“Clavis, buddy, calm down. We have to work together now, remember? You and me. The way it always is. The guards are coming. Cooperate with me, like we always do? Whaddaya say, buddy?”
“Sure, I’ll cooperate with you, buddy. I’ll cooperate with your corpse. After I’ve killed you.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clavis. Look! Those were our orders, okay! Shoot to kill. You just weren’t told about them, that’s all. And I can see why now. Well, I was briefed to kill both Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. We have to wrap this case up once and for all. It comes straight from the top.”
“Why?”
The guards finally started amassing by the doorway, so I fired a suppressing volley, full automatic, in their direction. One of them took a hit to the shoulder and spun around before collapsing to the floor.
“Dude, think about it. Think of the scandal if it ever got out that DARPA funded the research that led to international genocide. And think how bad it’d be for morale if John Paul told the world his story. Specially all the stuff about the surveillance crap that we do being basically useless. How there’s no correlation between traceability and the fall in terrorism. Think how people would feel!”
“But there is no correlation, you idiot!”
“So what are you gonna do, huh?” Now Williams was shouting too. “Turn back time? The people want increased security measures, don’t forget! Not just the government and industry, ordinary citizens too. People are happy to sacrifice a few freedoms in exchange for a safer society. So tell me, Clavis, what are you gonna do? Dismantle the entire surveillance infrastructure? InfoSec is a huge industry, you know that. Money’s still being poured into it from all angles. It gives jobs to tens of thousands of people, if not more. And it’s part of the system now. So call me an idiot if you want, Clavis, but just tell me this. What are you gonna do?”
With that, Williams chucked a grenade out of the bathroom and through the door that led to the second floor corridor. There was an explosion beyond the doorway, then screams and dust.
I turned to Williams again. “But it’s all bullshit! It’s all pointless! We don’t need all that security!”
“It might be bullshit, Clavis, but it’s our bullshit. And the horse is already out of the barn on this one. We’re committed. The whole economy’s committed.”
We had reached an impasse of sorts. But at this rate I would be out of bullets in no time.
I grabbed hold of John Paul’s arm, chucked a grenade over my shoulder, and jumped with John Paul through the moonlit window to the ground below. We landed on the lawn in a messy heap but scrambled to our feet and made a dash for the shore.
There was an explosion behind us. The grenade had just exploded. It had almost been a reflex action. I hadn’t even stopped to think what would happen to Williams. Not that I cared anymore.
The guards fired their AKs at us, but they were all terrible shots and a little too far away. The nanocamouflage probably helped some too. John Paul had no protective gear, so as much as possible I covered his back as we ran away.
I realized that John Paul’s shoulders were covered in Lucia’s blood and chunks of brain. I realized we had left her body behind. My chest wanted to explode. There was nothing we could have done in that situation to bring her with us. We had done the right thing. Logically speaking. But none of these facts helped to numb the gut-wrenching soul-pain I was feeling. I ran with John Paul, and before I knew it there were tears streaming down my face.
“Are you crying for her?” John Paul asked.
“I just left her there. Her corpse.”
“Surely you’ve seen plenty of corpses in your time.”
The girl whose head was exposed to the heavens.
The boy whose guts spilled from his ruptured belly.
The women and children doused in gasoline and left to burn in the giant hole in the ground.
Up until now I’d always thought of corpses as things. When a person died, he or she became an it. An object. And as Lucia had lost half her face and what was left of her soft brains was now dripping out of her eye socket, she was surely a perfect example of how a person could turn into an object in the twinkling of an eye.
And yet she wasn’t just a thing. I refused to see her as just a thing. She was still Lucia Sukrova, even dead. She wasn’t just a mass of flesh. She might have been a corpse, but she was Lucia’s corpse.
“Of course I’ve seen corpses before,” I said. “But this time it’s just so personal. When the person is important to you, they can’t become just a corpse.”
I gritted my teeth and we pushed on. John Paul and I made it into the jungle.
It wasn’t easy moving through the jungle with John Paul. He might have been familiar enough with war zones, but he was still a civilian. It required quite a bit of skill to be able to maneuver through this sort of terrain. Jungles weren’t designed for late-night leisurely strolls.
To make matters worse, John Paul had also sprained his right ankle when he jumped from the second-floor window. It wasn’t that far to the Tanzanian border where our recovery team should be waiting, but there was a limit to how fast we could move when his leg was like this.
“There’s no way I can hand you back to the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation,” I said, my eyes on the path in front of us. “If you were to go back you’d just start singing your song of genocide again, I know.”
“I’m not interested in going back,” John Paul muttered. The confidence he had back at the guesthouse had now all but disappeared. “Lucia said that I should explain what I had done to the world. She wanted me to tell the world just how shaky a foundation their ‘peace’ rests on, I guess. Well, I will stand trial, and I may be sentenced to death. Or perhaps I’ll just be dismissed as a lunatic and laughed out of court. Whatever happens, I’ll accept it, because that’s what Lucia wanted. It’ll be my way of apologizing to her, however pathetic and inadequate the gesture. I was the one who brought her into all this. I had only intended to stop in Prague long enough to get a fake ID, but then I found I wanted to see her face again for old times’ sake. That was all …”
I listened to John Paul’s story without saying anything. I just hacked through the jungle with my machete.
“I betrayed my wife and child and now I’ve also killed the woman I once loved.”
“What about all the people who died in the massacres you caused? Don’t they count at all? That’s quite a solipsistic sense of guilt you have, don’t you think?” I was feeling pretty cynical by now. “Don’t forget that there’s a staggering number of corpses behind you at all times.”
“No, of course not.” John Paul nodded. “I know. It’s something I’ve carried with me from the very first time I used the grammar of genocide.”