The Terminals (2 page)

“Police! Put the gun down!”

Hillar didn't move, but he didn't freeze. Relaxed and loose, he stared straight into Agnes's eyes.

“Remove the gun from her head,” Handso ordered.

But Handso appeared to be background noise. Agnes began to wail, the long shriek only broken by sobs for air.

“It's there, I see it coming!” Hillar shouted, the grin spreading. “It's like … it knows.” Drool strung from his lip.

The shot rang out. Handso registered the acrid smell mingling with burnt steak, and then he was moving.

He burst through the swinging kitchen door and hooked his legs over the counter, catching a cake stand with his foot. Black forest chocolate smeared across a tabletop.

“On the ground!” Handso hollered. “On the ground!”

Hillar the Killer lay on the cold, white, and black-checkered tiling with a smile on his face. Handso had aimed for the shoulder but struck a good twelve inches above, nearly taking off the top of the killer's skull.

Beside him, Agnes was on her knees, clutching her throat, eyes bulging.

“You okay?” Handso asked, not removing his focus from Hillar.

“No,” she told him, stunned. “It's like he tried to take my
soul
.”

Agents and officers crashed in through the doors. Patrons screamed as if suddenly given voice. Handso's hands went up, gun dangling from his thumb. Agnes buried her face in her palms. The FBI held their positions until Volt pushed past the group. He stopped short at the killer's body.

Without a word, Volt bent over, checked for a pulse, and shook his bald dome.

“Do you know how long a child can last without water, Officer Handso?” The agent's tone was cold and tight.

Handso chewed his cheek. He knew the rule of thumb.

“Three days in good conditions. That leaves at best seventy-two hours to search the whole goddamn state of Iowa.” He made a sound that underscored his opinion of the lieutenant's work. “You just traded the life of your cousin for the lives of eleven kids. I'd steer clear of the governor if I were you.”

A shudder crept along Handso's spine and it wasn't due to missing kids, or the fact he'd just killed a man.

It was the look in Agnes's eyes.

Chapter 3

I kept the bullet as
a souvenir. A .45 caliber, it fit my handgun. No doubt I'd use it soon, but two days after first meeting the general I still wasn't dead, though the trip to New York had been almost enough to finish me. The general had gone on ahead while I had another session of dialysis, and so I ended up on a return flight with a group of soldiers who'd completed their tour.

I've never felt more ashamed. Not only had I caused the death of many of my men, but I had also shirked the completion of my duties. Given it was my fifth tour, I had nothing to be ashamed of, but I couldn't share the camaraderie, the elation of returning home, the anticipation of seeing family; worse, I cast a pall over it. Luckily, due to the loss of blood, I was too tired to stay awake long and slept my way to Germany.

We landed at the same base from where I'd deployed, but I was quickly shipped out on a civilian aircraft and promised that my personal effects would follow. My uniform earned light applause when I boarded the plane, and I was grateful for the lack of blood or I would have flushed.

The combination of renal failure and flights caused my legs to swell to the point I could mould my flesh with my thumbs, leaving deep indentations. I asked the flight attendant to cut the laces off my boots, but they didn't have anything aboard sharp enough. After twenty-four hours in transit, I reached the New York Veteran's Hospital, the confidential base of the Terminals, and the pain was so bad I was tempted to find a secure washroom and blow my brains out.

Instead, I fainted in the entry and woke in a hospital bed to the smell of pizza and three old men tossing cards on my stomach. One appeared to be purposefully aiming too high or too low.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?” I asked as a randy old Indian groped a card from my right breast.

“Respect, Sundarshan.” My white knight was in his eighties with a neatly trimmed moustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a religious collar. He spoke as he studied his cards with bright eyes. “Don't mind him. My name is Arthur. We've been keeping you company. We like to include the other palliatives in our games, no matter their playing ability.” His eyes met mine.

Another card dropped near my crotch and I swiveled my hips, spilling half the cards on to the floor along with the slim box that had been lying across my thighs.

“My pizza!” The third man leaned slowly down to collect it.

“Name and rank, soldiers,” I said, still too feeble to sit up.

“Captain Arthur Collins, U.S. Army chaplain.” Arthur snapped a salute.

“Corporal Sundarshan Rangan.” The Indian's hazel eyes sparkled. “Friends call me Sunny.”

“And we all call him Sundarshan,” Arthur noted.

“Sergeant Major Francis Richmond, Army,” Francis said between bites of a salvaged pizza slice. Francis was rail-thin and looked as though he needed to eat continuously to remain upright.

“You're using a Lieutenant Colonel as a table. Colonel Christine Kurzow, active duty.”

Sundarshan whistled. “I'd heard they were letting girls command.”

Francis leaned forward. “We're active duty, too. Recalled.”

I paused in thought, letting Francis's comment register. These men were like me, waiting for a final mission. Terminals.

“But they better find me a mission quick,” Sundarshan said. “I'm not getting any younger.”

“You're terminals—”

“Ahem!”

I turned at the cough. A slight Indonesian woman sporting a hijab entered the room, wearing heavily applied lipstick.

“Sorry to steal your table, boys.” She pushed my bed, smiling down at me. I began to wheel away from their chairs. “Nice to see you awake after your grand entrance.” The look on her yellow face told me to be quiet. The men snatched at the cards before I was out of reach, and I had to slap Sundarshan's hand twice before he gave up on his real target.

“Don't mind them; Arthur and Francis are actually very handy if you need to know anything about a particular religion or advice in general. Sundarshan …” She lifted an eyebrow. “He'll be useful someday.”

Once in a hospital room, she shut the door and leaned against it, drawing deep breaths.

“They call me Morph,” she said, turning her forearms over so I could see the needle tracks running up her arm. “I'm your handler; at least I was supposed to be until yesterday.”

“What do you mean?” The bed had stopped in full view of a mirror. My wan face looked three days dead. I poked at my cheekbones and blood flowed briefly into my formerly dusky complexion.

“Those men don't know why they're here,” Morph said. “Only that America needs them, that we'll pay them active duty wages, and that their cost of living and medical care is free. I don't know how you convinced the general to let you in on all this, but I'm glad you did.”

“Why aren't you my handler?” Not that I objected; the woman was friendly but obviously an addict.

“Doctor Deeth had some blood tests run and—”

“Hold on, who's Doctor Deeth?”

Morph's gaze measured me. “He's the watchdog. Makes sure no one dies who has more than six months to live and never sends anyone into an afterlife they don't understand. Deeth makes sure no one goes terminal who shouldn't.”

“Huh.” I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. Sure he does.

“Anyways, your kidneys aren't in as bad a shape as they originally thought. They're healing. You're not going to die of renal failure.” When I failed to show any exultation, she continued. “We'd like you to become a handler.”

“Not part of my deal.” I wondered where they'd put my sidearm and spotted my rucksack.

“Don't get me wrong.” Morph sniffed. “This could be temporary—and looking at you, that seems likely. If you can convince Deeth, you'll have your mission, but in the meantime, my ticket's coming up, my liver disease is progressing rapidly and I need to be replaced by a terminal with a later best-before date.”

I hesitated.

“Either way you have to wait for your mission. Your options are to stay out here and play pinochle with the grumpy old codgers while you kill time, or join the group in Purgatory.”

“Purgatory?”

“That's what we call it … beyond the security door where the magic happens.”

“Cute.”

Morph shrugged, and in the slow motion of her shoulders and loll of her head I could tell she was very ill, or very doped. “Your job will be to explain to new terminals what their tasks are and then try to save America from whatever it needs saving from.”

“Right, with what the dead tell us.” I scratched my head, thinking of the
USS Bush
.

She nodded. “What's it going to be?”

“Molested by old men or playing the shade of death?”

“That's about it.” Morph smiled, and the room brightened.

“Oh, I do death fairly well,” I said, with no hint of humor.

“Great!” She grinned, and I knew I'd been manipulated. “Can you walk?”

I didn't know. I'd made it to New York. I swung my legs over the bed, annoyed to see I hadn't woken when someone had changed me out of my clothes and into a hospital gown. I placed bare feet on the cool linoleum. I stood, the room fading to black before returning again. At least the edema was thinning from my calves.

“They did another round of dialysis on you while you were out. In a week or so, you won't need it at all. They're pretty surprised how fast your liver's healed,” Morph said. “The boxes from your army storage locker arrived from the airport—”

“Where?” I demanded, staggering toward her.

Morph winced, and I realized that I must look like a shambling zombie.

“The boxes, where are my boxes?” I asked.

“We moved them into a room in Purgatory,” Morph replied. “Your room.” She placed a hand on the doorknob.

“Clothes first,” I said. “Then my gear. And then this handler business.” I needed to take back some measure of control. “I'm not yet convinced.”

Morph gave a sloppy salute. I stumbled to my duffel bag and pulled out my desert uniform. Stepping into it, I almost fell over and decided to sit down on the floor to change. After lacing up my boots, I stood too fast and my vision tunneled. Morph didn't notice, only grinning at my outfit, and then she was out the door and heading down past the common room where the wise men were playing atop of a new table, a turbaned man so frail that he looked part of the bed itself. Cords from his respirator were pulled taut, trailing to one of the dozen rooms that flanked the hall. He looked on the way out, and I wondered how the general would be able to tell him his mission.

With all the weight I'd lost over the last month, my BDUs hung at my hips. I felt small and fragile under the gaze of the men. As I strode past the card game to meet Morph at a heavy security door, Sundarshan worked his way to his feet with the aid of a cane. His complexion deepened.

“She gets her mission! She's been here twenty-four hours. Three months I've been here. Three months!”

Francis grabbed at the Indian's naked wrist, balancing a pizza slice on the tips of his other hand's fingers.

“At ease, Corporal,” I said, hitching my pants higher. “You'll be allowed to scream at me after you have earned a few more stripes.”

He sputtered, but sat down.

“Doctor Deeth doesn't consider Sundarshan terminal yet,” Morph whispered to me, “figures he has a little over six months to live. Not like us.” She winked before placing her eye to the cup of a retina scanner. With a click, the door swung inward, and I entered Purgatory.

The door opened on a brightly lit hall, and I was surprised when Morph waved me forward with a finger at her lips. From behind the first doorway on the right hand side, a man asked a steady series of questions. The second threshold on the right stood dark, but I sensed movement within. Morph kept an eye on it as she shuffled forward, pausing at the first door.

Inside a room painted half-black and half-white, lay a man on a bed. A barrel-chested black man wearing a doctor's coat blocked my full view of the patient. Also with his back to me, another younger man slouched in a chair and studied a crystal doorknob.

“Is that Attila?” I asked, deducing that the third man in the room must be the Terminals' psychic medium.

“Sure is,” Morph said in a hush. “Not one of us, though. He's not sick. Weird guy. Whenever you ask him anything he just stares at you, sips from his black coffee mug, and sneers.”

I shrugged. I supposed he could do as he pleased. Without him, the unit was nothing more than a bunch of dying soldiers.

“Why the Yin-Yang décor?” I asked.

“Not Yin and Yang.” Morph shook her head. “It's a Rom tradition that white is reserved for mourning. As the terminal passes away,” she indicated the man on the bed, and I gulped, “Attila moves from the black side of the room to the white.”

“And the other man asking all the questions is Deeth?” He wasn't what I'd expected. Maybe a small bald man with beady eyes rubbing his hands together, or a skeletal figure, but not an NFL lineman.

“Doctor Deeth,” she replied. “He's administering a lie detector test.”

I looked around for our commander. “What's the general like to work with?”

She glanced to the next room and tilted her head further down the hall. I followed.

Along the left hand side were six doors spaced equidistant apart. All were closed, and Morph fumbled for a key as she skipped past the shadowed doorway and stopped at the last threshold at the end of the hall.

By the time I reached her, unable to keep pace with even her slow progress, she presented to me a narrow room furnished with a hospital bed, table, dresser and closet. My boxes were stacked in a corner.

“It's not much,” Morph apologized. “I should know, after a year here myself.”

“A year?”

“Yeah, I'm a veteran in terminal terms. They've held on to me as long as they can,” Morph said.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm Muslim. A real prize. Not many veterans are Muslim, and they need a lot of us of late.”

I wondered whether I'd ever acted on intel gleaned from a terminal.

While I inspected my personal effects, Morph prattled on. She sat on my bunk and was either desperate for someone to talk to or avoiding my question about the general, which I hadn't forgotten. The tape I'd used on my boxes remained intact, and I piled them inside the slender closet, knowing by weight that nothing was missing. I saved the lightest box, opening it and pulling out a picture of my old German Shepherd, which I set upon the dresser. Once satisfied that all was right in my new eight-by-ten, windowless world, I turned my attention back to the strange little yellow woman.

“How long has the general commanded?” I asked.

Morph stopped mid-soliloquy about Attila's espresso fetish. “The man refuses to die,” she replied. “Fifteen years, he's had the same heart disease and if that isn't bad enough, he's pickled half the time.” She leaned in and added in a conspiratorial whisper. “I think he gets off on it. Anytime he speaks about a terminal case—anytime someone is going to die—one corner of his mouth lifts and his eyes clear …”

The general's eyes shone now as he stared at Morph from the doorway. He gave no indication of how much he had heard. Morph swallowed.

“General.” I broke the silence for her.

He nodded curtly. “Follow me, Colonel. I have your first case.”