Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  On the way up, your lungs on fire, and just before you crash through the surface, you bump into …

  Yourself.

  That is, the original version of you.

  Who is also drowning, the stupid, stubborn dick.

  Part of you wants to just let him go, and watch his body sink into the deep, dark ocean, following the wake of the spacecraft … wherever the hell that might be.

  But no. You can’t.

  Charlie Hardie still might be useful. All of the Cabal’s tricks had yet to be revealed, and maybe something Hardie saw could help. Either in his time in low earth orbit or back in their secret lab.

  So what you end up doing is scooping Hardie up. And you start swimming, one-armed, toward the shore.

  You’ve got a vague idea of where you’ve splashed down. Somewhere in the fuzzy zone between barely possible to swim to shore and no fucking way are you gonna live.

  This is not the way this mission should have gone.

  By this point in the mission you should have been done, kicking back in the satellite as it bobbed up and down in the ocean, waiting for the cavalry to arrive. Miller Time, as they used to say.

  But now you’re a long, long way from Miller Time.

  Legs pumping, arm pumping … your doppelgänger tucked under your other arm.

  This would be so much easier if you could just go whoopsie and let him drop. Unkillable bastard would probably survive it, wake up with Ariel and her daddy and that goofy talking crab, and look around and wonder what had happened. Yeah, that would be the easiest thing to do. You didn’t get into this line of work because it would be easy, though.

  As you swim you try to forget about how much your muscles ache already, how hard you’re breathing. Instead you ponder the mystery of the missing hard drive. You scanned the bejesus out of that spacecraft and there was no trace of it. The thing had to be up there. Why else spend so much money to launch a broken-down middle-aged man into low earth orbit? So it had to be an equipment failure. His hand-held scanner wasn’t sharp enough to pick up on the hard drive’s unique signature. That, or their intel was wrong. So in all likelihood, the hard drive was tucked away somewhere on that spacecraft, which was making an express trip to the bottom of the sea. Your people would just have to recover it before the Cabal. That part wasn’t up to you.

  So why work so hard to hold on to this 230-pound thug, when you yourself were struggling to keep your own 230-pound frame afloat?

  Because there was a slim chance that Hardie knew where the hard drive was all along.

  Maybe not consciously. But he could have a telling detail somewhere in that big skull of his. And you wouldn’t want to explain to your superiors why you surrendered that telling detail to the ocean.

  You keep swimming.

  It’s long, hard, exhausting work.

  You come close to giving up quite a few times, giving your aching, weak, nearly numb limbs the break they’re desperately crying out for. So what if the rest of you died. At least your limbs could have some peace.

  You keep swimming.

  Charlie Hardie is no fucking help at all.

  He could be conscious, pulling his own weight, but no. He has to rely on you.

  Fuck him for being a fat bastard, too.

  Two hundred and thirty pounds isn’t obscene, and he’s a tall, wide-framed guy. A lot of it has to do with genetics; some of it has to do with his military experience. But still. Fuck. If he weren’t so thick and heavy, you wouldn’t be so thick and heavy. Back in your previous incarnation, when you had a different name, you were just as tall and wide but a lot thinner. Lean muscle. Your old self, you could have swum to shore (wherever it was) and back again—twice—by now.

  No fucking help at all.

  At a certain point you realize what you’re seeing isn’t a mirage or a reflection of the sun on the water. It’s honest-to-fuck land, a beach, seemingly abandoned, even—which is perfect. You know you’re somewhere along the central California coast. Where, exactly, you have no idea. It doesn’t matter, because there is fucking land out there, people. Land. A tiny fleck of hope in an ocean of despair.

  Even though you see the land, you’re suddenly overcome with the oppressive feeling that you’re not going to make it, your head is going to slip under the surface of the water and that little glimpse of beach will be your last, and hah hah hee hee hawwwww won’t that be funny.

  You keep swimming.

  When you finally reach the shore you don’t do that lame Christopher Columbus thing where you fall, exhausted, to your knees and then genuflect to kiss the grains of sand. No, instead you scream and drag fat fucking Charlie Hardie far enough up the shoreline so that the waves won’t wash over his fat fucking face and drown him after all of that effort. Only then do you collapse next to him, eyes toward the sky, your limbs cursing you, you telling your limbs to shut up, and your chest heaving and your brain trying to supply countless demands for pain relief.

  There’s a noise not too far away.

  A crinkling of paper.

  “Whoah. You okay, man?”

  You twist your head around to see a bearded guy standing there with a notebook in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Even upside down you can tell he’s a hipster douchebag, central California version. The chunky glasses, the greasy hair, the tight misbuttoned shirt. He’s in dire need of a shower and a hug.

  “I’m doing just great,” you say.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Space.”

  The hipster douchebag, probably a fucking poet or something, doesn’t quite know how to respond to that, so he focuses on the big dude lying facedown in the sand next to you. He crouches down next to you both.

  “What about him? Is he okay? Wait a minute … are you guys wearing spacesuits? I thought you were just fucking around with me there.”

  Can’t get anything past this guy.

  “Can I show you something?” you ask, reaching for an imaginary pocket, and the moment his eyes track down to your hand you nail him. It feels good to take out some aggression on someone who totally doesn’t deserve it. By the follow-up rabbit punch he’s already out cold on the sand. Leaving you with two unconscious bodies on the beach. Let’s just hope hipster douchebag has car keys.

  He does.

  So you pick up your fat-ass doppelgänger and drag up him across the sand all the way up to the road where you find the hipster poet’s car, a late-model SUV. Inside, though, looks like what you imagine the guy’s apartment to look like. Books and papers everywhere, the cloying scent of hash or potpourri or some blend of the two, and a pattern of stains that creep you out. You almost feel bad for fat-ass—he’s the one who’s going to have to be passed out facedown in some unidentified stain. You, well, it’ll just be the ass of your spacesuit touching the seat.

  You sweep the backseat clear of grad lit major bullshit, stow your human cargo, then try to figure out where the fuck in California you are.

  The next few hours are frenetic and tense. You half-expect gunmen to turn a corner at any given second and blow the meat from your bones. But you can’t think about that, because those kinds of things are out of your control.

  You’re in a small California coastal town somewhere north of San Francisco, but it has the things you need. A drugstore so that you can shoplift some essential supplies, a chain motel where you can break into an unused room.

  This you learned from the Annotated Charlie Hardie, too. For a while there, after accidentally getting the Parrish family killed, Hardie was living in cheap motels, getting shitfaced, and forever losing his keycards. So he became fairly adept at using wire hangers to reach under the door and up and opening the handle with a quick jerk. When Hardie had been on the run in L.A. with the late Lane Madden, he’d perfected his technique to check into an unused room. He’d check the maid’s pencil charts to see which rooms had gone unused. You choose a motel pretty far from the beach—one of those non-chains that pretend they’re a chain anyway. You don�
��t need the room for long. Just enough time to pull yourselves together, call your handler, then wait for the cavalry to arrive. A few hours of sleep wouldn’t be a bad thing, either, while you’re waiting.

  Fat-ass, though, needs burn cream on his skin. It would be a lousy thing to have plucked him from the hot-cold vacuum of space only to have him perish from a skin infection. Unkillable or not, it was the little things that always did you in. As you work bandaging your body double, you can’t help it—you keep checking the prepaid cell phone you stole, hoping for that call back that will mean this nightmare is over.

  And then you see it.

  On the back of his—your—head.

  The scar that changes the whole game.

  14

  Don‘t start tryin’ to do the right thing, boy-o. You haven‘t the practice.

  —James Cromwell, L.A. Confidential

  HUH.

  Look at that.

  Still alive.

  Every time Charlie Hardie opened his eyes he experienced a sensation of mild surprise that he was still breathing air, still on this earthly plane of existence. Thing is, he never knew whether or not to be relieved or disappointed. For a good long while in his life, back when he was still house-sitting, he could have sworn he was in purgatory. And since you never die in purgatory, his continued existence was never a mystery. Since then, however, he’d gone through hell and back and had come to realize that he was indeed alive. But death could come for him at any moment.

  Like now.

  Hardie fully expected to wake up dead. The moment his head had slipped under the surface of the water, he had thought he’d drown in the Pacific Ocean, swallowed up and missing forever. Which was probably the fate he deserved, an anonymous burial at sea. So he was surprised to be on a too-soft bed in a dreary motel room with beat-up furniture. And standing across the way was …

  Himself.

  Huh. So it wasn’t all some weird prolonged nightmare, was it? Somebody had been crazy enough to carve up some poor bastard so that he looked just like him.

  The Other Him saw that he was being watched. “I can’t reach him.” His double had a disposable cell phone tucked between his face and shoulder. “I don’t understand it. This line was supposed to always be open and available.”

  “Who?”

  “My handler. I’ve been trying ever since I got the phone, waiting for a call back, but nothing.”

  Rising from the bed, Hardie felt like he was stricken with the most intense, bone-wearying flu he had ever had. Every individual part of his body seemed to hurt. Joints. Muscles. Bones. Even his hair follicles seemed to ache.

  But nothing was worse than the searing agony in both of his hands, which had been taped up.

  The Other Hardie noticed Hardie looking down at his paws. “Yeah, those are going to kill you,” he said. “But hang on until we get to Nevada. I’ll get you something that’ll take the pain away.”

  Hardie turned them slowly, examining the bandage job. What little he could see of his actual skin looked ugly and purple and very unskinlike. God, his hands. The one thing Kendra always said she liked about him.

  “Are they broken?”

  “Well, I don’t have an X-ray machine handy, but it’s safe to say you banged them up pretty damn bad. Just like your face.”

  “My what?”

  Hardie reached a taped-up paw up to his cheek, which set off twin waves of tear-inducing pain. The slight pressure on his fingertips sent lightning bolts down his hand all the way to his armpit. Simultaneously, his face remembered it had been burned to a crisp, and the pain centers lit up like a winning slot machine.

  “Oh hell, my face. What the hell happened to my face?”

  “I really don’t know, because I was knocked out by the crash. I only woke up as you were slipping under, taking me along with you. When I managed to pull your head above water, I saw that it was burned to hell. I’m sorry, man. But in the grand scheme of things, I’d say we’re both pretty lucky to be alive.”

  Which is what secretly worries you.

  You two shouldn’t be alive. That craft clearly wasn’t meant to be recoverable—it crashed too hard and apparently sank way too fast. There were no NSA rescue teams waiting to scoop you up as promised. You were left in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to drown. Not exactly how they’d sold it to you inside that antiseptic over-airconditioned vault of an office back in suburban Virginia.

  Now that you’ve seen the little jagged surprise on the back of Hardie’s head, you realize you’ve been fed misinformation from the start of the mission.

  My God, you realize with a start.

  Were you even meeting with the NSA over this past year? Or were you in the custody of someone else? You did the one thing you should never do in this game—accept something at face value. Just because you were remanded to the custody of US intelligence didn’t necessarily mean you remained in the custody of US intelligence …

  So what is going on? What part of the game board can’t you see?

  At the bathroom mirror, Hardie took a good long look at what was left of his face. The Other Him had done a thorough job. You couldn’t see much of his flesh, other than the raw red charred meat around his eyes and his mouth. There were two slits in the bandages around his nose that allowed him to breathe. His ears were exposed, and they didn’t seem too bad. Nor was his hair singed.

  Hardie remembered an old Bogart movie called Dark Passage—based on a novel written by a fellow Philadelphian named David Goodis. Bogie spends a good chunk of the movie wrapped up in bandages following some back-alley plastic surgery, San Francisco–style. Hardie always thought Bogie looked kind of ridiculous—almost clownlike. He had to emote through his eyes, and, boy, did that old tough guy emote. Now the joke was on Hardie, because he looked just as ridiculous.

  Okay, whatever. Who cares what he looked like underneath? He wasn’t going to be entering any amateur modeling competitions at the mall.

  Hardie’s bandaged fingers found a loose piece of gauze under his chin and he started to pull.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the Other Him said. He was standing in the bathroom doorway behind him, with his fully functional face and hands.

  “Why?” Hardie asked. “You about to eat lunch or something?”

  “No. Because of the risk of infection. I should have taken you to a hospital with those burns, but we both know you wouldn’t last long in a place like that. Not before they heard about it and took you out.”

  So the burns were that bad. Great.

  “Hey, I did the best I could.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Be grateful you’re alive at all.”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Hardie asked. “We’re unkillable. We can’t die.”

  “You might be,” Chuck said, “but the same doesn’t go for me. I’m absolutely mortal.”

  Hardie shook his head. “Trust me, I can be killed.”

  The Other Him looked at him and smirked. A trademark Charlie Hardie™ smirk. Which creeped Hardie out, just as your reflection would creep you out if it started doing something different in the mirror.

  “That’s only because you’ve never heard of Project Viking.”

  “Project what?”

  Project Viking had been buried for twenty years.

  Nobody knew about Project Viking.

  That is, until your handlers put together the Annotated Charlie Hardie—including a little shocking document they called the Arbona Memorandum—and discovered the truth about what had happened to Hardie in the early 1990s.

  Back in the early days of the Iraq invasion, which had been treated like a field test for a lot of crazy stuff they’d been saving up over the years, a private corporation received the nod to treat a few soldiers with a series of hormones and vitamins that would amp up their endurance. The soldiers weren’t told; nor were their superiors. But the idea was that if soldiers could last even a few hours more on the battlefield, modified to bleed out more slowly, or could be given extra blast
s of adrenaline at the right moment, then the savings would be astronomical. You wouldn’t have to deploy a new soldier if a bunch of old ones could last even a short while longer. Add those hours up, and you’re talking billions.

  Hence Project Viking. Soldiers were given doses during basic training, totally unbeknownst to them (they were told they were simply deficient in some vitamins and had to report for extra supplements). The creators of Project Viking thought they’d have a good old field test when the US Army kicked down Saddam’s door and got into a serious rumble. The excitement was palpable. Would Crazy Hussein (in the membrane, Hussein in the brain!) use his rumored stores of chemical weapons? And if so, would the Viking subjects last longer?

  As it turned out, Project Viking did jack shit in this kind of war. Didn’t matter how many vitamins and hormones and supplements you gave a soldier: An IED was still going to turn him into chunks of lunchmeat.

  And then the people in charge of funding fell in love with drone weapons and robots and all at once Project Viking was seen as a relic, a Captain America-ish dream that belonged back in the 1940s.

  “You were a Project Viking test subject,” the Other Him said.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t remember signing up for any experiments or tests. I was just there to escape my shitty neighborhood and my shitty life.”

  “These kinds of experiments, they didn’t ask for volunteers. They just ran them. No permissions slips, no questions asked.”

  “They,” Hardie said, anger building in his face as he tried to find the right words, “they just can’t do that shit to people!”

  “And yet they did. Look, the files were buried deep, but they exist. There’s nothing more suspicious than a blank page in someone’s biography. Well, the Cabal kept digging until they found it. And once they realized who they had on their hands, you suddenly became hot property. Since then, we’ve dug up copies of them for ourselves. I’ve read them. I know what happened to you. And it’s been a part of your life ever since.”