Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

Again the towel was clamped and the hard muscled limbs pressed against his bound body to hold against the spasms of the drowning man, and again he felt the dread infiltration of the water, its first mild licks, its rising chill, its fingers somehow clawing to rip at his mouth and nose and tear them wide open to fill them and kill him dead drowning.

This bucket was blue. That is to say, as the water rushed through the towel and clamped its intensity across his face, he was taken back in memory close on fifty years, and he remembered a day at the public pool in Little Rock, sometime in the fifties, a bright, hot summer, he and a thousand other kids flapping and jostling and splashing in that vast blue wetness, and he was trying to swim on his own and somehow his thin boy’s arms propelled him a certain blind distance in a certain blind direction and for just a second he actually was flat in the water propelling himself along on the rhythm of his muscles and then he ran out of strength and settled to the bottom, and that was when he realized he had swum too far in the wrong direction and was now in over his head. This is how children drown; caught in the grip of panic, he opened his mouth to scream but it didn’t happen and instead the cold, chlorinated brew of the pool raced in torrents into lungs and gut, and the lack of oxygen tripped off a flare of fear and he flappity-flap-flapped and he sank yet further and he had a moment when he knew he was dead and he saw blue blue blue shot with bubbles arising as if he were dying in Alka-Seltzer or some terrible thing, and suddenly someone strong had him, and the sun burst above him as if it were some kind of skyrocket, and the air rushed him, sucked with all the hunger of the young, and he was propelled this way in the strong hands of his savior, who of course was no one less than his father.

“Whoa, Bobby, you almost went to Davy Jones on your old dad, would have upset Mommy for days!” his father sang as he brought the boy to safety. “Yes sir, she’d never give me a moment’s peace!”

The man laughed, and Bob saw his father’s face clearly for just a second, a great man, a good man, a brave man, the best who ever lived for this among a million other reasons, all much better than this one, and it occurred to him that if he died, who on earth would remember his father? No one. He was the last who’d shared time on earth with Earl Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, the son of Sheriff Charles Swagger, Earl who’d gone off to war with the Marines and won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima and come home for ten good years as a state trooper in the Arkansas Highway Patrol before he was taken from the world for nothing, really, nothing that counted. And Bob felt some kind of sudden strength: if you kill me, if I die in this water, it is of little interest to the world, but it means Earl Swagger’s memory dies too, and I cannot let that happen.

Time passed.

His father aged.

It was a few years later. Daddy left in the late afternoon, knowing without looking that his son watched him go, and he raised a hand. So long, little boy. See you soon, little fellow. Daddy’ll be back and we’ll play some catch or walk in the woods or something, yes sir.

But his father didn’t come back again, ever. Instead, late at night, the colonel showed up, and then Sam and then some newspaper people and then some neighbors, and then some Negroes from the other side of town. They were all silent, except for his mother’s sobbing, and in time, the colonel came up and told him that his father was dead. Compared to that pain, that long, hard trek through wasteland and jungle, this shit was nothing.

“Goddamn him,” screamed Anto, in lost and wild fury, as the towels came off in what seemed like only three hours. “Look at the bastard. He just looks at us, him growing stronger, with them mad sniper eyes. Does he like it, do you think? Has he grown gills to live in water? Has he evolved himself backwards to some fishy lurker? The bastard, the bastard,” and he let fly, smashing Bob hard in the face with a muscle-clotted palm, driving him to the floor with a clatter.

There was silence in the room, except for the heavy breathing of the torturers. Finally Anto spoke.

“Get him cleaned up. Rinse him down. Get him some food. Let him piss and finally shit. I’ve got to try something else. The bloody fooker. He must be Irish to have a head or heart that much of steel.”

Nick had, for the first time in his life, taken to sleeping in. And why not? He had nowhere to go or be; he was just home, besieged by press, waiting for various accusations and investigations to reach some kind of clarity or resolution.

But that morning, Sally nudged him awake at 7 a.m.

“ Umm. Ummphh. Yeah, what?”

“Sweetie, sweetie, wake up. Something’s happened.”

He blinked, rubbed shellac out of his eyes so that they finally cracked open to admit the dawn, and sat up.

“Whattya mean?” he mumbled, his tongue still stuck to the roof of his dry mouth.

She stood by the window, trim in her blue business suit, her horn-rim glasses glinting.

“The vultures,” she said, hooking a thumb to indicate the alien gathering on the lawn, “they’ve tripled. Maybe quadrupled.”

“Kill some of ’em when you back out, will you?” he said.

“I just want to break the foot of that prissy little bitch Jamie whatever. She’s out there, the wan, pale little zombie. She nailed me on the Mason thing with an ambush on the courthouse steps. I still owe her.”

“Really,” Nick said, “it’s much cheaper to kill them. If you just maim them, you have to support them for years. If you kill them, their buddies lose interest in a couple of weeks.”

“Okay, sweetie, have to run. Summary’s at ten thirty. Have a good day.”

“Doubtful.”

She turned and left, hustling with efficiency and purpose. She hadn’t let this thing throw her off one iota and believed that Nick would, as usual, triumph in the end.

He lay there, heard the door slam, the garage door rise, her Volvo ease out as the reporters reluctantly made room, and then she sped off.

Lord God, thought Nick, looking at the now swollen mass camped in the front yard of his home, where they crushed grass to mud, left McDonald’s cups and wrappings everywhere, and annoyed the hell out of the neighbors, though nothing was said, as all of them worked themselves for the gov and knew this sort of thing happened every once in a while. It was what you got for pursuing a career in the town of power.

Nick stumbled into the bathroom, decided to shave for the first time in three days, showered, then climbed into blue jeans, New Balance hikers, and his favorite University of Virginia hoodie. His glasses were where he’d left them, which happened about twice a month; usually the strange men who came in and moved his clothes around in the dark did the same for his glasses. He made it downstairs, turned on the pot she always left prepared, and in a few seconds had himself a nice cup of joe, dead black and steaming, while he watched the news, which didn’t, for once, picture him and bring out breathless updates. These guys outside, they were ahead of the curve then, while local TV was behind or couldn’t get its stand-ups into position quickly enough.

He thought he might let ’em stew; he thought he might go online and read the papers and get the info that way, but after a while, it seemed sort of pointless. He got up, went to the front door-no jog today, too many morons on the front steps-and opened up.

“Nick, Nick, what do you have to say about the Times’s photo?”

“Nick, were you there? Did you let them pay your way? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Nick, did you just forget about the photo somehow? It slipped your mind or something?”