Balance

I remember the first one clearly: the oppressive, powdery smell of rain-wet concrete, a click when the car door opened, the silenced, .22 Browning twitching in my hand. The little slugs ricocheted wetly inside Kenny's skull, literally scrambling his brain, but he'd still look good at the funeral.
It had taken almost a month of my remaining time to convince Carver that I really would kill someone for money, and I needed a lot of money. The cancer was going to rot me within two years, and because the insurance company deemed it a "pre-existing condition", Beth and the kids wouldn't see a dime. A friend who occasionally sold me coke had introduced me to Carver. Soft-spoken, perfectly tailored, steady, friendly gaze; he was like a charmingly psychopathic big brother. Of course, when he had me checked out, I was perfect—average citizen, no record, desperately needed money, and nothing to lose.
Although Carver never provided personal details about the men I would kill, a little digging told me they were mid-level thugs whose transgressions usually involved money or someone else's woman. As time went by, I stopped digging. I began to feel better. The toxic residue of corporate servitude slowly seeped from me, and the headaches were going away. Beth and I were making love again.
On an icy November day, Carver invited me for a drink at his club, and as I sank into the big leather chair, he leaned forward and with the warmest of smiles, said, "It's been almost two years, and you're looking good, Bobby. I thought you'd be dead by now."
"So did I," I said. The doctors can't figure it out. Apparently, The cancer's in remission. One in a million." The glow from the fireplace and the taste of the fine scotch were soothing until Carver mentioned another job. Now was the time to say it. "This has to be the last one, my friend. Thanks to you, I can start over somewhere new, maybe Colorado. Good schools for the kids."
His smile broadened, but that steady gaze didn't change. "How are the kids and that beautiful wife of yours, Bobby?" That was all he said, but I knew what he meant. Later that night as I started planning the job, I finally acknowledged that cold little twisting in my gut for what it was: not fear, but anticipation. The headaches are all but gone, now.

Renovation

The second time Lewis died, it was surprisingly painful. By the tenth, he was raving mad (at least, he would have raved if his speech center had been working). Lewis was the perfect subject—no family, good health, a multiple murderer, and freshly-executed by lethal injection, so his organs were undamaged by cruder methods of dispatch. The life/death cycles continued.
The Colonel may have been insane; it was hard to tell because he was very good at his job. But then, the whole thing seemed slightly insane. Renovation was the Colonel's massively funded Black Project. The goal was simple in concept: reanimate a dead body in order to create an autonomous but totally-controllable sleeper agent who could be inserted into areas of interest. Suspend him between assignments, and it all began to look cost-effective by military standards. He would also have several grams of ultrahigh explosive built into the pacemaker in his chest. The Colonel had wanted a micro-nuke, but they were still working on a way to conceal that from deep scans.
The system had logged nearly a hundred cycles when it happened: Lewis took control, and the machines could no longer sense what he was doing. When he looked around the dim, dangerous room, everything was frozen . He didn't know if his eyes were open, but it didn't matter because now he knew what he had to do. He increased the frequency: thousands of transitions became millions, and then more.
Lewis began to understand How Everything Works. He became each of his victims. He felt every agonizing moment of the all the pain he had ever caused. Some cycles later, he knew that the glistening bone shrapnel from his exploding skull would kill everyone in the lab. Then he knew that he could easily destroy everything. The cycles continued, faster.
He extended himself through the probes attached to his body, through the hardened communications system, through transoceanic cables, through satellite networks, and then to Everywhere.
Several eternities after all the universes had disappeared, he created the heavens and the Earth.

Silo

Winter sunlight turned the ice-crusted snow into a sheet of white flame that crackled underfoot as we walked beside the railroad tracks running ruler-straight, East and West. We glanced back occasionally, trying to be casual, but we could see the thin curl of dark brown smoke rising into the perfect blue, January sky.
Our bootprints led back to an old, coal silo, a brutal pillar of curved, grey concrete blocks that stood beside the tracks. It had loomed there for as long as I remembered, part of youth's foreshortened landscape of time that makes the past impossibly distant. A foot above the ground, the silo's small, iron, access hatch was open, its rusted door lying broken in the snow.
One by one, we had squirmed through the opening. It smelled ancient inside. The sweet fragrance of the old timbers framing the interior was primitive and satisfying. The soft parts of the wood had shrunk like old flesh to reveal the sharp, time-carved ridges of the harder fibres. Fifty feet above us, the roof was pierced by jagged holes that cut the light into tilted, golden slabs, swirling with silvery coal dust.
No one plays with matches; you do things with matches: light the whole pack all at once in a whooshing sulphurous bloom; see how long you can a lighted one inside your closed mouth, trying not to shudder as you blow the stink out through your nose; maybe you burn something. Who had hung the burlap coalsack on the broken, spidery ladder that climbed the silo's inner wall? Who had brought the matches? Was the sack really smouldering as we crawled out? We walked back along the tracks, quickly, away from the silo, until it was almost out of sight.
"Is that a siren?," asked Gordie. We kept moving; distance was innocence. Then I heard it, and then more of them. Without a word, we all turned, and started back. As if it had always been there, awaiting release, a column of boiling, brown smoke, thick and solid, grew straight up from the silo into the cold, still air.
We joined the crowd growing around the silo. The air smelled as if time itself were burning. We watched with guilty, brotherly feelings of power and primitive, fire-born excitement. The smoke slowly turned white as water arcing from the hoses struck the flames, hissed into steam, and then froze in the rising, creamy pillar. Soon it was over. The fire was out, the neighbours returned to the warmth of their houses, and the day was slowly forgotten.
Winter melted into Spring, and a tall construction crane, improbably flimsy-looking, stood beside the silo. I could see the iron ball swing in a long, slow, inevitable arc until it slammed—almost gently, it seemed—into the silo's blackened flank. A moment later, the thump hit, in my feet, in my chest, and the first blocks crashed to the ground. Late in the day, only a cracked concrete slab, pierced by rusting bolts, remained. We drifted into the warm afternoon and the green scent of budding trees, and we never spoke of the silo again.

Everything Nice

The ragged rain clouds were moving out. Like a vast school of fish, the evening traffic swam toward some unseen shoal. The late-day sun burned the sky into mellow ochre smoke as Jake's cell phone chewed up his third call, electrons spewing uselessly into the darkening air.
"Shit". He slammed his fist against the steering wheel in frustration. The day had been an adrenaline blur of urgent voices, warbling phones, system failures. He had been running on coffee and reflexes all day.
Suddenly, the big car slid crabwise on the slick freeway. A huge red truck, blasting its train-like horn, swelled into the lane beside him, the driver's face sliding by in a pale smear, inches from Jake's car, which smoothly took control and corrected the skid. As the cold clutch of fear ebbed, and his grip on the wheel relaxed, Jake thought of his daughter, Terry, his only child after five years of marriage. He realized that in an instant he could be gone. The 11:00 pm news would digest him, and that would be it. Then he was in his driveway, the house looming.
The house still smelled new. Had they really lived here for five years? Joan wasn't home yet; more evenings with clients. Her career had taken off soon after Terry was born, and the late nights had become almost normal. When Lauren, the babysitter, scrambled into the kitchen, flushed and laughing, with Terry clinging to her leg, Jake regarded her closely. She'd be going back to university soon, her genuine combination of small-town friendliness and lithe, 19-year-old body the object of a thousand studly fantasies for another term.
"Joan called. She said she'd be here in an hour," Lauren said. Her use of Joan's first name was casual, companionable; they might have been sisters. Terry—a tiny replica of her mother—ran to Jake, squealing a happy hello.
The next day, at lunch, Jake had been stuck next to a sharp-faced young lawyer from Legal who was trying too hard to impress the table with his litigation skills. "Mega settlement, guys, mega.."
The young lawyer was far from likeable, but he was happy to provide details about cells and tests and, of course how brilliantly he had used the results against a high-rolling real estate developer who had womanized himself into a multi-million dollar paternity suit. Eventually, inevitably, the talk turned to money, but by then Jake was replaying Joan's late nights, and again he was thinking about Terry. Of course he wanted to know for sure—what man wouldn't? But he loved Joan. He had never thought about her being unfaithful. Was he that insecure? But it would be so easy to be certain; all he needed was a few cells: hair, skin. If Joan discovered what he was doing, of course she would feel horribly betrayed. But if—he tried to feel the possibility of it—if Terry really were someone else's, what would he do? What could he do? For a flickering instant, his daughter became a small stranger, and that moment made him decide. He had to know.
Jake felt unclean, slightly perverted as he scrabbled through the bathroom wastebasket. "Epithelial cells". The clinical sound of that, repeated like a mantra, helped to blunt the disgust he felt as he picked through an assortment of multicoloured wrappers, plastic containers, and other things that he tried not to recognize. He found what he was looking for: a few coppery strands of Joan's hair with roots. Contemplating his prize, he felt a sad, strange twinge of tenderness for the woman he had married.
Terry's sample was easier, of course: kids smear themselves over everything. He wrapped the samples and placed them in an ice pack. The testing lab was all tinted glass and soothing earth tones, and the staff was professionally pleasant. He handed the samples to a blond technician in a blue lab coat.
"You say this will be a private account, Sir?" The sleek receptionist smiled up at him. He nodded as he wrote the cheque. He gave her his work number, and then drove back to the office with an odd feeling of excitement, relief and dread, something like the few times he had tried cocaine.
A week later, the lab called. "You mentioned that you'd like to pick up the report yourself?" As Jake pulled into the lab's parking lot, the same edgy depression settled over him. Doctor Steiner was a small, grey man with a silky middle-European accent. He placed a thin folder on the immaculate rosewood desk.
"We double-checked the tests to ensure that there was no error, but they produced the same results. Are you quite sure about the samples?" the doctor asked. Jake was quite sure. He had taken great care.
"Doctor, exactly what are the results?"
"Well, the two female samples are from the same individual, and the male sample does not share any genetic material with them."
Jake focussed on the rosewood desk. The gray folder's outline was razor sharp against the exquisite, glowing wood grain. "How can that be? he asked.
The doctor looked at him with the slightest hint of skepticism. "I'm not sure, but in any case, if you would care to submit new samples? Or you might want to verify the results with another facility?" Jake knew that there was no need; this was one of the best labs in the country.
After he was out of the building, after the car had dutifully reminded him to submit to the prophylactic bondage of seat belts and harness, after he started to drive into the grainy blue night, he began to wonder how many more there were like Joan.

Ecology

Stevie Romero was unmarked except for the hole the single, 9-millimetre bullet had made when it entered just above the bridge of his nose. Gary looked down at the white-sheeted body on the table. "That's a hell of a shot," he observed.
The young cop looked away from the night nurse he'd been trying to impress. "Armed robber. The store owner got him with one round. Said he'd been target practicing for a while." Gary looked closely at the cop, who had a lean, hard menace in his movements.
"Target practicing?"
"Yeah, said he was tired of being ripped off."
Gary turned back to the body. The waxy blandness of death had erased the street pose; he looked incredibly young. Gary pulled the sheet up over the smooth face.
"The kid had a sawed-off shotgun," added the cop. "He was no virgin".
In the waiting room, the sound of a woman sobbing blended strangely with a man's soothing baritone. A large woman, the boy's mother, was the source of the sobbing; the baritone counterpoint was provided by a lizard in an expensive suit. Gary knew that voice; it was the transplant lawyer working his territory, assuaging old-world fears, emphasizing the humanity of helping others to live. The mother, bewildered (and shamefully relieved that the frightening young stranger in her home was gone) would sign the release. Most of them did..
The following day was a marvel of early Spring, and Gary decided to walk to work. The sunlight made him feel healthy and wise. As he walked, he scanned the headlines trapped behind the plastic windows in the newspaper boxes. Last night's gunshot kid was only thirteen—that made him newsworthy. Gary bought a paper. The story raved about the local hero shooting the punk, and the picture showed a pinched, fiftyish man in a dark shirt, but it was a statistic buried near the end that stayed with him: "60% of transplant organs are harvested from young, ethnic males".
The hospital where Gary worked was downtown, a few blocks away from one of the city's oldest sections, which had somehow escaped urban renewal. It was a fading bazaar of cheque-cashers, strip bars, and pool halls, and on one corner, a tiny funeral parlor where a service was in progress. Because of the unexpected warmth, the front doors were open. Gary slowed his pace to see the faces gathered in the dim interior. A black, middle-aged woman and a few younger men and women, perhaps brothers and sisters, sat in the front row of seats. As his eyes adapted, he was surprised at the large number of people squeezed into the small room.
When he got to the hospital, the familiar flow of damaged bodies was almost calming, and as he worked, he recalled that pinched face in the darkness of the funeral parlour, and he remembered how very many old people had assembled for the service.

Cottage Life

Carefully, Jamie settled down beside the big, bay window to enjoy the sunset. From here, she could see the lake nestled in the curve of cottages. A light breeze wrinkled the water, transforming it into blue-grey enamel veined with copper light.
As night fell, the cottage's perimeter awoke, performed a quick self-test, and discreetly removed a marauding groundhog. The old walnut clock whirred softly, chiming the hour as the rich evening light flowed over the persian carpet and up into the chair where it warmed Jamie's arthritic legs. The tortoiseshell cat leapt between darknesses, landing in a chair with a soft thump like half a heartbeat.
Slouching on a stool in the skin bar, Draper was bored. He was ready for another run, and the Ford was ready to go.
"Doin' a run tonight?".
Draper peered through the dry-ice fog at the ratty little man standing at his side. It was Farad, a nasty prick, stoned on blitz most of the time, but good with alarm systems.
"Maybe," said Draper. Actually he had already made up his mind. This was only a retirement community; he wouldn't need expensive help—Farad would do.
As they cruised the night streets, Draper turned off the air filters and opened his window a crack. The green perfume of freshly-cut grass rushed in. "Old fucks got it all," he thought. Built on a hill and powered by a central station, the cottages had none of the brown crud that city people breathed. He was beginning to look forward to squeezing some of those skinny necks. Make the old bastards pay some dues.
Farad came to life. He watched the cottages slide by, his eyes like black glass. "Shit, look at these places." In fact, they were comfortable but modest, built in a style popular a century ago. Lawns were manicured, and trees had leaves unyellowed by poisonous air. All this, of course, cost an impressive amount of money.
They stopped the car under a big oak tree. The cottage's main scanner was concealed in a lawn jockey, which Farad deactivated, and in seconds, they forced a basement window and were inside.
Jamie had become absent-minded over the last few years, so the cottage had greatly expanded its capabilities, and it took care to accommodate her lapses in ways that wouldn't disturb her. But now, she heard something.
"We have unannounced visitors," whispered the cottage. "I'll put them on the TV for you." The big screen bloomed with an infrared image of Draper and Farad.
"Who are those poor boys? They look hungry," Jamie said.
"Shall I make them something to eat?", asked the cottage.
Such a lovely voice, thought Jamie. "Yes, please." She always said please when she talked with her home; she felt that the little courtesies mattered.
"Fine," the cottage agreed, warmly, and then from under the basement, the retrieval units swarmed up to receive the new arrivals.

A Day in the Park

Little Eddie wouldn't stop blubbering. Lorrie twisted around in the camper's front seat and regarded her whimpering son with a mixture of sympathy, helplessness, and mild irritation. He had been moaning and bubbling for ten minutes. She wasn't sure what to say.
"But, Eddie, he was a real bad bear. He was gonna eat those people."
At that moment, Marie, Eddie's 10-year old sister, a more sophisticated observer of life, hissed in his ear, "Here comes the meat wagon. Gonna make some bear burgers."
Eddie brightened momentarily, but as soon as he made the association with one of his favorite foods, he renewed his howling. Although, while the park's bright yellow recovery truck held his attention, he reduced his volume a little.
Tom was still poking buttons on the videocamera. "Damn, Lorrie, I don't know if I got any of that." It had been like a bizarre circus act. A large bear, clownish and begging handouts, had captured a new SUV full of chubby children and their parents, who looked like a husband-and-wife wrestling team. The children squealed in terrified joy as they rolled down the rear window to throw doughnuts at their shuffling entertainer.
Perhaps it was an exotic intermodulation of frequencies from the SUV's power windows, maybe a digital belch from the surveillance satellite orbiting above them at that moment that triggered it. There was a flash and a dull pop from the flexicharge in the bear's bright blue collar. The bear crumpled to the asphalt, and only then did its head, flecked with bits of blue plastic, fall off, and then roll slowly to the side of the road. Burned hair and barbecue drifted like a memory for a moment. It all seemed oddly theatrical; the dead brown bear a flat, fur suit discarded on a huge, mountain-ringed stage.
The collar had identified the bear as a Sporter—although one that had somehow escaped. Starved for cash, many national parks had set aside large, fenced areas where hunters could take big game for big fees. The collars provided fail-safe hunting: part of the price included a small, remote-control trigger. It was considered bad form to use it unless your life was in danger or if the animal was wounded and escaping (besides, it only worked at close range). But the collars were placed so that they created a perfect trophy head, and if now and then someone got a little impatient to claim a creature that had cost him as much as his car, well, who was to know?
It was Saturday, and because they had left the park early, Tom was looking forward to a pleasantly beery afternoon of football. He took a can from the refrigerator, popping it on the way. He sat down to watch the game, and then, curious, he plugged the videocamera into the television. Despite the confusion, he had somehow recorded the day's events, and he watched as the scene replayed. He stopped the tape, and turned to the kitchen to get another beer, just in time to see Eddie, who had been silently watching the television from his position on the kitchen floor, clutching Red, the portly tortoiseshell cat. The cat was squirming frantically as Eddie—squeezing so hard that his little fingers were turning white—tried to screw its head on ever more tightly.

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