Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  His mother's status changed by the hour until she eventually lapsed into the coma that now entombed her in endless sleep.

  And the facts about the shooting became curiously... muddled.

  Things had seemed so straightforward at the start. Kris Osterman had shot his mother. Anzor Khujadze had shot Kris Osterman.

  But as the case progressed, certainty eroded. The few witnesses could not come up with a coherent story. His mother's secretary fingered Kris as the shooter. Two other people could not remember anything.

  A fourth person, a senior director for Project Elephant, had claimed Anzor Khujadze had been behind the gun.

  A curious trump card was played.

  His mother had come to Washington for the switching-on ceremony of the Project Elephant computer, the new national surveillance system that would stop another New York catastrophe from happening.

  Project Elephant revealed that this was just a charade. The computer had been switched on for more than a week.

  It was buggy, slow, and ineffectual.

  But it contained footage that damned Anzor Khujadze.

  At Anzor's court martial, they’d conclusively proved with video that he'd stayed behind the group, drawn his pistol, and shot the two other members of the guard detail in the back.

  Sun-Hi Shin had spun around, and he’d put a bullet in her brain. Kris Osterman had fired at him, missed, and then he'd been blown away too.

  The panic-stricken survivors fled in all directions as if driven by demons. He killed one more then holstered his sidearm.

  Medics had arrived, and the remaining footage showed Anzor flapping his lips, no doubt explaining that Kris Osterman had gone mad and had earned himself the Old Yeller treatment.

  The videos landed like a bombshell in court. Anzor's defense was blown to tatters.

  His lawyer had argued on and scored a few points.

  For one, several witnesses remembered Anzor being away from the group when the shooting had started. Two porters standing at the airport entryway could remember talking to him... and then hearing gunshots.

  For another, Anzor's service pistol had only fired three times. The Prosecution argued that Anzor had swapped pistols with Kris Osterman after the shooting spree had ended to add credence to his story. Fingerprint evidence did not back this up.

  But the video.

  The damning, awful video.

  There was no arguing with it. Project Elephant had Anzor Khujadze in a bind that not even Houdini could have escaped.

  A guilty sentence was handed down, and Anzor went away to Fort Leavenworth, the first man to be convicted on Vanadocam evidence.

  The DOD's legal representation tried a last-ditch jurisdictional ploy to have Anzor tried in a state that still upheld the death penalty. It failed, and Kwan didn't mind. He saw no worth in adding another body to the pile.

  A Project Elephant attorney had asked Kwan if he wanted to be present for the trial, to see the man who had shot his mother. Kwan had said no.

  What was the point?

  It was done. His mother was in a coma. There was no going back from this. To him, all the machinations of the court seemed comical, like buying a fireproof vest in New York after the bombing.

  Yes, it was mildly ironic that his mother's invention had convicted her attacker. But he was still alive. She, for all intents and purposes, was not.

  The way Kwan saw it, the last laugh was still being had by Anzor Khujadze.

  He stood by her bedside for an hour, sometimes two, letting go of time. Finally, he touched his mother's hand and let himself out.

  He wandered back out, gave a nod to whoever was at the front desk, and left.

  The ritual had ended. It seemed powerful, important, special. But it would never bring his mother back.

  I70, Kansas

  Deputy Tara Cordwainer finished the load out on the prisoner transport vehicle and got her first look at Anzor Khujadze.

  If her fifteen year old self had heard that she'd get to work a prisoner transfer detail involving America's most notorious terrorist—second most notorious, if one counted the New York Bomber—she'd have leapt at the chance.

  After ten years on a career track, she'd just groaned at the thought of all the duplicates and triplicates she'd have to file. Big-name criminals left an avalanche of paperwork wherever they went.

  He was a short guy, compact and stocky. His receding hairline and prison haircut worked in tandem to make him mostly bald.

  A bruise bloomed on the side of his head.

  If she'd heard correctly, there'd been a kerfuffle on the low-security wing yesterday.

  Apparently he'd gotten into an altercation with some guy in the next cell and had assaulted a guard. His security category had changed, and a tentative psych evaluation had pegged him as hostile and probably dangerous.

  He was now unsuitable for Leavenworth. This was the place you went when the dangerous stuff was in your head, not in your fists.

  Clank... clank... clank...

  He wore leg irons that allowed him to walk but not run. His hands were restrained by plastic flex-cuffs. Monadnocks.

  That wasn't right. That wasn't regulation.

  “We can't take him like that,” Tara said. “Where's his belly chain?”

  Assistant Deputy Miguel Herriera shrugged. “I checked the requisition room, but the last belly chain had been signed out, and the quartermaster had fucked off somewhere. I could have waited for him to come back, but the clock was ticking, so I just grabbed some Monadnocks.”

  “We don't transport prisoners cross-country in fuckin' Monadnocks. You know that.”

  “Hey, get off my ass, alright? We're behind schedule. Just get this guy in the back, and we'll get moving.”

  Tara sighed, shrugged, and unlocked the back of the PTV, exposing an aluminum prisoner's compartment separated from the driver's cabin by a pane of shatterproof glass. There was a single seat and a frayed seatbelt. The floor of the compartment was fluted and sloped down toward the door, so that vomit, blood, and diarrhea could be easily hosed out.

  “Get in,” she said to Anzor.

  Anzor shuffled forward with his head down and got up into the compartment.

  Neither Tara nor Miguel bothered to fasten his seatbelt.

  To do so, they'd need to bend over in front of the prisoner, which was a dangerous position for a guard. You could get a knee in the throat.

  Instead, they just closed the door on Anzor, hiding his thousand-yard-stare from view.

  He'd figure out how to fasten the thing, if he cared at all. Which was debatable.

  Prisoners were reservoirs of creativity. If they could figure out how to make a tattoo gun from an empty Bic pen, a rubber band, a lighter, and a disassembled airsoft pistol, they could goddamn figure out how to fasten a seatbelt while wearing plastic handcuffs.

  “We've got a ten-hour ride ahead of us,” she told Miguel. “Mind if I drive?” She wouldn't be driving. The car drove. She simply sat in the driver's seat, as per regulation.

  “Go for it. I'll run the CB.”

  They got in the front with Miguel in the shotgun seat. Tara checked through the glass to see how Anzor was doing, and started the engine.

  She wondered where he'd end up.

  They were taking him to a lock-up in Indianapolis for further processing. He'd spent the rest of his days in prison. There was no doubt of that. But where?

  San Quentin? ADX? Some other supermax facility? Tara didn't know.

  She only had experience with the law-abiding side of the bars.

  The suspension shook as they cleared the perimeter of Fort Leavenworth. A guard buzzed open the gate and waved them free to go.

  She stole another glance at their human cargo.

  She'd known a thousand men like Anzor. A big guy with a gun in his hand. Take it away and he became a boy.

  This particular wondershit sat in his seat, not talking or moving, staring at nothing, seemingly as dead as you could get while still bein
g alive. That he even had the volition to keep breathing was amazing to Tara.

  They did a dogleg through Kansas City, and hit the I-70. Traffic was still sparse.

  “You there, Indianapolis?” Miguel said into the CB.

  “Ten-four, Unit Six.” The dispatcher's voice crackled. “What's your twenty?”

  “Just left Kansas City, en-route on I-70 with an ETA of about eighteen-hundred hours. We are ten-fifteen.” Asshole in custody, in other words. “Do you copy, Indianapolis?”

  “Copy, Six.”

  She'd heard of Anzor's outburst second hand and knew him second hand, but what he'd done still surprised her. The halves didn't fit.

  He'd been a model prisoner all his years at Leavenworth, never making trouble, never rising to the bait of hostile prisoners or vindictive guards. He was extremely unpopular, but hadn't quite descended to scum of the earth.

  The Leavenworth inmates skewed patriotic—no matter how treasonous they'd been as free men—and Anzor was an easy figure to hate. Nearly everyone at Leavenworth had lost someone in New York, barring a few old-timers who'd been wearing prison orange for decades and didn't give a shit that there was an outside world. The fact that he'd survived these long years was a positive statement on his character.

  Apparently, someone had sliced off one of his fingers, but on the whole, he'd made it through his stay in their unhappy family pretty well.

  So why yesterday's violent episode?

  The car's tires sang down the interstate. They were doing nearly eighty miles an hour due east. A light thatch of oak, maple, and hickory lined the road. Tara saw the occasional whitetail deer.

  Miguel stayed busy on the CB. She amused herself with a polypaper copy of Guns and Ammo, black words dissolving and reforming into words again as she turned non-existent pages.

  She heard Anzor's voice. It carried quite well through the shatterproof glass.

  “Hey. Can I please have some heating back here?”

  “No.” She was used to automatically denying every question every prisoner asked her. Honor any kind of request, no matter how mild, and they'd think you were their friend. They'd think they'd gotten 'in' with you.

  “Oh, alright. I'm cold. That's all.”

  She saw him shiver in his prison johnnies. The orange paper clothes were sharp, clean, and new, contrasting comically with the human wreck wearing them.

  An hour later, he asked again.

  “It's really cold, guys. Can I have some heat?”

  They both ignored him.

  “Look, I'm not kidding. It's fucking freezing. Give me some heat.”

  He didn't get any heat, or even an answer. Even the fact that you consistently replied to questions could indicate to a con that they'd found a chink in your armor.

  Soon, they passed through Columbia, not stopping. Tara caught sight of Anzor glancing around at his surroundings.

  This trip is possibly the last time he'll ever see the outside world, she thought.

  They barreled right through, continuing due east. The woods and prairies continued. Occasionally the car's on-board computer slowed down when they were behind a truck, but otherwise it was straight driving. That was good. When you left behind schedule, you always held out hope that you'd make up time on the road.

  This time, they were probably actually going to do it.

  Anzor still wouldn't shut up.

  “Can you guys just give me some hot air? It's goddamn terrible back here.”

  Ignoring him was becoming a chore.

  “My ass is touching cold aluminum here.”

  “Shut up,” Miguel said. “You don't have any air outlets back there. We couldn't warm you up even if we wanted.”

  That wasn't strictly true. There were some high-pressure nozzles that fed through the main cabin, nozzles that could be used to administer cold water, pepper spray, knockout gas, or any number of other things.

  He'd better hope they didn't decide to warm him up that way.

  “Yeah, but there's a slot here you can slide open from the front. It would let air pass through from the cabin.”

  Tara looked. So there was. It was a plexiglass window four inches wide and a foot high. Strange how you never notice these things.

  To feed prisoners without opening the back of the PTV, she supposed.

  “Forget it,” she said. “You're not getting anything. Sit tight and enjoy the scenery.”

  He grunted tonelessly and sunk back down onto the seat. He shivered and rubbed his body with his arms.

  Miguel looked at her and snickered. This fucking guy, his expression said.

  She was a bit surprised at how full of complaints Anzor was. She'd only been in high school when he'd shot up Washington Airport. She'd always imagined a dashing revolutionary, a Che Guevara type, not a pathetic sap asking for warm air.

  But maybe all failed revolutionaries were like this. Only the successful ones got to reinvent themselves in the history books.

  She'd never admired him. She hadn't had a young girl fetish for serial killers. But still, the bathos was like a slap in the face. People were supposed to leave Leavenworth tougher than this.

  It was mid-day, and the sun glared through the PTV windows. Miguel shielded himself from the bright light with a magazine, an actual magazine. The wafer-thin polypaper ones weren't thick enough.

  The vehicle hummed and throbbed beneath them, changing gears, overtaking, speeding up, slowing down, and doing everything without a single human touch.

  Correctional facilities everywhere were on the verge of transporting all prisoners in self-driving cars. Tara had worked some of these details herself, shoving herds of orange-suited guys into glorified cattle cars, punching in the settings, and sending them off. But that was only for low-risk prisoners.

  Anzor Khujadze, as he'd demonstrated in Washington ten years ago and reminded an unlucky guard yesterday, was not low-risk.

  Protocol dictated that at least two guards had to be present for the transport of a prisoner in his category. And so Tara and Miguel were here, two butlers for a surly and ungrateful señor.

  “Damn it, sorry to keep asking, but can I just get a little hot air?”

  “Shut the fuck up.” This was becoming downright tiresome. Why couldn't they have ridden the other PTV, the one with soundproof walls?

  Suddenly, the PTV turned into an unpaved road.

  They felt it with a jolt in the shocks that vibrated up through their boots.

  “The hell? Why aren't we on the Interstate?”

  “I guess this is the fastest route. The computer calculates and recalculates based on weather and traffic conditions. Maybe there's a some kind of holdup on the I-70.”

  They bounced and shook along the dirt road.

  The trees grew thicker and were joined by bushes and shrubs. On the left hand side was a long ditch. Natural or man-made, Tara couldn't say.

  “I'm cold, guys. So fucking cold.”

  Miguel slapped the dashboard. “Alright, listen to me, Anzor. Here's what we're going to do. I will open the slot for exactly twenty seconds so that warm air from the cabin can reach you. Then we will shut it, and we will not open it again, come hell or high water.”

  “Thanks, that's great.”

  He held up a cautionary finger, as though Anzor could see it with his back turned to the cabin. “What's more, you will not complain again, or we'll spray cold water on you, and you can sit there catching pneumonia on the way to your next stone hotel. Deal?”

  “Yeah, whatever. Just give me some warm air.”

  Miguel reached between them, turned the catch release on the shatterproof glass slot, and slid it open.

  “Happy, dirtbag?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Miguel picked up the CB, perhaps to notify Indianapolis of their changed direction.

  Tara took her eyes off the long ditch beside them and went back to perusing the specs of the new Smith & Wesson hunting rifle.

  They both heard Anzor shifting around in
his seat, but neither of them looked back at him.

  A hand shot through the opening in the glass as fast as a rattlesnake strike.

  Anzor reached his arm through all the way to his armpit and hit the MANUAL DRIVE switch.

  In the one fluid movement, he snaked his hand across, snatched the bottom of the wheel, and yanked it hard to the left.

  Oh, fuck. The two words passed through Tara's mind like a turbocharged Catholic catechism.

  With an all-encompassing jolt, the vehicle rolled sideways, straight into the ditch.

  It was a heavy, multi-ton Mavron PTV, built to hold multiple officers and multiple prisoners, moving at better than eighty miles an hour.

  In that second, it lost contact with the road and became airborne.

  A four-ton bullet.

  Inside the cabin, the world flipped upside down. Miguel let out a shout as the CB radio flew from his hands. Vicious torque twisted Tara's stomach, and the sharp sensation of going down took over. The scenery around them spun. Their wheels were not touching anything. She had no reference point except the sinking feeling in her gut.

  They rode a roller coaster, blind and with no guardrails.

  The PTV smashed into the bottom of the ditch, almost tearing itself to pieces. Tara was flung forward, and her head crunched against the dash. The steering wheel broke clean off, driving the column into her chest and snapping off a rib. An airbag deployed and was immediately deflated, pierced by some unseen metal fang.

  She lost vision for a moment, unconsciousness rising up to meet her. Then she shuddered, and the black-tinged red swallowing her vision receded.

  “Oh, goddamn. Oh Christ.” She could hardly hear her voice over the hissing of shattered fuel and brake lines, deflating tires, tinkling glass, and metal shifting against metal, searching for its final place in the chaos.

  The throaty bellow of a dying bull came from the other seat.

  She saw Miguel resting his head on the dashboard, a starburst of blood spreading out from the impact point.

  Shiny white things tinkled off the dash. She realized what they were.

  His fucking teeth.

  She was dazed, stunned. Thoughts like concussion flitted through her head.