Kill Switch

EPILOGUE

Head injury.

Yeah.

Another damn coma. Only two days this time. Lucky me? Not really. Actually, looking back on my life since joining the DMS I’m not really sure where my life falls in relation to the whole “luck” thing.

I woke up. I’m alive and my brain still works.

Hey, if you have your health you have everything, right?

Right?

I woke to news and heartbreak.

Montana Parker and Brian Botley had died in the battle at the Pier. They were gone. And it was touch and go for Sam Imura and Toys. The surgeons earned their pay keeping them both on this side of the dirt. Sam lost ten inches of intestine. Toys had some kidney and lung damage. Bunny was going to be in therapy for a long time. Maybe Top, too, but he’s tougher than the rest of us.

Violin came to visit me. She brought flowers and food. Harry Bolt came to visit; he brought flowers and food. Every-damn-body else at the DMS came to visit. They brought flowers and they ate most of the food. The president did not come to visit. He sent the vice president. He brought flowers but no food.

Junie spent half of each day in my room and half in with Toys. She was going to need a lot of help getting over it. Sure, it wasn’t her doing those things, but tell that to her, or Top or Bunny. Tell any of the dozens of people around the country who woke up to find themselves standing on rooftops surrounded by drones filled with smallpox. Cops, lawyers, doctors, and shrinks may never sort it out. Maybe historians will.

I tried watching it all on the news. There was one international story about a vicious fight that erupted among disparate factions who had recently set aside their political and religious differences to follow what they thought was a new prophet. When a holy plague failed to sweep across America there was a bit of a backlash. Right now we’re all watching as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and a dozen other groups gouge chunks out of the ISIL leadership. I’d like to think that they’ll gang up so hard that they’ll crush ISIL flat. I’d like to believe in Santa Claus, too.

But it’s fun to watch.

The retaliation by our own government was severe. Some say it’s too harsh, but I’ll see their outrage and raise a weaponized plagued aimed at our kids.

Church came to visit me. He brought cookies.

I said, “Please tell me that the Gateway technology’s not going to wind up going to another black budget group.”

“Aunt Sallie has assembled a team,” Church told me. “It’s being taken care of.”

“I don’t even want to hear about any of this going to FreeTech. None of it.”

Church nodded. “We’re on the same page.”

“Good.”

“Good,” he agreed. We sat for a long time in silence. He’d brought a box of Nilla wafers and a package of Oreos. We each had some.

“So,” I said, “are there still warrants out for us?”

“I’m happy to report that they’ve been withdrawn,” he said. He removed a letter from his jacket pocket. “And you might find this interesting.”

The stationery was remarkably crisp and was embossed with the presidential seal. The letter was a newly drafted and signed executive order for a revised charter for the DMS. I read it and whistled.

“What in the wide blue hell did you have to do to get POTUS to give you this?” I demanded. “It makes our old charter look like obfuscatory gibberish.”

“I didn’t even have to ask,” he said. “This was hand-delivered within twenty-four hours of the raid in Rancho Santa Fe. I had Bug share your radio and body-camera feed with the White House. They saw and heard everything.”

I almost smiled, but the stitches in my mouth turned it into a wince. “You took Bolton alive, right? What have you done with him?”

Church tucked the charter away, patted my leg, and left without answering.

Junie came in and crawled onto my bed and we held each other.

Dr. William Hu was in intensive care for two weeks. We all came to visit him. Once I got out of the hospital, Junie and I were there every day. Aunt Sallie flew out from Brooklyn. So did Bug. So did a lot of people. The bullet had done a lot of damage. They operated on him three times and he survived each procedure. He woke up on the fifteenth day and saw that I was sitting beside his bed. He looked at me. I looked at him. He licked his lips and I gave him some water out of a bendy straw.

“The… children…?” he asked, his voice as thin as a whisper. “The lights?”

“The lights stayed on,” I said. “We kept the monster in the box.”

Hu smiled and closed his eyes.

The machines around him started screaming.

The doctors and nurses came running; they pushed me out of the way. There was a lot of yelling. I stood in the hallway watching them fight to keep him alive. They fought every bit as hard as I’d fought Santoro. As Toys and Junie had fought. As Church and Violin had fought. As Harry had fought.

They fought and fought.

But you can’t win every battle.

No, you can’t.

Goddamn it, you can’t. I stood there, numb and empty, and for a moment I thought I heard Hu’s voice. I turned and caught a fleeting glimpse of him going through the fire door. He cut a look over his shoulder and gave me a sarcastic smirk. When I blinked the fire door was shut.

I leaned slowly against the wall.

Slid down.

Sat there while they switched off the machines one by one.

Everyone came to the funeral.

Even the president.

Church met him at the entrance to the chapel and would not move. I joined him. So did Top and Bunny, Toys, Junie, Aunt Sallie. All of us. Even Harry Bolt and Violin joined the blockade.

The president stood on the steps, surrounded by his Secret Service entourage and all of his people. Mr. Church did not say a single word. He didn’t have to.

After five long minutes the president shook his head and turned away. His motorcade drove away with all of the usual lights and sirens.

Deconstructing it all will take time.

If I thought it would be the trial of the century, I was wrong. None of the true facts ever got out. Harcourt Bolton, Senior, went away somewhere. Not sure where. The public thinks he’s dead. The Closers are all dead. The dream team from the Playroom are in a secure psychiatric facility. Harry Bolt had gone around the room smashing the sleeping capsules, and apparently that caused a short resulting in traumatic brain damage to each of the dreamwalkers. They’re still alive but they’re vegetables. God only knows what we can or should do to them. The guards at that facility and everyone on the staff have to wear those damn aluminum foil hats just in case. Maybe it will ultimately prove too costly to keep them. Too costly in too many ways. Personally? I’m sorry I wasn’t awake enough down in Bolton’s basement to put a bullet in each one of them. Would have simplified things. Might even have made me feel better, or achieve a sense of justice. Or something.

Those are not thoughts I share with Junie. Or even Rudy, who’s recovering from knee replacement and nose reconstruction. He says that he forgives me, but I haven’t managed yet to forgive myself. Nor has Circe forgiven me yet. Fair enough.

And as far as Prospero Bell? The official story is still that he died after he and his friend, Leviticus King, set fire to their school. No need to amend that story with troublesome facts. We know what happened. That’s enough.

For me, I can’t ever look at the world the same way. Sure, I know that the monsters I saw weren’t part of my world. But on the way to that world I saw things about this world that hurt me. Things that eat at me. I saw the end of the world. I saw what I would become as things fell apart. Or maybe might become. Which means what, exactly? Am I doomed to live out that future? Will some old Cold War bioweapon turn everything into a wasteland picked over by the hungry dead? Is that my reward for all these years of fighting? Is the future a fixed point that we travel to with the certainty of a bullet drilling a hot hole through the air toward a stationary target?

God, I hope not.

Mr. Church says he doesn’t believe in prophecy. He says it’s been wrong too many times. He says that nearly all of the prophets have been wrong. What do they call it in fiction? Unreliable narrators.

But I saw it. This isn’t a Ouija board. This was me standing ankle deep in blood. If that is what’s coming, can I stop it? Change it? Save it? If so, how? Do I stay on the clock and stay in the fight so that I’m poised and ready? How soon before that would drive me absolutely out of what’s left of my mind? Or do I throw the universe a curve and lay down my arms, turn my back, walk off? In that dark future I was still a soldier. What happens to the future if I stop being that? Will it change destiny or insure it?

Those are impossible questions to answer.

Time, as they say, will tell. But forewarned is forearmed. We know about the Lucifer 113 pathogen. Church is looking into it. He’s going to see what he can do to stop it from ever being released. Maybe I can help. Maybe I can go find the people involved and put bullets in their heads. As a public service, you understand.

Which opens another door of speculation. What if that was a fantasy of a damaged mind under great stress? I had a head injury, after all. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this was nothing more than a trauma-born hallucination. How does that give me license to go kill people?

You see the problem?

The Kill Switch may be gone, but I believe there is still a darkness coming. The question is how to hold a light to keep it from becoming absolute.

So where does that leave the world? This world, I mean. The world of now.

That’s a damn good question. In my darkest hours I wondered how many times we could be knocked down and still manage to get back onto our feet. There’s that old saying from the Japanese martial arts that’s a favorite of Mr. Church. Nanakorobi yaoki. Fall seven times, get up eight. It’s a great philosophy, but after a while it’s harder to make it work. The knees don’t want to flex, the back is too sore, the heart is heavy. What if you manage it one more time and they hit you again and drive you back down? And again? And again?

The Modern Man in my soul wants to stay down, to hide, to burrow into the sand so that no one else takes another swing. The Cop wants to figure it out, to lie low until he’s sure there are no more punches coming. Both effects are the same; whether fear or caution, the sad fact is that the bad guys have put you down on the deck and maybe this is the last time.

But the Killer in my soul — the Warrior, whatever it is I call him or he wants to be called — he sees it differently. He’s too primitive to give up. He operates on the level of immediate need. It’s live or die. It’s fight or die. It’s kill or be killed.

On a sunny Southern California day twenty-eight days after the God Machine fired, I came into the office to find Sam Imura there, walking carefully, looking pale and thin. The others drifted in and we went up to the deck to watch the ocean. I’d brought with me a whole sack full of sandwiches. There’s a guy named Jake Witkowski who has a food truck near the Pier and he invented a sandwich for me. Rudy says that these things are more dangerous than anything we face when we roll out as a team. The “Joe Ledger Special” is a homemade bacon cheddar brat, sliced open and topped with a steak patty with grilled pepper and onions, piled high with a homemade cheese sauce, homemade whiskey BBQ sauce, and crushed Fritos. Anytime I feel one of my arteries opening, I have Jake make me one of these. Food for the soul.

We all sat on the deck and ate them. Me and what was left of my team, my family. Ghost, too. It was a farewell dinner in a lot of ways. Brian and Montana were gone. Dr. Hu was gone. At least half of the DMS field agents had been adversely impacted by the Dreamwalking intrusions. A lot of them were dead. A lot of them had quit or asked for transfers to desk jobs. The whole DMS had collapsed down almost to the size it was when I first joined. We were a broken machine, and even with our new charter, none of us felt up to the task of fixing it. Maybe it would never be fixed. Maybe this was the end of us.

Echo Team was falling apart around me. Lydia had submitted her letter of resignation from the DMS and had accepted the job of head of security for FreeTech. And Sam…? He said that he wanted to go back to California for a while and spend time with his family while he healed. When I asked if he was going to come back to Echo Team, he said, “We’ll see.” Which I took to mean, “No.”

Things were coming to an end.

Or… maybe it was like chess. The pieces are removed from the board one by one but you still have to play the game with what you have left. I had Top and Bunny.

I hoped.

As I munched my sandwich I looked at some photos Harry Bolt had sent me from his cell phone. The kind of pictures tourists ask passersby to take. Harry seated at a table at a sidewalk café in Paris. Short, dumpy, silly, and ineffectual Harry Bolt. World’s worst spy. Son of a madman who nearly ruined the whole country. Seated at a table with a gorgeous brunette with dark eyes, a mysterious smile, and an outrageous hat. I showed the photo to the guys.

“Well, kiss my ass,” said Top.

Bunny looked at it, and shook his head. “No. That doesn’t fit inside my head.”

“Why not?” asked Sam. “Kid’s richer than God. He’s going to be a chick magnet.”

“But him and Violin?” asked Bunny, shaking his head. “Seriously?”

No one could believe it. We all had a beer to shake it off. One beer didn’t do the whole job, so we had another. And another.

Which is where Church found us.

He came and stood there, looking down at us, at what we were eating, at the rows of empty beer bottles, and then out to sea. Finally he took a thick stack of folded papers from the inner pocket of his suit coat and handed them to me. First-class plane tickets. Hotel and car rentals. My name was on the top one, then Junie, and then everyone. A hotel in Hawaii, right on the beach. The flight was for ten thirty tomorrow morning. We all looked at the tickets and then up at him, attentive as schoolchildren.

“The world will have to turn without you for a couple of weeks,” he said, then he turned and walked away. I caught up with him at the door.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “Look, Boss, I appreciate the gestures, but we can’t go off the clock now, we’re just getting back on our feet and—”

Church said, “When was the last time you took a vacation, Captain? You live at the beach but you don’t act like it. When is the last time you went swimming when it didn’t involve having a boat shot out from under you? When is the last time you took a day off when it didn’t involve a hospital stay? When is the last time you went fishing, played tennis, rode a bicycle, slept in a hammock, hiked in the mountains, played catch with your dog, spent unstructured time with the woman you love?”

I opened my mouth to reply but I had nothing to say.

“The war will still be here,” Church said quietly.

“But—”

“If I need you,” he said with a faint smile, “I’ll call.”

We were on the beach in Hanalei Bay on Kauai’s north shore.

Junie was wearing a string bikini that tested the limits of public decency. I was very okay with that. Twenty feet away Bunny was sprawled on a chaise lounge in a Speedo that I was less okay with. They don’t call them banana hammocks for nothing. Lydia was seated nearby, smearing her legs with oil. Top was in a chaise lounge, snoring quietly, a peach-colored fedora covering his face.

That was how it was and how it had been for day after gorgeous uncomplicated day. Dangerous drinks with little paper umbrellas. Lotion glistening on sun-dark skin. Tourist hats pulled low over dark sunglasses. To passersby we must have looked strange. Not one of us, not even Junie, was unmarked by the weapons of war. Knives and bullets, teeth and claws. People gave us strange looks and moved on. At least for the first few days. As our tans deepened and we became familiar faces there were more smiles directed our way. Fewer frowns. Parents didn’t pull their kids to another part of the beach.

We baked. We ate. We drank.

We relaxed, I think.

In the depths of the dark tropical nights, as the fragrant flowers perfumed the air, Junie and I made love. Sweet and slow and gentle. Afterward, sweaty and spent, I lay in her arms and listened to the world be the world. No gunfire, no screams.

On days like this one, though, as we all lay sprawled on chairs and towels, it seemed to me that we had crossed a line, reached a place, achieved a state. Relaxation isn’t really the right word. Peace, maybe. Or a calm before the next storm.

Church said that the war would still be there. He said that if he needed us he’d call.

My cell phone sat on the table beside my chair, day after day, and didn’t ring.

It did not ring.

Until it did.