The Fall

by Michael McBride

  David “Kotter” Cosgrove sat in the chair behind Keller. He was an excellent nurse, somehow managing to tend to all of the refugees at once while Adam and Thanh could barely keep up with their half loads. He had a thick mustache and short curly black hair that could easily have been grown out into an afro, making him look just like the 70s sitcom star.

  “Oh my God,” Thanh sputtered.

  “…Syrian atrocities perpetrated on the former democratic regime. Again, these images were attained through undisclosed information networks, and no further details are available at this point in time,” the reporter said over the rolling footage. The CNN logo was clearly visible in the lower left hand corner, but the rest of the black and white picture was riddled with static. Fires burned as blinding white shapes to either side of what could only have been a road littered with rubble. The camera zoomed to the right, drifting in and out of focus at the will of the flames, then finally rectified the hazy image. It was the top of a man’s head, a flap of scalp flapping in the breeze, exposing the red maw beneath from which a flower of his gray matter bloomed. His chin rested against his chest, his eyelids held partially open by a thick layer of crusted blood over the surface of his eyeballs. Broken jaw set askew, his swollen tongue parted jaggedly fractured teeth. The lens drew away, again fighting for focus before capturing the entire image.

  The man was nailed to a cross formed from cut telephone poles.

  Crucified.

  The camera panned down the street, revealing the shadowed silhouettes of a dozen more similarly posed corpses.

  Adam couldn’t concentrate his thoughts enough to formulate speech.

  Static clipped the screen, which froze momentarily until they regained their connection.

  “…lining the main roads leading into the capital city of Baghdad as deterrent to further insurgence, and some think as a warning to the United States that intervention will not be tolerated.”

  The image cut from the sketchy handheld video taped on the street to a much clearer image labeled with the Al-Jazeera television logo and Arabic subtitles.

  “This was the scene this afternoon outside of what remains of the American Embassy,” the reporter said. A towering blaze burned in the middle of the street in front of the charcoaled skeleton of the building, twice the size of the men racing like savages around it, waving burning American flags. Firing rifles into the air. Throwing the bodies of US soldiers into a pyre fueled by their ranks. “Casualties are still estimated in the hundreds, but there has been no immediate confirmation.

  “In an impromptu press conference at the White House, President Wallace defended the decision to withdraw close to a quarter million troops from within Iraqi borders.”

  “This was not a result of abandoning the fledgling Iraqi government too soon,” the President said. His thick gray hair stood up as though he had been tearing at fistfuls, the bags rimming his eyes so dark they looked like bruises. “It was this administration’s—and this country’s—decision to bring our boys back home after the recent election. We’re saddled with the results of the former administration’s inept foreign policies, and, unfortunately, it falls on my shoulders, and the shoulders of the greatest military force this planet has ever known, to clean up this mess.

  “We have been assured support from the countries neighboring both Syria and Iraq. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and a solid list of others have all pledged military support, while offering staging grounds within their borders for our infantry. The Syrian occupancy of Iraq violates international law and should be seen as an aggression against a developing nation under the protection of the United Nations and the American umbrella.

  “Our country will not stand idly by while the oppressive fist of tyranny closes on these people who only recently tasted their first breaths of freedom, nor will we allow these people to be tortured and killed in defiance of the Geneva Convention. We liberated Iraq once. We can do so again if necessary. Let this serve as warning to Ali Ak-Abbat and his Syrian forces that the United States will not stand for this unprovoked aggression. Pull your forces out now. Leave the sovereign state of Iraq.

  “Or face the consequences.”

  “While the president declined to comment on the deployment of US forces, reports indicate that a fleet of battleships are already well on their way to the Persian Gulf to join the more than ten thousand soldiers currently afloat on warships both in the Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Fully loaded military transport planes have been taking off from Army bases lining the eastern seaboard all afternoon,” the reporter said, the camera cutting to a shot of him sitting at a desk on a news set. “Is this the beginning of World War III? At this point, one can only speculate, but with this administration’s platform of ‘Hands Off’ Diplomacy and the large cuts made in the military budget, the US appears at its most vulnerable since the dawn of the First World War. With the UN convening in an emergency session later tonight, only time will tell—”

  He paused, pressing his right hand to his ear. His eyelids closed and his lips moved over soundless words. After an interminable moment, he looked up to the camera, the color drained from his face, his plastic hair reflecting the stage lighting. At that moment, he looked like a lost little boy in an adult’s suit.

  “We’ve just received word that Al-Jazeera television has just broadcast a tape purportedly from Al-Qaeda operatives within the United States.”

  He sat there a moment, staring at the camera.

  “What’s going on?” Kotter asked, his voice a strained whisper.

  The radio crackled with life behind them. Sharp, fevered voices snapping back and forth.

  “We’re at war, kids,” Kimball said.

  Unblinking, he stared at the screen.

  The reporter was replaced by an image obviously shot on a handheld camcorder. It jiggled up and down in someone’s unsteady grip. Four men stood against a plain white wall behind a table, upon which rested what looked like an enormous garbage disposal unit lying on its side. Each man wore a black sack covering his face like a mask and a novelty white T-shirt. Disneyland was stenciled across one man’s chest with a picture of the Magic Castle, while another’s bore the Statue of Liberty. The third wore a Denver Broncos logo. The American flag graced the final man’s chest beneath the words “We Remember: 9/11”. He had scrawled a hurried slash across the flag with a marker.

  The man second from the left started to speak, his words garbled by both an electronic voice-altering device and his Arabic tongue. He gestured to the apparatus on the table.

  “This is a Uranium-235 explosive device,” a narrator translated with a thick accent, “the same bomb the infidels themselves used to annihilate Hiroshima. This is a two pound device capable of releasing 75 million joules of energy, or, in other words, able to create an explosion large enough to demolish half of New York City; more than enough to remove Salt Lake City, Las Vegas or Denver from the face of the earth.”

  He paused.

  “And we have four.”

  The other three men reached beneath the table and hefted matching units up across their chests.

  “Oh my God,” Thanh whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Control order four two six alpha,” a voice commanded from the radio behind them.

  All eyes turned from the computer monitor to the radio setup behind.

  “I repeat: four two six alpha.”

  “What’s four two six alpha?” Adam asked.

  Kimball turned to him, blue eyes set like stone in that white strip against his bronzed flesh.

  “Immediate evacuation of all units within two hundred and fifty miles of Iraq.”

  Adam looked to Thanh, who buried her face in her hands, then quickly back to the lieutenant.

  “We have forty-eight hours to fall back to the Caspian Sea for retrieval.”

  “What happens then?” Kotter asked.

  Keller turned around, jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.

  “Boom,” he said.

 
II

  12 miles west of Barstow, California

  EVELYN HARTMAN SAT ON THE ROOF OF THE DILAPIDATED BARN, HER EYES fixed on the western horizon where the desert terminated against the ridged foothills, speckled with small pines and Joshua trees. The last hint of the sun stained the sky a pale pink, which bled into the encroaching deep blue like a receding tide. She could remember sitting in this precise spot when she had been a little girl, imagining that on the clearest of nights, she could see the Hollywood sign stenciled into the mountains and the brilliant turquoise of the Pacific beyond. Like every other girl, she had dreamed of testing her fortunes in the magical city, fancying herself the next Carrie Fisher or Margot Kidder, but after making her first sojourn to the coast, those fancies had been relegated to a small locket she clutched to her heart. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous and blond like Kim Basinger, nor did she have the curves of Christina Applegate. She’d been a gangly fourteen year old with chestnut hair lightened by the sun to dirty blond, skin that was apparently allergic to every form of makeup, and clothes that had been clearly in style in Barstow, but were eons behind what they were wearing in Hollywood.

  Her dream had officially died that afternoon when her father had driven them down the Sunset Strip in their dusty old Ford pickup and she had seen all of the phenomenally beautiful women walking down the streets in clothes straight out of a rock video. Not one of them appeared flawed in any fashion. This was where the perfect people migrated like swallows. Her clearest memory from that trip had been sitting at a traffic light. There had been a pretty blonde waiting to cross the street in a herd of tourists. Evelyn could remember staring at the girl, her face familiar as though they had known each other at some point, but hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The girl looked down as she crossed the street, her eyes on her comfortable black shoes, greasy hair pulled back into a bun, smoke trailing from the Marlboro Light between her dainty fingers. She wore a tan waitress uniform, stained with amoeboid blotches of grease and oil.

  The girl had looked up, her eyes locking on Evelyn’s through the front windshield where she was pinned in the seat between her parents, before quickly looking back down to her feet and tugging her heavy brown purse back up on her shoulder.

  Evelyn finally recognized her. The girl had been one of the boarders during the first couple seasons of “The Facts of Life” and even had a good part in “Adventures in Babysitting.”

  She had watched the girl blend back into the crowd as they drove on toward Mann’s Chinese Theatre, tears blossoming from her own hazel eyes, all illusions shattered in that one bleak moment.

  The trip hadn’t been for naught though, as a couple days later they went to the Scripp’s Aquarium in San Diego and Evelyn found her true calling. It had been her first time ever seeing the ocean in person, and what she had found was a world beyond anything she could have ever imagined. Fish of every color and hue, every shape and size. A million varieties of crustaceans from electric blue lobsters to clams with lips that glowed fluorescent pink. Clown fish that actually lived in the stinging tentacles of anemones, immune to the toxins that killed most other fish. It was a society far more complex than even that of the world above the sea. There was definitely a food chain, but there were also amazing symbiotic relationships between separate species that defied anything she had ever seen. Crabs growing anemones from their shells; corals made of different species of colonial polyps; even jellyfish were composed of two different types of organisms functioning as a collective whole. It made the dry world of dust she grew up in seem like something from an old black and white reel.

  She knew her parents would never be able to afford to pay for her to go to college, not on what they made with their hatchery. Granted, a half-dozen Lady Amherst pheasant eggs could bring in a hundred bucks, but the market sure seemed to be dwindling even as the cost of scratch was rising. They had taken to growing their own corn, wheat, and sunflowers, but factored against the cost of their time, it was even more expensive. So she had to make sure that when she graduated there would be scholarship money, and after four years of killing herself in high school, there had been a full ride to the University of California at San Diego waiting for her.

  The money had covered the tuition and books, but had barely touched her cost of living, so she had worked part-time during the week at Sea World and her weekends at an organic grocery store, running a register and stocking shelves for the first couple of years before landing a higher paying gig in produce. She graduated fourth in her class with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences, majoring in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, and went on to graduate school at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

  During her first year of grad school, her mother, Karen, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which had metastasized so quickly that by the time they diagnosed it, the end was a foregone conclusion. She died within two months, leaving Evelyn’s father to handle the whole poultry operation single-handedly. The old man couldn’t afford to hire on any help, and though Evelyn repeatedly offered to come home and help him, he had insisted that everything would be fine once he managed to come up with a routine.

  A year and a half later, Gerald Hartman fell while patching a hole in the roof of the ringneck pen. It took him close to two days to drag himself into the house a half-mile away with a matching pair of trans-cervical fractures of the hip and three compressed vertebrae.

  Evelyn had been home within ten hours of receiving the phone call from the hospital.

  That had been three months ago now.

  Evelyn sighed and slid down the rusting corrugated aluminum roof, dropping into the mounded haystacks they used for litter in the pens. It wasn’t nearly the thrill it had been in her youth.

  The school had granted her a semester’s leave, but the way it looked now, her father wasn’t going to be in any condition for her to go by then. He was finally able to get out of bed, though every step he took came with a wince of pain. He wore an enormous plastic clamshell that held his torso firmly in place to take the weight off of the recent spinal fusion and prevent any sort of oblique torsion. The hip replacements had both been successful, but he was only now trying to teach himself to walk again. The surgeon rarely replaced both hips at once, preferring that they be done one at a time so that there was more of a gradual transition, but in her father’s case, there had been no alternative but to do them simultaneously since the broken femora had shattered his ilia bilaterally when he hit the ground. She could remember seeing his x-rays. It looked as though his entire midsection had been reconstructed with pieces from an Erector Set.

  So now she was up before dawn raking the desecrated hay from the pen floors and replacing it with a fresh layer, toting buckets full of scratch and water back and forth, tending to the incubation cabinets, packing and shipping eggs, taking care of the downy chicks in their red lamp-heated enclosures, and even releasing birds for hunters on the back acreage. Somewhere in between, she found time to fix the meals and look after her father, manage the business books and make sure both the doctor and the veterinarian stopped by when they were supposed to.

  But at the end of the day, she still managed to spare just a few minutes for herself. The following semester she was to begin work on her Master’s Thesis, which was pretty much the culmination of all of her life experience. Oceanic Agriculture: Industry and Conservation. Her working theory was that through the use of farms and hatcheries, more actual ocean could be set aside as preserves free from commercial fishing and trapping, and transoceanic shipping lanes could be consolidated creating hundreds of thousands of square miles free from the taint of man. The way she saw it, the ocean was the last remaining natural resource left that mankind had yet to pillage and plunder to the point of eradication and it was only a matter of time before there were people packed shoulder to shoulder on every continent, and all that was left was to look to the sea.

  After all, the entire beef industry was based on the premise of using large ranches to raise an
d butcher cows exclusively to meet the food demands. It wasn’t as though they hunted free-range cows. The chicken industry—all livestock industries, for that matter—was built upon the premise of captive propagation and wholesale slaughter. Why then were there still fishing boats trolling the coastlines, snaring dolphins with their tuna nets and raping the natural populations of crabs and lobsters? Surely, fish and crustaceans alike would be able to be harvested in farms in the very same manner as chickens and cattle. Aquatic kelp was one of the very best foods on the planet as far as nutritional value. She’d sold a ton of it through the market. For every square acre of corn produced, a hundred times as much kelp could be grown, and harvested twice as often.

  And then man could leave the ocean as he found it.

  It was a pipe dream, she knew, but one she had dedicated her professional life to living…a life that was now hundreds of miles inland.

  Brushing the hay from her dirty jeans and un-tucked blue and green flannel shirt, Evelyn crossed the windblown, packed-sand drive and scaled the rickety wooden steps to the back door of the house. The white paint was nearly peeled back to the bare wood, browned with age and smoothed by the torrential dust storms; the torn screen door stood ajar, preparing to bang against the side of the house with the first heavy gust.

  She threw in the door and closed it behind her, noticing the dust she’d allowed to accumulate on the avocado-colored linoleum floor and matching counters. Half of the mail scattered across the kitchen table was unread, most of it unopened. There was a stack of poorly rinsed dishes in the sink and the entire place still reeked of the meatloaf she had burnt the night before.

  There just weren’t enough hours in the day.

  Crossing the worn carpet through the living room, she ducked down the hallway and slowly cracked the door of the first bedroom on the right, just far enough to be able to see through with one eye. Her father was still asleep beneath the heap of patchwork quilts her mother had sewn, his microwaved lasagna untouched on the TV tray beside the bed. He had apparently knocked the TV guide from the nightstand in his hurry to get at the bottle of Vicadin that lay capless on the polished wood amidst a scattering of its contents.