, at the men gathered in the rear.

“You seem to take everything so calmly, Jamie. How do you do it?”

“Hm-m? Hell, I don’t know, kid. Just the way it’s been, I guess. When you fly, you stay calm or you screw the pooch every time. You get killed, fast. And speaking of which, you’re gonna need to be thinking pretty quick on your feet in about ten minutes. You’d better go back there, get with the ground team and ready to roll.”

“Yeah, right.” Austin turned, looked at the commandos huddled in the rear of the aircraft. Fifty men against whatever thousands ConIsmus could muster. Would they be enough? Would Weblen-son really be able to neutralize so many, so quickly? “Well, good luck Jamie.”

“Me? Shit, Ace, I’m gonna be sittin’ up front reading some vintage porn while you’re out there kicking ass. I may have big brass balls up here in the big, blue sky, but put me on the ground and I grow chicken feathers every time.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then shook hands. It was an awkward moment, in a relationship that had been nothing but a brief series of awkward moments.

“Right. Well, take care, brother.”

“I’ll try to keep a couple of cold ones ready.”

“Cold ones?”

James slapped his brother’s back. “Later, Ace, later. I’ve got to go do some of that flying shit right now.” He turned and walked back into the cockpit but hesitated a moment, turned and looked at his little brother one more time. He swallowed hard, tried to keep from tearing up while he watched the kid walk back to the other men.

“What a crazy, fucked up world!” he said, almost to himself. He turned and shut the cockpit door behind him.

+++++

Tribonian Bergtor-son led his small team – and the people they’d picked-up over the past couple of hours – through the Institutes buildings; he was looking for Misogi Kibata, the silver-haired exchange cadet from the Asiana confederation. The girl’s father was part of Asiana’s mission to the BlackWatch; it would do no good at all at this late date to lose the girl – even if she had known the risks. Besides, he’d heard a rumor she had a crush on Aurelius/Austin. That couldn’t hurt. And if he could get her onto The Emissary? Goodness! What concessions could he wring from Asiana for that

His radio crackled.

“Streetsweeper-3 to lead, we’re with Snowbird and we have her.”

“Lead to three, good work. Proceed to pick-up.”

Outstanding. Now, why hadn’t he heard from the birdmen?

+++++

Weblen-son pulled the Justinian through the surf, then up onto the beach. He looked at his watch, counted the minutes until sunrise. “Cutting it close,” he said.

She was bleeding, bleeding badly, but he hadn’t expected the sharks. He’d lost two men out there, two men when the brutes had appeared. The air car’s pilot started screaming, then disappeared in a thrashing flurry of red foam, and Weblen-son had grabbed the Justinian and begun pulling her towards shore. The next attack was beat back with small arms fire, but the sharks learned fast and came up from underneath on their next run. Weblen-son and five of his men made it ashore with the Justinian, and two of them were firing at the circling fins even now. His medic and another squad had remained ashore and they were tending the Justinian now, while he coughed and heaved salt water and bile onto the sand.

+++++

Her eyes were closed tight and she could barely open them, so Sinn August-dottir drifted, still sitting, she assumed, in her air-car. Suddenly she was aware of pain, pain in her legs and she forced her eyes open, reached down and felt her flight suit had been cut away. She forced her eyes open, raised her head and saw there was a blood-soaked pressure dressing over the top of her right thigh, and now her forehead burned, She reached up, felt a deep cut there, felt blood oozing through a gauze pad hastily taped there, then she saw four other men were laying on the beach beside her, two wounded badly but still talking, two no longer talking, and she wondered how she got to the beach. Then she saw the horrible gashes on their thighs and arms and she remembered flashing teeth, gunfire, and Weblen-son pulling her through the water. She heard gunfire in the memory, primal fear, existential fear, and she tried to recall having felt that way before, ever, but she simply could not. There had been nothing like this to fear in decades, since before she was born, and she saw them clearly now – the sharks that had come for her. The black eye, the huge open mouth, the serrated teeth. Great White. She remembered the image from a memory, a book perhaps, or a movie, and she saw the shark in her mind’s eye and compared that to the animal in the water.

“Yes, it was a Great White,” she said gently.

“Three of ‘em, Justinian,” one of the wounded men said. “Hey doc, she’s up!”

A medic was by her side now, sticking a syringe full of morphine into her other thigh. The world began to swim and shimmer as rolling waves of warmth carried into softness, and she could just barely make out what the men are saying…

“She’s lost a lot of blood, Commander.”

“We don’t have time for this; we’ve got to get moving!”

“Moving?” the Justinian said through a shifting purple haze, “Moving where, Commander?”

“To the airport, Justinian. The hospitals were attacked not long ago, and the streets are no longer safe. There is an aid station at the airport, and we’ve been told to report there.”

“What…? Why there…?” she tried to speak, instinctively knew something was wrong but her body wasn’t responding anymore. An orderly leaned over and put an oxygen mask over her face…but the gas smelled odd, metallic…then she felt her body falling, falling like a leaf onto a broad, fast running current… ‘I remember water,’ she thought – as the last ragged vestiges of consciousness reached out for her, before she was pulled up into the light. “I remember water,” she said, but her mind was closing now, her breathing too slow, almost shallow when she saw the rolling black eye again. She tried to fight now but nothing worked – and she knew she was doomed.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Weblen-son told his medic. His men gather and put her on a stretcher, and are walking through the sand towards ground transports when a huge, ripping sonic boom tore through the sky high overhead. Weblen-son looked up, saw the Commandant’s SCRAM-jet shuttle re-entering the atmosphere high over the city, then begin its wide, arcing turn to bleed-off energy out over the sea. He wasn’t a pilot, not a real pilot, anyway, but he knew with the wind blowing from the sea to the land that the shuttle would land heading west, that it would line up for the approach to LAX over the city, and he knew they were running out of time.

“Alright, that’s it…they’re here! We’re got to make a run for it, or we’re staying here for the duration.” He looked at the fiery re-entry one last time while his men loaded into the trucks, while he did the math. “We’ve got about ten minutes to get to the rendezvous.”

With the Justinian’s stretcher secured in the back of the transporter he clambered in, but he paused and looked at his dead men on the beach – then out to sea, remembering. He shook his head and climbed in, put on his seat belt as the pilot pulled back on the stick; the truck crawled up into the grim, smoke-filled sky, and he looked at the arcing gray smoke trail of shuttle – now out over Catalina Island – as it turned to the east.

‘This is going to be close,’ he said to himself, then realized he hadn’t heard from StreetSweeper for far too long – and wondered what had gone wrong.

+++++

“There it is!”

James Stormgren craned his head to the right, looked out past the co-pilot’s pointing finger. The SCRAM-jet was trailing a thick white vortex of condensation, the fiery residue from re-entry, and it appeared to be turning on the base leg of it’s approach while still over the sea. He looked down at the shiny domes that covered the remnants of Palm Springs, then at the threat receivers on the instrument panel: everything was still ‘all quiet’ – until the radio came to life:

“Angel One, LA Center, clear to land, no other traffic, contact approach on one two two point five.”

“Angel One to one two two point five,” he heard the shuttle’s pilot say.

Stormgren reached up, dialed in the new frequency and began jamming the ground radar, looked out over the left wing and saw the Commandant’s shuttle begin it’s turn onto final. He poured on throttle and began climbing for the intercept; by the time they were over the eastern limits of the city’s ruins he had the ‘invisible’ 737 tucked in behind, and just a little above, the shiny white dart-shaped shuttle.

And so far no radar contact, no warble from the threat receiver.

He backed off a little, moved a little left, then he saw another shimmer in the air.

His father, in the F35. The last real First Republic fighter, the fighter his father had flown once upon a time. He looked at the shuttle and a part of him hated to destroy such a beautiful machine, let alone the men and women inside, and a part of him hoped the other pilot would be able to control the shuttle and somehow bring her down intact. He wondered if he’d be able to in similar circumstances.

Probably not, he told himself. The shuttle was little more than a falling brick now, an unpowered glider with no way to evade a hostile enemy.

‘Murder,’ he thought. ‘This is little more than murder…’

He could see a huge white desalinization plant off to the southwest, the coast and sea sparkling beyond; almost dead ahead he could see the remnants of huge explosions drifting in the still morning air, apparently large fires were still burning down there in the city, probably out of control now, the heat out of control too.

“Five hundred,” the automated voice of the flight computer chimed as the runway grew near.

“Missile armed,” he heard his father say, and he knew that almost instantly threat receivers on the shuttle would go off, that they’d initiate countermeasures.

“Center, Angel One, we’ve got missile warnings up here…”

“Angel One, nothing on radar. It must be ground based…”

“Two hundred, minimums,” the voice of the 737s flight computer said.

“Fox one!” Thomas Stormgren said, yet the command was almost whispered. The Sidewinder leapt from its wing mounted rail and crossed the two hundred meters to the Commandant’s shuttle in a millisecond; before, probably, the other pilot had time to react to his threat receiver. The missile slammed into the left engine pod; fan blades and a huge orange blossom of fire erupted from the wing and left side of the fuselage; the shuttle began rolling drunkenly to the right as it’s pilot struggled to control the resultant asymmetry.

The shuttle crossed the runway threshold nose down and left wing up; the right wingtip struck the ground and the shuttle began cart-wheeling – before disappearing inside a roiling black cloud alive with orange flame. When the pressurized, almost empty hydrogen tank ruptured, a concussive explosion ripped across the airport, breaking glass for miles around.

Stormgren chopped the throttle, flared the 737 and touched down on the adjacent runway; he didn’t use reverse thrust now, didn’t want to call attention to their arrival and alert whatever ground forces were stationed at the airport, so the jet rolled out slowly to the end of the runway, and he saw the old coast highway, and the beach beyond. He turned the jet, aimed it right back down the runway, then cut power to the number one engine on the left wing as the jet rolled to a stop. He heard doors opening in the cabin, men shouting as they clambered down emergency webbing; he saw his brother running away from the aircraft to help establish a defensive perimeter and felt a little surge of adrenalin-fueled pride as he watched his father overhead, keeping a lookout.

“There!” his co-pilot sang out, pointing toward the old main terminal complex a mile away. “Trucks!”

Yes! And no one pursuing! The plan might work after all!

He looked the far end of the runway – to the wreckage burning uncontrollably there – yet so far not one fire truck, or other emergency vehicle, was responding. What the hell was going on?

Now two groups of trucks approached; one on the ground from the terminal and the other from the air. The air truck landed in a cloud of dust; men boiled out and joined the others already on the ground. He saw a stretcher being off-loaded from the air-truck, a couple of wounded ConIsmus troops being helped out by commandos when the first truck from the terminal arrived.

Another few minutes to load and they’d be able to get The Fuck Out of Dodge. Men were climbing the webbing to get aboard, and it was slow going.

A sonic boom, then another and another. Heavy transport shuttles re-entering atmosphere over the city; reinforcements arriving from another city-state. He reached for the intercom:

“Hurry it up back there! At least three shuttles inbound!”

Stormgren looked out his window; only a couple of men remained, one talking on a radio handset, pointing at the angry looking shuttles overhead, arcing down toward the airport like predators. Stormgren looked up at the shuttles; he’d never seen anything like them before. And they weren’t lining up to land on the runway! They were coming straight down, like helicopters, aiming right for the runway.

“Start one!” he yelled at the co-pilot. “Dad? You see those?”

“I’m on ‘em,” he heard his father say, but his F35 had gone to ‘invisible mode’ once again.

“But…” he heard his co-pilot object…

“Goddamnit, start one! Inbound fighters…” he said as the first laser guided bomb slammed into the runway.

“Starting one!” and Stormgren heard the turbine spooling up seconds later. The remaining men on the ground turned and looked up at the cockpit; one was still talking on the radio, Austin pushing him to the boarding web.

A commando burst into the cockpit. “All aboard!”

Jamie didn’t bother looking aft as he put his hands on the throttle: “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Now!”

The co-pilot nodded, looked at the engine temps and pressures as both engines spooled up.

“Confirm take-off flaps,” he said as the aircraft gathered speed.

“Set and confirmed.”

He looked back at the the runway, then ahead – and something caught his eye. The first troop transport was flaring to land far down the runway – and they were heading right for the old Boeing.

He pushed the throttles to the stops and pedaled the rudders to full command authority, all thought of his father up above fading as this new reality settled-in just ahead: he might not be able to clear the shuttle and it’s heavy, down-firing landing thrusters. The 737 gathered speed, the old concrete runway rumbled away underneath as it passed through one hundred knots, and Stormgren looked down the runway at the approaching shuttle.

“V-one!” the co-pilot called-out.

“Fuck!” Stormgren yelled. Another shuttle was now landing behind the first, and the shadow of a third shuttle appeared on the runway ahead, blotting-out the sun as it turned to land.

“V-two, rotate!” the co-pilot called out.

Stormgren pulled back on the yoke as explosions rippled through the air ahead. The first shuttle disappeared in a roiling fireball, then the third shuttle, the one still airborne, tumbled from the sky and fell into the old terminal.

As the air around the airport exploded, and Stormgren wrestled the old jet into a steep left turn; with throttles still set at take-off power he headed straight for the Santa Monica Mountains just north of the airport. Warning lights and threat receivers on the panel howled, yet he concentrated on keeping the aircraft as low as possible. A surface-to-air missile roared by a few hundred feet overhead; the threat receiver remained full red, continued howling as the missile disappeared into the deep haze over the city. He pushed the stick down a bit more; at fifty feet over the ground and three hundred knots indicated the landscape rippled by in a blur. He pulled up sharply to clear the ruins of a fallen skyscraper and the threat receiver howled again. He jinked hard high and right, then slammed the nose over and to the left as a second surface-to-air missile roared past and slammed into the hillside a half mile ahead. He leveled the wings as they topped the rubble and he pushed the stick down and eased off the throttle. They crossed the mountains, then flew over the ruins of the San Fernando Valley while Stormgren scanned the panel for the first time since take-off.

“Hull integrity, pressurization, secondary hydraulic reservoir are gone,” the co-pilot said. “And my fucking nerves are shot, too!”

“Roger that!” he sighed. “What do you make our fuel?”

“About two hours forty, a lot less if we stay down here in the weeds.”

“Okay.”

The cockpit door opened and Stormgren turned, saw Thor Bergtor-son – who until a few minutes ago had been Tribonian to the Senatus – standing in the doorway. The old man’s arms were stained with blood, his shirt ripped in several places.

“You guys alright back there?” Stormgren asked, his eyes wide, full of concern.

“It’s pretty breezy, but yes!”

“Breezy? What? Why?”

“Maybe you better come take a look!”

“Can’t right now…”

“Right. Well, the entire right side looks like Swiss cheese…”

“What about the wing?”

“Brown fluid coming out of the engine pylon, a big hole just shy of the wingtip.”

“How big?”

“‘Bout a foot ‘round.”

“Jenn, can you see it?” Stormgren said to his co-pilot.

“Leading edge looks okay – can’t see much else.”

A small mountain range loomed ahead and Stormgren increased power, settled on a four degree climb at seventy eight percent EGT – low and slow.

“Where are we headed,” Bergtor-son asked. “Edwards?”

“Nope. Hole in the Wall.”

“No kidding? Never been there.”

“What’s the Hole in the Wall?” Jennie asked, and Stormgren looked at her, smiled.

“Once upon a time it was called Area 51.”

He saw her mouth drop, her eyes flickering with disbelief, then he flashed his best ever ‘shit-eatin’ grin: “Wanna go see a Starship?”

+++++

The 737 taxied to a rough stop by an ancient tan hanger, while two very well preserved F-22 Raptors circled overhead. Stormgren chopped power, set the brakes, began shutting down systems one by one, and the cockpit suddenly grew warm, then hot.

“Well, that was fun!” his co-pilot said.

“Nothin’ to it,” Stormgren said, but his shirt was soaked through with sweat, his hands were still shaking. And the sun was now high in the sky, the air conditioning shut down when the engines idled down. The APU was fried so there was no power now.

The cockpit door opened, letting in more hot air, and he saw a stairway had rolled up to the fuselage and cadets and bureaucrat-cum-spies were filing out on the tarmac and jogging for the closest shade they could see – which was inside the open hanger door. Bergtor-son stepped back into the cockpit, fresh bandages on his arms and neck.

“A hundred fifty four out there,” he said, stating the obvious. Blistering hot air filled the cockpit now and it was beyond stifling. “We’d better get inside.”

When he was down on the concrete he heard the F35 on final, but still – he just couldn’t see the thing. He heard the tires hit the runway, saw puffs of smoke as the tires hit, then he saw the shimmering air. Oblivious to the heat now, he watched his father turned the jet and make for the hanger, then he felt Jenn by his side, looking up into his eyes. She tiptoed up and kissed him, then took his hand and pulled him to the hanger.

‘Goddamn! Why haven’t I noticed her before?’ he said to himself as he watched her. ‘That’s something that’s about to change,’ he sighed, looking at her red hair flying in the desert wind.

+++++

The hanger, like all the other buildings at the old base, was an empty shell; all it provided was access to a major R&D facility located deep underground.

James Stormgren sat in a small auditorium with the commandos who’d been on the flight; there were about forty men in the room and a handful of women, including his co-pilot Jennie.

His father walked in a few minutes later, and he stood before the assembled commandos, his eyes tense, full of concern.

“ConIsmus forces have breeched the Mag-Lev platform,” Bergtor-son began. “In about twenty minutes we’re going to detonate a large device east of the city. That’ll be the end of our access to the west coast, for good, I’m afraid.”

He looked around the room. “We’re not sure how ConIsmus will react, but we’ve just learned of a startling new development…”

Bergtor-son burst into the room, swearing under his breath. “We have eight hours until they detonate the device,” he said to Thomas. “The BlackWatch have just confirmed this. We must launch now, or as soon as we can.”

Stormgren nodded.

“I guess that’s it, then. Is everyone ready for this?”

He turned to his old friend then, asked the one question he had been dreading for some time. “Will you come, or are you going to stay and watch?”

“Oh, Thomas, I wouldn’t miss this for the world. We’d better get moving.”

+++++

Something was pinching her earlobe, the what? The right one.

She opened her eyes, saw an impossibly black face hovering over hers, shining a bright light into her eyes.

She tried to speak – but couldn’t – and an impossible terror welled up inside, seeking release.

“I’m Doctor Uhuru, Justinian,” the woman said. “You are in the recovery room. You were injured, very badly I’m afraid, and have been in surgery to repair your leg, and to remove shrapnel from your neck and chest. As soon as you can breathe on your own we will take you to the ICU, but first I’m going to have to take the tube from your throat. This will feel strange…”

When the physician was finished Sinn tried to sit up and cough but she felt to weak; still, she drew-in deep gulps of air through her nose and mouth while the woman looked at her vital signs on a bank of instruments – then she saw a gauze pad floating in the air over her bed…

“Where am I!?” Sinn August-dottir cried.

“I told you, in the recovery room,” but the doctor’s eyes followed Sinn’s and she plucked the paper from the air, wadded it up inside her coat pocket. “Much has happened in the past few hours, much you may not be ready to hear, and your body is weak. There are people waiting for you, when you get to the ICU, and they will explain things.”

“You can’t tell me where I am?”

But the physician walked from the room, leaving her bereft and alone, so alone. She’d never felt so isolated, abandoned in her life…

Yet the woman had said people were waiting for her.

The commandant! It had to be! She was in the hospital under the mountain – it could be nothing else…then she felt that warmth again, and she was floating…

Her eyes opened, but she was in a different room now.

Yes, but everything felt different here. Now, aside from the noisome glow of all this strange machinery, she felt a strangeness, a foreignness about everything she saw, and even the air she breathed tasted strange, almost manufactured. And she still felt alone, a profound loneliness enveloped her being inside this strange, glowing darkness – so what was this place? And – could she feel the room spinning, or was there some sort of medication affecting her senses? But, over there! Someone was sitting in a chair by her bed. It was a man. Was he a nurse? Where was that doctor?

“Could I have some water?” she croaked. The man in the darkness moved uneasily, reached for a cup and stood. He came to her, holding an odd looking cup and spoon in one hand while he held on to the bed frame with the other, and after he secured himself to the floor he fed her bits of crushed ice.

“Ice! Real ice! Oh, God, I feel so stiff. Where am I?”

“Well, I’m sure not God,” the man said, “but we did pull off a few miracles.”

“Aurie – Aurelius?” She could feel his voice in the core of her being.

“Try Austin.”

“Oh, right. Stormgren. I remember now.”

“More ice?”

“God, yes please!”

She took more from his spoon, chewed it slowly. The entire sensation was so foreign: “Ice…it’s been so long since I had ice.”

“Good stuff, frozen water,” Austin said. “Nothing like it.”

“Could you turn on a light?”

“You sure?”

“Yeah? Why wouldn’t I be?”

He ignored the question, the authoritarian tone of her voice, flipped a switch by her side and the room lit gradually, as if he had made arrangements for her own personal sunrise. Blue light, deep and radiant, glowed from the ceiling; in a moment streaks of gold and orange appeared in this “sky”. She looked around as the room grew lighter, but everything was all wrong! The room was too narrow, the ceiling too low, and everything was rounded – there wasn’t a sharp angle or corner anywhere – and one wall was all wrong… like she was inside a dome.

A dome! Of course! His people must have been building domes for as long as we had been building caves, maybe longer!

Yet the closest wall was sloped, curved! As the wall fell away from the ceiling she could tell that it too was curved, part of the dome; even the window inside this wall was curved! And the window? The glass was black, the corners of the window radiused, and the glass itself was – what? Too thick?

He watched her face, watched for signs of panic, even fear. As the light grew stronger it also became less radiant, somehow white and diffuse at the same time…like a cloudy day, perhaps. Her face was as soft now, but still radiant, and he hated what the next few minutes would bring to her life.

It was then she saw his face. He seemed older, or was it just a newfound maturity she saw in his eyes?

“Where are we? Is this a Dome? Am I a prisoner?”

“This – place – is called The Emissary, and no, you are not a prisoner.”

“But, you didn’t say – where this place is…”

He nodded, looked down at her legs, willed her eyes to follow his own…

She saw a canopy over her right leg, and suddenly knew it was gone. A short stump was, she guessed, all that remained.

She felt her throat closing, a scream building and he reached out, brushed away hair that seemed to be floating in front of her eyes, just beyond her silently falling tears.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said.

“Right, right, that’s easy for you to say…” He wiped away more tears and only then did she notice her hands were secured to small railings on the bedside with thick padded straps. She pulled at the straps, then panic filled her eyes. “Oh, God no, I am a prisoner!”

Yet Aurie smiled – again. “No, not quite, but you keep trying to pull out your IV, even in your sleep, so they tied them off a few hours ago.” Then he was trying not to laugh, and she was suddenly filled with blind rage and furious hate.

“You fucking bastard! You think this is funny!”

“In a way, yes. Yes, I do, because it is.”

“Get out of here, you arrogant fool! Go away and leave me be!”

“In a minute.” He grew stern, watched her now as a biologist might examine a specimen under a microscope. “We have a few things to discuss.”

There WAS something different about him. She wasn’t imagining it – because she saw it in his eyes, in his hair, and she grew afraid – quiet and very afraid.

“You’re older,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Yes.”

“Have I been in a coma?”

“No.”

“Aurie – Austin, would you stop this! Why do you speak in riddles? Or is the truth so hard to speak?”

His movements were jerky, somehow forced, as he turned and stepped over to the window. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, so just try to be look at what you see, and listen carefully to what I have to say.” He reached out and turned a dial; the intensely polarized window began clearing, then a white metal shutter of some sort slid up into the ceiling and out of view.

The moon hung before her, seemingly just outside the window, but it was rotating – like the room was fixed and the moon was orbiting a point outside the window. And the stars! Everywhere she looked – vast fields of stars! The sight was too strange, too unreal for her mind to take in. She was looking at a the moon, and behind, she saw two stars – one fierce and blinding white, the other a malevolent red eye.

“What is this? A hologram?”

“No.” He looked at her as he moved back to the bed, but he smiled even as her eyes grew wide, as her lips began to tremble. She tried to speak but only fractured bits of parched words crawled from her sundered mind.

“But, what is this? Two stars?”

“The white one is our sun, the red one is earth.”

“What?” she cried. “The earth?”

“The Senatus elected to send it’s people deep underground, then detonated a weapon that fused nitrogen to all available hydrogen and oxygen. Unfortunately, their scientists assumed the reaction would stop with those elements in the atmosphere. It did not. The earth itself is fusing even now, and will within a few months reach critical mass. The earth will become a star at that point, and we must be far from this orbit when it happens, or we will meet their fate, on their terms.”

“They destroyed the earth?”

“That about sums it up. After they moved the remaining population under their control to the caves, the broadcast a warning. They were purifying the earth, they said, to rid the planet God made of human imperfection, and only those chosen by God would remain to repopulate the surface.”

“Oh my – God.”

“If you insist, but I wouldn’t.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“Well, the concept of God isn’t real popular around here right now, if you know what I mean. Maybe that will change, but I’d keep that in mind when you talk to people around here, for the time being, anyway.”

“You said you were older. And Austin, you DO look older. What happened?”

“We’d best talk about your leg, first. The docs harvested cells during surgery, and they’re growing you a new one from your own DNA and stem cells. The docs will talk to you soon about what they plan to do, but the short version is you should have a new leg within a year or so. Still, the process won’t be pretty.”

She blinked, looked up at him. She understood his words, yet they made no sense to her world. Nothing made sense of this place, not without God.

“Second. In case you’re having trouble with the idea, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

“I got that. But are you saying that this is, well, Oz?”

“Not quite,” he laughed, “at least not yet. The Emissary is, well, more like a shuttle.” He watched her eyes; they were trying to follow his lips as he spoke, trying to wrap around the meaning behind his words. “We’re heading to L1, to a so-called LaGrange Point, and when we approach there’ll be a burn, a long burn. Like a rocket, except you won’t hear anything. But the acceleration will be powerful, and to you I’d guess painful. You won’t be able to fight the effects of the burn as your wounds move – at all. I was hoping they’d let you sleep through this, so, well, that you’d wake up after. It will be very disconcerting, disorienting.”

“And, I suppose…like this place isn’t disconcerting?” She pointed at the moon rotating outside the window – and at all that rotation implied.

“About two days ago, when we launched from Nevada, you were pretty much on your way to dead. You’d lost so much blood and expanders weren’t working anymore and, well, anyway, they got you to surgery here, then stabilized you until the ship left orbit. Once the initial acceleration stopped the operated, and that was about ten hours after we left. But the thing is, my dad and I left on a ship. About a day and a half passed here, on The Emissary, but I was gone almost eight years – completely the opposite of Einstein’s prediction, too, or so we thought at first.”

“You’re losing me.”

“Me too. The short version? We left in a ship, or I should say we disappeared in a vehicle of some sort and were gone a couple of days, then we reappeared, but for dad and myself eight years had passed.”

“That’s not possible.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Well, we don’t know. The correct question is why were we taken where we were.”

“Why? You mean someone…?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The ship? Who built it?”

Austin shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. “Yo no se, darlin’. But the important thing here is understand that we’re not alone. There’re other civilizations out here, and that’s going to be hard for you to grasp…”

“But why? Why should I doubt you? Because you think having a multitude of civilizations out here automatically excludes the possibility of God? I don’t think that changes things one little bit. If He can create one planet, why can’t He create millions of them?”

“Yeah, maybe. If that’s the case, I’d say He’s got a wicked sense of humor, though.”

She laughed. “May be. So, what happened during those eight years you were away?”

“I’m not sure I can explain, but I think we were being tested, or maybe evaluated is the best word.”

“For?”

“A seat at the table, I guess.”

“The table? What’s that mean?”

“If we’re worthy of survival.”

“Jesus…”

“Look, I…”

“I know, I know. Enough with all the God stuff…”

“No, not really, just keep in mind that when you look at the universe solely through the prism of religion, you in essence cut off half your intellect. You can look at the universe through faith and reason, not simply one or the other, but the problem we ran into on earth was that we tended to use one to obscure the other. We had a binary way of looking at things, it was either this way or that way, and because of that rigid construct it could never be both. Maybe we evolved that way, or maybe religious power structures forced us into thinking of the world that way, but the net result was we set ourselves up to fail.” He pointed at the reddening earth hanging out there in space. “There’s the result of our failure, by the way. I’d prefer we not make the same mistake again, if it’s all the same to you.”

She looked at him for the longest time, said not one word, then she looked out the viewport – at the moon spinning away, and at the baleful red eye hanging out there like an insinuation. At one point he almost thought she was going to cry – but she caught herself and pulled back from the abyss – then looked at him again.

“You never said what happened to you during the eight years you were gone.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Is there a reason why?”

He took her hand now, squeezed it gently while he looked into her eyes. “After the burn we’ll be coasting, we’ll be leaving the solar system at about 70 percent of light-speed. If all goes according to plan in about two years we’re going to rendezvous with, well, with something out there.”

She looked at him, wondered what he was holding back – until his words registered. “Something?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“Well, someone might be more accurate.”

“Someone?” Her eyes blinked rapidly. “Who do you mean, exactly?”

“Well, it ain’t a bunch of kids on Spring break heading to Florida, alright? My guess is they’re, well, more like nerds. You know the term?”

She nodded slowly, and a smile creased her face. “But what about…?”

He brought a finger to her lips, shook his head. “Sometime before the Secession War, the first one, I mean, NASA discovered a ship beyond the solar system, a huge ship. They thought ‘huge’ because of the amount of light it put out, then someone figured out the ship was powered by a light sail, and that the sail was huge. I mean really, really huge. The ship was headed, well, sort of, towards our solar system, and some people in government were scared, afraid the discovery would shatter belief systems, and I think that’s when things started to go to hell – in a hurry – and it’s probably no coincidence the Secession War started a few months later. Society would have fractured, the whole religion and science thing again, and everything began falling apart in government. With no coherent policy, even a secret policy, politicians split along lines faith and reason and went their separate ways.”

“That simple, huh?”

“Yes, but the scientists, well, they already had an organization in place to deal with such an eventuality. They called it the BlackWatch.”

“We never…”

“Never heard of it. I know. But it’s even more interesting than that.”

“Something to do with the ship?”

“Yup. The BlackWatch had been talking with them for years. Learning – listening, and learning. They were like, I don’t know, like teachers, then one of them came in a small ship. He was…well, something like a man. Biologically male, anyway. He brought evidence of a really huge space-faring civilization they had discovered, and, well, they were off to see the wizard, going off in search of this old civilization, and they invited some of us along for the trip.”

“Is that why…I’m here?”

“Yes. Your mother was one of the principal investigators, she discovered the ship, and she made first contact with The Watcher.”

“The Watcher?”

“Yes. He was old; expendable, as I understand it. He cloned himself.”

“He what?”

“Well, you see, in a way he was my father.”

“He WHAT?”

“I know. I don’t understand it all either. Anyway, this has been their plan, your mother’s and The Watcher’s, almost from the beginning.”

“So are you…”

“Yes. His DNA was integrated into mine.”

“Oh, God…”

“Do you remember the night I was taken? During the ride-along?”

“Yes… how could I forget…”

“There was a train under LA, a Mag-Lev. I was taken there, brought to Clarke Station. Your mother rode with me that day, and the experience was puzzling, almost funny. Odd, because I thought I recognized her. Funny, because it was you I recognized – in her.”

Sinn’s eyes were unfocused. Diffuse.

“My mother…? Was alive?”

“Yes.”

“Is she?”

“Yes.”

“The Watcher?” she asked slowly. “Is he here, on this ship?”

“There are twenty five ships in this fleet, Sam. I’m not sure which one he’s on right now.”

“Sam?”

“Samantha. That’s your name.”

Her lips started trembling now, and her eyes twitching, so he pulled a blanket up to cover her arms, rubbed her shoulders.

“She’s…my mother is alive…here, on this ship?”

“Watching us, even as we speak. Right outside that door, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh dear God. I thought she was…”

“ConIsmus abducted you, Sam, to get back at her. The operation was conducted by your friend, the commandant, and perhaps that’s why she named you Sinn. As in Sin, her original Sin.”

“What did you say?”

“Nyx was the one who abducted you, who took you from your family.”

“I always wondered what that name meant?” but she had turned away from him in that moment, turned and looked out the window again, and she heard the door open and close at one point and thought he’d left. Then she saw a woman’s reflection in the glass, the figure inside distorted by the curvature of the wall, by the passage of time.

“Nyx was the daughter of Chaos,” the woman said. “The only God feared by Zeus himself, she was of the underworld, Goddess of the Night, and she gave birth to Destiny, Death – and Dreams.”

Sam turned to meet the voice, and recognition was instantaneous.

Austin looked at the two women for a moment, then backed out of the room as quietly as he could. His father and mother were waiting for him there, and they tried to console him, to comfort him, but there was little anyone could do now.

Radiation levels in Saint Angeles had grown far beyond lethal levels after the second subterranean detonation, and those who’d been exposed for more than a few hours were now growing very sick indeed. Tribonian Bergtor-son, Commander Weblen-son and his men, the remaining cadets in the Academy – all were falling ill now, and none was not expected to live out the week. All were isolated in this one pod, and the pod would be jettisoned as soon as the last passed away.

He had wanted to tell her, but it was decided her mother would. Now, right now, and so he had left. It was his duty to leave, and Austin looked at his father as the father took in his son, and they held each other as closely as they could – because each understood the solution was so simple. So dreadfully simple…and so irrevocably final.

+++++

”Tell me about the Watcher,” Sam said when he returned later that ‘day.’ “What does he have to do with The BlackWatch?”

“His technology, he, well, he jumpstarted certain kinds of science. Primarily a new type of human-machine interface.”

“Do you know who, or what they are? The Watcher’s people, I mean?”

“I do, but it doesn’t really matter now, Sam. At some point the BlackWatch learned who I was, who you were, then they told your mother about us, about your plans to mate with me. She knew she’d never be able to tell you about this stuff, that you were too far away – emotionally – to reach, or to understand. So she sent for me, sent for me so I could go back and get you out of there, and, if possible, onto The Emissary ship.”

“What happened to you? During those eight years?”

“My father and I, both of us. It happened to us both. But not to my brother, for some reason.”

“What? What happened?”

“A gift, you might say. Or a curse. We can move through time.”

“What do you mean?” she scoffed. “We can ALL move through time, Austin…”

“Oh? Can you?”

“Of course. We’re doing that right now…”

He smiled, held out his hand. “Take my hand,” he said, “if you’d like me to show you what I mean…”

“What?”

“Take my hand, and shut your eyes.”

“Why should I…I have no idea what you’re trying to do to me…”

“I’m asking you to…take a leap of – ”

“What? Faith?”

“Yes, if you like. Faith. In me.”

She did not hesitate now – she reached out, took his hand in hers and…

…in the next instant she was standing on a sidewalk, looking in a shop window – and the air outside was impossibly crisp and clear…

“Where are we?”

“Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive. This is a store, an Italian store, called Gucci.”

“When is this?”

“1974. There is great uncertainty here today because the President of the United States, or what you and I call the First Republic, has just resigned. There is a war going on now too, it’s been going on for nine years in a place called Vietnam, and it’s going badly.”

They watch as a woman leaves the store, and Sam turns and follows the woman with her eyes. “I know her? I’ve seen her before…”

“Yes, her name is Elizabeth Taylor, and she is a very famous actress…”

“Is…you keep saying is, like this is just happening? But isn’t it the past?”

“No, it’s not the past. What happens five minutes from now has never happened before…”

Then it hits her – she is standing on two legs!

“My legs! They’re both…”

“Yes. They are. We have slipped behind that time, to a place where that had not happened – yet. You have two legs here and now, and you have not been irradiated – yet. Do you understand what I am showing you?”

She swallowed – hard – and her mind raced through the possibilities. “I can return to the past?”

“Yes.”

“I can stay in the past, and live there as I was?”

“So long as you go beyond the time where your illness happened, yes.”

“You’re not telling me something. What is it?”

“You cannot go alone. Either I would have to go with you, or my father. And we would have to stay then with you, until you passed.”

“And if I went to the future?”

“You would go there as you are now, and you would die within hours.”

“What if I went back…to Saint Angeles as it was when I met you? Would all the people be there who were before?”

“There would be no before. All would be as it was?”

“Could I change things? The things that happened?”

“You could try.”

“But…could I really change things…really make a difference?”

“Again…only if you try. But that’s all anyone can do, isn’t it?”

“The things in this window…what did you call this place?”

“Gucci. An importer of fine Italian leather goods.”

“These things look so fine. I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

“The world has rarely seen things so fine.”

“Are the things in here expensive?”

“Yes.”

“Like?”

“Miss Taylor just bought a handbag and a pair of shoes. They cost 15,000 dollars.”

“I don’t know what that means…”

“The woman there, behind the counter? She makes a little more than 9,000 dollars. In a year.”

“But…that’s grotesque! How could…something like this exist?”

“Such inequality has always existed, and in this case, such huge differentials drove events that led to the First Secession War, and the eventual collapse of the First Republic.”

“Can we go back to ship now?”

He let go of her hand and they were in the room again, and the pain in her leg returned like a thunderclap, the radiation induced malaise came on as a seeping flow of warm water might, slowing filling all her unseen places with wasting illness. She felt disoriented – until she looked out the viewport and saw the earth. It hung out there in space like a glowing ember, dying, slowly, but dying.

“I want to see my mother,” the dying girl said.

+++++

Aurelius Krül-son sat behind an arcing row of tables in the front row of a small classroom; he yawned – and wiped a smeary tear from his cheek – while his friends filed-in and took their assigned seats in the Academy classroom. He opened his notebook – Institute-issued and graded weekly for neatness – and took out a couple of pencils from the pristine attaché case that lay by his feet on the simmering concrete floor. He looked at his friends, at Greggor and Pol and Misogi  and he smiled inside, smiled at futility of the moment, and then a new instructor – one he felt quite certain he had seen before – walked into the classroom, and yet Krül-son caught his breath when he saw her, for he knew he had never seen so desirable a woman – and while he knew desire was a very tricky thing, he was confident he knew where this desire would lead…

The instructor was short, and while not particularly slender she was by no means overweight, yet she exuded a precocious self-confidence that was positively buoyant; of more importance and certainly more to the point, he thought she was sexy, conscientiously sexy, like she enjoyed projecting authority through the overt appearance of sexuality – and that made her a very rare bird indeed. She walked to the podium before the class and laid out her materials on the adjoining table – slowly, quietly, her every move exuding a gentle mirth – then she picked up a marker and walked over to the whiteboard.

‘Sinn August-dottir; District Attorney’s Office; Law of Search and Seizure I.’ Her words on the board, like her persona, were carefully structured and precise; the lettering and punctuation left by her fine-boned hand was clipped and neat, and full of latent purpose. At first all Krül-son noticed was the curve of her hips and legs, but soon the wedding band on the third finger of her left hand caught his attention, yet after a moment his eyes wandered back over her exciting lines.

She turned to the class but looked right at Aurelius Krül-son, then she nodded at him, and smiled.

‘Well, all she can do is try,’ he said to himself, then he looked up slightly, looked up at one of the surveillance cameras in the ceiling and smiled.

© 2009-2016 | Adrian Leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkühnwrites.com | this is a work of speculative fiction, and no persons depicted herein, oh…yada-yada-yada. Well, you get the point, I reckon. The two images are by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the journey.