“All her life, she’s been taught how to increase her chances of living a long life. Then one day, she learns she’s going to die in some fashion she’s always been told can be prevented. Maybe ‘heart attack.’ She makes changes—quits smoking, improves her diet, joins the gym—and she keeps going back to see if she’s tipped some cosmic scale, to no avail. She might die of a heart attack when she’s a hundred years old, except she’s crippled inside by waiting for it. She’s stopped living her life. She’s devoted it to her death.”
Barb kissed the top of his head. “We did well today. We’ll never know whose lives we may have changed just by breaking the right machine at the right time. For all we know, we may have shaped the opinion of a future leader who will finally outlaw the damned things.”
“It still doesn’t feel like enough,” Tommy said. “Half of what we trashed today will be back in action in a week or two. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a soup can.” He stopped, sighed. “We need something bigger. More effective. A statement.”
Barb reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. For a few moments, Tommy’s field of vision was a bright blot. As it cleared, he saw Barb, still beautiful and pale and very naked, rooting around in the night table. She pulled a gray file folder from under a stack of notebooks and papers. “I didn’t want to say anything until I thought we were ready.”
She set the folder on the bed. Tommy leafed through it—diagrams, floor plans, handwritten notes of conversations.
“What is this?” he asked, fascinated by the photos of long hallways and large rooms filled with equipment. Barb slipped back under the covers beside him.
“This,” Barb said, “is as big a statement as we can make.”
Klemm Fabrication Incorporated, located in Caruthers, fifty minutes down Route 171 from Barb’s apartment, was the largest manufacturer of Death Predictive Devices in the Midwest. They’d come to Barb’s attention via a Newsweek article discussing the company’s efforts to meet the rising global demand for the devices. She’d done a lot of social engineering to gather information from workers, county engineers, technicians who made service calls at the plant. She used her smile and charm, taking pieces from every encounter to form a complete picture of a vulnerable site.
“We take out the key points in the assembly line,” Barb told the group when they met to discuss their next action, four days later. They were all still wired from the success of their blitz, and Tommy could see everyone was hungry for more. They’d gathered in Penny’s suite on campus because it was the largest, plus it was in the Brewer dorms, where a large gathering would go unnoticed among the louder, more obvious frat parties. “Belts. Motors. The computers that control the operation. We destroy power conduits. We destroy the swing-arms that do the detailed work on the guts of the machine. We put them out of commission for weeks. Months.”
“How do you propose we do all this?” Roger asked. He ran a pro-machine Web site as a cover for his lesser-known affiliations. He was also a campus radio personality. “A hammer’s good one at a time, but it’s balls for heavy work. Too time consuming.”
“We use localized, shaped explosives,” Barry said, with a nod from Barb. He was a chemical engineering student who blamed the machine’s predictions for hastening the suicides of two friends. “Small, hot, hard blast, localized within a few feet. Like a cutting charge. You could snap the rear axle on a car and only nudge the engine.” As if the words were insufficiently shocking, Barry pulled a sample out of his backpack. Non-lethal and inert, he assured them, but it drove Mitch from his chair.
“I signed on for small public disruptions, not bombs,” Mitch said. “The malls, the one-off drugstore machine, fine. Explosives are crazy. We should step it up on larger medical testing locations instead. Doctor’s offices, clinics, hospitals. If people think they’re at risk, they’ll stay away.”
“That makes us look like terrorists,” Tommy said.
“Isn’t that what we are?” Mitch persisted. “Let’s not kid ourselves. You think people in malls aren’t scared of a guy in a mask with a hammer?”
“Right now, we’re stirring debate about the machine and what it does, not about ourselves,” Barb said. “The first time we threaten the safety of people with no interest in the machine, in a place of trust like a hospital, we become the bad guys.”
“I understand that, Barb,” Mitch said. For the first time, Tommy noticed the kid of seventeen inside him. Tommy was accustomed to a Mitch who was calm, decisive, old beyond his years. Before him now was a boy, nervous and uncertain. “I just think moving on to bombs is asking to get someone killed.”
“It will be after hours,” she said. “Clean. Surgical. We cripple the infrastructure, sting the corporation, make a statement to the press. We open peoples’ eyes wide to the issue.”
They debated a while longer. In the end, Barb required a unanimous decision. Mitch held out until he knew he was standing alone. He went on record that it was a bad idea before voting to go forward with the action.
Once they were in agreement, they sat around the coffee table in Penny’s living room and began walking through Barb’s plan.
They rehearsed for two weeks. They went over timings and variables until they could navigate the factory building with their eyes closed. Penny wrote the manifesto for mailing to the Tribune, the New York papers, the Post in Washington, and the L.A. Times. They called themselves the Unknown Future Liberation Front, “proud architects of last night’s targeted strike.”
They took the evening before the operation to relax. Barb invited Tommy over to her place to blow off steam. Despite the sparkle in her eye and the excited ache he felt, he declined. Saying no didn’t come easily, but he wanted some space, though he couldn’t articulate why. Beyond her disappointment, he thought he saw hurt in her eyes, but dismissed the notion. That wasn’t who they were.
His roommate out of town for the weekend, Tommy stayed on campus. He ordered Chinese take-out to his room, hung out with a couple of girls from the East wing of the dorm and watched anime until he fell asleep. His dreams were crowded with massive steel machines that towered over him, sharp teeth trying to draw his blood, ribbons of paper blotting out the sky and inscribed with the words “MISADVENTURE.”
His cell phone rang, piercing his sleep and dragging him up to consciousness. The room was bright with daylight. Sounds of student life filtered in from beyond the door. Tommy answered on the last ring before voicemail. He expected Barb or Mitch with bad news, a call to flee the dorm one step ahead of the police, the fate of all dozing rebels. Instead, it was his mother.
His mother never called.
She made small talk about the weather and his father’s job and her current book club selection, while Tommy stretched and threw on a layer of day-old clothing. When she finally ran out of stalls, she said “They’re voting on a draft bill Monday for soldiers for the Middle East.”
“I know, Ma,” he said. “It’s college. We keep an eye on these things.” They had been talking about it for weeks, in and out of class. Had he not been involved in disrupting the machine, Tommy would have joined one of the protests. He had friends who would vanish on a straight line to the sand in the wake of such a bill. “It’ll be fine. These things get voted down every year. This one will, too. And even if it doesn’t, I’m protected by the deferments.”
“No you’re not,” she interrupted.
“I’m an only child. Plus, there are very specific criteria for selection of college students. Believe me, I’ve looked into this. Don’t make yourself crazy.”
“Tommy, I had you tested when you were three years old.”
It was a graceless blurt, but it hit his chest like a finely tossed grenade. “You did what?”
“I always planned to tell you when the time seemed right,” she said, and fell silent. Tommy could hear her ragged breathing into the receiver.
“Why are you doing this, Ma? Why now?” He stopped. He didn’t want to know, hadn’t wanted to, so lo
ng as no one else did. And here was his mother, the woman who overcompensated his brother into misery, the unknowable known to her, not for a day, or a year, but for sixteen years.
“I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t think it was important.”
“How?” he asked, even as a voice inside told him to hang up the phone and walk away. “What does the fucking contraption have to say about it?”
“I don’t want you to worry. That wasn’t my intent—”
“Just tell me,” he said. “You wouldn’t have called unless you wanted to say it, so say it.” There was silence by way of response. “God damn it, tell me!”
“It says ‘FRIENDLY FIRE.’” Tommy heard her begin to cry. “You were three. Your father and I ignored it. When you have a little boy, combat is putting on a birthday party. You never showed any interest in the military. We saw no reason to worry until now.”
Tommy had always left room for the possibility that some day, he would be tested, with his consent or against his will. He hadn’t expected ambivalence as a response, but his immediate sense of it was akin to a shrug. It couldn’t be changed. Why would it matter?
He heard his mother swallow, half a continent away. “Tommy, we made mistakes with Davey. Everything we tried to do, we couldn’t—didn’t—see it coming. We failed him. I think sometimes if we’d talked to him, explained it, we could have avoided it, or at least put it off. I thought about telling you what your slip said after he died, but I didn’t want to fail you, too.”
Tommy was glad she was on the phone and not standing before him. The contemplation of violence had a twisted, calming effect. “You don’t get it, even after all this time. You didn’t fail Davey because you couldn’t save him. You failed him because you never let him live.” He paused, numb. “At least you gave me that much.”
His mother started to speak, but Tommy buried it with a thumb of the button. She’d said enough. He didn’t want to say too much.
He turned the phone off and crawled back into bed. He considered calling Barb to talk through his newfound knowledge, and decided it could wait until after their visit to the factory. He grappled with daylight, the prediction rattling around in his head, until he abandoned sleep in favor of a late breakfast.
Zero hour arrived in desperate darkness.
Barb, Tommy and the rest infiltrated the grounds in two places where the fence all but invited them, according to plan and unaware that prying eyes were following their movements. Soft radio calls and infrared scopes tracked them from the shadows.
Barb led Tommy and Mitch to the Assembly 2 building and through an easily-jimmied loading-dock side door. The line inside was silent, populated with machines left mid-motion when the line was stopped for the weekend. The trio walked the length of the conveyor, identifying strike points from the packaging queue all the way back to the head of the line. The room smelled of metal, solvents and sweat. Pallets of petrochemicals in drums lined the back wall. Tommy saw more of them, all part of a fresh delivery, through the doors that led to Assembly 3 in the adjacent room.
Mitch went to work on the main motor drive for the line. Tommy wired a charge further down the line, on the computer control center that coordinated activity for the length of the belts. Barb sought the thickest bundle of cabling that fed the equipment. By Tommy’s measure, they had seven minutes to finish wiring and fall back to the yard.
The authorities waited for them to begin arming explosives before moving in. The head of the government’s operation, a former Marine turned Homeland Security tactical consultant, wanted a bloodless take-down and an open-and-shut case. He envisioned a large and very public trial, something to quash grassroots protests and power his career forward.
The first shot was fired by accident in Assembly 3. Penny, caught in the beam of a flashlight, reached for her ID. She thought she’d been caught by a watchman they’d overlooked in their planning. Instead, the man was a soldier no older than Penny herself, hyped up, overstimulated in his first anti-terror deployment. He was certain she was reaching for a gun.
Roger, seeing Penny shot at close range for no reason, did have a gun, and brought it to bear. The kid soldier died hard and fast. A second one, older by ten years, put out the call that he had a man down, that the terrorists were heavily armed. He was silenced when Roger shot him in the chest.
It pivoted toward hell with jackrabbit speed.
The bark of a gunshot made Tommy jump. The report echoed through the room, seeming to return from a half-dozen directions. He had a gun, one of several they had obtained through back-alley channels, but Barb had been specific: weapons were a last resort. If caught, surrender, with a polite warning about the explosives. “No fatalities,” was her order.
Next door, Assembly 3 erupted in a firefight, driving Tommy to a crouch. He was moving up the line, towards the door, when hands grabbed his ankles from under the line, tripped him, dragged him down. A bullet tore into the sheet metal behind where he’d been standing. He was still fumbling for the gun when Barb put a hand over his.
“Come on,” she whispered.
They scuttled under the line and towards cover. Several more shots echoed. Roger screamed somewhere in the darkness. The pair found Mitch crouched behind a skid of shipping boxes and joined him.
“We’re screwed,” Barb said. “They’re everywhere, and they’re not asking questions.”
“How did they know?” Tommy asked. “How could they?”
Mitch shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
“Thanks for the headline,” Tommy said and cocked his pistol.
“No,” Mitch said. “They said they were going to scare us. That’s what they said. Homeland Security would arrest us and scare us straight.” He looked at Barb and Tommy. He was terrified. “That’s what the guy told me. No one was supposed to have guns. They were just going to scare us. They swore to me.”
A voice called from the darkness, demanded they throw out their weapons. Tommy stared at Mitch. The kid’s recent nervousness began to make sense. Oh, did it make sense.
“What did you do?” Barb asked.
Mitch’s face twisted, anguished. “I needed money. My kid sister got into some trouble, and had no one else to go to. My parents would’ve killed her.” His voice faltered. “They just wanted to know what we were up to. The guy who called me, he was hanging around the Deathics board. He said they figured out who we were, wanted to keep us from screwing up. They made it like a job, and I needed the extra money. There weren’t supposed to be guns.” He craned his head up from behind the stacked boxes. “You weren’t supposed to have guns!” he shouted.
A shot crashed and Mitch ducked down, right into Tommy’s grip. Tommy shook him.
“Stupid shit! They used you!” he shouted, shoving Mitch back into the boxes. He had to stop himself from doing more. He looked at Barb. Her composure helped him focus.
“We need to give up,” Barb said.
Tommy realized his desire to run, to fight his way out, was naked in his expression. Barb saw and read it and shook her head. “We’d never make it,” she assured him.
He stared. Nodded. That’s why she was the boss.
“We’re coming out!” Tommy shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
He rose with care, gun hanging by the trigger guard around the thumb of his wide open hand, arms stretched overhead. Barb followed suit. Tommy heard Mitch slip away in the darkness and found it didn’t trouble him. Mitch was already dead to him.
Tommy and Barb stepped from behind the boxes, frozen. They could hear footfalls in the darkness, glimpsed the passing of silhouettes across distant windows. They waited. A quiet, hard voice startled them from the left.
“This is for Dawes,” the voice said, and Tommy heard a gun being cocked. He turned and saw the soldier in shadow. Tommy pivoted, gun back in his grip.
Three shots overlapped in a hellish firecracker pop. The soldier fired a round that struck Barb in the arm. In turn, he received a bullet in the face from
Tommy’s pistol. As Tommy’s gun barked, he felt a punch in his left shoulder. He twisted as he fell, saw the still-smoking automatic in Barb’s hand.
Tommy landed on his wound, the pain blinding. His arm went numb.
Barb scrambled over to him, grimacing, issuing apologies under her breath. She examined him with frantic hands.
“It looks like it passed right through your shoulder,” she said. “Who’s your angel?”
“Wish I knew,” he said, ignoring his mother’s voice fighting to be heard above the din of his thoughts.
Tommy’s eyes picked Mitch out in the darkness, sandwiched between two of the nearby pallets of chemical drums, shouting obscenities, crying. He was no longer a revolutionary, instead reduced by his sins to a wounded youth. “No one uses me! I’m nobody’s Judas!” The silver detonator shimmered in his hand. Tommy saw one of their charges stuck to a 55-gallon drum. Tommy felt Barb’s gasp. They heard nearby footfalls, soldiers unawares.
Tommy rolled, shoved Barb to the floor and draped himself over her. There was nowhere to go, and no way for them to get there if there was. He had no idea if shielding her would make a difference. He didn’t care.
There was a new light in her eyes, admiration and sadness and warmth mingled in a single gaze that told him here, at the end, she wished for something different for them.
As the room transformed into thunder and flame, Tommy was glad he’d lived to see that look.
Story by Douglas J. Lane
Illustration by Kelly Tindall
NOTHING
SHE HAD STARTED TO PANT SEVERAL HUNDRED YARDS EARLIER; now a small trickle of sweat was beginning to make its way down her back. She stopped, turned around. The view was majestic: meadows and hedges made a chequered pattern toward the horizon; chimneys puffed out small, dark grey clouds over farms and villages; and as always, the grass was a certain vivid, dark, and slightly translucent green, which she had associated with a particular smell since childhood—a smell of sea, of fields, and of burning coal.
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