Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  I get dressed in near-blacks and grab my coat and stuff my pockets full of everything I need. Laptop and weapons in a messenger bag, more weapons in my coat, and what remains of my cash wherever I can fit it. The rest will burn. I will not be coming back. And it feels good to be moving, good to be doing. This is right. This is proper. It is time to move, time to move on.

  Time to stretch my wings.

  Apoptosis

  05/08/2014

  It is raining, which helps, along with the ocean crashing. Noise and cover: the freedom to make small, inevitable mistakes without them becoming fatal. Not that I expect to survive this. I would not mind surviving, but as the song goes, we get what we need, not what we want.

  This is fine. I need this.

  “You ready?” asks Josh.

  I look down the hill across the old naval base, long abandoned and turned into an imitation of a residential community, probably owned by some Spooky PAC no one will ever know the name of. Most of the homes are empty, but a few are occupied by government workers and at least one—our target—by employees of another organization entirely. Everything is painted a uniform institutional pink, the sort of color they used to use in schools and prisons to calm the inmates. Even the barbed wire around the place has been painted blunt under the same pink paint, someone’s idea of a joke.

  I am not laughing.

  “Ready?” he asks again. “Ed—”

  “Yes,” I say. “Let’s just do this.”

  “Let’s just.”

  Their defenses are nonexistent or apparently so. Despite the fence and security systems, the front gate stands wide open, daring anyone, everyone, to just wander on in, and although there are cameras, they are not connected to anything, mere props. Security theater. At least out here. Nearer the house, they have more cameras. Thermal. Likely some fancy sonics. But it is a fairly large house with fairly large blind spots, especially by the kitchen and garage. The trees and bushes—while giving them cover from the highway—also make an approach fairly simple, if you know where you are going. And especially if you do not have to worry about getting out.

  I scan the house one more time. There are probably four of them inside. Perhaps five, but I have only seen four, and they only have the one car. Not enough to keep watch indefinitely. Even they need sleep. But not me. It has taken twelve hours to prepare, two more to get here, and in that time Josh has slept. I have not, not since. I am more awake than I have ever been. More alive. I am fully and completely here, in this moment. In this now.

  It feels like enlightenment.

  It feels like right.

  I look at Josh, hold out my hand. He gives me the keys to the Mercury, then hefts Joe’s old M107 and spits a gob of chewing gum off into the rain. Then he holds out his other hand, waits. I take it, glove in glove.

  “We’re going to die, you know,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “But not first.”

  He nods, pumps my hand twice, then melts into shadow. I hear him sigh, faintly, through the rain, and then he turns and is gone. He is, of course, right. This is death. Death for us all. Not just for us, but for this entire cell, and perhaps others adjacent. This is not supposed to happen. Operational security demands that cells never learn of each other. Compartmentalization, they call it. Everything goes through channels. But Nick has changed that with this power play of his. He has disrupted the state of things, and everyone will pay for it. Starting with him.

  Of course, the thing is, this scheme of his probably works under most scenarios, precisely because of who he used. Bring her in, let her hands get dirty and take out your opposition, then take her out, and step into the vacuum. His only mistake was using her. Because she was not his to use. She was mine.

  I run a hand up and over my face, pushing rain-soaked hair back across my head. The other hand is through the open window, reaching in past the driver; he does not complain, on account of being dead. He learned the hard way why you never pick up hitchhikers after midnight. I slide the key into the ignition, and my hand lingers there for a moment. Rain wets the door, the steering wheel.

  • • •

  “Can I drive?” she asked me, not long after we got to San Francisco. Passenger window open, her feet dangling outside, front seat misted by rain drifting in. She did not seem to notice. We were cruising around on 280, not too far from where she would eventually commit infanticide. But that was just a future imperfect at the time.

  “Can you?” I asked.

  “May I?”

  I pulled over at the next rest stop and got out. She slid across the seat, ankle catching on the gear shift momentarily, one of her laces coming untied in the process. She let it dangle as I clambered in the opposite side and shut the door. The imperfection annoyed me; not that it existed, but that I could not fix it.

  She started the engine, and then sat there, hands on the steering wheel. Seconds passed.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  She looked at me and smiled.

  “I don’t know where we’re going,” she said.

  • • •

  Down, I think. We’re going down. Together.

  I turn the key. There is a spark, and flame and noise, and smoke in the rain. Then I shift the car into drive and let gravity take over. Headlights bounce and bob, and the front door of the house opens and one of them steps out, raising a hand and a gun. But the car does not stop, will not stop. The man shouts, and as he takes aim at the windshield there is a noise and what is left of him falls to the ground. If nothing else goes right then at least Josh has given us first blood. The car drives onward and hits the front of the house at about four miles an hour, a few feet from the door, not nearly hard or fast enough to cause any structural damage, not even enough to break the front window. But that was never the point.

  Two more of them come out the front door and they fill the car with fury: the windows smash and the nameless driver collapses against the steering wheel, drawing more of their fire. Josh and I had disagreed on this part, briefly. He wanted to tie the guy’s shoelaces to the accelerator, let the car build up speed and send it through the wall and into their kitchen. I talked him out of it. The object was not to destroy the car or the building. It was to destroy the people inside. Infrastructure is hard. People are soft. Either you get inside, or you get them outside. Why try to crack the shell when they will do it for you?

  The two guards keep low profiles, duck and cover, communicate well. One checks on his friend. Former friend. The other stays low as he moves cautiously around to the driver’s side of the car, opens the door, and closes the circuit.

  The explosion sends him into a nearby tree, the concussion taking out the rest of the glass in the car and some of the house.

  This part, Josh and I had agreed on.

  Now the clock is ticking. And calls are being made, and the nearest police are just minutes away. I step from the shadows, pocket my earplugs and let the sound of the rain fill my head once again. I open my trench and pull out my MP5K, then move towards the back of the house, because that’s where they’ll be coming out now, if at all. Josh will have to be trusted to clean up the front. I only hope he stays somewhat on target, because what he’s using can shoot right through the entire house.

  I’m not one for guns, as I’ve said before, but they have their place. Given more time, more warning, more materials, I’d have gladly gone with another plan, something safer, something where I’d be far, far away when it all went off and scattered ashes in my wake. Something with more bombs, more chemicals, and less risk. I’ve seen over half a century this year, and my body is well aware of this. But we do what we can with what we have, and right now I’ve little in me but hate, and blood.

  Guns will have to suffice.

  I can hear Josh firing as I near the back door—not just to kill the two out there but to drive the rest out the back. And sure enough, one pops out, and I give him two steps and then open up, fully automatic. I swear I can hear each individual bull
et—crack crack crack—watch each one spin across the way like a little black bird finding its home. It seems like slow motion, like a dissection, as the shred of bullets disrupts his vascular system, the hydrostatic shock stretching and compressing vital organs, his nerves trying desperately to communicate with his brain fast enough to respond. For several seconds he operates on remote control, finger twitching and spraying a few rounds roughly in my direction, but there’s more not me than me to hit, and he hits only not.

  And that’s four.

  I give it a full minute, as long as I can, before deciding that if there’s a fifth, he’s not coming out. Which means I have to go in. And I throw away the MP5K and pull the 870 from under my coat as I step over the body of the one I brought down. Parts of him—of all of them—will live for up to a day. The corneas, for instance. And I think that perhaps, somehow, they might have to watch each other slowly die for the rest of the night, and this seems just.

  I step towards the back door and slip in the mud, stumble sideways. And this saves me, because there is a sudden flare and a crunch. I know I’m not dead because I can feel the pressure tear my ears open and there is no more sound, and I am bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts and my ears and my nose, tiny bits of shrapnel with me forever now, for however long that is. But it does not hurt, because I don’t have time for that. I step forward and the fifth is there, and his handgun is yelling at me but I cannot hear a thing. My vest takes two rounds and my arm takes one and then it hurts, but not enough to matter. I raise my shotgun and squeeze something and his insides go out as he falls back into the bedroom. I fire again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And it’s only when I am reloading that I notice this fifth man was Nick, and this is what I came here for, this act of vengeance. I feel cheated somehow, having not realized it before. Cheated that it came and went without my knowing it. So I fire one last time, for Xtian.

  There.

  I lower the shotgun and scan the room. The world spins and pain crashes down, and the details hammer themselves home, bright graffiti on white walls. The room is saturated in red, from the haze before my eyes, from my trench stained and growing darker as I bleed. Nick is dead, they are all dead, and there is a girl on the bed, and there is a girl on the bed, and there is a girl on the bed, and she is broken, so broken, pink and red and unmoving. And she is Xtian.

  I drop the shotgun.

  She is tied, hands behind her back, face mashed into a pillow, and her back is black and blue from neck to thighs. There is red, some of it her own, and there is more, but I cannot look, just knock over the electrodes and knives and pliers, knock it all aside and grab a blanket and wrap her limp body inside because I do not want to see what is left. I try to lift her but my arm is not working right, so instead I just drag her by a cold broken ankle through the living room and towards the garage, because I will not leave her here. Because she is mine.

  Although I cannot hear it, I can see through the haze and the tears that the goddamned television has stayed on this entire time. Nothing has survived in here but this and me, and I am having doubts about the latter. I want to laugh and cry and scream. Instead, I find the remote and after a moment of blue uncertainty, Nickelodeon comes on, and I imagine Xtian watching it in my living room, laughing, happy to be alive.

  And I can think of no better thing. And no worse thing.

  There is movement to my left, and I drop Xtian to the floor and pull out a random handgun and turn and aim, peripheral vision driving it all. Josh enters through the front door. He drops his rifle and pulls his balaclava off his head.

  Whoa, whoa, it’s me, he mouths, and I cannot hear the words through the ringing in my dead ears but I can read his lips, his expression. I give him a moment, just long enough so he knows this was not reflexive, that this was not accidental. That this was, in fact, necessary.

  And then I pull the trigger, and tie off a loose end.

  In the garage, I find keys in the ignition of a black Saturn, and after the briefest of moments on the cold ground, Xtian’s body goes in the trunk, because I cannot bear to look at that in the rear view mirror. I rest her head atop my messenger bag and drape my bloody coat over her face, then lie the shotgun alongside her, closing the trunk just as the garage door slides open, and I feel like something rising from a tomb, biblical. Death behind, and who knows what before me. Whatever Nick was trying to start, I just ended it, along with whatever plans might have been brewing here in this dead cell. Dead by my hands, murder-suicide of a sort because there is going to be a large price to pay. At least one semi-involved party has survived all this—Abe—along with I don’t know how many others who were not here tonight. I don’t know who was involved with what, but that won’t matter. Word will get out, and when it does, I will be to blame for all of it.

  I am going to be cut off, probably completely, and perhaps forever. There will be no more jobs but those I find for myself. No more money but what I already have. No more secret nests but the ones I make myself. No one to trust, now, except myself. But somehow rather than depress me, all of this just renews my desire to live. To spite them.

  It is time to fly, and I am flying far and fast. Farther and faster than ever before. Goodbye, goodbye California.

  Although time is short, I pause for just a moment as I slide into the driver’s seat, aches both old and new making their presence known. I turn back like Orpheus, considering the cans of gasoline in the garage, the fertilizer in the other room. Normally I would burn it, burn it all and leave nothing but ash, but instead I decide to simply leave it. Some things cannot be scrubbed away, only covered up, and that is not my job.

  Not any more.

  SEA

  Clean Slate

  08/15/16

  It is sometimes hard to imagine that it has been over two years now since everything fell apart. I have of course done plenty to stitch myself up even with so many missing pieces—I am nothing if not a survivor—but lately I am realizing that some holes can never be filled, some wounds never healed. I want this thing to scab over, to scar and fade and be done with, but instead it festers and hurts. Infected. This will last, this new thing, and I had better get used to it.

  I am still in Seattle, still in the Ballard neighborhood, still living in the only hovel of mine that they did not know about. Seattle is as commercial and urban as things come—there are at least four coffee shops, including two Starbucks, within a block of where I sit—yet somehow there is a sense of escape here. The friendly reek of fish and oil off the pier, the cry of seagulls from above, looking out for me. Safe. Still a city, still horrifying me with the sheer number of other beings around, breathing, moving, sweating. But it feels different, tastes different. Here I can occasionally see nothing but trees, can wander down to the beach and look out across the Sound and imagine I am alone.

  I could have been alone in Portland too, and that would have been the easier option. It was in the way of Seattle, after all. And there were several hours that first night when I thought of staying there, of sinking some roots, trying to get back in, to see how far the damage had gone. I had places I could stay, there. Theoretical jobs. But they knew Portland. It was too risky. And seeing Xtian ruined … changed my mind.

  To think that I brought her in, and in the end, she brought me out.

  The end—could that be true? Is it over? Or just me?

  The smell here reminds me of my youth. We had a boat, for a while, and the month before my mother died, we went fishing on the lake. On the way back in, we saw a wallet in the water, and my father fished it out with a net and found a few hundred dollars inside. A lot of money, back then; my father had been out of work, like I am now. He said we should just keep the cash, but my mother insisted the proper thing to do was to return in the wallet, so we got in the truck and drove for two hours to the address on the license. My father knocked on the door, and went inside, and two minutes later he came back to the truck and threw four dollars on the front seat; this
was the reward for returning a wallet full of cash.

  I suppose the moral of the story could be that kindness is its own reward, but what I take away from that whole thing is that sometimes doing the right thing is the wrong thing to do.

  And I wonder a lot lately, if I have made the same mistake.

  • • •

  I walk down to the Fremont neighborhood and select another café to lurk at. Not in a hurry, and I do not think I can tolerate the bus. Or afford it. This is what I do these days—walk from coffee shop to coffee shop, sometimes buying something, sometimes not. Writing. Wasting time. Looking for opportunities. Like the one that jumps upon me here almost immediately.

  I hear her before I see her, or perhaps I feel her first, a subtle shift in air pressure as she sits at the table beside mine with a rustle of shopping bags and a grunt. I sneak a glance at her reflection in the window: mid-forties, leopard-print coat, more makeup than a clown college. I want to turn away but I cannot help but stare as she fastidiously wipes off her fork, knife, and spoon with a napkin, then inspects her glass for smudges and viral contagion. Then she pulls out her purse and pops open a little bottle of hand sanitizer and rids her hands of all but zero-point-one percent of what is bad with the world.

  I would remember none of this if not for the fact that she then—thoroughly disinfected—proceeds to pull out two filthy things: a phone, and a cigarette, both of which she sticks in her face as she walks to the corner, beyond the magic railings and NO SMOKING WITHIN 25 FEET signs. The irony of it all sticks with me, how selective she is about her pollutants—so much so that I almost do not notice she has left her shopping bags behind at the table. My initial reaction is instinctive—concern, since I have personal experience with abandoning packages in public areas. But she does not seem the type to bomb a coffee shop in the middle of the day, so I push concern aside and move on to my second reaction, which is to tuck my laptop under my arm, grab her bags, and walk away as fast as my legs will take me.