Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  Will shook his head. “Hey. Officer.”

  Al cocked his head in Will’s direction.

  “You might want to do that from behind the wheel.”

  Al looked over his shoulder.

  “With the engine running.”

  Al frowned.

  “And the car in gear.”

  Al turned back to the mountain. He aimed at a pitiful excuse for a tree halfway up Big Blue Rock. He took a breath, then exhaled slow and steady, gently squeezing the trigger. There was a flat crack as the gun fired and a bare limb leaped off the tree.

  Will applauded. “Damn fine shot ... if that’s what you were aiming at.”

  Al glared at Will. Then he turned and fired again, relieving the tree of another limb. “This is horseshit,” Al muttered. Taking a good long look to make sure that nothing alive was on this side of the mountain, Al braced himself and then emptied the remaining six rounds from the clip, firing high and low, and from side to side.

  “Well, that’s that then,” Will said.

  Carlos looked around nervously. The desert was as about as quiet as it could get on a hot afternoon.

  Al squatted and picked up the brass shell casings ejected from the handgun. He went to the trunk, put the brass in a burlap sack, then slipped a full magazine into the Colt and put the weapon back in its place. He slammed the trunk shut and slid behind the wheel. He was about to ask the guy in the ball cap why secret agents weren’t popping up out of the ground when the guy spoke.

  “Here we go,” Will said.

  Al glanced in the rear view mirror. The guy was leaning forward, looking through the windshield, looking up at the top of Big Blue Rock. Al looked in that direction.

  A slender black helicopter rose out of the top of the mountain. Al figured that at least half of the aircraft’s weight was comprised of the high-caliber machine guns mounted on each side of the cockpit. As Al watched a trench appeared about thirty feet to his left, a trench that was growing bigger and was not a trench at all but the earth being torn apart by the helicopter’s guns. In a moment the trench would meet the patrol car.

  In what seemed like one motion, Al started the patrol car and began driving as fast as he could in reverse while drawing his service pistol and taking aim out the window at the helicopter.

  “Pull that trigger now and we’re toast, Officer Al.” Will was smiling, enjoying himself.

  “Why is that?” Al shouted. The helicopter’s guns had fallen silent. The moment they opened up again, Al would be ready to reciprocate.

  “Those birds are also carrying rockets.“

  As if to prove Will’s point, a fireball bloomed on the road behind them.

  “Damn!” Al let the patrol car roll to a stop. If he thought he’d have any chance of outrunning the helicopter he would have gone for it, but that was impossible.

  What they’d need to get out of this jam would be a couple of wide body vans with huge, puffy wheels like a moon car thrown together by NASA, the wheels mounted on flexible axles that arced out and away from the body of the vehicle like the legs of a spider.

  Two black vans matching that description had just come out of a hole in the side of Big Blue Rock, and a second black helicopter appeared overhead.

  “These boys are working for our government?” Al asked. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Big Blue Rock was not what he had always thought it was.

  “Yeah,” Will nodded, “Every year there are hundreds of thousands of people who for whatever reason are late in claiming refunds from the IRS. Portions of the interest earned on that cash, and there’s a lot of it, go into managed funds, creating a huge slush fund that’s off the books. Part of that earned income helps obscure agencies like the Compound pay the bills for all of their installations. That, and patent sales.”

  Al and Carlos seemed stunned. Al asked, “Patent sales?”

  “Yeah,” Will replied. “Medical breakthroughs, technological advances, the latest weapons systems; there are some real smarty-pants working at the Compound, and they are given free rein to come up with a lot of fancy shit, most of which is used to do very bad things. The more patents they sell, the more cash they raise. The bigger their profit, the smaller their dependence on federal funding, and the more independent they are, the more dangerous they are. Most of the dipshits in Congress haven’t even heard of the Compound.”

  The black vans on spider legs were closing in. The helicopter gunships hovered overhead. “Are we gonna be able to get out of this?” Al asked Will.

  “To date no outsiders have ever heard of the Compound, and it’s said no outsiders ever will. They’re good at what they do.”

  The vans stopped, and armed men in black jumpsuits ran toward the patrol car.

  Carlos gave Will a curious look. “So how come you’re still walking around, when you know so much?”

  “Because,” Will said. “I used to be one of them.”

  * * *

  Betsy had lost control. At some point while following the white convertible along a road that was well-camouflaged she realized her physical self was gripped by a presence she could not fight. It controlled her and the motorcycle, and she suspected it was the reason she had turned off the highway in the first place.

  * * *

  John Godson didn’t know who the babe on the bike was behind him, but he did know that she had an extremely fuckable little bod. He also knew that he was going to have to bring her in to Compound West. He must have been daydreaming because he had made her follow him before he was even aware he was doing it. Now that he was conscious of his hold on her he realized that it was simply the right thing to do. Why? He had no idea, and that unsettled him.

  He was in control of her, but who or what was in control of him?

  Compound West would have already spotted her racing the bike along one of their concealed roads, so now he had no choice but to bring her inside Big Blue Rock.

  * * *

  Brian turned off the highway chasing the white convertible that was now a speck in the distance, and the girl on the bike. They seemed to be heading in the same direction as the County Sheriff had, and it was the sheriff Brian wanted to find. He followed the rough and winding road leading to the small mountain not far away with the black van still pursuing him, not realizing it would follow him right into its base of operations.

  * * *

  Richards and Dicks took their time rolling into Compound West. They were looking forward to some down time and medical attention. Things had certainly gone all to shit, but they were confident that after a brief rest they’d be back on the road on the trail of the hillbilly.

  A Page from the Past

  The Compound (outside Vienna, Virginia), November 10, 1989

  Will had picked the lock to a secure office, slipped through the door and drawn the shades on a window overlooking bare deciduous trees that seemed forlorn as they stood in a thin layer of snow. Only winter could intensify the bleakness of the Compound. Now he was reading through his own files as a television flickered against one wall, the volume turned low. He was in the office of the latest in a life-long series of psychiatrists who thought they would be the one to finally understand him after peeling away layers of his subconscious like an onion. They never succeeded.

  Will was leaving this place, and soon. He just wanted one last look at a photograph he hoped was somewhere in these files, and he wanted to see if they had any information on a date in August, years ago. Over the last few weeks he had secretly checked a number of Compound archives for what he sought, with no luck.

  He had the TV on ABC ‘s World News Tonight. He was able to watch TV in the cottage he called home, but his programming was regulated and censored. Reruns of old sci-fi shows and sitcoms were fine. Breaking news was not.

  The Berlin Wall was coming down, or so it appeared. Peter Jennings was standing in front of the wall in a trench coat. Behind him, a crowd was partying on the wall. Jennings said tens of thousands were doing the same, and the East German
government was letting people pass freely into the West.

  Stern had hated the wall. Will could remember the old man once railing against the wall, saying that men in power always wanted to hold that power, but sooner or later the will of the people won out. Will had been young then and hadn’t really known why Stern was angry; it was just another rant from the old man. When he thought of a wall he imagined one of the brick walls around certain buildings in the Compound, walls he had either climbed over or tunneled under as a kid as he let his curiosity lead him into mischief; the thought of a wall almost one hundred miles long would have seemed ridiculous to him at that age.

  He thought of walls and fences and old Doc Stern. As he got older, barriers were all he saw. With each day the Compound had seemed less like a training or research center and more of a prison. He felt like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, or Sefton, William Holden’s character in Stalag 17; he was only able to see those specific shows on TV with Stern’s permission. Eicher would have undoubtedly pronounced them suggestive and incendiary, but Eicher was gone by then, and Stern said he had taken the pretty little blonde girl with him. Will had been at the mercy of people who wanted to run his life and wanted to manage every little detail of each day. Escape was almost impossible. He had to sneak around and do things on the sly, hiding anything he considered a personal item, like an old photo of Stern beaming over baby Will as he was just learning how to walk, or a length of ribbon he should have tossed out long ago. When Stern was alive the Doc often told Eicher, and later Zane, to lay off the boy, but after the old was man gone, Will was completely alone.

  Or was he? As he matured from childhood into his teens there were times, usually late at night when he was drifting off to sleep, that he felt that there was someone else out there who was a lot like him. He found this tenuous presence that he thought of as little brother unsettling.

  Edmund Stern had been dead almost twenty years now and Will still missed the old man terribly. He missed the wild mane of white hair and the harsh laugh like the bark of a seal. He missed the way the Deutscher mangled English after decades in America and he even missed the times after Stern’s stroke when he would have to dodge the abrupt swings and stabs of Stern’s cane whenever the politics of the Compound sent the Doc into a rage.

  A few months before he passed away, Stern had asked, “Do you think that one day when I’m gone, you will be glad not to have this altes Schlachtross around anymore?”

  “Where would an old war-horse like you go?” Will had replied. He had been twelve then.

  “Direkt zur Hölle,” Stern had answered. “Ja, for all the bad things I have done in my life, I think hell is the only place that would have me.”

  Will had laughed and said maybe Stern’s final judges would give him a break when they saw how his best work had turned out. Stern had raised his eyebrows in question and Will had thrown his arms wide, saying that he was Stern’s best work, and he wasn’t bad at all.

  “Not now,” Stern had said, looking haunted, “But what happens to you after I am gone, William?”

  Will had been unable to answer that question. His life had never been normal, at least, as normal was defined in the books he had read or the scant few television shows and movies he’d seen. There were always weird things happening, new training methods, new weapons to enhance his skills, educational programs to enliven his captive existence, but he’d always been able to shrug it off with Stern’s help. The old man was the only thing in the world Will felt connected to. If Stern died, Will would be alone and unprotected. He had considered this for the first time in his life, and it had terrified him.

  That day did come, when Will learned Stern was dead. A massive stroke had taken the old man painlessly in his sleep and Stern’s little devil was truly alone. Will had gone to his quarters and cried, really cried for the first time in his life, snot running down his lip and his breath burning in his chest. He would cry like that only once more in his life. After he washed his face he had looked in the mirror a long time, staring at his reflection until he was able to make the fear on his face disappear. The boy he used to be had faded away before his eyes.

  That was when Will made his first escape from the Compound.

  That had been a crazy time. At twelve years old Will had set out across the country on the run from Compound trackers and ended up in a war in New Mexico at the side of the only other man he respected as much as Doc Stern. He had so much rage then, and he put it to use.

  Yet something had gone wrong ... Will had been badly hurt during that fight and it wasn’t long before the Compound found him and brought him back East.

  Will still had difficulty remembering the day Stern died and the time that followed. The only clear thing in his memories was the rage that had filled him.

  Now that rage was gone, and nothing had replaced it. Now he was empty. No one cared about him and he didn’t care about anyone else.

  Will turned away from the TV and opened one of the files he had stacked on the psychiatrist’s desk. Stern had been able to keep the shrinks at bay, but they were more persistent than ever now. One after another they failed to uncover Will’s secrets because the biggest secret of all was that he had no secrets.

  He opened a file and turned the pages, looking for entries from twelve years ago, eventually finding one dated August 16, 1977.

  Subject Hill was found crying at 10:00 AM when instructor Clutis arrived to escort subject to a Bare-Handed Kill Training Session. Subject was extremely emotionally distraught and would not or could not be consoled. Subject was uncooperative.

  I remember that, Will thought. It was before a training session. Two instructors had tried to goad a teenage Will into killing a pig in a fenced-in lot. Clutis and another guy, Stoniger. They wanted to see if he could kill something as big and strong as a man using just his bare hands. Will had refused. The instructors were carrying electric prods that looked like big sticks; guards patrolling the Compound perimeter carried those prods as well. They zapped him a few times, laughing as he collapsed and writhed in the dust.

  Will tried to remember how that training session had turned out. He remembered Clutis taking out a knife and sticking the pig a few times, laughing as the animal squealed and saying, “There, that should slow it down for you.” Stoniger had threatened Will with the prod again. “Kill the pig or I’ll shove this up your ass and fry you like a fucking mink!”

  One of them had broken his arm. Afterward he had worn a cast until there was snow on the ground. He’d fought back, breaking their knees and elbows. He closed his eyes, looking into the deep, dark waters of the past. In the end he used an electric prod on them, ramming the prod into their eye sockets and using it to burn off their genitals.

  He did remember killing the pig after all, breaking its neck to end its suffering as it bled out on the ground. Then he’d gone back to the small cottage that was his home.

  A darkness had come over him as he’d been lying back on his bed, reading an issue of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and trying not to move his broken arm. He would have sworn on Stern’s memory that he had heard a voice whisper “Goodbye, Jesse Garon,” and then he had started crying and hadn’t stopped until a guard looked into his room and then sounded an alarm. A medic had sedated him on Zane’s orders, and he had woken up a day later with a heavy cast on his arm.

  As Will read through the file documenting that day a final note in a long list of concurrent world events and possible explanations for Will’s outbursts, however remote, was both shocking and sensible, confirming something he’d suspected for a while now.

  Elvis Presley was declared dead on the afternoon of August 16; given the condition he was in when paramedics found him Presley had probably died hours earlier that day.

  “Well God damn,” Will said. The file also mentioned that Elvis’ twin who was stillborn thirty-five minutes before Elvis on January 8, 1935, was buried in an unmarked grave in Tupelo, Mississippi and that a memorial to Jesse Garon Presley at Gracelan
d spelled his name Jessie. Will closed the file and reached for another.

  The files held volumes of transcripts taken from audio and video interviews and analysis sessions as one doctor after another tried to figure out what made Will tick. He read one transcript from April of 1985.

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy:. I know you once killed a man by making a garrote from a roll of toilet paper, and I know that on another occasion when you were unarmed and about to be apprehended you disabled a female agent by literally sucking her eye out of its socket.

  WH: You know what eyeballs taste like, doc?

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy: I’m sure I do not.

  WH: Tears. They taste just like tears.

  Will remembered McGillicuddy, a wall-eyed, bombastic son of a bitch who thought he had all the answers. He was one of the low-life pricks who tried to smear Stern’s memory. The chickenshit always made sure Will was wearing cuffs and leg irons during their sessions.

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy: Moving on, Mr. Hill.

  WH: Okay.

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy: Why did you stop taking assignments?

  WH: I’ll give you a real patient-quack answer, just to make you happy, all right?

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy: Very well.

  WH: The rage is gone.

  Dr. P. McGillicuddy: The rage?