The Rise and Falling Out of Saint Leslie of Security

by Andrew Tisbert

  "Roger,” Leslie said. “I want to tell you why I'm really here."

  He turned, looked curious.

  "All right.” She paused. “I'm pregnant."

  "What do you want me to do about that?"

  "It's an embarrassment to Security and to Washington. I'm ... not supposed to have it."

  "And you want to? Why burden yourself? You're a saint. All expenses paid. Are you crazy?"

  Did he hate the American way of life, or did he envy her position within it? She frowned—and noticed how the side of her face was stiffening. “I've heard the cult has safe places. Places you can hide, get help..."

  Roger softly laughed now. “You want to use me to get in touch with the Sons of Man, so they can help you hide out to bear an illegitimate child."

  Memory of her old dream—the warehouse of tissue, the slick cement floor—flashed so sharply she caught her breath. “I just don't know. But, for once, I want to feel in control. I want to hold the options. I didn't want my life to change, but it did anyway. And I didn't want to kill anyone, either. I was in a situation, and training took over. I wish it had never happened."

  "So tell me why I should help you."

  "I don't think there is a reason."

  "Well, then."

  "But I came here alone, humbly, to apologize to you. I've been insulted, humiliated, punched."

  "Apologize!"

  "Are you goading me? Do you want me to freak out on you? Uphold some illusion you hold of what I am—murderous, crazy—"

  His eyes flashed with anger. “You killed my brother."

  The door buzzed. “Who could that be?” he said. “Leslie. Who could that be?"

  "I don't know."

  "Who is it?” he hollered.

  After a pause, Leslie heard Tommy Russell's voice. “Leslie? It's me."

  "Oh my god,” she whispered. Roger mouthed silently to her: Who is it?

  "What are you doing here, Tom?"

  "I want to talk. Will you let me in?"

  "Why are you here!"

  "Leslie. Do we have to talk through a locked door?"

  "What the Red Hell is going on?” Roger whispered, backing across the room. All his courage had evaporated. He looked like a three-year-old boy.

  "Just answer me, Tom."

  "They let me come alone to talk, because of our relationship. It's just me. Now will you let me in or do I have to burn the lock?"

  Leslie glanced at Roger. He stood in the kitchen doorway, just as he had when she first saw him. Except now, he was shaking. She put a finger to her lips and approached him. “There's a maintenance panel in the back wall of your kitchen, isn't there?” she whispered. He blinked and nodded. “Open it. Then you'll have to burn the lock into the robot access tunnel. Here."

  She un-holstered Gun and held it out to him. He looked at it as if it were about to explode. “Take it,” she said. Then, to Gun: “Hello, Gun. I'm releasing safeties. I'm giving you to someone else to use. It's all right."

  "Whatever you say,” Gun said. Leslie shook the weapon until Roger grasped it in a trembling hand. She watched him stumble into the kitchen.

  "How did you find me here, Tom?"

  "Come on, Les—"

  "My head mem? Has Security been monitoring my head mem, Tom?"

  He didn't answer.

  "I promised this man nothing would happen to him if we met. He hasn't done anything."

  "Worry a bit more about yourself. I don't want to see you getting any deeper into this than you already are. Don't worry about him. He'll get a fair trial."

  "A fair trial for what?"

  Again, he didn't answer. Leslie heard Gun sputter in the kitchen. She turned and her stomach knotted.

  You're committed now.

  "Let's get out of here,” she muttered. Then she heard Russell's laser behind her and she cursed.

  Roger had ripped out the maintenance panel beneath his auto-kitchen and burned open the crawl space, cluttered with wires and darkness, behind it. Crouching down, she motioned him in.

  "I can't believe this,” he whined. “I can't believe this.” Leslie took her Gun back, grabbed him by the shoulder, then thrust him down and forward. He scraped past the smoking, hot metal, where Gun had sheared through, and Leslie followed. “They're just going to monitor wherever your head mem goes, aren't they?"

  "I thought you people had a way to screen the signal."

  "The Sons of Man might, but I don't, for Washington's sake!"

  "Well, it all depends on how they're managing this operation, anyway."

  Roger didn't ask her what she meant. He said, “Shit,” and kept moving. Leslie wondered briefly what he was thinking about her. They squeezed through the tunnel, Leslie's knees banging painfully on the steel tracks that were supposed to draw the robots from apartment to apartment.

  After a moment, she heard Tom calling behind them.

  Don't follow us through the tunnel—please don't. It would be too easy to blow your head off in here.

  But he was smarter than that, she knew. He would be rushing to guard as many access points as he could. She wondered how many guards were with him.

  Roger stopped in front of her. “It drops here."

  "Good. Go down the shaft."

  "How the Red Hell am I going to do that?"

  "Head first. Hang onto the tracks and you won't fall."

  Leslie listened to him slide forward then heard his body slamming the shaft walls. Through her teeth she said, “Are you all right?"

  "Twisted my wrist."

  "Climb down one level, then find a horizontal passage. I'm right behind you.” She pulled herself to the edge of the blind drop and listened for Roger's motion below. When she heard what sounded like his body sliding into another tunnel, she reached over the shaft's lip and grasped the tracks that continued down along its side. She pulled herself out and down, hand over hand. The blood rushed to her head as she descended. She let her legs steady her against the sides of the narrow space. Then she felt the opening of the next level and, twisting her torso around for leverage, stuck her head into the tunnel. With her legs pushing against the walls of the shaft, she scraped, inch by inch, inside.

  She stopped to rest, lying on her side, her feet still hanging in the shaft. At first she couldn't hear Roger in front of her. A sharp pang of panic stabbed her chest, throbbed once in her fingertips, and was gone. Had he fallen? Or somehow gotten into a different tunnel? Then his shoe scraped the tracks only a foot from her head and she expelled her caught breath.

  As they crawled, Leslie felt along the sides with her fingers for an access to a maintenance panel. Her fingertips slammed into the lock of one, and she reached out to grasp Roger by the ankle. “Here.” She pulled out Gun.

  Suddenly it was not the darkness, but the light, blinding Leslie as she burned away the lock, thick sparks bursting up and singeing her hair. She forced the door into the wall with Gun's barrel, and punched open the access panel with open palms. They wormed into the lesser darkness of someone's kitchen.

  As Leslie stood, she heard someone stirring in the apartment's bedroom. “Somebody's in there,” she whispered. “Hurry.” They sprinted through the vision room and the front door.

  Surprisingly, the corridor was empty. Leslie motioned with Gun for Roger to follow, and headed for an elevator. Inside it, she turned to her panting companion. “We'll go down to sub-level and get out from there. Do you know of anywhere we can go?"

  He nodded. “If you get us out of here, I can get us to a safe house."

  Leslie bit at her sore cheek and waited for the elevator to stop. When the door slid open, she jumped out with Gun raised. Again, the corridor was empty. She ran down it, and Roger followed.

  The exit was unguarded. Leslie's mind raced. Security wouldn't want a story to get out about a defecting saint. Was it Security's need to be discreet that allowed them to escape? Or had Tom really been alone?

  As they walked out onto the subway port, she felt almost overwhelming r
elief.

  Roger's eyes were wide, and he still hadn't stopped shaking. “I don't believe it,” he kept saying. “I don't believe it."

  Leslie holstered Gun, and after a few moments, they boarded a subway train.

  8

  "Ooo...” She looked down at her swelling body in amazement as the power, the inexorable energy, moved her bones and bore down. “It ... hurts.” The sweating mound of her belly had gone rigid—two long blades of muscle, constricting—and her shoulders, her parted knees, thighs, her whole body, shook. Her vision kept fragmenting into pieces of electronic black. Tom was there, between her thighs, one hand gently resting on the tight tendon of her upper thigh.

  "Easy,” he said. “All right, take it easy. Keep breathing, Les. Remember to breathe."

  She gasped, gulped at the gelled air around her, and the black thinned, just a little. Pain eased and she fell to her back on the cushions, wondering if she could take another convulsion. She clutched at Tom, catching his wrist—"Hold me—” and pulled at him until he moved up over her, over her belly, and kissed her lips. The flesh of her lips felt alive. Burning. She clamped her arms around him, she dug into his back. “Just hold me.” She felt as if she were exploding through her loose, swollen cunt. As if her vagina were bursting with the whole world, writhing with fleshy life. And as it opened and opened and opened, that bright, molten doorway had two sides. And as life burst out over the oily threshold of her perineum, she could see to the other side, the side that was death. As if life would explode and she would implode, to the other side. She squeezed Tom and that lasted forever, for a moment.

  But he was straining against her. “Come on, baby. I'm at the wrong end, you know? I've got to be ... down there.” He pried himself loose and knelt between her knees again. The urge was returning.

  To push....

  "Breathe, Les, breathe."

  "I ca—"

  "Easy, slow."

  "I can't. I'm pushing."

  She heard the bones in her groin moving to accommodate the head. Heard the wet cracking as the baby fought to...

  Crown....

  She panted wildly as the rush receded. Everything was a haze. She barely heard Tom's nervous laughter. “All right. He's sliding down. Water bag's bulging right out but it didn't break.” Then she took another deep breath and the whole world rushed into her, bright, powerful, and moved down to her womb, contracting. She felt the hot spurt. Or gushing.

  All Tom said was: “Oh,” and rocked backward, soaked down his front. The smell rose to Leslie, thick, sweet and acrid, like cum only much stronger. Tom made no twisted remark. He only said, “Guess the water broke.” The lips of her cunt were inflamed, and her body was inflamed, and Tom had his hand down, pressing on her perineum as it went white, tightening. She strained. Her skin tightened more, as if she would tear open....

  And the darkness tore open to dull morning light that came from a strange window, filled a strange room.

  Leslie rolled to her side and propped herself on an elbow. “Tom?” Beneath her clothing her crotch was slick. Sweat soaked the back of her shirt. She lay on the floor of someone's vision room, on a pile of wrinkled blankets—had she fallen from the couch in her sleep? Beside Gun's holster on the arm of the couch, there was a device that looked like an old-fashioned radio attached to a wide belt. That was the scrambler. Leslie had never actually seen one before, but she knew what it was. It was designed to confuse directional signals. She could probably still receive—and possibly send—data with Gun or the head mem, but this device blurred specific locations from global satellite tracking. She had no doubt Security could sort out the scramble given enough time, and either track her through the head mem or Gun, but for now she knew it was saving their lives. As long as she kept it on, or at least within fifteen feet of her.

  She had stood under a street light, while Roger cringed his way into the shadows of a dark alley to meet the SOM member who gave him the belt. The man explained she would have to wear it until the head mem was removed, and then Gun would have to be destroyed too.

  Everybody's out to get Gun from me.

  A sardonic thought, Leslie decided, but she knew it was true.

  That had been somewhere in Connecticut. Hartford. They'd taken trains all the way to Baltimore. Leslie was terrified she'd be recognized, or they would run into a mechanical eye. She stayed in her seat and kept her head down. She leaned in low against Roger's trembling shoulder, her hand at her temple, above her throbbing cheek. Roger was drenched in sweat most of the time, and she could smell the fear on him. Leslie almost laughed when she thought how their postures should be reversed. She should have her arm around his shoulders, his head to her bosom. She could whisper to him to be quiet, things would be all right. Instead she was pressed against his rancid armpit, her eyes wide with rage. She tried to talk to him a few times, but he would only glance down at her, pale and haunted looking. It was all he could do to martial his self-control.

  In Baltimore they ascended from the subway to the streets by Curtis Bay, and found a vision stall so Roger could call a contact from the Sons of Man. They climbed into the dim cubicle and Leslie shut the door behind them. There were three vision panels, all showing the same commercial for the latest hard-on drug. It was funny to her, now, she remembered that ad so clearly. A successful-looking man in a pin striped suit walked through a busy office waving to his colleagues, while various beautiful secretaries fell over in their chairs as they caught sight of the enormous bulge in his immaculately-pressed trousers. Something about him had reminded Leslie of Father Washington. She could recall the arrogant look on his face more clearly than the face of the bald Sons of Man leader Roger called, who gave them directions to pick up the scrambler in Hartford, and to get to the safe house, and then insisted he speak with Roger alone.

  Now they were in the safe house in the Boston Fun Park and Museum—what had once been Downtown Boston. A year ago the automated Freedom Trail Ride crashed at the site of the Boston Tea Party and killed over two dozen people, only two months after the Shot That Was Heard Around the World Thrill Show ended with a bullet in a six-year-old boy's forehead. The entire city-sized park closed indefinitely for ‘renovations'. There were some construction crews around Paul Revere's house, the site of the Tea Party Tragedy, and Beacon Hill, but other than that the park was all but abandoned.

  Leslie looked around the room. This apartment was twice the size of her own, and brighter. The wall opposite the vision panels was almost entirely glass. Pale curtains, half drawn, filtered the noonday sun glinting off the edges of the distant high-rises of a spacious street. Roger wasn't in the room. Her right cheek was swollen. It throbbed now, and she touched it gingerly. “Hello,” she called.

  "I'm in the kitchen; I'll be right there."

  Leslie wondered if he always appeared in doorways with two steaming mugs of coffee. His hair stuck out in disarray and the stubble on his chin was noticeably longer. His eyes were sunken and his focus darted about, uncertain. He knelt beside her on the floor and handed her one of the mugs. “Taste this.” He tried to smile but it seemed sour. “This place is wonderful. It's got everything. I even found books in the den. Books!"

  Leslie's laugh was no more than a puff through her nose. She sipped the coffee. “It tastes odd."

  "That's because it's real, not the crap you're used to. Smuggled in from South America, probably. And fresh. It must cost a fortune."

  "I guess you have friends in high places."

  "Yeah. Well, actually, I was never much involved with the Sons of Man. As you should know by now. But they certainly do come through, don't they?” Roger slurped from his mug, then leaned forward. Letting out a long breath, he looked carefully at Leslie and shook his head. Gently reaching toward her cheek he said, “Hey, that really is swollen.” She jerked away from him and stood. “All right.” He held up his hand then let it fall into his lap. “Sorry.” He took his coffee with him to the couch.

  Leslie stood there glaring as he sat,
but her anger cooled and she tried to read his expression. If nothing else, she saw confusion in his dark eyes. He was a jumbled mixture of rash action and paralyzing fear. He seemed intelligent enough—likely smarter than she was. He had to resent her. He hadn't asked to be thrust into this situation, made a fugitive. But he was apparently trying to make the best of it. Leslie supposed he wasn't a bad man. And she had set him up....

  Anger burned the line of her throat again, but this time it wasn't for Roger. She closed her eyes, opened them again when she heard him rise. “Breakfast will be ready in about a minute,” he told her. “I'm going to clean up and shave.” She watched him retreat to the bathroom.

  Leslie un-holstered Gun and walked to the window. The panes looked bulletproof. About two dozen levels below her was a narrow, cobbled street, with restored brick buildings along the opposite side. She listened to the hiss of water in the bathroom, Roger knocking through cabinets. “Hello, Gun,” she said softly.

  "Ready, Leslie."

  "Gun. It looks like we are somewhere in the Boston Museum and Fun Park. Can you help me locate us?"

  "Sorry, Leslie. There's displacement around me. I can't locate us right now. Would you like me to keep trying?"

  "That's the scrambler for your head mem. I could have told you that,” Roger said from the doorway.

  Leslie turned to him coolly. “I'm just checking. No, Gun, you can cancel."

  Roger's eyes narrowed and he wiped at a spot of aftershave along the line of his jaw. Then he turned and retreated once again into the bathroom. Leslie listened to him slamming things around, slapping cabinets shut. When he appeared again he kicked at the door frame and said, “Look. What reason do you have to distrust me? We're in this together now. I've been pretty honest with you. I've got the Sons of Man helping you. And my whole life has been fucked in an instant because of you."