The next morning the neighbors were there again, as they had said they would be, the two youngest, bringing with them a barking, medium-sized dog on a leash. He told them to leave the pet outside and invited them in.
“Would you like some tea?” he said, like last time.
“Yes, please,” they said, like last time.
He padded to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. The faucet gargled and spat a few times before it ran smooth with clear, clean water. He put the old steel on the stove and lit the blue-burning gas with a match. As he handed the visitors their cups, one of the glass containers slipped from his hands, spun upward, and started on a trajectory toward the floor. Before he had time to think, his body had already reacted, caught the cup with open palms, and handed it to them. They grinned and cheered. He smiled, fetched the kettle and the tea bags, poured the hot water into their waiting cups, and sat down on the floor in front of them.
“We plan to use the change in climate to grow barley, rye, and wheat, low-pH winter varieties, of course,” the thirty-something woman who he remembered had introduced herself as Eloise, said. “That’s what our project is about.”
“But there’s just heather and mud here,” he said.
“It’s become a lot warmer than it used to,” her companion, Mark, said. “With the right treatment and seeds, the moor will be fertile enough.”
He thought of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and how it contained everything that was possible, all that could exist in its part of the universe, connecting it with the rest of the cosmos, leaving out nothing, accepting everything.
“I will let you use the land,” he said. “For free. Just give me a little of whatever it yields.”
“That’s a deal,” Eloise said and held out her hand. “Thank you so much. We will give you our contract and copies of the research and preparations we have done on the project, as well as the monthly progress reports we make for our investors.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing them,” he said. He shook their hands one by one, a warm and sturdy pressure against his skin.
“So you’ll be staying then?” Mark, Eloise’s husband, said.
“Yes,” he said. “At least for a while.”
5
FROM THEIR PRONE POSITIONS BEHIND A HALF-CRUMBLED wall, Kepler gave him the wind speed, wind direction, and distance to the far edge of the dirt road a few hundred meters ahead and six floors below them. The distance differed slightly from the number he had measured himself.
“You must be joking,” he said and disputed the result to see if he could work Kepler up a little, although he knew the spotter was right and adjusted his sights accordingly.
There was plenty of time. They had set out early and he had driven Kepler hard through the burned-down, bombed-out streets, past the vehicle cadavers and the mounds of debris, to the third tallest building that was still standing on their stretch of the road, and up through the gutted, wind-shorn structure. He wondered how Kepler had made it through the intense training required by the special unit, because the man huffed and puffed even after short lengths of travel and occasionally had problems concealing himself because of the size of his body. For that reason he sometimes chose routes through the rubble he knew would tire Kepler and had smaller or narrower hiding places, but the man was so observant he always found a wall segment or pile large enough to hide behind, and had the emotional resilience not to complain to him about it. Today, Kepler had been panting the whole time, but when the spotter set the booby traps in the stairs below, it had been with calm and steady hands.
Kepler lifted his rangefinder binoculars without moving any other part of his body and repeated the distance he had measured earlier with a confidence born from careful consideration and long-time experience, not simply stubbornness or the need to be right.
“Where the hell are you pointing that thing?” he replied.
“At your dick, or I wouldn’t be able to see it,” Kepler said and laughed from deep inside his belly.
“Someday, Kepler,” he said, “you’ll make a good spouse for another man.”
“I suppose you would know,” Kepler said and laughed again.
He had been open about his sexual orientation; he wasn’t the only one in the unit, and he thought he’d be able to handle any idiot remarks. The others had been surprisingly open-minded and made fewer comments and jokes than he’d expected, although one or two kept their distance, especially during social events or nights off. Kepler had made no such move and remained outgoing and talkative with him. That annoyed him too, that Kepler was more tolerant of him than he was of Kepler.
They watched in silence. At midday the wind rose and swept down the wide river valley and through the eviscerated building, stirring up sand and dust, and rolling tiny pieces of rubble over the ledge beyond. At most patrols nothing happened. Maybe a convoy or two, civilian or coalition, passed by on the road, or a dog or a fox slouched along the ditch that separated the thoroughfare from the desiccated field behind it.
Once, a rodent-like animal three times the size of a rat, with a broad, round back and a long naked tail, appeared right after twilight. Its whiskers had been bristling, its snout groping, and the fur slick with sewage.
“What the fuck is that?” Kepler had said. “Shoot it, shoot it!”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. If the crack from the shot didn’t give them away, the flash most certainly would. He hadn’t wanted to risk that, yet it had been difficult not to put a round into the disgusting animal. When they returned to camp, Kepler told everybody about the “giant rat” which his shooter had been too kind-hearted to kill. The other teams tallied scores and competed against each other; now their teasing for making Kepler and him join the contest only increased.
In the early afternoon a police truck rumbled past on the road, kicking up a veil of dust which hung in the air for a long time. A few hours later the vehicle returned, going in the other direction.
Then an old man and a donkey pulling a small cart appeared on the dirt, moving slowly along the parallel depressions left from countless wheels. The donkey flicked its ears and swished its tail while it blinked with endless animal patience. The cart’s load was covered with worn tarp, bulging from the objects beneath it.
“What have you got in that cart, grandpa?” Kepler muttered.
Both the man and the donkey were gray-haired and rheumatic-looking and moved at an infinitesimal pace along the road. The man wiped moisture from his deeply wrinkled face with a plaid handkerchief and flies buzzed around the animal’s muzzle. When the two had passed the midpoint of their field of view, the man stopped the donkey, glanced around, hobbled over to the cart, and lifted the edge of the tarp. Both Kepler and he froze on their glass. The old man took something they couldn’t see out from the cargo and crouched behind the cart.
“Is he in cover from you?” Kepler said.
“No,” he said. “The top of his head is just above the edge.”
“Will that be enough?”
“Yes.”
Kepler gave him the distance and windage to the upper railing of the cart, he adjusted, and took the final aim. But then the donkey shifted sleepily on its hooves and pulled the vehicle ahead a few steps, revealing that the man’s activities behind it were entirely peaceful, if very private, and that the object he had taken out was a bottle of water to use afterward.
“In all the holy hells!” Kepler laughed and lowered his rangefinder. “That would have sounded good in the debrief, killed civilian while he was taking a crap!”
He laughed too, against his will.
After the old man and the donkey had vanished, only dust stirred up by the breeze moved along the road for a good while. In the late afternoon four women appeared, carrying water in scuffed plastic cans, infants on their arms, toddlers clutching their hands, with slightly older children plodding behind them. Some of the youngsters clenched loaves of bread in their dirty hands.
“Pew pew!” Keple
r said while staring into the binoculars, then gave him the distance and windage of the passing group.
“Oh, please,” he said.
“What?” Kepler said. “They’ll grow up to be enemy fighters.”
“I’m hungry,” Kepler said an hour after the women and children disappeared. One more hour and Kepler took out and unwrapped a protein bar, bit off a generous piece, and held out the rest to him.
“No,” he said, “I don’t want any.”
Kepler moved the bar a little closer and waved it so the smell of cereal and sugar reached him.
He broke off the end, chewed slowly, could barely get it down.
Kepler held the food out to him again.
Once, he had gotten heatstroke from the sun and low blood sugar, and fainted in position. Kepler had doused his head and neck with drinking water and fireman-carried him back to the camp. The last thing he remembered from that trip was hanging limply over Kepler, vomiting on the spotter’s shoulder, and Kepler saying: “Hang on, we’ll be there soon.”
They took turns to get up and stretch and relieve themselves in a corner in the next room. When they were out on nights off Kepler for some reason refused to use public toilets, and as a result had a bladder which seemed to contain liters, but outdoors and in the rubble the man had no such compunctions. He, on the other hand, loathed the patrols where he couldn’t move and had to do his business where he lay, like a wild animal, and returned to the camp stinking as one.
“They’re not even trying today,” Kepler said. “Have we put the fear in them for good?”
“Just wait till it gets dark,” he said.
The sky turned more and more fiery before the sun dropped behind the mountains on the other side of the valley. He missed the bright, protracted dusks of home.
Several hours after nightfall there was movement on the road. In the night vision optics four figures were clearly visible. They were carrying backpacks and bags and moved quickly along the ditch on the far side of the thoroughfare. Kepler remained quiet. The group was several hundred meters away, but sound carried far in the rural quiet. The four figures stopped and put their loads down. Two of them peeled open the bags, while the others rose and started digging with hand shovels in the old wheel tracks on the road. Something looked odd about the four, but he couldn’t tell exactly what. Then he realized they were very young, perhaps only eleven or twelve, just a few years older than the children they had watched scamper after the women earlier in the day. He watched them intently. Kepler had not given him the range, but the group remained close to where the old man had stopped, and he could easily calculate the number himself. At sundown the evening had been almost windless, and as far as he could tell, the breeze had not picked up since then.
He glanced at Kepler. The spotter was watching the children through the binoculars, breath rapid and uncontrolled. He sank back behind his scope. Now the two with the bags had extracted the contents completely, large objects sprouting a profusion of wires. Slowly and carefully, the boys picked one device up between them and started carrying it over to the shallow hole the two others had made in the ground.
“Distance?” he whispered.
No reply.
“Kepler,” he hissed.
“I’ll call it in after,” Kepler said. “The mine crew can...”
“I’m not risking that,” he said.
Silence.
“Distance,” he said. Two pairs of hands started lowering the first device into the hole.
“They’re just children,” Kepler hissed. “Are you really going to shoot all four of them?”
“No,” he said, exhaled, and entered the space between one breath and the next.
The round curved out of the muzzle, glowing faintly on its trajectory like a falling star. Then the wired object exploded, with a pop more than a bang, which nevertheless tore the night apart. Almost immediately, the first detonation was followed by a second, the other device going off in the shockwave from the first. Then the fire and smoke from both flared in his sights. He scanned the ground for the dead. Only a few scattered remains were left of the two that had been burying the device. The others had been digging close by when the explosive went off. There they were, still alive, but something was clearly wrong. They weren’t trying to crawl or roll away from the debris that was falling and smoldering around them. Instead they were writhing and gasping on the ground, clawing at their eyes and foaming at the mouth. For a second he didn’t understand what had happened.
“What the hell?” Kepler said, still behind the binoculars.
“Gas,” he said. “From the devices.”
“Jesus,” Kepler said, snapping for air.
“Time to leave,” he said, looking up from the scope and pushing the night vision goggles on his helmet down.
“No,” Kepler said, tugging at his sleeve like a little boy. “We have to help them!”
“Their friends will be there soon.”
“At least put them out of their misery!”
“What?” he said.
“Look. Look!” Kepler flipped his goggles back up and pushed the binoculars down in front of his face, banging it hard into his upper lip. In the green illumination in the rangefinder the two surviving boys were still moving.
“If I shoot them now,” he hissed while pushing the binoculars away, “that will be even worse! Killing injured civilians, not giving them a chance to get help. Even you must understand that!” Before Kepler could stop him, he pushed off from the ground, shouldered his weapon, and started toward the stairwell.
Behind him he heard the quiet shuffle of Kepler rising, picking up the backpack, and following him across the floor.
They relocated to another spot in the hope of capturing the people who had instructed the children to plant the devices, but no one came to the boys’ aid. The road was empty, the night again dark and quiet, and they were told to return to the camp.
After the debrief neither he nor Kepler received a reprimand, but the previously frequent and intense goading to have them enter the kills contest stopped. Kepler carefully guarded his words around him and could barely meet his eyes. After he left the service, he didn’t hear from Kepler again. He never told Michael or Katsuhiro or anybody else what he had done.
6
HIS FIRST TASK AS PHOTOGRAPHER FOR THE FACULTY of natural sciences at the city’s university had been to shoot owls that were part of research into avian hearing and echolocation. He met Kaye, the assistant professor who had requested a photographer, by the reception desk on the fifth floor of The Institute for Biological Sciences. The assistant professor was a healthy-looking man of medium height, with light brown curly hair, and was somewhere in his mid-thirties, but his cargo pants, fleece sweater, and worn hiking boots made him seem younger.
“We’ll have to go up to the next floor,” Kaye said.
“There was no 6 button in the elevator,” he said.
Kaye gave him a glance. “The floor was added to the center of the roof long after the building itself was complete. That’s why there are no elevators and the structure is not visible from the ground.”
“Oh, it’s a secret government facility,” he said.
“The government doesn’t give a damn about zoology, or the environment for that matter,” Kaye said. “The sixth floor is where we keep the animals used for research. It’s not discussed much, by staff or students, and not many people know about it.”
“What sort of animals?”
Kaye shrugged. “Mice and rats mostly, a few rabbits and chickens, some bats, and of course, the owls. The rooms are small, though. That’s why I want you to see them first, before you start carrying spotlights and cameras up.”
“So how do we get there?”
“I’ll show you,” Kaye said, and began moving down the corridor. “Do you have any allergies? To mice or rabbits?”
He shook his head. “None.”
“Any phobias of birds or feathers?”
“I ought to b
e able to handle that.”
Kaye grinned. “Good, then I can show you to the owls.”
He followed Kaye down a hallway painted in a nauseating green, with a well-waxed linoleum floor in the same institutional hue. Most of the doors were open and allowed glimpses into laboratories, offices, and storage rooms. Students and academic staff of various ages moved through the corridor, and a few nodded to the assistant professor as they passed.
“This way,” Kaye said, turning first one corner, then another. At the end of the corridor three steps of grated stairs led up to an elevated door, which looked sturdier than the others in the hallway and was flanked by a keypad with metallic keys. Kaye typed a six-digit code into the keypad, then pulled the door open when the lock beeped.
“After you,” the assistant professor said. A short flight of stairs surrounded by white walls led to another door with a keypad. Kaye used the same code and pulled the handle as soon as the lock sounded. Inside was a corridor in the same sickly green as the floor below, only narrower, lower, and with fewer doors. They were all closed, sealed shut with black rubber lining, and bearing keypads. In the ceiling, circular vents covered by shields of consecutively smaller and smaller rings created a strong downward draft.
They passed two doors. At the third Kaye stopped and unlocked it with another six-digit code. When the assistant professor opened the door, air hissed into the room beyond.
“Good ventilation,” he commented.
Kaye nodded. “Slightly lower air pressure than outside, so nothing escapes to the rest of the building. Animal allergens are bad for air quality.”
“And viruses?”
“None that will infect humans,” Kaye said with a wink, grinning white, even teeth at him.
The space they entered was small, barely two by three meters. The long walls carried a row of hooks, on which several white lab coats, a few dark ones, and several mint green coveralls hung. Beneath them were racks for shoes, empty, except for a cardboard box and a yellow plastic bag someone had left behind. In the ceiling, fluorescent lamps emitted a light that was so bright it was almost blue.
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