The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination

by Bright,R. F.

  MacIan’s voice flattened. “What do they make?”

  Max looked even more surprised. “They don’t make anything. They’re taking railroad tracks back to China.”

  MacIan drew a smoldering breath through clenched teeth.

  Pastor Scott tagged in. “They set up in the old Pennsy roundhouse, years ago. Built special flatbed cars with arms that reach over and pull up the tracks. They started way down the line, somewhere in Nebraska, near the foot of the Rockies. Then they roll back this way, dismantling the tracks behind them as they go. An arm reaches over and pops the spikes off the ties, then lifts the tracks onto flat-bed cars, hundreds of them. Once they’re all full up, they drive back to Portage, unload, go back to where they left off — start in again. I heard they were done all the way up to somewhere in Ohio now.”

  “They take the wooden ties, too,” Fred said. “They’re worth more than steel. Not a lot of wood left in China. This is all part of one of those settlement deals, or whatever you call ’em . . . the trans-something or another trade agreement? I’m not sure which is which. Nobody asked us. Someone made a fortune and stuck us with the bill.”

  Pastor Scott’s rage had long ago boiled down to vapor. “It was all baked-in-the-cake, back when we made all those Trade Agreements. They shot our future in the head, we just weren’t smart enough to lay down and die.”

  “It’s state of the art,” interrupted Max. He’d heard all this political stuff before. “I love those airships. Helium gives them lift and the same hydrogen fuel system as this Peregrine powers their thrusters. It can carry just about anything all the way from here to China in about a month. Makes its own hydrogen from condensation on the way.”

  MacIan was impressed, but not in a good way.

  Max realized he was gushing and throttled back.

  Pastor Scott’s voice filled with impotent indignation. “Four hundred years of building this country, all sold off to pay for five decades of corruption and incompetence from short-sighted, double-dealing reptiles . . .”

  This was all just noise to Max, but he kept a read on MacIan.

  MacIan looked straight at him. “What d’you think?”

  Max made a ‘who me’ face and scrunched up his shoulders.

  MacIan seemed to be looking across time itself. Slowly his gaze returned and he aimed it at Max like a tractor beam.

  Max had never seen this before — absolute defiance.

  A mile or so before Lily, MacIan spotted what the Lilians called the Back Side, a cluster of odd structures on the opposite side of the hill from the village proper. These structures spiraled along beautifully laid retaining walls that curved down the hillside, creating lovely terraces. The expensive bricks, baked to perfection and glazed for eternity, were the final contribution from the nine good houses the good people of Lily had carefully dismantled and repurposed. Seven other good houses were turned over to seven families who were willing to fix them up and live in them, Max and Fred among them.

  MacIan chuckled at the sight of a pig-pen with a fancy terracotta roof and Romanesque columns at each corner. Several terraces wrapped around a hayloft made entirely from hand-carved doors of the finest hardwoods and stained glass. The larger of two tool sheds was clad in Edwardian, dragon’s scale siding with an elaborately trimmed porch. Even Fred’s purely utilitarian network of drainage tubes was done with great care. MacIan had seen many similar set-ups, and not just in America. This was one of the best. Well thought out, perfectly executed and it was beautiful. Why not? All the material was just sitting there.

  A wireframe of the hillside below popped onto the heads-up display and the camera zoomed in on a Browning M2, mounted behind the smaller tool shed’s gingerbread-trimmed eyebrow window.

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  Fred broke out his most cantankerous grin. “Fully defensible.”

  “How many do you feed?”

  “We feed everyone we can.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “Civility is vanity’s first victim,” said Fred.

  Max rolled his eyes. “He’s a poet.”

  “Buried in the graveyard of ambition,” MacIan finished the verse, and now he and Fred were true friends. Max drew a blank; he’d never heard the second line.

  Fred could not have been happier. He hated it when people didn’t get his jokes. “We feed . . . probably around ninety or so. It all depends. It’s not hard. That’s not much food to produce these days.”

  Max said, “With our own inventions, we’ve got a productivity multiplier of eleven to one. It doesn’t take much when one can feed eleven.”

  MacIan was impressed. “Why all the firepower?”

  “You’re only seeing this now that the work is all done,” said Fred. “It took a long time, but we were extremely prudent cannibals. Nothing went to waste.”

  Pastor Scott seemed to know what lay behind MacIan’s questions. “We had to protect what we worked for. Our families depended on us.”

  Max was not so squeamish. “We buried them there at the bottom of the hill, in that field over there, more than two hundred,” he said. “Not our fault we worked hard enough and smart enough to make it. We did what we had to do.”

  MacIan really liked this kid. “There are monsters in this world.”

  Max feared he’d sounded a little too uncaring. “That was how it was,” he said apologetically.

  “Can’t blame a man for his bubble,” replied MacIan.

  The Peregrine lifted up and over the Back Side then dipped straight into the village square, where everyone was waiting for the show to resume. The landing did not disappoint. The adventurous four stepped out and MacIan whispered, “Triage.” The shelf with the dead body slid open. MacIan rolled the body over, reached into the back pocket, and pulled out a rip-stop nylon wallet, with red piping to match the missing red coat.

  Max’s heart sank.

  MacIan could tell immediately that the expensive wallet stuffed with credit cards was not the kind of thing a hiker would carry. A transparent window showed a driver’s license with a picture of a good-looking older man named Arthur Gager. MacIan flipped the driver’s license back and rooted through the receipts sticking out of the slit-pocket. “Gotta go,” he said, and motioned to Max.

  Max anticipated a handshake and a friendly goodbye, but MacIan yanked the body around, pulled off the expensive hiking boots, and tossed them to Max. “These’ll go nice with the red parka.”

  Max clutched the boots and backed away. “How’d you know about that?”

  MacIan raised one eyebrow, then pressed the palm of his right hand against Max’s forehead and jumped into the Peregrine.

  Max stood dumbfounded. But as the wind-dome dropped, he felt something stuck to his forehead. He peeled off it a receipt from a New York City sporting goods store: 1 Size 48L - Red - Down Filled Parka = $1,729.00.

  Trooper MacIan landed at Bedford Barracks and taxied to the morgue entrance. The barracks was a mid-century modern facility, a key Pennsylvania State Police headquarters that’d devolved into a remote outpost of the National Police Force. The aluminum frame and glass block structure was low, flat-roofed and built to last. It looked almost new sitting on its knoll overlooking the historic town of Bedford, a seldom-used crossroad to Washington D.C., the Mid-Atlantic States, New York and New England, with Pittsburgh eighty miles to the west. A major crossroad in the middle of nowhere.

  MacIan got out and gave Arthur Gager’s body a quick once-over. He was checking his own pockets for the victim’s wallet when Cassandra’s voice came over the loudspeaker, calling him to Commander Konopasek’s office. Her voice trailed off into the silence of the winter forest on the verge of spring, alive with promise. He felt so alone.

  Commander Konopasek was a second generation Pennsylvania State Trooper. He hated that cliché, but it fit. The only thing he hated more was the consolidations that had castrated his beloved Pennsylvania State Police. They were the first State Police in the nation, had been no
torious straight-shooters for over a century, and got a thumb in the eye for their effort.

  Commander Konopasek had been asked to take over the newly consolidated Bedford Barracks, or take an early retirement. He had no life outside these barracks, which might account for his lack of social skills. Although well-spoken, his timing was so off he could barely tell a knock-knock joke.

  Three sharp raps sounded on his door. “Enter,” he said.

  MacIan stepped in and stood at attention. The Commander looked up from his desk with a silvery pen hovering over a stack of forms. “Sit.” He aimed the pen at an aluminum chair directly in front of his desk. MacIan sat, but maintained a respectful bearing.

  “So, ah, you just got here, when wazz’at? Oh, last night?” He pushed the forms into a pile and gave MacIan a welcoming grin.

  MacIan relaxed a bit.

  “Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m required to give you the speech. You know the little sack o’ shit I’m talking about?”

  “The one about safety and a proud history?” said MacIan cheerfully.

  A twinkle lit Konopasek’s eyes. “The very one.”

  MacIan liked this old guy right off the bat.

  “We haven’t talked, so we probably don’t have much to talk about then, do we?” said Konopasek, thumbing through MacIan’s paperwork and dotting his index finger on the tip of his tongue. “Um-hum . . . born 2019 . . . atzz’a what, thirty-two years old?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Pittsburgh — born in Pittsburgh?!”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Know it well, know it well.” He looked up at MacIan with a frown. “After the Withdra . . .” He lurched to his feet. “I can’t even say that word.” He sat back down, head shaking in disgust. “Looks nice in a history book. The Great Withdrawal!”

  MacIan wondered if these outbursts were typical.

  “I see a gap here,” the commander said flatly. “There’s no mention of your posting anywhere until Quantico a few months ago. Take a little vacation, did ya?”

  MacIan braced himself, “No. Sir.”

  “Where were you?”

  MacIan grew even more rigid, cleared his throat, and said pointedly, “I was over there.”

  The too-familiar taste of embarrassment filled the Commander’s mouth. “Oh . . . Ah, I see. Ah, well ah. We need not go into that, now do we?”

  “No, sir,” said MacIan with a reassuring smile.

  The Commander could feel little beads of sweat forming at his hairline as he stared blankly at MacIan’s folder. MacIan was alive, so ‘over there’ meant POW, and no one in their right mind asked about that. Ill feelings about the Great Withdrawal clouded every aspect of American life.

  The Commander perched on the corner of his desk. “Then I have to believe you were sent here for a good reason,” he said with muted curiosity. MacIan didn’t know how to respond. Unfortunately, the Commander mistook MacIan’s silence for agreement. “Then I’m not alone,” he said.

  MacIan tried to explain. “I’m just a pilot. A glorified bus driver.”

  Konopasek tossed him a cynical wink that said, I knew you were going to say that. “Um hum. Why do you think Bedford was spared?”

  “No idea, sir. Just got here.”

  “The NPF chose Bedford for a very strategic reason. There’s something here they need. And I know what that is.”

  “What would that be, sir?”

  The Commander’s eyes flared. “Nothing!”

  MacIan shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “There’s nothing here. Nothing! Absolutely nothing. So they can do whatever they want and no one will see them do it.”

  “Who?”

  “Your bosses. The guys who run the NPF. Admiral Carson and that bunch! The only ones with autonomy. The only ones not bought and paid for. The independent operators. The only fuckin’ men left.”

  MacIan had never considered what ulterior motives his superiors, especially the vaunted Admiral Carson, might have. Maybe he should. He looked to Commander Konopasek with sincere interest.

  Commander Konopasek seemed to sparkle. “And now they send me . . . you.”

  MacIan followed the smell of alcohol and chlorine through the lower floor’s gas-chamber green corridors and soon found the morgue. He stepped through its double doors and heard, “Yo! Too Tall. Over here!” A small man with coffee and cream skin and a rim of gray hair warming his ears waved from a large porcelain table, his movements restricted by a huge rubberized apron. The man pulled a latex glove from his right hand and stretched the hand out to MacIan. “Otis,” he said, stepping back and looking MacIan up and down. “You one big stack of pancakes.”

  MacIan released the hand, which floated to the top of Otis’s head and bobbed up and down, gauging MacIan’s height. There was at least a foot between them. “Where you find this guy?” He pointed to the naked body on the porcelain table and pinged MacIan’s metal nameplate with the heel of his scalpel. “Trooper Mac.”

  “In the mountains. Up by Lily. Know where that is?”

  “Lily? North on #53 Lily? Something about a whorehouse, or something. Right?”

  MacIan frowned. He had a very high opinion of Lily. “Two hunters found him about ten miles north of Lily, frozen to a rock.”

  “Ten miles north — there ain’t nothin’ ten miles north of Lily.” He waved the scalpel over the deceased.

  MacIan winced. “You gonna cut him open?”

  Otis spread his arms over the body. “Ain’t no reason to open this poor bastard. He froze to death. I seen it a hundred times. No holes. Nothin’ like that.” Otis pushed his glasses into place on his nose. “Died of natural causes. Cause nothin’ more natural than stupid.”

  MacIan moved closer.

  Otis lifted the dead man’s arm away from his body and pointed with the scalpel. “See how the skin is pale and grayish-yellow? Right there. Under the arm where the sun can’t affect its true color. And it feels hard, like wax. And here’s some blisters filled with blood and turned all blackish-bluish-purple.” Otis stared at MacIan solemnly. “They die in peace, them that freeze to death.”

  “Can you tell what happened?”

  “First, I gotta ask why a guy was out in the weather with no coat and no shoes.” He cranked his head to a skeptical angle, puffing out two questioning lips.

  “They’re still stuck in the ice,” MacIan lied.

  Otis grinned. “Bet they was. How high that rock he froze to?”

  “Fifty, sixty feet, maybe more.”

  “I ask because, his leg . . . bag-a-bones. Broke, crushed, smashed. Knee joint pulverized. This guy fell from way up high, way more than sixty feet, and crashed several times before he hit bottom.” Otis illustrated with a hand-puppet version of a man ricocheting down a mountain, adding several disturbing sound effects. He lifted the dead man’s pants from the back of a chair and held them from a belt loop, aiming the scalpel at a spot on the leg. “See these long tears and scratches here, from above the knees all the way down to the bottom?”

  MacIan bent to study the pants.

  Otis screwed up one eye and thwacked MacIan with his index finger on his metal nameplate. “This sorry sonnova-bitch fell off that mountain and disintegrated the bottom half of himself. Then! he crawled to that big rock to pull himself up outta the snow. Then! he froze dead.” Otis folded his arms over his chest with great finality.

  MacIan thought Otis was probably right, but there was something about this little guy that didn’t sort with the situation. “So you do cut people open?”

  Otis dumped a cup of strong disinfectant into a tray. “Not officially. Not like I get paid for it. I started here back when people still had people. Went to school right down the road. In my school the coolest guy was the one who made the biggest fool of himself, so I was definitely the coolest. Ended up with a kid and his sixteen-year-old mama. Came here, knocked on the door, hat in hand, begging for any work I could get. The Commander hoo
ked me up.” He paused to shake his head in amazement. “A black teenager, off the street! To this day I do not know why. But I do know this! I’m all about Commander Konopasek. Bit of a, well I don’t know how to say it, but you, you giant-ass mutherfuckka . . . you-will-not-trifle-with that man. Don’t make no difference how big you are. You hear me?”

  MacIan bowed his head and put his hand on his heart.

  Otis made a face that promised he’d hold MacIan to it and went on with his work. “The doctor we had got fired in a budget thing. Sometimes weeks’d go by and bodies piled up. But I just kept sweepin’ up. Kept my mouth shut. I had a good thing and I wasn’t going to put my foot in it.

  “One day, they sent a medical school student up from Pitt who did really good autopsies; he was really good. We were the only ones down here, same age, same sense of humor. So he taught me medical stuff. How a body works made sense to me right away. He said I had — the hands.” He made jazz hands, and continued. “I did a little doctoring on the side. Friends and family. Beer money.

  “Then they started them consolidations and nobody came to do the autopsies. And when the guards walked out of the Prison over in Somerset, them psychos came and took everything, including my wife. Me and my boy moved into a room in the back there, used to be a storage. He joined up like everybody else. He’s dead, somewhere over there in the desert.”

  MacIan winced.

  “I owe what little I still got to the Commander. So when he asked me to carve one up, I start carvin’. Been twenty years. In the bad times I’d do four, sometimes eight, a day. Farmers. Marauders. Grandmas and babies. I seen some shit. Brother.”

  Otis could tell that MacIan understood. He stared down at the floor, and mumbled, “I-have-seen-some-shit! Brotherman. And this, this right here,” he pointed to Arthur Gager’s body . . . “this is trouble.”

  A hundred harsh winters had failed to diminish the stark beauty of the Bedford Barracks’ space-age lobby, where MacIan stopped to examine a row of black and white portraits of former Barracks Commanders. Black and white made them less real, but more human. He pushed through the glass doors and into the reception area, which was still fitted with all the original, highly simplified furniture. Cassandra, the barracks’ middle-aged Office Manager, pointed a halting finger at him. “You talk to that nice preacher’s wife, Gina, up there in Lily?”