Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  Julio was selling his finished paella to the audience. Then he called a girl up from the audience, at least a decade younger than he was, more like two. Jeff knew he’d picked his next target. Julio had always been a fan of the long and leggy blondes. His wife, his mistress, and bee-you-tee-ful Jennifer from Ohio were practically interchangeable. He’d known Julio for years and the man never ceased to amaze him. Jeff had trouble speaking with a pretty woman outside his professional, on-screen persona. Julio swept them up like a Central Park street cleaner.

  The menu was really too small for the space it was supposed to fill. Somewhere he had a photo of Craig shaking his hand. An old Craig and a younger Jeff, much younger. Which was why he’d taken it down in the first place. But he was over that now and it would look nice beside the menu.

  On screen, the feeding each other thing made a cute touch. Julio and the leggy blonde looked good together on camera, you could even hear the audience sighing at the romance of the moment. He certainly knew how to play the crowd.

  Jeff should call him and see if he’d persuaded the blonde into his bed. Or even the blonde and her friend. It was hard to put anything past Julio, he was a blonde-glutton. Maybe he wouldn’t call, they might still be abed. It was only mid-afternoon.

  It wasn’t until the floor director rushed on screen that Jeff realized something was wrong. He grabbed the remote and turned the sound off. After some fumbling he turned it up to a room-filling roar. He more fell than sat back on his couch.

  Chaos exploded on his television screen. Julio and the girl collapsed. Audience members screamed. Someone actually trampled Julio as they sprinted across the set. Jeff jerked to his feet and then dropped back onto his couch as his knees let go. He looked around for some explanation. But he was alone in his upper West Side apartment. All the plush trappings of the nation’s number one television cooking show host paled before the tragedy unfolding on the screen.

  No one thought to stop the camera feed and the camera guys were doing their job well. Too well. They captured it all for posterity. The stampede as half the audience surged forward to gawk. The other half a stampede as they bolted for the door in terror of their own lives.

  Julio’s gaping mouth and confused, dying eyes were abruptly replaced with black. After a few seconds a Tide commercial filled the screen. The sound of the screams and confusion continued over the wholesome housewife and her son’s grass-stained soccer uniform.

  Jeff hit the mute button. The abrupt silence lasted a long moment before he heard a siren sound far below. It was wrong, they’d be too late already. And the time was wrong. He’d taped Julio last night.

  Julio couldn’t be dead, not last night and not now.

  He’d had dinner with the man two or three nights ago. Three. They’d been friendly rivals for a decade, once they’d found they were both from the same neighborhood in a back corner of Bronx.

  Julio had shrugged off the loss of both Becky and Bobbi Jean, his wife and mistress, lightly.

  “We learned growing up that it was dangerous to get too attached to anything, especially a relationship. You remember, mi amigo.”

  Jeff had grown up two blocks away and his parents had moved to the country before Jeff was ten or Julio was born, which Julio blithely brushed aside as if they’d been bosom buddies. But he remembered the Bronx and that letting anyone close was dangerous. Was that why he was fifty-six and alone? No, that wasn’t it. Jeff picked up the remote and set it back down.

  “I’d be some kinda peesed,” Julio’s television accent slipped out on occasion in his real life as well, “if they weren’t just women.”

  Jeff had almost spit his Katz’s corn beef sandwich on Julio.

  “See,” Julio had taken a bite of his pastrami on rye and spoken around it. “My male ego is intact. Women are everywhere. They are all beee-you-tiful,” he kissed his fingertips and tossed the kiss toward the ceiling, “and thankfully many of them are willing to tickle the fancy of big TV stars like us.”

  And last night, in the midst of a detergent commercial, Julio had died on a studio floor in midtown. Dead because of his promiscuity? Perhaps killed by his mistress or wife?

  He had to call Julio. It had all been some sick joke. They’d have a good laugh over it next week while Jeff cooked Beef with Oyster Sauce and Mr. Chu’s Pork Egg Fu Yung as promised.

  Jeff managed to find the stop on the remote, before reaching for the telephone. On screen was Maggie Hadderly doing her “Health and Happiness with Hadderly” routine. She was an up and comer, have to keep an eye on her. A comfortable enough thing to do for its own sake, cute kid. He’d even bought her cookbook, retail. It was good enough for a first one. The potential was there.

  The closed captioning caught up with the show, it came up whenever he had the sound muted.

  Yesterday Maggie Hadderly was cooking for a studio audience of sixty five . . .

  Good crowd for a weekday, pre-recorded show. She was doing better than he thought.

  . . . when she went to her oven. Experts are saying this required no exceptional mechanical skills to achieve.

  Maggie sashayed to her oven. She really was fun to watch, the woman definitely knew how to sell it. She pulled open the oven door and a tongue of flame twenty feet long shot out of the oven and enveloped her in fire.

  Jeff sprang back to his feet and dropped the remote. It bounced off the coffee table and the mute switched off.

  Screams filled his apartment. Maggie’s screams. Her audience’s screams.

  He almost screamed in response.

  People rushed in from off camera with fire extinguishers. They shot them off—and the entire studio kitchen was enveloped in flame.

  “In addition to the napalm in the oven, three fire extinguishers had been refilled with gasoline,” the voiceover resumed, some pert woman was reporting in exactly the same tone she’d probably used last week to report the results of the Westminster Dog Show.

  Jeff recovered the remote and turned the volume down as he watched. Maggie was roasted alive.

  God, napalm. Who had she “peesed off?” Some jilted lover? She was nearly as infamous for the length of her list of conquests as she was famous for her cooking. Had she and Julio both been murdered by someone they’d slept with?

  He buried his head in his hands. The phone in one hand and the remote in the other clunked against his forehead. He hung up the phone and muted the television.

  The news was now busy reporting a stray kitten who’d scampered across the runway at a Bryant Park fashion show. Leggy models in tight skirts and stilettos were sprawled like spilled rice along the runway. The captioning appeared . . .

  Fortunately the models in the shorter [cough] attire were wearing thongs.

  A close up made sure that America had a clear view of how little use a thong really was in hiding anything.

  He pressed the play button. Detergent had to be better than this.

  Show day tomorrow.

  For the first time he didn’t want to go and wasn’t sure if he dared. Not that there’d been any ex-lovers lately to hunt him down. But still, maybe the winning entry was to not enter at all. Huddling beneath the bedcovers in his high-security, high-rise apartment sounded very appealing.

  A sharp knock on the apartment door jerked him back to his feet. The television remote flew from his hands once more and landed on the carpet in front of the set.

  Some stupid corner of his brain suggested getting a new career selling yo-yos for the number of times he’d leapt to his feet in the last two minutes.

  The knock expanded. Bidda, bidda, bum, bum, bum.

  No! This couldn’t be happening. Bloody hell!

  Twenty-seven years since he’d heard the “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” drum solo pounded out on his door. Plus four months and six days, the same useless part of his brain informed him. He resisted looking at the clock so that it cou
ld fill in the hours. The morning of his last day with EMS. His last day working to change the world for—

  Oh hell and damnation!

  SECOND COURSE

  IN THE SOUP

  TODAY

  CHAPTER 4

  “How many of you are women?”

  Staff Sergeant Dave Lundgren managed to suppress his sneer. Who did this woman think she was talking to? Sure, Master Sergeant Shelley Thomas outranked him, but not by much and she’d probably slept with some general’s staffer to get the promotion. She did fill out a pair of fatigues the way few women could, but she was also a class “A” certified bitch to go with it.

  And now she couldn’t even count for herself. They’d make her a commissioned officer any day now.

  The three women in his seven man team raised their hands. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to a week of this training. Well, the Colonel had assigned them to it, but they were the best Military Police patrol at all of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They didn’t need this shit. They needed some R-and-R.

  Another week and he’d have been into the pants of Senior Airman Baker down the row. Now that was really talking. Pert little blonde and cute as could be. Not real chesty, but nice.

  “Then why didn’t any of you act like one?” Thomas would be berating the women for a while, so he tuned her out.

  This was the funkiest assignment he’d been on in his ten years in service. Loaded into the back of a Huey chopper with no windows at midnight, even a bulkhead between his team and the pilot. Doors locked from the outside, now that was real safe. He’d add it to his report to the colonel.

  For three hours the seven of them had been locked up while they flew who knew where. Landed at night. So fucking black they couldn’t see a thing. Not a light anywhere. Stars, the blacked out Huey, and a flight of stairs going down.

  Then this shit. He looked up at the roof, huge blast doors made the ceiling thirty feet above. They were in an underground missile silo. He’d give Sergeant Thomas coolness points for that. Building a training center in an abandoned missile silo was a badass idea.

  But the woman herself was hopeless.

  They’d been here since before sunrise and it was probably night again now. First, she lectured his team that they are going to be working downward through the stories of the silo as the week progressed. Second, that if they even tried to get out or go into the other silo they’d be shipped off to some kinda hardship post. Empty threats had never meant much to him.

  Now they’d spent hours learning to walk. A big loft covered most of the first floor. It was set up like a terrain obstacle course. She’d rigged sound meters by each type of ground and you had to keep walking back and forth over them until you measured quieter than a chipmunk or some such crap. Any idiot could walk across dirt, squelching mud just took going slow, same with flowing water, gravel was a pain in the ass, but tall grass was trickier than it looked. It had insisted on brushing loudly against his pants and gear. And no one but Baker managed to walk silently through the rose bush hedge. He was still all scratched up from that.

  “You!” Thomas was toe-to-toe with him, barely an inch away. He musta jumped six inches straight up. Her fatigues were buttoned up to the throat now. The colonel had pitched a fit that she’d walked right by him without an ID check. Better not to explain how fine the woman had looked with no bra and her fatigues open halfway to her navel. Auburn hair alive with curls flowing past her shoulders hadn’t hurt the image. The hair was now back in a severe ponytail. And the bitch within had replaced the friendly-woman role she’d been wearing like a cheap dress. Still, seriously nice stack, not big, just really nice. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of it under friendlier circumstances.

  “What!” he shouted back at her. She’d been on his case all day and he was sick of it.

  “Answer the question, soldier!”

  He’d been in the military long enough that he’d learned to remember what officers were spouting off even when he wasn’t really listening.

  “Why didn’t I act like a woman in the last scenario?” He slung his M4 onto his back, pulled the protective goggles down from his forehead like a pair of sunglasses, and wiggled his butt as he moseyed away from her.

  “Is that better, sir?” He made his voice all smooth like the girls did on Baywatch.

  Should have gotten a laugh from his team. It would have before Sergeant Bitch got a hold of them.

  She charged him. One moment she was fifteen feet away. The next she was laying her shoulder into his gut. He had the M4 barely halfway around when they flew backward and he was plastered onto the floor.

  She came off him in a roll and had her Glock pistol pulled and aimed at his eye. Shit! It was ugly looking up a barrel like that, just inches away even through Lexan goggles.

  The finger on the trigger tightened and she shot him.

  He heard a scream. In his own voice. Then he clapped both hands over his eye.

  She peeled his fingers aside and looked down at him even as he struggled to cover it again.

  “It was just a training round, you idiot.” She let go of his hands and they clamped back around the goggle.

  He finally managed to blink his eye open and could see his fingers clutching the goggle’s lens.

  He pulled them aside and he could still see. Thank God!

  Fuck!

  Her pistol still hovered there, six inches from his face.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I work for a living.”

  He nodded quickly to show she had his full attention.

  She stood up, managing to place a knee solidly into his gut as she did so. She holstered the Glock, which was a good thing. But he’d be more careful in the future, she’d pulled it so damn fast. He’d never seen anything like it.

  “First, why did you forget Tueller’s twenty-one foot rule that we spent so much time on this morning? I can charge twenty-one feet faster than you can draw, aim, and fire a weapon. There’s a reason our government spent so much time and money teaching you hand-to-hand combat. And second, why didn’t you think like a woman in the last scenario?”

  Tueller’s Rule. Shit! They’d all spent two hours trying to outdraw her as she charged them. No one came close, not even Baker. How many times had he felt safe while securing some drunken Marine because he knew he had a pistol if it got messy? Too many. If they’d had the brains to charge him, he’d have gone down a hundred times. The two times he had were bad enough.

  And “act like a woman. . .?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, si— ma’am.”

  “Look at the scenario.” She kicked him in the ribs. Hard enough to get him moving to his feet. Another item on the report, right there with shooting him in the face. Though on second thought maybe he’d leave that out.

  The missile silo was fifty feet across and she’d said it was almost two hundred feet deep. This first floor was thirty feet high. The terrain training had been in a loft halfway up the first story. The padded room for hand-to-hand training on the floor level beneath it. The other side of the room was dominated by a shoothouse.

  This one was in worse shape than most he’d seen, it had definitely had a hard life. The small building, made mostly of plywood sheets, had been built back against the curved wall of the silo. A battered door hung on the front, a couple more sheets of plywood made three internal rooms. A thousand training rounds had splatted against sides leaving their little scuffs and scars. A light inside shone out a side window and lit an elevator cage that led down into the deeper levels of the silo.

  “You had time to study this. We’ve been in this room for fourteen hours and,” she consulted a heavy watch with a snap cover that she wore on the inside of her wrist just like the Special Operations Forces guys, “eleven minutes. The shoothouse has been sitting here the entire time.”

  She turned to face the rest of the team.

>   “Every one of you was asked to mount a raid on the house knowing there was a hostage at risk inside held by a single attacker. Who survived their raid?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Shelley Thomas waited and watched. Would the blockhead sergeant get at least this right?

  No one raised their hands.

  His first correct answer of the day.

  Shelley had ambushed and shot every one of them and they’d have the welts of training rounds for another couple days to remind them. It served them right. Of course, she’d had her fair share of bruises when she was training as well, but she wasn’t about to tell them that. Instructors had to be invulnerable, bulletproof, and immortal.

  “First lesson, this one you should already know, don’t attempt room-clearing on your own. You’ve all been trained that such a strategy is non-survivable under most circumstances. Now, did any of you refuse the scenario?”

  Not a one.

  “So, you’re all suicidal. Did any of you team up?”

  None had. She could see them reviewing the orders she’d given earlier. “Each of you shall attack . . .” She’d been most careful to never say anything about how many at a time. One after another they grimaced at their own oversight, the slow sergeant last of all.

  “Suicidal loners.” Shelley walked to the other end of the line. The sergeant was too easy a target and she had to back off a bit. He was the team leader and she couldn’t have the team not respecting their leader. Though there had been more than one shake-up in the three years she’d been doing these week-long courses. The Air Force paid her to take teams to the next level. Four times teams had mutinied and selected new commanders. None of the failures had started out as bad as this guy.

  “Each one of you directly charged the door.”

  “I didn’t, ma’am.” The petite senior airman retained her ready stance. Spoke to the lion without letting any fear show. Some potential there. Shelley resisted the smile remembering the first time she’d talked back to a DI. The drill instructor had almost dislocated her shoulder on the way to putting her face in the dirt.