The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (5 page)

* * *

T
he entire Village
of Lily followed as Trooper MacIan led Pastor Scott, Fred and Max toward the Peregrine. MacIan whispered, “Doors.” The Peregrine whirred and its sides slid back, allowing easy access to any part of the interior. “Who knows how to get there?”

Fred nodded at Max, who affirmed with a tenuous wave.

“You’re in front.”

Christmas broke out all over Max’s face and they settled in like first class tourists.

MacIan placed his thumb on a fingerprint-reader set into the steering wheel; the dome lowered and the electric motor vibrations sent a column of ants up Max’s spine. Fred and Pastor Scott seemed unfazed. MacIan squeezed the steering wheel and the wind-dome locked in place. He tapped a green button on the dash; whatever had been stamped onto it had worn away long ago. Lights and meters and gauges read out the preflight sequence. MacIan gave these a glance, then turned to the star-struck boy next to him. “Max? Right?”

Max nodded, eyes glued to the dashboard.

MacIan said, “Hang on,” and hit the elevators as hard as he could, for Max’s entertainment. All stomachs dropped as they shot skyward, and MacIan asked, “Which way?”

Max opened his mouth; nothing came out, but he pointed north. MacIan grinned and banked off with nose-bleed G-force. “How far?”

“Jeez. At this speed?” said Max.

“In miles.”

“Oh, about five, on foot. Like this, I’m not so sure.” Max leaned forward. “See those mountains there? The two black spires? There’s two of ’em pretty much identical.”

MacIan found the Twin Spires and roared right up to them in seconds. Max could see from this high point of view how they were anchored to the sheer cliff. “Pull back a little,” he said, pointing straight down.

MacIan jockeyed out about one hundred yards from the cliff and waved a hand at the plateau of fallen boulders. “Looks like this mountain was hit by a meteor,” said MacIan.

Fred leaned forward. “How many times I tell you that? Little shit-bird.”

“Navy man?” said MacIan.

“Drop ’em and cough,” answered Fred.

“Corpsman?”

“Fred Burdock, P.O. First Class, sir.”

“He says that all the time,” said Max, pointing to a patch on the arm of the Navy pea-coat he was wearing.

MacIan glanced at the Medic Emblem and turned a gloomy gray.

Max caught that — he’d seen it before — and changed the subject. “Around that outcropping on the left,” said Max. “By that flat boulder near the sheer wall.”

“Why were you up here?” asked MacIan.

“Hunting,” said Max, stroking his fur hat.

“You make that?”

Max nodded proudly.

“You could get a hundred dollars for that.”

Max thought about it, then frowned. “I never met anyone with a hundred dollars.”

MacIan chuckled.

“On the other side of that really pointy one. See him?” Max swallowed hard. The body looked ridiculous without the red parka.

MacIan poked at the controls and they slowly descended. At about thirty feet a heads-up display projected onto the wind-dome. MacIan did a 360-degree pivot to survey every inch with a thermal scan before dropping onto a reasonably level spot.

A dreamy whir rippled through the billowing snow as the wheels telescoped down, each seeking a different length to accommodate the uneven terrain. The dome popped open and the doors slid back. Fred jumped out, but Pastor Scott thought twice. “I’ve seen rocks before,” he said, and leaned back to take in the celestial view.

Max ran to the body ahead of MacIan, Fred bringing up the rear. MacIan paused a few yards from the body and looked off into the horizon. “This is like a postcard.”

Max looked to see what had delighted MacIan so much, and, now seeing through someone else’s eyes, noticed the magnificent panorama he’d always taken for granted. It was absolutely spectacular. From this small plateau, they looked out over a cascade of mountains descending into the Chesapeake Watershed, where the Great Lakes make their way to the Atlantic.

MacIan wrapped his arms around himself, shivered, and said, “It feels strange standing on these humongous splinters, this wall, those spires, and that,” he pointed out over the horizon. “Makes me feel tiny.” He raised his arms to the sky.

Max was stunned. Here stood a man amongst men, a giant, talking to him as though he were an adult. A powerful man making little of himself. A man with a Peregrine. And best of all! MacIan wasn’t assuming he — wouldn’t get it. Max hated that.

“We’re like insects, microbes, on this scale,” said MacIan.

Max turned to Fred, who was poking at the body, and his face lit up.

MacIan envied the glow in Max’s eyes. He had someone to love. A luxury in good times, a necessity in bad. He had neither, and he intended to keep it that way.

The body hadn’t changed since they last saw it. MacIan turned toward the Peregrine and said, “Triage.” An ambulatory shelf slid out from its under-carriage. MacIan peeled the body away from the boulder. “Grab him,” he said. Max took the wrists, MacIan the ankles, and they lifted the body onto the shelf, which slid back under the Peregrine.

As they sped off, MacIan said, “No holes in him?”

“No, nothing like that. Not even blood,” said Max.

“Maybe he fell?” said MacIan.

A skeptical groan rushed over the natives. Pastor Scott spoke first. “I’ve never heard of anyone ever going up there. Ever. There simply isn’t anything there.”

Fred added, “No one could survive up there.”

“How about the other side?”

“The north side!” they jeered.

Fred said, “We’re a mile from the tip of a mountain and hundreds of feet above the tree line. It’s all straight up and down here, worse on the north face. The wind alone will rip the hide right off ya.”

MacIan turned back toward the Twin Spires. Once he’d found the perfect spot, he tilted the nose down until everyone had a bird’s-eye view of the whole range.

“Whoa. Dad! Look! You can see exactly where something big and round crashed into the mountain. Look!” said Max. “It’s like a gigantic, perfectly round swimming pool filled with boulders.”

MacIan leveled the Peregrine. “Back to Lily?” He could feel Max’s heart sink and it made him feel bad. “OK, then. Let’s have a look around.”

T
homka watched
in astonishment as Murthy continued to fumble with his phone, searching for the report he was pretending to have read. “Here it is,” Murthy said, without a hint of embarrassment. “The contractor’s name is Arthur Gager. Guttenburg, New Jersey. Former arms merchant. Yada, yada.”

“And what has he found so far?” asked Petey, his patience turning colder by the minute.

“He was following a lead to an . . . associate. A Tuke associate . . . A software developer. A disgruntled employee.”

Thomka couldn’t listen anymore.

Murthy bungled on in a drunken slur. “Associate . . . money. . . twelve gold bars for the location of Tuke’s hideout,” Murthy came up for air, shamelessly. “Some kind of game programmer. A Brian Tessyier.”

“Another Quaker?” grumbled Virginia.

Thomka seized upon the Quaker theme. “Now, that is odd. A Quaker throwing another Quaker under the bus. That never happens.”

Petey agreed. “He must have reason to believe Tuke is extremely dangerous. Why else would a Quaker resort to such a betrayal?” he said, shaking his head at Murthy. “What about this Brian Tessyier? Has our man, what’s it . . . Gager, contacted him yet?”

Murthy was reading ahead as fast as he could, but it was obvious he’d not seen any of this before. “Noooo. . . He got another lead on the way to see Tessyier. It says, ‘One day detour. Well worth it.’”

“Where is this Tessyier?”

“He lives in one of our Cubes, in Pittsburgh,” said Murthy. He winked at Virginia, a victorious glint in his eye.

Virginia stood. “There’s nothing between here and Pittsburgh but mountains. Big mountains. The Delaware Water Gap. The Poconos. The Alleghenies. The ass-end of nowhere.”

“And Quakers,” inserted Thomka, watching the alarm grow in Petey’s eyes. “That’s their turf. Penn’s woods.”

“Call that guy in Pittsburgh,” said Petey. “You know the one.”

Everyone’s eyebrows arched querulously.

“You know the guy. The Wall guy. The Irishman. The one with the crazy town that runs along the Pittsburgh Wall. The one-street nation.”

Thomka paled. “Efryn Boyne? New Hibernia? You don’t want to get involved with the Black Hearts. They are not like us. They hate us. They serve us, but only for their own purposes.”

Murthy chuckled. “Thought you said they’re not like us?”

“Everyone’s like us,” said Petey. “Enlightened self-interest is everyone’s prime motivator.”

“God looks out for those who look out for themselves,” sloshed Virginia.

“We all live in our own little bubble,” said Murthy, missing the point but toasting her sentiment.

Thomka hadn’t expected things to get this ugly. “What do we do with Tuke if we find him? He’s an international figure. A Nobel laureate.”

“I want to talk to this contractor,” said Petey. “What’s his name? Gager. Have the Irishman find him. If need be, he can deal with Mr. Tessyier as well. They’re both in Pittsburgh. If we can’t find Tuke the easy way, we’ll use his friends to flush him out. And another thing. And this is important. We need the NPF. They’re respected everywhere. Why? Because they thumb their noses at us. That has to stop. We have to privatize them. We’ll confer upon them shoot-to-kill status, no questions asked, and a substantial pay hike. We’ll portray them as saviors of the state. A uniting force. They’ll become the de facto — Church Police.”

Thomka considered this Petey’s most cockamamie scheme yet. “The NPF is an autonomous force already,” he said. “They answer to no one. They already shoot anyone they want. The NPF will never cooperate. They’re worse than Quakers.”

Virginia shook her woozy head. “Fuckin’ Quakers.”

Petey’s tone turned black. “The NPF is funded by an endowment set up for them when D.C. fell. A portfolio of international debt obligations, mostly Burmese gold. A few inside deals, you know the drill.”

“Representative Daniel Burfield oversees that,” said Murthy. “Dan’s a good man. Drinks a little . . .”

“Like his liver’s on fire,” mumbled Virginia.

“We’re going to crash that endowment,” said Petey. “Representative Daniel Burfield is about to become the embezzling bastard who destroyed the dearly beloved National Police Force, just when the country needed them most.”

“Burfield’s got his beak in the NPF fund?” asked Murthy.

“I don’t think so,” said Petey. “But when the time is right, we will expose Burfield for the corrupt politician we need him to be. Then we, The Church, will swoop in and save the day. We’ll rescue the NPF. Prosecute Burfield. We’ll pay for everything.”

Thomka’s smile failed to disguise blossoming disgust.

Murthy bobbed his head in adulation.

Petey took a bow. “We will ostensibly buy the NPF.”

“It’s a thing of beauty,” said Murthy.

Petey tipped his cowboy hat and raised an empty glass to Murthy — want one? He pulled the tap and a golden stream of frosty beer filled the glass. “We fell into this charade and now we have to go through the motions. Make all the right faces and meaningful gestures for as long as we can. It’s politics. A show. A puppet show. So someone’s got to pull the strings. That’s what makes it a show. And do not ever forget, my friends — it is a goddamned show!”

Thomka had drifted into a sullen mood, but listened halfheartedly.

Petey pointed an empty glass at him and moved to the middle of the floor. “Gentlemen, our grip is failing. If we fumble here, we will suffer greatly. We have to grab what we can, or haven’t already put in a safe place, and move to where they appreciate people like us.”

Thomka wondered
— where the hell would that be?

M
acIan banked
the Peregrine north and raked along the side of the mountain. His companions’ stomachs roiled, but they were having too much fun to puke. As they rose up and over the rocky peaks of their mountain, vertigo set in. Distortions in scale and perspective altered their faculties as the mountain melted into the foreground and the horizon broke in all directions.

MacIan poked another faded button and the heads-up display projected onto the wind-dome. Max took note of the button’s position. Details of the terrain below were projected onto the screen. MacIan zoomed in on a mile or so of tightly packed pine trees growing out of massive outcroppings and blind valleys. Not an inch of it fit for humans.

“You’re right,” said MacIan. “There’s no way up to the spires from this side.”

“This side,” said Pastor Scott, “runs all the way to Canada.”

MacIan steered in a wide arc so they might see as far as possible, until he spotted what appeared to be a small city with smoke-stack activity. “What’s that?”

“That’s Portage,” said Max. “One of the biggest rail hubs in the world, long time ago.”

“And that?” MacIan pointed to a gargantuan, zucchini-shaped object floating in the far distance.

“Airship-freighter,” Max said, shocked that MacIan didn’t know.

“Has to be a half mile long.”

“Three thousand four hundred feet. Belongs to the Chinese Factory,” said Max. “Biggest freight hauler on the planet.”

MacIan’s voice flattened. “What do they make?”

Max looked even more surprised. “They don’t make anything. They’re taking railroad tracks back to China.”

MacIan drew a smoldering breath through clenched teeth.

Pastor Scott tagged in. “They set up in the old Pennsy roundhouse, years ago. Built special flatbed cars with arms that reach over and pull up the tracks. They started way down the line, somewhere in Nebraska, near the foot of the Rockies. Then they roll back this way, dismantling the tracks behind them as they go. An arm reaches over and pops the spikes off the ties, then lifts the tracks onto flat-bed cars, hundreds of them. Once they’re all full up, they drive back to Portage, unload, go back to where they left off — start in again. I heard they were done all the way up to somewhere in Ohio now.”

“They take the wooden ties, too,” Fred said. “They’re worth more than steel. Not a lot of wood left in China. This is all part of one of those settlement deals, or whatever you call ’em . . . the trans-something or another trade agreement? I’m not sure which is which. Nobody asked us. Someone made a fortune and stuck us with the bill.”

Pastor Scott’s rage had long ago boiled down to vapor. “It was all baked-in-the-cake, back when we made all those Trade Agreements. They shot our future in the head, we just weren’t smart enough to lay down and die.”

“It’s state of the art,” interrupted Max. He’d heard all this political stuff before. “I love those airships. Helium gives them lift and the same hydrogen fuel system as this Peregrine powers their thrusters. It can carry just about anything all the way from here to China in about a month. Makes its own hydrogen from condensation on the way.”

MacIan was impressed, but not in a good way.

Max realized he was gushing and throttled back.

Pastor Scott’s voice filled with impotent indignation. “Four hundred years of building this country, all sold off to pay for five decades of corruption and incompetence from short-sighted, double-dealing reptiles . . .”

This was all just noise to Max, but he kept a read on MacIan.

MacIan looked straight at him. “What d’you think?”

Max made a ‘who me’ face and scrunched up his shoulders.

MacIan seemed to be looking across time itself. Slowly his gaze returned and he aimed it at Max like a tractor beam.

Max had never seen this before — absolute defiance.

* * *

A
mile
or so before Lily, MacIan spotted what the Lilians called the Back Side, a cluster of odd structures on the opposite side of the hill from the village proper. These structures spiraled along beautifully laid retaining walls that curved down the hillside, creating lovely terraces. The expensive bricks, baked to perfection and glazed for eternity, were the final contribution from the nine good houses the good people of Lily had carefully dismantled and repurposed. Seven other good houses were turned over to seven families who were willing to fix them up and live in them, Max and Fred among them.

MacIan chuckled at the sight of a pig-pen with a fancy terracotta roof and Romanesque columns at each corner. Several terraces wrapped around a hayloft made entirely from hand-carved doors of the finest hardwoods and stained glass. The larger of two tool sheds was clad in Edwardian, dragon’s scale siding with an elaborately trimmed porch. Even Fred’s purely utilitarian network of drainage tubes was done with great care. MacIan had seen many similar set-ups, and not just in America. This was one of the best. Well thought out, perfectly executed and it was beautiful. Why not? All the material was just sitting there.

A wireframe of the hillside below popped onto the heads-up display and the camera zoomed in on a Browning M2, mounted behind the smaller tool shed’s gingerbread-trimmed eyebrow window.

He glanced over his shoulder.

Fred broke out his most cantankerous grin. “Fully defensible.”

“How many do you feed?”

“We feed everyone we can.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Civility is vanity’s first victim,” said Fred.

Max rolled his eyes. “He’s a poet.”

“Buried in the graveyard of ambition,” MacIan finished the verse, and now he and Fred were true friends. Max drew a blank; he’d never heard the second line.

Fred could not have been happier. He hated it when people didn’t get his jokes. “We feed . . . probably around ninety or so. It all depends. It’s not hard. That’s not much food to produce these days.”

Max said, “With our own inventions, we’ve got a productivity multiplier of eleven to one. It doesn’t take much when one can feed eleven.”

MacIan was impressed. “Why all the firepower?”

“You’re only seeing this now that the work is all done,” said Fred. “It took a long time, but we were extremely prudent cannibals. Nothing went to waste.”

Pastor Scott seemed to know what lay behind MacIan’s questions. “We had to protect what we worked for. Our families depended on us.”

Max was not so squeamish. “We buried them there at the bottom of the hill, in that field over there, more than two hundred,” he said. “Not our fault we worked hard enough and smart enough to make it. We did what we had to do.”

MacIan really liked this kid. “There are monsters in this world.”

Max feared he’d sounded a little too uncaring. “That was how it was,” he said apologetically.

“Can’t blame a man for his bubble,” replied MacIan.

The Peregrine lifted up and over the Back Side then dipped straight into the village square, where everyone was waiting for the show to resume. The landing did not disappoint. The adventurous four stepped out and MacIan whispered, “Triage.” The shelf with the dead body slid open. MacIan rolled the body over, reached into the back pocket, and pulled out a rip-stop nylon wallet, with red piping to match the missing red coat.

Max’s heart sank.

MacIan could tell immediately that the expensive wallet stuffed with credit cards was not the kind of thing a hiker would carry. A transparent window showed a driver’s license with a picture of a good-looking older man named Arthur Gager. MacIan flipped the driver’s license back and rooted through the receipts sticking out of the slit-pocket. “Gotta go,” he said, and motioned to Max.

Max anticipated a handshake and a friendly goodbye, but MacIan yanked the body around, pulled off the expensive hiking boots, and tossed them to Max. “These’ll go nice with the red parka.”

Max clutched the boots and backed away. “How’d you know about that?”

MacIan raised one eyebrow, then pressed the palm of his right hand against Max’s forehead and jumped into the Peregrine.

Max stood dumbfounded. But as the wind-dome dropped, he felt something stuck to his forehead. He peeled off it a receipt from a New York City sporting goods store: 1 Size 48L - Red - Down Filled Parka = $1,729.00.

* * *

T
rooper MacIan landed
at Bedford Barracks and taxied to the morgue entrance. The barracks was a mid-century modern facility, a key Pennsylvania State Police headquarters that’d devolved into a remote outpost of the National Police Force. The aluminum frame and glass block structure was low, flat-roofed and built to last. It looked almost new sitting on its knoll overlooking the historic town of Bedford, a seldom-used crossroad to Washington D.C., the Mid-Atlantic States, New York and New England, with Pittsburgh eighty miles to the west. A major crossroad in the middle of nowhere.

MacIan got out and gave Arthur Gager’s body a quick once-over. He was checking his own pockets for the victim’s wallet when Cassandra’s voice came over the loudspeaker, calling him to Commander Konopasek’s office. Her voice trailed off into the silence of the winter forest on the verge of spring, alive with promise. He felt so alone.

Commander Konopasek was a second generation Pennsylvania State Trooper. He hated that cliché, but it fit. The only thing he hated more was the consolidations that had castrated his beloved Pennsylvania State Police. They were the first State Police in the nation, had been notorious straight-shooters for over a century, and got a thumb in the eye for their effort.

Commander Konopasek had been asked to take over the newly consolidated Bedford Barracks, or take an early retirement. He had no life outside these barracks, which might account for his lack of social skills. Although well-spoken, his timing was so off he could barely tell a knock-knock joke.

Three sharp raps sounded on his door. “Enter,” he said.

MacIan stepped in and stood at attention. The Commander looked up from his desk with a silvery pen hovering over a stack of forms. “Sit.” He aimed the pen at an aluminum chair directly in front of his desk. MacIan sat, but maintained a respectful bearing.

“So, ah, you just got here, when wazz’at? Oh, last night?” He pushed the forms into a pile and gave MacIan a welcoming grin.

MacIan relaxed a bit.

“Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m required to give you the speech. You know the little sack o’ shit I’m talking about?”

“The one about safety and a proud history?” said MacIan cheerfully.

A twinkle lit Konopasek’s eyes. “The very one.”

MacIan liked this old guy right off the bat.

“We haven’t talked, so we probably don’t have much to talk about then, do we?” said Konopasek, thumbing through MacIan’s paperwork and dotting his index finger on the tip of his tongue. “Um-hum . . . born 2019 . . . atzz’a what, thirty-two years old?”

“Yes sir.”

“Pittsburgh — born in Pittsburgh?!”

“Yes sir.”

“Know it well, know it well.” He looked up at MacIan with a frown. “After the Withdra . . .” He lurched to his feet. “I can’t even say that word.” He sat back down, head shaking in disgust. “Looks nice in a history book. The Great Withdrawal!”

MacIan wondered if these outbursts were typical.

“I see a gap here,” the commander said flatly. “There’s no mention of your posting anywhere until Quantico a few months ago. Take a little vacation, did ya?”

MacIan braced himself, “No. Sir.”

“Where were you?”

MacIan grew even more rigid, cleared his throat, and said pointedly, “I was over there.”

The too-familiar taste of embarrassment filled the Commander’s mouth. “Oh . . . Ah, I see. Ah, well ah. We need not go into that, now do we?”

“No, sir,” said MacIan with a reassuring smile.

The Commander could feel little beads of sweat forming at his hairline as he stared blankly at MacIan’s folder. MacIan was alive, so ‘over there’ meant POW, and no one in their right mind asked about that. Ill feelings about the Great Withdrawal clouded every aspect of American life.

The Commander perched on the corner of his desk. “Then I have to believe you were sent here for a good reason,” he said with muted curiosity. MacIan didn’t know how to respond. Unfortunately, the Commander mistook MacIan’s silence for agreement. “Then I’m not alone,” he said.