GWOT Processing Feelings

[drewkitty]

GWOT Processing Feelings


I am digging a pit at the base of Boot Hill. Note: not on the slope. At the base. This is important.

No one is helping me. That's OK. Even if some of them are clearly motivated by a desire not to be classified as accessories after the fact.

There is a body wrapped in blue tarps next to me. He used to be one of my guards. Now he's a corpse. This is a positive change for once.

It's amazing how much hard work is involved in digging a hole. You occasionally have to pry up rocks.

I am so very furious that I really don't care.

Yesterday, someone set off a truck bomb at my site. I came within moments of being killed several times.

That's not why I'm pissed.

Several people died. Some of them quite horribly.

That's not why I'm pissed either. My dead meat button is broken. It was pushed in San Mateo, broke off at Stanford, and was lost somewhere between Redwood City and Mountain View on a day of nightmarish post checks where I mostly found bodies.

Now meat is just meat. If I unwrapped the tarp, I would see that the dead guard's left hand is a tangled mass of broken bone and shredded meat.

I did that. With an sledge hammer.

Autopsy would show that the dead guard's heart stopped due to extreme stress.

A careful forensic autopsy would also show that the heart was stressed by continuous application of my thumbs to his carotid arteries, well after he lost consciousness and before I started what I knew in advance would be totally ineffective CPR.

I murdered him. Everyone knows it.

Almost everyone is OK with it.

The man who is not OK with it just walked off the site after throwing his uniform shirt and badge at me.

"Fuck you, sir, I'm out. Going to shoot me in the back?"

"No, Dave, I'm not going to shoot you in the back. Let me get you your last check."

"Fuck you and fuck my last check. I. Am. Out. Of. Here."

And with that he shouldered his backpack, the same one that had contained his lunch on the morning of the Firecracker War, and walked off site with expert knowledge of the premises, the people and the pre-apocalyptic situation.

I really should shoot him in the back. Or call out so that he turns around, and then shoot him in the front. But I didn't.

I keep digging the hole. You don't shit where you eat, and you clean up after yourself. It is right and proper that I be the one to dig this hole, to drag the now-naked corpse into it, and shovel dirt over it.

Two weeks ago, I'd be arrested. Charged with murder. Criminally prosecuted.

There would be no homicide investigation. There hadn't been of the guards and worse yet, Employees murdered by the attackers - with the knowing help of the guard I'd murdered. The police had come out, taken a brief report, and rushed off to the next call. It was a measure of grudging respect for us that they had bothered to come out at all.

I had compromised my ethics slightly, by asking that the landscaping crew bring over a blade full of tan bark to cover the soil.

As I started raking it, I heard gunfire from the North Gate. The same one Dave had walked out of.

I put the shovel in the golf cart, made sure my rifle was ready to hand in the other seat, and rumbled back down the path to the perimeter road, to the North Gate.

When I got there, Arturo was on a knee with his rifle up and looking through his optics.

He held very still, sighed slightly.

KRACK!

Shot fired.

"Shit," he said. "They got Dave."

"Who got Dave?"

Without turning or moving his head, he held very still again and fired another round. KRACK!

"Gangbangers. It's OK now."

I didn't have my binoculars with me. The North Gate guard handed me his pair.

Several men were waving and gesturing at us in that vaguely ridiculous way that means they're 1) really pissed but 2) at a considerable distance. But they were turning and turning again, on the edge of running away.

On the ground were two bodies. One was recognizably Dave.

"Arturo?" I started to ask, then stopped myself.

Of course.

Arturo laid down in the mud, braced on one elbow, sighed carefully, relaxed, breathed in and out deeply, sighed again.

KRACK!

In my glasses, I saw Dave's body move slightly. The men who had seized him were now running away.

Arturo stood.

"All clear," he announced on radio.

Arturo hadn't murdered Dave. The gang had. Arturo had saved him from a horribly prolonged death by torture, in the only way possible. By killing him.

"I told that idiot to leave by the South Gate," I found myself saying without thinking.

"He wanted to piss you off."

"Hell of a way to do it."

"Yeah."

"Do we have imagery of these pendejos?"

"Yes."

"Every face is marked. BOLO on all of them. Shoot on sight. Whenever, wherever."

"Copy."

I supposed I was supposed to feel something.

What was the acronym? Halt? Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired?

I was all four. And probably would be until I died.

I went back to raking tan bark over a human piece of shit.

As a direct result of his action, deliberately opening a security gate for a bribe, two guards had been killed and a third was badly hurt, expected to die. (That night, he did, as expected.)

With Dave, that now meant a four for one trade.

Then I went back to the new Security Office. I had work to do, vetting every guard, making sure I didn't have any traitors lurking as this one had.

Feelings?

Fuck my feelings. And fuck you too, Dave. I needed you, you dumb asshole. You had no right to commit suicide like that.

For a moment I considered the pistol at my side and the slung rifle over my back.

I had no right either. Less now.

Back in the office, no one wanted to meet my eye as I sat down with the video recordings. The DVRs still had more tales to tell. We had paid in gallons of blood for the knowledge they contained.

I could no more refuse to look at the recordings than I could escape my fate ... or help Dave to escape his.

That little bit of morality I retained.

Agency. A person has the right to choose the place, time and manner of their life and their death.

Dave had chosen his. The traitor had chosen his. Even the gang members and would-be terrorists had chosen theirs.

I was not however free to choose mine. My death was pre-paid, by screaming children and nuclear blast.

###

I was sitting in a courtroom. I was wearing an unfamiliar uniform.

I was called to the stand. I put my hand on the swear book. I said the words.

Then I gave my testimony. Root word: testes. Testicles. Balls.

Where was I at the moment the Firecracker went off? What part of the restaurant had I been looking at? What image indelibly burned itself on my memory, if not my retinas, at the moment the second airburst detonated a classified number of feet above San Francisco International Airport?

I heard myself speak. I did not hear the words.

I heard the tone.

I was swearing to facts which I knew utterly to be true, without fail and without doubt.

I was naming names. I was talking about subjects that made no sense. A man's name, a submarine, a permissive action link - whatever the hell that was. But my knowledge was hard won and it was absolute.

I had an ocean of blood to swim through before I reached that room.

Then I could die. Not before.

But I could always be killed.


###

"Sir," Sharon said carefully as I bolted upright and started to draw my pistol, then stopped.

I had fallen asleep. In front of me on the video monitor was looped the gate entry of the bomb truck.

I blinked and saw that there was a mug of tea on the table, still steaming.

I took a sip.

It tasted like fate.