Chapter Four
Vermont
Copley Circle is a neat neighborhood. The houses are small, but there’s space between them, and they all have little front yards with patches of artificial grass. The uniformity of the neighborhood reminds Jackson of a military base, rows of largely identical buildings lined up like a TA company at Morning Orders. There are hydrocars parked in front of many houses—personal transportation, an almost inconceivable luxury in a PRC.
4408 Copley Circle sits at the end of a long cul-de-sac. Out here, there are air filtration units in the windows as well, but as Jackson steps into the walkway that leads from the road to the front door of number 4408, she notices that their environmental unit isn’t even running. The air is so clean out here.
She presses the button for the doorbell, and once again, she feels a bit of hope flaring up—hope to have her ring unanswered, hope that the McKenneys are out to visit friends for the day, or down in the clean air of Panama for the season, so she can turn around and get back onto the train to Burlington with a somewhat intact conscience. Then she hears the sound of footsteps inside.
The door opens, and Jackson finds herself face to face with a tall man who looks to be in his sixties. He has thinning red hair that’s gray in many spots, and the soft-edged look of a government employee, someone who has regular access to something other than soy patties and recycled sewage. They look at each other for a moment, and he studies her uniform with an expression of mild distaste on his face.
“How can I help you?” he asks, in a tone that makes clear that he rather wouldn’t. Jackson takes a deep breath, and then finds that she has no idea what to say to the man whose daughter she killed two days ago.
“My name is Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” she says. “Are you Anna McKenney’s father?”
He looks past her briefly, as if he expected more people to have come with her. Then his gaze flicks back to Jackson—or rather, her uniform.
“You’re not on official business,” he says, and it’s a statement rather than a question. “They’d never send just a junior NCO all by herself.”
“No, sir. I’m here on my own.”
“I was hoping I’d never see another one of those fucking uniforms for the rest of my days,” he says. The swear word comes out as if he doesn’t use it very often. “What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Anna,” she replies.
He looks at her for a long moment, the distaste still etched in his face. Then he purses his lips and opens the door a little wider.
“Well, come inside before you let all the bad air in. And wipe those awful boots.”
The table in the dining room has two sets of used dishes on it. Mr. McKenney pulls out a chair and motions for her to sit down before picking off the dirty plates and carrying them off. She takes the seat and looks around in the dining room. There are framed prints on the walls, black-and-white photographs of untouched landscapes long gone. There’s a little china cabinet in a corner of the dining room, and a small collection of framed pictures on top of it. Jackson recognizes Anna McKenney in numerous stages of her life—basic school, polytech, proud college grad adorned with the obligatory gown and cap. From the lack of other children in that little picture shrine, she deduces that Anna was an only child, which makes the dread she feels even worse.
“You’re not one of Annie’s buddies,” Mr. McKenney states matter-of-factly when he returns from the kitchen, holding two brown plastic bottles in his hands. As he sits down in the chair across the table from her, he pushes one of the bottles across the polished laminate. She picks it up and sniffs the open mouth of the bottle.
“It’s just beer,” he says. “You can have one, since you’re not on official business.”
“Thank you.”
She takes a sip and lets the liquid trickle over her tongue. She’s never been much of a beer drinker—hard liquor is much more cost-effective for welfare rats, and much easier to make in large batches—but the bitter flavor of the cold beer is pleasing after the long walk in the warm sun.
“How do you know I’m not?” ask him.
He nods at her uniform and points at the green beret with the Infantry badge tucked underneath the left shoulder board of my jacket.
“You’re TA. Annie was Navy. Military Police.”
Jackson doesn’t know how to interpret his use of the past tense, and she doesn’t have a way of clarifying his statement without playing her own hand, so she just shrugs.
“So what do you want?” Mr. McKenney says. “If she owes you anything, you’ve come to the wrong place. She hasn’t been home in two years. I haven’t even talked to her on vid in a month or two.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she says. She takes refuge in action and pulls the dog tag out of her pocket. She puts the tag in front of Mr. McKenney, and he glances at it for a moment before picking it up. Jackson watches as he turns the worn steel tag between his fingers slowly.
“Where’d you get this?” he says after a few moments. “I didn’t even know she still had hers.”
She could tell him that she yanked the tag off his daughter’s neck after she shot her dead, two days ago and almost two thousand miles away. She has come all the way from Shughart to deliver that battered little piece of sheet steel, and maybe find a measure of absolution in the process. She doesn’t feel shame for having killed Anna McKenney—she tried to kill Jackson’s squad mate, after all. Jackson is sorry she had to kill her, this man’s only child, but she’s not ashamed, because she did what she had to do to save Grayson’s life. When she came here, she fully intended to come clean and tell her parents what happened to their daughter that night in Detroit, and that she won’t ever come home again. Now that she’s sitting here, across the table from the man who changed Anna McKenney’s diapers when she was little, the man who probably taught her to ride a bike and tie her own shoelaces, she just can’t bring up the courage to face his reaction.
“I found it,” she tells Mr. McKenney instead. “On the street, in Detroit, a week and a half ago.”
He shifts his gaze from the tag in his hand to her, and then back to the tag.
“Is there more to that story, or an I supposed to believe you came all the way out here just to return this thing?”
“No, I didn’t,” she admits.
“Didn’t think so. Where are you stationed, anyway?”
“Shughart, sir. It’s just outside of Dayton, Ohio.”
“That’s a pretty long way from Detroit.”
“We were on a call. Didn’t you hear about it on the Networks?”
Mr. McKenney raises an eyebrow.
“Hear about what?”
“We were called in to put out a welfare riot,” she says. “”Broke a bunch of stuff.”
“I haven’t heard squat about that. There hasn’t been a big welfare riot since Miami last year, and they say the Chinks started that one.”
“Well,” Jackson says, “I can assure you there was one, because we were right in the middle of it.”
“Anyone get killed?”
She instantly recalls the dozens of bodies strewn in front of her squad’s position after they opened fire on the surging crowd that had seemed determined to kill them with their bare hands. She remembers Stratton and Paterson, cut down in an instant by heavy weapons fire, and crumpling to the pavement like carelessly tossed duffel bags. She thinks of the apartment building Grayson demolished with a MARS rocket. She has no idea how many civvies their TA company killed that night, but if the other squads were only half as busy as theirs, they filled a lot of body bags.