Dig Ten Graves (7 page)

     And he heard the whistling again, as the man picked up his tune where he’d left off.

Always Too Late

     “What if it’s already too late?” the woman said. “What if all the things we dread happening have already happened, and it’s too late to save us?”

     “It’s never too late,” I said, and she gave me a sort of smirking, half-pitying grin. She shook her head and knocked back the rest of her bourbon and water.

     We’d gone out on the veranda, away from the heat and noise of the party inside, and now the night air was cool on our flushed faces and I was very aware of how close she stood to me. The Belle Isle property stretched out below us, lush and green, and wind rustled through the ornate shrubs and landscaping of our host’s private garden.

     I said, “What? You think that’s naïve of me?”

     “Maybe a little,” she said. “But maybe some willful optimism is necessary to survive in this world. If we knew the truth, we might just kill ourselves right now and be done with it.”

     I frowned at her. “That’s a pretty bleak assessment.”

     “It’s a pretty bleak world. And believe me, it’s going to get bleaker.”

     “Let’s walk,” I said, as much to change the subject as anything else. She nodded, and we left the veranda and made our way down to the gardens.

     She was a tough nut to crack, this one. Very doom and gloom. Me, I’d always been an optimist, but I’d be lying if I said her pessimism didn’t interest me. It seemed to come from someplace deep inside, someplace that actually knew something the rest of us didn’t know.

     We walked, and I said, “If things are really that bad, there doesn’t seem much point in going on, does there?”    

     She said, “No. Not much point at all,” and then, “So why don’t I kill myself? That would be your next question, if you weren’t so polite. Why don’t I end it all, if life is really that awful?”

     I didn’t say anything, and after a moment she said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

     We walked on in silence.

     The sky above was black and pinpointed with glittering white stars and a warm wind swept through the gardens and pushed her hair into her face. At that moment, she was so beautiful it made me ache.

     We stopped and I put my hand on the smooth curve of her jaw and kissed her.

     After a moment, she put her head against my chest and whispered, “You’re in danger. You have no way of knowing what’s in store for you.”

     I held her out at arm’s length, puzzled.

     “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so very sorry for what’s coming. I came here to… to tell you. But it won’t do any good, and I’m so sorry.”

     I started to ask her what she was talking about, but before I could form the words a low, buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees slowly descending, reached my ears. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

     She took a step away from me. “Oh God,” she said. “He’s here.”

     “What—“

     The buzzing grew louder, and out of nowhere a tiny speck of white light appeared in the air between us. I stepped back from it, and it grew bigger and bigger, a light so raw and white it hurt my eyes.

     The sound of it was like a roaring now, and I covered my ears. Cold fear gripped me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away. I couldn’t see the girl anymore, just the awful light that got bigger and bigger, until it was the size of a man.

     And then a figure stepped out of the light. He stepped right out, as simple as crossing a threshold. A tall, gaunt man with wavy blond hair and a tight-fitting suit. He had a gun in his hand.

     I stumbled back and fell on the grass.

     The woman said again, “I’m sorry,” but I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to.

     The buzzing sound faded, but the horrible white light stayed, like an open door into nowhere. The man stood before it, glaring down at me, his fingers tight around the gun. He spoke, and his voice was like gravel: “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I’m so thoroughly disappointed in you, Mona.”

     “Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt him.”

     The buzzing white light hung behind him, and he shook his head. “I’m not going to hurt him. But you, Mona, are coming back with me. You have a lot to answer for.”

     “No,” she said. “Please. I don’t want to go back. Please. Can’t I stay here?”

     “You belong with me.”

     He grabbed her wrist and started to pull her toward the white light. She fought against him, punching and kicking, but it was no use.

     I was starting to finally come to my senses. I pushed myself off the ground. “Leave her alone. I don’t know who you are, but she doesn’t want to go with you. Leave her.”

     Struggling with the woman, he snarled at me. “This is not your concern. She shouldn’t be here.”

     I took a careful step toward him, very mindful of the gun in his hand. “Let her go!”

     He raised the gun, aimed it at me, and pulled the trigger.

     The shot boomed across the gardens, and the woman screamed, but I was only vaguely conscious of it. I fell, feeling only a split-second of pain in my spine before total numbness washed over me.

     I could hear them fighting, the woman screaming and cursing, as he fought to drag her into the white light that hovered behind them. I heard it all, and could do nothing.

     The buzzing, which had faded after the man stepped through the portal of light, started getting louder again, and I could only stare straight up at the night sky, unable to move. I heard the woman fighting, the sound of a blow, the man grunting in pain and cursing, and then something hard and cold fell on my chest.

     I was able, barely, to move my right arm. Very slowly, my fingers crawled up my torso, touched the thing on my chest.

     The gun.

     I took it in my hand, lifted it. I fired blind toward the white light, four, five, six shots.

     And the light faded and disappeared and I lost the last of my strength and dropped the gun, and the night was again black and silent.

     Thirty years went by.

     Thirty years, and I sank into some kind of cesspool the likes of which I lack the ability to describe. Wheelchair-bound, I watched with bitter eyes as the world moved on, away from me, moved on toward some darkness that only I seemed capable of seeing, out there on the horizon.

     I had lain there in the grass for over two hours before anyone found me. An ambulance had rushed me to the hospital and surgeons saved my life, but my spine was shattered and when I woke up after surgery the doctor advised me that I’d never walk again.

     There were cops, but by the time I was able to see them I’d already made up my mind to not tell them the truth. Who would believe it? I told them I’d been walking the grounds alone, trying to clear my head, when some unknown assailant had appeared out of nowhere, shot me, and ran off.

     A puzzling case for them, no doubt. But not near as puzzling as the truth.

     They investigated, kept the case open for well over a year, but naturally there were no leads and eventually my shooting got marked down as unsolved. One of those ‘cold cases’ you hear about. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. It was too late.

     I watched the years stagger by, and every day brought us closer to the destination we’d set our compasses for. And no one seemed to notice.

     Long, strange years.

     In the early 2020’s, there was a short-lived nostalgia movement for the 2010’s, and a lot of teenage pop stars did their best to sound like their ancient idols. But with the rise of the Church of Christ Nihilist this movement ended abruptly and the country experienced an alarming spike in parents being murdered by their children to make way for Kingdom Come. After some hem-hawing, Fox News—“the Only News Allowed by Law”-- declared this a step toward a more stable and conservative society. But after the new right-wing president was assassinated by his own daughter, they re-thought the position and condemned the fervent young Christian Nihilists as ‘misguided’.

     Technology continued to evolve at a rate faster than humans could keep up with. I’d been in my chair for fifteen years when PC’s and laptops suddenly became obsolete and everyone simply had their systems downloaded right into their heads—just a small chip in the left temple, and you could do all your computing and web-surfing from anywhere in the world. The screen would appear in three dimensions, hovering in front of you, invisible to everyone but you, and subtle thought impulses replaced the mouse.

     There still wasn’t a cure for cancer, though. Or AIDS. Or MS.

     And no cure for a shattered spine.

     I’d been twenty years in the chair when the United States incorporated. By that time, big business made no bones about the fact that they were running the show and had been for decades, so they finally made it official. Without any ceremony, the U.S.I. dissolved the Constitution, took stock of the country’s assets, and appointed a CEO and a board of advisors. Share-holders bought in, and within five years every state in the country was contributing to the bank accounts of roughly a hundred very wealthy men. The rest of the country was assigned sliding pay scales, depending on their abilities. The average annual income was anywhere between 20 and 50 thousand. The unemployed were given a stipend and two years to find steady work. If no job presented itself, they were imprisoned. The mentally unstable and the hopelessly ill were shipped to rehabilitation centers where they were kept in confinement, feed two meals a day, and allowed out in the sun one hour every two days. This kept roughly a thousand people employed, but was a drain on the share-holder’s profits.

     If you were incapacitated but happened to have a little money stashed away, like me, the money was confiscated and you were assigned living quarters in what was called Capable Acres—more popularly known as Cripple Ghetto.

     The protest movement that sprang up after the incorporation got nipped in the bud early on. Dissidents were ‘fired’ for insubordination, imprisoned, and sometimes executed.

     They dropped nuclear bombs on Iran, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan one spring, effectively ending the ongoing hostilities in each of those places, along with the lives of millions of innocent people. This was classified as unfortunate but acceptable losses. Other rogue nations fell quickly into line and all assets were turned over to the U.S.’s shareholders.

     A rebellion in Austin, Texas was dealt with in the same manner.

     I watched all this from my chair. I watched in grim isolation, and every single day I thought about the woman, and I thought about the man who had crippled me. I thought and wondered and pondered. I subscribed to the Head News Feed and scoured it every day.

     And then one day, one fine morning thirty years after my spine was shattered, I saw his face.

      A billionare. An industrialist. A scientist. And one of U.S.I.’s favorite people.

     He’d been instrumental in developing the technology needed to maintain the Corporation’s dominance across the globe, but very few people knew he existed. The handful who did speculated—in private, of course—about his work. One of those speculations involved secret projects involving time travel.

     No one believed it possible. No one but me.

     I had been in contact the last ten years with a small rebel faction based out of the Lansing-Detroit Territory. Through a series of carefully encrypted head-mails, I learned that the scientist was in the final stages of a project that could potentially change the course of history.

     An area of three square miles, in the middle of the desert that used to be Austin, Texas, was scheduled to be cordoned off for one day. One day, two weeks from now. The project was top-secret, but the name of the billionaire-industrialist-scientist was attached to it.

     It took a week for me to secretly arrange travel to Austin, through the rebel faction. It took the bulk of the second week to work out a way into the desert compound.

     They were very helpful, my rebel friends. That morning, after evading the security forces around the perimeter, they dropped me off in the dusty desert, an old man in an old-fashioned wheelchair, an old man who hadn’t smiled in decades and was bent and broken by bitterness and hate.

     “Good luck, friend,” their leader said to me, before driving away. They didn’t think I’d survive. I didn’t think I would either, but it didn’t matter.

     I wheeled through that desert for three hours, sweat pouring from my brow, through the rubble of devastated buildings and playgrounds and freeways, all half-buried in hard black sand.

     When I finally came to the site, I was almost disappointed with its simplicity. Nothing but a small clearing, lined with a simple metal gate. Two or three modest machines. A metal fold-out table. That was all.

     And no scientist.

     But I wasn’t expecting him to be there, not yet anyway. I unlatched the gate, wheeled through, and positioned my chair facing the empty part of the clearing. I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait, but I felt sure it wouldn’t be too long.

     I waited, and the hazy sun beat down on my head and nothing stirred in the dead desert air.

     It wasn’t terribly long, fifty minutes by the clock on the arm of my chair. Fifty minutes, and then something shimmered in the air, a very small, white light. Then the buzzing noise, the buzzing I hadn’t heard in thirty years.

     The white light expanded, the buzzing grew louder, and then he stepped through the portal, dragging the woman behind him. She was still kicking and fighting and screaming.

     He yanked her through the portal, cursing, and threw her to the hard ground, and she crumbled there, crying.

     I said, “Hello,” and he jerked around to face me, startled.

     “What…” he said.

     “Long time no see. Although for you it’s been… what… five seconds?”

     The look of bafflement on his face was immensely satisfying. He stood there dumbly, and the warmth of my coming wrath filled me from head to toe and I smiled. I smiled for the first time in thirty goddamn years.