The Postmortal (36 page)

I turned from the river and stared at the dry-cleaning hook above the truck’s door. Solara dyed her hair this morning. I chose brown at the store. I don’t think I chose it deliberately, but who knows if that’s the truth. When she came out of the bathroom and let her new hair unravel, I found myself devoid of anything but primal urges. I thought of Alison as I looked at Solara, and the two merged in front of me into some new, otherworldly lifeform. Something better than anything that came before it. I couldn’t be around her without feeling like a hurricane someone trapped in a box, so I made her breakfast and left her alone as quickly as I could. My brain stayed dialed into her frequency every waking second thereafter, and I don’t think that’ll be changing anytime soon.

“You wanna look at the file?” Ernie asked.

“No.”

I let go and gave myself permission to imagine doing everything to Solara that I knew I wanted to do. Vagrants bashed on the side of the plug-in, and I didn’t flinch. Ernie had the WEPS radio on, and I heard something about China bombing Khabarovsk by accident while conducting a standard self-eradication. I heard it, but I didn’t hear it. I told Solara not to contact me while I was out on duty, and I found myself hating that rule despite its obvious need. Sometime in the middle of this internalized riot, we arrived at the Bethesda compound.

The address was 4912 Cedarcrest Drive, a small split-level house located within the NIH walls. It was a nicely landscaped home, with a white stone-lined path to the door and perfectly manicured shrubs and magnolia saplings dotting the outside. Fresh mulch had been spread, making the garden smell like my shoe after stepping in dog shit. A little black-and-white mutt was tethered to a post in the front on a retractable leash. He ran for the plug-in until the cord had no more slack, and then he started barking, nearly choking himself as he struggled to advance.

I opened the file on the WEPS and saw a little old lady staring back at me. The name on the file was Virginia Smith. She wore glasses with lenses that were no more than an inch in diameter. Dangling from her neck was a thin gold chain and a pendant with a small girl’s silhouette. Her birthday was March 1, 1950. She had a cure age of seventy-four. I turned to Ernie. “What is this?”

“It’s the file,” he said.

“This woman isn’t an insurgent. A softie? Matt booked us a softie today?”

“She didn’t file an RFE.”

“Then what the hell is this? Ernie?”

Ernie looked at me like he had just gone looking for something and returned with no clue as to where it was. “She’s just old, man.”

The dog barked and jumped onto its hind legs and fell back down, over and over. Virginia Smith opened her front door and looked out at Big Bertha, this orange monstrosity marring her perfect little cottage. She stared at us through her storm door, and I felt myself about to retch. She opened the door and approached.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Ernie.

“You didn’t want to be told. You were off in la-la land.”

“I’m calling Matt.”

“He won’t care.”

Mrs. Smith knocked on my window. I rolled it down. She looked like a human keepsake. She saw our licenses hanging from our necks. “Can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.

I lied. “I’m so terribly sorry, ma’am. My friend and I took a wrong turn, and we just need to recalibrate the GPS.”

“Oh, I could help you. Where are you going? I know the streets quite well.”

“You know, I didn’t even get the address right,” I said. “I have to call my friend and double-check it.”

“Can I get you boys some water or some zucchini bread? I just baked it fresh.”

“No thank you, ma’am. We’ll be out of your hair in just a moment.”

“Okay. Well, I hope you boys get where you need to go.”

“Thank you.”

She turned to the dog. “Momo, no barking!” The dog ignored her and kept lunging. She stood in her yard and watched us.

I frantically dialed Matt. He was painting his deck. “You calling about China nuking Russia ‘by accident’?” he asked. “That is some crazy shit.”

“What the fuck is this?”

“What is what?”

“Virginia Smith,” I said.

“Oh, that. That is our initial foray into the Senior Management Program.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Why are you freaking out about this? We’ve discussed this for the better part of a decade.”

“And I said I didn’t want to do it. And you said you didn’t want to either.”

“That’s because everyone says no to everything until they have to say yes.”

“What do you mean?” I turned to Ernie. “What does he mean?”

“He means the program is mandatory,” Ernie said.

“We don’t do it, we lose our license,” Matt explained. “All of us. We lose the benefits. We lose the government protection. Not only that, but anyone who says no goes right to the top of the program’s ‘to do’ list. Isn’t that neat? I’m a hundred and four, John. I’m too old to make the cut. And so are you.”

“They can’t do this,” I said.

“It passed Congress. What do you want me to say? ‘No, that didn’t happen’?”

“But millions have already died.”

“It’s not nearly enough. You know that. Whack one mole, a dozen more spring up. How long was your drive this morning? Eh? Come on, you knew this was coming. This is the next logical step.”

Momo the dog pulled up his stake and reached the plug-in at last. He scratched and barked, and I saw the tip of his nose pop up in the window every other second. Virginia Smith stayed where she was and now looked openly suspicious of us. I grew flush, every capillary in my face flooded with hot blood.

“We can’t do this,” I told Matt.

“We have no choice.”

“I’ve used that excuse before. You only get so much mileage out of it.”

“So this is the imaginary line you draw, Johnny Boy? This is where your appetite for this sort of thing goes sour?”

“It’s murder.”

“My God, it’s all the same shit at this point. They all bleed together. If I’d painted the old lady green, you would’ve blown her brains out by now. You’re just drawing lines in the sand to comfort yourself.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Then I have to fire you.”

“That’s it? Twenty years and this is where we end up?”

He bit into a pretzel and spoke with his mouth full. “Yep. How can I keep you around if I know you won’t do what I need you to do? What’s the fucking point, John?”

I sat there with the little dog trying to tear his way into the plug-in and Mrs. Smith now dashing into her home and picking up her WEPS to call someone. I looked at her—a small, frightened woman who had apparently overstayed her welcome—and thought of Julia, the first person I personally killed. I killed her at her behest, and who knows if her relaxed and happy face dead on the pillow meant murder or mercy or whatever came in between. It was all death, ugly and exposed. I turned back to Matt. I took his image in fondly, knowing it would be the last time we’d speak.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“See? That wasn’t so bad. Oh, and I never signed away Solara Beck’s file.”

“Why not?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Because you’re a crummy liar. I don’t blame you. She is somethin’ to look at. I gave you that mulligan. Not this one. Call me when it’s done.” He signed off.

The dog yowled. Mrs. Smith grew frantic. I had no way of safely contacting Solara, and suddenly I felt the Potomac widen to the size of the Pacific between us. I turned back to Ernie. “I lied to Matt.”

“I know that,” he said. “He knows that too.”

“You’re really gonna do this?”

He gave a flat smirk. “Here’s the deal. I’ve got the wife and the kids and the new kids and the grandkids and the new grandkids to think of. You don’t. We’re not in the same boat. I have a world of my own I need to protect. I don’t like it, but that’s what it is. You have more freedom than I do on this one. For me, having principles isn’t particularly realistic anymore. It’s all about craftsmanship.”

I formed a limp plan and committed to it fully, without bothering to play out the endgame. “This is what we’re gonna do,” I told Ernie. “We’re gonna drive away from here, and you’re gonna tell Matt that I drew a gun on you and went crazy and forced you to flee without killing that woman. Throw me under the bus. Then I’m gone for good.”

“What’s the point? There’s a stack of Virginia Smiths five miles high after you crap out.”

“I don’t care. You do what you have to do after this. I won’t begrudge you. But don’t kill
her
. That’s all I ask. Please, Ernie. Just tell him that happened so we don’t have to play this out for real. You’re my friend, and I don’t want that.”

Mrs. Smith stared at us through the window in what was now a state of terror. She screamed at the dog to get away from the car. Begged him. Ernie thought it over and brushed aside the arbitrariness of it all for my sake.

“Okeydokey,” he said. “She lives to play another day.”

He fired up Big Bertha, and we drove back out into the morass, leaving Virginia Smith alone with her little dog, forever confused as to why two end specialists would linger outside her house for so long. I hope she never has to find out the answer. She’s one hundred and twenty-nine years old.

 

I sat in the way back of Big Bertha as Ernie called Matt to tell him that I had stymied the end specialization. Matt shrugged it off. I lay in the back and tried to will myself to telekinetically transport home to Solara. I failed.

The plug-in barely moved along the Beltway. I heard the usual knocks against the side and shouts from crazies bobbing between cars to sell and demand things. It was like being in a car graveyard on a busted conveyor belt. Ernie turned up the WEPS radio, and we heard more bulletins about Khabarovsk being blown to bits, the same updates repeated every half hour. A huge book of tragedy waiting to be filled in. I’m so inured to it all that it may as well have been a report about circus seals. Ernie changed the station and Allan Atkins was busy demanding that we nuke Russia while its back is turned. Ernie tuned to the liberal station, and they demanded the same thing. The voices had become unanimous, as they do only under the strangest of circumstances. My mind played tricks on me. I felt the plug-in rolling forward, only to look up and find us stationary. I began silently counting to a thousand. Eventually, we moved.

At the exit to Route 50, Ernie gave the signal to drop me off. I climbed to the front and shook his hand. “Thanks, Ernie.”

“Keep your license around your neck,” he said. “No one out there knows it’s worthless.”

“I will.”

“I’ll work with Matt to file your termination as a resignation with two weeks’ notice. You won’t get severance, but you’ll get a head start.”

“You think Matt’ll do that?”

“Yeah. That wasn’t as easy for him this morning as you think it was. Now go. Save who you gotta save.”

I grabbed two pistols and a box of SoFlo shooters; then I busted the door open and leapt out and sprinted down the exit ramp. Dusk was approaching sluggishly. The compound was five miles away. I tore down 50, running around every derelict and impromptu dead-car camp. The sun was melting into the horizon, and every movement and action I took was with the singular purpose of getting me closer to Solara. My throat grew raw. The compound came into view, and I broke into a gallop, as if trying to run out of my own body. I outran the sun and made it to the gate just before nightfall. My apartment was a mile inside. I walked to rest, then ran, then walked again, then ran the rest of the way.

I reached my building, and when I stopped, sweat began gushing out of me. Little rivers of perspiration built up in fast currents and fell off my face and onto my bright-orange company shirt, making a large dickie of wet material from the collar downward. I went to the water machine and spent the twenty bucks for a bottle. It was empty before I even had the sensation of it touching my lips. I took the elevator up and paused at my door, dying to see her but reminding myself of the idea that she could be long gone—girding myself for disappointment.

I opened the door calmly, and the living room was empty. The bathroom door was open. I looked to the kitchen. No one. I went to the bedroom, and Solara lay on the bed in her jean skirt and a cheap new top, aiming a gun at the door. She saw it was me and lowered it. I wanted to embrace her but fought off the urge.

“You’re here,” I said.

“Where else would I be?” She looked at my drenched clothes. “What happened to you?”

“We have to go.”

I began to pack everything worthwhile.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Your file wasn’t closed. You’re still on the cloud. And I quit my job.”

“Why?”

“Because they want us to kill the elderly.”

“Jesus.”

“We have to go. There will be a hard ES order out on me in two weeks. Possibly sooner. We have to get away from here. Our meeting in Fredericksburg is a matter of public record now. Someone could snap our photo in this compound and we’d be boxed in. Pack what you need to pack.”

“Why should I go with you?”

“I have an armored plug-in. I have guns. I have supplies. I have money. Not enough to rent an electroplane but a good amount of money nonetheless. I can get you wherever you want to go. Mexico. Canada. We’ll move slow, but we’ll move.”

“I’ve done Mexico,” she said wearily. “I’ve done Canada. I’ve done my time out in the wilderness.”

“There’s nothing left but wilderness. This is what we have to do.”

She grew angry. “You lied to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You lied. It’s so obvious. You said you never mix love and death, but that’s all you do. They’re the same goddamn thing to you. Answer me this: Why do you
really
want to help me so badly? Out of all the lives you’ve taken, why choose me, why choose my child to protect?”