Recoil (17 page)

Chapter 18

Revelations

It was obvious that Roth and
Sarge
had
brought me to the hospital and shown me the rat fever patient to convince me
that taking down and bringing in infected people was a good option. And seeing
it for myself, I had to admit that it was more humane — both for the patient
and their family — than leaving them to suffer untreated. I couldn’t argue,
either, with their point that M&Ms should not be out in the world spreading
the disease. Hell, if I was ever infected, I wouldn’t want to be allowed to
infect others.

“How do you get them in?” I asked.

I’d seen on T.V. news how difficult it could be to take plague
victims in for treatment. There had been outraged protests from the Civil Libs
at the measures police and disease control officers sometimes used. I’d seen T.V.
footage of one case where police had
tazed
a rabid
over and over again, but the man had kept coming at them.

“Until now, we’ve had to rely on the traditional method of
injecting a tranquilizing drug, but to get close enough to inject the sedative
means you have to get close enough to be injured or infected. M&Ms are
unpredictable and aggressive — a sudden charge, a scratch or bite and we’d lose
a valuable asset. Our Research and Development department has come up with an
elegant solution that allows us to connect with the target from a safe
distance.”

“What is it — a dart gun? Like I’ve seen on T.V. wildlife shows?”
I said, thinking of wildlife veterinarians and toppling elephants.

“It’s a little more sophisticated than that,” said Roth. “A
dissipating bullet fired from a modified sniper’s rifle. The hollow round
im
plodes
as it penetrates the body, releasing a major tranquilizer which downs the
target instantly, and because it has low penetrating power, the slug is easily
removed from the body, leaving minimal damage.”

“Why do you need snipers — surely the police could do it?” I
asked
Sarge
. “Come to that, don’t the police already
have snipers?”

“We need perfect marksmanship if we’re operating amongst
civilians in the cities and suburbs out there. But we also really want a
low-key, small, maneuverable team that we can insert and extract with the least
possible red tape, and a minimum of fuss and attention from the public. It’s
fine for the public to see patients being taken off by ambulance — that they’ll
understand. But I’m not sure everyone will like the idea of us darting people
and having them hauled off by the cops against their will.”

“If,” interjected Roth, “if they can even be said to have a will.
Legally speaking, they are not in their right mind, and so their personal
liberties are constrained by society’s right to safety.”

“Point is, Blue, this is part of what your unit has been established
to do, with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of negative attention. Will
you do it?”

I looked again at the man lying so still in the bed, thought
again of the rabid in the street.

“Look, I can just about imagine myself helping to tranquilize
these people so that they can be brought in and treated, and that their
families can …” I gestured helplessly down the hallway where the family had
gone. “But back at the compound, you mentioned terrorists.”

“We need to bring them in, Blue. To arrest them, to question them
about their operations and methods and plans, so we can take this war to them
instead of sitting back like a bunch of dumb sheep waiting to be slaughtered.”

“And we need to subject them to the full force of the law. These
monsters need to be tried and punished for their heinous crimes,” Roth added.
She was hot on the law, all right.

“I can’t argue with that, but I also can’t see myself doing it.
That’s a job for a real soldier. What if something goes wrong? They’re armed,
aren’t they? And there would be real shooting involved, with live rounds.”

“We don’t want firefights out there among our citizens, Blue. And
we don’t want to use live ammo — we need the tangos alive and talking. As soon
as they come around from the
tranq
, we can start to interview
and debrief them, learn their methods. We start using real soldiers for these
missions, we’ll have us some dead bodies, and we’ll learn nothing.”

Still I hesitated.

“I’m just not sure I have the heart for this. I’m not … It’s not
…”

I struggled to express my deep reluctance. I now realized that I
had painted myself into a corner when I’d assured
Sarge
months back that I was capable of shooting live targets. When I’d made my
choice to stay at the Academy, it had been for the wrong reasons. It hadn’t
been because I liked killing — far from it. And it hadn’t been because I
believed myself the right person for this work. No, if I was honest with
myself, I had been motivated mainly by fear — fear of going back home and
getting stuck in my mother’s smothering net of worry, with all its unending
sameness. I hadn’t so much chosen to stay and snipe as I had chosen
not
to go home.

“It’s not my fight,” I finally said.

Roth and
Sarge
exchanged a glance, then
Roth said, “There’s something else you need to see. Follow me.”

Roberta Roth set off briskly down the hospital hallway, with
Sarge
and I following, and led us to an office occupied by
two white-coated doctors.

“Will you excuse us?” she said, and they left the room without a
word.

Sarge
closed the door behind them and
took up position in front of it, as if guarding the entrance, and told me to
sit in the chair at the desk. Roth sat down in the chair beside me, took a
laptop out of her briefcase and fired it up. She hit a few keys then spun it
around so that the grainy black-and-white image on the screen was facing me.
Two more keystrokes, and the window was maximized to full-screen size, and the
video began playing. I glanced quickly at Roth. Her mouth was pinched tight,
her eyes looked back at me with something like pity.

It took me a few moments to realize what I was watching was
footage from a security camera — from a couple of them by the looks of it, as
the angle on the scene kept switching — monitoring the floor and counters of
what looked like a busy bank. Behind the service counter, tellers were counting
cash and keying entries into computers. The camera view changed to the security
door that led from the banking floor to the area behind reserved for employees.
A smiling young woman with a strawberry-shaped birthmark on her forehead looked
up into the camera as she buzzed for entrance. The door clicked open and she
passed through to the employees-only side.

I leaned forward to read the numbers in the bottom corner of the
footage. Some of them rolled over continuously. I guessed those were the
seconds of the time-stamp. Eight digits interspersed with slashes stayed
constant — a date stamp. The footage was from a date in June four years ago. My
heart gave a sudden, unpleasant kick against my chest wall and beat more
quickly.

Something. Something bad. Something about this, about to happen.

Behind the counter, the young woman with the birthmark was now
standing between two of the tellers. She was holding a stack of papers and a
poster-sized bank advertisement, and laughing at something one of her
colleagues had just said.

As the footage changed to the camera covering the main entrance,
a group of five figures burst through the doors, training weapons on customers
and tellers. The camera view shifted to the row of tellers behind the counter.
All their heads snapped up. Their eyes were wide with shock. Stark terror
constricted the face of the one closest to the camera, as a thick sheet of
reinforced security glass slammed down between the tellers and their customers.

The view shifted again. One of the figures, a man who must be the
leader of the intruders, fired shots into the air above his head. His mouth
moved in a soundless stream of shouted commands. The video had no soundtrack,
but in the noise and pressure building inside my head, I could imagine the
reports of the weapon, the screams of the customers, the threats and orders as
the civilians were corralled into a group in the center of the floor.

Without warning, the footage changed. Now it was full-color, sharp-focus,
close-up and with sound.

“Now this is footage the terrorists took themselves, of their
actions that day and in the days that followed. We’ve edited it so that we can
show you what’s relevant to you,” said Roth quietly.

“We have brought this war into your temples of greed and into the
lives of your men, women and children, as you have so often brought your
unjustified military imperialism into our lands,” the man on the screen
shouted. He wore a scarf around his head, and above his bearded chin, his eyes
glinted.

My heart was racing. I couldn’t look. Something was about to
happen — my thumping heart told me so. But I couldn’t look away.

“An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth! A life for a life! Bring
the first.”

There was the briefest flash of a terrified child being handed to
the man, and then the picture jumped with an edit and I was looking at a
struggling man with wide, panicked eyes and arms bound behind his back.

No. No, please.

The
scarved
man held him around his
neck, pressed a filled syringe up against his throat. Pushed in the plunger.

No-no-no-no-no!

“We will not stop our war until you do!”

Cold sweat broke out on my upper lip. My hammering heart was the
whole of my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I could only stare.

“Tell your leaders what you think of them now,” they shouted at
him. “Talk to your people!”

Then the man did talk. He said, “
Jinxy
,
Robin, Marion. I love you.”

Chapter 19

Fury

A moment to take it in, and then my whole body began to shake. I
leaned over and retched into the bin
Sarge
held out
to me. Roth passed me a clutch of tissues, and I wiped my mouth and blotted my
sweaty face. They both stayed silent, watching me, waiting for my response. I
had to clear my throat a few times before I could speak.

“That’s my father,” I said, though of course they already knew.

Roth pinched her lips together and nodded.

“That’s how he really died?”

“Yes, that is what happened.”

“From the plague?” I still couldn’t quite take it in. I felt like
I had been catapulted into someone else’s life.

“I’m very sorry, Jinx. I know this is distressing, but we felt it
was time you saw for yourself.” Roth gestured back to the screen and my gaze
followed her hand. “As you see …”

And I did see.

I saw my father, filmed in bursts over the course of the next ten
days, watched as he disintegrated in front of my eyes. I saw how the light of
reason faded into a feverish mania, how the sheen that covered his face was
overtaken by the rash of weeping blood spots and dark hematomas. I listened as
his words of love and reassurance for me and my mother and brother fell into
begging and pleading — “help” he kept saying, over and over again, “help me” —
then tangles of meaningless utterances, random snorts and grunts and, finally,
wordless screams. I watched as his familiar movements — fingers run through his
hair, a wide yawn and even, once, a gentle smile — were replaced by endless
cross-legged rocking, relentless beating on the front doors of the bank,
vomiting of black blood, convulsive seizures, and attacks on himself — pulling
out gore-clotted hanks of hair, and scratching at his forearms until they
streamed with virus-riddled blood.

Roth froze the picture on a close-up of him turning to look
directly into the eye of the camera, his head twisted impossibly far around his
neck, his snarling lips smeared with red slime and black flecks, his red eyes
empty of any trace of the father I had known. And loved. I looked away, aware
suddenly that my face was wet with tears. A shudder ran through me. I was on
the verge of losing it completely.

“Suck it up, soldier,” said
Sarge
.
“Snap to.”

I swallowed hard, dug my nails into the palms of my hands and
focused on that pain instead of the one that threatened to swamp me.

“Your father was one of seven innocent victims who were infected
that day, all of whom were murdered in the same way. One was just a child. And
they filmed it, the terrorists. They filmed it in high definition and full
color so that they could release it on the net and to the newsfeeds so as to
terrorize our population,” said Roth.

“But I didn’t know. I never even … How is it possible I’ve never
seen this?”

“At the time, the government got together with the news
organizations and agreed that no one’s interests, apart from the terrorists,
would be served by showing such graphic footage. We’d already learned in this
country how deep a scar can be grooved onto the collective memory and psyche of
the public by showing footage of terrorist attacks over and over again. Of
course, there were some leaks in violation of the embargo, but we soon had a
court order and were able to get the footage removed and the offending sites
taken down. After a few successful prosecutions, people stopped disseminating
it.”

“And you left them in there to die? You didn’t try sending in a
SWAT team to rescue them?”

“We knew very little back then about this disease and how it
spreads. We couldn’t risk sending in a team of assets who might themselves get
infected. And we couldn’t blast an opening into that sealed building if that
meant letting the contagion out. Besides, once the victims were infected, we
knew they would die anyway. There was no cure. There still isn’t.”

“My mother, she told us he died of a heart attack.”

I remembered it clearly. When she fetched us from school that
day, her eyes were red and puffy, but she wouldn’t say what was wrong until we
got home. Then she made us both sit down and told us that Dad had had a heart
attack and was very sick in the hospital, that he might not make it. She said
we couldn’t visit him because kids weren’t allowed in the ICU. Then a few days
later, she told us he’d passed away. We never got to say goodbye.

“She lied to us all these years?”

“Hell, Blue, would you tell someone you loved that this is how
their father died?”
Sarge
dipped his head towards the
screen.

I kept my eyes averted from that final sickening image.

“Yes,” I said, aware now of an anger building inside me, coursing
into my trembling hands, gathering behind my eyes. “People deserve the truth.
She should have told us the truth!”

“I’m sure she was merely trying to protect you and your brother
from the pain of knowing how he really suffered and died. A lot of people
choose not to tell the truth about how their relatives passed away because it’s
such an appalling image to have stuck in your head. That’s part of the reason
for the work done in this unit” — Roth tilted her head back in the direction of
the quarantined room — “and the establishment of your specialized unit. But
you’re old enough to know the truth now, Jinx. And old enough to make a
decision about what you need to do, now that you know.”

“Now that I know.”

“Dammit, Blue, this
is
your fight. It doesn’t get
more personal than this,” said
Sarge
. “But only you
know if you’ve got the intestinal fortitude for the battle.”

I looked down at my hands, as if expecting them to give me the
answer. And they did — they had stopped shaking. I was still shocked,
horrified, sickened. But mostly … mostly I was
angry
. Livid with my
mother for never telling me the truth. Filled with fury at the men who had
killed my father, that child, the bank teller. Enraged that human beings could
do this to each other in the name of a cause, any cause. On fire with an icy
flame of wrath at the cruelty of the disease, and the extremists who started it
and still spread the suffering.

The plague was a darkly looming presence in the room — huge,
powerful,
evil
. And real. Real to me in a way that it
never had been before.

In spite of my fury, I finally understood my mother — how she’d
crumbled and gone silent on Dad after his death. Finally I got her paranoia
about the disease, her overprotectiveness of Robin and me. I even understood
why she’d lied to us. It
was
unspeakable. But in refusing to speak about his
death, she’d lost his life
and
her own, in a way. She’d stayed frozen in a lake
of pain and silence and horror, Robin had got stuck in his window seat, lost in
his stories, and I’d disappeared into a game. A game that wasn’t even a game.

There were so many losses, so much pain rippling out and out from
the center point of the plague. So many families out there were also trapped in
grief and fear, living their constrained lives behind walls and latex and respirators.
So many children might never get to play outside with the other kids in the
neighborhood, or camp out in nature, or have pets. I thought of Robin’s
skateboard, mounted like the head of a dead animal on his bedroom wall, of the
empty swing on Quinn’s porch, and the deserted city parks, of the boy and the
girl peering through the pane of glass at their dying father.

It had to end. And I had to help end it.