Houston, 2030

by Mike McKay

  “Nu-u be-ets,” William mumbled with his mouth full. In the corner of his mouth, there was, like a cigar, a two-thirds chunk of a fried sausage, while he was chewing on the rest. He just learned this trick on this very night. Clever Mike immediately suggested the name: ‘Winston Churchill.’ William forcefully swallowed, released his sausage-cigar to drop to the table and continued, “these TriSafe detos, Mister Stolz, I have not only seen, but also handled them many times. While I still had eyes to see and hands to handle, huh!” He moved his armless shoulders up and down, showing that now all these detonators became of little interest to him. “But I will not bet for a different reason. We will never know for sure what deto ‘my’ booby-trap had, right? So our bet will be theoretical. In the past nine months, I have this theoretical thingy up to my throat. Everything in my life is now theoretical.”

  “How is that?” Frederick asked, not realizing it was one of William's masochistic jokes.

  “For example, I can play keyboard. Theoretically! Hooray!” He wiggled his short arm stump, showing how one can theoretically play a synthesizer. The line about the keyboard was new, Mark thought. William played pretty well before his injury. They used to spend a decent amount of money for kids' music lessons. Mark suspected, he knew the rest of the punch-lines.

  “Or I can study medicine, for example. Theoretically! If I graduate, theoretically, I can give my patients theoretical check-ups and even administer treatment. Also: theoretical!”

  Frederick's face looked nothing like smiling, but William, of course, could not see the reaction and continued his stand-up comedian performance. “I can even go to a latrine all by myself. Who says I can't? It's easy! As the pure theory goes, it will come out all-right! Although, the ‘pure’ part may be disputed by the scientific community. Especially in the pants! Ha-ha-ha!”

  Nobody laughed, but William grew used to such an audience reaction and continued as if nothing happened: “And about the South American guerillas and the detonators, I do have a funny story. Like to hear it?”

  “Fire away,” Frederick crackled. Now he suddenly looked almost sober. Surely he wanted to clear the air after the ‘theoretical’ joke, which turned out to be so bleak.

  “OK, the thing was in Venezuela. In case you have not guessed,” William started readily.

  “But we have. Where else can you find the South American freedom fighters, pardon me, guerillas? Perhaps, at the corner, in front of your Salvation Way Command?”

  “Shut up, Mickey! It was, like, the second day of my deployment. A Mil-Int Corporal… The ‘Mil-Int’ for you, damn civilians, is the Military Intelligence, by the way.”

  “Bull shit! Such thing does not exist. ‘Military Intelligence’ is like ‘dry water.’ An oxymoron!” Mike inserted.

  “I said: shut up, Mickey! You are an oxymoron yourself, but with all the oxy substituted with the H2S farts! So the Corporal comes to us and asks: you, bros, have any Primacord left? Can we borrow some? Our Sarge says: no probs, man, which type? And the Corporal: the thicker the merrier. Well, our Sergeant gave him about half a roll. RDX-ten, yellow jacket. Never asked why he needed the stuff. Who cares, really, what the Spooks want to blow?”

  “Wait, can you speak plain English?” Arnold interrupted. “What exactly are all these: ‘RDX,’ ‘Primacord,’ ‘yellow jacket’?”

  “Primacord is a detonating cord,” Frederick translated: “Like a rope, but with explosives inside. ‘RDX’ is the type of secondary explosive. Good, but expensive stuff, only the Army can afford. If I remember correctly, the number ten in the yellow jacket is fifty grains per foot, the fattest variety.”

  “What a memory you have, sir! Spot on, the yellow number ten – is fifty G.P.F.!” William confirmed, “well, the Mil-Int Corporal says thanks and takes off. Our Sarge suddenly says: and why the heck did he go towards the river? We are bloody idiots! The Spooks just went bloody fishing! With our Primacord! They will have fish for dinner, and we will have nothing, but the butt-hurt. For the non-combat use of our explosives! OK, he tells me: you're the most junior here, follow this damn Corporal. The butt-hurt we will have anyhow, but I prefer to have it after I have my fresh fish on my dinner table. Just in case, if any officer asks, you are helping these bozos with the basic explosives training. Understood? Understood! So here I am, chasing this Mil-Int Corporal. We come to the river, and I see this: the Spooks apparently captured a little boat, and with it – two locals. Guerillas, no sweat. Or freedom fighters, whatever.”

  “Wait! How did you know they were guerillas?” Arnold asked.

  “For starters, they had an AK-47.”

  “Perhaps, they were hunting?”

  “With the AK-47? Hunting, sure! Well, the second weapon was one of these Chinese-made surface-to-surface guided missiles. Not quite hand-held, but portable. Nice design, by the way, better than what we had. Easy to use. Accurate. I am telling you, Arne, if these guys were out hunting on the river, they were hunting for one of our gun-boats…”

  Mark confirmed: “I just met one vet, from a river monitor. She was shot with one of these guided missiles.”

  “She? His boat, you mean?” Clarice asked.

  “Nope, I actually meant: both. The boat and the female vet. The girl was a volunteer, with the Navy.”

  “Some gun-boats actually have female crews,” William explained. “Anyway, the guerillas. One – just a kid, about thirteen or fourteen, the second is about my age. Naturally, both are beaten to shit, as only the freaking Mil-Int can do. The Spooks diligently extracted all the intel, right? The Sergeant, that's not ours, but the one from the Mil-Int – noticed me. He says, like: you must be new, Private? Interested? OK, watch this. Operation Titanic is on the way. One of the Spooks told these guerrillas in Spanish they would be sent to a POW camp… Or something like this.”

  “Something like?”

  “Well, my spoken Spanish is not too good. When I had it in school, nearly all Mexos were already gone from Texas to their dear homeland. Didn't have anyone around to practice the language with. OK, to make the story short, the Spooks sat these two guys in their boat and tied them up with our Primacord. As if it was a rope. The guerillas did not resist. The Primacord – it really looks like a clothes line. Of sorts… Then one of the Spooks attached a radio detonator. A tiny green box. By the way, Mister Stolz, besides the electronics, there is one of these TriSafe detos inside, as far as I was told… Right! The Spooks pushed the boat off the river bank and waited. Give it some time to drift to a safe distance. The older of the guerrillas, finally, had realized he is not going to the POW camp, but rather to some other place, far more distant. He started to yell: no, por favor, no. But: where can you, amigo, go?”

  “Well?”

  “That's all. The boat drifted about seventy yards. The Sergeant shouted, all by the rules: ‘Fire in the hole!’ Pulled out his tactical radio, punched in the code… Ka-boom! All gone: no boat and no guerrillas. The Primacord, it has this interesting effect. The explosion is not too strong, but all shredded. In teeny-tiny pieces… I was that close to throw up…” He moved his shoulders. It looked like he wanted to show with his hands how close he was to throwing up, but the hands were not there.

  “Well, what's so freaking funny about all this?” Arnold asked. It looked like as he too was going to throw up.

  “Good question,” William admitted, “in Venezuela, it was somehow very funny. Somebody says: Operation Titanic! And everybody goes: boo-ha-ha-ha! Maybe, just by the contrast. With all the rest. The rest was, in fact, far worse. By the way, after the explosion, the Mil-Ints ran downstream and collected some fish for dinner. Gave us some, too. Here, gents: a compensation for your Primacord! Only after seeing how the Spooks dispatched those two young men, I could not eat fish. Like: at all! All my deployment time – till the Dumpster… OK, forget it! Probably I should not tell this story first place… Ris, baby, can you check if I have vodka in my glass?”

  Operation Titanic, boo-ha-ha-ha, Mark thought. Just by the contrast w
ith all the rest… Yeah, the rest… As in the story of that singer, Jack-the-Rapper, in the morning. Two trucks full of human… chunks. Boys, no older than twenty. Without arms or legs. Laughing…

  Despite being heavily drunk, Mark did not sleep too well. He woke up around three in the morning, in cold sweat and breathing heavily. He had a nightmare, so realistic that finding himself back in the bedroom darkness felt like he escaped death.

  In the dream, he was walking through the cargo section of the Houston Hobby Airport. Mark was there few times in the pre-Meltdown period and once – soon after the Meltdown, meeting some FBI brass. Somehow, he knew he must hurry, as the plane had already landed. Indeed, the ‘Hercules’ transport was already in front of one the hangars, being off-loaded. Strangely enough, it was the Garret Road Slum ‘Hercules’ derelict, complete with the broken wing and protruding aluminum ribs. About a dozen of Air Force personnel were running back and forth with medical stretchers, placing on the concrete a long line of something, which looked like military duffel bags.

  As Mark came closer, he understood that these were not duffel bags, but people, dressed in faded field uniforms. Quad amputees, totally without arms or legs. In the head, he knew his airport visit was because of these vets, but did not quite remember why. Of course! Mr. Todd, from the Salvation Way! He asked Mark to help with adding forty-four new collectors to the Change for Vets program. Favor for favor, for the funerals of Nick Hobson and Amelia Khan. Right! No problems, then, no big deal. Mark was trying to make the faces of the poor cripples on the tarmac, but the bright sun and a bit of fog (how these could be together, Mark wondered) made it impossible.

  Mark came even closer, and suddenly realized that the first vet in the line was his son Mike. Mr. Todd appeared from nowhere, accompanied by the sharply dressed Salvation Way lady from the window poster. The lady had a pencil and a notepad. Mr. Todd carefully unpinned Mike's Purple Heart and dropped the medal into the red donation bucket.

  “You don't need it, Mickey,” he explained, “the medal is for those who cannot show the battle scars!” Then, he dictated the donation bucket's serial number to the lady with the notepad and set the bucket on the tarmac, between Mike's leg stumps. Mike did not move or did not say anything. He was just sitting and smiling happily.

  “A bit hot today, isn't it?” Mr. Todd asked Mark, “Mister Pendergrass, would you be so kind to help this vet out of his jacket?”

  “No problems, Mister Todd. Always happy to help,” Mark replied, crouched down, and proceeded unbuttoning Mike's uniform. He discovered that Mike's arm stumps had jagged scars, as if the surgeon did the amputations in a great hurry. Same as William's left arm stump, he thought.

  Mr. Todd was already setting the donation bucket next to the second amputee in the line. I must undress this one too, Mark decided. Ninety five degrees! Sitting in the full uniforms must be so uncomfortable. ‘Quads!’ Good for them. Mr. Todd must give them permanent spots. So they would not need to walk several miles every day as William and Clarice… He removed the second vet's jacket, and finally recognized his face. It was Arnold Stolz. Arnold recognized Mark too and gave him a polite nod. Oh, right, he could not talk now, Mark understood. Arnold always lifted his fingers asking for permission to speak. Perhaps, after a little while, the boy would learn to insert his opinions without permission, same as my Mike kept doing?

  Meanwhile, Mr. Todd and the Salvation Way lady, as one well-oiled machine, continued distributing their red buckets. Tup! The medal drops into the plastic bucket. Serial number, such and such. Did you get it right, Miss Smith? Thank you. Tup! The bucket is placed on the tarmac in front of the amputee. Mark proceeded from Arnold to the third vet in the line and crouched down. This one was a female, and he did not know if he should remove her uniform or not. What if she had no T-shirt under her jacket? Strangely, the military uniform looked a lot like the school uniform, his daughters were wearing since the Safari school uniform introduction. Or the opposite: the school Safari looked like a well-used military uniform nowadays.

  “Hi, Dad!” the vet in front of him said.

  Mark was shocked. Dad? Dad? He looked at the vet's face: sure enough, it was his Samantha. Mark felt angry. Why the hell did she volunteer for the Army?

  “I did not volunteer, Dad,” she said. Her lips did not move, and the voice magically appeared in Mark's head. “I was drafted, remember?”

  Suddenly, Mark remembered. The girls were drafted now! They had no choice!

  “What are you waiting for? She is not comfy. Undress her!” there was a voice from above.

  Mark looked up. A military surgeon, with red eyes from the continuous sleep deprivation, was holding a neat, shiny chainsaw. Strangely enough, his surgical scrubs had Barney and Friends dinosaurs all over it. Like that time, four years after the Meltdown, when little Sammy had a twisted ankle, and the surgeon had to explain Mark that the locally-made anesthetics were not as safe as the real stuff, and better to be avoided on the kids.

  “Undress her,” the surgeon repeated in Mark's head.

  Mark unbuttoned Samantha's jacket and felt relieved to see she had her favorite swimming suite under it. Her arm stumps were also uneven and jagged, same as Mike's and William's. A real pity. This would surely spoil her looks.

  “This is what we call a quick radical treatment, man; your Sammy might even like it this way,” the military surgeon's voice in Mark's head said.

  “Quick is always better,” Samantha nodded and smiled to the man with the chainsaw, “you did it quite OK, no complains.” She liked the surgeon and had no hard feelings about her new mutilated condition whatsoever.

  “None of my amputees ever complained,” the surgeon boasted.

  No, the surgeon was no maniac, Mark decided. Twenty surgeries a day; what else could he do? Then, Mark suddenly felt that he had missed something. Something important. He had it in his head just before entering the Airport, but now it was gone. He ran along the line of the quad amputees, looking into each face. The faces look familiar, like those people he had to interview over the past two years about the Butcher case, but he could not associate the names. The line seemed to be endless. Some vets recognized Mark, nodded, or said something polite without opening their lips.

  Suddenly, Mark stopped on his tracks. The next two amputees in the line were Patrick and Pamela, sitting on the scorching tarmac in their Army (or school?) uniforms, with the Salvation Way buckets between their short useless leg stumps.

  “Hi, Dad,” Pamela said – directly in Mark's head, without opening her lips, “look, how funny: me and Ricky don't have no arms and no legs no more…”

  “How many times I told you to drop these double and triple negatives, Pamela? Only beggars and street gangs talk like this! Proper English, you promised me, remember?”

  “OK, OK, Dad. Patrick and I have neither arms nor legs. Better?”

  “Much better, Pamela. Although, that ‘neither-nor’ is grammatically correct, but sounds a bit pompous… In the context, I mean. If I were you, I would simply say: ‘Patrick and I have no arms and no legs.’ A single negative is perfectly fine here…”

  So stupid, Mark thought. Like back then, I was teaching the kids about the supermarkets, banks, credit, stocks, bonds, and hedge funds… The historical knowledge, totally useless in the modern life! My daughter had been reduced to a limbless torso. A ‘Quad,’ only good for sitting with this stupid donation bucket, yelling ‘Change for Vets!’ once in a while, and saying ‘thank you’ to any passerby who drops a dollar or two. It was perfectly OK for her to use double, and triple, and quadruple, and whatever-multiple negatives. Only beggars and street gangs talked like this? So what? This was their new language, targeted to the specific new audience. Now, she didn't need no goddamn ‘proper English’ no more!

  “And who says: ‘Three out of each five,’ Mister Pendergrass?” Mr. Todd's voice boomed from behind. Mark turned. Surprisingly, Mr. Todd was talking as normal, with his lips moving. “Who says: ‘Three out of each five?’
You can get much luckier than that! Right, Miss Smith?”

  The Salvation Way lady from the poster nodded in confirmation. “Absolutely right, Mister Todd. Absolutely right! Take Mister Pendergrass, for instance. He got all his kids back – perfectly alive and well. Although, his Billy still has the legs. What a waste.”