The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I have to find out.”

  They found the ferry rocking gently on the night tide. The captain was sprawled in the back, a fishing pole in his lap, head nodding as sleep threatened to overtake him. Hayes picked up a stone and sent it ricocheting across the stern. The captain sputtered awake and then hauled them in, complaining with each heave.

  “We have to get to Garvey,” Hayes said as the ferry started off. “We have to tell him that McNaughton has armed the unions. Maybe not all of them, but some, and enough. And we don’t know why.”

  “We don’t?” she asked.

  “No. We don’t.”

  “What about that thing? That machine?”

  “That’s why you’re going to go to Garvey,” he said. “I’m going up into the mountains to do some historical sightseeing. I’ll go visit Mr. Kulahee’s cave. I think it’s a tourist site these days. But no one there’s looking right. Not really. But I know how to.”

  “How?”

  “With this,” he said, and tapped the side of his head.

  The boat sped over the waves, dipping up and down as it sloshed through the water. They saw the jeweled mass of Evesden rise up ahead, the glitter on the black shoreline growing with each mile. Both Hayes and Samantha stood at the stern, watching it approach with different eyes, as though it were a foreign land.

  “Look!” cried Samantha suddenly, and pointed.

  They both leaned forward to see it better. It was faint but it was there, a streak of the night sky that was a slightly lighter color than the rest, almost ash-gray. As they came closer they could see that where it met the cityscape the streak’s innards were red and molten and boiling. Then the cradle spotlights flashed along the column’s side and they saw it fully.

  “It’s smoke,” Hayes said. “Jesus Christ, it looks like all of Lynn is on fire.”

  “What the hell?” said the captain. “What the hell is going on?”

  The boat veered closer to the bays of the city. They could hear screaming from far, far away. A whine like some insect, buzzing madly. Then a low-throated burst, and the column of smoke lit up.

  “What the hell was that?” said Hayes.

  “They’ve started,” Samantha said softly.

  “What?”

  “They’ve started. Don’t you see? They’ve started. The union men, with the guns. They’ve got them now and they’re using them.”

  Bells rang somewhere and went unanswered. People rushed back and forth along the dock front, shouting to one another. Someone cackled somewhere and there was the sound of glass breaking and more screaming.

  Hayes pulled out his gun as they came close to land. “Here,” he said, thrusting it toward her. “Take this. Get to Garvey. Just tell him what happened. Tell him what’s going on.” Hayes put one foot on the bow of the boat and waited for the captain to pull it in.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Samantha.

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. Then when he was near enough Hayes leaped down to the dock. He slipped and fell, recovered himself, and sprinted off toward the fire.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It seemed as though in Hayes’s absence the city had become a different place. Some streets had no lights and were filled with complete darkness. Homes were being emptied and small crowds filed down alleys and lanes, though none seemed sure of where they were going. And on some darkened streets one could look far down the block and see distant building faces lit with the hellish glow of merry flames.

  He managed to stop one young woman and force some sort of story out of her. “They took hostages,” she panted.

  “Hostages? Who?”

  “The union men. They stormed the Southeastern Office of McNaughton, tried to take hostages. Political hostages, they said. But things went wrong. The guns they had, they did something crazy. Hit a gas main.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Everything’s on fire. You got to get out, mister. Got to get the hell out of this town before it all burns down.” Then she turned and fled and was gone.

  Closer to the Southeastern the flow of the crowd was almost overpowering. Women clutching children or dragging them along. Men bowling one another over as they fought to escape the oncoming flames. As he crossed the Lynn Canal Hayes began to see fire trucks among the throngs of people, clanking, yellow contraptions piled with rubber tubing. They pulled up at the street sides and turned their nozzles toward the burning buildings and poured great gouts of sewer water through the windows. They seemed forced to work the fire at the edges, though; toward the Southeastern the inferno was immense, whole buildings crumbling under its onslaught, and in those places they could not venture close to the flames.

  There was a noise from the burning end of the street like a thousand steam whistles ringing at once. One of the firemen screamed, “Get down!” and the entire crowd dropped to the cement, except for Hayes. He watched as one of the building faces lit up as if an entire spotlight were focusing on one square foot of the building’s facade. Then a white-hot spark flew from an alley across the street to strike the glowing spot and the building erupted like it had been hit with an artillery shell.

  Hayes was blown backward off his feet and tumbled to the pavement. His ears rang and the street scene grew hazy and stuttered. He wondered what had happened before remembering that he was stunned. He took a deep breath, remembered what he had done under the same circumstances during his old life and the appropriate reaction, and wriggled his fingers and toes until the world became still again.

  He rolled onto his belly and saw a man running out of the alley across from the building that had exploded, carrying something long and thin in his hands, like a short pike with a scooped blade at its end. One of the firemen screamed something and several policemen fought to their knees and began wildly firing at him. The man screamed, the shoulder of his overalls suddenly dotted with red, and he pointed the thin pike at them. There was the piercing whistling sound again and the end of the pike glittered white. The policemen fell to the ground. From the end of the pike a small spark the size of a thumb came shooting out, arcing over them and the street behind them, far up into the air where it burst like a firework, shrapnel spinning down to the city below. The man stopped and tried to rerig the device but was hampered by his dead arm. The police began firing again and there was a wet burst from the edge of the man’s neck and he sank to the ground and lay there. The police kept firing at him. His calf burst. Then his side, yet still they fired.

  “What the hell sort of guns did they give them?” Hayes heard himself asking.

  The damaged building caved in on itself. Hayes could see the shivering light of small fires dancing in its husk. The building next to it fell as well and more fire spilled down the street. One of the firemen shouted something and waved his hand and the crews began reeling in their lines to withdraw down the street. This neighborhood was lost, they called. The most they could do was contain it.

  Hayes tried to stand. He watched the screaming faces rush before him. Watched as the fire licked adjacent roofs or crept down into bushes and small lawns. He saw there was something moving in one of the homes, ambling back and forth and covered in flames. It fell from sight and he did not see it again.

  He realized he felt something in the back of his head. Something cold and intense like a drill being pushed into his brainpan. Sensations washed over him, lurid terror and wild fear, eating into him and seizing up his heart.

  “Oh, God,” he murmured to himself. “Not now. Please. Not now.”

  But there was no stopping it. The attack was coming. He fell to his hands and knees and waited for it to pass.

  Yet it did not pass. It grew and it grew, swallowing him and pulling him down and drowning him. Soft blue lights began flashing at the edges of his sight, just as when he’d seen that strange vision in the trolley tunnel. He took a deep breath and wondered if vomiting would clear it, but as he did he realized that the pain was lessening, but the sensations we
re not going away. He could still feel the people around him, yet it did not pain him at all.

  He opened his eyes and stood and looked out at them and, astonished, held them clearly in his mind. Sensations flooded through him, the echoes of many thoughts and desperate hopes and wild fears, but they did not pain him or wound him as they always had. It was so clear, so focused. It was as though he had been blind, but now for the first time he could see the world clearly and without pain, and he looked out on what surrounded him.

  A chorus. A wailing chorus of fear and terror, and his soul was the reed that caught their scream and sang out, loud and high and clear, begging for someone to listen.

  He looked at the building behind him and knew immediately someone was inside. In the lower back room, hiding in the bathroom. More than one person, probably.

  Several nearby firemen began to load up to head out, and Hayes ran to one and grabbed him and shouted, “There’s someone in that building!”

  The fireman looked at Hayes, then at the building. “What? No, we evacuated that an hour ago!”

  “You’re wrong! There’s someone in the back!”

  “In the back? How the hell do you know? Get your goddamn hand off me.”

  “I’m telling you there’s a mother and daughter there!”

  The fireman shoved him back and brandished a leather-gloved fist. “Get the hell off me or I swear to God…”

  Hayes steeled himself and reached out to him, desperately listening to the growing echoes from within the man. It had never come so fast before, and so easily, and soon he heard…

  “Janey says you need to listen,” he said suddenly.

  The fireman stopped and stared at him. “What?”

  “Janey says you need to listen to me. To help. Or else it will have all been for nothing, all of it. Will you help me, then?”

  The fireman’s mouth dropped open. He gaped for a moment, then said, “How in the hell do you know?”

  “Will you help me?” said Hayes again.

  The fireman’s face grew pale. Shaken, he nodded, and followed Hayes into the building.

  Hayes led the fireman down into the basement, standing aside sometimes to let the man hack away at the doors that barred their progress. When they reached the bathroom in the basement they had to turn aside and cover their faces, as the ceilings were filled with thick rolls of black smoke, yet they saw a mother and her little girl lying on the sooty floor like dolls thrown aside. The fireman stuck his head in and looked at them for as long as he could, then looked at Hayes and said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Then he went to the front door and called for help.

  Four more firemen trooped in. Hayes withdrew to the street and watched. He could feel it when the firemen grasped their limp arms and dragged them out, the little girl pale as the moon, the mother drooling and unconscious. Hayes watched as the firemen laid them out on the cement and began to tend to them.

  Then the fireman he had spoken to approached him slowly. “How did you do that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hayes said honestly.

  “How did you know they were in there?”

  “I don’t know. I just did.”

  “Can… can you find any more?”

  Hayes turned and looked at the buildings up and down the street. “I think so. If I get close.”

  “Well. We’ll follow you if we can.”

  Hayes took a thick leather coat from them and began the haphazard process of sprinting up and down any alleys he could, frantically trying to listen for anyone trapped inside. He would know when they were close, as they lit up in his mind as they always had, but so much faster and brighter than he had ever felt it before. For a while there was nothing as he dodged and ducked among the flaming pathways, but then he skidded to a halt before a small ramshackle tenement, looking up at it. Then he ran back to the firemen, calling, “In here, in here! There’s one in here!”

  They came and broke the side door down. Inside was a man trapped in his stairwell, his leg broken in two places and his ankle crushed below a mound of fallen wood. When they found him he looked up, gaping like a fish and scrabbling at his leg. He was curiously bald, his hair having slowly withered in the heat, and his face glistened with the promise of blisters. The crew chief levered the boards up and they pulled his foot out, twisted and wet and red. Then they hauled him away, and he howled whenever his foot touched cement, tears running down his red face.

  The firemen stared at Hayes. “Jesus,” one said softly. “What the hell are you?”

  “Enough of that,” said the crew chief. “He can find more. Can’t he?”

  Still breathing hard, Hayes nodded.

  “Then go to it, I guess,” said the chief.

  Hayes sprinted through the network of streets, the fire crew shining in his mind and distant screams ringing in his ears. He led the crew through a maze of ruined streets and tumbling rookeries to three vagrants trapped in a cellar, having crept in in the middle of the night to find a warm place to sleep. The fire crew hooked the truck’s hoses up to the hydrants, and the hose chuckled and whistled as the water barreled through it until finally it shot a towering spray onto the alley. It blew the boards back and the fire died instantly, and Hayes and the crew pulled the drunken vagrants out and led them staggering out to safety.

  Hayes wiped sweat from his face before running back into the streets. There were more, many more. He felt them, when he looked. Felt their terror beating wild, hovering in the fire when they were near like will-o’-the-wisps in boggy mists. Minute after minute he returned to the gathering fire crews, telling them where he had found another and how they were trapped. Then he realized more people were following him. Not fire crews, but normal people. Normal people listening to his voice and following his commands.

  He was surveying the fire from a corner when he felt it start to leave him. His veil of awareness slowly began to recede, and the souls that had burned so brightly in the night now dimmed to become murky haze. Soon he knew he would be blind and broken and fumbling again, shortsighted and lost, and he cried out, “No! No, not now! Please, don’t!” But it did not stop. It was leaving him.

  He climbed back up to the top of the fire truck and began desperately shouting orders. He pointed up one street and told them where survivors were hidden, and pointed down another and told them where the fires were spreading fast. He told them who was hurt and where and how long they had. And each time the crews emerged from the rubble with a black-streaked refugee he waited for them to be laid upon the sidewalk before turning around and sprinting back into the fire.

  And the crowd watched him. They watched this strange, sooty little man bellowing hoarse commands and ordering them this way and that. They watched him climb up onto a car roof and summon some strange authority around himself like a cloak and then shout directions to teams far down the street. And for some reason they began to believe that he wielded some power over the fire, as if he could control the fire itself. Like he could merely point at a burning home and the flames would wither and die and not return. And how could they believe otherwise? Battle-scarred and tattered and grim as the fiercest warrior, how could this little man be anything less than the commander of all things within his sight?

  Hayes knew this. He heard what they thought of him. And he knew then that this moment would echo through time for him. This one would be different. In some way he knew that even though he had been whole and painless and powerful for only a short time, he had been what he was always supposed to be, and would be for the rest of his days.

  He was watching the firemen tend to the wounded when it left him entirely. The world fell silent around him, dead of all the thoughts and hopes he’d heard so clearly. Now he heard only the indistinct mutters he’d heard all his life. It was like being struck blind.

  Hayes sat down on the hood of the fire truck. He huddled in his coat and wiped tears from his eyes and fought to hold on to that feeling, that feeling of being whole, of being unbroken and able.
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  “Are you all right?” asked one fireman.

  “Yes,” said Hayes hoarsely. He stood up. “What else is there to do?”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  It took a long while for Samantha to get to Garvey’s apartment. In the past few hours the city had come under siege, practically. As Samantha hurried through the gloomy streets she held the pistol Hayes had given her at her side, glad it was there but hoping she would not have to use it. You could hear the din of the crowds and fires far away to the southeast, as if through a radio, and all the sky was smoke. The few cabs that were still out would not stop for anyone and trolleys sat abandoned in their tunnels and stations. Some of the eastern portions of the city had lost power, and there the windows and stoops were lit up with candlelight, little flickering stars spackling the building fronts. It seemed medieval.

  When she finally came to Garvey’s apartment she found it deserted. At first she was frightened for him, but then she saw it had not been ransacked. Everything was clean and ordered, as usual. Even the bed had been made. Then she opened the drawer to his desk and found his gun was missing.

  “Oh, Donald,” she said sadly.

  She thought for a moment, then went east to where the Wering Canal began. She followed the paths down into the canal to where they ran just above the water. As she moved she could hear people running around among the bridges and sidewalks above her, sometimes cackling or shouting threats. She was glad of the solitary darkness down here, underneath the bridges and forgotten piping.

  Soon the paths rose up and she was met with a string of small apartments, the first one being Hayes’s safe house. She went to the door and found it unlocked, then thought hard and pushed it open to reveal darkness. She kept the gun pointed down as it swung. There was a sharp click, the sound of a pistol cocking from somewhere back in the room. She shut her eyes, waiting for the bang, yet it never came.

  “Goddamn,” said a hoarse voice. “Samantha?”

  She cracked one eye and saw a gray electric light fluttering on far back in the room. A figure was hunched on the bed with a pistol pointed to the floor. The light grew to show Garvey staring at her, breathing hard. “What the hell are you doing with a gun?” he asked.