Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  There’s a silence. Then an obese, very inebriated man in the back guiltily raises a hand.

  “I will bring it to you,” she says curtly. She begins to step away.

  She sees the movement out of the corner of her eye. Oklahoma reaches down, grabs something, moving fast, and then suddenly the group around him disperses, stepping back fast. A couple of people gasp, and one man shouts, “Watch it!”

  Delyna freezes, turns around, and sees the pistol in Oklahoma’s hands, pointed directly at her head.

  “Disrespectful,” he says, his voice slurred. “This is disrespectful, is what this is.”

  “That situation’s resolved,” says McDean merrily. “Why don’t we show the exits?”

  “Can do, boss,” says Darrow.

  On the screen, the viewers’ feed switches to Stacey Robwright’s face, concerned and slightly disgusted. “And it does sound like we have an unfortunately large number of people trying to escape the environment . . . Let’s take a look.” The feed switches to drone video of a small crowd of people, mostly families, desperately hammering on the twenty-foot-high walls of bulletproof glass that have barricaded the exits of the mall. ONT security contractors look on from behind the walls, their faces fixed in the blank, dull expressions of someone being paid a lot of money not to think or feel. “Look at these people—trying to escape!” says Robwright’s voice contemptuously. “They turn and run, like cowards, rather than prepare themselves and fight!”

  “We always have this happen, Stacey,” says Gramins’s voice, “and it always surprises me how many of them there are.”

  The video of the terrified mall customers shrinks to become a thumbnail. The main feed changes to Gramins, Robwright, and Army Man sharing a large couch together, hunched forward like someone watching a tense football game.

  “I mean, think about it,” says Robwright. “They could have been like Molly Jones. They could have fought back. They could have been victorious, even for a moment. But they chose not to.”

  “It really does make you think about what’s going on in America,” says Army Man. “It really does.”

  McDean doesn’t feel great about how this one worked out. Usually, they show the exits after a successful victory: the goal is to make the audience feel anxious but also superior to these people who are trying to flee. You prove it can be done—then you show people who didn’t even try. It’s just all compromised by their having to take out Miss Dang.

  But he did the math: the TMAs for having an Asian lady take out a shooter were far, far lower than the TMAs for seeing the exits after a compromised civilian victory. It would have seriously damaged his aggregate scores.

  “Audience growth rate?” asks McDean.

  “Holding steady,” says Ives.

  “Jesus. Amazing. Let’s roll some ads.”

  “Ten-four,” says Andrews.

  Robwright faces the camera. She smiles glamorously. “We’re going to take a quick break and be right back.”

  The ads roll.

  “Sir,” says Delyna quietly. She has to clear her throat. Her mouth is dry, her ears are suddenly hot, and all the world is faint and distant. “Sir, I am not sure what . . .”

  “You shut up!” shouts Oklahoma, shoving the pistol forward. “You shut up! I am tired, I am damn sick and tired of being disrespected all the time!”

  She swallows. She feels like she’s about to pass out, and she has to struggle to stay standing. “Sir . . .”

  “Scott,” says the mechanic. “Scotty, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I am fixing this,” says Oklahoma. “I’m fixing what’s wrong! Don’t you see it? Don’t you see how these people are? How they get at you?”

  Delyna thinks, Who is “these people”? But she’s smart enough to keep quiet.

  The crowd is alarmed, but they don’t seem particularly offended by all this. They appear to be waffling back and forth between interest and irritation: they’re not sure if they like what they’re seeing, but they’re willing to keep watching. They are just curious spectators in this horrifying moment in Delyna’s life.

  “It is my right,” says Oklahoma. “It . . . It is my right as a citizen to have my voice heard!”

  Delyna struggles with her bewilderment. “And watching the channel you want to watch in some dive-ass bar is how you make your voice heard?” she asks, genuinely astonished.

  “It was a Vigilance!” he shouts. “You can’t turn that off! We got to watch, we got to!”

  She is so agog at this line of argument that she forgets the gun in his hand. “Sir,” she says forcefully, “it is a television show.”

  “It was a Vigilance,” says a woman in the back. “What kind of person turns that off?”

  Delyna looks around and realizes she’s losing the crowd. These people might very well let him shoot her, or even approve of his doing so.

  “All our lives, we get attacked,” says Oklahoma. “Every day, our way of life comes under siege. We are always having to defend ourselves. We are always having to fight for what’s right. But I’m sick of it. I am willing to be a warrior for truth.”

  Delyna’s head is spinning. It’s surreal. She thinks she heard those lines once on The O’Donley Effect.

  The crowd is nodding. She sees Raphael withdrawing from the order counter, eager to get out of the line of fire.

  She realizes she needs to do something.

  Shit, she thinks. What do these people want to hear?

  She looks at the crowd again, shaking with fear. She faintly realizes that these people are watching because they expect to see something akin to the stories they see on television all the time: there is a bad actor, there is a hero, and then there is violence, resolving the issue.

  How do I change the story? How do I get myself the hell out of this?

  She has an idea. She’s heard plenty of ONT in her life, and she quickly cobbles together some stolen lines.

  “I’m,” she says haltingly, “I’m . . . just a bartender. I came here to go to work. That’s all. I’m . . . I’m trying to run things as I have always run them, as I choose to run them. That’s my right. That’s my right as a citizen.”

  “We have to watch,” Oklahoma says. “We have to. We got to stay alert!”

  The crowd nods. “We do,” says a woman. “How are we going to stay safe?”

  “But I’m not safe,” says Delyna. She looks at the gun. “Am I?”

  “You . . . you chose to put yourself here,” says Oklahoma angrily.

  “Noooo, no no no,” says Delyna. “The one making the choice here is you. You’re the one choosing to stick a gun in my goddamn face.”

  There’s a flicker of emotion in the crowd at that.

  “I didn’t hurt anyone,” says Oklahoma. “You’re the one who hurt us!”

  “I did not,” she says. “You think you’re the good guy here? That you’re the one putting things to rights? Imagine if you walked into any other place and saw a man pointing a gun at the clerk and making demands! Why wouldn’t you think he was a thief, a murderer? Why wouldn’t he be the bad guy?”

  She feels the crowd considering that.

  “I ain’t a damn thief!” he snarls.

  “Not yet,” she says. “But if I give in here, why wouldn’t you ask for my till? Why not my goddamn tips? What’s keeping you from pointing that thing at everyone else in here and demanding their wallets, their jewelry, their lives? If you’re willing to do it to me, why not them?”

  The crowd exchanges a glance.

  Holy shit, she thinks. Is this working?

  “I ain’t a damn thief!” he says again, louder.

  “What you are is a screaming man with a gun in an American bar,” she says. “And I bet if any one of these people pulled iron on you and gunned you down, they’d be considered heroes for doing it.”

  Now the crowd is very intrigued. She isn’t even sure if “pulled iron” is an actual cowboy phrase, but it sounds cowboy enough.

  Oklahoma feels t
he crowd turning on him. “You shut up!” he cries.

  “If this were a Vigilance,” she says, “who do you think the active would be? And who’d be the hero? Are you so sure it’d be you?”

  Oklahoma glances around and licks his lip. “You . . . You be quiet.”

  But it’s too late. The crowd starts moving.

  A woman at the far table frantically pulls her hand out of her purse, holding a pistol. She points it at Oklahoma, her hand wobbling like the gun is too heavy for her wrist. “Listen, you . . . you motherfucker,” she says, nervously excited. “You put that dang thing down!”

  Oh, shit, thinks Delyna.

  Oklahoma wheels and points the gun at her. “W . . . What?” he says.

  The obese, inebriated man who ordered the chili fries fumbles to produce his weapon. To Delyna’s horror, it’s some kind of fully automatic pistol. “Don’t . . .” He pauses to belch. “Don’t you point that thing at her!” he says.

  Everyone stares at one another for a moment.

  Please, no one else take out a gun, she thinks.

  Then the mechanic steps back and awkwardly reaches for his holster. He’s surprised to find it’s missing. He looks around and cries, “What? No! Fuck, fuck! Not again!”

  “Stop,” says Delyna. “Please, just—”

  “Stop it!” screams Oklahoma. “Stop it! Everyone stop it!”

  “Put it down!” screams the woman.

  “Put it away!” shouts the drunk man with the automatic pistol.

  Another man reaches for his gun.

  Delyna stares in horror as her gambit continues to go wildly awry. She’d just wanted Oklahoma to relent, to put his gun away out of fear someone might shoot—but she’d never thought everyone would eagerly fight to be that someone.

  They all want to be heroes, she thinks, dismayed. They all want to be dumbass heroes in their dumbass stories!

  Oklahoma is panicking now. He stares at the many, many firearms now pointed at him.

  “You stupid bitch,” he says quietly.

  Delyna sees that he’s desperate—and she knows desperate men do very stupid things.

  He grimaces and says, “You stupid black bi—”

  It’s at this moment that the bathroom door slams open, and Randy—drunk-ass, homeless, sad-eyed Randy—comes staggering out. He’s holding something in his right hand. To her dismay, Delyna sees it’s a Klimke pistol.

  The crowd turns to stare at him, surprised.

  “Hey!” shouts the mechanic. “That’s mine!”

  Randy leans this way and that, a classic drunk’s struggle with equilibrium. “Check this shit out!” he shouts, holding it up. “Think this thing’s loade—”

  He pulls the trigger. The gun goes off. A bottle of vodka explodes on the wall behind Delyna.

  Without another thought, Delyna dives behind the bar.

  The South Tavern erupts with the harsh, brittle cracks of gunfire. Delyna doesn’t have the mind to scream, she just rolls up in a ball on the sticky, beer-soaked floor and covers her head, trying to make herself as compact as possible. She can hear people screaming and stumbling around, she can feel the reverberations in the floor as the bullets strike the walls, she can feel dust drift down to her as they chew into the ceiling. One sound is especially predominant, a raw, hyperactive chattering of gunfire from what she suspects is the fat man’s automatic pistol.

  She dimly realizes that now she is screaming, shrieking at the top of her lungs as the gunshots go on, and on, and on.

  And then, finally, they cease.

  She lies on the floor, ears ringing, her heart fluttering madly. She’s smart enough to stop screaming, just in case Oklahoma is still alive and willing to kill her. She just lies on the floor, listening.

  All she hears is a dull coughing and something dripping—all else is silence.

  Delyna slowly sits up, still listening closely. Nothing. She crawls to the edge of the bar and peeks out.

  The South Tavern is a tattered, ruined mess. Bodies lie everywhere, drooping over tables and chairs or prostrate on the floor. Glasses have exploded into twinkling shards that stretch across the floor.

  Everyone, it seems, is dead or at the very least dying. Oklahoma is perhaps the most dead: there is not much left of his head or, indeed, even his chest. It seems everyone was very excited to shoot him. The woman who pulled her gun from her purse is lying across a table: she apparently took some kind of advanced round in the stomach, and her intestines droop from the edge like festoons of garland. The mechanic is sitting up against the wall with a tiny, perfect hole drilled beside his nose. Poor Randy is dead as well, having taken a bullet in the belly just above his crotch, and another in the chest. The fat man with the automatic pistol is still alive but obviously not for long: he’s taken three, four, maybe five hits to his torso. It’s clear he did the majority of the damage, and he’s still trying to do more: he is still waving his pistol at the bar, his finger still squeezing the trigger.

  Delyna watches him until finally his arm falls and the gun clatters to the ground.

  She hears a rustling behind her and sees Raphael’s face peeking over the order counter.

  “God damn,” he says softly. “God damn, Delyna. Girl . . . Girl, why didn’t you just turn it back on? Why?”

  She stands up. She thinks for a moment, then goes and grabs her purse from the office. “I’m gone,” she says.

  It takes him a moment to understand her words. “You what?”

  “I’m gone,” she says. “For the night. Forever. Tell Martin I quit.” She starts walking to the back door. “And remind him of what my fucking name is!” she shouts over her shoulder.

  McDean stares at the ads as they wash over him.

  This is a different set from the previous advertisements: they’re gorgeous, wonderful, calibrated creations, all winsome nostalgia and beatific calm. His ads feature old Chevrolet trucks with wooden beds, the kind that haven’t been made in over one hundred years; they feature milkmen, and mailmen, and firefighters, and policemen who look like they came out of a comic book from the 1930s; families strolling through pecan groves; kids going to diners and getting a fucking malt milkshake, kids putting pennies in piggy banks; librarians with beehives and horn-rim glasses; people wearing brimmed hats and then tipping the hats to each other and saying “yes, ma’am,” and “no, ma’am.” It’s just a giant nostalgia enema, glimpses of an America that, if it ever even existed, is nearly a century old by now.

  And his audience fucking loves it. He watches on his tablet as his TMAs climb, and climb, and climb.

  It’s a psychological trick that McDean developed and refined: he gives them an oasis of the achingly familiar amidst this rush of modern carnage. It isn’t enough to dilute the audience’s anxiety, but it gives them a moment to catch their breath.

  He nods as he watches the data on his template—Pareto charts and bar charts and multiple regressions and ARIMA models. It’s a wonderful, beautiful symphony of data, all brought about by his marketing innovations.

  Striking that balance of terror and relief has been a learning experience for McDean. When they first started Vigilance, they went all in on fear and terror, and that worked at first—somewhat. But trying to figure out which images and experiences goosed his core demographic—and his Ideal Person, his most valuable viewer—was strange.

  At first, he went with dead children: images of them, audio of the school shootings, news footage from school shootings, and so on. He’d thought this would activate their most protective instincts, sure, but the main reason why he went with dead children was that just they had so much material of it—for although America doesn’t manufacture much anymore, it sure as hell makes a lot of dead kids: children shot at schools, in the home, at the playgrounds; shot by cops, by themselves, by their parents, by each other; just heaps and heaps of little angelic bodies, all perforated with bullet holes, all still and cold and perfect.

  Surely, he thought at the time, this would evoke the desir
ed biochemical reactions in his target audience. Surely, this would alarm them into never turning away.

  And yet their reaction had been . . . muted.

  He’s seen it a lot since, and it’s puzzled him every time: John McDean’s Ideal Person is just strangely unaffected by the sight of dead children. It simply doesn’t do it for them anymore, if it ever did.

  It bothers him. He knows it shouldn’t—usually, he just forgets about the stats that have such low R-squared scores—but it just does.

  Why are these grandmas and grandpas and mothers and fathers just so fucking indifferent to the sight of so many children in harm’s way? Why?

  He’s developed a theory about this, a crude one, a strange one—but one that he thinks comes close.

  To witness youth in this America is, in a way, to know that the world is failing. It’s failing in lots of ways: the reproduction rate has plummeted; the immigration rate is a net negative; the government is bankrupt; lots of America is either sinking into the sea or burning like kindling; and on, and on, and on.

  So, when they look upon the young and see how miserable and terrified and despairing they are, some part of the older generation’s brains must realize that they were the ones who’d been the stewards of America during all of this—and that they’d just fucking blown it.

  And they had blown it, McDean supposes. The wheels have come off the economy two, three, four times. The melting Arctic is belching methane into the atmosphere. McDean can’t even keep track of how many wars they are in these days, or how long they’dvebeen going on for. And China has just blown by everyone, turning into some scientific marvel, engineering super soldiers, seeding the stratosphere with sulfates to slow the changing climate, and even starting to terraform fucking Mars, for Christ’s sake.

  The older generations had sat back and just watched all that happen, or even made it happen. That is a fact, and they know it, though they might not want to admit it. Yet when they saw their unhappy, dwindling progeny, the evidence was undeniable.

  So, what did they do?

  They destroyed the evidence—or they allowed it to be destroyed.