Hardbingers

2

"It's terrible, Jack. Terrible. So awful I can't believe. Like a knife in the heart it hurts. And you… how you must feel… unimaginable."

Jack could only nod.

Exhausted, he leaned on the scarred counter at the rear of the store, with Abe seated across from him. In a way he didn't understand, he took comfort in the familiar clutter, in the sound of Abe's voice, his proximity, his uncharacteristic mother-henning. This was a side of his old friend he'd never seen.

"Also you look terrible. You should be resting. And eating. Are you eating?"

Jack shrugged. "Not hungry."

"You must eat already. You'll collapse if you don't. I have cake. I'll make us some coffee and—"

"Food is the furthest thing from my mind, Abe."

"Some chicken soup then? I can go around the corner—"

"Please, Abe."

Silence hung between them.

Finally Abe said, "And the latest report?"

"Deepening coma for Gia, Vicky's still seizing off and on. And it wasn't an accident."

Abe's pale, never-seen-the-sun skin blanched further.

"They were targeted? No, you've got to be wrong. Why on Earth should anyone want to hurt those two sweet people?"

Jack explained what he'd learned from Rasalom and the Lady.

Abe's expression went slack during the telling. He rubbed a pudgy-fingered hand over his face and continued on to the balding pate above it.

"All this time you've been blaming the other side, this Otherness thing."

"Exactly what the Ally wanted me to do. It wasn't just stripping my branches, it was heating me to the point where I'd do anything to get back at the Otherness."

"When all the while…"

"Yeah. My side was doing the shafting. But wait. It gets worse."

He pulled the NATO round from his pocket and set it upright on the counter.

Abe stared at it for a few seconds, then picked it up for a closer inspection. An instant later he stiffened, his head snapped up, and he stared at Jack with wide eyes.

"LaGuardia? These yeniceri schmucks did LaGuardia?"

Jack nodded. "That's where all the signs are pointing."

"But it's meshuggehV

"No. It's pragmatic."

God, he'd come to hate that word.

"The Ally has worked all this circumspectly, so much so that I still don't know how it managed Kate's and Tom's deaths. The Ladies know. I wish I could sit down with one of them for a couple of hours and find out."

"How would that help?"

"I guess you're right. The how doesn't really matter. It's the what that counts. And what the Ally has done is backfiring. Now I want to get back at it. Now I hate it more than the Otherness. I'm crazy mad enough to sign up with the Otherness."

"No."

"I need to get back at it, Abe. But how?"

Abe shrugged. "I should know how to take revenge on an amorphous cosmic entity? Like fighting air already. Besides, the rest of us need the Ally to keep out the Otherness."

Jack knew he was right.

"It's really got me, hasn't it."

"Yes. You can't join the other side, you can't even declare yourself a non-combatant, because you're not the type to sit idly by and watch everyone and everything you know destroyed."

Trapped. He wanted to scream, throw things, break things. But he held back. For Abe's sake. Not fair to decimate his stock.

"We may not like this farkuckt Ally, but we need it. And it needs you."

It needs you… that struck a chord in Jack. He'd been thinking along similar lines…

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Abe.

"How much of these can you get me?"

Abe scanned the list, nodding. "Some I have here, some I can get without too much trouble." He looked up at Jack. "You planning on starting a war already?"

"Yeah."

"You think you can beat this Ally?"

"No. But I need to get its attention."

"For what?"

"To make a deal."