Genocidal Organ (42 page)

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe the jury will laugh the case out of court. But if you kill him now, if he’s killed before anyone has the opportunity to learn the truth, and everything is just brushed under the carpet, then as far as I’m concerned all the people who ever died in those massacres that he caused might as well have been killed by our hand. We’d be ignoring all the corpses just so that we can selfishly grab a little peace and quiet for ourselves. That would be unforgivable.”

Corpses.

Our world was built on top of corpses.

And it was filled with people who stood on a foundation of corpses and never suspected a thing.

But Lucia and I knew. That was the difference. We were past the point of no return. We couldn’t go on cashing in on the misery of others.

“Fine. Let’s take your John Paul with us and go,” I said.

Bzz
. A sound. Lucia’s forehead expanded into a giant marshmallow. I stood there dumbly for a moment.
Oh, a hollow-point bullet.
I felt bizarrely calm. Lucia’s forehead burst like a ripe tomato. I was standing right in front of her, so some of her blood and brain matter splattered across my face.

Lucia’s left eye had been blown clean out of its socket; there was now a gaping hole where it used to be. What brain tissue she still had started oozing out through the new opening in her face. Lucia’s body shifted and toppled over, carried forward by the energy of the blast. She slumped over John Paul’s shoulders. Where she had been standing I could now see Williams, who was brandishing a handgun with a silencer attached.

“Lucia—”

She had lost half her head. A sight I’d seen numerous times before. It was a common enough way to go in battle. To have part of your face blown away by a bullet.

I screamed. No, I tried to scream, but no sound emerged. My mouth was wide open, but only my anguish came out. I pointed my rifle at Williams and fired.

Williams charged at me, right into my line of fire. He couldn’t stay where he was in the corridor—the guards would be here any second to investigate the sound of the gunshot.

“Clavis! Calm down! Our orders were to kill on sight!”

“She wasn’t the target! You didn’t need to kill her! You didn’t need to kill anybody!”

Williams had run into the bathroom. I could hear voices in the distance, outside the door. I shoved John Paul away from Williams’s line of fire and tossed him back his Browning.

“Use this to protect yourself,” I said. John Paul nodded in silent assent.

This was a small room. Once Williams came out of the bathroom it would be a close-range battle. A bloodbath. Well, the guards would get here first anyway.

“Why did you kill her?” I shouted.

“For Monita and my baby.” Williams’s voice was calm but forceful. “So that they don’t have to know what a shithole this world is. My baby doesn’t need to know that our world is teetering on the edge of the abyss. All she needs is the opportunity to grow up at her own pace, in our own world. Got that, Clavis? I’m prepared to protect my world. I’m going to defend the world where you can order a jalapeño pizza and pay for it by thumbprint. I’ll fight to the death for my family’s right to eat as many Big Macs as they like and then throw away whatever they can’t eat.”

I heard the sound of footsteps converging outside the door. The worst-case scenario now would be a three-way shootout involving myself, Williams, and the guards. And we were heading straight in that direction.

“Lucia didn’t need to die. And now you do. You have to die here,” I said.

“Clavis, buddy, calm down. We have to work together now, remember? You and me. The way it always is. The guards are coming. Cooperate with me, like we always do? Whaddaya say, buddy?”

“Sure, I’ll cooperate with you,
buddy
. I’ll cooperate with your corpse. After I’ve killed you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clavis. Look! Those were our orders, okay! Shoot to kill. You just weren’t told about them, that’s all. And I can see why now. Well,
I
was briefed to kill both Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. We have to wrap this case up once and for all. It comes straight from the top.”

“Why?”

The guards finally started amassing by the doorway, so I fired a suppressing volley, full automatic, in their direction. One of them took a hit to the shoulder and spun around before collapsing to the floor.

“Dude, think about it. Think of the scandal if it ever got out that DARPA funded the research that led to international genocide. And think how bad it’d be for morale if John Paul told the world his story. Specially all the stuff about the surveillance crap that we do being basically useless. How there’s no correlation between traceability and the fall in terrorism. Think how people would feel!”

“But there
is
no correlation, you idiot!”

“So what are you gonna do, huh?” Now Williams was shouting too. “Turn back time? The people
want
increased security measures, don’t forget! Not just the government and industry, ordinary citizens too. People are
happy
to sacrifice a few freedoms in exchange for a safer society. So tell me, Clavis, what are you gonna do? Dismantle the entire surveillance infrastructure? InfoSec is a huge industry, you know that. Money’s still being poured into it from all angles. It gives jobs to tens of thousands of people, if not more. And it’s part of the system now. So call me an idiot if you want, Clavis, but just tell me this.
What are you gonna do?”

With that, Williams chucked a grenade out of the bathroom and through the door that led to the second floor corridor. There was an explosion beyond the doorway, then screams and dust.

I turned to Williams again. “But it’s all bullshit! It’s all pointless! We don’t
need
all that security!”

“It might be bullshit, Clavis, but it’s
our
bullshit. And the horse is already out of the barn on this one. We’re committed. The whole economy’s committed.”

We had reached an impasse of sorts. But at this rate I would be out of bullets in no time.

I grabbed hold of John Paul’s arm, chucked a grenade over my shoulder, and jumped with John Paul through the moonlit window to the ground below. We landed on the lawn in a messy heap but scrambled to our feet and made a dash for the shore.

There was an explosion behind us. The grenade had just exploded. It had almost been a reflex action. I hadn’t even stopped to think what would happen to Williams. Not that I cared anymore.

The guards fired their AKs at us, but they were all terrible shots and a little too far away. The nanocamouflage probably helped some too. John Paul had no protective gear, so as much as possible I covered his back as we ran away.

I realized that John Paul’s shoulders were covered in Lucia’s blood and chunks of brain. I realized we had left her body behind. My chest wanted to explode. There was nothing we could have done in that situation to bring her with us. We had done the right thing. Logically speaking. But none of these facts helped to numb the gut-wrenching soul-pain I was feeling. I ran with John Paul, and before I knew it there were tears streaming down my face.

“Are you crying for her?” John Paul asked.

“I just left her there. Her corpse.”

“Surely you’ve seen plenty of corpses in your time.”

The girl whose head was exposed to the heavens.

The boy whose guts spilled from his ruptured belly.

The women and children doused in gasoline and left to burn in the giant hole in the ground.

Up until now I’d always thought of corpses as
things
. When a person died, he or she became an
it
. An object. And as Lucia had lost half her face and what was left of her soft brains was now dripping out of her eye socket, she was surely a perfect example of how a person could turn into an object in the twinkling of an eye.

And yet she wasn’t just a thing. I refused to see her as just a thing. She was still Lucia Sukrova, even dead. She wasn’t just a mass of flesh. She might have been a corpse, but she was
Lucia’s
corpse.

“Of course I’ve seen corpses before,” I said. “But this time it’s just so personal. When the person is important to you, they can’t become just a corpse.”

I gritted my teeth and we pushed on. John Paul and I made it into the jungle.

It wasn’t easy moving through the jungle with John Paul. He might have been familiar enough with war zones, but he was still a civilian. It required quite a bit of skill to be able to maneuver through this sort of terrain. Jungles weren’t designed for late-night leisurely strolls.

To make matters worse, John Paul had also sprained his right ankle when he jumped from the second-floor window. It wasn’t that far to the Tanzanian border where our recovery team should be waiting, but there was a limit to how fast we could move when his leg was like this.

“There’s no way I can hand you back to the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation,” I said, my eyes on the path in front of us. “If you were to go back you’d just start singing your song of genocide again, I know.”

“I’m not interested in going back,” John Paul muttered. The confidence he had back at the guesthouse had now all but disappeared. “Lucia said that I should explain what I had done to the world. She wanted me to tell the world just how shaky a foundation their ‘peace’ rests on, I guess. Well, I will stand trial, and I may be sentenced to death. Or perhaps I’ll just be dismissed as a lunatic and laughed out of court. Whatever happens, I’ll accept it, because that’s what Lucia wanted. It’ll be my way of apologizing to her, however pathetic and inadequate the gesture. I was the one who brought her into all this. I had only intended to stop in Prague long enough to get a fake ID, but then I found I wanted to see her face again for old times’ sake. That was all …”

I listened to John Paul’s story without saying anything. I just hacked through the jungle with my machete.

“I betrayed my wife and child and now I’ve also killed the woman I once loved.”

“What about all the people who died in the massacres you caused? Don’t they count at all? That’s quite a solipsistic sense of guilt you have, don’t you think?” I was feeling pretty cynical by now. “Don’t forget that there’s a staggering number of corpses behind you at all times.”

“No, of course not.” John Paul nodded. “I know. It’s something I’ve carried with me from the very first time I used the grammar of genocide.”

I realized that, in talking to John Paul, I was telling him to do as I said and not as I did. I was telling John Paul not to forget about all the corpses, and yet I had no idea what to do about the burden I carried with me. All of my sins, not just my matricide. The sin of killing people without having chosen to kill them myself. The sin of dodging my responsibility. I wanted closure. From Lucia’s mouth. Redemption—or condemnation.

But Lucia had died. And there was no one left in this world who could either punish me or forgive me.

This was hell, right here, right now. I was trapped in a hell called myself. “
Hell is here, Captain Shepherd”
was what Alex had said. And he had been right. I was in the deepest pit of hell. I had come here to be punished and, at the end of the punishment, find a glimmer of hope, the possibility that I could be redeemed. That was why I had come to Africa. But shortly after I arrived, the prospect of punishment and forgiveness slipped away forever; it disappeared, broken.

Maybe this
was
my punishment. To be doomed to walk the earth till the end of my days, weighed down by the burden of corpses.

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Now that Lucia’s dead, do you regret what you did? Laying the groundwork for so many people to die?”

Now that he had lost Lucia, I wondered whether John Paul felt any sort of solidarity with the people who had died, or the people who had lost loved ones.

John Paul shook his head. “No. Not at all. I have no regrets on that front, at least. I put two sets of lives in the scales. The lives of the people in our world on one side, and on the other side were the lives of hostile people who lived in poverty and hatred and cast a shadow over our happiness. I went into this thing eyes wide open and made a completely sober and rational decision. I even had a good idea of how many people would die in the process. Once you know what you are capable of doing, it becomes impossible to escape from your own potential.”