| |
––––––––
DAYS BLED INTO WEEKS, which morphed into a month. My secret mission to infiltrate the Children of Liberty and find their secret lab faded to background noise. I worked like a diesel engine from before dawn to well after dark, six and a half days a week. (Momma Rose insisted my crew and I take a break for church on Sunday mornings, which was a whole ’nother subject.) In those four weeks, I cut, drilled, hammered, cabled, sweated, cursed, argued, and laughed. The juvenile delinquents managed not to get burned to a crisp. Some even learned to wire solar panels to an inverter and integrate it with a building’s power supply.
After about day three, they reluctantly accepted I knew my ass from a hot stove. The sullenness wore away day by day until they forgot about playing tough and disinterested and started pitching in.
It was like the plot of a Disney movie. Very touching.
On a particularly hot Saturday, a rail-thin girl named Monique and I labored atop a building roof, installing panels in parallel rows. With my head buried under a rack of panels, I was cursing a connection into place when Monique sang out from the other side of the roof. “Hey, Joe!”
“Yeah?”
“Somebody here.”
“If it’s not Bears with that goddamned pair of linesman’s pliers I wanted, feel free to throw ’em off the roof.”
Sweat drizzled in rivulets, stinging my eyes and splattering the hot tar surface near my face. I needed another six centimeters of wire from the end of the conduit to reach the spot where I could attach it, and the flipping wire would... not... come... through!
“Shit!” My needle-nose pliers slipped, and I skinned my knuckles on a sharp metal J-box. “Son of a stiff-legged-whore-fucking-dickless-goat-sucking-shit!”
“Wow, Joe,” said a woman’s voice. “Do you kiss your mother with that potty mouth?”
“Is that—?” I scrambled up—Thonk!—without looking. “Ow!”
“Watch your head, Joe,” she called.
“Millie?” I rubbed the forming lump on my skull and squinted at the woman standing by the roof hatch. She wore a summer-weight pastel-blue dress and leather sandals. Her blond hair had grown out and now curled under her ears.
For a long second, I found it hard to breathe. Must have stood up too soon. “How, uh, how’re you doing, Millie? How’s your... uh...” I waved vaguely.
“Good, Joe,” she said. “I’m good. The doc says my leg will be fine. See?” Millie hiked her skirt and showed me a red, puckered scar on her thigh. “This side’s not so bad, but...” She twisted and showed me the back of her leg. The exit wound was three times the size of the puckered dimple in front, a jagged, ugly mess of scar tissue, which I noticed did nothing to detract from her shapely thigh.
“Joe? Hello, Joe?”
I snapped back to the present and realized Millie had been calling my name. “Yeah, sorry. I’m here. Touch of heat stroke, is all.”
“Well,” Millie said, skirt back in place and facing forward again. “When you get through saying magic words over that panel, can you come to Franklin’s office?”
“Uh, yeah,” I told her. “Sure thing. Half an hour?”
“That’ll be fine.” Millie smiled and climbed back through the roof hatch, flashing a wave before her head disappeared.
A subsonic jet climbed out of O’Hare, leaving behind a muted roar. Pigeons strutted on the hot tar roof, careful to maintain their distance from the crazy humans invading their territory. I caught sight of Monique, standing hipshot beyond the roof hatch, whirling a crescent wrench by her index finger through the hole in its handle. Her lips twisted in a smirk.
“What?”
“Uh-huh,” she grunted.
“Uh-huh, what?”
“I saw the way you lookin’ at her. Like she a bowl of vanilla ice cream and you the scoop.”
“Hah! Very funny, Moanie. You know you’re the only one for me.” I slapped the useless needle-nose pliers into the tool belt at my waist. “Just drop that loser, Domino...”
“You be de las’ one I call,” she promised. “You jump right over my pussy, get to that white chick. I see how that is.”
“You’re a hard woman, Monique. Finish this up? I need to take a shower.”
“Uh huh, you sure do.”
***
“JOE!” JOHN MARSH—TALLER than a sequoia and stronger than day-old coffee—bear-hugged me the second I filed into Franklin’s office. Spinal joints crackled in my back. “Man, it’s good to see you.”
“Oof. Agurble-mestsed-utooh.”
“What?”
“Put the man down, John,” Millie said. “I think you’re strangling him.”
“Oh.” John released me and pounded my back with a meaty hand. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I wheezed, holding up a hand to stall any more help from the big man. “Good to see you too.”
“Man, you filled out,” he told me. “Got some sun too, it would appear.”
“He’s right.” Millie sat on the couch, in the same spot she’d occupied a month or so before, when first pronouncing judgment on me. “You don’t look nearly as much like a Halloween decoration as you did before.”
“Hard work and Momma Rose’s cooking will do that,” I said, not without some pride. They were right too. I had gained weight, gotten thicker through the chest and shoulders, and working rooftops had darkened my normally pale complexion to the point I could pass for one of Alex de Galvez’s countrymen.
Speaking of Alex de Galvez, he was sitting to Millie’s right until I came in, and now extended his hand. “Joe, it’s been a while.”
“It has, Alex.” I shook his hand, realizing as I did how genuinely glad I was to see him.
Franklin Rogers waved everybody to seats. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
“Started?” A coffee service beckoned from the table, and I helped myself. I made a point of examining the room. “And where’s that lovable furball, little Timmy?”
“Tim didn’t want to come,” John said.
“He thinks you set up the Revivants to hit us at the Drake,” Millie explained. “He... he can’t accept that you’re not a government informant.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I tried to get myself shot. Makes sense.” I lounged back and crossed my legs, hiding my face with a sample of hot coffee.
Millie shrugged. What can you do?
“More importantly,” I asked, “have I passed my probationary period?”
“Take a look.” She placed a palm-sized vid player on the table next to the coffee pot and touched the screen. A projection appeared above the unit, rendered in full color, four dimensions, and five senses. A chilly breeze ghosted from the display and washed over me, and when I recognized the scene, something twisted in my stomach. The coffee I’d swallowed turned to acid.
“We had one of our people hang a LiveCam in the trees that night,” Millie explained. “It took some time to retrieve the unit, but this is what it captured.”
In perfect scale miniature, the Children of Liberty lined the walk behind the Drake, shuffling and shifting in place. Near the middle stood Millie, arms linked with Goldie on one side and Sterling on the other. From the lower right, John Marsh and I ran into the picture. Our voices were muffled by distance and wind noise, I couldn’t make out what we said. At this moment, I couldn’t even remember those words.
The massacre played out on the tabletop, as if we watched a video game with a grisly cut scene. Shrieks and gunfire blasted from tiny speakers. Hell’s soundtrack, recorded in stereo for the torment of the damned. My companions in Franklin’s office leaned forward, frozen by the drama; all of them appeared as incapable of speech as I. When Goldie faltered and dropped, shot through the head, I wanted to reach out and stop the playback. Freeze time so that her death never happened.
Did the unseen recorder happen to catch my conversation with Ramirez? It happened on the other side of the Drake, down a dark alley, but still...
Tears traced Millie’s cheeks, and I realized my face was wet as well.
“Here.” She touched the screen, and the image slowed. Some idiot jumped from behind a car and waved his arms like a jackass. Revivants trained their weapons on the tiny Joe figure and opened fire, blazing away on full auto, their rounds chewing out chunks of concrete, metal, and glass. To the left, John disappeared into the building, carrying Millie.
“What a putz,” I remarked. My words dropped into the sudden silence with the weight of steel plates falling on the floor.
“No,” Millie said. “What you did, Joe... that was heroic. Don’t diminish it with your typical flippant remark.”
“Heroic!” I laughed. “Man, that bullet ripped out a chunk of brains after all, 3M. My pants are too dark there, or you’d see where I peed myself.”
“You saved us, Joe,” John intoned. With his too-serious face, the words came out like a cancer diagnosis.
I shook my head. “You guys are loony.”
“Shut up, Joe,” Millie ordered.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We wanted to know,” she continued, “if you would consider another little outing.”
Every eyeball in the room fixed on me. Rogers regarded me over steepled fingers, and Alex nodded when I met his stare. John’s smile was encouraging. Millie said nothing, and her face gave away even less. Somebody ran a vacuum in a room nearby; its drone cycled up and down.
“An outing?” I said. “You mean like a picnic?”
“No,” Millie told me with a shake of her head. She curled her hair back over her ear. “I don’t think it will be much of a picnic at all. I can’t tell you anything about it until you agree to go. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, no hard feelings. I’m sure Franklin can use your help for as long as you want.”
Meaning I would never get any closer to the Children of Liberty than I was right now. I could hang out here and wire buildings or fix the plumbing or do one of a thousand jobs that needed doing in Cabrini territory, but I’d never see the secret rebel base that was my ticket from under Ramirez’s thumb.
“Uh...” Here it was, the moment of truth. Ramirez wanted me inside, and it seemed as though the Children were opening the door and letting me in. All I had to do was say yes, and I’d be part of the gang, secret handshake and everything.
“What’s wrong?” Alex asked.
“I, uh... I’m not sure if I buy in to the whole party line, y’know?” And I don’t know if I have the guts to squeal on you to Ramirez.
“There’s no party line.” Alex’s brow creased, and he leaned forward. “You’re free to believe what you want, that’s the power of the founding documents of this country. All we want to do is free people from the tyranny and slavery of the welfare state. In 1929—”
“Alex,” Millie warned. “No lectures, okay? You promised.”
“Sorry.” He shrugged at me. “Occupational hazard.”
“It’s time to pick a side, Joe,” Rogers stated.
“Joining up is a commitment,” Millie said. The fire in her eyes could weld steel; their actinic flare burned hot and true with the flame of a righteous, deeply held commitment. “Let’s be clear about that. It commits you to opposing the government of the United States as it’s currently constructed. We fight for three things: civil liberties as promulgated by the Constitution, personal responsibility, and the right to succeed or fail without government oversight. We believe in taking care of each other without a centralized authority telling us how to do it.”
“Wow,” I said at last, having to physically force myself to back away from the nuclear fission glowing from within the short woman. “I thought you said no lectures.”
“Joe.” Millie busied herself with packing away the vid player. “You saw what they did to us. You saw how the media treated it. Can you deny the government has grown beyond anything intended by the original framers of the Constitution?”
“No.” I topped off my cooling coffee with a fresh hit from the pot. “No, I can’t deny that.”
“Are you in or out?” Millie challenged.
“I’m in,” I said.
And won’t Ramirez be proud of me? Good doggy.