Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  And that meant everything.

  32

  You pull a gun, you gotta be ready to kill somebody. And I’m telling you, it’s better to run.

  —Robert Culp, Hickey & Boggs

  SIEGE HARDIE TOLD his mom he’d be right back. He saw the stark fear in her eyes—she couldn’t move anything else—but reassured her. “I’ll be right back. I promise. I have to check.”

  That was his dying father’s last request, after all.

  The rental home had turned into a house of horrors. Siege’s limbs still ached and felt numb, which only made the short journey through his kitchen, out the backyard, around the side of the house, and down the front walk all the more surreal. As if he were a dead man, a ghost, doomed to haunt a crime scene forever. Maybe that was his fate. After all, he’d just blown away his father.

  Anyway, there was his old friend One-Eye with a rod of wood sticking out of her eye. The other psycho chick with her throat slit. A guy with a bow and arrow (ah, which explained the wood sticking out of One-Eye’s one eye). Around front, another guy stuck to their front door with a bunch of arrows. Then finally, a guy with his head almost cut off sitting in a van. Sure it was close to three in the morning, and this was a sleepy suburb, but Siege was half-surprised there weren’t cops everywhere. I mean, shots had been fired. Guess everyone just assumed it was a car backfiring. Or they all really didn’t give a shit.

  As Siege trotted up Fox Chase Road he tried to imagine what would be in the trunk of that car. Would he slide the key in and open up the lid only to discover Laurence Fishburne sitting there, offering him the choice of the red or the blue pill? What else could possibly save his father’s life?

  Then he spotted the black Lincoln, right near Roseland, as promised.

  Siege opened the trunk. After the shock at finding a body curled up inside subsided a little, he remembered his father had sent him here for a reason, so he’d better find out what. He pulled away the facial bandages.

  Oh my God.

  At first: relief.

  Then confusion.

  Then, as his trembling fingers reached for the man’s still neck …

  “MOM!”

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION—11 MONTHS LATER

  33

  We all go back to where we belong.

  —R.E.M.

  THIS WAS IT, finally, at long last. Hardie thought he’d lost the taste for it, since it had been almost—what—seven years since he’d had one? The night before flying to Los Angeles. The night before Lane Madden. The night before everything. The doctors told him he’d never have one again. Too much damage to his system. He needed to eat right and focus on healing. They made him promise. Kendra made him promise. And for almost a year, he’d honored that promise.

  But fuck it. Sometimes a guy just wants to crack a beer.

  Hardie bribed the supply sarge, this brush-cut foul-mouthed guy named Phillips, to put aside a six of Yuengling Lager the next time a bunch of cases showed up at the base. Military bases, even super-secret ones like this, had a policy about rotating the beer selections so no regional brew was slighted. So every week a plane would bring in Shiners from Texas, or Buds from St. Louis, and so on. Hardie decided that if he was going to fall off the wagon, he’d do so clutching a can of his favorite beer, Yuengling, brewed in Pottsville, not too far from Philly. Oldest beer in America, they claimed, brewed continuously since 1829. Hardie had no idea what they did during Prohibition, but whatever. You’ve gotta love a survivor.

  So now Hardie dug his secret six-pack out of the bottom of the fridge, hidden beneath a bunch of vegetables in plastic bags, plucked one can from the plastic holder, and carried it back to their modest living room.

  It was close to 2:00 a.m., and all was quiet in this quiet, anonymous patch of the country. Where? Hardie couldn’t tell you. No, literally. That was part of the deal.

  Quite a bit had happened since he was gunned down on a dark highway in Nebraska. At the time, Hardie had been pretty sure he was done for, story over, check, please. Much to his surprise, he’d woken up a day later in the trunk of the fucking coma car with his boy looking down at him, utter shock on his face.

  Hardie would learn the whole story—or as much as Kendra and Charlie could tell him—days later. In that moment though, once Seej started yammering about how he’d died, and how could he be here, and what the hell was going on … Hardie lifted up two fingers and told his kid to please shut the fuck up. He may have missed the main show, but he still had to save his family.

  “Do you have a driver’s license?” he asked, his voice cracked and weak.

  “Permit,” Seej replied.

  “Go get your mother.”

  Seej made a motion to start untangling Hardie from the life support gear in the trunk, but stopped when Hardie waved those two fingers. No. Much as he hated this damned car—specifically, the trunk of this car—he knew it was probably the only thing keeping him alive. If you could call this a life.

  “No, please, don’t. Just get your mother.”

  Even now, thinking back on it, the events of that night were disjointed in Hardie’s head, like a hastily edited montage in a 1980s action movie. Some of it barely seemed real. Yet it had happened, otherwise he wouldn’t be here, in this living room, with a beer in his hand, right?

  Siege had indeed gotten his mother. Both were shaky, seemingly barely able to stand. Kendra was even more shocked when she saw him in the trunk. Shocked … then angry, for some strange reason. Whatever, Hardie thought. This wasn’t the time for family therapy. This was the time for getting the hell out of town.

  Apparently after much confused back-and-forth, with Kendra insisting that they needed to drive his shot-up ass to the closest hospital right this very second, Hardie somehow finally transmitted the message to his estranged wife:

  Put the boy in the car and drive all of us down to NSA headquarters in suburban Virginia.

  NOW.

  No, I don’t have an address. Look it up on the way. Figure it out on the road. The boy’s smart. He probably has a magic phone that can help him out.

  Once you arrive at NSA headquarters, ask for the most senior person you can find and open the trunk for him.

  I’ll live until then. Fuck, I’ve managed to survive this long.

  The NSA is home base.

  Getting us to the NSA as quick as humanly possible is our only chance.

  (The Other Him kept talking about the NSA this, the NSA that … so they would know what to do, right?)

  Kendra drove them south on I-95, leaving all of their possessions—and many, many dead bodies—behind.

  Including a dead body that looked just like him.

  Cut to:

  The NSA, having no fucking idea what the hell he was talking about.

  No, we did not carve one of our agents to look like you, Mr. Hardie. Nor did we shoot this fictitious agent, um, into space. Who are you again?

  But once a junior-level agent began digging into the case, fireworks started to go off. Apparently someone had been investigating him all this time, thanks to some obscure document they kept calling the Arbona Memorandum, which Hardie didn’t fully understand. Nor did he care to understand. Hardie had stumbled into this world by mistake and found himself caught up in it for seven years of pure misery. Now he had the chance to possibly stumble back out of it, and that would be just fine with him.

  The important thing was, they knew about the Cabal, though nowhere near as much as they thought. They were looking for Doyle and Abrams, two lawyers who’d slipped off the grid some time ago. And once they recovered the crashed spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean floor, just off the coast of California, Hardie thought, they’d have evidence to destroy them all.

  Hardie was content to let them. He was out of the destroying-the-evildoers game. All he wanted to do was heal his body to a reasonable degree. He didn’t want to run marathons or stop bullets with his bare hands. He just wanted to live.

  The NSA had access to an excellent priv
ate hospital; Kendra and Seej were put up in housing—under heavy protection—adjacent to the facility. They were as essential to saving Hardie’s life as the surgeons who labored on his hopelessly wrecked body. But the real surprise came when they took a CAT scan of his head and found …

  … a small computer chip welded to his skull.

  They told a semi-conscious Hardie what they’d found. He asked what it looked like. Puzzled, the techs told him:

  “A small black square of shiny plastic, mounted on four corners with some kind of gummy material.”

  Hardie started to laugh, which made the anesthesiologist worry, because he wasn’t supposed to be having that kind of reaction to the gas while his head was cut open. Hardie, though, thought of the poor bastards doing a deep-sea dive to pull up a wrecked spacecraft … when all this time, he had the power to destroy the Cabal in his head.

  Thank you, Glinda, Good Witch of the North.

  See ya, Cabal. Your days are numbered.

  However, when the NSA finally broke through the impossibly sophisticated encryption programs, they found that the chip welded to Hardie’s skull had but one message:

  FUCK YOU DOYLE

  And nothing more.

  The real bombshell dropped later.

  NSA operatives found the pulpy, wood-chipped remains of a woman believed to be Abrams in the Pacific Northwest. A good old-fashioned forensic trail led them to her former partner, Doyle, who was holed up in an assisted-care facility in South Dakota. The man was clearly insane, babbling, “I wish I hadn’t walked through her. I wish I hadn’t walked through her.” No one could figure out what that meant until they analyzed the footprints at the crime scene. All of Abrams’s personal documents were in Doyle’s possession, and they led to a safety deposit box in a small savings and loan in Santa Monica, California. Inside of which investigators discovered the complete operational secrets of the Cabal, and the Industry, and the Accident People … since the very beginning. Every last move, recorded on a series of forty-two flash drives. No password protection, no encryption, no nothing. They were even helpfully indexed.

  Still, Hardie’s testimony was invaluable. Especially after word of Hardie’s cooperation reached Eve Bell and her secret army working all over the world to dismantle Cabal operations. In exchange for their cooperation, Hardie and Kendra and CJ were given new identities, a new life, on a secret base somewhere within the continental United States.

  At least, that’s what he’d been told. It was hard to make sense of anything these days.

  Hardie’s head still hurt, even after the operation. Time was kind of disjointed and fuzzy, and not entirely real-feeling. Sometimes he would blink and for a moment forget who he was, what he was doing here, what he wanted. This never lasted more than a moment or two, but it was nonetheless awful to experience. Imagine walking down the street and the sidewalk dropping away from your feet, giving you an instant and terrifying sensation of free fall … before the world righted itself again. Sometimes Hardie thought he was dead and his brain just hadn’t processed the information yet.

  The on-base doctor explained that this sensation was perfectly normal. After all, all three of them had been given memory shots after their transport. For a hellishly paranoid moment Hardie thought that this was it; that these NSA guys were just another front for the Accident People, the Industry, the Cabal, the Whatever … and that he’d just sentenced his family to death. But instead they’d woken up in this small but clean house. New construction. The usual appliances and furnishings. No phone, no open Internet, but still—better than death.

  Meanwhile, the world thought Charlie Hardie was dead. After all, local police had found his body in the basement of his wife’s rental home, fatal gunshot to the chest, with assorted assassins and psychopaths littered around the property. Pop culture changed its tune about Charlie Hardie. He was no longer the nutcase from Philly who’d snuffed an actress in a seedy Hollywood hotel. Instead Hardie was a hero, because Jonathan Hunter had been telling the truth about the Accident People and Hardie had sacrificed his own life to save his wife and boy. Whereabouts unknown, but the world assumed they’d gone into hiding. After all, wouldn’t you? The body of Charlie Hardie was given a hero’s funeral. There was even talk of a citywide Day of Remembrance, but then the Phillies start to pick up some heat and attention spans moved elsewhere.

  Narrative over.

  But the real Charlie Hardie, aboveground and recovering from six lifetimes’ worth of physical abuse, was cooling his heels at a secret military base somewhere. Though it wasn’t exactly a military base; it was a suburb next to a military base.

  Yep, after all of his adventures, Charlie Hardie couldn’t quite escape the burbs.

  Hardie had been told that this place was housing for the employees of a government research facility, secret shit happening everywhere. Everybody in town had the same deal: You just lived your life the best you could and didn’t talk about what anyone did. Hardie asked for a job, to be able to do something, but his caseworker told him he’d done enough for his country. Hardie pressed the point, and the caseworker finally relented. “We’ll call you if we need you.”

  That had been ten months ago. So far, no call.

  So it was time, at long last, for a Yuengling.

  Hardie’s life was far from empty. He had physical therapy six days a week and was finally walking on his own again. He had occasional debriefings from anonymous men in suits who asked a few specific questions, then asked them another way and still another way, then departed without explanation.

  But most of the time Hardie spent trying to reconnect with Kendra. They had parted under the lousiest of circumstances, and their reunion wasn’t exactly roses and confetti, either. They had grown into different, older people. Still, somehow, their strange little shared spark was still there, beneath all of the years and hurt. Hardie felt it in her touch, in her kiss. If it had been extinguished completely, this new life would be unbearable.

  Most importantly, the hate in her eyes was gone. Hardie took that as the best sign of all.

  CJ was another matter. He was a young man, eighteen now, and full of rage and confusion. Hardie got it. You grow up thinking your old man snuffed some actress before disappearing for seven years … and then the next thing you know, you’re living on some secret base somewhere … well, yeah, you’re going to have some blame and rage issues.

  Hardie twisted the top off the cold bottle of beer. He did the sommelier thing and even sniffed the top. There was no better smell than this. It only worked the first time. He put the top to his lips and tilted.

  The on-base doctor had told Hardie confidentially that he probably didn’t have all the time in the world. He’d burned too fast, too hot, too hard. No, he didn’t know about any Project Viking. There was no trace of any kind of gene therapy or secret government projects. (Then again, Hardie thought, this was a military doctor. Of course he’d cover it up!) The doctor emphasized: You can’t expect your body to absorb that kind of punishment without breaking down completely. You drink a beer, the doc said, and you’re just giving yourself a good hard nudge toward the grave. The very idea gave him pause. Hardie didn’t want to pull the grass and sod over himself until he had a chance to make things right with Kendra and CJ. As right as they could be. In this weird afterlife, every minute with his family was a bonus.

  Hardie swallowed long. The beer was cold and fresh and felt like it had hit a part of his soul that hadn’t been touched in ages.

  Time fragmented again. Hardie blinked and found himself on the floor. His fingers closed around a bottle of Yuengling that wasn’t there anymore. Did he finish it? Geez, did one sip knock him out? The ceiling looked strange, unfamiliar. So did the carpet under his arms. He was having a difficult time moving.

  Which of course is when the alarms went off.

  And somewhere, in the distance, in the direction of the base … gunfire.

  At first Hardie thought he was having the mother of all death flashbacks, t
hat eleven years hadn’t gone by, and that he was lying in a pool of his own cooling blood in the middle of his Philadelphia living room, having just been gunned down by those crazy asshole Albanians. And everything that followed: exile, booze, Lane, Accident People, Alcatraz, Abrams, the double, the shootout in Hollywood, everything … had just been a fever dream, experienced in a matter of seconds as the neurons in his brain misfired and gave him the pulp-action show of a lifetime …

  More gunfire. Rocket blasts … were those rocket blasts? Hardie thought fast. Could it be some pissed-off remnant of the Cabal, coming after him finally to settle a score? No, he decided. If they were to come at him, they’d come at him directly. And stop thinking everything’s about you. Because it’s not.

  Whatever it was probably had to do with the top-secret shit going on all around them, because wherever you had top-secret shit, you had people doing top-secret shit to steal the other top-secret shit because, Hardie supposed, nature abhorred a vacuum. This was the way the world worked. Hardie’s world, anyway. He’d come to accept it. Bad shit went down, and for some reason fate kept nudging him into its path.

  More gunfire, explosions, screams. This wasn’t sounding good.

  So go on, Hardie.

  Get up.

  Grab your gun.

  Where is—

  Oh God, where’s your gun?

  Hardie hadn’t just bribed his way into a six-pack of beer. Six months ago he’d managed to get his hands on a Glock—again, from that foul-mouthed brush-cut supply sarge. This was a clear violation of the rules of this secret base. But Hardie had been through too much to be without a weapon ever again. He’d kept it a secret from Kendra and CJ, naturally. Kept it in a locked table by his recliner, key on a chain around his neck, so heavy firepower would forever be within easy reach.

  But now the table drawer was unlocked and open. No Glock. Damnit, did they do a security sweep of the house and confiscate it?