The Hound of Justice

by Claire O'Dell

  I paused. Considered what madness I had volunteered for. Then, before I lost my nerve, I pressed my thumb against the margin and braced for what came next.

  Good thing. The entire page shimmered, so bright I almost dropped the damned book. Before I could catch my breath, the sheet had crumbled into a fine white dust.

  Well, that’s final.

  I wanted to laugh, but my hands were shaking as I shook the ashes into the toilet. At the sink, I scrubbed my right hand clean. The left one, I rubbed gently with a clean towel. By now I was shivering, and my stomach had knotted itself into a tight fist.

  No time for drama, however. I hurried to the next stage. Security.

  Security had always been a nightmare, but since the Bloody Inauguration, the process had become even more grueling. Most people traveled by train or car or bus these days, but even so, the line snaked out and around to the edge of the nonsecured hall.

  Ninety minutes until boarding started. What if I missed my flight?

  I sighed, shifted the bag over my shoulder, and shuffled forward with the others.

  Eventually I reached the front of the line.

  “Next!” The TSA agent signaled me to the ID counter.

  I presented my cell with all my electronic paperwork and the printed certificate from the ticketing agent. I shucked off my shoes and loaded a basket with my belongings. I submitted to the pinprick to collect a sample of my DNA, followed by a scan of my thumbprint. A wand swept over my body to detect any dangerous chemicals. The TSA agent paused at Lazarus.

  “You have a medical note?” he asked.

  “It’s not required,” I said. “But I did notify the airline in advance.”

  He shrugged and continued the scan, then waved me forward.

  I had another moment of terror when they searched my bag and the agent paused to leaf through the book, but the woman’s only comment was that she had never liked the author.

  Am I done? Was it really that easy?

  No, it was not.

  Government regulations stated that racial profiling was illegal. Anything beyond that was the result of random sampling. Random sampling, my ass. So I wasn’t surprised when the TSA agent directed me into the quarantine room. Someone didn’t like the color of my skin. Someone especially didn’t like a black woman with an obviously expensive piece of medical equipment.

  The interview started off innocuously, or at least what passed for innocuous these days.

  “Ms. Watson,” the interviewer said.

  I considered the pros and cons of arguing and decided this one was important. “It’s Dr. Watson. I work at Georgetown University Hospital.”

  He nodded. “Are you a U.S. citizen?”

  You have all my records. You know my title. You know I’m a citizen.

  But I smiled and said yes, I was.

  I answered the rest of his questions as calmly as possible. Yes, I was employed in Washington, DC, as a surgeon. No, I had no felonies, nor did I have any connections to terrorist organizations. My degree at Howard University and residency at Georgetown University Hospital didn’t matter. My record in the service didn’t matter. I was a black woman with a strange device and therefore I was a danger.

  My parents had endured the same, that last morning of their lives, before they boarded the plane that took them to Atlanta and to death.

  Another agent, a woman this time, joined the first and they ordered me to remove Lazarus. The meshwork of steel alloy over electronics did nothing to reassure them. The man poked at the device with a screwdriver. I wanted to shout at him to be careful, but I knew better than that.

  The woman plucked my device from the table and held it up to the glaring lights, as if she could uncover its secrets. “What the hell is this thing anyway?”

  I tried to explain, avoiding any mention of electronics or custom programming. I repeated that I was a surgeon, and the device was designed to allow me to continue my work after leaving the service.

  “Some people aren’t so lucky,” she muttered.

  Don’t I know that?

  But I couldn’t talk about those who had died. Those who had survived, but with their lives and bodies shattered. If I did, I would not be able to keep my voice soft and calm.

  “You say you’re a surgeon?”

  “I am,” I said.

  They ran through the same questions the clerk at the counter had. I repeated the information about my position at Georgetown University Hospital, and the reason for my travel to Georgia. I gave them the address and telephone number of the farm, and the same for my sister in Washington State. Eventually they ran out of questions and I was free to continue to the gate.

  Oh Christ, oh god. All I wanted to do was huddle in a corner for the next hour, but my flight left in twenty minutes. I fumbled through the steps to reattach Lazarus. Then I snatched up my bag and ran for the gate.

  Five minutes past takeoff. The boarding area was empty, but a clerk behind the counter waved me forward. I presented my credentials, skipped down the jet bridge into the airplane itself, where a flight attendant greeted me with a frown. I couldn’t blame her. I slid into my seat in the business class section and stowed my carry-on under the seat.

  I’m here. I made it.

  ***

  Our flight departed only twenty minutes past schedule, in spite of my delay. The flight attendants had forgotten or forgiven me, because they all greeted me with the same friendly smiles as they offered to other passengers. I paid for a cup of coffee (hot, strong, and surprisingly good) and a sandwich (cold, soggy, and not-so-surprisingly awful).

  Two hours to Atlanta. Less than that. I glanced toward the nearest window. The passenger next to me, a white man in his fifties or thereabouts, muttered under his breath. He was a thickset man, his hair and beard shaved close, which made it look as though he’d been dusted in silver. Even his suit was gray. Businessman in business class, and not at all happy that I’d delayed his flight.

  I smiled at him. He flinched and looked away.

  So that’s how it is.

  Briefly, I contemplated hauling out my book. No, I’d had enough mystery for today, considering. I reclined the seat an inch or two and closed my eyes . . .

  It was April, a muddy cold April morning with the fog wreathed around our tents. I’d spent ten hours at surgery the day before. The enemy had attacked the border to the south—a useless raid that left hundreds of their dead behind, and hundreds of our own. So many wounded—by IEDs planted in advance of the attack, by rocket launchers, even by bayonets and poison gas. I’d slept as though drugged.

  But I’d rolled out of my cot at the first blare from the loudspeakers.

  Red alert, red alert! Enemy incoming.

  I scrambled into my trousers, still not entirely awake.

  Repeat, enemy incoming. This is not a drill. All personnel—

  An explosion threw me to the ground. The loudspeaker tower had vanished in a burst of flames and smoke. Only then did I truly take in the warning. I lay there a moment, deafened by the noise, until I came back to myself with a start and a gasp.

  “—approaching Atlanta International Airport. Estimated touchdown in fifteen minutes—”

  I woke with a gasp. For a heartbeat, I was back in my nightmare, hearing the staccato rattle of gunfire. Then my vision cleared. I saw the mottled gray seat back in front of me. I had flung myself forward, Lazarus clutched to my chest. My throat felt scraped and raw, as if I had done more than gasp. One of the flight attendants had paused next to me.

  I shook my head, willing her to move on.

  The loudspeaker went on with its litany of instructions. “. . . Make certain your seat is upright and your belongings are safely stowed under the seat . . .”

  My hands, both flesh and metal, were trembling as I adjusted my seat. Only after the flight attendant continued down the aisle did I rub my right hand over my face. My left lay blessedly inert in my lap.

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  Busi
nessman was eying Lazarus with deep suspicion.

  A medal from the war, I wanted to say. I knew better, though. Smile and nod, my mother always said. Doesn’t matter what they say to you. Attitude never got anyone anywhere.

  I smiled and nodded. “It’s a medical experiment.”

  His mouth dropped open. His face twitched, as though he was working through my words, looking for a reason to complain. But then the flight attendant made her way back up the aisle, collecting any last trash, while the loudspeaker announced our final approach.

  We suffered through a bumpy landing, then a delay while the pilots waited for a gate to clear. Atlanta’s airport was far busier than DC’s, with more flights connecting Europe and Africa to Mexico and South America. It was one reason the terrorists had chosen here and not National or Dulles.

  Once we finally could disembark, I followed my fellow passengers through the tube connecting the plane to the gate. There a secondary security check awaited us in case we’d managed to construct a dangerous weapon in the airplane’s cramped toilets. Halfway through the wait, I found myself wondering if I could have walked to Atlanta faster.

  Eventually, I passed through the body scan, the second DNA test, and another round with TSA as they rummaged through my bag. I had one moment of stark terror, when an agent picked up my Rachel Howzell Hall book and squinted at the title. But he tossed the book back into my bag without doing more than flipping through the pages.

  Once again, they pulled me into a separate room for a personal interview, but this side of the flight, the questions were merely tedious. Barely fifteen minutes later, they released me into a maze of gray corridors, with illuminated signs pointing toward the exit and warning me not to turn around.

  Most of the other passengers from Flight SX1167 had gone on ahead of me, but crowds from other flights overtook me. I trailed after them automatically, running through the final steps between here and tomorrow morning. My inexpensive rental car. Syncing my cell with the local GPS. Acquiring a paper map as well, since the rural counties didn’t have reliable reception.

  The interior corridors opened at last to a broad terrace that curved around a vast plaza below. I stopped a moment in surprise. Almost immediately someone bumped into me. An elderly woman, leaning heavily onto her walker. I apologized and stepped off to one side.

  Once, just once, I had come through this airport. Not with my parents—we’d traveled by rusted car from Georgia up north. No, I’d come this way once before as a surgeon in the army, on my way home on leave that first year, when it was easier and safer to travel from Illinois to Atlanta by plane, then up north by railroad. Back then, the airport had seemed a bit shabby, in spite of its size.

  The terrorists of the New Confederacy had fixed that all right.

  Two men with false IDs had infiltrated airport security, bringing with them four suitcases loaded with plastic explosives. They had arrived in a FedEx truck, which the FBI later determined had been stolen. Once inside the airport, they had met with four employees from an airline catering crew. The catering crew had dispersed the suitcases to four points within the central hub of the airport. They were on the point of leaving when the terrorists had triggered the explosion.

  Five thousand dead. Two thousand more critically injured. A hundred or more listed missing, because no one could find their remains. Nothing was left of that destruction. No blood, no bodies, not even the remains of the original building.

  I breathed, slowly, carefully, steadily, until the panic subsided.

  Someday, you must face what happened, Faith Bellaume had told me.

  I guess that would be today.

  I opened my eyes. The airport that stretched out before me was a glittering modern structure, with a glass ceiling that arced from sky to ground, held together by a cross-work of bright metal frames. Alida Sanches and Congress had dedicated this new building in defiance of the rebels, but all I could think was Here is where my mother and father died.

  “You lost someone here?”

  I blinked back to the present. A black man, dressed in a porter’s uniform, had asked the question. No, it wasn’t a question. He knew. He had recognized my expression.

  “My mother and father,” I said. My voice came out as a whisper, thick with tears.

  He nodded. He was my age, or a bit older, with broad shoulders and his hair braided close and covered with a cap. It wasn’t just for pity, or for business, that he’d approached me. I recognized that bleak expression.

  “You lost someone here, too, didn’t you?” I said.

  “My brother. His name was Isaac.” He sighed, and there was a world of private history in that sigh. Then he shook his head, as though shaking off the grief. “My name’s Andrew. If you got a moment before you head on, I want to show you something. A memorial,” he added, when I hesitated. “I think you might like it.”

  He led me down the main escalator, around the tourist information counter, to what looked like a boulder set into the floor. Water cascaded over the rough surface and vanished into a narrow pool. Small plaques engraved with names had been embedded into the rock. I circled around the boulder and found my parents’ names. MICHAEL JEFFERSON WATSON. ALICE IFUNANYA WATSON. The plaques overlapped each other, which seemed fitting. I reached out and touched each in turn. Felt the shock of cold water over my fingers.

  Maybe I should come back another year. Maybe this is a better pilgrimage than my talks with Mr. Lincoln.

  Or maybe there was room enough in my life for both.

  I drew back and wiped the tears from my eyes. Andrew had lingered nearby, his attention on a plaque with the name ISAAC THOMPSON.

  “Thank you,” I breathed.

  He smiled. “We got to do for each other, don’t you know?”

  “That we do,” I said.

  14

  By late afternoon, I had navigated my rental car away from Atlanta’s airport and onto Route 85 heading southwest. I’d come into my second wind, and I wanted to drive as fast as the speed limit allowed—faster—but I knew better. This was the South, after all, and while the South wasn’t as red as it used to be, all it would take was one bully cop to turn me into a hashtag.

  So I kept my foot light on the gas, and put extra distance between me and the car ahead, especially in the choke of traffic that was Atlanta’s rush hour. I faithfully used my turn signal. Even when I exited the beltway for 85S, and left the traffic behind, I never let my speed get above 55 mph.

  Twenty miles outside the city limits, only a few signs remained of the decades since I’d last visited. The crumbling townships—built from cinder block and false expectations in the late 2010s—were no more. The strip malls and cheap office complexes had managed to survive longer, but with the coming of the New Civil War, these, too, had finally given up. It was like the corridor between DC and Baltimore, the farms and green fields replaced by acres of concrete in that mad rush to build and build. That, too, had turned into a desert of weeds and trash.

  I was glad when I finally left the ruins behind for the rural counties beyond. Just outside Molena, I stopped to refill my gas tank and buy a Diet Coke from the station’s convenience store. The attendant, an elderly white man, shook his head at my credit card. I stopped myself from sighing just in time and handed over two twenties as a deposit while I filled my own tank. The old man rounded up the charge to the next dollar, then glared at me as if daring me to argue. At least he didn’t spit until the screen door closed behind me.

  Twenty miles more, thirty. I could almost imagine myself back with my sister and parents, during that long, long ride up north, with our father driving as cautiously as I did now. I drove on while the sun sank into a glorious explosion of color and twilight settled over the land. Every now and then, I consulted the directions from my aunt.

  109 to 74. That’s Crest Highway. Go down east a couple or so miles, just past Mallory Road, to a dirt road heading east. If you get to Jeff Davis Road, you gone too far.

  I nearly missed Mallory
Road but saw the rusted street sign just in time. A couple hundred yards past Mallory, I eased my car onto the almost invisible dirt road that wound east and south through cotton fields with their buds just sprouting green. Memories teased at me with snips and snaps of images that almost—but not quite—matched the scene before me. Or maybe this was only the expectation of memory. The brain could be funny like that.

  My aunt’s directions told me five miles to the next intersection. I turned left, as directed, into an even darker stretch. Cottonwood trees lined the road. Off to one side, I heard the deep croak of bullfrogs and the peep of birds. Overhead the clouds blocked the stars and the moon. Oh, yes, the land here was beautiful, the night soft and warm and welcoming. But if you weren’t a farmer, if you dreamed of a future elsewhere . . .

  An old crumbling brick square that called itself a school. No library. The textbooks little more than hand-me-downs from the richer counties. The teachers doing the best they could with the little they had. No wonder Mom and Dad wanted to leave.

  At last, I came to an intersection with another, wider dirt road. No street sign. No other indication than the miles recorded by my trip odometer. My GPS gave a hopeful blink before it died again. My aunt’s email had seemed damned clear to me the other day, but right now, in the soft damp dark of the Georgia night, I wasn’t so sure. I reset the trip odometer, then guided my rental car left into a new set of ruts and hoped for the best.

  Almost forty minutes later, with the moon setting over in the west, I pulled into a driveway of gravel and packed dirt. This, this I remembered, as if I were suddenly returned to five years old, coming home from the rare treat of a visit to Grandpa Benjamin over in Turner County. The weeds were just as tall, the muddy scent from the creek just as strong. I could even anticipate that final bump before the weeds abruptly stopped and I was faced with a broad expanse of lawn and the old-fashioned farmhouse. The house itself stood just as I remembered it—three stories high, with a wraparound porch and a brick well off to one side. Several barns were just visible beyond the main yard, and I heard a dog yipping excitedly. I’d told myself and Faith Bellaume that I remembered nothing about this place, but I had lied. My blood and my bones remembered. They seemed to vibrate with memories I’d long forgotten.