The Cause (29 page)

I tilted my headlamp to my shoulder and saw blood seeping
through my shirt. The wound wasn’t deep, but the blood kept flowing, dripping down on my boot.

“It should leave a nice trail,” he said.

The light passed underneath him once more. He looked like a glassy reflection in a river eddy—me at the river the morning after I had drowned Burns, a man not entirely of this world, a man about to leap for the Lushing Tree, a man ready to climb Jacob’s Ladder from the sandy Pit. I put my hand to the wound, and applied pressure, asking myself how I could pull the trigger on a man birthing an idea that might actually change the world.

“Are you fucking crazy?” I yelled out to him, reaching out and pushing his gun out of my face. “This is not a game!”

“The State needs a head. The media needs a hero. Let’s not let them jackoff to a huge search where I’ll end up dead anyway. Let’s do this on our own terms. I will not be a prisoner to anyone.” With his knife, he stroked each cheek, making streaks of red, a war-painted face. “I know this is no game, but this is game-over if it doesn’t get done.”

I waved my flashlight over his eyes to blind him from my expression. “Why did you let me live knowing my motivations coming into The Abattoir?”

“You came in with preconceived ideas. You knew nothing of The Cause. You were a traitor then, but you aren’t one now. Everyone knows it. Everyone has seen it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that.”

Tires swished by on a road from the world above. Way off in the distance, some drunk howled at the wind. Down in the darkness of the sewer, the steady sound of the stream flowed through the pitch-black corridor.

His tone softened as he grabbed ahold of the barrel of my pistol and pointed it at his chest. “One of the hardest things in life is having to say goodbye to someone you love. In this score, we are brothers. I appreciate that it will be you if it makes any
difference.”

I thought of my father squirming on the ground after I shot him, after I had taken off his mask, after I had thrown my gun long and far across the parking lot. He asked the impossible. “This doesn’t have to be done.”

“If you look at it clearly, you’ll see that not only does it have to be done, but it has to be you.”

He pushed his chest against the barrel. “Pull the trigger. It’s what you’ve wanted? Now is your chance.”

“I’ve given up that chance. It’s not what I want at all.”

“It’s not what we’re going to make them believe.”

With my gun against his chest, I felt his fingers over the trigger guard. Like his every move, reason and intent stood behind it—cold calculation, rational thought in the midst of stormy emotions. A memory of Drew Gareth being shot by the map man flashed in my mind, Seee standing there without even blinking an eye.

“How are we going to make them buy such a story?” I asked.

“We’ve left a trail for you. Messages to Pelletier. You are no longer at The Abattoir. You’ve been on my tail now for a while. You knew about Jackson Hole. You texted it to them a few minutes after it started happening.”

He tilted his head back and laughed. “You, my friend, are a patriot.”

Strained lines furrowed deep in his pallid face. He spoke with the voice of the earth, graveled and fading, light dimming in his eyes. A realization dawned in him that these were his last minutes, that they would be spent with me, that I was the man standing in front of him whom he was going to say goodbye to. His lips were void of color, a breathlessness rising to the surface. Flesh on his face thin, like snakeskin ready to peel away.

“Tonight is Second Sight,” he said. “My leap of faith. I die either way. The only question is will you help me?”

I paused to think. He kept silent, running his flashlight
against the walls of graffiti. My mind tried to penetrate his, discover how time moved for martyrs, men lingering in the womb about to be birthed to another world. His facial features became more oblong as he yawned in the artificial light, as if casting a shadow upon himself. But I realized he wasn’t stretching his jaw out of fatigue. My procrastination caused him anxiety, so finally I agreed, submitting to his final wish.

He explained how things would proceed, pouring it out in a stream of sentences. He told me my alibi, where I was and at what times, how it would be conclusive evidence of my patriotism. He gave me a phone and a key, told me what they were for. When he was about finished, I stopped him. Out of my backpack I dug out my photo of the Earth. I tilted my head and held it up so he could see it. Our headlamps illuminated it, brought it out of the darkness. There it was—the aqua-planet, suspended in space, a sky full of clouds whirling over a cerulean ocean. He remarked he had never seen anything so beautiful. I gave him the photo. He fingered it, felt the frayed white edges, the folds, the deep furrows within the glossy surface. As he took it, he said, “Sometimes it isn’t easy being brave.”

I squeezed his shoulder, and then we moved out of the double-barreled tunnel and into the starry night, the air weightless and misty. A strong breeze blew over my face, a Mojave wind torched with the desert heat. My feet seemed to be moving in slow motion, not really believing what was happening. A golf course on the right, we paused gazing out behind the concrete wall of a runoff drain for any groundskeeper in the area. On the other side of the fence, Las Vegas Boulevard bustled, two lanes of traffic to thread through to get to the other side.

He told me to give him a two-second head start, then he ran forward. The rattle of the chain-link fence rung in my ears as he scaled it. He was almost over when I sprinted forward. My heart thumped in my chest, a hammering force, a giant’s footsteps. My
fingers slipped into the parallelograms of the fence and I was climbing. Looking up at the sky, the world felt alien, the neon glow of Vegas clouding up Orion in a gas of carnival colors. At the top of the fence, I glassed the tunnel, the darkness inside deep and massive. Gravity pulled me back to it, but my feet hit the pavement, and I bolted across Las Vegas Boulevard afraid I would lose him. The Mandalay Bay towered to my left. Over the street the
Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas
sign
sparkled
, the star atop of it blinking in raucous colors of orange and red. Yellow lights outlined the heart-shaped sign, an artery of bulbs racing around it and flowing into a ventricle. I heard the sound of jazz coming from across the street. A throng of tourists was out there for a free twenty-dollar giveaway, pulling on one-armed bandits, relics with the lever on the side.

Seee hurdled a small green fence, taking it in stride as I gained on him. A ribbon of dust whirled in the air, a tiny maelstrom of dry desert hardpan gobbled by the wind. I saw him pull his gun out of his pants—slowly, deliberately, as if he wanted to make every instant count. I hurdled the fence, yanked my Glock out of my jeans and fired two shots well clear of his shoulders.

Screams from the crowd.

Panic.

The future is Turbulence.

The smell of tar in the air, blowing all the way from the north Salt Lake City salt flats. The idling highwaymen in orange jumpers smoking cigarettes. Steel-toed boots hot on the asphalt, the highway bouncing up and down in my vision, the blinking lights of the Vegas sign bursting in my eyes.

Man. Machine. The real world. The Underworld.

All of them crashing down. The squeal of a horn passed behind me. The word asshole coming from the car, dragging in the wind in a rippled Doppler effect. Panting breath—hot, hot, hot under the beaming moon. Shadowy craters, scoops of rock
and moon dust cut out of the crust, a face pocked by meteors over eons.

The crowd still scampering away, except for a man near the Vegas sign post. Planted there like a root. His phone out recording the incident. Behind one of the old slots, another head popped up recording the scene. Two eye-witnesses.

And then Seee was there, in the special spot we agreed upon, in the middle of the sign ten yards out. I stopped and leveled the Glock, closed an eye and peered down the sight, a palm under my shooting hand to keep the gun steady. He whirled around and fired a shot. I pulled the trigger, my finger still squeezing as the bullet yanked Seee backward. I shot twice more before he hit the ground.

Yelling. Stopped traffic. Blaring horns.

I kept the gun lowered to the ground and walked forward. People out of their cars. The wail of a siren.

I moved above him to see if he was still alive, if my shots had failed to hit their mark. But he was dead, a wide stare in his eyes, one not of shock, but of expectation, a plutonic expression of stoicism that said he welcomed the other world, that he had done everything he could in this one. Crumpled in his open palm was the photo of the Earth. A strong urge came to pick it up and pocket it. I stood there biting my lip as the breeze took it. It rolled around the dust for a few feet before it stopped. I let my gun fall out of my hand, and it thudded to the ground. I dropped to my knees as the sirens got louder. My hands went up in the air as the breeze picked up the picture once more. I watched it dance its way back over Las Vegas Boulevard. I had done my duty for him, a patriot in his eyes, yet a traitor in my own. I was Cerberus, the three-headed hound from Hell—patriot, traitor, and the gray in between.

A heartfelt thanks has to go to Robert Barclay who has supported me throughout, giving me sage advice and suffering through the beginning years. Thanks to Charlie Boodman, who got me started in this game and helped me become a better writer. Martin Fletcher, for his developmental edit, another big thanks to my main editor, Elizabeth White, and finally a warm thanks to my copy editor, Dominic James who was very patient with me. Sarah Reckefuss encouraged me, became my number one fan, and broke out her limited rolodex to help. Then there was Margaret Harmer at
ShiftingWaves.com
, the dream maker helping out with my vision for a book trailer. Thanks to my other beta readers: Amanda Callendrier, Massimo Marino, Fraser Grant. There are numerous people to thank in the Geneva Writers Group. A special thanks to Susan Tiberghien who runs it. Thanks to the Geneva International Book Club (Andy, Mehran, Helen) and Goodreads friends Stacey, Linda, Jenny, Amber, Chris, among others.

Roderick Vincent is the author of the
Minutemen
series about a dystopian America. He has lived in the United States, England, Switzerland, and the Marshall Islands. His reviews and short stories have been published in
Ploughshares
blog,
Straylight
(University of Wisconsin, Parkside) and
Offshoots
(a Geneva publication).

For more information, to sign up for the email list (email not shared, has “unsubscribe” feature), or to connect with him, check out
roderickvincent.com
or find him on Goodreads in his Fiction Threads Goodreads Group (formerly Trauma Novels). Other places to find him are:

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https://twitter.com/R_D_Vincent
)
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www.facebook.com/roderick.d.vincent
)
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www.neoworldview.com
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If you feel inclined, please do an Amazon or Goodreads review. Reviews are increasingly more important as the publishing industry undergoes a wave of change. The author would truly appreciate it.

The CIA regularly subcontracts to consultants. For example, they contracted SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) instructor Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns and Dr. John Bruce Jessen (whose handwritten notes described torture techniques). The two later formed Mitchell, Jessen & Associates which taught SERE courses (SV-91). According to
truth-out.org
, Jessen and Kearns worked on “a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation.” These special mission units fall under DoD clandestine Joint Special Operations Command. The Abattoir is not so different with its advertised mission, although quite different with its intended one. It is not a CIA black site, but rather one owned and operated by the contractors, and its location is kept secret even from its CIA employers. While the character Seee was not based on Kearns, there is the similarity that people graduating from Kearns’ courses were sent around the world on secret, covert missions much like the type of agents bred at The Abattoir. Unlike Kearns and Jessen, who appear to have fallen out, the characters Hassani and Seee worked together intimately from the beginning for The Cause.

The term “battle lab” (used by Seee in the chapter with Tongueless Downs) was used by Guantanamo officials Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/205:exclusive-cia-psychologists-notes-reveal-true-purpose-behind-bushs-torture-program

NSA Terms—Stellar Wind has been associated with the NSA’s Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah (
http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
). From Wikipedia, the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations is “a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the NSA” (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations
). Turbulence is a cyber-warfare
program within the NSA started in 2005 and might or might not be ongoing (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence_%28NSA%29
). StormBrew is another Internet surveillance NSA program (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORMBREW
). Its usage in
The Cause
by Montgomery is fictional, but one can imagine there are certain ways to “control” the Internet.

611 Folsom Street in San Francisco is the true location of the AT&T Building where fiber lines converge. According to “The Shadow Factory” by James Bamford, this is where the NSA has a little room off to the side called the SG3 Secure Room. For more information, see (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
).

The DARPA BigDog is made by Boston Dynamics, which has subsequently been bought by Google. Google plans to honor the remainder of its DARPA contracts (whatever that means). One can find information on the BigDog here: (
http://www.bostondy-namics.com/robot_bigdog.html
)