by Guy Adams
Mr Wynter arrived at Mulroney’s ranch half an hour after his prey had flown. The front door was open and the house empty.
He sat down on a wooden bench that looked out over the fields beyond, pulled his cellphone from his pocket and dialled.
‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘But only just. I want every eye in the sky to be gazing down on the roads between here and Washington. They’re coming to get us and we must be ready.’
Six weeks earlier…
Mr Black sighed impatiently and ran his finger down the itemised list of technology that had been prepared for sale to the Americans. All seemed perfectly fine; why he had to get governmental approval, he didn’t know. After all, in matters like this it was the Department’s responsibility. The Department sustained, governments came and went. Especially this one.
‘He’ll see you now,’ the PA announced, offering Mr Black a smile she clearly practised in the mirror.
‘Oh, will he?’ replied Mr Black. ‘How gracious of him. Please tell me you’ve at least freed up five minutes with the boss? I don’t want to have to go through this twice.’
The PA’s smile flickered slightly but she swiftly fixed it back in place. ‘He has the full authority of the PM, Mr Black, as you are aware.’
Mr Black sighed. Two meetings with the King of Also-Ran in one week, he must have annoyed the universe for it to be treating him this badly. Reluctantly, he nodded at the PA and followed her along the corridor to the office. He ushered her out of the way and strolled inside, dumping the paperwork on the desk and going to look out of the window while he waited for the necessary signatures.
‘Mr Black,’ said the man behind the desk. ‘Must I ask again that you treat me with the respect I deserve?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Mr Black replied. ‘If I was treating you with the respect you deserve, you’d never get the stains out of your suit. Now sign off my paperwork so you can get back to being deputy arsehole and the rest of us can do some proper work.’
The other man gave a roar of anger and slammed his fist on the blotter. ‘I will not be spoken to like this!’ he shouted. ‘I occupy one of the highest offices in this country, and I demand that people acknowledge the fact.’
Mr Black charged across the office, grabbed the man by his boring tie and yanked his head sharply down so his forehead banged off the surface of his desk.
‘You can’t—’
Mr Black proved him wrong by bouncing his face off the desk blotter again. This time it gave him a nosebleed.
‘Want me to do it again?’ Mr Black asked, ‘because I will if you want me too, or you can just juice up those cherry lips of yours and kiss my arse if you prefer?’
‘I am—’
‘Nothing,’ interrupted Mr Black. ‘You are a caretaker, a man who holds the coats while the rest of us get on with the important stuff. Let me tell you a secret about power: if the dickheads on the street can vote you out, then you don’t have any.’
Mr Black straightened the politician’s yellow tie for him, plucked a couple of tissues from a box on the desk and handed them over so he could wipe his face.
‘Now,’ he said, his voice light and charming. ‘Here is the list of the technology we’re proposing to sell to the Yanks. I’ll remind you that your… government wants this sale; we’re raising you rather a lot of cash. Would you kindly glance at the list, then sign your name at the bottom so I can finalise arrangements?’
The politician looked at the sheet.
‘What’s an Ytraxorian Reality Rifle?’ he asked, scrolling through the list.
‘Nothing you need worry about,’ Mr Black replied. ‘If it was worth keeping, we wouldn’t be flogging it. If memory serves, it’s an unreliable lump of junk. Not that those don’t have their uses.’ He smiled and handed the politician his pen. ‘As you’re about to prove.’
Seventeen
‘Where’s Mikey?’ Larry Gulliver asked, running around the kitchen, tie half-slung, briefcase and jacket under his arm. He rammed a piece of toast in his mouth and then regretted it as he tried to shout around it and nearly choked.
‘One day,’ his wife said, appearing calmly in the doorway, ‘you’ll set your alarm five minutes earlier and save the DEFCON 4 emergency every morning.’
‘Where would be the fun in that?’ Larry asked, retrieving the toast from his mouth and giving her a smile smeared with butter and honey.
She gave him a look of mock-disapproval and nodded towards the front door. ‘Your son awaits you, as patiently forgiving as ever, in the safety seat. Now go!’
‘I’m going! I’m going!’
She tutted as his kiss left honey on her cheek and he dashed off, juggling his case, jacket and toast as he fought his way past the front door and out onto the driveway.
‘Hey, Mikey,’ he said, opening the back door and dumping his case and jacket next to the little red safety seat. ‘Try and be a bit more prompt, would you? You nearly made me late.’ He gave his son a big grin. His son thought about it for a moment and then grinned back, shooting out both of his little hands and cooing. ‘Jazz hands!’ his dad said, which made little Mikey do the same move again.
Larry got in the driver’s seat, started the car and pulled out onto the quiet, suburban street.
‘Mikey,’ he said, slowly working his way towards the Interstate, ‘don’t forget we’ve got the Leatherman presentation today, OK? So I need you to be on top form. You feel confident?’
Mikey gave a whoop from the back seat.
‘Or I guess I could do it and you just chill with Grace in childcare?’
Mikey whooped again.
‘If you’re sure. I don’t want you calling Jimmy from accounts a dick-limpet again though, OK? I think it hurt his feelings.’
Mikey whooped.
Larry put the radio on. ‘Let’s find some tunes,’ he suggested and grinned as Mikey offered jazz hands again from the back seat. ‘That’s right my man, something with a bit of class.’ He pressed the program button for KUVO, his favourite of the handful of local Jazz stations and began to play along to Duke Ellington on the patented Larry Gulliver Mouth Trumpet. On the back seat, Mikey chuckled along.
Traffic began to get heavy around them as they got closer to the city. Larry pulled onto Interstate 25 and tried not to let it bother him.
Duke Ellington switched to Miles Davis, Miles Davis switched to Stan Getz. Larry took it all, singing, trumpeting or drumming on the steering wheel.
In the back, Mikey whooped. Fell asleep. Then woke up and whooped again before dribbling slightly and falling back asleep.
Business as usual on the Larry Gulliver morning run.
Over Denver a decent morning was shuffling into a more surly mood. It just couldn’t decide whether it wanted to shine or rain.
The cars flooded in regardless. They would soon be stuck in their offices anyway – to hell with what the sky wanted to do with itself.
Ahead lay the Mousetrap, the major highway intersection north of the city. It had got its name when a traffic reporter, looking down from his news helicopter, noted that traffic would often come in but not easily get out, the sharp turns notorious for tipping lorries that took them too fast. The city rebuilt it in the end, after a Navy vehicle spilled there, toppling six torpedoes onto the highway. When one of those torpedoes started leaking, the locals really began to panic. It turned out be nothing, but the fear lingered and the city planners stepped in, softening those curves, widening those lanes. Now, fewer lorries tip over, but the traffic was still one snarled-up son of a bitch.
In fact, many of the locals would happily bend your ear about the complex routes they take in order to avoid the place. ‘The Mousetrap?’ they say, laughing. ‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’
At 8.17 that would become a very apt turn of phrase.
An hour earlier, the news helicopter for Channel 7, Denver’s ABC affiliate, was prepping to take off for the traffic report. The morning’s ‘roving eye on the roads’ would be, as always, t
he velvet-voiced Tom Washburn, a contrary bastard when the hangover was really pounding but a favourite with the ladies because, say what you like about radio, Tom had the looks for it.
‘Come on!’ shouted Jamie Kelver, the chopper’s pilot and not a patient man in the mornings.
‘Hold your goddamn horses,’ muttered Washburn working on that bedroom growl the lady drivers loved with a shot of espresso and the tail end of a Philip Morris. ‘You’re not the talent, you’re just the man that gets it from A to B.’ He looked out over the city and felt a sense of ownership. ‘Today nobody moves without my say-so,’ he told the view, before flicking his cigarette butt off the roof and strolling towards the open door of the chopper, the rotors of which had impatiently begun to spin.
‘Shouldn’t throw things off a roof this high,’ said a voice in his ear before the helicopter engine got so loud he could hear nothing at all. ‘It might hurt someone when it hits the ground. Tell you what…’ Washburn spun around, coming face to face with the sunburned face of Corporal Cotter Gleason, late of the United States Army, ‘why don’t you pick it up?’
Washburn didn’t enjoy his last panoramic view of the city, it was over too quickly and he had his mind on other things.
Kelver didn’t see any of this. He was too busy rueing the day he’d started working with Tom Washburn and running through his pre-flight checks. The first he knew about things being different this morning was when his door opened and a man dragged him out and to the ground.
‘What the hell?’ he shouted, thinking Washburn had finally flipped and gone Peter Finch on him.
It wasn’t Washburn, it was Lieutenant Corporal Patrick Mulroney, and he wasn’t ‘mad as hell’ either – quite the reverse. He laughed himself silly as he yanked the pilot’s headset off Kelver’s head and put a bullet in the pilot’s left eye.
‘You hear me?’ he said into the mouthpiece, the roar of the helicopter engine now more than conversation could bear.
‘I hear you,’ Gleason replied, pulling his own headset into place and climbing into the back of the helicopter, the Ytraxorian rifle clasped firmly in his hands. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Roger that.’ Mulroney climbed into the pilot’s seat and took over where Kelver had left off. ‘When this is over,’ he said, ‘remind me to buy myself one of these will you? I just love ’em!’
The helicopter lifted gracefully from the roof and headed out over Denver’s early morning skyline.
Once upon a time, Leonard Weisman would have loved a downtown address in Denver. A bit of history, a little class, certainly better than the dump he’d spent ten years in when married to Velma. Actually, he thought, he probably still was married to Velma, hard to serve the papers down here after all. Because these days Leonard did have a downtown address, not that you’d find it on any list of postal codes. It was hard to regulate mail to a cardboard box.
He’d been in the underpass a year now and had left a great deal of his old life behind. He was no longer even called Leonard Weisman. To his fellow travellers down here in this exclusive offshoot of urban existence, he was known simply as Liquid Len, due to the fact that he was a very thirsty man. Very thirsty indeed.
Liquid Len was awake that morning due to the unfortunate fact that he had barely managed to get his lips around a bottle the day before. Therefore he had not had the advantage of a good night’s sleep that being screaming bloody drunk gets you. Say what you like about unconsciousness, he thought, shifting himself around underneath his threadbare blanket, but at least it keeps the bastard cold off and makes the day go by a bit quicker.
A few feet away lay Mary the Greek.
Len had no idea if Mary was Greek (to him she sounded kind of Irish), but that was what they all called her so to hell with it.
She was a contrary woman, prone to screaming in the middle of the night. She believed the underpass to be besieged by alien life forms and was frequently convinced they wanted to probe her with their ‘evil ass pumps’. This opinion was frequently the highest source of laughter in the underpass and would keep a lot of the locals laughing right through until the early hours. By which time, they would be so drunk they’d all be trying to yank her skirts up and get out of the cold for a while. The fact that this behaviour was no doubt the cause of her paranoid delusions seemed to have slipped past everybody involved. But then the underpass was not a place for deep thinkers.
Len wondered if Mary might be of a mind for a little rough and tumble now. If nothing else, it might make him a bit more sleepy.
Then he decided he really couldn’t be bothered. Len was not what you might call a romantic.
He rolled out from under his blanket and strolled off into the bushes for a piss.
This act of gentlemanly privacy was not just civility on Len’s part. Truth was, he had a shy bladder and one had to keep some semblance of societal convention, even down here where the air was so thick with methane you could silence a hungry belly just by taking a deep breath.
While enjoying his morning ablutions, Len looked up past the concrete pillars and imagined who might be driving above his head. Sometimes he filled his days with this game. Gave them all names and wondered where they lived. Wondered what it would take to see them down here spending their days in a home with Apple Jacks printed on the side.
Not much he reckoned, not much at all.
He zipped himself up and decided to go for a stroll, work out the aches in his legs.
At 8.14 he looked up and saw the Channel 7 helicopter hovering above them all. In a moment of absurd solemnity, he saluted it. He had no idea why.
Gleason let the fronds of the Ytraxorian rifle close over his hand. Rather than be unnerved by the tingle of electricity, he decided to be emboldened by it. He imagined that charge coursing up his arm, making his heart pound faster, filling him with life and determination. He opened his heart to the weapon, let it see all he had to give, let it know how far he was willing to go, how little mercy was to be found in him.
It began to hum.
It was hungry.
It wanted to see a world burn.
Gleason pointed it at the coursing lanes of traffic below and pulled the trigger.
The effect was not instantaneous.
A laser beam did not scythe down bringing instant death.
The force that blossomed from the barrel of the gun was slow, almost lethargic. It floated down like a cloud of pollen rather than a wave of energy. The quality of the light changed when viewed through it, a crystal clarity, like that found just before a storm.
‘Jazz hands!’ cried Larry Gulliver, eager to see his wonderful son wave those delicate, heartbreaking fingers at him. Fingers he just wanted to kiss whenever he laid eyes on them. Then he saw the back of his own hands and the effect the almost imperceptible wave had on them. They grew paler, drier, Fat brown splotches grew between the lengthening grey hairs, liver spots enlarging like droplets of wine soaking into a cream table cloth. He held his hands up towards him, mindless of the road ahead, and watched them crumble from the fingertips down. Like the perfect ash of a cigarette crumbled away to nothing at the whisper of a breeze.
He turned to his son, to make sure he was OK, but the rest of his body followed his hands and all he succeeded in doing was spraying the backseat of the car with the soft, fatty ash of his face.
Car collided with car, bumper meeting bumper, as every driver experienced the same thing. Some had the foresight to slam a foot down on the brake, but the crumbling bones of their ankles couldn’t bear up to such strain and powdered with the impact. Passengers stared open-mouthed only realising that the same desiccation was visited upon them as their startled eyes wizened and wept out of their sockets to push loose the powdery flesh of their cheeks.
Liquid Len, looking up and watching that faint wave as it fell down on them all, bringing years of age as it passed, had a little longer than most to wonder what it was that had brought all the traffic crashing to a slow halt. He heard the crump of compacted metal and
the tinkle of shattered glass, almost graceful as the slow, rush-hour chain, hundreds and hundreds of lives, came to a halt above his head.
Then the wave hit him also and his salute, still in place, crumbled down into confused eyes. His last thought was an apologetic one. All these years, he thought, and Mary the Greek was right after all.
A peace descended, broken only by the constant shuffle of the helicopter blades as Gleason and Mulroney descended for a flyby. Mulroney held the camcorder with one hand, the control stick for the helicopter with the other. As they flew past, he let the camera’s lens linger on as much of the carnage as possible. They circled a few times until, with the distant sound of traffic sirens creeping ever closer, they decided enough was enough and sailed away to clear skies.
Below, car after car sat stationary on the Interstates. Those that were outside of the field of fire drew to a halt as they looked at the chaos in front of them, a chaos that spanned half a mile in all directions.
As the emergency vehicles pushed their way through, they moved from car to car, unable to believe what they saw. Every vehicle empty but for the ageing, crumbled remains of people, most no more recognisable than the emptied bags of vacuum cleaners.
Then a call rang out in the unnaturally still Denver morning. ‘Over here,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I’ve got one!’
Sergeant Dolores Cortez, of the Denver Police Department, couldn’t believe the look of the guy sitting naked on the back seat of the car. Hand over her mouth, she wondered if it was cancer that made him look the way he did. He was so thin, every vein visible through his translucent skin. It’s not cancer, she realised as she opened the door and backed off to let him crawl out. He was just so old.
