by Simon Curtis
You’re doing this for her.
He had to stop and remind himself every now and then to remember why he did all of this in the first place. It hadn’t always been like this. He’d been great once. People loved him. Respected him. Admired him, even. There was a time when he lit up every room he entered with only his smile. When he could’ve talked to any girl and felt good about his chances that she wanted to talk to him as well. When his parents looked at him as though they couldn’t be more proud of anything on Earth.
He hadn’t seen them in years.
He didn’t even know if they were still alive.
Would they even recognize me now?
He thumbed the ridge of the thick scar running down his cheek.
He didn’t recognize himself anymore.
The final drag of his cigarette burned his fingertips. He flicked the butt onto the ground and stomped it into the lifeless gray dirt with his boot.
They’d be coming soon, and most of the guys here would die. This one was special. Had to be. There had never been an operation like this that he could remember, and he’d been on almost since the beginning. How many had it been now? How many innocent faces haunted him? Crying, begging, running—he killed them all. He had to. He had no choice.
At least that’s what he told himself.
It kept him from ending it all.
You’re doing this for her.
He closed his eyes and let the afternoon desert sun burn into his skin.
He remembered feeling the sun like that on his face after football games back when he was young. Back before everything had gone wrong.
It was senior year. He peeled off the helmet and let the rays bake into his sweat-soaked skin for a moment as the crowd cheered. He opened his eyes and saw his parents up in the bleachers, beaming. They’d won the game. The state championship.
“Hey!”
A shout from across the field brought him back to earth, and a smile crept across his face. There she was.
Alice.
His best friend. His love. His everything.
She tucked a stray lock of her wavy brown hair behind her ear and waved as he ran over.
“Great game, mister.”
Her eyes sparkled in the summer sun.
“What happened to the debate? I thought you couldn’t make it?” He wiped sweat from his forehead as he approached.
“I let Alex take the reins for the day. I couldn’t miss this.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She was the cocaptain of the debate team to which she had devoted most of her high school career.
“You’re so sweaty.” She laughed playfully as she pulled away.
“I can’t believe you’re here. Thank you.” He couldn’t help but beam.
She tucked her hair behind her ear once again. “I knew how much it meant to you. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
He grinned as he took her hand and went to find his parents.
• • •
“I just don’t understand how none of them are offering any scholarship money,” his mom said again as she read the letter.
“It’s really competitive now, Mom. I don’t have enough extracurriculars, and my GPA isn’t that great.”
“You have a 3.8. This is ridiculous.” She leaned against the counter and grasped her temples with her free hand.
“Mom, it’s going to be okay. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll figure out how to pay for it.”
“Between football and all the time you spend with those kids, you think that would count for something.”
“Mom, you know I don’t do it for that.”
“I know, sweetheart. That’s what makes you amazing,” she said as she put her hand on his shoulder. “I just wish they could see what I see.”
• • •
He felt the light shining on his face as he stood on the stage and looked out into the audience. Alice held his hand. It was trembling. He gave it a squeeze and drew her attention to his eyes. He smiled and, for the moment, cracked her nerves and got her to smile back at him. He walked up to the microphone as they placed the crown on his head.
Alice tucked her hair behind her ear and blushed.
“This is such an incredible honor, guys,” he said to the crowd of faceless silhouettes hidden behind the white beams. “I think I can speak for both Alice and myself when I say that we are proud to call you guys not only our peers, but also our friends.”
The crowd was silent. They were always silent when he spoke.
“It’s been such an incredible experience growing up with you guys, going on this journey together, and now that we’re on the verge of entering a new chapter of our lives, I think it’s really important that we all stop and take a moment to appreciate every single person in this room.”
He scanned the crowd in vain for two faces.
“In particular, I wanted to take a second to appreciate two of the kindest, most incredible people I’ve ever met. I’ve learned so much from them over the past four years, and I will never be able to thank them enough for the lessons they’ve taught me.”
There they were.
“Edwin and Kimberly, could you guys come up here?”
Two figures stirred from the side of the streamer- and balloon-littered conference hall and made their way up to the front.
The light caught both of them at the same moment—Edwin, with red hair and freckles in a suit two sizes too big for him, and Kimberly, in a lavender dress with matching eye shadow and a purple corsage on her wrist.
“You guys have changed not only my life, but the lives of every person you’ve come into contact with here. I think I speak for all of us when I say you deserve this moment to shine.”
With that he took his crown from his head and placed it on Edwin’s as Alice placed hers on Kimberly’s.
“Everyone give it up for your prom king and queen!”
The crowd erupted into cheers.
I love you, Alice mouthed to him over the roar.
Love you, too.
• • •
The entire town buzzed for weeks about how the quarterback and his girlfriend had given up their titles as prom king and queen to the two students with Down syndrome they’d tutored. The local news wanted to run a story on him, but he’d turned them down. That wasn’t why he’d done it.
He wanted two people he cared for to feel the light shining on their faces. To make sure they knew how special they were.
He’d had enough time in the light.
• • •
His parents beamed at him the same way as always when he graduated from basic training. He had to pay for college somehow, so he’d enlisted after graduation. Now here he was, head buzzed, standing in rank, everyone he cared about smiling at him from the audience. Pride radiated from every angle.
Alice. There she was. Today was going to be the day.
• • •
The night of the wedding, as he held her in his arms and swayed to a love song he would’ve found cheesy on any other night, she looked up at him, right into his eyes. “I need you to be okay.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“I’m going to be great. We are going to be great.”
He let her head rest upon his shoulder.
“I hope so.”
• • •
When he came back, everything was different.
Everyone had warned him before he left.
War changes people.
They all said the same thing, but he didn’t understand it then.
He did now.
Nothing felt right. Everyone took everything for granted. No one understood the brevity of our freedom, of our existence. Everything was given, nothing was earned. Everyone around him was so entitled it made him sick to his stomach, and nothing he’d seen could be unseen.
He didn’t know where he fit in anymore.
Worst of all was the divide with Alice.
He didn’t want it to be there. He tried to ignore it
for months. But there it was: a gaping canyon of understanding separating him from the only person he’d ever truly loved in his entire life. He didn’t know how to cross it and, even more painfully, neither did she.
• • •
He tried school for a semester and dropped out. Nothing made sense. It was a waste of time. The people around him were spoiled children and he couldn’t stand being around them.
When he closed his eyes, gunfire. When he lay down to sleep at night, the feeling of explosions shook the ground beneath him. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t cope.
So he drank.
He drank, and signed up for the police academy.
• • •
The distance between him and Alice grew wider every day. She didn’t understand him anymore. He wondered if there was anything left of him to understand. They tried to get pregnant, but it wasn’t working.
Secretly, he was glad. He couldn’t bear the thought of bringing a child into this broken, senseless world, but he’d never tell Alice. It would’ve destroyed her.
• • •
Alice gave birth the day of the shooting.
He’d chased two men who’d held up a gas station clerk at gunpoint down an alley. He shot one, and the other got away. The one who escaped looked back at him before he jumped the fence. Their eyes locked. He could feel the man studying his face before he dropped to the other side and vanished. The other gunman lay in a lifeless heap on the concrete. Blood pooled out from his back and formed a twisted, scarlet imitation of a snow angel.
He’d never shot a man here at home before. It brought everything back—the war, the death, and endless, mind-numbing pain.
They waited until he’d finished giving his testimony, recording every detail of his account, to tell him that his wife had gone to the hospital around the time of the shooting and had given birth.
It was dark when he got to the hospital. The scent of saline filled his nostrils as he caught his breath and signed in at the front desk.
He would never forget the look on his mother’s face when he got off the elevator and walked into the waiting room upstairs. She’d been crying. They all were.
The blood drained from his face as he walked into Alice’s room. Her eyes were wet and red, her skin drained of life. She looked up to him and managed a smile. “Come meet your baby girl.”
He walked over and grasped Alice’s outstretched hand. There, in a bundle in the crook of her left arm, was their newborn baby.
She was born with Down syndrome.
• • •
He was on paid leave when it happened. For months everyone said he’d grown paranoid and that he was drinking too much. The drinking had gotten a bit out of hand, he knew that, but he wasn’t paranoid. The phone calls in the middle of the night, the car that followed him to and from work, a silhouette of a man always lingering in the corner of his eye—he wasn’t paranoid; he was being followed. He’d tried explaining to the chief that the man who’d fled the scene last year was stalking him, and he was put on leave. No one believed him, not even Alice.
Alice had her hands full then. Daisy was a happy, bubbly baby, and Alice eagerly devoted every waking second to her. It helped her avoid acknowledging just how much of a hollowed-out shell he’d become and how little of the man she loved was even left.
He dreaded coming home those days. His mom had moved in after his dad had the stroke. His social security checks paid for the home they sent him to, but she couldn’t afford to keep their house. He hated seeing her lose the house he grew up in, but Alice needed the help with Daisy anyway, so it all worked out. Still, he couldn’t help feeling like a failure when he came home those days. A wife who didn’t recognize him, a mother whose only son was a failure, and a daughter he didn’t know how to love.
It was easier to just have another drink.
• • •
It was raining the day it happened. He’d driven home from the bar drunk, watching the rain splatter on the windshield. It reminded him of the body splayed out upon the concrete before him. A life ending right before his eyes. It had been one year to the day. Each drop on the windshield played it again in his head. So much had happened since that day. So much had gone wrong.
He couldn’t help but notice the headlights that followed his every turn, and gripped the wheel tighter.
He parked the car crookedly on the street and wondered why so many other cars were there. When he stumbled into the house, it hit him that something else had happened a year ago today.
Alice turned from her conversation with the neighbors and looked at him with disgust. They all did. They were already eating cake. The presents had been opened. His mother couldn’t even look him in the eye.
Daisy sat in her high chair, icing on her hands and face, happily playing in the mess of cake on the tray before her.
Everyone went silent.
“Well, here he is. The drunk.” His words sloshed out of his mouth a bit clumsier than he wanted them to.
Alice came to him and placed a hand on his arm. He brushed it aside.
“Did she tell you I lost my job? Did she?”
She pleaded with him under her breath, tried to guide him to the bedroom down the hall.
“Of course she didn’t. She probably doesn’t even mention my name.” He stumbled forward. “Why would she? What’s there to be proud of?”
He looked at his mom. She stared at the floor.
“Do you, Mom? Do you ever mention me?” He leaned down and got in her face. “Are you proud of me?”
The words slurred. They tasted foreign in his mouth.
“Your ex-cop son. The failure.” He raised a shaky finger and pointed at Daisy. “I couldn’t even make a fucking kid right.”
Alice’s slap sent stars across his vision.
He didn’t remember much after that. Just people shuffling out awkwardly, hushed good-byes and apologies. His mom crying as Alice packed her things into suitcases. He watched from the window as they embraced in the driveway. Alice buckled Daisy into the car seat in the back, gave his mom one last hug, and drove away. He stumbled back to the couch and passed out.
Visions swirled in his head for the rest of the night. The face of the man who’d escaped last year staring into his soul, seeing every fiber of his being, every failure, every flaw. He laughed and sneered and plotted his revenge. He chased him down the alley now, roles reversed. His teeth grew long and jagged in the moonlight, and he snarled like a wild beast, hungry for his prey.
The jiggling of the front door handle startled him awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but it was pitch-black out, and the house had gone quiet. The door handle jiggled again.
Someone was trying to break in.
Calmly, silently, he got up and crept to the desk against the wall. He slowly slid open the drawer and grabbed the pistol inside. He clicked the safety off and cocked it.
The door finally gave, and in crept the man. The man from the scene. He’d finally come.
Two shots rang into the night. The flash lit the room like bursts of lightning.
Only it wasn’t the man from the scene.
It was Alice.
Her body lay in a lifeless heap on the entryway tile. Blood pooled out from her chest and formed a twisted, scarlet imitation of a snow angel.
• • •
He’d been in three years when they approached him with the deal. It was all top secret. They couldn’t even tell him which branch of the military they were operating under, but they wanted to recruit him. They needed soldiers. Soldiers who could slip away and never be missed. It was a tough criterion to meet, but he fit the bill perfectly. In exchange, his mother and Daisy would be taken care of. His father too, if he was still alive. There was a lifetime pension. A good one.
All he had to do was shed his identity in exchange for a number and pledge his service. It was an easy exchange to make. Anything beat prison. The memory of Alice’s dead body on their entryway floor was all the punishme
nt he’d ever need.
He thumbed the thick scar on his cheek as he contemplated their offer. He’d earned it in a brawl his first year in. A gaping slice that ran from right under his left eye to his chin.
He shook the man’s hand and took the job.
• • •
He trained for almost a year before they sent him on his first mission. He was one of the very first members of the SHRF and one of the first to face the greatest threat ever known to mankind.
They’d learned of the synthetic humans that now populated the country, possibly the entire world. They were meant to be soldiers, designed to spare human casualties in future wars, made so that kids like him would never have to trade in their futures ever again. The scientist who had led the team working on the project sabotaged their efforts, introduced the synthetic cells into sperm banks, fertility clinics, blood banks all across the country. American citizens had been unknowingly giving birth to powerful weapons for two decades now, and they had to be reclaimed before they could cause real damage. The future of not only the entire country, but the entire world, now rested upon the SHRF’s shoulders. If they didn’t reclaim each and every one of these synthetic weapons, all of humanity could be compromised. He was going to save the world.
The first time he drove one of the metal spikes into a crying girl’s head, he thought of the videos they’d watched. All of the children smiling, the president saluting them, the flag waving proudly behind him. The girl’s skin lit up and fizzled away in his hands, just like they’d said it would, but it didn’t change anything. It felt like murder. She’d looked him in the eyes and begged. She said she didn’t know what was happening, begged him to help her. He drove a thin metal rod into her temple instead. The heat from where her body burned away charred the fingertips from his gloves.
He was sure to not touch the skin when he reclaimed the next one.
• • •
He finished stomping his cigarette into the dirt and thought of Daisy. He wondered where she was. If his mom was still alive, still doing the job that he wasn’t man enough to do.
He’d killed too many at this point. They all haunted him. Every face. Every scream. He couldn’t do it anymore.
He was going to submit his resignation after today. Once this mission was over, he was out. No matter the cost. He’d go back to prison, serve whatever time he had left on his sentence, forgo the pension, whatever it took. He wanted his daughter back. It was time to be a father, time to be the man he always knew he was meant to be.
