Cast Of Shadows

– 71 -

Mickey the Gerund pulled the last job of his career in Seattle, blowing up a doctor, her husband, and their two college-age sons as they drove to dinner. Although he used them sparingly early in his missionary career, there was something about bomb-making he’d grown to love. He taught himself about explosives and timers and triggers, and so there was some DIY satisfaction in that. There was also the permanence of a bomb. A bomb is instantaneous and forever. Guns and knives create wounds that can be undone. A doctor can look at the knife and see where it entered the flesh, and he can sew it together again. But a bomb takes things apart – both lives and property – in a magical, secret way, and every char and shrapnel it creates is unique. If you knew how to ask it, the bomb might be able to tell you how to put it all back together, but – and here’s the elegance of it – the bomb destroys itself first.

Mickey knew the Seattle job might kill a few innocents, if you could call people who ate expensive meals and enjoyed Ivy League educations paid for by the business of cloning “innocent.” That had stopped being a dilemma for him long ago. This was a righteous cause, and for the cause they were fighting and winning, in no small part due to his willingness to kill “non-combatants.”

Some polls showed more than fifty-five percent of Americans considered themselves “anti-cloning.” There was more ambivalence over the use of cloning techniques for medical research and so forth, but on the subject of human reproductive cloning, the public was sending Congress a clear message, and although the wheels turned slowly in Washington, there was a fair chance they would pass the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act in the next few years.

Mickey sat on the end of a queen bed in an Idaho motel room and cleaned his gun. There was plenty more he could accomplish with this rifle and this box of wires and the leftover C-2 explosive, but it was time for him to retire. His back hurt from all the miles upright on the road. His head hurt from the meticulous planning. All his life he’d remained three steps ahead of everyone, but he didn’t want to think ahead anymore. He wanted to meditate on the present for a change. To enjoy a sunny day without having to worry about the consequences of nightfall. To drive his car without running away. To plant and care for a real garden, with lilies and tulips and vegetables. To give birth to a yard of grasses and flowers and fruits, and let it feed on the sun. Watch it mature. That would be a fitting retirement for him. A celebration of God-granted creation.

He cleaned his gun out of habit, but this time it was more like a wipe-down. Before the sun came up he would throw the barrel overhand into the Arrowrock Reservoir, and later that day he’d toss the stock in a bend in the Snake River, and that would be the end. Back to Ohio for a life of prayer and contemplation in his house turned church turned monastery. If the Hands of God wanted to send someone else to the front lines until the war was over for certain, then so be it. He had fought bravely and fought well, and like a good covert soldier, he could never have a single body traced back to him.

That night, Mickey prayed for the souls he had saved with his bullets and bombs. Those souls were his responsibility and he remembered the names of every one he had set free from an infected body. With Mickey as their shepherd, they had stepped out of one car, in which they had sinned, and into another car, in which they could be saved.