"How can you say no?" he handed off a paper cup to a passerby, turned back to her. This close, she could see the vein of green in his blue eyes.
"You're not stupid," he said. "You know I'm telling the truth. Won't you help me?"
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm getting into Disease Control," he said. "I'm getting proof that this is all just to keep us in line, and I'm going to air it across the country. People are going to have a nasty wake-up. "
She wondered how he planned to organize the nation full of people he was going to wake up. "I can't help you," she said.
"I know where you work," he said, pleading. "You can help me get the message out. All you have to do is let me in. I'll go upstairs on my own, I can get the message out from there. "
She took a step back. "I can't," she said. "It's too dangerous. "
"No one will know it was you. "
That much she knew for sure — she said, "Someone will. "
"How can you be such a coward?" He was louder now — too loud, the other Disease Control agent looked concerned — and Liz took a step back as Johnny stepped forward. His eyes were sharp and bright. "Don't you see what they've done to you?"
"Leave me alone," she said. She wished Greg or someone was here, just in case.
He dropped the tray with a clang; paper cups and pills skittered across the pavement, bounced off Liz's shoes.
"It's over," he said. "they'll kill me if you don't help me. You've killed me. "
Liz couldn't breathe. She felt dizzy. She didn't understand what he meant.
The next moment she was on the ground, being handcuffed, and Johnny was being picked up (five cops, maybe more) and carried, kicking, into the back of a van that had appeared out of nowhere.
As the two policemen walked Liz to the car, they passed the van, blaring the last swells of a familiar tune through its speakers.
"Are you due for a date?" called the announcer. "Check with your doctor. "
Mr. Randall was waiting for her on the eighteenth floor of the Department.
She waited. She tried to think how many people who came up to report something to the Department had ever come down again.
"We'd like to congratulate you," said Mr. Randall.
Liz blinked. "Pardon?"
"Your John Doe was part of a series of test runs we did around the city to gauge the audience for a new instructional film. Marketing has been working with us for months. "
Relief flooded her. "Oh, I see," she said.
"Our field man did his damnedest, but I told him — I said, that girl has her head on straight, you won't get her to help you! He tried twice, the theatre and the street, but did Elizabeth fold?" He laughed. "I told him he'd have as much luck getting help from me as from you. "
She thought about giving Johnny her keys to Greg's place, telling him the fastest way to get there, taking Greg's arm to go for an alibi date.
No one had told Randall about that. This was no undercover job, then; Johnny Doe had died and taken that secret with him.
"Thank you, sir," she said.
When she got back to her desk, she called Greg. "Want to get married?"
He only hesitated a moment. "I thought you'd never ask," he said, a little too brightly, but only just. "I'll pick you up tonight and we'll go to City Hall and your doctor. "
She wanted to tell Greg what had happened; how she had been too afraid to help Johnny, and what must have happened to him by now. "See you soon," she said, hung up as he was saying, "Goodbye, darling. " Above her, the film was ending, the Department actor grinning through the
last frames of twinkling music. "What do you know that we should know?"
Independence Day
by SARAH LANGAN
Sarah Langan is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. She is the author the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and Audrey's Door. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Lightspeed, Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father's Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet.
If you listen closely to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," you'll hear real pain beneath the slick guitar solos. The song is a lament for an America where ordinary people mattered and their vote made a difference in the direction of the nation. It was a song written in response to the Vietnam War, and the squawking nationalism that swept the U. S. after the Bicentennial.
But it's the Tricentennial that our next story examines. Polluted and terrorized, somehow America is just as frantically patriotic as it was when the Boss wrote his classic song — and the feeling is twice as empty. Langan says of her piece: "I was working on an homage to Springsteen. I couldn't decide on a particular song, and decided instead on what I thought was the essence of Springsteen; standing up, and fighting for what you believe in a screwed-up world. "
The waiting room is shiny and bright, but the people inside it are dirty. Trina tries not to stare but she can't help herself; she can tell just by looking that a few are addicts trying to score a fix. One lady's wearing a black garbage bag instead of clothes.
Trina waits her turn with her dad, Ramesh. He won't be seeing the doctor today. He's never seen the doctor. He says he's not sick, but he's lying. He coughs all the time, and in the mornings she's seen him spit blood and phlegm into the bathroom sink. Last month, the Committee for Ethical Media installed a television camera in their kitchen because he submitted an unapproved audio to the news opera "Environmental Health. " Instead of running it under a pseudonym like he'd wanted, the editors called the cops. Now the whole family is under house surveillance. Anybody who wants can flip to channel 9. 53256 can see her lard-congealed breakfast table, and the weird foam curlers her mother keeps forgetting to take out of her hair in the morning. Her whole eighth grade class knows that Ramesh's pet name for her is Giggles, and that they can't afford fresh milk. Only one-day soured from the bodega on 78th Street. It's humiliating, and so is he.
While they wait, he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the skin surrounding her port like he's trying to pull it out. He doesn't understand, even though eighteen Patriot Day channels repeat it day-in and day-out: You can't stop progress!
Trina rubs her bruised cheek and glares at Ramesh. He sighs and lets go of her port. It's a victory, but it doesn't make her happy; it only stirs the piss and vinegar stew in her stomach.
She's carrying the list in the pocket of her spandex jeans. Each visit, her dad makes her write down her complaints before they leave the house, and then goes over them with her. He tells her that he wants to be sure she says the right things so she doesn't get in trouble. But the truth is, he doesn't give crap about her. He's just protecting his own sorry ass.
He got drunk last night at dinner. Her mom, Drea, accidentally took too many vitamins and nodded off at the table. Trina pretended she was a duck, and let it roll off her back. Quack, fricking quack. At least dinner was ready. Peanut butter and Fluff: the ambrosia of champions. But after a few drinks, Ramesh got The look. He started talking through his teeth like a growling dog: "they're pushing me out. Looking over my shoulders all the time. Even the janitors. Cameras everywhere. A man can't work like that. "