God, I hope not.
Mr. Church says he doesn’t believe in prophecy. He says it’s been wrong too many times. He says that nearly all of the prophets have been wrong. What do they call it in fiction? Unreliable narrators.
But I saw it. This isn’t a Ouija board. This was me standing ankle deep in blood. If that is what’s coming, can I stop it? Change it? Save it? If so, how? Do I stay on the clock and stay in the fight so that I’m poised and ready? How soon before that would drive me absolutely out of what’s left of my mind? Or do I throw the universe a curve and lay down my arms, turn my back, walk off? In that dark future I was still a soldier. What happens to the future if I stop being that? Will it change destiny or insure it?
Those are impossible questions to answer.
Time, as they say, will tell. But forewarned is forearmed. We know about the Lucifer 113 pathogen. Church is looking into it. He’s going to see what he can do to stop it from ever being released. Maybe I can help. Maybe I can go find the people involved and put bullets in their heads. As a public service, you understand.
Which opens another door of speculation. What if that was a fantasy of a damaged mind under great stress? I had a head injury, after all. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this was nothing more than a trauma-born hallucination. How does that give me license to go kill people?
You see the problem?
The Kill Switch may be gone, but I believe there is still a darkness coming. The question is how to hold a light to keep it from becoming absolute.
So where does that leave the world? This world, I mean. The world of now.
That’s a damn good question. In my darkest hours I wondered how many times we could be knocked down and still manage to get back onto our feet. There’s that old saying from the Japanese martial arts that’s a favorite of Mr. Church. Nanakorobi yaoki. Fall seven times, get up eight. It’s a great philosophy, but after a while it’s harder to make it work. The knees don’t want to flex, the back is too sore, the heart is heavy. What if you manage it one more time and they hit you again and drive you back down? And again? And again?
The Modern Man in my soul wants to stay down, to hide, to burrow into the sand so that no one else takes another swing. The Cop wants to figure it out, to lie low until he’s sure there are no more punches coming. Both effects are the same; whether fear or caution, the sad fact is that the bad guys have put you down on the deck and maybe this is the last time.
But the Killer in my soul — the Warrior, whatever it is I call him or he wants to be called — he sees it differently. He’s too primitive to give up. He operates on the level of immediate need. It’s live or die. It’s fight or die. It’s kill or be killed.
On a sunny Southern California day twenty-eight days after the God Machine fired, I came into the office to find Sam Imura there, walking carefully, looking pale and thin. The others drifted in and we went up to the deck to watch the ocean. I’d brought with me a whole sack full of sandwiches. There’s a guy named Jake Witkowski who has a food truck near the Pier and he invented a sandwich for me. Rudy says that these things are more dangerous than anything we face when we roll out as a team. The “Joe Ledger Special” is a homemade bacon cheddar brat, sliced open and topped with a steak patty with grilled pepper and onions, piled high with a homemade cheese sauce, homemade whiskey BBQ sauce, and crushed Fritos. Anytime I feel one of my arteries opening, I have Jake make me one of these. Food for the soul.
We all sat on the deck and ate them. Me and what was left of my team, my family. Ghost, too. It was a farewell dinner in a lot of ways. Brian and Montana were gone. Dr. Hu was gone. At least half of the DMS field agents had been adversely impacted by the Dreamwalking intrusions. A lot of them were dead. A lot of them had quit or asked for transfers to desk jobs. The whole DMS had collapsed down almost to the size it was when I first joined. We were a broken machine, and even with our new charter, none of us felt up to the task of fixing it. Maybe it would never be fixed. Maybe this was the end of us.
Echo Team was falling apart around me. Lydia had submitted her letter of resignation from the DMS and had accepted the job of head of security for FreeTech. And Sam…? He said that he wanted to go back to California for a while and spend time with his family while he healed. When I asked if he was going to come back to Echo Team, he said, “We’ll see.” Which I took to mean, “No.”
Things were coming to an end.
Or… maybe it was like chess. The pieces are removed from the board one by one but you still have to play the game with what you have left. I had Top and Bunny.
I hoped.
As I munched my sandwich I looked at some photos Harry Bolt had sent me from his cell phone. The kind of pictures tourists ask passersby to take. Harry seated at a table at a sidewalk café in Paris. Short, dumpy, silly, and ineffectual Harry Bolt. World’s worst spy. Son of a madman who nearly ruined the whole country. Seated at a table with a gorgeous brunette with dark eyes, a mysterious smile, and an outrageous hat. I showed the photo to the guys.
“Well, kiss my ass,” said Top.
Bunny looked at it, and shook his head. “No. That doesn’t fit inside my head.”
“Why not?” asked Sam. “Kid’s richer than God. He’s going to be a chick magnet.”
“But him and Violin?” asked Bunny, shaking his head. “Seriously?”
No one could believe it. We all had a beer to shake it off. One beer didn’t do the whole job, so we had another. And another.
Which is where Church found us.
He came and stood there, looking down at us, at what we were eating, at the rows of empty beer bottles, and then out to sea. Finally he took a thick stack of folded papers from the inner pocket of his suit coat and handed them to me. First-class plane tickets. Hotel and car rentals. My name was on the top one, then Junie, and then everyone. A hotel in Hawaii, right on the beach. The flight was for ten thirty tomorrow morning. We all looked at the tickets and then up at him, attentive as schoolchildren.
“The world will have to turn without you for a couple of weeks,” he said, then he turned and walked away. I caught up with him at the door.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “Look, Boss, I appreciate the gestures, but we can’t go off the clock now, we’re just getting back on our feet and—”
Church said, “When was the last time you took a vacation, Captain? You live at the beach but you don’t act like it. When is the last time you went swimming when it didn’t involve having a boat shot out from under you? When is the last time you took a day off when it didn’t involve a hospital stay? When is the last time you went fishing, played tennis, rode a bicycle, slept in a hammock, hiked in the mountains, played catch with your dog, spent unstructured time with the woman you love?”
I opened my mouth to reply but I had nothing to say.
“The war will still be here,” Church said quietly.
“But—”
“If I need you,” he said with a faint smile, “I’ll call.”
We were on the beach in Hanalei Bay on Kauai’s north shore.
Junie was wearing a string bikini that tested the limits of public decency. I was very okay with that. Twenty feet away Bunny was sprawled on a chaise lounge in a Speedo that I was less okay with. They don’t call them banana hammocks for nothing. Lydia was seated nearby, smearing her legs with oil. Top was in a chaise lounge, snoring quietly, a peach-colored fedora covering his face.
That was how it was and how it had been for day after gorgeous uncomplicated day. Dangerous drinks with little paper umbrellas. Lotion glistening on sun-dark skin. Tourist hats pulled low over dark sunglasses. To passersby we must have looked strange. Not one of us, not even Junie, was unmarked by the weapons of war. Knives and bullets, teeth and claws. People gave us strange looks and moved on. At least for the first few days. As our tans deepened and we became familiar faces there were more smiles directed our way. Fewer frowns. Parents didn’t pull their kids to another part of the beach.