Wei cracked his knuckles and stepped beside a medical board. He selected a hypodermic needle and a vial of AE7. She was stubborn, possessing a core belief system that added to her rigid worldview. A double dose, yes, she would need a greater dosage to force her thoughts into a fantasy delusion. Then she would begin to tell him what he needed to learn.
Thirty seconds later, Wei slid the needle into her flesh, sinking the plunger as he pumped the drug into her bloodstream. It would take time before the AE7 brought her to the required state. Using his cell phone, he checked the time. Ah, he could go into the other room and smoke a cigarette.
Captain Wei slipped into the hall, entering an empty room. He found that his hands were shaking. How odd. Taking a pack of Lucky Strikes, he extracted a cigarette, stuck it between his lips and used his lighter. Soon, he stared blankly at the ceiling, occasionally watching the smoke curl. He refused to think about her words, her foolish curse or the way her body had contorted on the table. He had seen such things a thousand, a million times before. Instead, he smoked, emptying himself of thoughts, of emotions and emptying himself of the tedium of life. Mechanically, he shook out a second and later a third cigarette, enjoying them in the solitude of the basement.
The effects of the blue pill must have dulled his sense of time. Much later and with a start, Captain Wei took out his cell phone, checking it. Thirty-seven minutes had passed.
The small East Lightning officer rushed out of the smoky room and ran to the interrogation chamber. Sometimes, there were bad reactions to AE7. He had forgotten that and his dismissal of a watching operative.
Captain Wei threw open the door. “No,” he whispered. He rushed to the table. Maria Valdez lay still, with a serene smile on her face. He checked her pulse and snatched his hand away, horrified. She was already cold. He hated everything about corpses, their stiffness, their chill, their—
“No,” he said again. Wei blinked rapidly. What was he going to do? Higher command wished to know many things concerning her sabotage. Now—
Rushing to the computer, Wei sat down. He ran his fingers through his hair and logged in. Time. He had to register her time of death, her answers, her—
Wei licked his lips. What had he read about her earlier?
You need to think. You need to cover yourself. Is this her curse starting to work?
The thought sobered him. He needed a cigarette. No. He needed to use his years of expertise, giving High Command what it feared most. That way, they would worry more about the repercussions of her sabotage than how he had interrogated her.
Captain Wei of East Lightning began typing fabricated answers, turning dead guerillas into American commandos. It was clear by Wei’s false answers that some Americans had escaped with knowledge of Blue Swan. The leak of the convoy’s route and time of travel—it had occurred according to what Wei wrote because of a traitor on the Occupation Staff. Wei hated the Chinese Army, the way many soldiers looked at him with distain when they thought he wasn’t looking. Yes. Wei grinned as he typed. The Americans had suborned this person because of his relatives living in North America. High Command would devour that, as they feared Chinese-Americans infiltrating their ranks.
Wei became thoughtful. How should he word this? Hmm. In his zeal to uncover more, there had been an accident. Yes, he had injected her with—
“No.” He needed a doctor. There would be an autopsy. Wei considered ordering the body incinerated, but that would be a risk. He had already broken protocol ordering the operative away. Any more deviations would invite a full-scale investigation, just the thing he was trying to avoid.
Wei stared at his answers, checking them, looking for flaws or red flags. Returning to his office first and fortifying himself with another blue pill, he returned to the corpse and called for the resident doctor. He would say little, waiting for the doctor to tell him why the patient had died. Then he would concoct the end of the story and hope no one ever dug too deeply into what had really happened.
A defeated Stan Higgins sat in his base house at his desk. It was in a small cubicle and blocked by a closed door. He could hear his wife in the other room watching Hartford Wives. She couldn’t believe the news and had blanked it out. She escaped into the never-land of TV soap operas.
Stan stared at a computer screen, studying the judge’s sentence: induction into a Detention Center until someone posted a ten thousand new-dollar bail. Stan massaged his forehead. Where was he supposed to get enough money to pay for his son’s bail? Why had the young fool gone and protested? Why couldn’t Jake stick to his engineering studies? It had been hard enough gathering the tuition costs.
In his day, kids got student loans from the government. With the Sovereign Debt Depression that had gone the way of the dinosaur. Now, people had to scrape enough together to send their children to college. It meant fewer people went to college, making high school more important again for a person’s future.
Stan closed his eyes. He felt the weight of his years. Three weeks ago, he’d turned fifty. He couldn’t believe it—fifty! He still lifted weights, played basketball, ping-pong and ran occasionally. More than anything, the trouble was recuperation. He didn’t heal like he used to and his left knee bothered him. He couldn’t play basketball on cement courts anymore. Even blacktop hurt the knee. Wooden floors were the best. The truth, he should give up basketball. Otherwise, he was begging for a ripped tendon or a torn muscle.
Yet even ping-pong pained the bad knee when he lunged to slam the ball. If he slammed the ball too many times in a game, it made his shoulder hurt for the next two days.
Who would figure that ping-pong could hurt a man, even an aging athlete? It was ridiculous. Maybe he could learn to play like some of those experts he’d seen in Las Vegas last year. One old man with white hair had hardly moved. He had been an old geezer in every way except that he’d hit the ball just so and it did magical things, spinning off at bizarre angles, making the younger players leap around like fools. The trouble was Stan had never played that way. He liked speed, to drill the ball as hard as he could.
“Ten thousand new-dollars,” Stan muttered, attempting to focus on the computer screen. His son had been accepted to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. That was one of the best places to earn an engineering degree. Now Jake had gone and openly protested the President’s state of emergency. Even if Stan posted the bail, Jake would probably get kicked out of Cal Poly. Losing his Student Status, they would likely draft him into a Militia battalion.
“I don’t have ten thousand new-dollars,” Stan told himself.
Lines appeared in his forehead. Should he have remained in Anchorage? On his teaching salary and with the extra pay from the National Guard—
Stan blew out his cheeks in depression. So much had changed since the Alaskan War. What had that been, seven years ago now?
He had a theory about why time moved faster the older you got. When you were ten years old, a year represented one tenth of your life. When you were fifty, one year represented one fiftieth of your life. Therefore, one year was shorter the older you became. But none of that was going to help him post bail.
Laughter rang out from the TV, sounding like a drunken hyena. No doubt, it was over a joke that wasn’t even funny. Shows still used laugh tracks just as when he’d been a kid. Stan wanted to yell at his wife to turn down the TV. She knew he was in here thinking about how to free Jake from the Detention Center. If someone spent too long there, officials stamped their driver’s license with “Resister Status.”
Stan massaged his forehead. He’d always wanted Jake to succeed. He wanted to give Jake every advantage he could. It wasn’t like the old days. Good jobs were hard to come by now. An engineering degree from Cal Poly would have gone a long way toward making sure the boy avoided the Army, whether Regular or Militia.