The Stickmen (4 page)

Idiots…

The sudden clench of his hands on the
steering wheel was merely a reflex of something that could be
likened to excitement.

He’d just entered the official limits of
Washington, D.C.…

He was getting close.

Good.

Once Maryland Route 50 turned into the
District’s well-known New York Avenue, a trash-strewn, pot-holed
mainline through the nation’s capital, the driver’s eyes quickly
scanned the coming road for a pay phone. Insular cell-phone devices
or even satellite phones would not suffice for this: too risky.
Instead, he looked for a simple landline.

The ludicrous lighted sign bloomed: SCOT. A
gas station. Hadn’t that franchise gone under decades ago, right
along with BP and Sinclair? Evidently not.
Probably a tag-along
station privately owned,
the driver guessed but hardly cared.
He pulled in at once, stopped the rental right in front of the
phone booth. The rain splattered on him, stepping from the car to
the booth, then he clacked the hinged doors closed.

Outside, the storm continued to rage.

His gloved hands deftly opened the black
lunch-box-sized case he’d brought with him: an N.P.O 1309 telephone
descrambler. He removed the pay phone’s receiver and snapped it
into the unit’s reception cups, then picked up the unit’s own
receiver. In the reflection of the phone booth’s glass, his face
looked phantom-black.

He dropped thirty-five cents into the slot
and dialed “O.”

“Thank you for using Bell-Atlantic,” a
cheery voice answered. “How may I assist you?”

GO GONZAGA EAGLES,
he read a brief
announcement scratched into the phone’s chrome coin-box plate. And:
IF CLINTON DIDN’T INHALE, DID MONICA SWALLOW? “I’d like to place a
station-to-station call, please,” he said. “Area code 202-266-0001,
extension suffix 6.”

“One moment please.”

The driver’s eyes flicked up at a sudden
thumping on the phone booth glass. In an instant the door was
loudly pushed wide open.

Standing in the phone booth’s rainy entrance
was scrawny shaven-headed punk in a sleeveless black-leather jacket
and enough facial piercings to fill a tackle box. Twenty-five,
thirty-five—it was hard to tell these days; the crack and the ice
and the black tar Mexican “boy” wrung them out young these days,
added a decade for every year. The kid’s swollen red eyes looked
puffed and teary in whatever addiction it was that he’d sold his
soul too.

“Nice suit, fuck,” the boy said. “I’ll take
the jacket and the wallet. Now.” Then he raised a sharpened
screwdriver.

“Think so?”

“Be cool, man, don’t be stupid. Hand over
the wallet. If there ain’t some good cash in it, you’re fucked.
Don’t make me kill you.”

“What’s a bag of boy cost over here in the
east?” the driver strangely asked. “Ten bucks, twenty? On the west
coast, they sell the shit by the quarter-gram, but they’re all
loaded shots. Tips you losers over in a day. For God’s sake, what
the hell is wrong with you, kid? Life is a gift. Look what you’re
doing with it.”

The addict stared, taken aback even in his
twitching withdrawal. “You crazy, pops? I’ll gut you right here.
Gimme the cash…and the jacket. And I’ll take the car keys, too.”
Next, he raised the screwdriver higher.

“What are you gonna do with that? Hang a
towel rack? Get a life, son.”

The addict was incredulous.

“I’m making an important call,” the driver
said. “I got no time to play paddy cakes with junkies, so I’ll tell
you this
once
: Walk away.”

The addict grinned. “Fuck it.” Then he
lunged.

The driver’s left hand shot out, grasped the
addict’s throat while his right hand kept the phone calmly to his
ear. A few futile jabs of the sharpened screwdriver buffeted
against the suit jacket, not even scratching the Threat-Level III
Kevlar vest beneath. The addict’s face ballooned as the driver’s
left hand squeezed harder. In a moment the screwdriver clattered to
the floor, and a moment after that his trachea splintered.

“Rogers and Sons Dry Cleaning,” came a stiff
male voice over the phone.

The driver clicked a button on the receiver
with his thumb and then came brittle
fizzing
sound over the
line, then a long beep.

“Tango-six-dash-four-nine,” the male voice
said. “Counter-measures confirmed. Feed-decay-refeed loop—positive
for C.E.I.C ancillary band.”

The driver released his sudden burden; the
addict fell to the floor with a meager
thunk,
twitching,
gargling blood.

“Order retrieval request, ID eight,” the
driver said into the phone.

“Crypt double?”

“Q-J.”

“Crypt triple?”

“W-Y-N.”

“Roger, QJ/WYN. Listen and out.” A pause
lingered over the scrambled/ descrambled transmission. “Unto
whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”

The driver, QJ/WYN, replaced the unit’s
receiver into its case and hung up the pay phone.

At his Gucci wing-tipped feet, the dying
drug addict still twitched, still gargled foamy blood.

The tracheal wound would more than likely
kill him, but more than likely wasn’t good enough. QJ/WYN removed a
Mont Blanc pen from his jacket pocket, pressed the clip, and out
shot a four-inch-long barbed titanium needle. He inserted it into
one side of the addict’s neck, dragged it back and forth a few
times until the carotid was sufficiently torn.

Within a minute, QJ/WYN was back in the
rental, back in the rainstorm, driving toward the city which lay
ahead.

CHAPTER TWO

Silence.

Blackness. Then—

The little boy’s name is Danny, and Danny is
walking up a long hill from a distance. Dull red and yellow lights
seem to be throbbing from the other side of the hill. Is that what
Danny is walking toward? The lights?

Yes.

The night-time has no sound at first, no
crickets, no peepers, none of the sounds he’s used to on summer
nights. As his pace up the hill breaks into a trot, his footfalls
make no sound. There’s a funny smell drifting around him, like
burning metal, like last summer when they’d had that big storm and
lightning had hit the neighbor’s TV dish.

Now, the red and yellow blobs of light
appear to be leaking smoke, or steam, and their patterns change,
almost as if the lights have somehow been able to sense Danny’s
approach.

Once he’s made it to the top of the hill, he
just stands there, staring.

Staring down at—

Danny doesn’t know what it is.

Trapezoid,
he thinks. He knows the
word from math class, when the teacher was talking about geometry.
Basic shapes and angles. It’s stuff he’ll learn more about when
he’s older and gets into higher grades. Circles, squares,
triangles. Parallelograms.

Trapezoids.

The trapezoid is made of blinding white
light that seems to be sitting on top of the other red and yellow
lights. And now Danny can hear a sound: the sound of his own rapid,
terrified breathing.

All the colors churn over his face. He can
feel each separate color—the white, the yellow, and the red—as
though each is a hand rubbing over him.

Suddenly, then, something moves. It’s inside
the trapezoid.

A shape, a thin figure.

Looking back at him—

—and—

—everything turns black—

—and—

“No! No! No!”

—and then Danny woke up.

He jerked bolt upright in bed.

“No,” he whispered to himself.

His rapid breathing continued, the same
breathing he’d heard in the nightmare. His heart felt like a little
fist trying to beat its way out of his chest.

The nightmare again,
he realized.
The nightmare…

Only now did his heart pace down; he glanced
around and saw with relief that he was not on the weird hill at
all, and there were no funny lights and no trapezoid. Instead he
lay in the safety of his own bedroom.

It took a few more moments for the shock to
run out of his eyes.

“The trapezoid,” he whispered to
himself.

He sat up in bed, catching his breath. His
pajamas were damp with sweat. He looked at the clock on his
nightstand, right beside his Hercules and Xena figures. The clock
read: 6:00 A.M.

He remembered the funny smell from the
dream, the smell like burning metal, which somehow seemed to linger
even though the dream was over. But then the smell was replaced by
something much more familiar—the aroma of bacon frying.

“Danny!” his mother called to him from
downstairs. “Time to get up! Breakfast is ready!”

««—»»

Garrett frowned in the bookstore window, and
the sign that read: “Meet Best-selling Author Arron Matthews, and
Buy His New Autographed Book, THE ALIEN ANTENNA NETWORK OF THE
GREAT PYRAMIDS!”

Blow me,
Garrett thought.
It
should be me on a damn book tour, not this idiot.

What Garrett hated most were the
theory-predators: the phony “autopsies” sanctioned by prime-time
tv, the bullshit tabloid and even
Penthouse
magazine
“extraterrestrial” photos, the Joe Scully UFO book that was
underwritten by the Air Force as disinformation, etc., etc. More
than half of Garrett’s battle wasn’t with the government cells that
strove to rape his constitutional rights and discredit him to
preposterous degrees, it was the simple assemblage of cash-grubbers
out there—like this nimrod Matthews—who would go to the most
creative lengths to profit from the work of Garrett and his
vilified coterie with everything from snapshots of “faeries” to toy
submarines masquerading as the monster of Loch Ness to British
bumpkins with nothing better to with their time than elaborately
manufacture “crop circle” landing sites.

And with just the right camera angle, an
altered gorilla suit made for a
great
Bigfoot.

The field Garrett had given up so much
potential for to put all of his belief into was truly a three-ring
circus of fakes, schmucks, scumbags, and greed-laden boneheads. It
only made Garrett’s true calling that much more difficult, because
for every scintilla of truth he legitimately exposed, there was an
avalanche of fraud he had to sift through first like straining
lumps of feces from a box of cat litter with his bare hands.

Even when he persevered to meet his most
honest objectives, he still wound up smelling like shit.

The tentacles of sham stretched far, yet
those same tentacles happily encircled Garrett’s neck on a daily
basis. He had no choice but to simply live with it—just as a
ditch-digger lived with calluses and a street prostitute lived with
subjugation—because it was part of Garrett’s turf, and nobody was
putting a gun to his head to walk on it. He walked it because he
chose to, because he chose to pursue the truth behind the Big Lie.
The shammers were just mosquitoes on a hot, humid day. Garrett
didn’t like them, but he swatted them off just the same.

Garrett’s mother had died when he was
ten—spinal meningitis. It took Garrett five years to get over
it…and then, when he was fifteen, his father had died—heart attack
tumor. Just like that, that fast. Good quality middle-class life in
Wheaton, Maryland, good schools, good upbringing, never wanted for
anything—then
poof!
It was all gone.

And it had all happened so fast, the young
Garrett didn’t know which end of the world was up. His father’s
only brother had taken him in for the high school years, and
Garrett’s constant honor-roll status had gotten him a scholarship.
Four more years of close to a 4.0 average had set Garrett up
right—or should have. He’d done everything right, in spite of
losing his parents. Since his parents had died, he’d always felt a
deepening hole in his heart, but then he looked around and saw the
schizos on the street picking cigarette butts out of gutter cracks,
all the people in motorized wheelchairs who drooled uncontrollably
and couldn’t even hold their heads up straight, and the typical
“bums” who sat in alleys like piles of human rot.

All Garret had to do was look at those poor,
destitute people to realize that his life, in spite of its traumas,
was too bad at all. Sure, his mother and died and his father had
died, but some force of fate or God or luck had kept him whole and
sane and walking. Garrett felt like the luckiest guy on earth when
he saw what life had bestowed upon certain others. Earthquakes
wiped out tens of thousands in a single minute. Genocidal wars
claimed
millions
in months. Weighed against all of those
brutal truths, Garrett knew that he’d been dealt some damn good
cards.

In college, he’d hung in there and
made
it. Hard work, focus, studying when everyone else was
slamming beers at the Student Union (Garrett had only slammed them
on weekends). His major in computer engineering opened an influx of
doors. But then Garrett had done the least logical thing.

He’d enlisted.

He’d joined the Air Force.

He needed more experience. He needed more
life.
For him, the standard pattern of high school, college,
and solid mainstream job didn’t make it. There’d always been
something missing. He didn’t know what but he just
knew.

And that’s when he’d started hacking into
encrypted databases…

That’s what had put the match to the fuse of
his current plight, and made him what he was today…

It was just that some days were better than
others.

He left his sour grapes at the bookstore
window, and now, in jeans, and a crumpled black t-shirt that read
SYSTEMS BRANCH: USAF, paused on Connecticut Avenue to light a
cigarette, frowning at its stale taste. With the feds raising
tobacco taxes every other month, Garrett was forced to buy generics
made with tobacco from Indonesia.
Twenty-five bucks a carton for
this crap,
he sputtered to himself.
Pretty soon I won’t even
able to afford to light a match.
But at least he knew his taxes
were going to a good cause: J-STAR targeting satellites and the B-3
Bomber.