Independence Day

by Bob Mayer

  How’d he know that? Roland wondered. Both times Scout had the help of Pandora, who apparently wasn’t a Goddess, but something, whatever, right now that wasn’t important because Roland began to appreciate that he was in big trouble. Scout had been cut on her last mission and reported that even with Pandora’s help, they’d needed assistance from a priestess to take out the assassin. Three on one.

  And they’d barely survived.

  “You’re bleeding,” the man said. “Nothing major yet. I can make quite a few more cuts. It’s a form of art. Using the body as a canvas, a blade as a brush, and blood as the paint.”

  He attacked. Roland did his best to defend, taking three superficial, but bloody cuts in less than a second without even getting close to a strike with his Bowie. The heavy blade was much too big and cumbersome against the daggers, sort of the way Roland felt about himself against this guy.

  “Are you from the Shadow?” Roland asked, trying to gain time, which embarrassed him, but embarrassed wasn’t dead and time was time.

  “You are supposed to be their best warrior,” Legion said. “It is Roland, isn’t it?”

  “You have the advantage,” Roland said. “Your name? Not ‘our’ name.”

  He shrugged. “You missed a fierce battle the past few days. How does it go? ‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action like an Angel.’ Killer Angels. I like that. You can call me Angel for the minutes you have left.”

  “How did you find me?” Roland asked, running various tactical scenarios through his mind, rejecting one after another.

  Angel was too fast.

  “You had just enough information to know a warrior needed to be sent here and now.” Angel nodded, looking past Roland toward the Union lines a half-mile away. “Right where I thought you’d be.”

  “You were the source of the intelligence,” Roland said. “Where’s our agent?”

  “Dead, of course, once the intelligence was sent.”

  Roland realized he was going to die and in his mission. Roland was going to miss Neeley more than anything else if he was killed. He smiled and shook his head. Unacceptable. “Not today.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Angel said. “I’ve heard all sorts of words. Prayers. Begging.” He swept his blades wide, taking in the Valley of Death. “Music to my ears. A symphony.”

  “Not today,” Roland repeated.

  Angel cocked his head, curious. “What?”

  “Perfect,” Roland said. “You’re right. This is the perfect place. Reminded me of something.”

  “I hope it was—”

  Roland charged, all or nothing, no options left. He took a cut on the forearm of his knife hand, another on the side of his neck, but instead of pulling back, he took the pain and kept coming, surprising Angel.

  Roland had him, sweeping one arm to grapple Angel and seize the assassin while slicing upward with the Bowie.

  Then he didn’t have him. Angel slipped underneath Roland’s grasp and was behind him. Roland braced for the daggers in his back.

  Then the shot rang out.

  Roland spun about.

  Angel was looking down at the exit wound in his chest in disbelief. Both his arms were raised, daggers ready to finish Roland off, but he’d been interrupted.

  Looking past Angel, Roland saw the kid holding the gun in both hands, the rain cutting through the smoke drifting out of the barrel.

  “You people,” Angel said, shaking his head. “Seriously?” He fell to his knees, then tumbled sideways into Plum Run.

  Roland watched the body sink beneath the water, but it crumbled inward, dust to dust, before it was completely submerged.

  Roland ran to the kid, who’d dropped his gun. New blood was seeping past the makeshift bandage.

  “Didn’t think I could hit him,” the kid said. “Where’d he go?”

  “You got him,” Roland said.

  Drawl chimed in. “Good shot. He just disappeared. Like he was made of nothing.”

  “First man I ever killed,” the kid said. He coughed, an attempt to laugh. “Last man too, I suppose.”

  Roland sat next to the kid. He ripped the sleeves off his shirt and used them to bind better makeshift bandages, front and back, on the kid.

  He was violating nature. Delaying the inevitable. He’d interfered, and he could imagine his mother’s disapproval.

  “What’s your name?” the kid asked.

  “Roland. You?”

  “Jeremiah. But my ma calls me Tad.” His eyes lost their focus for a moment. “She and Pa and my brother always called me that. Don’t really know why.”

  “What happened to your Pa?”

  “He left, long time ago. Said he was going to find work. Never came back.”

  “Why’d you join up after getting your brother’s letter?” Roland asked.

  “I’m fighting ‘cause they killed my brother.”

  Roland thought of the seven Yankees whom Tad’s brother had killed at Fredericksburg and the cycle that never ended.

  “Hey!” Draw called out from the tree. “Who was that fella?”

  “A bad person,” Roland said.

  “Ain’t never seen someone disappear like that,” Drawl said.

  Several of the wounded murmured assent. Roland supposed this had violated Rule Number One in some way, but what did it matter?

  “Hey,” Drawl called again. “Could you tighten this on my leg? I just don’ have the energy. You saw me. I was trying to shoot that fella. Help you.”

  “I’ll be back, Tad,” Roland said to the kid, who nodded, his face turned upward to the water descending from heaven.

  Roland walked to the Dying Tree, no longer concerned if there was a sniper out there. They’d have taken their shot when he was fighting Angel. Both armies were spent, even the unscathed, another reason Meade’s officers had argued against counterattacking Lee. After three days of fighting, most couldn’t conceive of a fourth consecutive day.

  Of the twenty-two men who’d crawled to the tree, six were still alive, four Confederate and two Union. Roland did a quick assessment of all six.

  They were all going to die before the day was out.

  Looking toward Plum Run, he saw that only the lower legs and shoes of another man who’d drowned earlier were visible. The rain was moderate and the ridgelines east and west were visible, some movement here and there, but otherwise, everything seemed subdued. A great pause after great events.

  Roland tightened Drawl’s tourniquet.

  He helped the other five as best he could, making them comfortable, if such a thing were possible.

  “You are bleeding,” the man with the Scandinavian accent said as Roland adjusted his position. The man had been shot in the groin and it was just a bloody mess down there. Roland didn’t even deal with it, because there was no way he could bandage the wound with what he had. The man was so pale, Roland didn’t give him long.

  The rain had washed the blood off Roland’s face, and he barely registered the other wounds. “It’s nothing.” He noted the insignia on the man’s collar. “First Minnesota.”

  The pale man shook his head. “It is no more.” He pointed at a corpse dressed in blue. “Me and Sven, we tried to make it back. This was far as we could make it. He died yesterday. Guess today is going to be my day.”

  “I saw you fellows,” Drawl said. “Two days ago. You were damn crazy the way you charged.”

  “Stopped you though,” Minnesota noted.

  “That you did,” Drawl allowed. “That you did. And we had the numbers. Crazy.”

  The download updated Roland. “General Hancock knew Cemetery Ridge would fall on the Second unless something drastic was done. He ordered the First Minnesota to attack.”

  Minnesota was bitter. “We knew it was suicide. Every one of us. We could see all the Rebs coming and how badly we were out-numbered. Attack? We should have hunkered down. But the Colonel, he ordered charge.
So we charged. It all occurred so fast. Don’t rightly know what happened. ‘Cept it killed Sven and it’s gonna kill me.”

  The download had the numbers. Two-hundred sixty-two men in the Regiment charged. Two hundred fifteen went down in five minutes. The eighty-two percent casualty rate was the largest loss ever for any U.S. military unit in history.

  Still was in Roland’s day.

  But they’d charged when ordered. It was either the worst of mankind or the best, but it was actually both.

  The survivors within sight or earshot of the tree, now began calling out for help, which wouldn’t help them. Roland thought I gotta get out of here. He’d never abandoned a mission, but this, this was wrong. Nature was the lion and the gazelle and the snake and the eggs. There was nothing natural here in Death Valley. There was nothing natural about men killing each other; worse, men leaving other men to a hard, slow death.

  Roland went back to the Whitworth.

  He’d already broken Rule Number One, but he didn’t think it would matter. Those six he’d helped would be dead before the sun went down.

  Roland lay back down between the two dead men. The cries seemed to be louder as the morning wore on and he continued to watch the ridgeline. He didn’t know if that was real or some of it was in his head, echoing in his conscience.

  He noticed motion to the left. A rider with a flag of truce was riding across the field, from the left to the right, about three hundred yards away. Dressed in sodden gray, the rider rode slowly, looking neither left nor right, picking his way through the dead and wounded.

  The download answered the question as soon as Roland wondered: Lee was proposing a prisoner exchange for their ‘comfort and convenience.’

  Roland, for want of something to do, tracked the man through the Whitworth’s sights.

  Meade would reject the offer, desiring Lee to be burdened with Union prisoners rather than giving back soldiers that could fight once more.

  Roland tracked him until he went through the Union lines and disappeared.

  Where the hell was the target?

  He knew he couldn’t lie here all day long with the dying. If he was forced to, by the end of the day, he would no longer be human.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 July 1776 A.D.

  “That is the myth,” Thyia said. “The relationships are actually a bit more complicated than in the stories. You must have studied the classics. In New York.”

  “I have read extensively,” Doc said.

  “And your name?” Thyia asked.

  “Doc.”

  She gave a low laugh. “A job or a name, or both?”

  “Both.” For some reason Doc didn’t think it was the right moment to bring up how many PhDs he’d earned.

  “You do not look European,” Thyia said, “nor African.”

  “My parents traveled far from my home country,” Doc said.

  “To New York,” she said, with a smile that dismissed his cover story. She pointed down the street. “That building. Recognize it?”

  “The Pennsylvania State House.”

  Thyia took two steps to make up for Doc’s retreat and more. She put a hand on his shoulder. A slight shock tingled where she touched. “Something important is happening in there tonight. Perhaps we should see?”

  Doc was losing control of the mission. “Yes.”

  The bell tower was different from the one that sat on top of Independence Hall in the middle of Philadelphia in Doc’s time. The download had a ton of data on the building, from concept, through construction, through the various stages: destruction, reconstruction, etcetera, etcetera, but Doc kept all that at bay. He was more concerned about the woman walking next to him, on the cobblestones of Chesnut Street toward what would become Independence Hall after this day. Doc noted that the street name was spelled that way on the old map, but was spelled correctly, in his time: Chestnut.

  “Why would someone want to kill me?” Doc asked.

  “To keep you from doing your job.”

  “I’m just a—”

  “Please,” she cut him off. “Pretend elsewhere, with someone else. I saved your life. You owe me truth.”

  “So, you’re here to help me?”

  “I’m here to kill him. If that helps you, that makes you a fortunate man, does it not?”

  “This ‘him’ have a name?” There were lights on in the State House. The reality that Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, and other Founding Fathers were in there right now, arguing about the exact wording of the Declaration of Independence, seemed almost an abstract.

  On his third Time Patrol mission, Doc was trying to learn to process the experience. He’d been in the presence of the Last Tsar of Russia and watched Anastasia’s sad eyes peering through a window at him as he faced a firing squad.

  He’d escaped. History had taken her.

  He’d been inside the containment core for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and helped irradiate the place in order to prevent nuclear war.

  Neither of them insignificant events.

  Since then, he’d realized the best way to deal was to make it an intellectual exercise, to keep his emotions detached.

  “I’m sure he has a name,” Thyia said, “but we haven’t been properly introduced, and I doubt that we will be.”

  “So he’s an assassin,” Doc said, trying to sort this out. He was thinking of Legion, the killers that Scout had run into. If one of them was here for him, he was in big trouble.

  “Yes.”

  “And where are you from?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Legion?” Doc tried, throwing a dart into the darkness to see what the response was.

  Thyia ignored it. They arrived at the front of Liberty Hall.

  She looked at a light in a second floor window. “They’re up there. The Five.”

  Doc understood whom she meant: the Committee of Five, who’d been tasked with drawing up the Declaration of Independence.

  “Is the assassin after them?” Doc asked.

  Thyia turned her head to look at him. “No. His mission is to stop you. My mission is to stop him. It is what I’ve trained for.”

  “What’s my mission?” Doc asked, realizing he’d already given away enough in conversation to stomp all over Rule One without explicitly breaking it.

  “You’ll have to go in there to find out,” she said, as she led the way to the front door of Independence Hall.

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “I’m not. You’re just getting the benefit of my mission.”

  “’The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ sort of thing?” Doc asked.

  “The enemy of your enemy, is your enemy’s enemy, and you don’t factor into it, except as the target,” she said and Doc had to take a moment to unravel the sentence. “Friend is something completely different.”

  They slipped inside. The first floor was deserted. Doc took a moment to look into Assembly Hall where the famous document would be signed. It was to one side of the Central Hall. The Supreme Court Room on the other. The download directed him to the stairs that led to the second floor.

  As soon as they entered the dark stairwell, voices raised in argument echoed off the walls, growing louder as Doc and Thyia climbed. The door to the Governor’s Council Chamber was open and the voices came from inside. Light from several lamps inside cast a narrow glow down the hall.

  “I will stand guard,” Thyia whispered at the top of the stairs.

  Doc wanted to argue, but she turned to face the other way. Doc crept down the short hall, leery of any creaky boards. He had no clue what he was supposed to do; yet he had a woman of myth guarding his back.

  “We must not descend into superstition!” someone insisted.

  Doc looked about, noting that the transom window above the door was canted open. From the dimness in the hallway, he saw the lit interior of the small room reflected on it.

  Jefferson sat at the head of a narrow table. Adams was to one side. Accessing the download,
Doc identified the two men sitting to the other side as Sherman and Livingston. Franklin was in a fine chair near the window, which let in a slight breeze, some relief from the July heat.

  Doc leaned against the wall, listening, watching the reflection.

  “I am not a man given to superstition,” Franklin said. “Just because I cannot explain something, does not make it any less real. The empirical evidence is that three of us experienced the same vision this past night. The exact same vision. I do agree that trying to explain it to those who didn’t experience it would be fraught with issues of credulity as to our sanity.”

  “Visions!” The same voice, which Doc could now ascribe to Livingston, the Chancellor, the highest-ranking judge in New York State. Some years from now, if history held true, he would swear in George Washington as the first President of the United States at Federal Hall in New York City.

  If history remained true.

  Adams spoke up. “You insist you did not have the same experience?”

  Livingston rolled his eyes. “I did not. And I do not understand this sudden change of heart.”

  “Not of heart,” Adams said, “nor of mind. Perhaps you might call it a stiffening of resolve.”

  “From what little you have said,” Livingston said, “perhaps this ‘vision’ should be viewed as a warning not to take action on the dreaded issue.”

  The table was covered with parchment. Via the angled glass Doc couldn’t make out any detail, but he wondered which was the Declaration of Independence, and what would be done with the previous drafts? What a treasure trove of history lay there, some it like so much scrap!

  Sherman tapped the pile. “The Congress has already indicated in the majority that it will not allow the passage regarding the slave trade. What is on the table now goes much farther than that.”

  Livingston sighed. “All three of you saw the same thing in your dreams?”

  “’Dream’?” Franklin repeated. “More a nightmare. Mister Adams has already given you an idea. Let me give you some of the more pertinent details.” He indicated the other two men. “Mister Adams and Mister Jefferson, please correct me if anything I say that is much different from what you experienced. For me, it was so real, it was as if I were there. Not just seeing and hearing, but even smelling and feeling. I have never experienced the like before.”