Point and Shoot (3 page)

Seej was in the living room, holding up an imaginary gun-sword thing and blasting and slashing away digital opponents on a flat screen. Hardie had no idea what the boy was playing. The last video game he could remember the kid playing, more than a decade ago, was something involving Italian plumbers and giant magic mushrooms. What the hell kind of game involved a gun and a sword? If a gun didn’t do the job, did you really need the sword to finish off the bad guy? And why slash at him with a sword if you’ve got a gun at your disposal?

Still the boy was enraptured. Nothing real, except the sick delight on his face. You could tell when he got off a particularly gory shot, because his eyes lit up in a certain way. Partly appalled, partly amused. Much as Hardie didn’t want to admit it, he looked like the kind of kid who might shoot up a school someday.

This was Charlie Hardie’s family. Right there in front of him. Flesh and blood, living their lives, struggling with their problems.

Utterly unreachable.

For the past nine months, Charlie Hardie’s life boiled down to mind-numbing routine. Open eyes. Crawl out of the harness that held him in place while he tried—and failed—to sleep. Evacuate bladder in a separate harness setup—which up here entailed a seventeen-step process. Climb over to the control panels. Check the levels, comparing the numbers against the ones in the manual, even though he knew them by heart. Stand to eat a bland meal, because sitting made his stomach hurt too much. Wash self with moistened towelettes. Do sit-ups and pedal an ergometer to get strength back. Push the same sequence of buttons again. And again. And again. A monkey could do this. But they didn’t want any old monkey.

They wanted a monkey named Charlie Hardie.

It had been a year since Charlie Hardie
almost
shot that nice woman in the face.

And every day in this cramped-ass satellite, Hardie thought about what life would have been like if he
had
shot that woman in the face. Probably would have been short. As in “a few seconds long” short—because if he’d killed that woman, her armed minions would have blasted the meat from Hardie’s bones with a dazzling array of heavy artillery. A few seconds may even be generous.

Instead Hardie had agreed to not shoot the woman in the face, and to surrender to the Cabal and pretty much do their bidding.

The Cabal … oh, they had so many names. When Hardie first encountered them, he knew them as the Accident People who worked for the Industry. Back then they’d nearly killed him … but he’d hurt them bad, too, scuttling a deal worth billions and
really
pissing them off. So much so that the incident (a) stole five years of Hardie’s life, and (b) stuck him in a secret prison and forced him to be the warden. Needless to say, this really pissed
Hardie
off. So when Hardie finally busted out he set out to destroy the three known members of Secret America—which is what the inmates in that prison called the Industry.

But when Hardie asked the nice lady he almost shot in the face what they called themselves, she chuckled and said, “Call us the Cabal.”

Hardie wanted to crack a joke like, “Kebob? As in chunks of meat on a stick?”

But it was hard to make a joke with so many guns in your face, ready to end your life in a fusillade of lead.

Oh, Hardie had tried. Just before finding himself in an unwinnable standoff, he had embarked on a mission of blood-splattered revenge. It was, to be honest, kind of a mixed bag. The first leader of the Cabal? Killed without a hitch. You might even go so far as to call that a smashing success. The second leader? Hardie thought he’d killed that son of a bitch, but it turned out that he had survived after all. Maybe. It was all kind of unclear. And the third leader?

Well, that was the nice lady he
almost
shot in the face but didn’t.

Which brought them to their current arrangement. In exchange for a year of indentured servitude, the Cabal promised Hardie that the slate would be wiped clean. The Cabal would not actively seek to kill Hardie, and they would not seek to send the Accident People after his estranged wife and son. That’s all Hardie wanted, of course. To have the threat of death finally removed from the heads of Kendra and Charlie Jr. So Hardie had lowered the gun and agreed to work for the Cabal.

We just want you to guard something, they said. That’s what you do, right? You guard stuff?

Yeah, Hardie said, I guard stuff.

Only they didn’t tell Hardie he’d be guarding something in
freakin’ outer space.

Okay: “low earth orbit.”

Same damned thing, Hardie thought.

The very idea of it sounded insane. But the Cabal insisted that it was not only possible but practical, too. Certain things were way too valuable to keep on the surface of the earth, where they could be hacked or dug up and breached in countless ways. For as long as people had scuttled across the planet, they had been devising countless ways to steal the possessions of others. For total security, you had to remove the planet from the equation.

That required some expensive technology—but in the long run, it was not as expensive as maintaining an ultra-secure facility planet-side. Once you shot the thing up into low earth orbit, you could be assured that only organizations with the resources of the Cabal could get up there, too. And no one had the resources of the Cabal.

But you also needed a human presence, because machines, no matter how well built, could malfunction. Hence the need for a guard.

Hence the need for Charlie Hardie.

Hardie shifted his body in the cramped space near the monitor, trying to stretch his sore body, get the blood flowing. He forgot his pains, though, when he saw his family.

On screen, Kendra cracked eggs into a glass bowl to prepare the batter for French toast. Hardie was instantly hurled back in time, a decade ago, watching her do the same thing on a Sunday morning, back when she
was
his wife. Same glass bowl. Same stainless steel whisk. Same plug-in electric fryer on the countertop, passed down from her mother. The sight of the familiar kitchen gear made it feel like they were still married, still together.

He knew they weren’t legally married anymore. Too much time had passed. If she were smart—and Kendra was the smartest woman he knew—she would have declared him legally dead and collected an insurance payout.

Even if Hardie were somehow able to magically teleport himself down to the surface of the earth, inside that kitchen, what would she say? Their last days together, those years before all that madness in L.A., had been awkward and painful and tense. Back then, Hardie swore that if you could somehow liquefy and bottle Kendra’s angry glares, you’d have the most potent weed killer on the market. He’d ask what was wrong. Kendra’s mouth would say,
Nothing, I’m fine
. But her eyes would say,
I hate you with every fiber of my being
.

Kendra left the kitchen. The camera should have cut away to the dining room, but it didn’t. Which was strange.

Whoever was in charge of giving Hardie his daily dose of family time was usually pretty good about making sure those few minutes were worth it. Hardie couldn’t help but wonder how often the same person—male or female—watched over Kendra and the boy the rest of the day. Was it constant surveillance, or just the occasional check-in to make sure they were still alive and thus useful to the Cabal? Was this person a perv? Did he or she watch Hardie’s family in his/her spare time?

Usually Hardie couldn’t think thoughts like these—not with him trapped in low earth orbit and unable to do a thing about it.

But sometimes he spoke aloud to this mysterious Watcher, on the off-chance he or she could hear.

Which he knew was ridiculous, because this was a one-way transmission—they had stressed that during his training. We’ll be able to monitor you through various sensors, but don’t bother talking to us. And fuck you very much!

Still Hardie couldn’t resist.

“Come
on
.”

He spoke out loud just to reassure himself that he had a voice. He almost wished he could time travel back about a year and visit himself in that lousy secret prison and tell himself,
Look, buddy, at least you’ve got people to talk to. Even if they are crazy. So enjoy it while supplies last
.

Hardie would say all kinds of things to himself.

You know how screwed you are, Chuck
?

Chuck. Always Chuck. Nobody in real life called him anything but Hardie, and that would have included Kendra most times. But after he was almost shot to death nearly nine years ago, the media decided that he was Unkillable Chuck. And he was up in this tin can, still alive. So he must be Chuck.

Right, Chuck?

How we doing there, Chuck?

Morning, Chuck, you big asshole.

How’d ya end up in a satellite anyway, Chuck
?

There was only one way up to the satellite. You basically had to own a rocket, possess the technology to dock with the satellite, then force your way into the orbiting craft—which was not much bigger than a Honda Odyssey. But
if
… and this was a HUGE
if
… you could manage to clear all of these hurdles, then there was one last fail-safe:

Charlie Hardie would be waiting for you, ready to point and shoot.

The only entranceway—a long tube that didn’t feel much wider than a hula hoop—was lined with machine guns. If you stepped inside and Hardie pulled the dual triggers, you would be cut to ribbons, then jettisoned back the way you came, along with your intruding craft. In lots and lots of chunky, frozen pieces.

Hardie almost
wished
someone would try to break in, just so he’d have something interesting to do. Instead he languished inside a satellite parked 166 miles above the surface of the earth—passing over the United States, according to one monitor.

What was so important about this satellite? Hardie has no idea. But his life had boiled down to three duties: (a) press a few buttons to perform simple maintenance, (b) keep himself alive, and (c) shoot anyone who showed up.

Hardie still didn’t fully understand why he’d been chosen for this particular mission.

I’m no astronaut
, he told them.

That’s fine, they told him. We don’t want an astronaut. We want
you
.

Why?

You’re a survivor. We realized this when you survived what happened in L.A. five years ago. This was confirmed when you managed to work your way out of an escape-proof prison facility. It’s you we want. But first, we have to make a few modifications.

Yeah.
Modifications
.

You see, astronauts typically remain in orbit up to six months. Any longer than that exposes the astronaut to weakened bones due to loss of gravity and exposure to solar and cosmic radiation. (Not to mention the psychological stress of being so far from any other human being for so long.) But they claimed to have procedures that would limit the risks. Hardie wanted to know what they were going to do to him; they more or less flatly refused to tell him any detail.
Proprietary secrets
, they said.
Fuck you, it’s my body
, you said.
Is it really
? they said. And they had a point.

All he knew is that after surgery, his head had ached for a really long time. And more or less hadn’t stopped hurting since then, as if they’d sawed open the top of his skull, moved some stuff around, and then put his head back together a millimeter or two
off
.

Anyway, that had been nine months ago; there were three to go on his contract. Besides the hellish confined spaces and the constant low-grade headache, it wasn’t complete misery. There were perks. In addition to Hardie’s family being permitted to live, he was allowed to watch them for a few minutes a day, via secret cameras inside Kendra’s rented home just outside Philadelphia.

Each transmission from Earth was torture and relief at the same time. Hardie supposed that’s what ghosts must feel like. Watching your loved ones live out their lives while you were completely powerless to affect them. Hardie began to suspect that watching these little snippets of his family every day had driven him insane. But what was he supposed to do? Stop watching?

After his contract was up, he would (supposedly) be allowed to return to them.

Hardie didn’t believe this for a minute. The lizard cop voice inside his head told him that this would never happen.
They will kill you after this job is over. They will kill your family, too
… So Hardie knew he had only three months left to figure out a plan to escape, rejoin his family, then disappear with them. That, of course, was presuming his wife and son would want anything to do with him.

Still the faithful husband
, his nemesis had once told him.
Which is really impressive, considering how long since you’ve seen them
.

For now Charlie Hardie’s life was simply mind-numbing routine in a super-confined space. And the occasional pleasure of watching his ex-wife make breakfast.

But now Hardie was staring at the surveillance image of an empty kitchen. He tried to project his thoughts across the atmosphere and straight down into his ex-wife’s head in Philadelphia. Come on, Kendra. Just walk back into the kitchen for something. You forgot something, didn’t you? Maybe you didn’t turn off the fryer? Give me something. Anything.

But there was nothing.

Seej, where are you? Don’t you want to raid the fridge for a post-breakfast snack? The boy, who was pretty much now a man (as much as Hardie didn’t want to admit it), was lean and strong and ate like a trucker. Whereas Kendra seemed to consume small, birdlike portions, Seej could put away the provisions for the working staff of an entire farm. And then be hungry again for lunch by midmorning. He looked nothing like his father, but he ate like him.

So, c’mon. You must be hungry again, Seej. Let me see you. Or have you gone out somewhere? Maybe to meet a friend? Or a girlfriend?

But there was nothing.

After another few minutes of nothing, the transmission came to an end. Hardie was beginning the process of unstrapping himself when—