Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  “What do you mean?”

  The Other Him gave a creepy look that bordered on pity. Oh, you poor baby. Which was surreal. Was that what Hardie looked like when he was trying to look sympathetic? No wonder everybody seemed to want to punch him in the face.

  “You can stop beating yourself up because you lived and Nate died.”

  The words were like ice water through Hardie’s veins.

  “You may think you know what happened,” he said quietly, “but every part of my life is not contained in a bunch of files somewhere.”

  “You lived because of Project Viking. Your body is able to rally and heal itself a lot faster than an ordinary human being’s body. Just think about that for a moment. Think about what you could have done with that gift, rather than wasting it on … whatever it is you think you’ve been doing.”

  “If this is a pep talk,” Hardie said, “you suck at it.”

  The Other Him smiled. “Maybe this is my version. Because, buddy, you and me got a long road ahead of us.”

  “They’re going to find us anyway, aren’t they? I mean, this is your all-powerful Cabal we’re talking about. How long can we hide from people like this?”

  “We can do this,” the Other Him said. “We have to make it to my debriefing station. That’s the only way now. I have to assume the field teams working the mission have been taken out, as well as my communication channels. It’s in person, or it’s nothing.”

  “Where’s this station?”

  “Somewhere in Virginia. I know it by sight.”

  “And we’re somewhere in California right now.”

  “If we leave now, we can be there in two days.”

  “Wait … you mean drive it?”

  “No other way.”

  “How about in an airplane, maybe?”

  “They’d spot us within seconds. Especially with you, looking like the Mummy’s ugly cousin. And me, wearing your face.”

  “Driving sounds insane,” Hardie said.

  “You don’t understand,” his double said. “I’m not giving you a choice here. This is how it plays out. Otherwise we’re all dead. Including Kendra and CJ. We’ve gotta take down the Cabal while they’re vulnerable.”

  “Uh-uh,” Hardie said. “We get my family first. Once they’re safe, then I’ll do everything I can to help you bury these bastards. I’ll do a drunken jig on their graves. But not until I know my family is safe.”

  15

  I’m gonna get us something from all four food groups: hamburgers, French fries, coffee and doughnuts.

  —Jim Belushi, Red Heat

  THE GREASY SPOON on the ground floor of the motel was decorated for Christmas. Strips of aluminum foil were meant to be tinsel, cotton balls were meant to be snow, pine cones were meant to be … pine cones. Plastic molded Santa Clauses and reindeer were affixed to the walls and coated with at least two decades’ worth of airborne grease and dust, the remnants of past holiday customers and what they ate.

  Appetizing.

  Charlie Hardie had no idea what to order. He didn’t know what his stomach could handle after nine months of freeze-dried and powdered space food. Order a burger, and he could be seeing it again within minutes. And it wouldn’t be nearly as appetizing the second time around. But he also knew he should be eating something. His double had insisted: Eat now or hold your peace for three thousand miles. Hardie realized the guy was right. His body needed fuel. He’d be of no use to Kendra and the boy if he was passing out every few minutes.

  But what? Nothing on the menu didn’t make his stomach pre-emptively clench. Everything seemed to be fried, breaded, or grilled—or covered in onions that were fried, breaded, or grilled. Wasn’t this supposed to be California, land of healthy living?

  Whatever he ordered, he was definitely going to pair it with a beer. It would probably hit him way hard, just like it did the last time. But screw it. A man who survives a crash landing from outer space deserves a cold one.

  Hardie was still at a loss. “What do you recommend?”

  “The pie’s good,” the counter girl said.

  Yes. Pie. Wholesome, nourishing all-American pie. The staple of American diets since the colonial days. No, seriously. Hardie had read about it in an in-flight magazine once. How pies weren’t just dessert. They were entire meals. Throw a bunch of ingredients into a dough shell and there you go.

  “Pie,” Hardie said. “Yeah, a big slice of pie.”

  “What kind?”

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as bad pie. And also, a beer. Doesn’t matter what brand, either.”

  “Beer and pie. At 7:30 a.m.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We don’t serve beer. No liquor license.”

  “Then I guess it’ll just be the pie, then.”

  The waitress nodded but lingered on his eyes a bit. Hardie could tell she wanted to ask him about the bandages on his face and hands but ultimately decided that she could live without that knowledge. She turned to the Other Him. “How about you?”

  “Pie sounds great, any kind. Something different from my friend’s order, okay? That way if we don’t like it we can switch.”

  “I’m not switching pies with you,” Hardie said.

  “What, you don’t want a beer or anything?” the waitress asked, not even the barest trace of a smile on her face, even though she was joking.

  “Me? No. Not this early in the morning. My friend here’s the drunk.”

  She went off to the cooling case to pull out two different pies. They were uncut, virginal. Hardie watched her use the knife on the pies and turned to the Other Him and said, “We need a name for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t call you Charlie, I’m sorry. You’ve got a real name, don’t you? Before all this you were Secret Agent somebody, right?”

  “I’ve had a few names in my career.”

  “So pick one.”

  “I can’t. They’re all classified.”

  “And your birth name?”

  “It’s been so long I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Okay, it’s classified, too. Look, they take this stuff seriously. But more than that—if you start calling me another name, it’ll mess with my mind. The key to being you for all of these months? Truly believing that I am you. It’s hard enough being with you right here. The bandages help a little.”

  “What do you mean, believing you’re me? You’re not me. We’ve established this already, right?”

  “The thing is, some part of me still thinks I am you. So you can’t call me anything other than Charlie Hardie.”

  “You’re fucked in the head, you know that?”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  The waitress put the pies in front of them. Cherry for Hardie, Apple for He Who Had Yet to Be Named.

  It could all end here, with a slice of apple pie.

  You tell yourself: Be smart now.

  Quickly you plunge your fork into the center and reach into your pocket at the same time. You ask Hardie to pass you a napkin, because (luckily) the dispenser is on his side of the counter. You jab the pie with your left hand, pinch the capsules in your right. Meanwhile, Hardie’s distracted, looking for a napkin. His peripheral vision is crap, thanks to those bandages. Now. Make your move. Do it, and do it quick. Burst the capsules with your thumb and index finger. Sprinkle that shit liberally.

  Hardie’s picked up his fork now and is ready to plunge it when—

  “Wait,” you say. “I can’t eat this. I’m allergic to apples.”

  Hardie’s head snaps to the right and his beady eyes peer at you from behind the bandages. “I’ve never heard of an allergy to apples. Plus, you’ve already stuck your fork in yours. No thanks.”

  “The fork didn’t touch my mouth.”

  “I don’t care if it didn’t touch your ass. I’m sticking with the cherry.”

  “Come on. Cut me a break.”

  “Order another slice th
en.”

  You’re thinking fast, tap-tap-tap-dancing inside your own skull. Boy, this really could go in any direction right now …

  Hardie plunged his fork into his own pie, chopped off a ridiculously large portion of it, and shoved it into his mouth. Cherry juice stained the bandages around his mouth.

  “You’re an ass,” you tell him.

  “Mmmmmm, mmmmm, you really should order a slice of this,” Hardie says.

  But you’re not done yet.

  Oh no.

  “You’ve got cherry gore on your face,” you tell him, then reach across him for a napkin.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  People are staring now, which is fine, because they’re all focused on him and not on your right hand, which has the contents of three burst capsules in it—and now you’re sprinkling that stuff right into the gaping wound in Hardie’s cherry pie.

  “Come on. Let me clean you up.”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “I’m not driving cross-country with someone who looks like he’s been snacking on small woodland creatures.”

  “Whatever. Let’s get out of here. I’m done with this.”

  “Will you just finish your pie? After all of that bullshit about ordering it?”

  Now Hardie realizes that, yes, he’s the toddler making the scene in the nearly empty diner, everyone is looking his way, and well … he’d better shut up and enjoy his damn pie. He takes another forkful, not quite as large this time, but that’s okay. Because that one forkful has it all.

  Go ahead, eat up.

  Enjoy your pie.

  And then get realllll sleepy.

  Now that you know he’s all right, and his head isn’t about to go ka-boom, you realize you need Charlie Hardie unconscious for the next part of this trip. It’ll make things so much easier. You’re in charge; not him. You need him asleep and out of the way so that you can win back your freedom at long last. The tricky thing is giving him enough to knock him out but not kill him. His tolerance for poisons and gases is legendary, but you realize there has to be a tipping point. And Charlie Hardie may not be much of a bargaining chip if he’s dead.

  The second bite of cherry pie didn’t taste as good to Hardie. Probably the damned fake freeze-dried space food ruined his taste buds for life. That or the sting of embarrassment ruined the whole thing. He wished they served beer here. What he wouldn’t give for a beer.

  The hipster poet pays for your pies, though he doesn’t know it. You’ve already changed out the license plates on his SUV, but that ruse won’t last forever. You need another vehicle as quickly as possible. But not any old vehicle. You’ve got a special vehicle in mind, one that makes you believe that all is not lost, that you can pull this off.

  You look over at your twin. He should be feeling the effects of the pills by now. Just to be sure, though, you’ve still got a pocket full of them, and while Hardie goes off to shake the dew off his lily one last time, you’re going to dose a bottle of water you’ve bought him.

  This would be so much easier if you could have access to the usual array of tools, poison, and rigs. Alas, wish in one hand, crap in the other …

  “Come on, let’s get a move on.”

  Predictably, you both make a beeline for the driver’s seat. He thinks he’d driving. That’s funny, for many, many reasons.

  “I always drive when breaking in a new partner,” Hardie says.

  “You were never a cop.”

  “Screw you! You got the driver’s harness on the spacecraft.”

  “A lot of good it did me. Look, I’m happy to trade up somewhere down the road. But you’ve just been unconscious for twelve hours. Who knows if you’ll suddenly slip back under?” You clamp your teeth down on your tongue before you can say, And you will. Oh, you will …

  “You were out before we even touched ground,” Hardie replies. “If there’s anybody who’s at risk, it’s you. Geez, what if we go more than fifty miles per hour? That might just knock you out again!”

  “You’re not driving. Want to know how I know that? Because I have the keys.”

  You want to scream: Will you just fall asleep already! Yawn or something. Let me know the stuff is working on you.

  From behind the bandages, Hardie’s beady eyes are fiercely trained on you. “I can take them from you.”

  This kind of banter goes on for a while until you finally just push your way past Hardie, open the stolen car, and strap yourself in behind the wheel. Hardie does the sullen teenager thing as he climbs into the passenger seat and leans back against the headrest. Finally. He’s feeling it, isn’t he? You key the ignition and peel out of the diner parking lot and start your high-speed cross-country journey. If he falls asleep, you think everything will work out okay.

  Hardie does not fall asleep.

  Even after a very difficult interlude where you manage to dump more of your home-grown knockout cocktail into a bottle of water you’ve packed and offer it to Hardie. He’s grateful, because the sun streaming through the windshield is making him thirsty, and he gulps down half of it.

  But he does not sleep.

  And then he drinks the other half a few minutes later!

  But he does not sleep.

  You’re feeling sleepy just thinking about all of the milligrams of good old-fashioned pharmaceutical night-night juice you’ve dumped into that water because it seems to have no effect whatsoever on this guy.

  You think: Project Viking, you can kiss my fat, surgically altered ass.

  Hardie was tired as hell. All he wanted to do was close his eyes for a few minutes and let his brain cycle down. But he knew that would just be asking for trouble. He could easily imagine waking up to discover his disembodied head floating in a jar of electrified water or some such shit. His clone may have yanked him out of the Pacific Ocean and bandaged up his face and hands … but he still didn’t fully trust him yet.

  Instead of drifting off, Hardie thought some conversation would help. Chances were his clone would say something to piss him off, and the adrenaline would go coursing through his bloodstream and keep him alert for the duration of this hell trip.

  The first question being, “Tell me again why we didn’t steal a fucking plane?”

  America is a nation of roads and bridges and tunnels and buildings and wide-open spaces, his clone patiently explained.

  “The Cabal,” he continued, “is part of a shadow nation of roads and bridges and tunnels and buildings running parallel to those we all know.”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “No,” Hardie said. “I believe you. I was trapped in one of those shadow zones for longer than I care to remember. So your big idea is to speed across the entire country through these shadow zones, hope we don’t killed, rescue my family, then zoom down to home base somewhere in Virginia?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “They’ll find us on the road and kill us. We both know this.”

  “Not if we use their own roads against them.”

  “Still think flying’s quicker.”

  “They’re going to come at us with everything they’ve got,” the Other Hardie said. “But it’ll be in the way you least expect it.”

  “Always is,” Hardie said.

  “No, you don’t understand. You faced the Accident People all those years ago, right? They were good at orchestrating events at a single scene.”

  “Not that good.”

  “Good enough. But imagine that kind of care and planning on a national scale. That’s what we’re up against. So we have to hide within their system.”

  “How do we do that? We’re in a stolen car on the open highway. I don’t see these shadow roads you keep talking about.”

  “The roads are a metaphor. It’s not the road but the vehicle.”

  “You’re getting all Jack Kerouac on me, aren’t you.”

  “No. I’m talking about an actual vehicle, bulletproof and untraceable, hidden in a secret storage u
nit in the middle of the Nevada desert.”

  16

  You may not like what you’re about to see.

  —Peter Weller, RoboCop

  WitSec Site #1919—Now

  ONE COLD MORNING, Ellie Clark started talking to her husband again.

  It wasn’t much, and no eye contact. It was merely: “You want some?” Some being the rest of the scrambled eggs she’d cooked up for the girls. Still, this was progress. Five weeks earlier, when Deacon “Deke” Clark had placed his wife and daughters in witness protection, Ellie vowed never to speak to him again. Usually Eleanor Jean Clark was a woman of her word. She was a loving wife and a wonderful mother. But she recalled grudges like people recalled their Social Security numbers.

  Now, all these stone-silent and awkward weeks later, she asked him, “You want some?”

  Some, meaning the sad little clump of slightly browned scrambled eggs tucked to one side of the cheapo frying pan they’d had to pick up at a Podunk grocery store.

  To Deke, it was like she had proposed getting married all over again.

  Which is why it was really going to kill him when he told her that he had to leave her and the girls for an indefinite period of time.

  “Thanks, baby,” Deke said. His wife wordlessly pushed the clump of eggs onto a plate and put the cheap frying pan and even cheaper plastic spatula into a small, stained sink.

  They hadn’t spoken about it (obviously), but Deke suspected that the kitchen gear was the thing that angered her the most. They had spent their nineteen-year marriage gathering good plates, utensils, silverware, and pots and pans. Nothing fancy, and by no means all at once. A guy on an FBI salary isn’t splurging on an entire set of Le Creuset cookware. Ellie picked up a piece at a time, almost always taking advantage of a sale or coupon. Both Deke and Ellie used the pieces equally; they were a couple who truly enjoyed cooking.

  When they had to enter the protection program, however, nearly all of their possessions were dumped unceremoniously into cardboard boxes and stacked in a ten-by-twenty-five-foot pen in some anonymous storage facility center near the turnpike. Would they see their belongings again? Deke assured his wife that, yeah, of course they would. But he wasn’t so sure.