Newt Run

John Clarington

  He watched them through the sight of his rifle, crouching in the underbrush above the Northern Road. His breathing was slow and measured, his muscles loose. The heft of the rifle felt good, the trigger cool and inviting against the exposed skin of his finger. The weight of the rifle's butt on his shoulder was as comforting as the touch of a friend's palm, or a father's. He sighted the gun along the column, moving from the old man and the girl at the front to the tall man who brought up the rear. A low shiver of pleasure worked its way from the base of his spine to the back of his skull.

  "Nothing's real," he whispered, and touching his tongue to his lips, he pulled the trigger.

  At one time John Clarington had been a soldier. He enlisted out of high school, telling his friends and family that he was doing so to pay for his college tuition, but after a year of service he knew he'd never do anything else.

  For as long as he could remember, Clarington had lived with the sensation that the ground he walked on was nothing more than a shell. Beneath it there was nothing, an emptiness in the shape of the world; everything carried the faint reek of fabrication. Looking at his face in the mirror was the same as staring into a mask, and other people, even his own family, seemed to him like actors or automatons. This didn't change when he joined the army, but at least the gun they gave him had some weight.

  He made a good soldier. He followed orders, and he was fearless, or that's how it appeared to the men he served with; he never flinched from combat, throwing himself into even the most dangerous situations with an abandon that bordered on recklessness, but the truth was that Clarington was almost always afraid. Most nights he spent gazing at the ceiling of his barracks or at the back of his eyes, doing his best to choke down the fear that lodged in his throat like a wedge of tin. If it came at all, sleep was a thin, fraying blanket that never managed to fully cover him. He was not afraid of dying, or of being injured. In fact, this fear was only a continuation the same anxiety that had been with him all his life; he felt like a counterfeit being in a made-up world, and the broad, dusty streets of the towns he patrolled and the men and women he saw there were as thin as strips of paper. He had only to reach out his hand to tear them away.

  "Of course he might have been right," mutters the old man. "Maybe none of this is real. Maybe it's all a dream, but who cares? Thinking like that is as good a way to wind up in a mental institution as I know, and whether it's real or not there are 24 hours to kill in a day. Clarington was no different: he got up when he had to, shat and ate, drank down his thin coffee in silence and did what his superiors told him to do. The only difference between being in the army and any other type of life was the reality of battle."

  Once the first shot was fired, the day seemed to break apart; time was reduced to an abstraction, parceled out in units of sound and heat, and the pounding metronome of Clarington's heart: now he was crouching with his back to a wall, now rising to fire. Still later he was cowering in the dust, pressed to the ground by the iron weight of the sun. Only in battle could he ever place himself, only here he was alive, and then, almost overnight, the war was over.

  They reported it as a victory, but Clarington could smell the lie; nothing had been resolved, no one liberated, and even his own nation's tenuous grip on the resources they'd really been fighting for was no certain thing, not once the troops were recalled. At home there had been some kind of economic crisis, and the government was on the verge of collapse; the truth was that the war was over because they could no longer afford it, and for the first time in more than a decade, John Clarington was no longer a soldier.

  He drank for a straight week, waking up each morning with only the most tenuous grip on where or who he was. When he remembered to eat he had food delivered to his door, paying for it with a crumpled and diminishing wad of bills. Otherwise he filled his empty stomach with whiskey, and looked out from his kitchen window at a city he barely recognized. Just beneath its surface, he was sure, waited a gaping pit.

  There's no telling how long he would have gone on like that, but then, on the morning of his eighth day in the capital, his phone rang. He moved numbly from the couch, stepping over a floor littered with empty bottles and used dishes.

  "Hello?" he muttered into the receiver. On the other end a man was clearing his throat.

  "Clarington?" said a voice.

  "Yeah? Who's this?"

  "It's Fawkes."

  Clarington pictured him as he had last seen him, a young man in a uniform that had never quite seemed to fit; they'd met during a campaign to take a town that didn't even appear on most maps. At that time, Fawkes wasn't much more than a kid, a raw recruit who did his best to ingratiate himself to the older man. When they weren't on patrol they deadened the long succession of hours with sparse conversation and even sparser emotion; it was only the approximation of a friendship, but when Fawkes' tour was up and he announced that he was done with the army, Clarington was sorry to see him go.

  "Fawkes," he said into the phone.

  "I heard you were back."

  "Read a paper huh?" said Clarington; his tongue had the weight and texture of a slab of dried meat.

  "How you getting on?"

  Clarington grunted, and the man on the other end of the phone laughed.

  "I know. Worst thing they could have done to you, ending that war."

  "You call for any particular reason?"

  "Thought you might be up for a bit work, assuming you haven't found anything yet."

  "What work?"

  By the time the younger man had finished explaining the job, Clarington was smiling.

  His shot took the tall man in the stomach; Clarington pulled the trigger again, and watched as the old man dropped to his knees. He was about to fire for a third time when Fawkes was shot in the head. A second later another blast rang out, not two meters from where Clarington was hidden.

  "Shit," he muttered.

  He had gone over all the details with Fawkes again the night before, and spent the morning waiting in the designated place. Fawkes and the group he was travelling with arrived more or less when they were supposed to, and up to this point everything had gone as planned; Clarington knew their target was the little girl (he assumed she would be ransomed), but with Fawkes dead he had no idea how he should proceed. He could risk taking the girl on his own, but the thought of bringing her to some remote location, a warehouse or abandoned cabin, and threatening her until she told him who her parents were was like a scene from a movie he had no interest in watching. Instead he began to disassemble his rifle; the air was cold in his lungs, and the ground he stood on a solid, unbroken thing. He already had what he came for.

  He got to his feet and backtracked through the woods, making his way along an overgrown path to the road. From there, he got in his car and drove back to the capital.

  There were reports of the attack all that night and the following day, but Clarington didn't see them. He sat in his kitchen and stared at his hand, rotating it slowly in the fading light from the window, clenching and relaxing his index finger at intervals; the hair follicles on the back and the lines crisscrossing his palm were startlingly clear, the response of his muscles as articulate as he'd ever known them. Something had changed. He had changed, and the sense he'd carried all his life of living in an unreal world was gone.

  When he finally opened a newspaper, he did so looking for work. One ad caught his eye, a half-page call for private security contractors from the Institute for Applied Research. Without stopping to think about what he was doing, he took out his phone and dialed the number at the bottom of the page. Within minutes he found himself agreeing to come in for an interview the following day.

  The address they gave him turned out to be a mid-sized office tower just outside the business district. The lobby was deserted, and half of the ceiling lights had been switched off, possibly in an effort to save electricity. Next to the elevators was a whiteboard with a list of firms written in a black, erasable marker.
The Institute for Applied Research was on the 8th floor.

  The elevator's interior was an unadorned box. There was no music, and the noise it made during its ascent was like the monotonous droning of a hive of insects. At last the doors opened, and Stevens walked the length of a silent, cream-coloured hallway to a door at the far end. Opposite was a wide conference room, the walls of which were lined with mirrors. Hanging from the ceiling was a low bank of fluorescent lights, half-hidden by a decorative sheet of crenellated plastic. Seated at the only table were two men, both of them dressed in drab, conservative suits. Neither looked like a scientist or a security contractor. At best they resembled business men, middle-management types destined to spend their careers watching younger colleagues promoted ahead of them. The man closest to the door looked up as Clarington entered the room, while the other continued sifting through a stack of papers.

  "John Clarington?" asked the first man.

  "That's right."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "We're having trouble locating your resume here."

  "Not a problem," said Clarington.

  The man stood up. He was tall, with wide shoulders and close-cropped brown hair. His cheeks were chapped and raw-looking, and there were several red cuts on his neck, as if he'd recently shaved with a dull blade. In his hand was a vaguely cylindrical device that might have been a metal detector. Clarington raised an eyebrow.

  "Sorry," the man said, waving the device over Clarington's chest. "Standard procedure."

  "You think I'd bring a gun to a job interview?" Clarington asked.

  "Of course not," replied the man, smiling, and then he made an adjustment on the back of the device. "This will only take a second."

  He passed it over Clarington a second time and frowned, going so far as to show the reading to the 2nd man, who made a note of it on Clarington's file.

  "Did I pass?" asked Clarington. The man continued to smile, but his eyes hardened.

  "Have a seat Mr. Clarington," he said. "My name is Marshall Harris. And this is Dr. Lee."

  "Nice to meet you," said Clarington.

  "First of all Mr. Clarington, I'd like to ask you what you know about the Institute."

  "Just what everyone else does. You all do some pretty heavy research."

  Dr. Lee smiled and jotted something down in the file.

  "That's a nice summation," said Harris dryly. "We are engaged in some pretty heavy research, but recently we've embarked on a project that, shall we say, extends beyond the laboratory."

  "I see," said Clarington. Dr. Lee smiled again.

  "You don't," he said, speaking for the first time. His voice was firm, but oddly muffled, as if he was speaking from behind a glass wall. He was much smaller than Harris, with short, dark hair and eyes the colour of sunbaked tar. "Not yet. Mr. Harris and I have been charged with putting together a task force, and based on your file you have exactly the background we're looking for."

  Clarington stared at him, trying to decide what he meant, but the man's face was unreadable.

  "What kind of task force?" he asked instead.

  "Investigation."

  "I see," said Clarington. Dr. Lee made another note.

  "Recently certain facts have come to light," Harris chimed in. "We have reason to believe there are possible... rogue agents at work in the capital, and perhaps elsewhere."

  "Rogue agents?"

  "Subversive elements," said Dr. Lee.

  "We want to make one thing perfectly clear at the outset Mr. Clarington, and that is while the Institute has in the past been affiliated with the government, we feel as if we've moved beyond that."

  "Our patents in various technologies have afforded us the freedom to operate independently," Lee explained. "These days we prefer to think of ourselves as a corporation with an aggressive focus on research and development."

  "If you agree to work with us you'd be taking an active role in the research side of things."

  "I'm not scientist," said Clarington.

  "We know that Mr. Clarington, but for what we have in mind you appear to be an ideal candidate. Needless to say, the compensation we're prepared to offer is generous."

  Clarington looked at his hands.

  "How generous?" he asked.

  After being hired he was made to sign several non-disclosure agreements and relocated to a compound at one of the Institute's regional facilities, about 100 km from the capital. Once there, he was escorted to a small room where he was left on his own. Besides the Plexiglas table and two plastic chairs, the room's only discernible feature was a large two-way mirror that dominated the wall opposite the door. Clarington sat down with his back to the mirror. A moment later the door opened, and a slim man entered the room. Like Clarington, he was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He took in Clarington and the room's contents with an amused expression and sat down roughly in the other chair. He regarded Clarington mildly, drumming on the table with his fingers.

  "We'd like to thank you gentlemen for agreeing to be a part of this task force," said a voice, so heavily distorted that it was barely recognizable as human. Clarington swept his eyes over the walls and the ceiling, but could see no sign of speakers.

  "The two of you have been matched as a result of the personality tests you completed during your respective interviews. For the duration of this task force you will be working as partners. The door to this room will remain locked for the next 24 hours. We sincerely hope you will use this time to get to get to know one another."

  The taller man laughed.

  Clarington did not like his partner, a younger man named Elliot Thomas, and he doubted the credibility of a scientific organization that couldn't even get a personality test right. Still, he'd worked closely with men he didn't like before. Harder to bear was the so-called "training" they were subjected to: most of it, as on that first day, was monitored, either from behind mirrors or by silent pairs of scientists who observed their progress openly, marking down notes in an illegible short-hand that looked to Clarington like the scribbling of an epileptic child. Clarington and his partner were assigned spatial reasoning tests and abstract problem-solving exercises, given pieces of paper and asked to fold them into boxes, the failed results of which were collected by cool-faced men in lab coats. They exercised daily, and were made to watch hours of security footage without being told what it was they were looking for. Through it all, Thomas was a picture of ironic detachment, while Clarington clenched his jaw and several times had to hold himself back from screaming.

  After a few weeks, the two of them were brought to another of the seemingly endless array of nondescript meeting rooms the Institute had at its disposal. Inside were both Dr. Lee and Harris. Neatly folded on the table in front of them were two coats made of a black, synthetic fiber, along with two pairs of goggles, and a single black briefcase.

  "Your equipment," Harris told them. "As the senior partner Mr. Clarington, you'll be responsible for the case."

  Clarington said nothing.

  "Gentlemen," said Dr. Lee. "I suppose by now you're wondering what it is we hired you to do."

  "Thought this was it," said Thomas.

  "You're just about done with your training," murmured Harris. "There's only one more test we'd like to perform."

  Dr. Lee removed a small, metallic box from the pocket of his coat. Within it were two disposable syringes, and a vial of orange liquid.

  "This is a narcotic," he said, plunging the first of the syringes into the vial and extracting a large amount of liquid. "Developed using powder taken from the mines at Newt Run. We'd like you both to take it now."

  "Sounds like fun," Thomas said.

  "What does it do?" asked Clarington.

  "The powder affects perception," said Dr. Lee. "We've added various other agents in order to amplify the effects. Taking it will help to answer any questions you might have about the nature of your job and the reason this task-force has been formed. I assure you that it's perfectly safe. Doin
g things this way will be much more efficient and... convincing than anything either of us could tell you."

  Clarington shrugged his consent, and Dr. Lee took his arm. As the point of the syringe pierced his skin, a single, perfectly formed drop of blood appeared at the hole, and he became aware of a faint sound in the distance, like the hum of a small cooling fan or the hiss of steam from a broken pipe.

  Both men spent the next several hours in their seats, staring at the far wall. When at last they returned to the room, Dr. Lee was gone and only Harris was there to meet them.

  "When do we start?" asked Clarington.