Skinner

by Charlie Huston

  The distance between the two men is no more than four meters. The rooftop of the shop less than half a meter above Skinner’s perch. He has no idea of its structural integrity. Assuming that it’s made of something he can navigate without crashing through and landing in a vat of acid underneath, he feels quite certain that he can maneuver himself into position without being heard by the man or seen by any of the other men with guns concealed nearby. Whether or not he can kill the man while remaining undetectable to the others is quite another matter. A matter he hopes can be offset by taking possession of the man’s assault rifle. After that, everything rests on whether or not he has indeed identified the hiding places of all the men or, rather, fighters (some of them appear to be women) waiting to ambush him. Six is the number he’s arrived at. Kill the man in the backyard and that would leave five to quickly pick off before they’ve ascertained where the gunfire is coming from. It is, he thinks, a highly idealized scenario.

  Preferable, by far, will be if Jae can successfully contact Little Shiva and get an alternative meeting place. More than likely this ambush is Little Shiva’s work, but requesting a new meeting place will at least force improvisation on the other side. Improvisation inevitably leads to mistakes. Skinner is very happy to play a little chess on this occasion. The opaqueness of the circumstances aren’t likely to reward blunt action. And, truly, his greatest wish at the moment is that he’d thought to take a piss before climbing up onto the awning. More than one man has been killed because a full bladder led to impatient action.

  To distract himself, he counts the fighters again. The number is still six. They are exceptionally good at being still. Perhaps less so at camouflage in this environment. They are, judging by appearance, members of the force that is holding the slum’s perimeter against the Indian army and Bombay police. Same equipment, similar garb. Well-equipped, excellent commercial-grade communications, newer body armor, favoring AK-47s, street clothes, and jungle boots. But however skilled they may be as soldiers, they are spread impossibly thin. The only things more porous than their perimeter is the supposed no-man’s-land the army has tried to establish around the entire slum.

  Expecting the possibility that any egress from Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport might be restricted in light of the current events, Skinner and Jae had been more than slightly surprised to find that not only were they not hindered, but there was no indication of hightened security anywhere near the airport. Arranging a cab to take them to within close proximity of Dharavi had been rather more difficult, but primarily because of the intense competition involved in taking possession of a taxi in the first place. After that, their final destination was entirely a matter of negotiation. The cabbie giving every indication that he would happily drive them through the police lines and directly to the heart of Dharavi, provided the compensation was above market rate. Having declined his offer to take them closer than Mahim Junction railway station, they did accept his suggestion that they leave a small amount on deposit with him, in consideration of which he would wait some vaguely defined number of hours and keep watch on their bags.

  It had been difficult to determine whether the bustling crowd surrounding the slum was more a product of curious onlookers eager to get a peek at an antiterrorist operation, or inhabitants of the slum who were equally eager to decrease their proximity to the mad goings-on in their neighborhoods. As for the prospects of a nuclear device, that was little, if any, great concern. While the world media were beginning to foam at the mouth over the prospect that such a thing might be true, the local angle on the story seemed to be that it was likely all a great deal of hoo-ha dreamed up by these terrorist people to increase their news coverage. Obviously incompetent, these people, because otherwise why would they be attacking Dharavi, where everyone knows nobody in government gives a shit what happens unless there is an election. An alternate reading of the events had been offered by their cabbie, one in which the real estate developers were behind the whole thing and this was how they were going to finally clear out Dharavi and begin Redevelopment in earnest. You simply look at the money and it tells you who is guilty all the time. Blood on the hands is good, yes, but look for the money is better.

  Skinner could hardly disagree.

  Having made their way through the crowds, paid a bribe to a police officer under the pretense of being members of the foreign press hoping to get closer to the action, and passed into the no-man’s-land, Skinner and Jae found it densely populated with Dharavi residents who had no intention of leaving. The general sentiment being that, if they walked away, the government and the developers would swoop from the sky, demolish their hutments, and drop an apartment block in their place. Only as they approached the center of the slum had the population thinned. The streets taking on the character of a troubled frontier town in a western. The helicopters becoming louder, everything else drawing to silence.

  When gunfire erupted some distance away, they were holding a position twenty meters from the defensive perimeter. As Skinner was taking a GPS reading and contemplating an approach that would minimize the danger of tripping a land mine, they’d watched a family of locals (mother, grandmother, four daughters) pop out of the window of a home on the near side of the perimeter, walk two meters and through the doorway of another hutment on the far side of the perimeter. And so there the path was clear of mines. Skinner saw no reason to complicate things. The hut on their side of the perimeter was unoccupied. Entering by the doorway and exiting by the window, they crossed the alley and walked through the door that the family of women had taken, and found that clan had already moved on. But the space was occupied by another grandmother and eight young men who were either her grandsons or her tenants. There was some confusion at their appearance, but Jae was able to use some of the rupees Terrence had left for them to ease their passage.

  Through the lines, it has become easy to see that the balance between the defenders of the perimeter and the forces of the Indian army and Bombay police is quite the work of fiction. The only thing that will keep the attackers from overwhelming the slum will be if they choose to rush the defenses on foot and horseback. Scattered, these jungle fighters would be more than able to cut multiple paths of destruction and death across Bombay. They are armed and equipped for just such a task, but, entrenched as they are, it will take only the most modest of armored forces to slaughter them and overrun the slum.

  Nuclear capacity.

  The cornerstone of their defense is a rumor. No wonder the authorities are only moderately troubled by the prospect. The situation on the ground speaks volumes about the great possibility that the claim is purest bullshit. In a room somewhere, several rooms, Dharavi natives believed to have ties to the fighters will be undergoing close scrutiny. Asked to illuminate the nature of the capacity. Encouraged to elaborate on what the fighters actually have in their possession. Beatings and blood, electricity, the knife, nothing spared in the circumstances. Disinformation breeds distrust, anger. Interrogation so often takes on the character of revenge. Skinner has seen this.

  The center cannot hold. Collapse will come soon. Whatever it is Jae will learn or do here, it will have to be accomplished quickly. The violence will be indiscriminate and wholesale. Pitiless.

  Minutes have passed. The gunfire stopped before Skinner and Jae arrived at the dump. She is hunkered in an empty hutment, working to reestablish contact with Little Shiva while Skinner perches on his awning. There is nothing for him to do here. His skills won’t shift the odds in their favor. With immense slowness and care he slithers backward off the awning, making the boldest of his movements when the loop of a helicopter brings its noise closest. Success and failure are easily judged in situations like this. No one shoots him, so he knows he has succeeded. A pause some meters away to piss on a wall, and then back to Jae’s hut.

  She squats with her back to the wall, laptop on her knees, looks up as he comes through the door, a panel of rippled green fiberglass that is lifted to the side and then replaced.<
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  “Little Shiva sent new coordinates. A few streets away. Or alleys. Or whatever.”

  Skinner looks around the interior of the shack. It takes only a moment to mentally superimpose a grid over the space and then inspect each square in sequence. Tiny home. Nothing of value. TV. Every hutment he’s seen has a TV, but no toilet or water taps. Utilities are a live wire running from one of the tangles of cable outside, and a hose running from a gas cannister to a single ring burner. No knives here. The utensils are all wood.

  “Do we know if it’s really Little Shiva?”

  Jae is closing her laptop.

  “You know who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?”

  “No.”

  She slips the laptop into her daypack. All their other luggage still in their waiting taxi, if not rummaged and sold off by now.

  “They were either written by Shakespeare or by someone calling himself Shakespeare.”

  She rises.

  “I have a set of coordinates from someone who either is Little Shiva or is calling himself Little Shiva. For all we know, the person Terrence wanted us to meet was killed before any of this started and we’ve been played all along.”

  Skinner looks again for a weapon, a matter of habit.

  “There’s going to be a great deal of killing here. Soon.”

  Jae, putting her arms through the straps of her pack, pauses.

  “Yes. That seems. Yes.”

  Skinner stops looking. There are weapons outside. He’ll have one soon enough.

  “Aside from the imminent danger of being caught in the middle of that killing. There is also the prospect of seeing it.”

  She yanks the pack straps tight.

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  He dips his head.

  “Yes. That’s why I thought you might want to avoid it this time.”

  She rubs the back of her neck.

  “The bee that killed my mom. I didn’t like that. The senselessness of it. So I tried to figure out why it happened. I started doing bee research. The area was not a natural bee habitat. Where did that bee come from? Allergy research. My mom hadn’t always been allergic to stings. So where did that come from? What I found out was that the bee colonies had been displaced by housing developments that had been displaced when a nuclear power plant was built nearby. And I learned that allergies are linked to a genetic mutation. Radiation, mutation. Nuclear power plant. I was young, suffering from PTSD after watching my mom die from anaphylactic shock. Not terribly rational. I saw a configuration connecting the Diablo Canyon Power Plant to her death. My dad worked at the plant. Blame seemed easy to place. But there was no configuration. What was happening was changes in my brain chemistry as I entered puberty. Obsessive behaviors that I learned how to focus over the years. Sometimes. But, even when they’re focused, I can’t really stop myself from finishing these connections. Configurations. Whatever finishing means in a given situation.”

  She stops rubbing the back of her neck.

  “It’s not like I want to be this way, Skinner. I just am.”

  She walks to him.

  “I need to finish this configuration. Terrence was counting on that. So let’s go see what he built for me.”

  She puts her hand on the back of his neck.

  “And maybe after that.”

  Kiss.

  “You can take me someplace safe.”

  Part of the myth of himself that Skinner created, part of the horror he instilled in others, was the idea that he couldn’t be surprised. But he can be. There is always something new and unexpected. The trick is to not be put off guard by the surprises. Jae has been a surprise, but he has kept his feet. Arms twirling wildly from time to time, but still upright. However, after they walk the empty alleys, twists, and cutbacks, guided by the glowing red dot on the GPS, and find the hutment they are looking for, careful to not be seen by the guards posted outside a large warehouse just up the wide main road, he is surprised to find that the hut is filled with children. Stepping inside, there are more surprises. For instance, the kids are manning a media center almost identical to the one the anarchists had in Gamla Stan. Surprised a third time to see a beautiful young woman tending a squat bright orange stove, a baby in the crook of her arm. And again surprised when a boy of ten in a muddy Transformers t-shirt stands up and tells them that he is Little Shiva. All other surprises eclipsed when Haven steps from behind the still open door (oldest of traps), aims with swift and deliberate care, and shoots Jae.

  Making it, improvised or not, a very good ambush indeed.

  a child in his home

  IT HURTS LIKE hell.

  The wound hurts in an otherworldly manner. Like something literally brought to her from another dimension. An alien sensation that it is not possible to comprehend until thrust upon you. Here now, occupying her body, colonizing it. Seed of future distress. And still, still she cannot let go of the configuration.

  Stupid fucking brain!

  She missed it. So lost in the configuration Terrence built, she missed how obviously backward and exposed their line of communication had been. A public message board? Skinner’s great fucking blind spot. His own brother. Heathrow. If Skinner saw Haven, then Haven most certainly saw Skinner using the public terminal to get online. Log on at the same terminal, the search registries are notoriously never erased. classicsteelbikes.com. Scanning over the most recent posts, how long would it take him to recognize his brother’s messages? Skinner trying to communicate with dead Terrence. Shit, imagine how he felt when he saw that the man he’d killed was messaging to Skinner from the grave. All Haven had to do was keep looking back at the board to see if there were any new messages. Supposed frame geometries that were GPS coordinates? How sly. Hack the account? Hack a message-board account and send your own private messages? Fucking who can’t do that? And Skinner. His password is probably something like skinner101. The elite protector. Fuck.

  Fuck it hurts.

  Haven is the smart brother. Clearly. Hacked the account. He contacted Little Shiva after he arrived at the original coordinates and saw the ambush waiting at the dump. He came here. He did everything they did, but he did it first. Then waited for Skinner to see the ambush and do the same thing. Already here, telling the kid how to respond.

  Played by Haven again. Used to pull his real target into the open. And then the asshole goes and shoots her.

  Fuck! It hurts!

  And that kid! Little Shiva the destroyer and bringer of light. Fucking kid. Terrence. Kill Terrence. If he was here, just fucking kill Terrence.

  Fuck! It! Hurts!

  Who knew a bullet could hurt so much.

  She can smell the blood. Route Irish again, blood and burning in the air. There’s so much blood that she can smell it. Shit. The shack is so small they probably all smell it. Two of the kids are crying. The one with the cricket bat (cricket bat?) and the one with the lazy eye. The girl next to them is shushing. The tallest boy is putting an arm around the lazy eye kid, hugging him. Jae would like to cry. Shit, tears are all over her face, but it isn’t real crying, just pain and anger. But she’d like to cry. Dying like this, she really wants to cry.

  Haven is still pointing his gun at her and she doesn’t know if she has time to cry.

  He’s pointing the gun at her on the floor, but looking at Skinner a meter away.

  “Do I have your attention, Joel?”

  Skinner hasn’t moved. Still frozen, half turned toward Haven, as if the gunshot has disconnected some wire in his head, immobilizing him. He hasn’t turned to look at Jae on the floor, poised on an internal cusp. Still deciding, Jae thinks, whether to try to kill his brother.

  Haven, pointing that tiny gun at her.

  “It’s a good wound, Joel. Outside thigh, away from the femur, full metal jacket. Close range, small caliber. As long as you don’t move toward me, the only thing she has to worry about is bleeding to death. And you can stop that with a tourniquet. Look at it. I’m not lying. It’s a good wound. Trust me
. I don’t want to kill Jae. I think you know that. Do something now. Give yourself a task. It will help you calm down. I know you don’t like being upset like this. I know how uncomfortable and confusing all those emotions must be. Focus. Just look at the wound. She’s not dead. Look at the wound and bind it.”

  His voice soft, coaxing, but authoritative. Man to child. To dog.

  Skinner looks at her.

  When he kneels, unbuckling his belt to wrap it around her upper thigh, she almost writhes away. An animal instinct to distance herself from a touch that will cause pain. His hands are shaking as he cinches the belt tight a few inches above the wound, cutting off the flow of blood. He looks only at the wound.

  The baby starts to cry. Haven looks up and the mother opens a gap in her sari, sticks the baby’s face inside and the crying stops as the tiny thing latches on and starts nursing. Still crouching by the stove, she lowers her bottom to the floor, leans against the side of the cot next to it. The boy, Little Shiva, is looking at her. The other kids look at him.

  Skinner is done with the tourniquet. His hands no longer shaking.

  Haven looks at the back of Skinner’s head.

  “Do you have a gun?”

  Skinner shakes his head.

  Haven nods.

  “On the cot.”

  Skinner rises, takes a few steps, turns and sits on the cot, careful not to let his legs brush the arm of the nursing mother at his feet. Jae’s blood is on his fingers and he rests his wrists on his knees with his hands palm up. A man come inside with greasy fingers, unsure what he can touch.

  Haven looks at Little Shiva and tilts his head in the direction of the guarded shed at the end of the lane.

  “What is it?”

  The boy looks from Haven to the woman with the baby. His mother, Jae now sees. Resemblance in the eyes and nose, point of delicate chin. A child in his home. Man with a gun. Bleeding woman on the floor. As scared as Jae is, the boy is far more scared.

  Jae’s mind does something to her. The part of her that is uncontrollable, the part that needs the configurations, it tells her to stop hurting so much, and the pain goes far away, becomes small. In its place, the configuration, pushing up against the interior of her skull, filling it with those arcing international flights, cargo carriers, opium routes, ice flow retraction, free-trade agreements, oil pipelines, urban growth and rural shrinkage, IMF bailout terms, Chinese auto industry orders, Terrence’s file boxes, ash concentrations in the sky, Club-K carrier-killer promo video, contraction meme adoption cues, Naxalite, West-Tebrum peak consumption charts, load-balancing fluctuations, critical dependencies, energy dependencies.