Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss (2 page)

Voices rose up from it, echoing with the acoustics of the room below.

"What do you even want?" Lange recognized Eiberg. He sounded weary, frustrated, strung out. "Money? You'll be dead before you can spend it."

"Why do you care?" The voice that retorted was young, arrogant, hungry, mocking. "If it doesn't matter, then why are you here? Why waste your life protecting money that nobody even cares about?"

The answer came in the form of a fresh exchange of gunfire.

Walker held up a hand and started creeping slowly down the stairs.

There was a cry of pain from below. Lange hoped it wasn't Eiberg. Not when they'd just arrived. Not when they were so close.

"It's not about the money," Eiberg said. "This is all I have left. Duty. Protecting this place from scum like you."

"Fuck you!" A second voice. "I was all for leaving, but you shot Danny, you old fuck. You shot Danny!"

Perez started down slowly after Walker.

"Then go!" Eiberg shouted.

"I hope your duty is worth dying for, old man."

"It's the only thing worth dying for. Who we are is all we have left. It's all that matters. What we do now... it's our last chance, you know? The last thing we say to this bastard world before it's over. I was there. I mattered. And this is who I was."

There was a gunshot from below.

"Oh yeah, keep shooting at an old man, try to get money you can't even spend. That who you want to die as? I'm dying the way I lived, being a good cop. You at peace with dying as this person?"

Lange listened to the exchange and slowly slunk down along the wall. Was this who she was? It hadn't been. A cozy life. A pair of cats. A loving boyfriend. Goofy friends. That was the measure of her life, not protecting a city gone mad from itself. She shouldn't be here, she should be home with her George.

"Fuck you," the first voice below said. "You can sit here in the dark until the comet hits for all I care, old man. Me, I'm going to spend that time living. You ain't worth it."

"What about Danny?" the second asked.

"Fuck Danny." There was a pause. "Shit! Cops on the stairs!"

There was a pair of deafening bangs as Walker fired, then stumbled back against the stairs as he was hit.

"Fuck!" Perez said, backing up a step, shooting down through the doorway. "Fuck! Walker!"

Lange snapped out of her fugue. "What? Walker?"

Perez's head snapped around. "Those fuckers shot Walker!"

Lange stared down the stairs at her friend's still form. "Walker."

Perez turned back, both hands on his gun. "We can take 'em. Let's go."

"Why?" Lange asked.

"Why? They fucking shot Walker?"

"Yeah," Lange said, holstering her pistol. "But... what's it matter? I loved Bill, but... he died being a cop, right? What more could he ask for? It's like you said earlier. What's the point?"

"What's the point?" Perez's jaw dropped. "How about not being shot by some fucking skel in a bank vault?"

Lange couldn't help but chuckle. "All talk, right up to the end Perez. You can't even do nihilism right."

Perez stared at her, a look of disgust crossing his face. "Useless bitch. Fuck you then. The Blue Code still means something to me. Even if the rest of the world is going to shit, we watch out for our own, and that's what fucking matters."

Lange walked back through the lobby, back to the street, largely oblivious to the sound of gunfire behind her. Did it matter? If Walker had survived, he'd have died like everyone else, cowering in the dark, starving when the skies went dark if he wasn't lucky enough to be near enough to the comet's impact. Let him die like this. A hero. A cop. It was who he was.

She sat on the curb, watching the skies fill with smoke. Elsewhere in the city her brother officers were holding doomed lines against rioters and looters engaging in mindless violence and stealing things that they wouldn't have any use for. It wasn't futile. Not really. They were like Walker. Like Eiberg. Working for the chance at a good death, a clean death, the last pension they'd ever need.

Anger

Carson and Blake put their shoulders to the study's door, knocking it off of its hinges and tearing the security chain out of its casing. It was easy, almost surprisingly easy, even given how much they'd practiced, how much they'd planned for the moment. The timing was crucial.

"Gun!" Carson sprinted across the living-room, cross-checking the apartment's inhabitant with his baseball bat before the old man could even begin to rise out of his chair, before he could pick up the pistol in his lap.

Blake was beside him in an instant, grabbing the gun, pulling it from the old man's reach. The old man was lucky that he hadn't gotten to him first; the normally staid and conservative IT manager had taken to their mission with a particular vicious enthusiasm. He had displayed a matter-of-fact attitude towards personal violence that gave Carson more than a little pause, but this was a new world now. People adapted to it in different ways, and who was he to judge?

Carson took a few steps away to cast a glance into the kitchen. He was, he supposed, the "cautious" one, and that restraint had served them well. It was, he believed, a twisted reflection of the dynamics they'd played out back when office politics had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Blake had been objective but absolute in monitoring employee computer use, and took a certain savage glee in meting out disciplinary action.

Carson hauled the old man up and into his chair, holding his arms against its back.

The old man seemed dazed. "What do you want?"

"Justice," Blake said, a wide grin on his face. "You're going to pay for what you've done, Representative Briar."

"I haven't done anything!"

Blake grabbed the man by the jaw, a curiously intimate gesture. "It's what you didn't do, you goddamn son of a bitch. What you didn't let anyone else do."

"Help!" the representative cried. "Peterson! Lawson!"

"Help! Help!" Blake backhanded the older man, the force wresting him from Carson's grip and sending him sprawling onto the floor. "It didn't take much to bribe your secret service agents to take the rest of the night off, Briar. Couple bottles of
Patrón
. Maybe they blame you, too. Maybe they just wanted to get drunk."

"So hard to find good help these days," Carson said, crouching next to Briar, hauling him back to his feet. "Anyone else around?"

"No." The old man sounded defeated. "No, it's just me now."

"You'll forgive me if we don't take you at your word." Blake checked the revolver's chamber, giving it a spin. "Watch him. I'll check the kitchen."

"Look in the flour," Carson said. "My grandmother always used to keep emergency money in a baggie in the flour jar."

"Your grandmother was weird," Blake said, departing.

Carson couldn't argue with that. She carried the Depression-era attitudes she'd grown up with for the rest of her life, squirreling money away, never trusting the banks, never trusting much of anyone, never throwing anything away. She'd raised him, infected him with her own attitudes, and a healthy respect for the capabilities of the elderly. He kept one eye on the old congressman while his gaze cast across the rest of the study.

Shelves lined the walls. Books lined the shelves. The Representative Briar was infamous for his anti-intellectual stances. Before he'd chaired the House Subcommitte on Space, he'd been on the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, and gained national attention for broad budget cuts that had defunded public schools in low-income areas.

"You a big reader?" Carson asked. "Yeah, I bet you're a really big reader. It's your fault my little brother's school library hasn't gotten any new books since 1996."

He was acutely aware of the old man watching him. He tensed, but the old man's gaze wasn't anticipatory. It wasn't fearful.

Carson and Blake had brought their particular brand of justice to three other members of the committee before they'd mustered up the courage to come to Briar directly. The others had been junior representatives, worried by the riots, holed up somewhere secure, but relatively unprotected. Representative Summers had been terrified, crying the whole time -- though he supposed that was largely Blake's fault, and whatever it was he'd been saying while Carson had been raiding the pantry and kitchen. She'd been an absolute wreck when he returned to the bedroom, though Blake insisted that he hadn't laid a finger on her. Carson believed him, and somehow that made it worse.

Their second practice run, Carson had volunteered to watch Representative Simmons and his wife while Blake went scavenging. Simmons was a beefy guy, aggressive, but Carson had felt secure in his baseball bat. When the big man had made his move -- and Carson had just known that he would -- he reacted without thinking, swinging the wooden bat against the side of his skull. They'd left him there, unconscious but breathing, in the care of his hysterical wife.

Carson didn't know if he'd recovered. He didn't know if he was a murderer. He tried not to think about it.

Representative Briar, however, didn't seem afraid, and it didn't look like he was going to try and escape or attack. He just seemed... curious. His silent scrutiny made Carson more uneasy than the Simmons' hostility had.

"This your daughter?" Carson tapped a photo of the old man, an old woman, and a younger woman in a graduation gown.

"Melanie. My granddaughter," the old man said. "She's about your age."

"She live here?"

"Florida," the old man said.

Carson's lips drew thin. He hadn't really cared. He didn't want to humanize this man, this killer of billions.

The old man spoke again after a few moments of silence. "You've done this sort of thing before?"

"Oh yeah," Carson ran a finger along the spines of the books in front of him. "I'm a pro. Stone cold. "

"What did you do before this?"

"Worked in an office," Carson said, not sure why he was humoring the old man. He could handle the fear. He could handle the anger. But the almost conversational way Briar was engaging him... it didn't make sense, and it made him wary. He didn't know if the silence was more unnerving.

"Making friends, Carson?" Blake asked, returning to the living room. "You know your new buddy here is a psycho?"

"What?"

"Guy killed his wife." He thumbed back the way he'd come. "She's in their bed, wrists slit."

"Heidi killed herself," the old man said quietly.

"You just left her there?" Carson turned away, back to the books, filling his mind with their titles. The third representative they'd hit... a few weeks ago stumbling on suicides like that would have shocked him, terrified him, turned his stomach. Now though, now it just seemed normal. Like killing yourself was a perfectly rational course of action. According to the news, a lot of people appeared to agree. Not that he could take that course himself. His grandmother had instilled in him an irresistible will to survive.

The old man looked down at his hands. "I've been trying to decide whether or not to join her."

"She's been there a few days," Blake said.

"It hasn't been an easy choice."

Blake clucked his tongue sympathetically and put a boot on the old man's coffee table. "You religious? Afraid you'll go to hell?"

He shook his head. "It's more complicated than that."

Blake pulled the revolver out and leveled it at the old man. "Let me simplify it for you."

"Jesus, Blake," Carson turned from the books.

"It's cool," Blake said. "If the old man wants to die, I'll do it. Never killed anyone before."

The old man spoke slowly, but there was no fear in his voice. "No. I don't think I do."

Blake smirked. "You let your wife kill herself, and you don't even want to follow her? You some kinda coward? You know you deserve it."

"We'll all be following her soon enough," he said. "No need to hurry."

Carson felt a sudden panic welling up in his chest. How could he just... say it like that? Like it was nothing?

Blake looked put off, too. He put the revolver away. "Whatever. I'm going to go look for the old man's safe."

"There's no safe," the old man said. "All our savings were in the bank. Doesn't matter now, though."

Carson turned back to the books.
Slaughterhouse 5, Brave New World, Stranger in a Strange Land...

"Why are you doing this?" the old man asked. "What do you want?"

"Who's going to stop us?" Blake asked. "We can do anything we want. There aren't any consequences. And you know you deserve it."

"So it's revenge?" Briar asked. "What's the point?"

Carson sat on the sofa across from him, flipping through a copy of
Crime and Punishment
. "You deserve it. You. You did this. It's your fault. Blake and me, we were in the financial districts when the riots hit. Sorta got swept into it, and for awhile we just went along with it. Broke into a few stores, stole a new television."