by Dan Simmons
As always on this flashback, Carol marvels at the sight of herself as she checks the rearview mirror to make sure that her makeup is all right. Her hair is shaved and dyed and spiked, she has three fake diamonds in her left ear, and her lashes and eyeliner make her look like a bright cartoon. Along with the shock of seeing herself young and bold, Carol feels the energy of youth in herself. She feels the lightness in her step, the firmness in her breasts and muscles, and the enthusiasm in her spirit. More than that, she senses the bounding skitter and slide of her own thoughts, as different in their energetic optimism from the daily plod of her thinking in the future-present as her appearance is in the then-now.
Kathi is chattering but Carol tunes out the babel and merely drinks in the sight of her friend. Kathi dropped out of school in her senior year, dropped out of sight shortly after that, and dropped out of Carol’s thoughts until the fall of ’98 when she heard from a friend that Kathi had died in a car accident somewhere in Canada. As always, Carol feels a flood of warm feeling toward her old friend and has to fight the useless urge to warn the girl not to follow her boyfriend to Vancouver. Instead of warning her, Carol hears her own voice babbling about who wrote whom a note in study hall that day. She feels her quickened heartbeat and flushed skin as she studiously avoids talking to the strange boy in the front passenger seat.
Ned has roared back out into traffic, cutting off a Villager van and switching lanes almost at random. Now he turns around and says, “Hey, Carol babe, you gonna ignore my friend here all day or what?”
Carol raises her chin. “Are you going to introduce your friend, or what?”
Ned makes a rude noise. From the rush of fumes, it seems that he has been drinking. “Carol, this stud muffin is Danny Rogallo. He’s from West High. Danny, meet Carol Hearns. She’s Kathi’s friend and knows our football team, uh, how do you say it? Intimately. Oh shit.” Ned has to brake hard and change lanes to avoid a truck that slows suddenly.
Carol bobs forward, braces herself with both hands on the back of the new boy’s seat, and looks at him. Danny has turned to smile at her, either from the introduction or out of embarrassment at Ned’s driving. Carol hears herself thinking that the boy is handsome with his Tom Cruise–like smile, severe athlete’s haircut, and diamond ear stud. “Hey there, stud muffin,” Carol hears herself say.
Danny’s smile broadens.
“Hey there yourself,” says the new boy, still twisted in his seat to look back at her.
Carol knows that the flashback is precisely half over and the next big moment is when their hands will accidentally touch as they ride the escalator in the mall.
“Halfback to Base. Five minutes to destination.”
Robert glances at the front seat to see Emory Roberts set the radio down and write something in his shift report. Robert shakes his arm to free his sweat-sodden shirt and then glances to his right as Jack Ready says something from the running board on the opposite side of the chase car.
There is a sound.
Go, goddammit! Go! You have almost two seconds. Use it!
His gaze snaps back to the railroad overpass and he hears himself think, Christ, one of those goddamn workers has fired off a railroad torpedo.
Lancer’s arms rise almost comically. His hands go to his throat so that, from the rear, his arms seem to extend in a direct line from his shoulders and terminate at the elbows.
Robert feels himself jump from the running board. Finally.
He is running hard toward the blue Lincoln. There is a babble in the chase car behind him. Robert has to concentrate during a score of flashbacks to sort out Emory Roberts’ voice commanding Jack Ready back onto the running board and the voice of Dave Powers, Lancer’s friend who is riding in the Secret Service chase car for no special reason, crying out, “I think the President’s been hit!”
It is all unperceived realtime background noise now—indistinguishable from the echoes of the gunshot or the flap of pigeon wings—as he digs hard for the rear of the open Lincoln, his eyes fixed on Lancer’s head of chestnut hair.
Lancer begins to slump.
The Lincoln inexplicably slows.
Robert dives for the rear trunk grip.
Another shot rings out.
Lancer’s head explodes in a spray of pink mist.
“Goddamn,” said Robert. He was weeping. For a second he did not know where he was—the sixties decor, the traffic outside the motel window—but then he raised his hand to wipe the tears away, bumped the VR headset, and remembered.
“Goddamn,” he whispered again, tearing off the headset. The almost-bare room reeked of garbage and mildew. Robert pounded the cot and wept.
Val has passed the old malls, all boarded up or converted to prison space now, and then climbed the wooden scaffolding to the strip mall on the freeway.
They were called malls and were the only malls that Val had known in his short lifetime, but even he knew that in reality they were little more than glorified flea markets on the elevated stretches of Interstate Highway that had been abandoned after the ’08 Big One. Today a quarter of a mile or more of brightly colored canvas rippled and fluttered in the breeze; the gypsy vendors were out in force. Val joined the midday mobs of shoppers and understood why Coyne and Gene D. had urged him to do his flashback shooting here: he could blend into the mob in a second, there were a score of stairways down which he could escape, and the maze of shattered concrete slabs and support rods on the tumbled section of the freeway was a perfect spot to get rid of the gun.
Val walked the white stripe between canvas booths, checking out the new Japanese and German merchandise and pretending to look at the old recycled Russ and American crap. The Japanese VR and interactive stuff was cool, although he knew it was generations behind the tech toys that Jap and German kids could buy. The problem with TV, especially interactive TV, was that it gave you a taste of how the other half lived without showing you how you could ever get there. Val’s mother said that this had always been the case with TV—that when she was a kid way back in the dark ages, Africs and Spanics in the ghetto had felt that way about programs that showed white, middle-class American affluence. Val didn’t give a damn what it used to be like in his mother’s day; he just wanted some of the new Jap tech stuff.
But not today. Today Val only wanted to use the .32, get rid of it, and get out of there.
Coyne and Gene D. swore that there was nothing in the universe like flashing on doing someone. Sully also swore that, but Val trusted nothing that the taller boy said. Sully used crack, angel dust, and turbometh as well as flashback, and Val had the usual flashbacker’s contempt for someone on one of the old drugs. Still, Val could only watch when the three others used a thirty-minute vial to replay their own shootings. Their faces would get lax in that sort of idiot-dreamer’s expression flashback-users had, and then they would slump and twitch, their eyes rolling in REM randomness under closed lids. Val had seen Coyne actually get sexually excited as he approached the shooting part of the flashback. Gene D. said that wasting someone was better in flashback than in realtime because you get all the adrenaline rush and physical high while you knew—the you watching behind everything knew—that you weren’t going to get caught.
Val touched the pistol through his loose shirt and wondered. He had not enjoyed the flashback of the rape of that Spanic girl the way Coyne had said he would: her cries and the smell of her fear while Sully held her down made him sick each time, so that he felt his nausea under his replayed nausea. So after two or three of the gang flashbacks on that gig, Val had taken to remembering something else—such as the time he and Coyne had stolen Old Man Weimart’s cash box when they were seven—rather than replay the rape.
But Coyne said that there was nothing like flashbacking on wasting someone. Nothing.
The open-air strip mall was busy with lunchtime shoppers and flashback dropouts. Val had noticed that more and more people were just not going to work anymore; realtime interfered with their flashing. He wondered if t
hat was the reason the garbage was always piled so high along the curbs, why the mails rarely were delivered any longer, and why nothing seemed to get done anymore except when the Japanese were there to supervise.
Val shrugged. It really didn’t matter. What mattered now was finding someone to waste, dropping the gun, and getting out of there. Strolling away from the crowded booths selling Jap and German goods toward the Russ stalls, he felt his heart rate accelerate at the mere thought of what was about to happen.
He began to see how it should be done. This section of the shopping strip near the tumbled section of freeway was less crowded than the main area, but still seemed busy enough that Val could do the shooting and get away without being too visible. He noticed the narrow lanes between the booths. Moving into one of these canvas-walled alleys, he could see the shoppers without being watched by them or by the sales people inside the makeshift tents. Val pulled the small automatic out of his waistband and held it loosely by his side. The choice now was who…
A woman in her sixties wandered from stall to stall, peering over bifocals at the Russ artifacts and icons on the counters. Val licked his lips and then lowered the pistol again. She looked too much like photos he’d seen of his grandmother.
Two gay dudes in wraparound VR peepers strolled arm in arm, laughing at the crude Russ merchandise and using every laugh as an excuse to hug each other. One of the men had his hand in the hip pocket of the other’s jeans.
This seemed good. Val held the pistol higher. Then he saw the poodles. Each of the gays had a yapping little dog on a leash. Something about the thought of those dogs barking and leaping around after he wasted the guy was not sympatico. Val set the pistol behind his back and continued watching.
An older man moved down the line of counters, giving close attention to the Russ junk. This guy was bald and liver-spotted with age, wearing neither VR shades nor peepers, but something about his baggy old-man clothes and his watery old-man eyes reminded Val of his grandfather.
Val lifted the pistol, clicked the safety off, and took a half step beneath the flapping canvas overhang. Shoot, walk away slowly, toss the gun in the concrete tumble down below, take the J Bus home…he went over Coyne’s instructions in his mind. His heart was pounding almost painfully as he lifted the little .32 and sighted down the short barrel.
A shot rang out and the old man’s head jerked up. Everyone was looking down the aisle toward where the gays and their poodles had gone. The old man moved away from the counter and stared with the others as the shouting and footsteps grew louder.
Val lowered the pistol with shaking hands and stepped out to look.
The woman with gray hair and bifocals was lying in a tumble on the white-stripe center of the shopping lane. A kid no more than twelve or thirteen was running toward the end of the elevated section, his leather jacket flying. One of the gay dudes had dropped to one knee and was shouting for the kid to stop. The other gay dude was holding a badge toward the crowd and yelling at them to stay back while the dude on one knee gripped a blunt, plastic tube with both hands. Val recognized the black lump from a hundred interactive movies: an Uzi-940 needlegun. He had no doubt that the clownlike VR wraparounds were giving targeting and tactical info. The cop shouted one last time for the kid to stop. Almost at the end of the staircase, the boy did not even look back. The two poodles were straining at their leashes and barking hysterically.
The boy finally looked over his shoulder just as the cop fired. The Uzi made a compressed-air noise much like a tire gauge slipping off a valve and then the boy’s jacket seemed to explode into a black cloud of leather strips as several hundred glass and steel microflechettes hit home. The boy fell and tumbled, limbs as loose as a rag doll’s, as his own inertia and the impact of the needle cloud carried his body under the rope railing and off the elevated strip. Bits of leather jacket were still coming down like confetti as the crowd rushed forward past the gay cops and the hysterical poodles to goggle at the body thirty feet below.
Val took a breath, slipped the .32 into his waistband, pulled his shirt over it, and walked slowly to another staircase. His legs were only slightly shaky.
Carol came out of her flashback of meeting Danny to find Dale Fritch waiting just outside the door of her cubicle. She had no idea how long he had been waiting. In the past few years, privacy had become an imperative and everyone who used flashback respected other people’s need for a time and space beyond interruption. Now Carol used the small mirror in her desk drawer to check her makeup and to quickly run a brush through her hair before opening the door.
The Assistant D.A. seemed uneasy. “Carol…ah… I was just wondering if you…ah…might be free for a special project tomorrow.”
She raised an eyebrow. She had worked with Fritch on more than a few depositions and had been court reporter for a score of trials that he had appeared at, but until their conversation about her father that morning, she did not think they had ever said anything personal to one another. “Special project?” she said, wondering if this was some sort of come-on. She knew that the Assistant D.A. was married with two small children and had thought that his only passion was one he spoke of occasionally: trout fishing.
Dale glanced over his shoulder, stepped into an empty meeting room, and beckoned her in. Carol waited while he closed the door.
“You know that I’ve been investigating the Hayakawa murder?” he said softly.
Carol nodded, Mr. Hayakawa had been an important corporate advisor in the L. A. area and everyone at County knew that the investigation was…to use a word the D.A. tended to overuse…sensitive.
“Well,” continued Dale, running a hand through his blond hair, “I have a witness who swears that the shooting wasn’t robbery the way the cops pegged it. He swears that it’s drug related.”
“Drug related?” said Carol. “Coke, you mean?”
Dale chewed his lower lip. “Flashback.”
Carol almost laughed out loud, “Flashback? Hayakawa could have scored flashback on any corner in the city. So could anyone else. Why would they kill him for flashback?”
Dale Fritch shook his head. “No, they killed him because he was supplying it and someone disagreed on the amount. Or so my informant swears.”
Carol did not hide her skepticism. “Dale,” she said, using his first name for the first time, “the Japanese don’t allow any use of flashback. It’s mandatory death penalty over there.”
The Assistant D.A. nodded agreement. “My informant says that Hayakawa was part of a delivery network. He says that the Japanese developed the drug and…”
Carol made a rude noise. “Flashback was first synthesized in a lab in Chicago. I remember reading about it before it hit the streets.”
“He says that the Japanese developed it and have been foisting it on us for more than a decade,” continued Fritch. “Look, Carol, I know it sounds crazy, but I need a good stenographer who can keep quiet about this until I show that this informant’s crazy or… Anyway, can you do it tomorrow?”
Carol hesitated only a second. “Sure.”
“Can you do it during your lunch hour? We need to meet this guy at a café all the way across town. He’s paranoid as hell.”
Carol smiled only slightly. “Well, if he thinks he’s blowing the lid off some gigantic international conspiracy, I can see why. Sure, I usually just brown bag it. I’ll meet you in your office at noon.”
Dale Fritch hesitated. “Could we make it outside…say the corner on the south side of the parking garage? I don’t want anyone in the office to know about this.”
Carol raised an eyebrow. “Not even Mr. Torrazio?” Bert Torrazio was the District Attorney, a political appointee of the mayor and his Japanese advisors. No one, not even the stenographers, thought that Torrazio was competent.
“Especially not Torrazio,” said Fritch, his voice tense. “This whole investigation has been off the record, Carol. If Bert gets a whiff of it, Hizzoner and all the Jap money-men downtown will be on me like flies
on shit…sorry for the language.”
Carol smiled. “I’ll be on the corner at noon.”
The Assistant D.A.’s relief and gratitude were visible on his boyish face. “Thanks, Carol. I appreciate it.”
Carol felt like an idiot for thinking that his approach had been a come-on. Nonetheless, she did not think of Danny for the entire ride home. She made it to her garage with her charge dial reading zero.
Robert saw the problem in Val’s face as soon as the boy returned home. The teenager was frequently manic, more frequently depressed, and often out-of-focus from the dislocation that flashback gave you, but Robert had never seen the boy quite so distressed as this evening. Val had slammed in while he and Carol were microwaving dinner and had gone straight up to his room. There was no conversation during dinner—which was not unusual—but Val’s face held that slick sheen through the entire meal and his eyes continued to flicker left and right as if he were waiting for the phone to ring. The TV was on during dinner, as was their habit, to cover the lack of talk, and Robert noticed the boy watching the local news carefully, which was more than unusual, it was unprecedented.
Robert saw the boy shift in his chair, his head actually jerking up as the local anchorwoman began describing a shooting on the I-5 strip mall.
“…the victim has been identified as Ms. Jennifer Lopato, sixty-four, of Glendale. LAPD spokesperson Heather Gonzales says that no motive has been established for the shooting and authorities suspect that it is another flashback-related murder. In this case, however, the alleged shooter was caught in the act by two off-duty police officers who responded with deadly force. CNN/LA has obtained official LAPD gun-camera vid footage of the shooting. We warn you, the vid you are about to see is graphic…”
Robert watched Val watching the tape. As far as Robert could tell from glancing at the screen, the footage was no different than the nightly gun-camera carnage that filled the news these days. But Val seemed mesmerized by the images. Robert watched the boy staring open-mouthed as a youngster ran through the crowd, refused to respond to the off-screen officers’ shouts to stop, and then was blown to fragments by the flechette cloud. His grandson only closed his mouth, swallowed, and turned back to the table after another minute of unrelated news about L.A.’s person-on-the-net responses to the bad war news from China.
