Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

“I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.

He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”

I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”

In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”

“Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “’Ah. Okay’?”

He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”

Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.

“… Three… two…” said Delahaye.

“You fucking bastard!” I screamed into Larry’s face.

“… One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.

I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the Colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a civilian specialist . To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA , which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.

“How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the wheel.

I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”

Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “ General .”

I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a General than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.

There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an ‘up’ and a ‘down.’ Or maybe it was a ‘down’ and an ‘up.’ I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was… I was…

It took me a long time to get my bearings. Or maybe I never did, maybe it was all an accident. I walked. Travelled, anyway. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t be sure that I was seeing it. I wanted to curl up and die, and I did in fact try that a couple of times, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even curl up, in the sense that I understood it. I held my hands up and looked at them. They were… they were…

At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred million years, I came upon a… structure. Too small and too large to see, all at once. It looked like… there’s no way I can describe what it looked like, but I touched it and I reached down and I curled around it and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”

I turned my head, astonished that I still remembered how. A soldier was standing a few feet from me, illuminated by moonlight, pointing an automatic weapon at me.

“Who are you?” I asked, and almost choked myself because I was still trying to speak as I might have when I was there . I coughed and retched, and at some point I realised I was naked and freezing cold. I said again, “Who are you?”

“Who are you ?” shouted the soldier.

“Dolan,” I said, and this time I managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”

There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He claims there’s been an accident.”

At ground level, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the gate, and they spent a good half-hour checking our documents and establishing our bona-fides before letting us through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody we knew about, anyway.

The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways.

I drove until we were a few hundred feet from the control room building, directly under the slowly-twisting spiral cloud. Unable to hush the cloud up, the Government had admitted that there had been an accident at the Collider, explaining it as an electromagnetic effect. Scientists — Government-sponsored and otherwise — were still arguing about this.

Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the Defence Budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to Point Zero.

There had been much discussion about what to do about him after I appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working-group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What To Do About Corporal Robert E Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen me appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

Their solution was elegant and, I thought, unusually humane. Corporal Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty — and his silence — had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of three-star general. What fascinated me was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

“Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

“Yes,” I said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” I looked at the cloud, looked at the buildings around us. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still in the Army, but he was no longer of the Army. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved me. His General’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair I hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to me the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and Congressmen and Senators, and maybe even Presidents. In my darkest moments I looked at Former Corporal Fenwick, and I almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.