Harmless (18 page)

Men
—weak, pathetic men making the world a hunting ground, an outlet for their flaccid cocks and mommy rage.

“Those men think they’re going to get away with it,” Alex said. “They think they’ve won. They
like
winning. It makes them feel strong.”

Of course. Exerting absolute power over their victims wouldn’t be enough—they’d want the same power over their victims’ parents.

“They planned everything perfectly, but they made one mistake. They think men like us never
do
anything. They think we’ll just take it, that no matter what happens to us, we won’t act.” Alex stood up and pointed the rifle at the black wall of vegetation, as if he was ready to take out the forest one tree at a time. “They think the worst we can throw back at them is a weepy phone call to the cops.”

“They have a point.”

“You’re right! They
know
what kind of men we are—harmless, married to the system in spite of our constant griping about it. They’re counting on us to call our surrogate daddies at the cop shop.”

“That’s what I would’ve done,” Joseph said, eager to support this withering assessment.

“Of course you would have. And that’s
still
what you want to do—hand responsibility to the police and hope they’ll return Franny unharmed.” He leaned down until their faces were almost touching. “They don’t realize that we’ve changed. We walked into the woods with our fantasies of
decency
and
fair play
, afraid to even think about the kind of men who took our daughters. But we’ve changed. We’re not acting according to type anymore.”

“Yes.” Joseph said the word tentatively, but he won the long-awaited big brother’s smile.

“They don’t know what we’re capable of. What are you capable of, Joseph?” Alex spoke his name in a voice unheard outside movie theatres or private fantasy—the voice of action. “I know you’ve
imagined
doing things decent men aren’t supposed to think about. You imagined punching the dumb-ass dad whose kid pulled Franny’s hair in the sandbox.”

He had, in great detail, right down to the dad’s grovelling apology, which he did not accept.

“The asshole berating his girlfriend over his cell phone at the back of the streetcar—”

“I smashed his head into a pole! I broke his nose and his teeth. And the shithead who used to race his car down the street when Franny was a kid. Took a baseball bat to his face.”

Alex nodded. “You waited by the car of your company’s
CEO
and smashed his face into the windshield.”

“Fuck yeah. Worse. I pushed him down the stairs, heard his leg snap.”

“And you kneecapped the gutless politician who cut programs at the rec centre, and you beat to death the climate-change-denying talk-radio
DJ
.”

“I lined up all the cunts who crashed the economy against the wall.” Fucking right he did! “I made them think they could get a last-minute reprieve if they begged for their lives.”

Alex was smiling. “It’s time to do something, Joseph. Not to
imagine
—to act.”

Joseph had been waiting to hear those words since boyhood, the call to action and consequence, and the words came to him on beer-scented breath, as he knew they would.

“We have our
kids
to protect,” Alex said, watching Joseph’s reaction. “Those creeps think
they
have nothing to lose? That they’re the only ones who’ll go all the way? No.
We
have nothing to lose. We’re fathers. Everything is permitted.”

“There’s nothing I won’t do,” Joseph said, his voice as tentative as the first time he told a woman he loved her. Then firmer: “Nothing. I’ll kill those fuckers.”

Alex nodded, his squared shoulders and expert grip on the gun announcing the imminent demise of the men who’d taken Franny and Rebecca. No police, no courts—this fight began in the woods and it would end there.

Joseph got to his feet. His ankle throbbed, but the pain burned off the vapours of useless
talk
from his mind, opening up space, so much space, so much energy, flowing through him, from his heart out to his hands and feet.

“They’ve probably got two hours on us,” Alex said. “We’ll go to the commune and surprise them.”

The commune: Joseph imagined a gabled farmhouse rising from a litter of sagging outbuildings and tarpaper additions; in the field a barn, converted to a meeting and dining hall during the commune’s Eden period, reverted now to a pen for animals and human body parts. There would be a storm cellar, its earthen floor absorbing the blood and the screams. The men had Franny there. That might not be the worst thing. The killers’ actions were dictated by pathological compulsions, but they were also good at what they did—they’d delay gratification until everything was in place. Franny was smart, she was adaptable—hadn’t he taught her about adjusting to unexpected situations?
The shock of capture would have worn off. She’d be taking stock: she and Rebecca were at the mercy of Bad Men—worse than bad, these men were ghouls from the outer rings of humanity. There was no appealing to their “good side,” but she might delay the inevitable by asking the men about themselves and the old commune. How long have they lived out here? Do they still grow crops or keep animals?

Keep them talking, Franny, buy us some time
.

F
ranny started dreaming about a zombie apocalypse when she was nine, not long after Joseph moved out. Violent and monotonous in their hopelessness, the dreams locked her and her friends inside a public institution—school, hospital, police station—whose walls proved useless against the onslaught of the flesh-eating undead. The zeitgeist was lousy with zombies, standing in for personal and millennial fears, but only he, her wayward father, could talk Franny back to sleep after they attacked. Martha would phone Joseph after one of the nightmares, and he’d share with Franny his storehouse of weird facts and news stories—giant galaxies discovered by deep-space probes, lost cities uncovered by archaeological digs, giant squid sightings,
UFO
rumours—rattling them off until her voice grew calmer, softer, then faded out to soft breathing.

There was still time. The ordeal would leave the girls with terrible memories, hours of experience teaching them more about human venality than their friends will learn in a lifetime, but he and Alex could still spare them the worst.

The air was starting to sag, heavy with water. Soon they could add rain to the list of advantages working in their favour: rain, darkness, the element of surprise, a rifle, and righteous anger. And Julian’s knife—he’d almost forgotten about it. The vets would be closing the commune against the approaching storm, the girls securely confined in the basement, the men confident that a visit from the police, if it came at all, was at least a day away. They knew how these things worked, but their detailed plan wouldn’t take into account Joseph and Alex slipping into the yard in the night, Joseph drawing the guard’s attention with an innocuous noise while Alex knocked him out with the rifle butt. The other kidnappers would be caught off guard and beaten unconscious, tied up and left to await their punishment while Joseph and Alex located the girls—frightened, in shock, but restored by the sight of their fathers.

Then they’ll punish the men who took their daughters. They’ll break the abductors’ fingers and toes, then the major bones; limbs will be pulled from their sockets, eyes gouged out, testicles crushed. If drugs are available they’ll inject the men to intensify the pain and terror. Then the prolonged executions, maybe a full-body skinning or a castration, the sheer range of violence so absolute in its retributive power that other sexual predators will swear off hurting children for life. Martha will be proud of him. She won’t want the details. Knowing he finished the job will be enough.

Not Jane.
I hope you made those sick fuckers suffer
. Joseph was up for it. “Did you learn how to kill other men?” he asked Alex. “In the army?”

Alex had to think about the question. “We fired guns.”

What Joseph wanted to know was: Could Alex crush a man’s larynx with an open palm? Could he break wrist bones with a quick twist? Because Joseph couldn’t. He was not like his father, a bartender who’d considered steady employment, marital fidelity, manageable alcoholism, and the maintenance of a strong-but-distant paternal presence the limit of his life responsibilities. Now
there
was a man of the Old School, a guardian of boundaries and oaths, standing behind the long, polished hotel bar in a starched white shirt, black tie, and pressed pants, the red money belt around his waist a challenge to any bull mad enough to charge.

“Did they teach you how to take out an enemy
without
a gun?”

“I learned some nasty business in a special training course. None of this pin-the-guy-to-the-mat stuff. It was about inflicting maximum damage with the minimum moves.”

That’s better
, Joseph thought.

“Only a few of us were invited.” Alex didn’t try to hide his pride. “Getting picked meant you had hard-ass potential.” His voice had acquired a commanding, military edge—or so Joseph assumed. “The course screened for potential special forces recruits. They had to see if you could survive in any situation and act without conscience.”

Joseph wasn’t surprised that the officers had picked Alex. But how, over the course of their friendship, had Alex refrained from bragging about getting chosen to take a special forces training course? Joseph couldn’t have gone fifteen minutes without reminding everyone of his army experience, yet Alex had kept this training to himself.
Maybe the experience didn’t fit with his identity as an activist and family man.

“How did they test you?” Joseph asked.

“We went without sleep, did night hikes, learned hand-to-hand fighting techniques—skills you need to survive behind the lines. After the training they took us into the wilderness, split us into small teams, and left us to find our way to a rendezvous point thirty miles away. After four days we finally rendezvoused in a ravine. Only one guy was late, so the commanding officer decided to make an example of him. Showing up five minutes late could get your whole unit killed, he said. He ordered us to hide in the bushes and to mess the guy up when he arrived.”

Joseph easily cast himself as the missing soldier, announcing his late arrival with excuses that would only make things worse.

“The missing soldier was
two hours
late. By then we’d have jumped him without the orders. Eight of us took him down, but he went into a berserker rage. Hit you where it hurt—knees, nuts, throat. Every time we pinned him he’d spring up and knock us down like bowling pins. Then the
C.O.
suddenly steps in and pins the guy in three seconds flat. He’s got one foot on the guy’s throat and he’s twisting his arm like a wet towel. But the soldier won’t give in. He pulls a knife on the
C.O.
That was it. The
C.O.
pulls out a pistol and puts it to the guy’s head.”

Maybe Alex
had
told this story before, because the details lined up in Joseph’s mind a half-second before he heard them. He could have sworn the
C.O.
had a dog.

“What did you do?”

“I yelled, ‘Don’t shoot!’ I was the only one—the rest would have let the
C.O.
blow the guy’s brains out.”

“Jesus.”

“The
C.O.
wasn’t
really
going to shoot him. It was all a test—the soldier showing up late and pulling the knife, the
C.O.
pulling the gun—they set it up to test our reactions.”

Joseph felt betrayed. More than anything right now, he needed for Alex to have passed through the crucible of real violence.

“I failed the test because I second-guessed an officer and brought civilian morality to a situation that demanded ruthlessness.”

“Maybe you knew all along, subconsciously, that it was a set-up,” Joseph said, trying to coax back the man whose speech had raised him from the garbage-strewn logging road.

“No, I believed he’d kill the soldier—I
wanted
him to—but I was so horrified by my reaction that I yelled at the
C.O.
to stop.”

“This is a different situation. Entirely different.” He understood: Alex was afraid that he’d freeze up when the time came to pull the trigger, punch out the teeth, stick in the knife. Everyone felt like that these days—angry and frustrated, but afraid of confronting power and losing what little you had. “It’s like you said, Alex: everybody imagines taking action, but when the time comes, can they do it? You can. You have to.”

Alex nodded as if he was continuing Joseph’s speech in his head. “I’d have let the
C.O.
kill him if I thought the guy deserved to die. That’s what it comes down to: appropriate punishment, giving somebody what they deserve.” Then he
stopped, as though he’d reached the edge of a shore, his flashlight pointing at a boulder beside the path. The light set the boulder apart from the dark mass of rustling trees, catching seams of quartz that marbled the rock’s surface like fat in a good steak, but Alex was staring beyond it.

“We have to do what’s necessary,” Joseph said, disturbed by Alex’s wide blank eyes.

“I will. This time.” Alex’s voice was strangely inflected. “We should hurry. It’s going to rain.”

The wind picked up again. An animal ran across the path, proof perhaps of recent human passage—or just another random event in the wilderness.

There were about a dozen fresh indentations on the path, each a few inches wide, and the sandy ground was torn up by half-circle wedges and skids.

“They’re bike tracks, probably
BMX
,” Alex said. He was down among them with his flashlight. “They’re fresh.”

Joseph looked back in the direction they’d come from. The tracks did not continue that way. “They must have turned around.”

“No,” Alex insisted. He was standing again, his flashlight beam stabbing at patches of the criss-crossing tracks. “Look! The tracks
stop
here. Four sets of tracks come this way—you can see them approaching—then it’s like they fell off the earth.”