The War on Christmas

I was halfway to Boston when I got carjacked. I had just crossed into Virginia from North Carolina. It was four in the morning. The last Starbucks mocha grande had worn off and was only keeping me awake by pressing on my bladder. Even that wasn't working so well. There wouldn't be more Starbucks until Richmond in an hour, two before they opened.

That damned extra hour. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have been in this mess. Ok, that and if I hadn't been driving my wife's car. Which I wouldn't have if it weren't for Homeland Security. Who says irony is dead? I think that lot has made it into an art form.

It started at the airport the day before as we were checking in. My wife had decided she wanted to surprise her parents for the holidays this year. A white Christmas in New England? That's what the Weather Channel was promising. As I was finding out hour by hour, nothing about this trip was working out as planned. My idea of the spirit of the season was me, my recliner, my X-Box controller, and a freshly minted Fallout 3 apocalypse to explore in 7.1 Dolby surround and 46 inch high-def plasma with only a bottle of 40 year-old Napoleon brandy as a companion. Needless to say that wasn't going to happen, so we compromised. I would fly into Boston instead of Hartford, rent a car and drive to meet her at her parents' after spending a day or two exploring Quincy Market with my aunt. My wife had it all arranged, at least in her mind. The details she left up to me.

The best we had been able to book with our frequent flier miles were flights that left just far enough apart to make it impractical for me to drop her off and return home until my departure. Instead, I would have several hours to kill in the airport, perhaps bouncing back and forth between the espresso bar and brew house until my blood chemistry had achieved the optimal balance necessary for holiday flying, somewhere between three and four shots of each.

We were running late that morning at the airport, so we rushed her through check-in and sprinted toward security with barely a spare moment for a "love you" and peck goodbye. When she boarded the tram to take her to her gate, she was beaming, almost radiant at the prospect of going home and spending the holidays with her family. I suspected it was the overactive airport AC that had brought the color to her cheeks, but that image of her happiness stuck in my mind. How could I ever have thought of denying her? That sentiment soon became my undoing.

I decided to check-in before beginning the ritual of hopping from line to line until the alcohol and caffeine had come into a perfect state of equilibrium most conducive for take-off. While I had been blinded by twinkle in my wife's blue eyes at the checkpoint, she had dumped all the presents we were carrying north on me without my noticing. As I turned to go after watching her angelic smile fade in the distance as the tram pulled away, there it was at my feet, the huge bag brimming with gifts, my new, and quite sobering, responsibility. That was only the first of a series of unplanned events.

Next, the automated kiosk wouldn't check me in. A cute ticket agent dressed like one of Santa's elves, complete with green tights, miniskirt and a pointed red cap, came by, referenced her own terminal, frowned and asked for my ID. Then next thing I know, I'm being bum's rushed by four of the burliest Santas I've ever seen.

Their idea of getting into the Christmas spirit. Imagine the cast from "Conan the Barbarian" decked out in red felt, faux fur trimmed Santa suits, their badges and Glocks strapped to the extra-wide black vinyl belts, acting as if I'd just broken into their tower, stolen their gems and killed their pets. For several minutes, all I saw was Coca-Cola red. By the time I was done coughing up white synthetic fur from breathing through the sleeve of the whichever jolly fellow had me in the chokehold, I was handcuffed to a chair in a steel-line broom closet somewhere off the main terminal, thinking I was about to cash in my round-trip voucher for a one-way ticket to a sunny resort in southeast Cuba and an all expenses paid winter vacation courtesy of the U.S. Government while the security Santas tore into the presents like a mob of angry children in a Yuletide version of "Lord of the Flies."

After a brief interrogation complete with a holiday rendition of the classic Good Santa, Bad Santa routine, everything was sorted. No, we didn't make a mistake, sir. There was just a minor clerical error regarding your driver's license number, middle initial, date of birth and country of origin. Yes, we are ninety percent confident now that you are a U. S. citizen just like you said. Sign this classified non-disclosure waiver of liability and you're free to resume your travels. No, it shouldn't happen again on your return flight. But you might want to arrive four hours early, you know, just in case your name doesn't get cleared from the list in five to ten business days. I'd avoid all airports until then. Happy Holidays and have a nice trip.

By the time I had cleaned the fingerprinting ink out of my hair, my flight was in final boarding. Only one problem: I no longer had a ticket. While I was MIA in the bowels of the airport, the airline had given away my seat. We'd be more than happy to rebook you, right after the blackout period for your frequent flier miles. How does January 8th sound? Certainly, I can get you on this flight, as long as TSA unlocks your credit card in the next five minutes. Oops, it looks like your seat has already gone to standby customer. All we have left is first class. You don't have cash, do you? Of course, you can talk to a supervisor. She'll be in first thing in the morning.

The next thing I knew, I was behind the wheel of my wife's SUV in long-term parking, dizzy and slightly disoriented from the lack of much anticipated stimulants and depressants packaged in delicious chocolate and amber beverage form, picturing my next phone call shattering my wife's cherubic happiness. In that post-traumatic adrenal hangover I was struck by a way to salvage this less than perfect holiday.

Back in college, I had once driven straight through to Boston. Ok, it had been middle school, and I had ridden with someone else. But I remembered it had taken just over 24 hours. I used to pull all-nighters during finals. The speed limits were higher now. The weather was supposed to be clear until the day after tomorrow, giving me plenty of time. Gas prices had fallen so it'd be cheaper than flying with same day prices. If I hit the road now, I'd arrive before the next flight arrived, if I could catch one. And I'd still have time to rewrap all the presents before I headed across the Mass Pike. I had procrastinated on talking to my aunt, so she only knew that I'd call sometime tomorrow. Like every convicted felon says at the news conference just before he goes to jail, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I should have written the day off to karma and returned home to the holiday scent of newly unwrapped game disk. But I knew my wife would think I'd somehow arranged my misfortune to duck out on a family gathering. After last year's debacle, I would do anything to maintain our current marital détente.

So here I was twelve hours later, just crossing into Virginia. The interstate seemed to stretch out forever, at least that's how long it seemed to take for each mile to pass by. A pair of shadowed sneakers with no feet in them had just run across the road in front of me, jarring me into paranoid alertness long enough to spot the "Virginia Welcomes You" sign advertising an all-night rest area two miles farther on the right. I was ahead of schedule so figured I could afford an hour or so to sleep off the hallucinations before continuing on my way.

I whipped into a spot on the back side of the restrooms. I had barely set the parking brake before I was out the door and scooting for the side marked "men." After the blessed relief of making room more Starbucks, I strolled back toward the car, with a quick detour to peruse the vending machines, confirming that I would be better off waiting until Richmond for breakfast. Nothing in the slots looked comparable to handcrafted hot oatmeal with fruit and nuts and brown sugar that I knew would be waiting in the hands of my incomparable barista.

As I approached my wife's SUV, I noticed the moon was bright and just past full, giving the grass between the spreading oaks the look of freshly fallen snow. My breath steaming in the brisk air only added to the illusion though the sky was clear and full of stars. The place was peaceful and deserted. It was the Friday before Christmas so the holiday travelers wouldn't take to the roads until at least tonight. The only activity was in the truck parking area a hundred yards away where two USPS semis and a FedEx long-hauler were catching what rest they could before their frantic delivery schedule resumed.

I had just crawled back into the car and reclined the seat when something startled me back awake. I'm not sure whether it was a dream or a noise but in my sleep deprived haze I was convinced it was the sound of ice ricocheting off my windshield. I snapped forward, nearly slamming my forehead into the steering wheel. I shook my head to try to focus. It was still dark, so I hadn't been out very long. As my vision cleared, I saw a stocky boy in front of my car, just standing there, staring at me.

I rolled down the window and called to him, "Are you ok, son?"

Nothing, he just kept staring, kind of like that kid in "The Shining." No, I was just paranoid and exhausted. I unlocked the door and swung my feet out. "Are you lost? Where are your mom and dad?"

Just as my feet hit the pavement, a gang of children swarmed around the car from the front and behind. Before I could scramble back to the safety of the front seat and the cell phone charging in the lighter, I felt a gun press against my left kidney. "Don't move, stretch, unless you want to pee through a machine for the rest of your life."

I had no idea what that meant, but with my bladder still trying to relax after four hours of coffee torture, he had my full attention.

"Now, unlock all the doors and get behind the wheel, slowly." His voice was deep and gravelly, kind of like Pigpen from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," not at all what you might associate with a kid. "Keep your eyes front and your hands in plain sight, beanstalk, or they won't find your body until the tundra melts."

I flicked open the master lock switch and eased into the driver's seat, placing my hands at ten and two on the wheel, just like in driver's ed, hoping this was just some childish prank. "I don't have much money, but there are some Christmas gifts in the back. Take them and I'll forget this ever happened."

By then I heard the other three doors open and kids were piling into the SUV, thumping and bumping like a herd of cattle making its way through the slots of stockyard. "You think we came for your merchandise there, Sasquatch?"

"Well, there are some pretty cool toys. And chocolate. Good stuff. Ghirardelli."

"You got it all wrong, Abominable. We don't want your stuff. Everybody in?" Grunts of assent resounded all around me like a troop of baboons at Busch Gardens. "Gun, secure that cell phone."

"You got it, Sig," another strange voice beside me replied, like Froggy from the Little Rascals. What kind of kids were these? I heard rattling noises of the charger being unclamped and the cord wrapped up.

"What do you think, Hagan," the one I thought was Sig asked another companion. "Will it all fit?"

A new baritone voice from the back seat responded, "Just barely. We have to ditch some of the junk back here."

"Ok, Yeti," Sig said from between the seats. "You can relax. We don't want your money or your stuff. All we need is a ride and a few hours of your time. Hell, it might even be on your way."

"You want the car, take it," I said. "It's my wife's, anyway. Just drop me where I can call my insurance company in an hour or two."

"Take a look around you, troll. Does it look like any of us is going to drive this monstrosity?" I slowly turned my head. What I had mistaken for children all had thick, bushy beards, except the one who had been standing in front of the car initially. None of their heads came more than halfway up the seats.

"You guys are all little people," I said in astonishment.

"Are you some kind of moron?" Sig asked, waving his pistol in front of my face. "We're dwarves, not 'Little People.'"

"But I thought that was the what you liked to be called," I protested.

"You're not the fastest car on the track, are you?" said the one sitting in the passenger seat, Gun, I think. "We're Dverger. Dwarves, not dwarfs."

"Why do we always get the ones with IQ's short of the highway numbers?" grumbled a new voice behind me, a dwarf with a sharp nose.

"At least, we're on the East Coast." Hagan added.

"Dwarves? You mean like Tolkien?" I started putting it together.

"Tolkien was a hack," Sig snapped back. "The only thing he got right was that we don't like elves. Think older and more epic."

"Wagner?" I asked. I knew all those classic graphic novels I read would come in handy some day.

Sig shoved the gun into my eye. "You calling us Nazis, there, Cyclops?" All the other dwarves froze.

"Whoa, whoa, no way man." I protested gripping the wheel as though it were a life ring. "Sorry, I didn't know."

"Leave him alone, Sig," Gun said as he connected the power source of a GPS to the lighter, and another one for a radar detector to the spare 12V socket. "He's just uneducated. His brain is probably steeped in O'Really's propaganda."

We all took a second to calm down. Sig took a deep breath, deeper than I believed possible from such a small man, er, uh, dwarf. "Just start it up and pull around to the picnic area. We need to pick up our stuff."

I started the SUV and eased it back out into the parking lot. Following Sig's gestures with the pistol, I pulled into a secluded spot back by some deeply shadowed picnic tables, where two more of his friends emerged. Neither could have been much above four feet tall. As my eyes adjusted, I spotted a chubby one sitting on the picnic table, the benches of which were stacked with metal crates the size of small footlockers.

"This sled the best you could find," one of the pair who approached the car asked when Sig rolled down a back window. "Are these windows even legal?"

The windows were dark, but that dark? Ok, maybe in hindsight insisting on drug dealer tinting with the after-market guy who'd setup shop in the storage warehouse had been a mistake on my part. I knew I should have taken the Jeep to the airport, but who wants to leave a soft-top with no locks in long-term parking over Christmas.

"Hagan says it'll all fit," Sig replied. "Now, get it loaded before that sheriff figures out Carl's trick. It's almost light."

He was right; the sky was beginning to brighten. Normally, the transition between night and dawn was the worst time to be awake. Oddly, between the cold and the guns and the surreal nature of my captors, I was surprisingly alert.

As I stared out the windshield, uncertain whether I wanted the sheriff to return or not, the other dwarves began loading the SUV while Sig kept an eye on me, having climbed around to the front seat. I figured all their gear would fit with some careful arranging, though I wasn't sure where the other three dwarves would sit. But the SUV kept bouncing on its shocks as they arranged and rearranged things behind me.

Finally, Hagan came around to the passenger side and said, "It's all in, but we had to ditch some stuff."

I looked over toward the picnic table to see all the gifts my wife had entrusted to me scattered across its top and benches, along with most of my luggage. "Hey, those are Christmas presents." I protested.

"We're at war," Sig replied. "Consider them casualties. Schil, put a note on them saying "Donations for the Poor" for when the sheriff gets back so the troll here doesn't pout. Then we're out of here."

The dwarves piled into the SUV. At first I wasn't sure they were all going to fit. They almost didn't. Gun took the front seat. Sig, the beardless one and one other took the rear. Hagan and the last three split to either side of the cargo deck. They had stacked their crates to create facing benches. The four of them had laptops that they kept rumbling over in low voices and adjusting. I didn't know what they were up to, but it looked serious and illegal.

"Where are we headed, boys?" I prompted once they were all settled.

"Just pull back on the highway, northbound," Sig answered with a glare. "Gun will direct you from there. And buckle up. We don't want to give them any reason to pull us over. That would end badly for everyone."

Given his tone, I believed him. He had a lot of attitude packed into that small body.

As soon as we got on the road, Gun flipped the radio over to AM and started scanning through the channels. Normally, I avoided that band. All they ever ran was talk radio, and that by guys whose politics hovered between black-helicopters and vast left wing conspiracies. Even FM was dicey until you got to DC. At least after that you could tune in something other than country. I usually relied on my iPod, but Gun had disconnected that and tossed in the glove box, right after scanning through its contents with a scowl. "Just a bunch of Lilith Fair crap, and some 'This American Life.' What are you, gay?"

"Married," was all I could think to say. Nothing like having your masculinity challenged by someone half your size to get you thinking on your feet. Gun just grunted.

He settled on a station out of Norfolk that was like an American Top 40 for ideologues with alternative band names, with Shawn the Manatee, Plush Limburger and Will O'Really holding steady atop the charts for the eighth consecutive year. "It's time for you to get a real education, ettin-boy, something with some red meat, not that oatmeal they serve on NPR."

The O'Really Report was up, an encore presentation from yesterday afternoon. Will O. was the king of this tribe of cultural cannibals; he had a radio show plus a cable television "news" program called "The O'Really Reckoning" on Coyote News. Personally, I was more of a "Countdown" fan; I liked a side of humor with my news and rants. But I knew who O'Really was. I would pause on Coyote News during commercials on "Countdown" just to annoy my wife, until she threatened to stab out my eyes with her crochet hooks and steal back the remote.

Today, he was ranting about the Governor of Washington State and a War on Christmas that she'd apparently fired the first shot in a few weeks ago by not burning some atheist in effigy in Olympia's public square. A single, secular sign had defiled the nearby nativity just with its proximity.

This got my passengers all fired up. At first I couldn't tell whether they agreed or disagreed with O'Really. They grunted and snorted at whatever he said. They cried out with unintelligible exclamations. Those proceeded to unfathomable response phrases, like a liturgy, whipping up their emotions until they could barely be contained. Pretty soon the inside of the SUV sounded like an old time tent revival, culminating with Sig shouting, "He wants a war, he's getting a war, right boys?" The SUV erupted in agreement, the pandemonium rocking it back and forth on the off-road-rated shocks, nearly causing it to swerve from lane to lane as I struggled to control it.

Fortunately, O'Really's show ended before they could get truly fired up. As a closer, Will O. put out a pitch for his Christmas special live from Rockefeller Center in New York City at nine tonight, where he would have Santa Claus giving away presents to the progeny of his faithful.

"We'll see you there, Will O." Sig shouted at the radio to a backslapping chorus of agreement.

Gun scanned around until he found Pall Hardy somewhere down the dial, "We really love this guy," Gun whispered to me at one point. "An American classic. One of the few you guys ever got right."

As Sig, Gun and their comrades listened in reverent silence, I began wondering just what I was involved in. These guys were nuts. I had no idea whether they were performance artists, a terrorist militia or escapees from a psychiatric hospital. They acted like meth-lab chemists who worked without respirators. Whichever was true, I was screwed. There was no way I would be able to talk my way out of this after the airport incident.

After Pall Hardy informed us that we now knew the rest of the story, the station started playing Christmas carols. Gun swatted the radio in disgust. "Celtic propaganda," he muttered.

I started giggling as sleep deprivation and the ridiculousness of the situation began to sink in. It bubbled up slowly, unwilling to be contained no matter how hard I tried until I was shaking and tears were streaming from my eyes.

"What's so funny?" Gun demanded.

"Just that this day couldn't get any better," I laughed, wiping a hand across my cheek. "In the last twenty-four hours, I've been interrogated by TSA Santas at the airport then carjacked by a bunch deranged dwarves with a Christmas fetish. But that will be nothing compared with what happens the day after tomorrow when I show up at my wife's parents' with no gifts. Then, I'll wish Homeland Security had deported me to Guantanamo."

Sig perked up in the back seat. "You're on the no-fly list?" he asked, looking anxiously at Gun.

I nodded as microburst giggles continued to erupt from my chest like a cross between the hiccups and a grand mal seizure.

"Gun, change course," Sig barked. "Hagan, I need intel, now."

Suddenly, the SUV was a hive of activity. The laptop crew popped open a crate between them sporting what looked like some sort of weird, helical structure similar to an impressionist sculpture of a DNA strand. Gun was scrolling through the GPS street-finder at lightning speed, calling out cities and addresses in a language that only it seemed to understand. The laughter died in my throat like a cancerous cramp.

Gun had me exit the highway within a mile and head toward Norfolk. We started on a Federal Highway but quickly descended through the hierarchy of roads from state to county then municipal and finally to roads without markers or names or sometimes pavement. Gun kept shifting me from one to another, always making sure I obeyed the speed limit. There was nothing out here other than tobacco fields and stands of trees all softened by a hint of fog.

"What is that thing back there," I asked Gun when he paused for breath from his conversation with the GPS.

"Satellite downlink," he replied distractedly. "Turn on the rear defroster. It gets better reception that way."

"What else is in those crates?" I asked, knowing I probably wouldn't like the answer.

"Mostly black market stuff out of Iraq and the Stan." Gun started ticking off stuff from a Tom Clancy wish list, "Night vision equipment, encrypted communication links, Alpine climbing gear, pixelated camo, you know, like the Marines wear."

"You know how hard it is to find that stuff in boy's extra-husky?" the dwarf with the sharp nose interjected rhetorically.

Baby's first battledress. Where would you even look for that, I wondered, The Blackwater Gift Collection? Halliburton R Us?

"Please tell me I'm not hauling weapons," I begged. If I was, chainlink isolation in Guantanamo would look like a beachside paradise in a distant tropical dream.

"Wish I could, there, big boy," Sig replied. "We're a self-contained commando unit with almost everything we need. The rest we pick up on-site."

"Need for what?" I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"You heard O'Really. For six years he's been railing about there being a War on Christmas. Now, we're going to give him one. This Santa stunt of his is the perfect opportunity to send a message."

My world became a little darker, like I was staring at my future down a long, black tunnel whose sides were closing in. I drove in silence for a while. They were serious.

Hagan's voice broke me out of it. "The NSA database says he's clean. The vehicle is unmarked with no current surveillance. There's a pending instruction to move his name from the active to the inactive watch list, with a possible upgrade to archives in five years unless he screws up again."

The dwarves all exhaled simultaneously, which sounded like the air escaping half a dozen weather balloons.

Sig spoke first. "Gun, get us back on course. Keep to the secondary roads, just to be safe. We'll shoot up the peninsula and pick up the interstate outside of Wilmington to keep a low profile."

"I'm on it," Gun replied. He directed me back to a relatively straight two-lane blacktop that paralleled the Federal Highway we had started on.

For a while, I concentrated on driving, trying to figure out exactly how deep I was into this and whether I could get myself out. Before I had come to any conclusions, we were pulling onto the beltway around Norfolk.

"Pull off at this exit," Sig instructed. "I see a Home Depot."

Once were in the parking lot, he leaned forward to me and said, "Go in there and get us a chainsaw, the smallest one they have."

"Gas or Electric?" I asked.

"Are you being funny, big man?" He showed me his pistol again.

"I take it you'll need a gas can, too."

"And some chainsaw oil. Oh, and get eight pair of linesman's pliers, good insulated ones," he added. "Don't try anything stupid. Hagan has access to your NSA file. One quick update, and you're as much a part of this as we are. All the files they pull off our hard drives will implicate you as a ringleader." The laptop gang all smiled malevolently and nodded in unison.

"Oh, and get us some bratwurst and pretzels from the vendor by the door," the chubby dwarf ordered. "And don't forget the mustard. Spicy, not yellow."

"Carl, go with him to keep him honest," Sig amended. "Pretend to be his son."

The creepy, beardless dwarf got out of the SUV with me and grabbed my hand as we approached the entrance. Great. Now I knew how Oedipus' father must have felt.

We collected everything Sig wanted and returned without incident. The only question came when I ordered eight brats with sour kraut and eight bottles of water from the hotdog vender, along with a large black coffee. "The kid's hungry," I said to his quizzical expression. That and a long, probing look at Carl seemed to satisfy him.

"Beer would have been better than water," the chubby dwarf commented on our return.

"I'll put that in their suggestion box the next time I'm through," I remarked, pretending to write a note. "'Dear Home Depot, please sell more beer in your parking lot.' You want an ammo tent, too? Tools, guns and alcohol, that's probably one-stop Christmas shopping for you guys."

They all glared.

Back on the beltway, we skirted Norfolk and headed across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. They posted Carl in the front seat now, to keep with our cover. Me and "my son" were the only ones the toll attendant would see. Once we were clear of the tollbooths, we stopped for gas and Gun took over at navigation again. Sig seemed confident that a full tank would get us to our destination.

The ride up the Delmarva Peninsula was mostly quiet. Sig ordered Nibel and Schil, the chubby one and the one with the sharp nose, to keep watch with Gun while the rest of them caught a nap. I wished I could. I was entering that zone of exhaustion where you had to actively calm down before you could get to sleep. I needed something to help occupy me, so I tried to engage Gun in conversation.

He seemed sociable enough now that he had some food in him. There wasn't much but rolling hills and farm country between the Bay and the Maryland border. Halfway there, I'd learned all their names. Sig, Gun, Hagan, Nibel, Schil and the twins, Gern and Gisel. They called themselves the Fenris Brothers. He looked at me as though that was supposed to mean something. It didn't. Sig was the oldest, then straight down the line. They had all come over from "the old country" on fake passports and visas saying they had seasonal employment at Disney World. Carl, they'd picked up at "South of the Border." Gun didn't know his last name, or really much else about him. "I think he's a cousin we lost track of somewhere. He might be Swedish. They're all beardless and kind of strange."

"So what's your beef against O'Really?" I asked as we passed the sign for Wallop's Island.

"O'Really is just a pawn. Our beef is with Christmas. Specifically, with the big man."

"Santa Claus?" I asked. These guys were armed AND delusional.

"That's what everyone calls him now," Gun said. "When we knew him, he was just Fat Nicki. We started this Yule thing together as a distraction, a winter feast with ice beer."

"You ever seen Norway in winter?" Schil chimed in. "There ain't much to do other than ski and drink, preferably at the same time."

"It grew into an incentive program," Gun continued, "a kind of an end of year raiding bonus. Then it became a payoff to keep the adolescents in line until we could ship them off in the spring. They kept demanding more and more younger and younger."

"That was before the Christians co-opted the whole enterprise." Sig had woken up and joined the conversation. "The Celts rolled over first, so their holidays got priority, Halloween, Easter, Candlemas, all based on Celtic holidays. But we held out another five hundred years, so they needed something big to reel us in. That's when they took over Yule."

"Oh, really," I said, trying to sound interested.

"You think that's funny?" Sig glared at me. "Decorating Norway spruces, where do you think that started, funny boy? And the traditional Christmas ham? You think a bunch of erstwhile Jews thought that one up? Yule logs, mistletoe, holly, garlands, stockings by the chimney, giving presents near the solstice, even the cookies, all of them came out of Norse traditions. Without us, Fat Nicki wouldn't have a franchise."

"So, what, you guys are culture warriors out to set the record straight?" I figured why not play along with their distorted fantasy. At least it was entertaining and keeping me awake as the miles spooled by.

"It goes deeper than that." Gun took over again. "Before they canonized Fat Nicki to buy him off, we were his associates. We had the gold, so we bankrolled the whole operation. We had some money we needed to clean after the Fafnir raid. In return, we got a cut of the profits. Once it took off, the Christian Mafia muscled in. They were concerned about their image, more worried about the Irish than the Danes, so we got the boot and the elves took over."

"So this is basically a contract dispute?" I knew I shouldn't spin them up more, but I couldn't resist.

"This is about plain old theft," Sig interrupted. "They kidnapped Fat Nicki in the dead of night to brainwash him and stole our reindeer. They even renamed them."
"They don't remember us now." Schil sounded sad.

"For a long time we let it go," Gun explained. "We had a lot of mining interests in Wales at the time, so for a while, we were making out pretty good with the whole coal thing. Only smart things those fairies ever did."

"Actually, I think it was Fat Nicki," Carl spoke for the first time. "A part of his reprogramming that didn't take."

"So, what do you need me for?" I kept digging, hoping they would realize how ridiculous it all sounded. "Why don't just ride in on a sleigh?"

"We use technology, idiot," Sig snapped. "Haven't you been paying attention? Magic is for fairies and elves. We spent the better part of three years upgrading to the latest equipment after the Macy's fiasco."

"How was I supposed to know he'd send a body double that year?" Hagan piped up again from behind his laptop.

"The elves must have smelled something wrong," Gun said. "They've tapped into the National Intelligence database through their NORAD connections. You know government does radar telemetry assistance and threat assessment all Christmas Eve. You can watch Nicki's progress online."

"How are we supposed to fight DoD and Homeland Security?" Schil asked rhetorically. "They frost-boarded our cousins Alber and Andvar last year."

"That's why we've gone low profile," Gern or Gisel took it up now, "and taken up insurgent tactics."

"And how is O'Really involved in this?" I asked. I was getting a headache, but just had to know where he fit in this elaborate theory. Amazingly, they were all singing from the same sheet of music. It was beautifully confusing how they could complete each other's thoughts.

"Limburger, the Manatee, Will O., they're are all just Fat Nicki's mouthpieces," Gun answered. "O'Really is like a one man propaganda arm for the elves, trying to secure the franchise against poachers with this fake War on Christmas. So, we decided to turn that against him. He'll have the eyes and ears of the nation with his Christmas special tonight, broadcast live coast to coast on Coyote News."

"He had the audacity to schedule it on the eve of the winter solstice," the other twin added, Gisel or Gern. I'm still not clear which was which, but they were both awake now. "That's like snowball packed with ice to the back of your head."

"That's like throwing down a gauntlet," Sig finished up. "If he thinks he can Zarathustra us, he's sadly mistaken. This time we aren't laying down. Those bastards stole our holiday. Well, this year, we take it back."

That seemed to end the discussion. All the dwarves were awake and busy again. They seemed to have a list that they were checking and rechecking. Maryland soon fell behind us. Before I knew it, we had bypassed Dover and were coming up on the interstate again near Wilmington. Before we got there, we pulled into an abandoned barn for a final pit stop and equipment check. Nibel and Schil broke into a previously unopened metal crate and drew out a feast of what I could only assume were the dwarven equivalent of MRE's: smoked Atlantic salmon, Jarlsberg cheese, savory bread-like crackers, venison sausages and homemade Norwegian flat beer in Grolsh-style bottles. I was famished, so tried a bit of everything. All the food was delicious, hardy and filling. The beer was potent. I finished one before my world became untethered and I drifted completely out.

When Nibel woke me, it was dark outside. The dwarves had killed off most of their supplies. Empty bottles littered the floor of the barn. How they could drink that much and still be on their feet was beyond me. Everyone except Carl had donned gray and white urban Marine camo. Gern and Gisel were just finishing coiling ropes and reloading them in the crates. Hagan was reviewing something on his laptop with Sig and Gun. Schil and Carl were on watch by either door, cleaning their weapons. They were all smoking pipes stuffed with a sweet yet mild smelling tobacco. All except Carl, who had rolled his own cigarettes. Smoke drifted through the barn like a layer of fog. It was like an ATF trifecta in here. Nibel offered me a thermos filled with strong, black and reasonably hot coffee.

"We need you awake and alert for the next few hours," he explained. He proffered one of Carl's handcrafted cigarettes that I stashed in my shirt pocket for later. "But make sure you pee before we leave. Sig says we'll drive straight through once we hit the interstate."

As I sampled Nibel's gift and attended to his warning, the dwarves stowed everything back into the crates and reloaded the SUV. A few minutes later, we were headed north again.

The remainder of Delaware became a blur. Traffic picked up as more people took to the roads. The interstate was packed. Hagan kept a constant monitor on the weather. It looked like it the worst of it would hold off until at least after midnight. But that meant everyone wanted to get where they were going in a hurry. It required a constant four-dwarf watch to keep us from getting run into the barricades lining the New Jersey Turnpike.

The mayhem continued as we took the Lincoln Tunnel into New York. My memory of the city is a chaotic haze, even with having recouped a few hours sleep. The only thing I can remember are a series of headlights, horns and screaming cabbies before Gun had us safely tucked into some back alley normally used by trucks to pick up trash from behind the businesses two blocks from Rockefeller Center. With Gun's navigation skills and the dwarven watch, we'd made record time.

"Ok, this is where we get out," Sig said as I shut off the engine and killed the headlights. "You've done your part. No matter what happens from here, we'll keep you out of it. I'd get as far away from here as you can and forget you ever met us."

I figured that would be impossible, though I knew they'd lock me in an institution if I ever shared the story. "Your secret is safe with me," I said, knowing it was the truth.

"It had better be, Jolly Green. If I find out you're one of Nicki's stooges, we'll hunt you down next. Even if we fail tonight, remember we have a lot of cousins with long memories. Back home we have a reputations against giants." I nodded somberly, taking him at his word.

But I couldn't let it lie. "One question, Sig." He cocked his head and glared at me, then nodded reluctantly. "Will anybody get hurt in what you're about to do?"

He squinted his eyes at me and smiled an evil smile. "Only someone's ratings."

That was good enough for me.

In the time that Sig and I had spoken, the others had unloaded the SUV. They policed any sign that I'd ever had passengers. Everything was spotless and just as it'd been before the rest stop, with the exception of a pine-scented addition shaped like a fir tree suspended from the rearview mirror. I watched as they faded into the night, crates hoisted onto their shoulders, ropes coiled around their arms, linesman's pliers and a single small chainsaw dangling from their belts. One of them carried a gas can. I still had no idea what they intended to do.

I eased the SUV back out into city traffic. Gun had instructed me on the best way to get back to the tunnel and the interstate. It was a harrowing drive without the dwarven watch, but I made it without any unreasonable detours. In an hour, I was headed north again, my eyes half glued to the rearview mirror waiting for the inevitable red and blue pursuing lights.

I arrived in Boston just after midnight as it started to flurry. I found a hotel on the South Shore, near where my aunt lived. I'd wait to call her until the morning, hoping a decent lie came to me in the night. I collapsed on the bed and turned on the TV, still wired from exhaustion. I scanned through the channels until I came across Coyote News.

They still had the "Breaking News" banner splashed across the bottom of the screen. They were showing replays of the footage captured just hours before of the giant Christmas tree overlooking the ice rink at Rockefeller Center crashing toward the cameras just outside the Coyote News studios. Individual strings of lights had been cut until the words "God Jul" could be clearly read down its side in blazing, six-foot letters. Amazingly, there had been no injuries, though Will O'Really had been rushed to a local hospital for observation after some sort of apoplectic seizure.

NYPD and Homeland Security had cordoned off a ten-block area around the ice rink. Witnesses had reported a small horde of heavily armed children rappelling from the lower limbs of the tree just before it snapped and fleeing the scene on foot. Another suspected member of the group had been sitting on Santa's lap, rumored to be played O'Really, and whispered into his ear "the real War on Christmas is about to begin" just before the lights on the 72-foot Norway spruce flickered and the tree toppled after a resounding crack. Just prior to that, the kid had reportedly asked Santa for a Nintendo Wii with a cross-country ski package for Christmas. I recognized Carl's creepy little smile from the police composite sketch.

Sources close to the investigation said they were also looking into an Al-Qaeda link to a previously unknown group from Norway known as the Dverger Winter Arctic Reindeer Veterans Emancipation Network and Lapland Expatriate, though D.W.A.R.V.E.N.A.L.E had claimed no official responsibility for the act. Linguists at the FBI were still trying to decipher the nuances of the group's message.

NYFD was consulting with local construction crews and structural experts on how re-erect the eight-ton tree with building cranes and brace its trunk with steel bands as soon as authorities reopened the site. Linesmen from Con Edison's Local 1-2 had volunteered to restring the more than five miles of wiring and 30,000 replacement LED lights, saying they would have the tree ready for the re-lighting ceremony tentatively scheduled for Christmas Eve. Habitat For Humanity was still scheduled to come in after the New Year and haul away to tree's remains for salvage lumber to rebuild a house for a refuge from Hurricane Ike.

Homeland Security had elevated the threat level around the White House Christmas tree to Red. The Vice President, who was supposed to play Santa for the Congressional children this year, had reportedly been moved to an undisclosed, secure location.

As the news loop began to repeat, I smiled and flicked off the television with the remote.

After a brief but pleasant visit with my aunt, I arrived at my wife's parents', still trying to figure out how to explain the missing gifts as I trudged through the snow to their door. Instead of having to conjure another unconvincing lie, I found a package addressed to me waiting on the porch, mailed from Bergen, Norway, by international overnight express. That must have cost a pretty krone. Inside were replacements for all the gifts that had been left at the rest stop, with the addition of a present addressed to me from "The Real Santa's Helpers" that I later found contained a sampling of smoked Atlantic salmon, Jarlsberg cheese, savory bread-like crackers, venison sausages and seven Grolsh-style bottles containing homemade Norwegian flat beer and one with a potent but heavenly mead. There was also pipe carved to look like a dragon's foot clutching the bowl and a packet of that same sweet yet mild tobacco. "God Jul" was all the card inside read.

"How was your trip," my wife asked as she opened the door to greet me. Her cheeks were rosy, her hair a gold and copper halo. Her eyes sparkled like the Atlantic on a clear winter's day. Being home made her even more angelic, until she glanced at the driveway and asked, "Is that my car?"

I could only laugh and shake my head, "It's a long short story that I'll tell you while we rewrap these presents inside."


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Kami

She honored her mother at sunrise. She honored her father when the wind raged across the western sea. She honored her grandparents, Izanagi and Izanami, and the eight children that they bore together. She honored her grandfather's mourning that had given her mother life.

The shrine was her sanctuary, the grove, the garden, the reflecting pool. Inside the ancient walls and gates, the towering, bustling city disappeared and the old ways were not forgotten. She drew comfort from the balance of man and nature, the still pool barely rippled by the stream of water falling from the roof, the tended trees whose perfume blossomed early each spring, the carefully placed rocks that grew mossy with lichens, the grain of the worked stone in the temple wall, the red pillars at its entrance and the sweeping arch between. Unity and purpose from another place, another source, another time.

The people who made their devotions here thought she was the spirit of the shrine. They floated candles upon the still waters. They left tiny, rolled scrolls tucked between the stones like prayers, often with just a name designated for a blessing or a curse. Her friends thought her a kind spirit, her enemies a demon. Her uncles, Ren and Koan, had taught her the way of the warrior, the way of the sword.

She knew that Neko, the lucky stray, was the true spirit of the shrine. She only cared for her as much as anyone could care for a wild and independent spirit. She had found her among the overgrown ruins with a broken paw when her spirit had been awakened by the candles, and tended her until she recuperated. She decided to stay, to ensure the shrine wasn't desecrated again, a spirit of justice disguised as an ordinary girl named Kami.

Outside, they thought she was a street waif, another urchin raised in the feral Western wilderness her ancient city had become. Just beyond the garden walls, modern glass and steel shrines dedicated to yen and Euro and dollar loomed over her. Only Ronin Software, whose headquarters her shrine was nestled beside, sheltered her, not having lost touch completely with the ancient ways. Each morning, they sent their custodial staff to ensure the shrine was clean and well maintained. Each evening, they left food for her and Neko. On holidays, they brought clothing and gifts, most of which she donated to the poor as she already had everything she needed. In return, they were content to bask in the glow the rejuvenated shrine cast their way and the luck that Neko seemed to bring.

Today Kami hoped to replay their kindness. Recently, the scrolls in the wall were dominated by a single name: Jimmi Tens. He and his ritually tattooed street clan were no longer content to terrorize just the corporate invaders. Now, he extorted the poor, conscripting street orphans into his illicit enterprises. He coerced the boys into becoming runners and lookouts. The girls, he merely rented or sold. The corporations turned a blind eye. They found it easier to trim their profits to pay for protection and purchase underage prostitutes for their parties than to get into a street battle with a group well acquainted with the tactics of violence. All but Ronin Software, whose extended corporate family were beginning to pay a heavy price for their moral and ethical stance.

Jimmi Tens used to come around with candles. For a while, he had sheltered her like a young uncle protecting his orphaned niece. When she'd first settled, he had helped her clear out the vagrants whose only interest in the shrine was as a public bath and bathroom. When some of the drunks had threatened her, a gun had appeared and he'd taught her how to shoot it. He found the image of a grubby back alley girl pointing a 9mm at a street thug and instructing him to "say, 'Hello, Kitty'" irresistibly amusing. When she'd needed to see the priests and city officials to register the shrine as reoccupied, he'd loaned her his Kawasaki Ninja to get around the city. He used to joke that she liked to feel something powerful and throbbing between her legs. He would never find out. She hadn't realized that even then he was like all the others, that his only agenda was to frustrate his enemies and increase his own power. He had already become alienated from the ways above.

Kami had never truly needed his help. He had been arrogant to think so. Now he dared to threaten not only the people under her protection but Neko. A week ago, one of his minions had the audacity to graffiti a hanging cat in white spray paint outside her garden gate. That act had elevated him from an annoyance to a problem that needed to be solved. When that demonstration hadn't provoked her compliance, he'd escalated.

She gazed down at his handiwork again. She could see the suffering, the depravity. The blood had darkened to rusty brown, staining the bright red gates of the shrine in small rivulets. She had had to borrow a hammer from the Ronin maintenance station, waving the workers away when they'd asked if she needed help. Gingerly, she had removed each of the four nails, extracting one from each paw. She prayed the creature was dead when she had been placed there, but suspected otherwise. Thankfully, by the time Kami found her, she had joined her ancestors. At first, she had thought the poor creature was Neko. Jimmi had chosen a gray tiger, a stray of similar size with similar markings to serve as his final warning.

He had defiled the gateway to the garden to send her a message. She understood that message now, though it wasn't the one he'd intended. She knew what she had to do. He wanted her to know that she'd outlived her usefulness to him. Unlike the sword of his ancestors that he revered, this one had two edges. He was no longer a protector of the shrine. He had sworn an oath. He had strayed from the way of heaven. He would learn what that betrayal meant. The spirits might be sleeping but that didn't mean they would forgo payment.

She knew he was trying to provoke her, to get her to leave her ancient sanctuary and reenter the modern world. In the seat of her power, she knew she was safe, that she could not be harmed. Out there, she was vulnerable just like any other girl. But she couldn't risk the damage Jimmi could do to Neko or the shrine. He thought of her as traditional, bound by the old ways. That would be his mistake. Heaven spoke in many voices. Most days those voices were like a choir singing in harmony. Some days they sang with a slight dissonance, like the J-pop girl bands she'd come to love.

After she'd buried the cat, she exchanged her traditional attire for that of errant schoolgirl, torn black stockings, stained plaid skirt, dingy white blouse, somewhere between punk Lolita and the pre-delinquent look. She gathered her long, black hair and tied it in a ponytail. Just above the ribbon she slashed it short and diagonal with a straight razor, an ancient sign of mourning that would help her blend in. Outside the gates, she would be hard to distinguish from the street girls and alley strays she had grown up with. She would challenge Jimmi on his own territory, defeat him at his own game.

Kami unrolled her spare sleeping mat, uncovering the pistol concealed within. It had appeared at the shrine just after the shooting involving a young anime enthusiast. The police had never identified a cause or suspect in that Otaku murder despite the weeks of coverage in the local and national press. She suspected the handgun was connected to Jimmi somehow. The pistol was an anodized pink 9mm with a Hello Kitty emblem embedded in the handgrip. A custom piece out of Hong Kong, unless she missed her guess. A quality weapon someone paid a high commission to have crafted, and a higher one to have smuggled in. What guilt was associated with it, she did not know, but she intended to redeem it.

She rummaged through the most recent pile of donations until she found the disposable cell phone, one she knew had nearly an hour remaining on its prepaid limit. She made certain it had the ability to send and receive pictures as well as texts and voice. She also found a woman's makeup kit, the compact type some of the female executives donated for the local women's shelter.

Next, she went to the stash of prayers on parchment, the names that had been tightly rolled and slipped into cracks in the wall. She had kept a special pile for Jimmi Tens to serve as a reminder. The one she was looking for was right on top, yesterday's addition to what could be patched together into a rather long list. The difference was that she knew whose hand had drawn the calligraphy of his naming symbols on this one, knew that hand held no stain of enabling him. The characters were perfect, with a slight flourish that spoke of a young girl's script.

With the cell phone, she flashed a picture of the parchment against the flagstones of the temple. There was no point in disguising where it had been taken. Jimmi would know from the parchment who had sent it and what she intended to do. Kami was counting on his reaction. She knew after his demonstration that he'd have his soldiers watching the shrine. If she timed it right, she could use them to allow her to get closer to him.

She checked the clock on the cell phone. Nearly time. She'd have to hurry now. Quickly, she donned the red skirt and white blouse of a shrine maiden over her other clothing. She pulled the white stockings over the black ones, and slipped on the red sandals. She pulled her hair back, and tied the ponytail she had cut off into the traditional red and white scarf. Then she pulled the small, white mantle over her head and settled it onto her shoulders. She straightened the entire ensemble so she would look like one of the mikos who sometimes came to assist her.

She glanced at the cell phone clock before stuffing it, along with the makeup, into the smallest of the three zippered compartments in the pink, camo-patterned backpack she'd selected. The handgun, she slid into the mid-sized compartment just behind it. She placed a pair of more contemporary low, black boots into the large, main compartment.

Neko rubbed against Kami's leg and reached up with a paw to lightly tap it. She squatted down and scratched behind Neko's ears, then under her chin, which drew out loud and gravelly purring. "I have to go outside for a while," Kami told her. "Yes, it's time. Stay out of sight while I'm gone. Hide if anyone unfamiliar comes inside. And no chasing the koi while I'm away." She stooped down even farther on hands and knees, almost in supplication. Neko rubbed along her face, tickling her nose with her whiskers, before disappearing silently into the grove. Kami hoped she would be safe. Neko would be vulnerable if she failed.

Kami picked up the backpack and clutched it to her chest under the white shoulder mantle. This would be the tricky part. She would only have a minute to cross without being intercepted. Instead of heading for the shrine's main entrance that opened onto the street, she shuffled toward the back gate, the one that led to a side entrance off of Ronin Software's main lobby, the one employees sometimes used at lunch to make their devotions which would start soon. She hated the single thong sandals. How did women ever get around in them? She supposed that was the point once upon a time.

As quickly as the sandals allowed, she shuffled across the open space between the temple grounds and the Ronin tower. She kept her head slightly down and her eyes forward, yet her peripheral vision caught the two street thugs in stylish sunglasses smoking cigarettes and watching the main entrance to the shrine. As she neared the glass door into the office building, one of them nudged the other and nodded in her direction. By the time they started toward her, the white gloved security officer stationed in the lobby opened the door, sending a wicked glare in their direction. As she nodded to guard, she saw the pair peel back the other way. They would have to hike the long way around the block to intercept her at the plaza by the Ronin tower's main entrance. They wouldn't hurry, thinking her dress and sandals would slow her.

Once inside the lobby, Kami quickly bowed to the security guard, who winked at her in recognition. She ducked into the sheltered alcove by his station. Out of sight of the employees in the lobby, she quickly tore off her traditional attire, revealing the more modern, younger clothing she had gathered from the castoffs in her charity pile. She removed the black half-boots from the backpack and crammed her feet into them without bothering to tie the laces, then balled up the mantle and scarf with the remnants of her hair into the skirt and blouse and stuffed them into the pack. She mussed her hair to give it the right look. Her makeup would have to wait. She slung the pink camo backpack across one shoulder and strode through the lobby, looking like an executive's wayward daughter who was late for school. None of the busy employees gave her a second glance.

She glanced out the main doors of the lobby as she approached them. The city bus was pulling up to the stop just down the street, right on time. She slowed her pace a fraction as she saw people queue up to get onboard, gauging the distance. She'd run for the bus just as the last person ascended the steps. The driver would wait only a few seconds, even for a scrambling latecomer, the only compromise between an innately polite society and a transit system that prided itself as always running on time.

The last man was boarding just as she cleared the lobby doors. She ran for the bus, careful not to trip over her untied shoes. The two thugs appeared around the opposite corner, but paid her no mind. She reached the bus just as the door was starting to close. A quick bang saw it reopen. She scrambled aboard and grabbed a ticket. Outside, Jimmi's enforcers were milling about the plaza in front of the Ronin tower. When a security guard stepped out the main door to confront them, they split up, going different directions around the block, not seeming to notice the bus pulling away.

She headed toward one of empty seats to catch her breath, wondering if the pair would figure out that she was the girl who had sprinted for the bus right in front of them. By the time they did, it probably wouldn't matter. She sat down as far away from the other passengers as she could and pulled out the cell phone.

First, she entered the phone's menu and set it to answer directly to voicemail. Then, she loaded the picture she'd taken into a blank text message and sent it to Jimmi Tens' mobile phone. He wouldn't recognize the calling number, but he would be curious. She knew he couldn't resist an enclosure from a strange caller, especially to his private number, one he went to great lengths to keep out of the phonebooks of all but the closest associates. Within a few minutes, his street warden would be calling to inform him that she had slipped away from the surveillance at the shrine. Then he would understand that she was coming for him.

She knew Jimmi would put a trace on the phone. Not many people knew he had that capability, but it was easy enough to hack into the NTT database to check on a number. Mothers and fathers did it legally all the time. It was a feature on most phones now. All he had to do was input a bogus security string to take him through the backdoor the police used. Then he could track her phone as long is it was on.

Queuing up the photo once again, this time to load it onto the Internet, she sent it to a special Flickr group she'd created. That upload would generate an automated text message informing all the members of the group there had been an update. She had recruited a small army of keitai, crowdsourcing her own surveillance needs to the children of the mobile phone culture. The message would let them know to start tracking Jimmi Tens, flashing pictures of him discretely with their cell phones wherever he went. They would post those images to her Flickr group. From there, she would know exactly where he was. All she had to do was wait, and eventually, he would come to her.

Oh, and ditch the phone where someone was bound to find it, someone who would use the remaining minutes rather than turn it in. Somewhere like right here on the bus. She scanned the other riders to make sure no member of the green uniformed Smile-Manner Squadron was present. Luckily, there were none. Most of the respectable people were at work by now, as were their children. Whoever picked up the phone was likely to use it. That would draw off Jimmi's minions and bodyguards.

Finally, she returned to the phone's features and reset all the personal data, as well as the log of all the calls in or out. A temporary measure that would buy her time once it was tracked down. She then closed the phone and carefully tucked it between the cushions of the seat, just barely peeking out. She wanted to make sure none of her neighbors were helpful in pointing out she had left it behind. With any luck, whoever discovered it would use it or sell it. At worst, it would be turned into the driver and move around the city with the bus.

With that done, she fished out the small makeup kit from her backpack and began applying the rest of her disguise. Dark eyeliner, heavy mascara, exaggerated eye shadow, bright lipstick. She could sense her fellow passengers watching her out of the corner of their eyes with disapproval, but she didn't care. That meant they were less likely to inform her about the phone should they spot it, since she had broken one of the unspoken rules of bus etiquette. It fit perfectly with her image of a bratty executive's daughter.

When she finished, she looked up to find her stop approaching. As the bus slowed, she sashayed forward, slipped her ticket into the reader and dropped the correct change into the receptacle by the driver, all without making eye contact or acknowledging anyone, pouting slightly the entire time. By trying to draw attention, she ensured she would be less noticed, one of the quirks of modern Japanese society.

She changed busses several times after that, hopping from one to another without much thought of their route or destination, just taking the first available so she didn't have to stand around very long. Her meandering path sketched a modern line drawing of a Japanese character through the city as seen from above. There was a more direct route to her travels, but she wanted to make certain her trail was obscure, just in case. Half an hour later she started paying attention to moving closer to her eventual destination.

From the final bus stop, Kami turned down a well-trafficked side alley. The city was still alive and crowded though not like rush hour when the sidewalks would be packed. Digital advertising brightly lit up the street even against the sun. Deeper down the overshadowed alley, store signs and advertising cast an almost psychedelic range of blinking yellows, greens and reds. Not quite seedy, so it wouldn't attract any of Jimmi's watchers who might be out. Reputable and slightly touristy but off the beaten track. The pedestrian alley opened into a small plaza between the looming buildings. She was near the corporate downtown not far from Ronin Software, on the edge of Jimmi's territory. Were she to look up, which only tourists would, she would see a small square of blue sky above. Instead, she headed for a narrow staircase between the shops at the back of the plaza, then up them to the Internet café.

Inside, she traded cash for a prepaid credit card at an automated vending station. The café wasn't crowded like it might be after school let out. She chose a cubicle facing the windows so she could keep an eye on the plaza while she waited.

She logged on to her Flickr page. At the top she saw the photo of the parchment she had posted, viewed over a hundred times already but uncommented. Below another two dozen newer photos waited. Quick shots, all from cell phones but remarkably focused and composed. Most showed Jimmi Tens making his way through his normal day. He didn't have a routine, per se, or even a regular path. But he did tend to have a few daily haunts and subtle patterns to his movements, more like opportunities, one of which she was specifically waiting for. A sampling of others showed his lieutenants scurrying to carry out his orders. A couple showed the shrine, safe and undisturbed. She hoped it remained that way. She hoped Neko remained out of sight.

She knew Jimmi Tens would approach his day casually, unrushed, as if nothing had happened. It was important to his ego, his image of self-control. But she knew he would recognize the hand that had penned his name and at some point go to confront his girlfriend. He wanted to make sure the girl was unsuspecting, thinking she had slipped something by him, that he wasn't paying attention. Then he would pounce, like the tiger that stalked his arm in ink.

Sipping a cup of mildly horrible tea brewed by another vending machine beside the door, Kami waited. She set the browser to refresh each time a picture was uploaded. So far, it looked like a normal day for Jimmi Tens, the tattoo parlor, the video store, the modeling agency, all providing either direct or indirect income to his organization. Then on to the small-cap real estate franchise that he had bought a token share of on the local stock exchange, one that enabled him to remind the owners that certain shareholders intended to ensure their investment was managed the way they wished. It appeared he might not check in on his wrestler's mother today, one of the many people whose welfare he saw to personally, as a reminder of his power over them.

As Kami waited for the pattern of his movements to compile, she stared out into the plaza, remembering when it was a tea garden with the same cobblestones full of artisans, students, and minor officials, all trying to avoid the samurai and their soldiers. So long ago. So much had changed, some good, some bad. The people were less militant and warlike now. The youth of today seemed more open than any generation in centuries. But they had once again lost their way, had become separated from the spirits. She had thought men like Jimmi Tens could help steer them away from the seductions of modern commercialism. She had been wrong. When she'd first met him, he wanted to reform the corporate culture that dominated the city now, saying he strove for a more balanced future. Now, he was indistinguishable from the other men who led organizations of violence. He terrorized individuals, threatened their families, ransacked their homes, burned their cars, murdered their pets and threw the severed heads over their garden walls, whatever was necessary to force them to comply with his desires. But, he had threatened an innocent, someone not involved in his schemes. Someone who had sought her out for justice.

Jimmi Tens had chosen his fate and driven it home with each nail into the temple door. Kami had no pity for him now, only sadness. He was irredeemable.

She continued watching her Flickr page update. Her keitai were working out better than she had anticipated, covering Jimmi, his lieutenants and street wardens, as well as the shrine. Each seemed to be in a private competition to outdo the others in the photos they captured surreptitiously. They were nearly as good as tapping into the citywide close circuit camera feed and much harder to trace or crash.

Jimmi was on the move again, this time toward the pachinko parlor in which he was a silent partner. That was the destination Kami had been waiting for. From there she knew the pattern. He would meet with his agents for an hour or more, reviewing their books and operations to ensure his sidelight ventures were running the way he desired. Then he would sneak out the back and head for his favorite sushi bar, the one where his new girlfriend worked. The one he had threatened, the one who had prayed to Neko for protection by penning his name to parchment, rolling it tight and inserting it into the temple wall.

She envisioned the route he'd take, out the service door, through the back alleys, touring the older, unmapped areas that still existed between the feet of the concrete and steel giants that had sprung from the ground around them. The city had grown organically over the centuries, and her knowledge of its streets with it. There were alleys and pathways, shortcuts and blind gates known only to a few. She knew more than even the most cunning of Jimmi's street wardens.

She knew the exact place she would intercept him. Buried in the maze of streets and ancient alleys was a traditional soba noodle shop, catering mostly to delivery and contract lunches in the office towers, Ronin Software among them. They crafted some of the best thin noodles and miso in the entire city and had for generations. It wasn't much to look at, just a lone holdover with a narrow storefront wedged between two towers. It had a pair of windows that looked out onto the dark, alley maze, marked only by a hand-painted sign.

She logged off her terminal, being certain to clear the browser of any traces of where she'd been. As she left, she tossed the remnants of tea into the clean, white receptacle by the door, exactly where it belonged. She descended the stairs but instead of emerging back into the plaza, she turned toward an unmarked, age-darkened wood and steel door at the back of the adjoining hallway. Few knew the door was always unlocked, one of the only surviving remnants of the ancient daimyo's watchtower that once dominated the landscape here.

The heavy door slid shut quietly behind her. She emerged from beneath an arched overhang at the corner of a narrow, stone alley, deep in the maze that clung tenaciously to the margins of modern society. One day, one of her aunts would rumble her discontent and this last vestige of a bygone age would disappear beneath stone and dust. But not today.

Kami wended her way through the maze, turning down narrow passageways, opening and closing unlocked gates, moving though stone-lined canyons that rarely saw the sun. Unlike their newer counterparts in the remainder of the city, all of them were clean. The families and businesses whose rear doors exited onto them still swept them each morning and rinsed them once a week. It pleased her to know that not all of the traditions in the city had died.

Ahead, Kami spotted the noodle shop sign hanging across from a doorway flanked by a pair of windows. Each window had a small, two-person table behind it for the scant customers who dropped in rather than called. Mostly, it was a convenient waiting area. The windows were from a day when the alley was actually a bustling back street. The ancient owner, who doubled as the chief cook, could clearly remember that time, decades before the firebombings had transformed the city both in geography and in temperament. He relished having someone stop in and take the time to appreciate his craft. He received so little direct feedback these days. She enjoyed his fare more than any other in the city, simple yet elegant. Hot or cold, you could taste the time-honored tradition in every bite.

She approached the counter and gave her order to the owner's daughter, a grandmother in her own right. No chitchat like the modern restaurants, just a simple attentiveness and courtesy. The afternoon was warm so she ordered a plate of chilled noodles with a nori seaweed topping and a pot of tea in case she had to wait. Though it went against the usual custom, she paid in advance. She would need to leave quickly once Jimmi wandered by.

Setting her backpack on the stool by the door, she settled onto the seat in the corner. She faced the side alley where Jimmi would emerge and turn away from her, the perfect location to intercept him, where he would have little time to react. The pink camo backpack contrasted nicely with the traditional amber wood seat, a perfect blend of past and future.

The noodles and tea came out promptly, giving her plenty of time to savor them before her target was likely to appear. She had to stay alert. Her wait could be half an hour or three; there was no way to predict. But she knew he would come before the day was out.

As she slurped her noodles noisily, the final wave of delivery boys, mostly grandchildren and great grandchildren, entered and left the shop with piles of boxes bound for the corporate towers. This was their last run in a two-hour marathon of deliveries to feed the office workers who had long since replaced the artisans who once made the city great. They would be gone for many hours, fanning out across the city afterwards to pick up supplies for tomorrow's fresh batch before they returned for the evening deliveries.

Sated by the noodles and nori, Kami turned toward the tea, savoring its green, slightly nutty flavor. Sencha, she presumed. The pale, steaming liquid flowed so gracefully from the cast iron pot into the sky and cloud glazed, handleless pottery cup. The comparison between this and her early sampling in the Internet café was simple: there was no comparison at all. She felt sorry for today's youth who had turned to that insipid substitute, or even coffee, over this delicately flavored jade brew.

Time stretched with each sip from the rough-thrown earthenware that warmed Kami's hand. The grandmother had long since disappeared into the back to help her father with the cleaning up. He came out briefly to sit at the table across from hers, smoking a cigarette in silence, another anachronism from a distant time she recalled so vividly, a time before Christianity or even Buddhism, had spiced the city's already flavorful stew. He met her gaze once and nodded. She smiled wanly and nodded back. He took no notice of her attire only her demeanor. With Kami, people saw only what they wanted to see. He soon disappeared back to his daily routine.

When the alley began to dim as the sun retreated behind towers of glass and steel, Kami feared she had miscalculated. She was thinking about heading off to another Internet café to check her Flickr page again in case Jimmi's routine had changed when she noticed a cat stroll down the alley, a large, gray tiger that she could have mistaken for Neko had he been striped rather than marbled. An omen. She set down her cup, knowing Jimmi couldn't be far behind. In the back of the shop, she heard the splash of water and the clank of metal as lunchtime dishes were washed. No one would hear her leave.

A moment later, she spotted movement at the corner. Jimmi Tens emerged and turned away from her, his long black overcoat flowing behind him. He didn't so much as spare a glance in her direction through his dark, designer shades. As she stood to retrieve her backpack, outside the gray tiger rubbed Jimmi's legs, trying his best to trip him with affection. Jimmi continued on his way, undaunted.

Before she left the shop, Kami unzipped the middle compartment of her backpack, then picked it up by the small carry handle between the straps with her left hand.

Back outside, Jimmi had disappeared. The alley jogged through a series of sharp corners beyond the intersection Kami had been watching. As she turned the second corner, the alley began to change from stone to concrete, from natural to manmade, the threshold of a transition from old to new. She could feel the power and rightness of this place. Her right hand delved into the open backpack compartment until it found the cold steel grip of the pistol.

When she turned the next corner, she found Jimmi had paused to scratch the gray tiger behind its ears. He sensed no immediate danger, unlike the cat, which saw her, perked his ears and darted back the way he had come. Only as Jimmi turned to see where the cat had disappeared to did he notice Kami. Even then, he didn't look even mildly concerned.

"Kitten," he said with his typical false sweetness and surprise, "just the person I've been looking for. You've become shy and elusive recently."

"Hi, Jimmi, I was starting to think you wouldn't come," Kami replied evenly.

Jimmi spread his hands wide, "Here I am, girl. But what's with all the drama? What's so urgent?"

"You received my message," she said, a statement not a question.

"On the phone? Yeah, it was kind of cryptic. Who wrote that anyway? Don't tell me someone's been spreading lies about me."

"You know better than that, Jimmi. I don't get involved unless someone asks, someone who needs my help, someone pure."

"There is no one pure in this city anymore," he said, shaking his head, "not even you.. Your time here is done. But you can stop by my apartment tonight and we can talk. Maybe we can take the Ninja out for a ride again, like old times. Right now, I on my way to see my new girlfriend."

"To raise your hand to her again? I don't think so" Kami's left hand dropped the backpack carry handle. The pink pistol slid free from its concealment in her right.

Jimmi raised his eyebrows in feigned surprise. "Oow, Kitten thinks she has claws. Where'd you pick that toy up?"

"You should know, Jimmi;" she answered casually, "it traces back to you. Someone dropped it at the shrine after the Otaku murder. What did that child do to you?"

Jimmi smiled his cynical smile. "He promised to create a buzz for a new manga my sister's daughter had an interest in. I told him only girls and children are involved in that anime culture. He said he was ready to be a man. But he couldn't do a man's work."

The gun hung heavy in Kami's hand. Jimmi had just confirmed that its associated guilt was linked back to him. In her hand, it was transformed into a holy weapon, an instrument of the gods. Nothing but atonement could save him now. "What, he wouldn't commit your violence for you? You can still make amend your path."

Now, Jimmi grew angry, "I have nothing to amend. Violence is for street gangs and petty thieves. I am neither."

"I think that captures the essence of you now, Jimmi, petty and violent." She was trying to antagonize him, like Neko playing with her prey. "I used to think you had potential before you went all Martin Luther on me."

His eyes grew as hard and sharp as a katana. "You act as though you know better than I do how I should act and who I should be. You should stop this, Kitten, before someone you care about gets hurt."

"Someone already has, Jimmi, someone you threatened, someone you nailed to my temple door. You said you would defend Neko and the shrine. You swore an oath. You lied." She raised the pistol and aimed it at his chest. "You, off all people, should understand what betraying your word means."

"You think anything I promised you is important?" he retorted, maintaining his defiance. "You're just a schoolgirl playing in a man's world for excitement. What were you before I met you? The same thing you are now, a street slut pretending to be a priestess. You didn't even know how to shoot that before I taught you. Do you even remember?"

Kami let the hint of a smile creep across her face. "I remember what you told me once, 'don't point a gun at something unless plan to shoot it; don't pull the trigger unless you want it dead.'" She cocked her head inquisitively and let her smile blossom. "Did I get that right?"

Only then did the gravity of his situation begin to sink in. His fingers twitched as he longed to draw the weapon she knew he had secreted somewhere in his clothing. His eyes flicked around quickly as if trying to identify anything nearby that could save him. They found nothing. "You've never shot anyone before, have you, Kitten, never actually watched someone die." He held out his hand for the gun. "Leave a man's work to men like me and you'll live a much longer and happier life. Girls like you aren't strong enough to shoulder the load."

"You're wrong, Jimmi," Kami replied, her hand unwavering. "You only taught me to shoot, not to kill. It's time for you to face your ancestors. It's time for you to atone for what you've done." She thumbed the hammer back until she felt it click. "It's time to say, 'Hello, Kitty.'"

Jimmi's hand began to move toward his coat as he began to dodge to one side. Kami squeezed the trigger, just like he'd taught her, slowly, deliberately, until the hammer fell in explosive silence.

When the people of her island were born, their parents penned their names to the Shinto lists; when they married, they sought a Christian blessing; when they died, they were purified by Buddhist flames. Somewhere in the city, Buddhist gongs called their monks home from the fields, Christian bells called their monks to Vespers. She had never been threatened by either of their traditions, had always enjoyed them both. Perhaps one of them would claim Jimmi Tens. The Christians would condemn his soul to eternal torment, the Buddhists to another cycle on the wheel. To the spirits, he would serve the city better dead than he had alive, as an example. He had been chosen for greatness. He could have been a new leader. Instead, he had selected a divergent path, one that had separated his spirit from the ancestors. Now, he was like a candle at dawn, no longer necessary to combat the darkness. As her own temple chimes echoed like a choir in the distance, his spirit flickered out.

Kami stared down at the man who used to be a warlord, an oyabun, and now might become someone's revered ancestor. Only if a sister or a niece mourned him earnestly and reinserted his name somewhere in the temple wall. She reached into her backpack, pulled out the miko's hair scarf and wiped the pistol's grip and trigger. He would be found in an hour or so when the sabo shop's delivery boys returned. The gun alone would be enough for the national police to dismantle his organization, though they would wonder what had killed him. She didn't think there was a box for guilt on the coroner's official forms. She doubted it would be ruled a suicide, which undoubtedly it was. In the end, the report would probably say that Jimmi Tens had died as he'd lived, by violence.

Kami deposited the pistol onto his chest before drifting back through the ancient city toward the shrine where she would burn his name from the lists and tell Neko that she, too, had received justice.

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Connecting Flights

"Connecting Flights" - a reading (on YouTube)


"Incoming" he yelled, ducking as the large shadow darkened his peripheral vision.

The plane had just turned onto the runway after an exhausting hour of creeping toward takeoff as rain and fog descended in a tattered curtain that played hide and seek with the blue and green tarmac lights, all but closing the airport. The air inside the cabin had grown warm, thin and stale. His face had grown flushed, his head light.

The cabin grew silent. His fellow passengers stared, apprehensive that he was one of them, one of the crazy or difficult ones that the evening news always warned them about. The men nearby tensed, ready to subdue him if he did anything more than raise his voice. The women slithered as far away as the cramped conditions allowed. Two flight attendants unclipped their harnesses and rushed along the aisle toward him, one forward, one aft. The farther was five rows away, the closer three when another passenger screamed, "Oh my God...."

She was cut off as the plane jerked to the right when the pilot swerved and gunned his engines, realizing his mistake, too late.

He hugged the seat in front of him like an infant desperately clinging to its mother. He curled his knees tight to his chest, his feet perched on the seat, hoping he could maintain his embrace with the cushioned security that his arms had wrapped completely around. He closed his eyes and turned his head like a lover moving in for a kiss.

His vision stuttered to a series of freeze frames jumping from one to the next. Reality became a strobe light at a rave with his mind clouded by ecstasy and his heart providing the thunderous beat. In the continuous-shot photography clicking through his head, he could see the shadow of the other plane descending, getting longer and larger and darker as each picture snapped by, click, click, click, until a wheel dropped into the frame bounded by the window and the wing, first brushing the top edge, then one quarter, mid-frame, contact. At that moment it seemed to snag on the wing frame after frame after frame with only slight waves of distortion around the connecting point as the metal folded and buckled. For those instants, time might have stood completely still, his mind refusing to move to the inevitable conclusion of the photographic montage.

Sound maintained its continuity but distorted. Like the Doppler effect after a sports car with a booming stereo had zipped passed, frequencies elongated, tones slowed and deepened. The high-pitched agony of tearing, twisting metal became a groan, the creaking he might hear in an ancient elevator as its cable strained to lift it. The scream of the jet engines receded to a gentle breeze stirring across the distant shore of a private beachside paradise that he alone occupied.

An instant later, time accelerated to ten times normal speed like a bachelor's DVR on extreme fast forward as he scanned recorded movies for the barest hint of exposed female flesh. Sounds returned to normal pitch though the volume increased until the highs and lows distorted. They pushed the limits of his eardrums like a high-school death-metal band amplified over aging speakers by an amateur mixer at 2 a.m. one Saturday at a nightclub called Diabolique. Metal screeched as the wing and wheel crumpled, rubber squealed as tires lost their traction, engines shrieked at impossible attempts at acceleration or air braking. Aluminum tore and crushed and rended. Children wailed. Adults screamed. Time stopped.

Perhaps his will had suspended the laws of physics. Perhaps his mind had become drawn into the moment as captured by a modern sculpture constructed from diminutive I-beams and rivets, all struts and scattered panels, alluding to aircraft without filling in all the details. One perched atop the other like skeletal dragonflies approaching a midair mating, seemingly defying gravity, connected only by one's wheel resting behind and beneath the other's wing. He could see the piece touring the country, garnering rave reviews stop by stop, with an itinerary crisscrossing the busiest air corridors, hitting all the major hubs: New York, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles. Its final destination Washington D.C., just off the fourteenth street bridge outside the Air and Space museum where a tour guide in a blue blazer detailed how the artist had captured the instant of impact with one plane seeming to float above the other, noting the roll and pitch and yaw as the top plane attempted to veer away and the minor skew as its partner had just begun to react. The gathered crowd studied the piece dispassionately beneath a cerulean sky with its unblemished puffy whites reflected in the tidal pool, contrasting the greens and pinks of the cherry trees as their blossoms shed one by one and floated toward a soft, water landing, stunningly beautiful even as their detachment signaled a slow, spiraling death.

The impact threw him backward, pressing him deep into his seat as the other plane imparted its momentum, lifting its partner's wing with its wheel as it attempted to continue flying, even just a few yards farther until it was clear, throwing them toward the white shroud draped just beyond his window. The plane struggled for lift like a young osprey thrown from its mother's nest. His stomach told him the pilot had succeeded, however briefly, in gaining air beneath their wings. He felt light, almost ephemeral, as the pair separated with a screeching whir and a reverberating thunk. He squeezed his eyelids tighter as he waited for the secondary impact, the one he knew would end in his shattered or fiery death.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. Sorry for the bumpy takeoff. We wanted to get airborne before the ceiling dropped and closed the airport. We just squeaked out before the last plane landed. Even though our departure was delayed, we should be able to make it up en route and get you to your connecting flights on time."


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Sky Cell (Abrami's Sister pt. 2)

"We’ve got a new one arriving this morning. Prisoner 108. Dahl’s started a pool on how long this one will last."

"Who is he?"

"He’s a she. That’s all my people will say. This time they’re citing regs."

"They always cite regs."

"This time they’re serious. But there’s only one ‘she’ that makes sense."

"Abrami’s sister? No way, Boyd. The guys back home are screwing with you. They haven’t even backed up her conviction records yet. Besides, conspiracy can’t land you here."

"Conspiracy to commit genocide can. I hear they amended the charges again, right after her conviction."

"The tribunal went for that? Good. It’s about time they used section 37 the way it was intended."

"So how long do you think she’ll last?"

"Up here versus ratting out her own brother? I give her five weeks, but only if it’s her."

"Five weeks? Are you nuts, Shay? Prisoner 106 didn’t make ten days. By the end of that, he was mess. From what I hear, it took the psych-techs weeks to put him back together."

"You haven’t been up here long enough, Boyd. Prisoner 106 was a wannabee. I remember when Prisoner 12 went eighty-four days. And he was only Abrami’s pilot, not a blood relative. Real Greens are tough."

"Guess that’s why we still have a job."


The grav-car circled the plateau lazily once the reinforced window-shields slid back, giving prisoner 108, as she’d come to think of herself, a panoramic view of her destination. In the time since her conviction, her captors had stripped away almost everything, her clothing, her possessions, her makeup, her freedom, her name. But not her identity, nor her desire to resist.

Below, amid the low outcroppings and sandy gray-brown hills strewn with rocks and boulders, a spire rose above the desert, as smooth and black as obsidian, which it both was and wasn’t. Technically, it was a synthetic with a similar composition to volcanic glass, but with a much higher tensile strength from a tighter molecular matrix though it still lacked an overall crystalline structure. Technically, it was also grown rather than extruded from the earth as quick-cooling lava.

Prisoner 108 didn’t know those details. She only knew that it was tall and impressive, even from far above. She wasn’t sure how tall, there was nothing below to give it scale. It was the dominating feature on a desolate plain. The sides were polished and vertical. There was a slightly rounded platform on top, like a nesting box sitting atop a pole.

The grav-car hovered then slowly descended. The top of the platform was flat and enameled a blue nearly identical to the cloudless sky near the horizon, nearly identical to the color of her jumpsuit. Perhaps not enameled but grown with a surface layer of the desired color. There were discontinuities on its surface, items grown in the same color that she thought might be a bed and some kind of seat.

The pre-departure briefing told her a great deal about her impending incarceration. She had received a number of modifications to ensure her safety. The first was a series of medical nanite injections to boost her immune system, both to detect and clear out any internal overgrowths and to deny access to any external vectors. That meant no colds, no flu, no pneumonia, no Candida outbreaks. She had also been injected with a series of highly tailored impulse-control modifiers to ensure she ate and drank when such necessities were provided. There would be no hunger strikes. LOW OrbIT had learned from its early failures.

Her jumpsuit was proactive, embedded with genetically engineered organisms that thrived on dirt and sweat and dead skin for built-in self-cleaning, thus circumventing any hygiene concerns. The organisms had been designed for deep-space, military EVA’s. They could even live on her excrement in extreme conditions should she choose not to use the minimal facilities provided. If she chose to live in her own filth, it would only last a little while and provide her no legal, humanitarian respite.

Her skin had been modified to provide it with an inherent resistance to UV radiation, the equivalent of a near-complete UV block to prevent any complications from long-term exposure. Even her corneas had been modified to prevent damage or blindness in case she took to staring overlong at the sun, as many prisoners did. Her mouth had been colonized with bacteria that ate plaque and her teeth coated to prevent decay. Her head had been shaved and her scalp treated with a hair growth inhibitor.

Her brain had been infected by other colonies of nanites responsible for maintaining proper brain chemistry, keeping her endorphins balanced, ensuring she didn’t slip over the edge into depression or full-blown psychosis. The people watching her wanted her to experience the mind-numbing nature of her surroundings completely, but to remain relatively sane. Near the lymph node cluster of her left arm, they had lodged a medical suite the size of a small analgesic capsule that monitored and broadcast all her vitals, from heartbeat to hydration to brain and blood chemistry.

What she hadn’t been told is that the area of her brain responsible for auditory interpretation had been colonized by another set of nanites that responded to a narrow range of overlaid, sub-audible frequencies which would at first make her increasingly anxious and tired, then quickly put her to sleep if the sounds persisted or increased in volume above a certain threshold. In practice, it meant she could approach but never reach the edge of the platform, so she could never see the planetary surface below and not end her confinement through a creative use of gravity.

This modification also meant her watchers could put her to sleep on demand, using the same sub-audible tones. This way, they could drop her, pick her up, examine her if something unexpected happened, all without her knowing or having to interact with anyone. It also meant they could resupply her provisions occasionally while she slept.

Provision replenishments came at random intervals to prevent her from gaining any sense of time or routine. The nutrition packets in each drop were identically packaged, but varied in caloric content and time release so that a set of three meals would sate the average person between nine and seventy-two hours, depending on how they were tailored. Only water provided any sense of routine, though even that requirement varied slightly with the moisture content of each nutrition pack. Everything, including the water, was dispensed from the waste disposal unit which was fashioned to look like a standard recycler, though only the water was recycled and that only partially. A variant on the jumpsuit flora inhabited the recycler, reducing everything but the recycled water to a fine, powdery dust that only needed removal once a year.

Rumor had it that the planet itself had been selected very carefully. It was tidally locked so it had no day-night cycle. It was just the right distance from its star to maintain a temperature between 15 and 25 degrees C, varying very slowly over the course of its elliptical wanderings. No hypothermia, no heat-stroke. Not even any real weather, discounting the occasional low dust storms that lapped at the base of the spire. The planet was barren of all indigenous life. It seemed to replenish its own oxygen, though without life the initial survey team was baffled as to how. No scientist had been given an opportunity to examine this unique phenomenon. The planet was the exclusive domain of the military now, housing up to 144 prisoners at a time spaced in identical sky cells distributed so that none was within visual range of another even on approach.

At first LOW OrbIT had denied the existence of the sky cells and refused to release any information about them. But over time, they found that giving briefings about certain conditions and rumors about others was more effective than a complete information blackout, as it gave the minds of potential inmates something to chew on before they landed. The strategy was so effective that fully one third of the people sentenced to the sky cells never made it beyond the isolation of the interstellar trip to the planet. Another twenty percent started talking soon after they hit the platform.

In the sky cells law and ethics collided with society’s need for information and intelligence to protect itself. LOW OrbIT had tried various mechanisms for ripping what it wanted from people’s minds, everything from truth serums to vocal impulse inhibitors to nanite memory stimulators. All either had devastating, sometimes irreversible side effects or had been shown to be less than completely effective. The only acknowledged side effect from a sky cell was a mild to severe case of agoraphobia, a condition deemed neither cruel nor unusual in a society so heavily populating closed and artificial environments. The medical nanites and other modifications to the prisoner would be washed out immediately upon her release, so that she suffered no lasting alterations.

Everything was provided for the safety of the prisoner. Nothing was provided for her comfort. To end her isolation, all she had to do was tell them what they wanted to know. Or convince them that she didn’t know anything, which could take some time as military personnel with clearances high enough to have access to the sky cells tended to be a rather cynical group as a rule.

All this meant that once prisoner 108 was dropped, she would be completely isolated and alone, with no human contact. Every moment would be observed and recorded from an orbital platform. Every utterance would be analyzed. There was no escaping the anonymous watchers, though she would never see them. The opportunity for personal interaction was gone, a right stripped away by her lack of cooperation. Her only companions would be her own thoughts and the unchanging, unending sky.

Even the grav-car was fly-by-wire and unoccupied except for the prisoner, both to prevent any interaction between passenger and crew as well as a security precaution to ensure there was no way to hijack the vehicle from on-site.

As the grav-car hovered, prisoner 108 felt a slight throb below and behind her ears that resulted in a feeling of pressure on her sinuses. She would come to recognize that sensation as the sub-audible stimulation that slowly turned off her senses and put her into a conditioned sleep. She barely saw the grav-car begin its descent before gravity called her eyelids shut and a dreamless darkness claimed her.


When she awoke, she was lying on a thin, foam mattress encased in a synthetic cloth that felt like vinyl, but wasn’t. The casing was probably some carbon nanotube construct that was stronger than steel and bonded to the obsidian base of the bunk on a molecular level. Even if she could damage it, she had already been informed that the punishment for that destruction of LOW OrbIT property would be to do without even that minor comfort for the duration of her incarceration.

Beside the sleeping platform was a cube with a lid and a slot on one side with a blue plastic spigot beside it. The lid lifted to reveal a commode, a standard, waterless recycler rife throughout the cells she’d inhabited already. Fortunately, she’d already gotten over any shyness about her body functions no longer being private, but she still felt an odd sense of vulnerability about doing those things completely exposed to the sky.

When she examined the side slot, she found a pre-packaged ration bar. As soon as she saw it, she realized she was hungry, very hungry. The nutrition bar filled that need as water from the spigot slaked her resulting thirst, but neither provided any real sensation to distract her mind. The food bar was odorless and the color and consistency of the skin that formed on oatmeal left uncovered too long. It was wrapped in a rice paper like skin that she had peeled away and set aside. The bar had about as much taste as she figured the wrapper might. It was nearly flavorless, like a chewy granola bar without the chocolate or raisins, or a slightly soggy, salt-free rice cake bound together with flexible silicon caulk. But she devoured it quickly, her impulse to eat making her ravenous to the point where she couldn’t resist wolfing it down. Later, she would wish she could savor its disgusting texture in her mouth.

Even as she thought the wrapper might at least provide something to occupy her time, she noticed it melted into a pool that rapidly disintegrated until it was nothing more than dust that slowly drifted away. As she experimented over the next few meals, she found the process began quickly after the seal was broken. More nanites or tailored bacteria. She also discovered the wrapper was edible, and provided a contrasting, papery texture to the nutrition bar but no real flavor. She stopped receiving even that distraction after she crafted a wrapper into a paper glider that disintegrated as it sailed beyond the edge of her platform, much to her delight.

She got her fill of water after every meal, sometimes between if she was thirsty, but never if she just felt bored. To operate the water dispenser, she had to sit on the bed and bend her head beneath the spigot before she flipped up the tab opening the tap. No bottles to watch melt from towers into molten flows of dust. At least the water tasted clean and clear, not tainted with any metallic or plastic tang as were most of the recyclers she’d used before. After a few meals, she longed for a break from the monotony of that flavorlessness, even with the implications of where that tang might come from.

Sated, she investigated her open cell. She had access to an area about the size of a standard tennis court. The bunk and recycler stood at the very center of the platform. While from above, she could clearly see the platform against the landscape below, here the blue blended seamlessly into the sky. There was no distinction, no horizon, nothing to focus her attention. She suspected the platform edges were equipped with camouflage transmitters to blend it with the sky.

The last human voice she’d heard before she’d been dropped had told her the exact information they wanted from her. It told her resistance would only prolong her isolation. Other prisoners had advised her to try not thinking about what they wanted, but she thought they had been planted by the people holding her. She knew that would only make things worse. Trying to resist thinking about something just seeded thoughts of it within her brain. Just like by telling a toddler to ignore a cookie jar just within reach while you were out of the room, you ensured it would become the object of her every obsession.

At first, she enjoyed the freedom of the sky, the openness after so many weeks confined in cramped conditions under artificial lights. She lay on her bunk for hours soaking up the warmth of the distant, pinpointed sun that was not her own. Soon she found it lulled her into a twilight between thought and dreams. If she closed her eyes, she sank into the cushion of the bunk and could feel the platform sway slightly beneath her. It seemed to move just enough to reinforce the sensation that she was floating in the sky. Almost like a monochromatic version of sensory depravation, only she had just enough markers to anchor her to reality, the sun, the bunk, her hands and feet, the recycler. Her mind refused to drift into hallucination, however much she wished it might just to break the crushing boredom between each sleep, the unchanging sameness of this moment and this moment and this moment.

She lived for any stir of breeze, anything to distract her from the thoughts circling in her brain, reminding her in someone else’s voice that she held the keys to end her captivity, and that her punishment fit her crime. By turning her back on the security needs of her society, she had forfeited her right to human interaction.

Her feet made no sound upon surface of the platform when she walked. She had no blanket to rustle, no pillow to fluff. When she screamed occasionally to remind herself she was still alive, the sky absorbed her protest like a formless void, leaving no echo, no ripples, no telltale indication her voice had existed at all once it faded from her ears.

She paced off each day, each hour, each minute of her indeterminate sentence until even her steps lost their meaning. She tried approaching the edge of the platform, but could never get close enough to see even a hint of the ground below. Each time she tried, anxiety gave way to pressure, then grogginess then sleep before she came within a dozen paces. Each time she woke up back on her bunk, drifting in the blue. She tried running toward the edge, but found she could never build enough momentum to make it before she collapsed. Once, she tried repeatedly, as a demonstration of her resolve to her watchers. Each time she awoke on her bunk, she jumped to her feet and sprinted outward again. The last time, the tickling behind her ears changed. Her muscles still went to jelly, but she didn’t lose consciousness. She just became trapped as within a nightmare, floating, falling, anxious and terrified, yet unable to move. After enduring that limbo for what could have been minutes or days, she managed to summon the strength and resolve to crawl back to safety. She didn’t test those boundaries again.

She played with shadows in her bunk like a child, inventing games and characters within her mind. In her desperation for human contact, she took to reciting monologues about her childhood, all the stories, all the moments, every incident she could remember however trivial. Everything she’d told them before. She didn’t always stick to her half-brother, but constructed a random, broken, schizophrenic family history, like pieces of a puzzle they might fit together into a complete picture where she had failed. Or a mirror they might reconstruct from the shards she clutched in her bleeding hands. No new memories or insights emerged. Nothing she uttered ended her isolation.

After that, she began to forget how to speak, how to communicate, how to form even fundamental words. After what might have been weeks passed, she became an automaton. She ate, she drank, she urinated, she defecated. The rhythms of her body became her only markers of time, her clock and calendar until she forgot to wind them and they, too, became unreliable. Finally she drifted, spending hours just staring at the sun. She floated in the endless blue before slowly sinking beneath its surface, drowning in the sky.

She knew she was near the breaking point. She knew she couldn’t hold on to her sanity much longer. The childhood memories she had recounted were still too sharp, too fresh, almost new in their ability to bleed her and beat her and bring her pain again.

A change in her surroundings brought her back to consciousness gasping for air. At first she thought the static in her mind had taken over her hearing until she realized that the sound came from outside her head. A wind had risen, a real wind strong enough to ruffle and snap and tear at the cuffs of her jumpsuit. When she sat up, she felt it along her scalp and the stubble of her hair. Wind, glorious wind, strong enough to raise billows of gray-dun dust to define the edges of the platform, thick enough to darken the sky and anchor her back to this life, this reality, this torment her captors put her through. She was here, really here, in a prison of someone else’s construction not trapped within the sky and a past that had passed her by. As the sun faded to a tiny, dull orb, she became giddy in her excitement. She jumped up and danced and laughed and screamed her joy, until her savior became a dark and angry god.

Lightning slashed across the sky, blinding her with its fury. Nearly simultaneous thunder rolled through her in waves of sound that made her heart stutter in its regular, rhythmic beats. She spread her arms wide, throwing back her head, daring the storm to take her, as she had once dared her mother before a particularly vicious incident. As she did, an epiphany overtook her, a memory that flashed like a slide or a single frame of video across her mind. The exact information her watchers wanted. A name she had heard only once and only for an instant, when she was four and recovering from one of her mother’s worst ministrations, one that left her with a swollen head and blackouts and memories that came in jumpy visuals like stuttering scenes from several silent movies randomly spliced together to make a disjointed film. Souleymane had whispered the name of a friend who wanted to hide her once she recovered, the only time he had mentioned him. He was ten and had said this was the only person he would ever trust, a person she remembered, one who had kept in touch and watched her if only from a distance.

Tears streamed down her face, dried instantly by the wind, leaving her cheeks streaked with smudges of dust. She knew she now held the key to her release. Before she could stop herself, she remembered speech and shouted toward the sky the words she’d longed to say to Souleymane all those years ago but had been too afraid to utter. The wind tore her voice away before it even reached her own ears.

When she came back to her senses, she covered her mouth with both hands. She fell like a stone unto her bunk as the nanites in her brain were overloaded by the sudden release of the chemical imbalance that caused depression as she realized her mistake. She curled up tightly and wept, thinking she had lost her only advantage, thinking she was once again at the mercy of the unseen eyes in the sky.

No one heard her confession. At that moment the technicians were scrambling to boost the signal of the audio emitters surrounding the underside of the sky cell to overcome the noise floor raised by the gale force winds. The unprecedented dust storm had obscured their satellite visuals. The lightning was chewing huge holes in their monitoring systems, briefly taking them offline, overloaded by the wild swings in electromagnetic flux. The systems would survive. They were speced for the military so they would reset, but some data might be lost. They needed her sleeping to minimize that risk. After several unrecorded minutes, the technicians finally cut through the noise and sent prisoner 108 into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke uncertain whether she’d imagined the storm. There was no evidence on the platform to suggest it had been any more than a dream, not even a sensation of grit inside her jumpsuit. But even if was a dream, it had restored her sanity to where she now knew her way out. They hadn’t taken her, so perhaps they hadn’t heard what she’d said. But what to do with the information? They had nearly driven her mad and she hated them for it. They had no regard for her life or her sanity. She did not feel inclined to sacrifice someone who had helped her to people who had actively tried to harm her. So, she chose to continue her resistance.

Even though she was afraid they already had what they wanted, new words escaped her lips, words she reshaped subtly to suit her purpose by simply adding one "s." She said something new, a sentence of four words with one variation, words they’d never heard before. Words her watchers at first couldn’t make sense of but then came to recognize one by one, breeding excitement that prisoner 108 had finally broken, eliminating another threat, scoring another victory in their endless twilight war.

Their celebration lasted until they understood the meaning of the sentence she repeated over and over again, if only to hear a voice in her ears as she stared at the empty sky. Linguists parsed the words to make certain they had them right, that there were no alternatives they had missed. Analysts consulted and cross-referenced their databases to correlate the name. When the results came back, their jubilation faded and they became increasingly convinced they had suffered a major setback if not an outright defeat.

The sky cell would no longer work on prisoner 108 because someone, a rival on a different team playing a different game by a different set of rules, had turned her to his own purpose. He had embedded hope somewhere deep within her, an alternative to cooperation which she had latched onto like a lifeline in a critical moment, a lifeline that kept her from crossing into the controlled insanity they desired. They had seen this behavior before and it was always terminal. In their experience, hope could not be vanquished, only extinguished through careful, patient means. But this individual had sabotaged that effort for his own selfish ends to preserve his own selfish theories on how best to approach not only these interrogations but the very foundations of how intelligence should be stockpiled and shared and used. He would have them throw out the results of years of well-documented experiments, honed to a precise, psychological edge as sharp as any surgeon’s scalpel in favor of the blunt instrument of his own intuition, brilliant as that sometimes might be. One day, they swore to demonstrate their methods to him personally, but only after his powerful allies had passed the way of dust. Until then, they could only hope he was right, at least this once.

The psychological risk analysis revealed it was unlikely they could push her back to this breaking point without making her completely useless in the process. After a series of animated briefings and discussions, the psych-techs finally convinced their superiors to terminate the eighty-seven day, silent interrogation and remove prisoner 108 from her cell. Until the grav-car arrived and the watchers forced her brain into a deep catatonia, Josephine Sorin repeated that phrase with the one variation over and over in tones ranging from whispers to screams to sobbing mumbles until it became a mantra even in her sleep.

"Tell him I’ll go, tell him I’ll go. Tell Michaels I’ll go."


Next Vengeance (Abrami's Sister, pt. 3)

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III