Murdoch was a California boy, the kind of adolescent drifter that state had so often produced, until he drifted into the Corps and discovered a purpose in life. That purpose was the maintenance of portable weaponry and the instruction of recruits in the use of same, and it was the only thing Murdoch seemed to care much about. When Contact emptied Quantico, Murdoch was devastated. He kept driving back to the base, he said, every few days, like an ant to an empty nest.
Then he saw John Tyler’s sign and guessed there might be a future for him after all.
Tyler offered in exchange some of his own recent history. It was hard to explain the civilian work he’d done, since it crossed so many borders—Congress, the defense industry, banking. His job had been to know people, but not too well; to say things, but not too explicitly. In fact, that life was already beginning to feel vague and distant; the intricacies that had once intrigued and compelled him seemed as abstruse now as the mating dance of an extinct species…
He didn’t say exactly this to Murdoch. He did make some mention of the revolt that had been derailed, at the last minute, by Contact. Murdoch was fascinated: he’d been aware of the high-level alert that August night, the furtive troop movements. “It was exciting,” Murdoch said. “Like something out of the Civil War. Firing on Fort Sumter. I never did care for that windy old fart in the White House.”
Bolstered by this, the Colonel described his last meeting with the Commander in Chief—a somewhat polished version.
Murdoch was wide-eyed. “You actually had a pistol on him?”
“Yes,” Tyler said.
“You could have killed him.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”
“It wouldn’t have helped. It might have attracted attention. Anyway, he was… too malleable. Too yielding. Do you understand, Mr. Murdoch?”
“I know what you mean. I meet people. People I used to know, even. They’re real nice. Too nice. It’s scary, but you can’t hate ’em for it. Much less shoot ’em. Be like killing a rabbit with a pipe wrench.”
Tyler nodded.
Murdoch extracted two cans of Coors from a cooler in the back of the vehicle. He offered one to Tyler, who popped the tab and listened to the hiss.
“No,” Murdoch said, “they’re not the enemy. Those things on the road, on the other hand…”
“Helpers,” Colonel Tyler said.
“Uh-huh. Now, to me, they look like the enemy.”
“I share your thought,” Tyler said.
“You thought about what to do about it?”
“Obviously. But why don’t you give me your perspective first.”
“Well… there’s all this technology lying around, but most of it you can’t manage if you’re just one person—or just two. Might be fun zooming over the treetops with an A-10 and twelve-hundred rounds of those depleted uranium-tipped slugs, say. But, shit, I’m no pilot. Sir, are you?”
“About a hundred hours in a Piper Cub.”
“We couldn’t even preflight an A-10. So we’re looking at portable ground weapons. Not a tank or a self-propelled Howitzer or anything sluggish like that. I mean, we don’t know for sure what we’re up against. So, something lean. A Dragon, an AT-4. Okay, we can get lots of those. The whole world’s an armory, right? And the doors are wide open. But for a first encounter, I’m thinking power and mobility. I’m thinking shoot and scoot.”
“The Hummer,” Tyler interpreted.
“The Hummer, and more specifically that TOW on the roof. The way I see it, we encounter a Helper on the open road, we can bust it and break away before their cavalry arrives.”
Tyler sipped his beer and pretended to be thinking it over.
“Mr. Murdoch, we don’t know what defenses those things might possess.”
“I don’t think we can find out except by shooting at ’em.”
“Might be dangerous.”
Murdoch heard something in Tyler’s voice, some unsuccessfully suppressed note of mischief. He smiled. “Sir, it might indeed. It’s a pretty day for shooting, though, isn’t it?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You have to teach me how to operate this TOW.” Tyler glanced up at a sky the color of blue chalk. “It’s a pretty day for some live-fire exercises, too.”
Murdoch wasn’t pleased with this. “I’d hoped to operate the TOW myself—you know—when it comes time.”
“Rank has its privileges, Mr. Murdoch. I expect we’ll both get a chance.”
“Yes, sir,” Murdoch said.
They came to know each other that first week they were together on the live-fire range at Quantico, Murdoch teaching him the TOW and some smaller tank-killers. Tyler guessed you could say they were friends, the barrier of command fractured a little by their odd situation. Tyler shared some secrets, as friends do. But there were secrets he simply couldn’t share, had never shared with anyone—such as the history of his madness.
“Madness,” too strong a word, but Tyler used it to remind himself that it was not merely unhappiness, not merely self-pity, it was a darker and more powerful presence that from time to time settled upon him.
Ever since Sissy died.
These memories came back at night.
Key events during his twelfth year: He achieved a B+ average at school, scored well above the norm on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test administered by the school board, and fainted twice, once in gym, once in homeroom. The school nurse asked him what he usually ate for breakfast and dinner, and he answered, both times, “Frosted Flakes.” He liked the picture of the tiger on the box. He did most of the shopping himself. He never bought vegetables because he wasn’t sure how: you put them in these plastic bags, you weighed them… it was confusing; he worried he might spend more than the three or four dollars Sissy let him carry to the store.
As for canned vegetables—he had tried that once. Canned peas, which came out pale green and wrinkly, not much like the picture on the label. Sissy said they tasted like rat poison. Had he ever watched a poisoned rat die? Sissy had. Sissy described the event. “You want to do that to me?”
Tyler thought he’d better stick to Frosted Flakes.
The nurse and his homeroom teacher conferred, which led to a visit from a social worker, which led, after no little trauma, to Tyler’s installation in a foster home and Sissy’s forcible remittance to a white brick building out of town, where she died six months later of “an accident while bathing.” Tyler had seen the guards who worked at this institution: They were barrel-chested, stupid, and permanently pissed off. Sissy used to spit at them. So Tyler was suspicious when they told him the “accident” part. But Sissy was dead—that was a fact.
He never found out what happened to the old row house or Sissy’s remittance money. He didn’t want to have anything to do with either one. He was glad Sissy was gone. Life was better without Sissy.
Still, when he overheard a social worker say the same thing—that he would be better off without Sissy— Tyler tried to kill the woman with the sharp end of a blue Bic pen.
He didn’t do much more than scratch her face, though he privately hoped the ink had dyed the skin beneath the wound, a permanent tattoo, a reminder that such calculations were not hers to make.
The act propelled him out of his foster home and into a grim institution (perhaps not unlike the white brick building in which Sissy had died spitting at her captors) in which Tyler was kicked, assaulted, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, at best ignored. He was rescued from this limbo when a legal inquiry into Sissy’s holdings discovered a living relative who was willing to take custody of the boy.