The Holocaust Engine, page 18
“A few times.”
“And you came back?”
“Yeah.”
Glen chuckled and shook his head, incredulous. “Why?”
“I figured I was needed more in here than out there.”
Glen scoffed at this. He looked all around his rich guildmate’s living room. “Nobody on this island is worth that.”
“They are now.”
For a long moment, he kept smiling. Then the gears locked into place.
They are now.
Glen Waldron almost reeled as the words struck him like a physical blow. For whole minutes, he did nothing but stand behind the sofa while his mind took the words—they are now—and worked through the implications.
Hunter had left the room.
Lacewood was ready to play and called for him.
“Just a minute,” he had called back.
They are now. They are now. They are now.
Could importance work like fuel? Like energy? Was it something that could be placed inside an empty system and allowed to move the other parts? No, he thought, it can’t be. The fuel makes the machine work. It gives it the power to accomplish a task. The kind of reverse engineering that Hunter Grant had clearly meant was all in his head. What could it possibly change?
But his mind would not let it go.
This is it! This is it!
He could hear himself thinking.
This is why the machine of your dad’s life does not work. Look at the paintings. Look at the sculptures next to the fireplace. What do they do? They don’t work like a machine. Why are they worth any more than a child’s finger-painting? You know why? Because someone is willing to pay more. The buyer sets the value.
If no one on planet Earth was willing to save these people, then they weren’t worth saving. If no one would help them, then his dad was right. But Hunter Grant was here, with a stack of registration forms for people outside the cordon. That could only mean that he’d been sneaking people through.
But he could have been doing it for money, part of his mind resisted. And what good is money now?
No, he knew it. He went back to the TV room and sat down next to Lacewood, and started to play, and he knew it. Anything in this world is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. It could all be important. It could all be made to mean something. It remained worthless only if no one would pay the price.
He set down the controller. “I got to go get some things.”
Now, tonight, for him, for Face, the whole idea of infusing meaning would be put to its greatest test. Because when Lacewood and Hunter came back and had told everyone what needed to happen, and Hunter asked them all for ideas on how to do it, Glen told them. It was obvious. They had everything already.
The only hitch in the plan was that it meant Glen ‘Face’ Waldron was about to kill a substantial number of his fellow human beings.
Face felt numb, and yet simultaneously sickened. His stomach roiled with the knowledge of what he was about to do, but there was no pain; the feeling dissipated as it left his abdomen. By the time the nerves reached his hands, no sensation remained, as if his arms and legs belonged to someone else.
Getting into the compound had been simple. They didn’t even have guards. In fact, they had no structure at all.
Billy and Shawn had scouted it out that afternoon, not the first time they’d been on the old naval base. Two weeks before, they’d explored the grounds. The next night, they’d gone back. No longer a base, not even a fortress, Protest City was more like... just that, a city. The protesters themselves came from all over the country, some from the Midwest, some from the Northeast. They met one from Oregon. Most had been staying in hotels, but some of the protesters were locals. When the quarantine started, these all went back to their homes, and they housed as many of the others as they could. In the first few days, they’d still paraded up and down the streets shouting slogans and demands. Now, the streets were no longer safe. When the looting started, a few of the business owners fought back. One set his own restaurant on fire with several of the protestors inside.
Of all the zombie stories Billy and Shawn had heard, theirs were by far the most vivid. Not, “I heard there was one walking down Laird Street yesterday.” More like, “Susan and I were rummaging through the loft for clothes when we heard a noise downstairs.”
They took over the Annex simply because it was big and empty. No one shot at them behind the gates and the iron fence. They didn’t have any doctors. If someone got sick and looked like they might be infected, they could take them to the hospital, or just drop them in front of the one of the churches.
They fed themselves in the first few days, in the mess hall, and from the restaurants and nearby houses. That was all gone. Some of them went up to the officials for supplies, but they kept getting into fights. They never could get organized. They had no system for doling out their meager supplies, and no official guards to keep the others from raiding the storerooms.
They tried designating leaders but it didn’t work. They wouldn’t submit to any authority, least of all their own. Only one thing held them together—the common belief that the world owed them something, and they would not be quiet until it had paid every last penny. Every day, someone raged against the unfairness of it all in the front courtyard. Every night, they stood out on the beach and out on the pier, holding signs while someone screamed into the megaphone in the Navy’s general direction.
That was the first thing Billy and Shawn said when they came back the second time.
Billy made the ‘metal horns’ with his fingers and shouted out, “We totally did it.”
“I did it, bedwetter,” said Shawn, and told them how the megaphone was being passed from one to the next like a kind of open mic night, and how somebody had passed it to him, and then he’d started screaming about the useless fucking Army and the useless fucking politicians, and how they were all in it together. Then he’d started in on things like how teachers had it out for their students, like that useless asshole Mr. Randolph, and how useless boy bands were ruining music just to see if everyone would keep shouting in approval.
“They did.”
“They totally did.”
Face wanted to sympathize with them, but kidnapping nuns did take a certain something away from the left-for-dead-on-a-strange-island sob story.
The way Billy and Shawn told it, only a few of them had actually been in on it. They had no problem finding out where the nuns were being kept, and even went inside the office building and had a girl point out the room where they were all tied up.
There were eight of them total, not just the three nuns.
Two days before, a couple of the local churches managed to organize a food run to the Annex. The nuns were a part of the group in three trucks, about fifteen people in all. They tried to distribute the food, but some of the protestors got out of hand. They started fighting with each other, and then somewhere in all the chaos, several of them grabbed some of the girls. The others tried to fight, but were beaten and eventually ran away. More came back later and tried again to get their people released. They too were attacked.
The twins had gotten the story from a group inside one of the barracks. The kidnappers said they were holding their prisoners as leverage, but everyone they took was young and female, except for one man who’d taken a horrific beating when he refused to leave the others. Not only this, but one of the girls at the barracks meeting—the same one who eventually took the twins to the room—had heard that at least one of the girls was raped last night, and none of them had been fed in two days.
No, getting in would not be a problem, but getting them all back out would require just a little more planning and execution. Only Face had an idea that would mean none of them getting hurt. Hunter liked that part of it. It also meant that everyone at the Annex was about to learn a painful lesson, and Hunter seemed to like that part of it too.
This time, Hunter ordered Vera and Thyroid to stay behind, since they wouldn’t need any dogs.
Thyroid pleaded, “If you have to carry that injured guy, you might need me.”
“I know,” Hunter had said, “but, Chris, I want you to watch Vera for me.”
At that, Thyroid’s eyes had gone wide, and he’d simply nodded.
The rest of them hit Fort Street in front of the Truman Annex, and then split into two groups. The twins walked through the front gate, while Face, Lacewood, Lindsey MC, and Hunter ran to the north with the rope they would need to scale down the other side of the iron fence, where a braced dumpster allowed them to climb up from the sidewalk.
When the last of them cleared the fence, they left the cover of the line of royal palms that ran behind the fence, and jogged toward the main building that the twins had pointed out. The grounds were filthy with looted items already discarded. The grass had been reshaped into dirt walking-trails surrounded by everything from furniture to dishes, from piles of wet clothes to shards of broken glass.
A group had circled around a fire in the front courtyard. A few of these looked at Face and the others running by—one even tugged on another’s arm to draw his attention—but none followed. Most of the protesters were down at the Mole Pier. Some held banners. One shouted into a megaphone, calling for the world to unite against the blockade and the military-industrial complex that kept it in place.
The Rats waited at the back of the Annex’s large office building, in full view of anyone on the beach or the pier who might turn around.
Then Billy and Shawn ran up.
“They see you?” Hunter asked.
Billy answered. “We couldn’t find any of the same people from earlier, but we asked for, like, the girl who showed us where the prisoners were—”
“So unless they’re just really stupid,” Shawn cut in, “they should figure it out.”
A back door near the south end stood open. Just inside, three of them, two blacks, one white, sat at a table in a downstairs break room eating something out of a cardboard box, while a pair of decorative candles that looked like they belonged on someone’s dining table lit the room. These three also just watched while six teenagers, all armed, all with their faces covered by gray bandanas, one carrying a small trash bag, another carrying a pair of bolt cutters, walked by.
“What the fuck?” Hunter whispered.
None of the three had even stood up.
The twins showed them the stairwell and turned on their flashlights. They took the stairs three at a time while the others followed. The prisoners were on the second floor, and the twins had cleared the entryway by the time the others arrived. They walked down one hall and then another, the twins peering around each corner.
Shawn waved them all into an empty hallway and pointed. “That door.”‘
They found the hostages on the floor, with their hands tied behind their backs, in what had been a conference room with tables and a projection screen.
The man lay by himself, in a corner. He didn’t move.
Face watched for a moment as the women recoiled from the flashlights. He adjusted the painter’s goggles on top of his head. When he turned, Hunter was explaining to them all that Father Barclay had sent them, and he could hear them beginning to go to work on the ropes.
Face stepped out into the hallway by himself, walked to the end of the hall, pulled a can of paint remover out of his back pack, and sprayed a thick layer of the slippery fluid back and forth over the floor. Then he went to the other side of the hall and did the same. Still no response from the protesters. He went back to the door where the others were freeing the prisoners, and stood a lonely vigil, waiting for the inevitable. He didn’t mind. He wanted to be alone for this.
Behind him, he heard crying that he assumed were tears of joy. The other Rats were rescuers. They were heroes.
Only he would leave the Annex a murderer.
But minutes later, after they’d freed all the prisoners and Hunter had given the ready signal, no one had run up the stairs, and no one had hit the floor slicks. He looked at Hunter Grant, their leader, who just shrugged.
“I think there’s a hole in your plan,” said Lindsey MC.
“What the hell?” Face went to the next room, walked past a sort of receptionist desk opposite multiple sets of tables, and looked out a window. The bulk of them still gathered at the pier. Face wondered if the Rats could simply walk out with their freed prisoners.
He could see a group of animated protesters talking on the beach, and one of them, maybe one of those who’d been eating below, pointed at their building. If they left now, they might get away before a response arrived.
And they might not.
Face pulled the coil of rope off his belt, and tied one end to a nearby table. Then he opened the window and dropped the other end to the ground.
Now several protesters were pointing.
Face took deliberate steps back out into the hall. “They’re coming,” he called out. “Finally,” he said to himself.
Then he put in a pair of foam ear plugs, lowered the goggles, and pulled the first device from his pack. He was still staring down at it when he heard their steps.
A group of them arrived all at once at the T-junction to Face’s right, hit the slick, and crashed to the floor in a heap. Another followed and did the same.
Face shined his flashlight at the cursing. The light shined off of the eyes of one with dreadlocks in a ponytail, who’d managed to get to his knees. Maybe a half dozen sprawled there, none older than twenty-five. Face’s breath caught in his throat.
Then he threw the bomb. Roughly the size of a heavyweight flashlight, it clattered end over end down the hallway, the little Christmas light on top flickering innocently. Face turned to dive into the room, where the prisoners all huddled under a makeshift shelter of tables.
But the Rats were not. They were standing with their fingers in their ears.
At this moment, his body moved in what felt like slow motion, and Face understood that he’d not adequately explained this part of the plan. He just assumed they knew. Sterno and hair bleach cold-welded into a steel pipe the width of his arm... they should have grasped the magnitude, but these were gamers. Face suddenly realized that, even though he’d told them to get everyone under cover, and even though he’d insisted that he make the bombs alone inside the Krasinski house, while Hunter and Thyroid stood guard outside, they didn’t quite get it. With the nine-volt battery duct-taped to the pipe, and the Christmas bulb at the top, the bombs looked very much like the pipe bombs in any standard first-person shooter, like the black powder bombs in a zombie shooter. They must have expected that sort of explosion.
Wrong. So wrong.
“Get down!” he screamed to the others, and had just enough time to tackle Lindsey MC and cover her body with his.
The entire building erupted into a world of noise and pain. Pressurized air washed over Face like a crashing wave. He felt tiny pinpricks, flecks of speeding drywall, through his pants and jacket. Something, maybe a door, crashed from side to side down the hallway, then slid loudly on the floor.
He stood up coughing into his gray bandana. The flashlight illuminated nothing but dust. He wiped at his goggles until he could make out the others on the floor, all stunned, but all alive. He felt his way out into the hallway, then to the next room, and back to the now shattered windows. He couldn’t hear them because his ears throbbed—his entire body throbbed—but he could see them.
The protesters ran in all directions, scattering away from the explosion.
Perfect. Almost.
He shuffled back out into the hall, and when he neared the T-junction, he had to watch his footsteps. He walked around a fluorescent light fixture and its wires, which now sagged almost to the floor. He passed something covered in dust that he first mistook for a wooden board. It was a severed arm, blackened. The stream of light moved over debris and torn-out corners of walls, and then a black hole on the far wall, which Face realized was an entire section of bricks that had burst out into the courtyard.
Cautiously, he tested each step with the toe of a work boot. Halfway to the far wall, his toe touched a section of floor that gave like a crust of sun-scorched dirt. It took a moment to see where the floor ended through the haze of dust.
He took out another bomb.
Then he stopped with his finger on the switch. The gravity of what he was doing threatened to overwhelm him. Two versions of tonight’s events flared in his mind, like a binary circuit with both paths competing for the power flow.
On the one hand, he’d just ended several human lives—students and workers, sons and daughters. They had hope and promise and a future. Now their remains lay scattered about, indistinguishable from the rest of the devastation.
I did that.
He killed them, and he was about to drop a second bomb that might kill more—a second bomb in a military installation, which, two months ago, would have made him a terrorist at the top of every watch list in the western world.
Of course, the other side was that the military had left this instillation to people who’d just kidnapped and raped a group of women who were only trying to feed them and keep them alive. This was no longer America, it was the Kill Zone, and everyone had to pick a side. These protesters had chosen to become monsters. The Wharf Rats had chosen to protect everyone else from monsters like these.
Hunter Grant had been right; they had all made their choices—the Rats, the kidnappers—and now they had to face the consequences.
For Face Waldron, the choice was made.
One explosion could mean any number of things. Someone might take cover and wait, and then attack if they thought they could take the bombers by surprise. A second explosion would mean only one thing—they were being bombed, and it could happen again and again, and they needed to run and to keep running. Tonight, the protesters were going to run for their lives. By morning, they would be scattered all over the island.
Did any of it matter? It does now!
