by John Barnes
He sat perfectly still, and by now the room seemed very dim. It was all but impossible for me to connect the things Dad was saying with my own life. Bombs and irrational vengeance, and for that matter the suppression of a book, seemed like something in the movies. What was real was Marie’s white dresses, and our little apartment in Italy, and the nice academic friends we had in New Haven, and the little parties where we drank too much and got profound about art and solved the world’s problems. Terrorism was on some other planet entirely.
Finally, as the whole room seemed to be receding into unreality, I said, “Well, I don’t see anything wrong in what you did. It won’t hurt your career at this point if it’s a long time before your next book, and it isn’t like you’re the only person who knows about the Blade. They sound more like a job for the CIA or the big news organizations anyway.”
Jerry mumbled something, Carrie said “yeah,” and Dad asked him to repeat it.
Looking down at the floor, the light from the table lamp glowing off the back of his head, Jerry said, “It seems to me like … well, I can’t criticize your choice but … I wish you hadn’t made that choice. It’s um, well … Dad, it’s just now how you raised us, and that’s all there is to it. And I … well, it’s water under the bridge anyway, I guess, since you’ve already done it.”
Dad shrugged. “I can finish your opening speech for you, Mr. Prosecutor. It’s nothing I haven’t said to myself many times at night. The real problem now is that it will be known that I can be threatened. Blade of the Most Merciful will make sure enough of that. And once it is known that I can be threatened, whatever small security I once had is gone. Anyone who wants to slant my scholarly writing can now do so, just by threatening me.
“The fact is that I’m now afraid to go out in the field again. I could not return to Teheran, Islamabad, Baghdad, or Beirut. I would only wonder who would first say to me, ‘Don’t write this, or thus-and-so will happen.’ And from there it’s a very short step to ‘You must write this, and sign your name to it, and swear publicly that it is so—or thus-and-so will happen.’
“They’ve broken me already, you see. I am going to take early retirement. Then perhaps I will devote myself to a little study of mine on arms smuggling in the Persian Gulf before World War I. I don’t think Fiscus has said the last word on the subject. Perhaps I’ll also translate some modern Arabic literature that I think hasn’t yet received a fair hearing in the West. But my career as you and I have known it is over.”
Carrie shook her head. “Dad, this isn’t right. This is America, and a bunch of rag-headed—”
“Carrie, I still do not tolerate racist—”
“When they threaten my father, they’re rag-heads.” Her eyes were burning with anger; she’d have made a great model for a Joan of Arc right now. “And when he gives in to them, he’s a coward. Excuse me. I meant to say a fucking coward.” She got up and stormed out. There was a very long awkward silence.
Jerry stood. “She got all the temper, you know, and most of the brains, but … she’s right, Dad. I’m not mad, but I’m very disappointed. I guess you can’t help it, and we’re still family and all that, but I’m real disappointed.”
He went out with no sound at all.
That left me. After a bit Dad said, “And you think I did right?”
“Well, I’m married, too. And this might not be the time to mention it—I was saving it for breakfast tomorrow so don’t let on—but maybe my feelings will be made clearer if I mention—” Deep breath here; how do you tell them these things? “Marie is pregnant—you’re going to be a grandfather.”
He jumped to his feet and surprised hell out of me by hugging me. “Yes, I guess you do understand.”
I don’t know what Mom told Marie or said to her about why all of us were off with Dad. Probably just kept her distracted—Mom could babble up a storm of small talk when she needed it—but when I came up to bed Marie asked nothing about what had been up.
We made love slowly and without any noise, with the lights on—she was so beautiful I always preferred it that way—and it took a long, long time. I don’t think we knew what was coming; I think we just knew that in a few months we would not be able to do this for a while. It was very gentle and felt wonderful, both during it and after. I remember her whispering, “Mark, Mark, Mark” in my ear at the end as her slim fingers danced along my back and her long, thin thighs held me close.
The next morning our announcement seemed to break the ice at the breakfast table—there was a lot of cheering and whooping, and Jerry and Carrie started an immediate argument about whether a child is better off with a favorite aunt or a favorite uncle.
But Marie and I, knowing the family, had planned this one out carefully—there wasn’t much time until we were to take the twins back to the airport, since both of them were flying out that day.
Dad was always a rotten driver—he thought about too many things besides the road—so as always, Mom was to drive the van. She got into the driver’s seat, and Marie got in behind her. Jerry, saying something silly about adjusting the child-restraint seat, climbed in next, and then Carrie reached out for the doorframe and stepped onto the running board.
The van exploded.
The bomb under it had been wired to the ignition—Mom must have turned the key, but I never saw that—and was big enough to flip the van over and roll it down the lawn, slamming most of the frame and floor up into the ceiling.
Carrie was flung back against me like a sandbag. I didn’t so much catch her as cushion her impact. It was only all those years of training that kept my head up as I hit the pavement on my back, with Carrie on top of me.
Dad, who was farther away than we were, grabbing some last-minute thing, saw more than Carrie or I did. I’ve always been sorry for that.
As I pushed Carrie to the side and slid out from under her, my ears and nose running with blood from the force of the blast, the first thing I saw was that the stumps where her legs had been were squirting blood like paint from a sprayer running out of pressure.
It was pure instinct—in a case like that you don’t think about how much of the limb you can save. I had my belt off in an instant, wrapping it around one of Carrie’s legs and passing it through the buckle, hauling it tight with all my strength.
Praise god Sis had skinny legs. There was enough slack left in the belt to reloop around the other stump and come back through the buckle again. It was messy work—her blood was everywhere on me and the pavement, and I was afraid my hands would slip on the makeshift tourniquet, but I had kept it dry enough; I hauled, tugged, used my other hand to straighten things and make the rough figure-eight tourniquet bite deep into her flesh, then tied the anchor knot to keep the free end from going back through the buckle.
The stench of blood was everywhere and when I unconsciously wiped my face I got more of it there. I didn’t really realize that until days later, when I was looking at a Post-Gazette and there was a “scene of the tragedy” picture. I looked like hell—though I wasn’t much hurt. Physically I mean.
I was just telling myself I should have used Carrie’s belt to make a second tourniquet when I finally looked up far enough to see that her left arm was also gone, shredded bits of meat and bone hanging from eight inches or so of upper arm. I undid her belt, yanked it through, whipped it around the stump up close to the armpit where the pressure points tend to be—I vaguely remember the next day a doctor bawled me out because if I’d put the tourniquet down lower, or used the pressure points, they might have given her a bigger stump to tie a prosthetic arm to.
The evil spurting and the sickening spat-spat-spat of blood on the flagstone pavement stopped at once.
She was still breathing, and a quick check showed no more wounds and nothing that looked like a hole in her. For all I knew she was hemorrhaging internally, but there was nothing I could do about that.
At last I looked up. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I had run out of things I could do for Carr
ie and couldn’t stop myself from looking up. It had been maybe twenty seconds since the bomb had gone off. (I was just realizing it must have been a bomb.) A lot had changed in those twenty seconds.
Dad had run by me, moving terribly fast for such a heavy old guy. I turned to get up and follow him, and that was when I fell—looking back I discovered, quite suddenly, that my ankle was broken. That can happen, I guess, with enough adrenaline pumping into the system. But though it could keep me from feeling the pain, it couldn’t make me stand up on something that would no longer support me.
So I could do little, as I pushed myself up off the blood-slick pavement with my hands, except to look toward the van.
It wasn’t there, because the blast had flipped it and rolled it down the lawn, but it was easy enough to follow the track. It had rolled several times, smashing a hole through the yew hedge, crushing roses into the soft damp mulch of their beds, tearing deep gouges in the dew-wet sod. There were long strips where the black mud showed through, as if the yard had been raked by giant fingernails.
Now the van lay on its side, flame and smoke pouring from it. The underside was toward me, and I could see how it had been slammed upward, bending into the body everywhere it wasn’t tied down, broken at the top of the crude dome it formed.
Dad, forced back by the heat, was dancing around it like an overmatched boxer, trying to find a way to the still-open side door now on the top of the van. From where I lay, I could see it was hopeless—the frame had been bent and jammed up into that space, and even without the fire he couldn’t have gotten anything out through there.
He said he saw something or someone moving in there in the long second between when he got there and when the gas tank blew. The coroner said, though, that to judge from the shattering of the bones that remained afterward, there was nothing alive in there at the time; he thought Dad was probably hallucinating, or perhaps had seen a body sliding down a seat or falling over on its side.
Anyway, if the coroner was right, Mom was probably crushed against the ceiling instantly; the brains that people all over the world wanted to talk to were smashed like a pumpkin in the wreck of her skull. Jerry was impaled on a piece of chassis that—again, to judge from where they found him and it—must have ripped up through the seat, moving at bullet velocity, entered his body somewhere near the rectum and exited by way of breaking the collarbone. His whole body cavity must have been torn to jam before the first time the truck rolled, and the sudden pressure loss would have meant he was unconscious before he knew what happened.
The coroner spent quite a bit of time on the question of what had happened to Marie. The skeleton—what was left of it after it burned—was in a horribly distorted, coiled form, and his best guess was that the whole seat had been hurled against the ceiling, fracturing her skull (but the cracks could have been caused by the fire, and people sometimes survive fractured skulls), breaking vertebrae in all three dimensions (I would have tended her for fifty years if she’d been a quadriplegic) and ripping both shattered femurs out through her leg muscles. There were undoubtedly many internal injuries that mere bones could not document … the coroner figured the pressures involved must have ruptured many of her internal organs. He assured me, repeatedly, that there wasn’t any way at all that she could have been conscious by the time Dad got to the van. Chances were she was dead before the first time the van rolled, dead while it had not yet crushed the roses let alone rolled down the lawn.
Chances were.
She probably never knew.
But Dad saw something moving in there, just before the gas tank blew, and if Mom and Jerry had both received unquestionably instantly fatal wounds …
It could have been a hallucination. Dad doesn’t hallucinate, but anyone might in the circumstances. Anyway, the door was blocked. Anyway, it could have been a body falling. Anyway, moving someone with a fractured skull and spine would kill the person immediately. Anyway, a severed spinal cord wouldn’t transmit pain, not even if the body were on fire.
Anyway anyway anyway.
Dad said he saw something moving in the van. But the van burned all but completely before the fire trucks even got there, burned while he danced around it trying to get in and see and maybe pull something out, burned while I crawled miserably down the lawn, my clothes still drenched in Carrie’s blood.
3
There had been a lot of weeks afterward when they just gave me pills, and a lot of mornings when I would wake up and try to pretend that at some point or other it had all become a dream. Sometimes I pretended that Marie was going to be there next to me when I rolled over, and we would be back in our house with our new IKEA furniture and the walls covered with Pre-Raphaelite prints. Sometimes instead I pretended that I was waking up in my dorm bed my freshman year, and that I had dreamed Marie, that Jerry and Carrie were still in high school and nothing had really changed my life yet, but there were all sorts of adventures in front of me. And sometimes I pretended that I was about ten, that the whole dream of being an adult was just a nightmare, and I was really still going to grow up to be an astronaut. Mom and the twins and I were going to go for a day hike up in the Laurel Caverns area.
I pretended pretty hard, so it wasn’t for lack of effort that I always opened my eyes on the bleak world I had closed them on.
I stayed that way for months. I rarely was awake for ten hours in a day, and when I was I sat around in a bathrobe, looking at old pictures or just staring out at the yard where the burned and torn scars on the grass were healing, watching as leaves fell and snow began to blow.
Dad, meanwhile, got better. The Center went out and got donors like crazy, and they funded a full set of bodyguards for him. Then he went ahead and published his book about Blade of the Most Merciful, after a revision to make it more readable by laymen—a thing called Solely for the Kill.
It was the kind of smart, effective revenge you might expect. The news stories plus Dad’s book did the job. Any normal terror outfit tries never to hit in the USA because they know how crazy the public goes and how completely it unleashes the President, who is suddenly trying to look as tough and mean as possible to the voters. Most of the time Americans are merely annoyed by terrorism as “something weird that foreigners do, over there.” But let it get “over here,” and the sky falls in on whoever brought it. Look at what happened to Libya a few years ago …
Blade of the Most Merciful went from something whispered about to front-page news, instantly. Moreover, they were too hot for anyone to touch—they had nowhere to hide and everybody was glad to turn them in. There were strikes by the American Delta Force, by Seals and Green Berets; SAS, Mossad, the West Germans, Egypt, all got into the act. I followed it in a half-interested kind of way, on the news and in things like Time and USA Today. It seemed like one more branch of the sports news … something else to read in my bathrobe as I ate cold cereal up in Dad’s spare bedroom, and fell asleep, and woke up again and again hoping it hadn’t happened.
Once what had happened to our family—plus Dad’s book—made it clear to everyone that this was a mad-dog outfit, it was cleaned out in a hurry. Newsweek did a front-page profile of Dad, and they used the word “courage” about every other paragraph, which made him furious.
They ignored me—one look and I suppose they decided that was the kindest thing—but they just loved Carrie. In just a few weeks she was getting around on her powered wheelchair and doing her physics grad work mostly over computer modem; it seemed to take her only a day or so to master the one-handed keyboard. She began to move very quickly toward her Ph.D.—she said it was a matter of not having sports to distract her anymore.
There were two Blade of the Most Merciful assaults on the house, finally; they came when the organization was on the ropes and desperate and, I suppose, wanted to show that it had any fight left at all.
The first was the night before Christmas. I’d done no shopping and barely knew what day it was; I suppose in my strange, muddled state I was hoping that Santa wou
ld bring me a new life or take back all the bad things that had happened, or some such. I was asleep, in the usual restless dreams, when the delivery van leaped the curb from the alley, crashed through the wire fence at the back of the yard, and headed straight for the house.
The men from Steel Curtain Guards were on the stick. By the time my feet were hitting the floor after the crash of the fence, the Steel Curtain guy watching the back had flipped on his infrared spotting scope, seen the crude armoring of the engine on the oncoming van (strips of Kevlar stretched across it), put his laser designator spot on the biggest gap, and started pumping rounds in. Those nifty little .22s were designed for SWAT teams, and they have practically no kick and a very high rate of fire—once they’re sighted in they’ll chew whatever is in front of them to hamburger. In an instant he’d cut a hole through the radiator, and he could see a scattering of hot little lights, like crazed fireflies, streaking and pinging around in there.
I was still reaching for my robe when the SCG “utility infielder” on the second floor got to a window, sized up the situation, brought his AK to his shoulder, and started blasting down into the roof of the oncoming van.
The angle was lousy. He might have gotten the driver, but it’s hard to say. At least he was able to rake the unarmored roof twice, and if he didn’t do any damage, he surely made the driver’s last moments a little more nervous.
More likely if the driver was hit it was by something coming through the fire wall from the first sharpshooter. In any case both the riflemen guarding our house agreed that the driver never tried to get out, the door handle never moved, when the van slid to a halt in the good old Pittsburgh mud, thirty yards short of the house, its engine dead—by that point the engine had absorbed most of a magazine, and no doubt plenty of wires, belts, and hoses were severed, or maybe the alternator had gotten zapped. Anyway, the van sat there for three long seconds—meanwhile I was in my robe and running out into the hallway—and then the forty or so pounds of C4 in it, probably placed under a barrel of kerosene, blew up with a deafening roar.
