Subterrene War 03: Chimera (10 page)

She looked at me and smiled. “Wheezer said the same kind of thing—when we lived in Buffalo. The snow used to bury us, and we lived in one of those underground apartment complexes, ten feet under rock, under forty feet of snow. Winters were so long that I don’t know how we never had a kid.”

“You’re better off that way, without kids. Trust me.”

“Yeah.” Michelle nodded and blew smoke so it hovered, then sank, cooled to the point where it was heavier than the humid air, giving me the chance to change the subject.

“You know Bea accepted a housing post in one of the reclamation districts out west?” I asked. “She’s about forty klicks from the Phoenix hot zone. On days when wind blows from the west, they have to stay indoors from fear of radiation, and they didn’t even bother with new housing. She lives in one of those ancient, tiny units from when population was a problem.”

Michelle went silent for a second, staring at the sidewalk before looking at me. “Bea called last week. She left you, Bug.”

The words stunned me. It wasn’t that they hurt as much as it wasn’t a possibility that I’d considered. “What’d she say?”

“Phillip got tapped for an academy; Bea didn’t want to live down there in the desert, alone, so she asked for a state-sanctioned divorce and went into the breeding program.”

“The kid?” I asked, disinterested in Bea completely. “Which academy took Phillip?” But it wasn’t me asking, at least it didn’t feel like it, because the news had shattered everything. This is what it took to make me feel something—learning that Phillip would be one of them, the walking dead—but I tried to console myself with the
knowledge that those who made it through recovered quickly, maybe in a matter of a few months because I’d seen the first ones here and there in the field, and the scientists figured nobody could hold that much information in their brains anyway. It left an imprint more than actual memories. The military data pushed into neurons until they made new connections and networks, which, when it was over, relaxed and dumped as much as they could—kind of like taking a final exam after cramming for three days; you forgot everything the next week. The difference was that with this system, the neural networks had been reformed and shaped to an optimal pattern for strategic and tactical thinking in combat, and those new networks lasted a lifetime. They liked them young because it was easier to shape the brain as it grew, and anyone who showed promise in early testing was snatched up and sent to an academy based on their scores; Annapolis was at the top, with West Point next, then Colorado, and downward from there.

“Annapolis,” she said.

Some parents would have been proud.
Phillip isn’t my son.
But I heard the whir of a camera as it panned above us and everything snapped, my mind flying into a place uncharted.

“What are you doing?” asked Michelle, and the camera’s voice came to life as soon as I started to scale the lightpost.

“You have been identified as Lieutenant Stanley Resnick. Attempts to tamper with the Assurance surveillance systems is a federal offense. Please get down; I’ve notified the proper authorities.”

But I didn’t listen. The speaker was the first to go, cut
ting off the thing’s voice in midsentence, and I grinned because I thought that it would at least be silent for a few minutes. But its voice came from a speaker down the street, booming until people started coming from their homes to see what was going on.

“Stanley Resnick. You are in violation of federal statute thirteen-U.S.C.-thirteen-sixty-one, destruction of government property. Desist now and wait for the authorities.”

“Fuck you!”

The camera had been fastened to the post more securely than its speaker, and I hung my entire body from the thing before its mounting cracked and the wires snapped, sending me to the sidewalk for a hard landing. It knocked the wind out of me. In the distance the sirens came, making me laugh, and I smashed what was left of the camera against the concrete, then jumped on pieces with my boots, grinding the plastic into tinier chunks.

I laughed again and saw people staring. “This is what we should all be doing,” I said, “getting them out of our brains. What right do they have to our neurons? I’m the only sane person on this street, and when I’m done here,
I’m coming for the rest of you!”

Michelle grabbed my arm. “Stop it, Bug. Please stop.
Now.
”

“They’re all nutjobs, Michelle. Everyone except Wheezer, and they never gave Phillip the
chance
to be sane because now they’ll just force everything on him. He’ll wind up like Wheezer or worse. Nobody needs to know how to murder using a tab stylus; do you know what that does to your head after twenty years, especially if you’ve killed someone with one?”

“Well, then quit!”

Michelle’s words silenced everything, sending me into a spin. Now I saw the cop cars, screaming down Boulevard from both directions, but didn’t hear them because she had gotten me thinking, sent me into a trance where I had to examine an idea that had never occurred to me before.

A few seconds later the first cop tackled me, pushing me facedown into the Cobb house’s dirt yard. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

“I quit.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” He forced my hands back, snapping on plastic ties, and another officer ran up to stand over me.

“This guy’s crazy,” the first one said.

The second one squatted next to my head. “Son, are you on drugs? Have you been drinking? Have any needles or weapons in your pockets, anything we should know about?”

“I quit,” I repeated, wondering why they didn’t understand. “I quit because I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m finished.”

The second one stood and pulled off his cap, scratching his head and looking at the damaged camera. “Lock him up. We’ll wait for the Feds and see what
they
want to do.”

Michelle yelled good-bye as they dragged me to the closest car, but I was too amped up to respond, too busy grinning and feeling happy—so happy that I screamed it at her.

“I QUIT!”

Once they saw my war record, the Feds went easy and didn’t press charges but made me promise never to do it again. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Part of me
thought that jail was the right place for someone in my state, someone who was thinking of hopping a ride to Annapolis and greasing every son of a bitch who tried standing between me and Phillip, but who didn’t understand why he cared so much about a stupid kid. A chasm had opened. On either side were two versions of Stan Resnick: one the operator, the man whose marketable skill had been an ability to kill and sleep soundly; the other was a version within whom a dormant consciousness had awakened, someone who I despised because he had failed to materialize in time to save his family and whose regret for having failed was a liability. Had the Feds grasped this, they would have kept me in lockup. But now, on the streets, nobody could have predicted what I’d do, not even me, and once I remembered where I’d parked my rental the next decision would be difficult. There was still time for my flight, and the old me screamed to just push on and complete the op, get to Bangkok and start killing again. The new me had other plans.

My car was still where I left it, near the Cobb house, and my gear was still in the trunk.
But where to?
I needed time to think, and Atlanta was the best place for it because from there I could hop a plane anywhere, and so I turned onto the bypass toward the highway, knowing that within three hours I’d be drunk. I started out west but after a few pulls on a bottle decided to hell with it and turned around for the backroads north, toward Annapolis, because whether he was my son or not, leaving Phillip to those bastards wasn’t going to work, and I didn’t want to deal with an airport or its security.

Small towns flew by in a haze of abandoned gas stations or restaurants run out of people’s homes, and my car was
the most modern one that some of these places had seen in years. The rental had air-conditioning, but the hum sounded odd over the engine, a strange rattle that hadn’t been there the day before, and soon I began wondering if the vehicle itself was being monitored, transmitting my location and anything I said to one of the semis whose quantum core would parse the data and decide whether it was worth forwarding to one of Ji’s friends. It took a second to pull over. A few minutes later I had ripped apart a portion of the dashboard, not satisfied that the system was clean until the sharp plastic cut into both hands, sending my blood to puddle in the air-conditioning ductwork. From there it wasn’t hard to imagine a listening device was hidden in the radio or navigation systems. By the time I had finished convincing myself that those were also clean, along with the rest of the car, the entire dashboard had been removed, I’d ripped the seat cushions out, and covered myself in clay from slithering underneath to check the frame and undercarriage. When I crawled out, a group of three boys sat on bicycles about thirty feet away, each of them with one foot on the ground.

“Hey, mister,” one of them called. “What’s wrong with your car?”

The embarrassment nearly left me speechless, and it took a moment to think. “A snake. Damn rattlesnake got in, and I had trouble finding it.”

They didn’t respond but watched as I climbed in to sit on a metal seat frame and pull onto the road. All of them stared as I drove past, and their looks said the same thing I’d begun to think: I’d lost it. Then again, Phillip didn’t have anyone else looking out for him, and it was still more than nine hours to Annapolis, so between now and then
my nerves would have to settle out or I’d blow the whole thing. I rolled down the window and stopped in front of the kids.

“You boys know where the nearest liquor store is?”

Everyone those days was insane. To me, looking around the bar I’d found off of 95 North, I was the only normal person alive, and while two Marines on leave attacked an Air Force officer, slamming a broken bottle deep into his stomach, I grinned at their technique and laughed until the police showed up and dragged them out. Who knew how much I’d drunk? The bottles kept coming, and there was a breeding facility attached to the place so that one minute I’d have a blonde girl bouncing on my lap and then would black out to find a redhead; some were pretty, others a horror of bad genetics, but it didn’t matter to me. This was a place where everything converged, where death and sex and liquor flowed into one whirlpool, with me at its center, mouth wide open and guzzling until I wound up passed out in one of the facility’s tiny hotel rooms. Maybe sociologists could have worked it out. They would have said that the letdown from the Subterrene War in Kazakhstan had resulted in a kind of societal
snap,
like two kids who pulled a rubber band to its breaking point and then released it without warning, the result being stung fingers and heat. But instead of heat we got breeding facilities. The Deep South and the Midwest, they were the places where sex was easy and encouraged, where government brothels had sprung up on every street corner right between First Presbyterian and the family pharmacy and where all you had to pay was the entry fee and submit
to a quick med scan before stepping onto the floor—slick with the day’s production of human sweat and everything else. This was the birthplace of soldiers.

At least a percentage of them. In watching and participating I’d studied the process, and it was like a shot between the eyes when I figured it out: the satos were better than us, not just because of their engineering but because of the fumbling nature of human reproduction. Even here, breeding was a random thing with no control over whose genes went where except for a quick genetic manipulation after conception—at which point the mother was whisked away to some garden spot—to ensure the woman gave birth to another government son. I’d asked myself how many satos I’d killed, but then again how many sons had I fathered? How many other Phillips were there in the world who had no chance of being saved by a crazy man driving shitfaced up Interstate 95? That was the thought that killed my mission. It drove a stake through it, then planted a boot in my face and pushed in the humiliating truth: that my strategy was rooted in hypocrisy, in which I had failed to account for the fact that just because Phillip wasn’t mine, it didn’t mean I didn’t have any children. And if I cared about another guy’s kid, why wasn’t I driving all over the world to track down my own sons born from breeding sites and who, by now, could be close to twenty? Some of them may have even been operators, knee-deep in the sewers of Dzhanga or some other place.

One night I woke up in a girl’s room, still drunk. She grabbed me and begged for me to stay, but it was the grip that got me, that pried loose some petrified crap in my brain and unclogged a torrent of insanity, because I screamed and dropped to the floor. By the time an employee came
and got me, the girl was screaming too, and the pair of us had to be sedated by facility nurses, one of whom cooed in my ear as she walked me back to my hotel room.

“She grabbed me by the wrist,” I said.

“There, there, it’s all right; it’s all over.”

“The wrist. She had claws, nails that dug all the way in like she was trying to open a vein.”

The nurse nodded and caught me when I almost fell over. “I bet it was scary, but soon you’ll be in your own rack, and then you can sleep it all off. You know what I’d do if I were you?”

“No, what?”

She grabbed the hotel chit from my hand and waved it over my door lock, pushing me through when it opened. I collapsed in a heap on the rack.