Keeping Luna Read online

  Other men began to pour into the area to see what had happened, their excited voices raised in anxious curiosity.

  “Shut up! Back to your grids! Keep clearing!” Kale bellowed at them.

  The muffled voice of a man yelling in the same throaty language rose up from underneath the metal door.

  “He’s coming up,” Kale said. “You two stand on the sides and grab his arms and pull him out.”

  After a minute, they could hear the clanging footsteps of a man climbing a metal ladder, and then the hatch began to push open. The man was pushing up the heavy lid with both hands when Kale grabbed it and lifted it away from him. The two soldiers did as commanded, each grabbing one of the man’s arms and lifting him out of the shaft and well clear of the ground before slamming his chest and face down onto the stone floor.

  Kale spoke and the man spoke back, wincing beneath the knees and feet that were pressing into his back. Kale gave the nod to Tony, who was hovering near the man’s head, and he swung his rifle down and he pulled the trigger. No one seemed to mind the spatter. The fronts of their shirts and pants and their faces were covered in small dots and streaks of red.

  “Sir?” asked Tony. “What did you say to him, anyway?”

  Kale sighed a deep breath and peered down the hatch.

  “I asked if he was coming out or if a grenade was going in.”

  “Coward.”

  “Oh, I’m fairly sure he would have taken the grenade if it were just him.”

  Kale spoke down into the hole in that same strange tongue, and then swung his legs over into the dark and started to climb down, leaving his rifle where it was on the floor up top.

  When he got to the bottom, he turned slowly. The small bomb shelter was lit by a single electric bulb which hung from an orange extension cord. He saw them huddled together against the far wall. The woman was sobbing, and even seated as she was, and holding to her chest a baby no older than a year, he could see that she was pregnant. Her left arm was wrapped around a little girl, maybe six years old.

  He spoke to the woman for about five minutes, calmly and softly, until she finally gave a reluctant nod. Kale turned his head up towards the surface.

  “There’s a pregnant woman and a baby. I’m sending them up.”

  He knelt down so that he was on level with the little girl’s eyes. She stared defiantly back into his face. She was a homely child, made more so by the dirt and soot that covered her, but Kale could swear that he saw something magical in her puffy eyes, some sort of sparkle. He hadn’t been around many children in his life, but he always found himself marvelling at them on those rare occasions when he had.

  Such a sweet thing, he thought. She isn’t even crying. So brave.

  He could see by the lighter streaks leading from her eyes down through the dirt on her cheeks that she had been crying, but right at this moment she needed those eyes to stare at Kale, to burn a hole right through his face, to let him know how little he was to her. He spoke to her in her language as delicately as he could: “I understand that you hate me. And you should. You are right to hate me. But I need to get you up out of this hole. I promise I won’t hurt you, and you can go on hating me the whole time. I promise.”

  Kale told the woman, whose eyes would not stop running, to climb up the ladder with the baby, and that he would follow behind her with the little girl. The woman was hesitant, but didn’t really have any option other than to consent. Of this much Kale had assured her. So she started up the ladder.

  He started upward ahead of the girl. As he reached the seventh rung on the ladder, he looked up and saw that his men had a hold of the woman and the baby and were pulling them out at the surface. He reversed his movement, returning down the steps and forcing the girl beneath him to do the same One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. He knelt down and looked once more into her eyes, this time with a soft, sincere smile.

  He reached his hands towards her head and she flinched and threw up her own hands to try to block his. He pulled his hands back in front of him and said, “It’s ok. I’m not going to hurt you. It’s just that your hair is a mess and I thought we would straighten it out a bit before your father sees you up there.”

  Her eyes lit up at the thought that her father was still alive, unable to dismiss the seed of thought once it had been planted, and her hands came reluctantly down from their defensive stance.

  Kale smiled and reached for her again. He planted his fingers into her dark, dusty hair where it met her forehead and ran them back behind her and all the way out through the ends. Then he did it once more. The third time, when his fingers had reached the back of her head, they continued down to the back of her neck, where they threaded together. He pressed his palms firmly into both sides of her neck, and the blood in and out of her brain was halted. Her eyes widened in surprise and she swung her arms and kicked. After a time her eyes relaxed to the point that they were almost closed and she stopped her kicking. Now he spoke to her in English.

  “I’m very sorry. Truly I am. But you are too young for coupling and too old to one day forget all of this. We have no place for you.”

  He could feel her legs go out from underneath her and knew that she was unconscious. He held her like that for two full minutes until he was sure she was gone, although her eyes never did close completely. Then he laid her softly onto the floor and straightened out her ragged clothes and thought she looked peaceful.

  “See? Didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

  He started up the ladder. As the last bit of him emerged from the hole up top and he started to swing the hatch shut, a deafening scream pierced his ears as the woman doubled over in new tears, shrieking and wailing in agony and hatred. She cursed Kale, she cursed his men, she cursed this world. Kale motioned to the men watching her to lead her and the baby away and they did so, but her cries could be heard for at least three more minutes, well after they had disappeared out of sight.

  Kale looked around at the blackened desolation surrounding them.

  I’m going to miss this, he thought. In what other line of labor can a man see in such clear terms the product of his work?

  He looked down at Trevor, lying there with one eye and a bloody face.

  Then he remembered the half fig in his hip pocket. He removed it gingerly and pulled a loose thread off of it. He blew it once more to rid it of whatever else he imagined might be resting upon it, and made two bites of it.

  Perfect, he thought. Perfect.

  Chapter Six

  There it was, waiting once more on the spotless glass of the coffee table. Inviting. Menacing. Its soft, round curves incongruent with the sharp edges it contained. The cold, dark glass an odd match for the heat within.

  “Today, Gabriel, you will do the pouring. Whenever you feel we need it.”

  Gabriel smirked in suspicion upon hearing of this new duty.

  The drink was towering over everything else in this room, which itself was filled with curiosities and intrigues. It demanded his attention and his apprehension far more than the antique hunting rifles and the numerous exhibits of taxidermy that were perched overhead, glaring and sneering down at him. Much more than the strange book titles screaming out at him from the large oak bookcase, titles he knew couldn’t be found in any library he’d ever set foot in.

  The presence of that bottle was both exciting and terrifying, but the thought that it was to be under his charge was truly vexing. He was torn. It was illegal, he reminded himself. Drinking of this bottle was not only a betrayal of the state, but also of his own self-control. It was capable of blurring the line between the things he thought he knew and the things he had known were only thoughts. And it opened his mouth when he otherwise would have thought it wise to keep it shut. But then, all of these things were strangely appealing, too. At once both repellant and enticing.

  Last week he brought up Freud, he thought. This is to be a psychological trial of sorts, isn’t it? He’ll be waiting, noting when I elect to pour the scotch, and how muc
h I pour. Whether I pour us out even, or if I happen to fill his glass more than my own out of some sense of inferiority.

  Gabriel looked up at the stuffed hawk in the corner. Its posture was that of attack. It was forever diving down on its prey. Down on him.

  Or perhaps if I were to fill my glass more than his, confirming the dominance of my own ego?

  Lamar was studying Gabriel’s face, which did nothing to betray the torrent of torment he was inflicting upon himself in trying to evaluate this situation. That is to say that nothing twitched or pulled or contorted, but his eyes… those were elsewhere, engaged, working out the problems he was just as busy creating.

  Lamar knew that something was occupying Gabriel, that he was trying to balance some imaginary ledger in his mind, and guessed correctly that it had something to do with the scotch he had put before them. He had recognized this tendency of Gabriel’s to over-think, to over-evaluate. But to be honest, Lamar didn’t really care when or how the young man poured the scotch. As far as he was concerned, the sooner the better. But he did enjoy Gabriel’s discomfort, so he just sat and waited another minute before starting.

  “So. Here we are again,” began Lamar. “I guess I’ll take it from where we left off. Where was that again? Ah, yes. I was nineteen, working as a computer programmer in the U.S. Army. I was the youngest programmer in my department, although not by much. The best of us tended to be young and grew up with computers. Me, I was practically raised by one. By the time I was six, I was resetting the parental controls and extorting sweets from my folks in exchange for the password.” Lamar stopped for a second and gazed through the wall behind Gabriel. He was far away and smiling. Then he returned.

  “My parents were kind people, but busy. So they would just set me in front of that computer to keep me from getting at them while they worked and ran errands. By the time I was finishing school, seventeen years old, I was leaps and bounds beyond anyone I knew. Coding. Site-building. Recreational hacking… heh heh… Sometimes I’d hack the social media accounts of people I knew, post deviant pornography on their profiles and generally make them look like perverts, and change their passwords while I was at it. Ha! Truly there was nothing clever about the content of these pranks, but getting in was tricky.

  “The town I came from was small and so was the money. There were jobs down in Seattle, but any job worth having required an education that I couldn’t afford. So I enlisted in the Army, partly to cover my tuition later on, but mostly just to get the hell out of town. They seemed eager to take me. I suppose they seemed that way any time they got fresh meat.”

  He stopped and looked at Gabriel, who in turn was eyeing the brown glass bottle.

  “Just pour the fucking scotch already!” Lamar roared with a laugh.

  Gabriel felt like a fool, but kept it to himself. He reached forward and poured both glasses half full and held one out for Lamar.

  Lamar held his up and looked at it from the side. “Now that’s well done, lad. There must be about four shots in here.” He held it out, said “cheers,” and put it all back in two large mouthfuls. His eyes squeezed shut as he returned the glass to the table with a bang, and a few seconds later he exhaled powerfully through his nose and clacked his teeth together a couple times.

  “Woohaw! Mind splashing a bit more in there for me?”

  Gabriel obeyed and refilled the dram, somewhat less this time, and passed it over.

  “So… taking it slow, taking your time with it?” he raised a mocking eyebrow. “Weren’t those the words you used?”

  “Ha! Sometimes a man’s gotta piss into the wind, Gabriel!” Lamar was smiling wide and his face was lit up dark pink. He held the glass up between them, staring into it. There was admiration in his eyes.

  “This is a wild horse,” he said. “This is Mother Nature. We do well to remind ourselves from time to time that we have not tamed her.”

  Gabriel took a cautious taste of the whiskey. Lamar continued with his account.

  “So then, the Army. I was a programmer, as I think I mentioned. It’s most often very tedious work, so I created for myself a hobby to fill my free hours. I would develop a virus, infectious on a level that had never been known, and absolutely dominant and crippling to the systems it infected.

  “This would become an obsession for me. I spent months and months working out the code, then testing it on a closed community of machines, then fine-tuning, and then doing it all over again. I think I went a little mad, really, and I came off as anti-social, at best… but the result was awe-inspiring and terrible.

  “Once introduced to the hard drive of any household computer, and in those days every house had at least one, this virus of mine would jump across the lines to every computer it was connected to, and those would infect the ones they were connected to, and so on and so on. And once you got the ball rolling, well… EVERYTHING was connected at some point, in some way.”

  Gabriel knew next to nothing about computers, aside from those he’d used for writing assignments and for searching library catalogues and research databases. But he understood the broad strokes of the story well enough that the details became peripheral and unimportant, so he held his questions.

  “When I felt satisfied that I had done as much with this little pet of mine as I could, I brought it to my commanding officer. Immediately he asked me if I had told anyone else. Anyone at all. He told me not to. He said I was to finish my shift as normal and go back to my quarters like any other day and keep my mouth shut, for Chrissakes. He really stressed that part. Don’t say a goddamned word. To anybody. So I kept to myself and finished my shift and I went to my room.”

  Lamar sat up in his chair and leaned forward, placing his elbows onto his knees and weaving his eager fingers together in front of him.

  “And that’s when I met the General.”

  Gabriel nearly choked on his whiskey. “You met the General?” he coughed. “THE General?”

  “He was sitting at my desk, in my chair, in my quarters! And he asked me to sit with him, to show him my pet. I did. With the handful of computers I had there in my room, I showed him how the virus could be introduced and spread, and how I could consequently control or disable those infected machines from my own desktop.

  “I expected astonishment. I expected him to be impressed. But he told me I wasn’t quite there yet. This child of mine, that I had built of nothing, that I had nurtured, that I felt was just as perfect as could be, was only half-complete. But its potential was undeniable, not just for its ability to control or disable machines on the other side of the world, but also for its ability to covertly place misinformation into the computers, and the minds, of our enemies. Whoever they were.

  “I fell into silence, stunned.

  “And then he asked me the last question I could ever have imagined him asking. He said, ‘Lamar, do you like sci-fi? Books? Movies?’”

  Lamar stopped for a second to allow himself a large, nearly childish smile. Nostalgia can be a powerful force, and it was chiseled heavily onto his brow as he faded away and then back again.

  “I said yes. The General followed by asking me if I had noticed anything interesting about the various races of alien beings that were presented in these works, themselves just the imaginings of authors and producers and directors. Of course, I started listing physical attributes as they differed from our own. Wrinkly foreheads, abnormal skull shapes, skin color and texture, and so on.

  “He told me that these things did not matter.

  “These things were distractions.

  “It did not matter what they looked like, these foreign races. What technology they possessed. If they were inclined towards conflict. Or peace. Or ambivalence. What truly mattered was solidarity. He told me that every alien race, and every depiction of humanity’s future across the wide spectrum of all things sci-fi, fell into one of two categories. There were those races who worked together towards a common aim, as a whole, effective and purposeful… and those who were splintered into fac
tions, forever teetering on the brink of civil war, if not immersed in it completely. One society was successful and prosperous, and the other was not.

  “‘Now which of these two categories does the human race fall into?’ he asked me.

  “We were doomed to suffer, to fail. And I was unable to argue.

  “He explained that we would be inclined towards our own extinction for as long as we maintained the tools of our own segregation. Race. Religion. Government. Language. Money. History. All of these things were walls that we held in place every single day, and every day their weight crushed down on us a little bit more. The General said that he intended to remove these walls, and he asked if I might be interested in helping him to do that.”

  “An easy answer, I suppose,” said Gabriel. He was nearing the bottom of his glass, and the fuzziness was finding its way to him once more. “I guess the question was designed that way.”

  “The man could talk. No doubt. He had me from the get. And he never had to tell me that this was something I wouldn’t be able to leave. He never had to level any threats, or even imply them. He knew he had me.

  “The very next day I was reassigned to a new building. New living quarters. New faces. A new life. I had a large computer lab at my disposal. All mine. And I began really fine-tuning the monster I had created, finding ways to set parameters, to control it. To tame it.

  “Gradually I was introduced to more and more people who were working for the General, and slowly it sank in that we were no longer working for the United States of America at all. We were just using its resources to build something better. All of us worked in seclusion. Discreetly.

  “It was at this time that I became close friends with a young man named Eli, who had been working on a monster of his own, a powerful yet restrained electromagnetic pulse that could effectively shut down entire cities. Eli and me, we spoke the same language, you might say.