by James Grady
Main doors.
He’s there. Elbows the shiny steel plate automatic door opener. Rifle up, alert position, gun butt by his shoulder. Just like SWAT guys on TV. Staring over the barrel. Focused. Sliding past the heap of dead men blocking his way down one ramp. Past the Army jacketed meat slumped in a wheelchair nearly blocking the stairs by the top of the second ramp where the shooter had pushed it.
Stairs are tricky while aiming over an assault rifle, so he SWAT glides down the second ramp to the heap of bodies, women on top fucking bitches.
“YOU CAN’T FUCK!”
Two quick shots at that in the parking lot sound.
The shooter lowered his rifle, the better to see.
Gunshots ringing in his ears, the ringing smoke detector back in the food court: he doesn’t hear the whirr of rubber tires on cement as coming behind him, the wheelchair bearing Army-jacketed meat rolls rushes down the ramp.
Splashing hits his left side and back, head, stings his eyes. That splash hit him from off the ground and the heap of dead women.
Stinks, what—
SMACKED in his face with an empty plastic orange bucket pumpkin.
Eyes burning, the blur of some woman swinging a pumpkin to hit him again/feint, he knew that was a feint, blocked her true attack kick with the assault rifle and knocked her down Why do I smell? His gun barrel sought the her to kill.
In the shooter’s new behind him:
Warren’s blood smeared on his forehead.
Warren’s Army jacket worn for Trick Or Treat.
Condor launched himself from the rolling wheelchair.
Yelled so the shooter whirled.
Tossed the ’bucks cup full of wet into the shooter’s face.
Tripped with inertia from his wheelchair leap.
Condor crashed to his knees, heard the falling on concrete of that cup.
That paper cup he’d stuck into the stream spewing out of the bullet-punctured steel tank under a car that sheltered him and Malati and a child who wanted to be called Punkin and nodded all the way down into her bones that she could she would she’d do what she had to do even if she wasn’t ’posed to.
The ’bucks cup he’d used to bail that spewing stream into Punkin’s pumpkin bucket. Bucket full, he filled the cup to carry with him. Crouched low so the robot shooting inside the rest stop facility couldn’t see him as like in some don’t spill Fourth of July picnic contest, he frog-ran to the level concrete right outside the main doors. Purple smoke mushroomed inside the food court. Condor set the cup down. Don’t spill! He pulled the Army jacket off Warren. Got his black leather jacket on the dead vet. Smeared blood from Warren’s third eye on his own forehead. Grunted the body onto the heap of corpses blocking the other ramp. Plunked himself into the wheelchair.
Malati, careful not to spill the liquid from the pumpkin she carried, fumbled where Condor’d told her, the throat-shot bus driver’s shirt pocket— Got it!
Tossed a tumbling glint of silver to the man in the wheelchair.
Malati draped herself over the murdered teachers.
Punkin yelled like she was ’posed to.
Death stalked down the ramp.
Got ambush doused with gasoline.
That stinking wet killer jerked Condor off his knees.
Condor pushed the bus driver’s open silver cigarette lighter against the shooter and thumbed the wheel.
WHUMP! A fountain of fire engulfed the man who’d come to kill and die BUT NOT LIKE THIS!
Screaming. A human torch blazed the morning.
Dropped between the burning man’s wobbling feet, Condor jerked the combat knife from its ankle sheath—slammed the blade up into the crease of shooter’s groin.
Blood sprayed Condor, wiped on the Army jacket as he scrambled away.
The burning man staggered.
Collapsed in a flaming heap.
Sickening sweet stench of baking crackling flesh and gasoline.
Condor, hands and knees scrambling up the ramp past the overturned wheelchair to where his black leather jacket clad the body of Warren.
Helicopters.
Chopping the air, racing in low, fast and hard to kill or capture who’s crazy.
Whoever’s crazy.
“Remember,” the soldier who’d had a gun and was named Doug had said: “We can do anything we want as long as nobody ever knows who we are.”
From his knees, Condor yelled: “Punkin!”
Trashed his way free of the bloody Army jacket.
“Punkin! All clear! FREE BIRD! FREE BIRD!”
There! Running toward the main entrance from between parked cars.
Her face not gonna cry and gonna run, run, RUN!
Condor—Vin, my name is Vin—wiped his face with Warren’s jacket, saw the smear of blood, hoped he looked close to whatever survivor’s normal was.
The seven-year-old girl with curly brown hair and red-white-and-blue clothes ran toward the silver-haired man who’d revolutionized her supposed to’s.
Condor pulled his black leather jacket off Warren.
Maneuvered that dead vet’s arms and body enough so Warren wore the gas and blood-stained Army jacket he’d died in.
Shrugged himself into his own black leather jacket with its weight of legends.
Collided with and swept a little girl into his arms.
Swooping roar over them as helicopters flew a draw-fire pass.
Malati stumbled toward them.
The package, her responsibility, his arms wrapped tight around the don’t you dare call her a little girl, that silver-haired Condor told Malati: “You spy, you lie.”
Then he held the seven-year-old so they stared into each other’s eyes.
“Punkin, I’m so proud of you! You did it! You did everything right! You saved so many people and us, you saved you and me and Malati. You’re so great! But Punkin: there’s one more giant big ’posed to.”
She nodded with all her heart.
“You can’t tell the whole truth. The real truth. You gotta tell the good truth. The guy who you helped, the man who saved you, the guy who got the gas from the shot-up car, rolled over there and did it, the guy who burned and stabbed the bad guy …
“It was him.” Condor nodded to Warren’s body. “The guy in the Army jacket. That’s the most anybody else probably saw. That’s all you say or tell anybody ever. He did it. Got the gas. Tossed it, lit the monster on fire. He rolled his wheelchair away to escape, that bad guy squeezed off a wild shot. Must have hit the Army jacket guy, you don’t know. You only know you made it and you did what you were ’posed to.”
Every good lie needs a why.
“Punkin,” said the silver-haired man, “me, Malati, we’re spies. No matter what, we’ve got to be a super secret that nobody but you ever knows. You can only say that we were here with you. Just people who ran and hid and didn’t get shot. We’re all telling the same story with the true part being what you did. But with the wheelchair guy. You, her, me: we’re a cross our hearts forever secret.”
Punkin nodded her solemn vow.
Must stay secret spies in that rampage of her life made as much sense as anything else anyone ever told her.
She hurled herself back into Condor’s arms. He got held tight.
This, he prayed to the meds: Let me remember this, this.
Helicopters vibrated the world.
Burnt flesh stench. Shattered glass. Purple smoke swirls. Megaphone commands.
When the three of them sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the shot-to-shit rest stop, before she cell phoned the Panic Line and like a pro triggered the make sure it holds cover story of them as random survivors not identified in official police reports, named in newspapers, or broadcast by television crews who showed up on their own helicopters while flying ambulances were ferrying out t
he sobbing wounded, before all that, her face pressed against asphalt, Malati whispered to the silver-haired man laying beside her:
“Is it always like this?”
And he said yes.
for Ron Mardigian
CONDOR IN THE STACKS
First published by The Mysterious Bookshop, 2015
“Are you trouble?” asked the man in a blue pinstripe suit sitting at his DC desk on a March Monday morning in the second decade of America’s first war in Afghanistan.
“Let’s hope not,” answered the silver-haired man in the visitor’s chair.
They faced each other in the sumptuous office of the Director of Special Projects (DOSP) for the Library of Congress (LOC). Mahogany bookcases filled the walls.
The DOSP fidgeted with a fountain pen.
Watch me stab that pen through your eye, thought his silver-haired visitor.
Such normal thoughts did not worry that silver-haired man in a blue sports jacket, a new maroon shirt and well-worn black jeans.
What worried him was feeling trapped in a gray fog tunnel of numb.
Must be the new pill, the green pill they gave him as they drove him away from CIA headquarters, along the George Washington Parkway and beneath the route flown by 9/11 hijackers who slammed a jetliner into the Pentagon.
The CIA car ferried him over the Potomac. Past the Lincoln Memorial. Up “the Hill” past three marble fortresses for Congress’s House of Representatives where in 1975, he’d tracked a spy from US ally South Korea who was working deep cover penetration of America by posing as a mere member of the messianic Korean cult that provided the last cheerleaders for impeached President Nixon.
The ivory US Capitol glistened across the street from where the CIA car delivered Settlement Specialist Emma and silver-haired him to the Library of Congress.
Whose DOSP told him: “I don’t care how ‘classified’ you are. Do this job and don’t make trouble or you’ll answer to me.”
The DOSP set the fountain pen on the desk.
Put his hands on his keyboard: “What’s your name?”
“Vin,” said the silver-haired stranger.
“Last name?”
Vin told him that lie.
The DOSP typed it. A printer hummed out warm paper forms. He used the fountain pen to sign all the correct lines.
“Come on,” he told Vin, tossing that writing technology of the previous century onto his desk. “Let’s deliver you to your hole.”
He marched toward the office’s mahogany door.
Didn’t see his pen vanish into Vin’s hand.
That mahogany door swung open as the twenty-something receptionist yawned, oblivious to the pistol under her outer office visitor Emma’s spring jacket. Emma stood as the door opened, confident she wouldn’t need to engage her weapon but with a readiness to let it fill her hand she couldn’t shake no matter how long it had been since.
The DOSP marched these disruptions from another agency through two tunnel-connected, city block-sized library castles to a yellow cinderblock walled basement and a green metal door with a keypad lock guarded by a middle-aged brown bird of a woman.
“This is Miss Doyle,” the DOSP told Vin. “One of ours. She’s been performing your just-assigned functions with optimal results, plus excelling in all her other work.”
Brown bird woman told Vin: “Call me Fran.”
Fran held up the plastic laminated library staff I.D. card dangling from a lanyard looped around her neck. “We’ll use mine to log you in.”
She swiped her I.D. card through the lock. Tapped the keypad screen.
“Now enter your password,” said Fran.
“First,” CIA Emma told the library-only staffers, “you two: please face me.”
The DOSP and Fran turned their backs to the man at the green metal door.
Vin tapped six letters into the keypad. Hit ENTER.
The green metal door clicked. Let him push it open.
Pale light flooded the heavy-aired room. A government-issue standard metal desk from 1984 waited opposite the open door. An almost as ancient computer monitor filled the desk in front of a wheeled chair. Rough pine boxes big enough to hold a sleeping child were stacked against the back wall.
Like coffins.
“Empty crates in,” said Fran, “full crates out. Picked up and dropped off in the hall. It’s your job to get them to and from there. Use that flatbed dolly.”
She computer clicked to a spreadsheet listing crates dropped off, crates filled, crates taken away: perfectly balanced numbers.
“Maintenance Operations handles data entry, except for when you log a pick-up notice. They drop off the Review Inventory outside in the hall.” Fran pointed to a heap of cardboard boxes. “From closing military bases. Embassies. Other … secure locations.
“Unpack the books,” said Fran. “Check them for security breaches. Like if some Air Force officer down in one of our missile silos forgot and stuck some secret plan in a book from the base library. Or wrote secret notes they weren’t supposed to.”
Vin said: “What difference would it make? You burn the books anyway.”
“Pulp them,” said the DOSP. “We are in compliance with recycling regulations.”
CIA Emma said: “Vin, this is one of those eyeballs-needed, gotta-do jobs.”
“Sure,” said Vin. “And you’ll know right where I am while I’m doing it.”
The DOSP snapped: “Just do it right. The books go into crates, the crates get hauled away, the books get pulped.”
Vin said: “Except for the ones we save.”
“Rescuer is not in your job description,” said the DOSP. “You can send no more than one cart of material per week to the Preserve stacks. You’re only processing fiction.”
The DOSP checked his watch. “A new employee folder is on your desk. We printed it out. Your computer isn’t printer or Internet enabled.”
“Security policy,” said CIA Emma. “Not just for you.”
“Really.” The DOSP’s smile curved like a scimitar. “Well, as your Agency insisted, this is the only library computer that accepts his access code. A bit isolating, I would think, but as long as that’s ‘security policy’ and not personal.”
He and brown bird Fran adjourned down the underground yellow hall.
Vin stood by the steel desk.
Emma stood near the door. Scanned her Reinsertion Subject. “Are you OK?”
“That green pill wiped out whatever OK means.”
“I’ll report that, but hey: you’ve only been out of the Facility in Maine for—”
“The insane asylum,” he interrupted. “The CIA’s secret insane asylum.”
“Give yourself a break. You’ve only been released for eleven days, and after what happened in New Jersey while they were driving you down here …
“Look,” she said, “it’s your new job, first day. Late lunch. Let’s walk to one of those cafés we saw when we moved you into your house. Remember how to get home?”
“Do you have kids?”
Her stare told him no.
“This is like dropping your kid off for kindergarten,” said Vin. “Go.”
Emma said: “You set the door lock to your codename?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Condor.”
His smile was wistful: “Can’t ever get away from that.”
“Call you Vin, call you Condor, at least you have a name. Got my number?”
He held up his outdated flip-phone programmed by an Agency tech.
She left him alone in that subterranean cave.
Call him Vin. Call him Condor.
Ugly light. The toad of an old computer squatting on a gray steel desk. A heap of sagging cardboard boxes. The wall behind him stacked with wooden crates—coffins.
Thick heavy air smelled
like … basement rot, paper, stones, old insulation, cardboard, tired metal, steam heat. A whiff of the coffins’ unvarnished pine.
He rode the office chair in a spin across the room. Rumbled back in front of the desktop computer monitor glowing with the spreadsheet showing nine cases—pinewood coffins—nine cases delivered to this Review Center. He clicked the monitor into a dark screen that showed his reflection with seven coffins stacked behind him.
Only dust waited in the drawers on each side of the desk’s well. The employee manual urged library staffers to hide in their desk wells during terrorist or psycho attacks. Like the atom bomb doomsday drills when I was a—
And he remembered! His CIA-prescribed handful of daily pills didn’t work perfectly: he could kind of remember!
Tell no one.
He slid open the middle desk drawer. Found three paperclips and one penny.
From the side pocket of the blue sports jacket he fetched the stolen fountain pen.
Sometimes you gotta do what you do just to be you.
He stashed the stolen pen in his middle desk drawer.
Noticed the monitor’s reflection of seven coffins.
WAIT.
Am I crazy?
YES was the truth but not the answer.
He turned around and counted the coffins stacked against the back wall: Seven.
Clicked open the computer’s spreadsheet to check the inventory delivery: Nine.
Why are two coffins missing?
The CIA’s cell phone sat on his desk.
This is your job now. No job, no freedom.
Condor put the cell phone in his shirt pocket over his heart.
Suddenly he didn’t want to be there because there was where they brought him, transporting him like a boxcar of doomed books. He counted the coffins: still seven. Walked out the door, pulling it shut with a click as he switched out the light.
The wide yellow-bricked hall telescoped away into distant darkness to his left. To his right, the tunnel ran about thirty steps until it T’ed at a brick wall.
