Gnash (2 page)

Emory glanced up at the gigantic sculpture that sat in the atrium of the office building.  The piece, called
Mountains and Clouds
, was a large metal sculpture consisting of angular steel plates in the shape of five mountain peaks with two arch-like legs, one branching from the other, and several clouds suspended 85-feet in the air from the ceiling of the 90-foot tall atrium.  The clouds, four individual sculptures made of aluminum and painted black, were originally mechanized and turned by varying degrees over the course of the day, but the system had broken down years ago.  There was a renovation project to repair the sculpture before the Sequestration debacle a few years ago, but the project seemed to have been abandoned, so she hadn’t heard if they ever expected to complete the job and get it moving again. 

When she worked late at night, the shadows around the sculpture seemed darker and sinister in a way.  A few times, when the lighting was dimmed for the evening, she had been startled by the janitors cleaning around the base.  There would have been plenty of space for someone to hide in the shadows and it didn’t help any that she was scared of the dark when she was by herself.  Her therapist called it nyctophobia and had tried several treatments to overcome her fears, none of which had worked.  So it seemed that she was stuck with a racing heartbeat and a mild constriction of her throat anytime she wasn’t in a well-lit area.

Senator Fergusson’s office was on the second floor so Emory took a quick trip up the stairs and down the hall to the office suite.  The door was unlocked and the lights were on, which meant Bradley, one of the Senator’s other staffers, was already in and getting things ready for the day.  He was an alright kid, twenty-four years old with a wide-open future after the two or three years he would work for the Senator.  There were two types of people that worked in a Congressional office, the long-term, committed staffer that would stick through thick and thin with their legislator and the ones who were hired right out of college, interested in gaining valuable resume enhancements and then they’d be off working at Fortune 500 companies making triple what the professional staffers made.

She sat down at her desk and put her ID card into the card reader that allowed her to access the computer system.  There was an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management regarding heightened security alerts in the Washington area.  The OPM is the management organization for all the government civilian personnel and is also responsible for contacting everyone with pertinent information and announcements.  While technically, the staffers weren’t managed by the OPM, they still received the emails from their system.

She deleted the email after a cursory glance at the reading pane on her screen.  The heightened security alerts had been coming out periodically since September 11
and no one really paid any attention to them anymore since nothing happened.  Working for the Senator, she did know of a few foiled plots overseas that the media didn’t get wind of, but nothing really major or even close to threatening anyone on American soil.  Even Grayson didn’t take those Homeland Security alerts seriously and he was a big-time believer that the U.S. was being watched and terrorists were planning another big attack. 

The next email was from Grayson and was sent about twenty minutes ago.  It said to call him at work, he’d probably been there for over two hours already.  He left for work early, before she woke up, and his day ended relatively late, so he did most of his personal business in little moments of time captured throughout the day.  She picked up the phone and dialed his number, “Force Management operations desk, Grayson Donnelly.”

“Hey baby, it’s me.  What’s up?”

“Hey. Good morning, hon.  I just got word I have to fly out to Oklahoma tomorrow.  There’s a live-fire test of the new howitzer and my office wants someone there.”

“Really, tomorrow?  That’s our anniversary.  Did you tell them it was our anniversary,” she asked.

“Yeah, but you know how things are and how
she
is.  This is another Number One Priority to the Army and good ol’ dependable me has to handle it,” he said with a slight southern Texas accent.  “Colonel Reeds said there was absolutely no discussion about it, I was going and that was final.”

“You can only have one number one priority before something is forced to become number two, Gray.  Doesn’t that stupid bit-,” she caught herself, “…woman understand that?”

“I’ve told her that, but she isn’t listening.  They have me flying out of BWI
[2]
at ten tomorrow morning with a connecting flight in Dallas to Fort Sill.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Eight days, so I’ll be back next Thursday afternoon.”

“I am so pissed right now.  You are going to have to make this up to me.  You really screwed up my plans for a nice evening with you.”  She knew she shouldn’t take it out on him, it wasn’t his fault that his job required him to make sacrifices, but somebody had to catch hell over this and she had him on the phone.

“Babe, play your cards right and we’ll have tons of anniversaries, you’ll laugh that we missed this on,” he said playfully.  “But I promise you I’ll make it up to you and then you’ll want me to miss more big events in the future because of how good I’m going to treat you.”

“Ugh, you’re such a guy, trying to buy your way out of things!  Well, when you do make it up to me, it better have at least three key components: Copious amounts of wine, a very expensive gift that sparkles and mind-blowing make-up sex.”  Bradley looked over at her from where he was making coffee with a stupid high-school grin on his face.  “Oh grow up Bradley.  Women like sex as much as you boys do.  We just use it to our advantage when we can.”

Grayson laughed on the other end of the line.  “Alright, I’ve gotta go and get a little prep work done for tomorrow.  We’ll talk when you get home tonight, ok?  And babe, don’t be too hard on Millie,” he said.  “She’s a good dog, a little hyper but she really does like you and wants you to like her.”  He’d had the Weimaraner for a little over six years.  She was a great dog but apartment life didn’t suit her so well.  When he bought her he’d been stationed at Fort Bragg and had land for her to run on.  She needed constant attention to keep her from going crazy and it got on Emory’s nerves a little bit. 
At least she doesn’t bark very much
, she thought gratefully.

“Fine, I’ll make sure to take her for walks and play fetch with her for you.  Hell, if I didn’t she’d probably think she’d been abandoned since you spoil her so much.  Start planning your next credit card purchase now.  And tell everyone at your office that I hate them.”

“Love you too Babe.”

TWO

14 April, 0738 hrs local

I-495 the Capital Beltway

Washington, D.C.

Shit, that was close!
he thought as he jammed his palm down against the horn on the Wrangler’s steering wheel.  He was pissed about this trip in every way, now he had to deal with the idiot drivers on the Beltway.  Grayson Donnelly had just been given the big fat finger by his boss when she told him he had to make a last-minute trip to Fort Sill, Okla-fuckin-homa on his anniversary with Emory.  Sometimes he thought it was worse being an Army civilian than back in the days when he was an Active Duty soldier.

His boss, Colonel Reeds, was a one of those people who had succeeded only by the help of those around her and it showed constantly.  This time, she had waited to make a decision until yesterday morning so he had to rush around to get his flight booked and make hotel arrangements to go to Fort Sill as a representative for the HQDA
[3]
for the field test of the new howitzer they were interested in producing and fielding to the Army.  And to top it all off, because of the late notice, the only flight available was out of BWI in Baltimore.  It would have been so much easier to ride the Metro over to Reagan National, or even to take the bus to Dulles, but those flights were all full.

He knew he should just take it in stride and not let it get to him, but that woman was always doing dumb things, often repeating mistakes she should have already learned from, and her people suffered as a result.  When he was still in the Army he would have never put up with it.  He’d risked insubordination on several occasions in order to take care of his troops and this was really nothing different.  Except that in the military, his superiors had looked at his actions with respect for the dedication he had for his guys and now that he was a civilian, he could get fired for telling his boss that she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground.

When he thought about his current work situation he sometimes wished he’d either stayed in until retirement or not gotten a civilian job with the military.  But the economy was in the toilet when he got out in 2008 and the government job was good, guaranteed income.  If he looked at it objectively, he really should be thankful for his job.  If he’d went to some company as a new-hire manager-in-training then his position probably would have been one of the first cuts at a struggling company.  Hell, over the course of ‘08 and ’09 that company probably would have gone out of business anyways so maybe he’d made the right choice after all.

And, there was Emory.  Their relationship looked like it was going to continue to flourish.  He’d meant it when he told her if she played her cards right she’d have a real anniversary yesterday.  He could easily see himself marrying her, settling down finally and having a couple kids.  At 35, he really did need to make a decision if he was going to have a family or not.  He’d always really wanted children, but the problem was usually the women that would come with them.  He was a perfectionist and never could find someone that he wasn’t sick of after a few months.  When he turned thirty his mother told him his opportunities were over and that she wouldn’t get any grandchildren out of him.  What did she know?  She was old-fashioned.  If she’d had her way he would have been married off two weeks out of high school the way her and Dad were back in the Seventies.

He enlisted in the Army after high school.  He knew that he ultimately wanted to be an officer, but as a kid, his father, a retired NCO
[4]
in the Marine Corps, had told him stories about the merits of officers he’d known who had been enlisted first.  Chief among those merits were the ability to understand the viewpoint of the regular Marine and their common sense approach to leadership.  After his initial training, his first duty station was Fort Hood, Texas, which was only about three hours from his mother and father in Ozona, Texas.  He signed up and went to night school at the University of Texas at Austin which was about an hour drive down the back roads from the base.

He didn’t even have time for women or socializing outside of work for those five years that it took him to earn his degree, but he did it, only a little behind schedule and he’d been able to use a combination of tuition assistance and his Army income to pay for school along the way, which meant that he didn’t have the student loan debts that most college graduates did.  After that, he got the approval of his chain of command to attend Officer Candidate School down at Fort Benning.  He graduated at the top of his class and became an Infantry officer.  He suffered through Airborne and Ranger schools with the rest of his classmates and was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina to the storied 82
Airborne Division. 

He didn’t regret any of the years that he’d dedicated to his Army career.  He’d deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice, leading troops in combat over all three deployments.  He got a 7.62mm bullet through his forearm in Fallujah during a riot in April 2003 and had skin from his ass and thigh grafted to his arm now.  He’d taken shrapnel to his face and neck when an RPG round hit a wall he was taking cover behind in eastern Afghanistan in early 2005.  Then his unit went to New Orleans after the president called the 82
in to provide aid and help rescue the residents after Hurricane Katrina. 

It was there, in the Big Easy, after his second deployment, that he began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing.  He didn’t join the Army to keep people from fighting over food and umbrellas while he simultaneously saved people who used their situation to act like animals.  People were murdered for food, or even worse, for big screen TVs.  There had been rampant looting and vandalizing of the city for no reason.  Hell he’d even seen more than one person waiting in line for the buses out of the Superdome pull their pants down and shit right there beside the line because they didn’t want to lose their place.  What kind of people did that?  Not even the Iraqis or Afghans did that. 

He decided to get out after at the ten-year mark, adding another deployment to Afghanistan and a messed up shoulder after his Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle was overturned when it was hit by an IED to his other two Purple Hearts.  The truck worked as advertised and he was alive thanks to all those last-minute armor upgrades by the Army.  That pretty much sealed it, he figured he’d tempted fate too many times, so he got out a before he would have been eligible for Major.  His father tried to talk some sense into him.  He said that Grayson was throwing away ten good years of his life and was already halfway to retirement, the economy sucked and he would be plenty young enough to get a second career when he retired at 38.  But Grayson wouldn’t be swayed about getting out.  He did take part of his dad’s messages to heart and signed up as an Army civilian so that his time in service would ultimately count towards his thirty-year retirement.  A year or so later he met Emory and they hit it off right away.

Grayson parked in long-term parking and pulled all of his baggage out of the tiny trunk space of his Jeep.  He checked everything at the airline counter except his backpack that held a laptop, his MP3 player, a book and a couple magazines.  He made his way through security and went to Terminal C where his plane would be leaving.  Luckily, directly across from his gate was a bar that was open early. 

He pulled out a barstool and sat down heavily on the worn wood.  “Watcha havin, sweetie?” the bartender, Katy her name tag said, asked him.