Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

He glanced at me. “Did your source tell you that as well?” I nodded and he shook his head. “Why don’t they just pick him up then?”

“I told you, they love to play games. Modem said Harry was in Sheffield last night meeting with a Resistance cell.”

Rex put back his head and laughed. “Either your source was playing games, or it’s not as well-informed as we thought. Harry was nowhere near Sheffield last night.”

“Oh?” I was rather hurt. “Where was he then?”

“He was with me, burning down the Chronicle’s office.”

I stood still. Nobody I had spoken to this morning had mentioned anything about a fire, but I supposed they’d all had other things on their minds, like mourning Ernie and getting to the pub for opening time.

Rex walked a few more steps, then he turned and looked at me. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,” he said. “He’d have done it to us.”

That was fair comment, I supposed. “You’ll never get away with it. He’ll know who it was.”

He smiled cheerily. “There’s knowing,” he said, “and there’s proving.”

I caught up with him. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Rex looked thoughtful. “No,” he said finally. “No, neither did I.” He looked about him, then started walking again. “We didn’t put him out of action permanently, anyway. Just sort of charred the office a bit. He’ll be up and running again in a couple of weeks. It’s actually rather funny.”

“How on Earth is trying to burn down your competitor’s office funny, Rex?”

He chuckled. “It’s just that Harry and I spend most of the night skulking around the Chronicle’s office, trying to put Liam out of action for a while so some of the advertisers will sign up with us, and this morning we find the back yard full of livestock, courtesy of your friends.” He shook his head. “I just found it funny, that’s all.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. I knew there would be some kind of price to pay, but there was no way of telling what it would be. Or what would happen when the elves didn’t find us amusing any longer.

“One of us ought to go over to the Chronicle’s office and do some kind of story,” Rex said.

I grinned. “You cheeky old sod.”

“It’d look suspicious if we didn’t. And it’s good copy anyway. ‘Local Newspaper Burns Down.’” He nodded to himself. “Good local copy. The cornerstone of a good local paper.” He looked at me. “Would you like to do that?”

“It would make my day,” I told him.

He nodded again. “Good lad. And if you see Alice, give her my regards.” And he walked away, head up, back straight, whistling a little tune, the happiest editor in Derbyshire.

v

This was written for the Lou Anders anthology Live Without A Net , the premise of which was that all the stories took place in worlds where the internet either did not exist or had been lost. There was a lot of good stuff in that book, and it’s worth tracking down, not least for the stories by Adam Roberts, John Meaney, and John Grant.

Lou gave me a space of about 6,000 words to fit my story into. I’ve never been quite happy with the pacing of this one; I’ve always thought it needs to be two or three thousand words longer. I occasionally take the MS out and read it and fiddle with the idea of doing a sort of Director’s Cut, but I always wind up putting it away again untouched. Maybe one day.

From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

The young lieutenant sitting across from me looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter — the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. I sometimes wondered why we were bothering to keep it secret; if we waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

I leaned forward and raised my voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

The lieutenant just looked blankly at me. Beside him, I saw Former Corporal Fenwick roll his eyes.

“Just trying to make conversation,” I said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who I was — or rather, he had been told I was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the Site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the Site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion — it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a colonel I had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the Lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, I thought I could see my old house. The city had been evacuated shortly after the Accident. It had taken weeks to clear the place out; even after dire stories of death and disaster, even with the cloud hanging over the Site, there were people who refused to leave. The fact that the skies by then were full of military helicopters, some of them black, hadn’t helped. The Government had handled the whole thing poorly, and there had been a couple of armed standoffs between householders and the military. Then a bunch of asshole militiamen had turned up from the wilds of Montana, vowing to oppose the Zionist World Government or the Bilderberg Group or whoever the hell they believed was running the world. I was glad I’d missed the whole thing.

Further out, I could see the buildings of the Collider in the distance. From here, all looked peaceful. Apart from the cloud, towering over everything, it was as if nothing had ever happened here.

The pilot eventually got permission to make final approach and we landed in a park on the edge of Sioux Crossing. The park was ringed by prefabricated buildings stacked four high, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages surrounding a big white ‘H’ sprayed on the ground. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last I saw of him was his back as he strode away from us towards the control centre.

“Talkative fucker,” Former Corporal Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside me.

I sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards us from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.