Machine of Death

by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki ! (Editors)

  Though the residents and long-time nurses did their best to combat complacency—after all, you could never know if the heart attack implied on the slip was this one, or another in thirty years—you could still see the knowing look in the doctors’ eyes when someone crashed. If you were lucky, the advance warning made things a little less traumatic for both patient and doctor. More dignified.

  Annie pushed off from the ground and the merry-go-round spun hesitantly, their weight throwing it off balance and making it squeal against its steel and rubber fittings. Ryan realized he’d trailed off and snapped back to the present, turning toward her.

  “Did you talk to your mom?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did it go?”

  “About how we expected.” She reached up with one hand and tucked a lock of severely cropped white-blond hair behind her ear. “She doesn’t really trust it, and has all sorts of philosophical misgivings, but in the end she knows it’s our decision and supports us without question. She’d like us to come out and see the new house whenever we can—she’s trying to hold it back, but I can tell she’s already gearing up to play the doting grandmother. She’s probably already got the shower half-planned. I told her you’re booked solid, but that we might be able to make it out in a month or so. What do you think?”

  Ryan grunted noncommittally, feigning reluctance. She shoved his shoulder hard, tipping him off balance.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know you love it. You don’t even have to help cook—you just get to read and ride the horses and hang out with William. I’m the one who’s going to have to go visit eighty-year-old great-aunts and listen to stories about people who died in 1967.” She stood and grabbed his hand. “Come on, let’s go sit on the swings.”

  Ryan stood and let her pull him along. In the dark, her tiny hands glowed against her sleeves, and he marveled at the boundless energy contained in something so small and delicate.

  The park was nothing extravagant—a gravel-covered box edged with trees on one side, with the merry-go-round, a few big climbing toys, and a swing set. Nothing like the expansive playgrounds both of them had grown up with, but that was the price they paid for living in the city. During the day, every square foot was covered in running, yelling children, offering local mothers a few minutes to read their books on the surrounding benches. But at night it stood empty, save for the occasional drug deal or sleepy hobo.

  Annie had exploded into Ryan’s life like a mortar round, with only the faintest whistle to warn him. A smile across a crowded party, and suddenly she was right in front of him, introducing herself with a confidence that made him sweat. The rest of the party had suddenly paled in comparison, fading to a dull buzz, and the two had quietly excused themselves, drifting out into the silent streets.

  Something about each of them opened a vein in the other, and the conversation flowed in great torrents, both of them pushing further and faster, daring each other to greater depths of intimacy. In a heartbeat Ryan found himself offering up his deepest secrets, astonished and enraptured by the care with which she picked each one up, examined it carefully from all sides, and then replaced it. They’d walked for hours, finally stopping in this park to rest on the swing set. When they eventually left, he’d gone home alone, but something had changed. It was a new sort of alone, relaxed and refreshed.

  He’d invited her out again, and once more they’d walked until they dropped, taking a different path but still ending at the park. He’d repeated the date three times, reluctant to risk changing any variables, before she finally suggested that they might want to try going out to dinner or a movie once in a while. The fact that she said it while lying in his bed, hair tousled and one pink-tipped breast peeking out from beneath the threadbare cotton sheets, had taken any sting out of her words. They’d built a life together, but the park had always maintained a special place in their relationship. It was there that he’d asked her to marry him—not the most creative choice, but she’d still said yes. Even once they lived together, it had still been a place of significance. Neutral ground. Holy ground.

  Annie sat down in the lower of the two swings and leaned back, toes barely dragging in the gravel. In the one beside it, Ryan’s feet were flat on the ground, weight pulling down on the rubber until the chain pinched his sides.

  “How was it?” he asked.

  “Pretty easy,” she said, slowly beginning to pump. “It’s pretty much the same as amniocentesis—there was more than just the pinch they tell you to expect, but not much. It was over in like thirty seconds.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

  She reached over and twined her fingers in his, making his arm sway in time with her.

  “I know,” she replied. “You had to work.”

  He stiffened, but her eyes held none of the old resentment. It was true—she really did know. And it was okay.

  They’d conceived before. The first was a surprise, when they’d been married only a few months, and the tears of joy had been tinged with shock and a vague sense of panic. When she’d miscarried two months in, they’d been heartbroken, of course, but eventually both admitted to pangs of guilty relief.

  The second time the stick turned blue, it was intentional—they had good jobs, a car, a house, and a strong desire to take the next step. They’d surprised their parents with it on Mother’s Day, and were immediately enveloped in a whirlwind of blue and pink, both grandmothers good-naturedly attempting to outdo each other with baby preparation. Ryan’s father, the paragon of stoicism, had cried and hugged him, tears leaking out from behind Coke-bottle glasses. Annie glowed.

  When the baby spontaneously aborted in the eighth month, the pain was unlike anything Ryan or Annie had ever known. The doctors explained that there was nothing they could have done, that sometimes these things just happened, but their words fell on deaf ears. Annie blamed herself. Ryan felt helpless. In their sadness, they turned away from each other. Conversations became arguments became battles. Annie, the picture of brazen self-confidence for as long as Ryan had known her, became weepy and dependent. She resented his long hours at the hospital. He resented her resentment. They’d separated for several months, her flying back to her parents’ place in Maine, him staying in Seattle and picking up as many extra shifts as he could. But in the end, neither could stay away, and one Saturday she’d showed up on his doorstep with tears and a suitcase. Together, they’d worked through their grief. When it was done, they were a little bit harder, a few more wrinkles in their faces, but the love that had been soft and warm and all-pervasive was now iron-hard, a steel cable that suspended them above the dark pit they’d both stared into. Their love had been tested. It had passed.

  There followed a long stretch where neither mentioned trying again, both of them reluctant to reopen old wounds. But all around them friends began having children, and both watched the way the other smiled when they saw small children running, the way their faces lit up when they cradled a newborn in their arms. And finally, after careful consideration and numerous late-night discussions, they had tossed out the box of condoms. Three months later, Annie was pregnant.

  They’d gone back and forth on whether they wanted to test the fetus with the machine. These days, most adults went ahead and got tested, with the exception of the religious nuts and the staunch free-will atheists, who finally had a common cause to rally around. Both Annie and Ryan knew how they would go, and had shared that knowledge with each other early on. Yet the decision of whether to test a child, let alone an unborn one, was difficult, and raised a bevy of uncomfortable questions: would you abort a child that had a horribly painful death in store for it, or one that might die young? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome made frequent appearances on the machine’s little slips of paper. Was it better to die at six weeks or to never be born in the first place? And suppose your child survived to adulthood. When did you inform them of the method of their eventual demise? Some parents advocated raising children with the knowledge f
rom birth, in the hope that never knowing a life without a prescribed death would make it easier. Others waited until the child asked, or graduated from college, or got married. Whatever the call, knowledge of the means of death quickly wrenched the title of “the Talk” from comparatively paltry topics like “where babies came from” and “you’re adopted.”

  Pundits on both sides raged, but in the end, for Annie and Ryan, there was no question—if this child was going to miscarry as well, they needed to know as soon as possible so that they could induce it themselves. Abortion was far safer for Annie, and though neither of them said it, both knew that it would be easier to end things if they had less time to get attached.

  Annie put her feet down, stopping herself, and squeezed his hand once before letting go. Reaching inside her jacket, she pulled out a small envelope, turning it over and over in her hands. The service she’d used had embossed it with pastel blue angels and clouds. She wedged a finger under the flap and looked up at him.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  A sudden lump in Ryan’s throat kept him from speaking. He nodded and reached over, placing jittery hands over hers. She broke the seal and pulled out the small, plain white card. On it, in large block letters, were printed three words:

  CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE.

  Ryan let out a breath. The world was spinning, sparkling at the corners. His stomach felt like he was falling.

  “Do you know what this means?” he asked, voice husky and strained.

  Annie turned toward him, tears glistening on cheeks pulled tight by a shaky smile.

  “We’re going to have a baby,” she whispered.

  Story by James L. Sutter

  Illustration by Rene Engström

  SHOT BY SNIPER

  LIEUTENANT GRALE CRAWLED THROUGH THE ASHEN SLOP BENEATH AND BEHIND THE SLANTED BILLBOARD THAT’D HALF-FALLEN FROM THE ROOF ABOVE, its Arabic advert made all but illegible, even to the locals. The machinegun fire crackling through the air was background and indistinct. If one were careless, the sound would become ambient, like the bustling traffic in New York or the steady hum of a computer.

  A shot kicked up dirt in front of Grale’s face. He pulled himself backward, back to the dubious protection of the fallen sign.

  A sniper. “Shit.”

  He looked across the road. His men hadn’t noticed yet.

  “Sniper!”

  Everyone moved at once, except for Paula. She was green, and waited just a second too long. She turned to face Grale, and as she did, she staggered backward, blood flying from her arm. Gearhead leapt out, grabbed her, and pulled her behind the cover of the still-standing wall of a long-destroyed hotel.

  The sniper waited, silent.

  Across the street from the fallen billboard, Grale’s men looked at him, pasty-faced and wide-eyed. One of the men—Simmons—signed for him to stay put.

  “No shit, Simmons.”

  A panic swept through the men as they crouched behind the wall. They were reacting, damn it, not thinking, and Paula’s cries of pain were rattling loose what little cohesion they had. Grale needed to cross the street and reach them, and he needed to do so before the SNAFU became FUBAR.

  But those three little words on that tiny slip of paper kept him from dashing across.

  The focus of the panic shifted from Paula to Grale. They knew she’d be fine, after all. But the eyes on Grale hadn’t the slightest shimmer of hope. No. They all knew Grale would die here. God damn that machine.

  It’d been a week ago, back when the insurgency seemed stoppable. A couple of rookie privates had found the machine in the wreckage of a casino. (Well, Grale called it a casino. The locals insisted it wasn’t. The locals insisted a lot of things.) The machine still worked.

  Grale had said to throw the damn thing out, but most of the platoon kicked up a fuss. “It’s one of the newer models,” Gearhead had said, looking at it. “Forty different languages. Takes a pinprick of blood—less than most blood-sugar machines—and it’s supposed to be the wittiest model yet. Come on, Lieutenant? What harm will it do?”

  Machines weren’t infallible. That was Grale’s sole understanding of computers, and even Gearhead (reluctantly, at times) agreed with him. So let the boys (and girls, Grale, you can’t forget them) have their fun. Right?

  “Says I’m going to drown.”

  “That blows.”

  “Paula—What’s yours?”

  “Uh—car accident.”

  “Oh, what the hell? Mine says ‘Killed by cow.’”

  “A cow?”

  “Always knew you’d amount to great things, Simmons.”

  “Blow me. Hey, Lieutenant!”

  “Lt. Grale! You gotta try this.”

  “I really don’t,” Grale said.

  “He just doesn’t want to see the words ‘old age’ in print.”

  Everyone laughed. An explosion and the sound of wrenching metal pealed through the open windows, a distant and painful reality check.

  “Gearhead,” Grale said, “Take ten men and go see who killed who.”

  “Yes, sir!” the skinny youngster said, snapping gum that’d been in his mouth since morning.

  The rest of the men kept joking about the machine’s one-line fortunes, and Simmons, with a half-smile plastered on his face, said, “Come on, Lieutenant. It won’t hurt you to see what it says.”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant, come on.”

  A chorus of “come ons” and “yeahs” broke out, and Grale couldn’t see the harm in a little fun.

  He stepped up to the machine—it was such a humble thing—and Paula showed him how it worked. It reminded Grale of a slot machine. Maybe that was why it’d been in a casino.

  A tiny slip of paper curled out.

  Grale ripped it free, read it, stared at it for a moment, and then let it fall to the floor with a shrug. Like jackals, Grale’s men fell on the scrap and gaped at it, horror-struck. By nightfall, everyone on base knew how Lieutenant Grale was going to die.

  The change came the next morning. Some of the men wouldn’t talk to Grale unless they had to. Overnight, he’d become the most beloved and still (somehow) least-popular man on base. And anyone with something bad to say about Lt. Grale: Watch out!

  Everywhere Grale went, his soldiers looked at him with wide, wet eyes and the color would swirl out of their faces. They’d utter “yes, sir,” as if the post had arrived with a thousand pounds of Dear John letters.

  What harm could a little fun be? Grale snorted at the thought.

  Aside from bringing morale to an all-time low? Not a goddamned thing.

  “I want that damn machine turned into scrap.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You hear me? If it stays on this base, it’ll be reincarnated as a locker.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now! I want to see you do it, Marine!”

  That caused some grumbling. Word went out that ol’ Grale was afraid of the death machine. “And who can blame him?” they’d say.

  What the hell did they know?

  Grale crouched behind the billboard and watched the disaster unfold across the street. His boys (and girl), the whole lot of them, in an instant, decided that they were going to defy fate, to prove Grale’s slip of paper wrong. He couldn’t hear what they were saying over the gunfire, and they weren’t signaling anything.

  A bullet sliced through the sign and sent bits of brick from the building behind Grale into the air. The damn thing almost parted his hair. He pressed himself against the ground.

  He saw Gearhead on the radio. Calling an air strike. Good boy.

  Simmons put a new mag in his gun and shifted his legs.

  No, damn you, Simmons, stay put. Grale gestured for him to stay down.

  He didn’t.

  “No!”

  But Simmons charged around the corner. Gearhead looked across the ruined street at Grale and Grale shook his head. Gearhead stopped the others from following. Good boy.

  Grale ground his teeth. Once, his dau
ghter had left at seventeen hundred hours, back at the base in Germany, and never reported for dinner. She’d come home at oh-one hundred, drunk and battered. Grale knocked a few heads in that night, that was for sure. But the time between seventeen and oh-one hundred hours? That excruciating wait? That was how Grale felt when Simmons turned the corner and charged toward the ruins of the office building.

  A crack shattered the other sounds of the urban fighting and Grale knew what’d happened, even before he heard Simmons cry out. Just like he knew what happened that night, so long ago, before his daughter had opened her mouth to start crying.

  Grale peered over the sign. Simmons was down, hard. The sniper had shot his leg. The bastard was hoping to draw out more.

  Grale made a gesture at Gearhead.

  Gearhead shook his head.

  Grale made ready to spring, putting his back against the sign and shouldering his rifle. This was his job, damn it, these were his children. Screw that miserable machine and its miserable opinion.

  “Covering fire!” Gearhead screamed. NATO rounds poured upward toward the office building. Grale turned at the edge of the sign and dashed into the street. Throughout, the sniper was silent. Good boy, Gearhead.

  Grale reached Simmons, and winced. The boy’s leg was mangled badly—he’d be lucky to keep it. Have to carry him, Grale thought.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Shut up. You gotta live so that cow can kill ya.”

  Grale squatted and hefted Simmons up. Boy could use a meal or two extra. Damn, it was hot out.

  Grale’s eyes were glued up to the building.

  He saw the sniper.

  He could see into the sniper’s eyes, all the way from the ground. They were like brown glass, and the man behind them—the man behind the rifle—hated Grale, hated Simmons, and he’d hate anyone else that stepped into the street. The NATO rounds weren’t keeping him down anymore.