The sun was coming up, and watching it were three men. One with a cane, one with a hat, and one with an eyepatch. And Herbert.
Morning peeked over the valley, shaking the birds awake into an unusually cross morning chorus. Young light washed over old bones, hidden away somewhere under wrinkled coats of skin.
There was nothing to say for a while. A set of dentures were replaced. A foot was wiggled into a more comfortable spot. Shoulders shifted into a relaxed groove in a chair that was older than sin.
And then: “Say then, did I ever tell you chaps about that one job back in the sixties?”
Eyepatch and hat turned to regard the man with the cane. His name was Matthew.
“I don’t think so,” said hat.
“Don’t figure,” said eyepatch.
“Well, it was a bloody nasty one. Don’t know how it slipped my mind. You see, there was this bird -”
“Was it a cockatoo?” asked hat.
“No, no it w-”
“Because I had a cockatoo once. Cleverest bird I ever met. Saved my life at least sixteen times, and it took a bullet for me when it went. Good ol’ Alexander.”
“Martin, would you please stop interrupting me? I mean a woman. You know, a bird.”
“We used to call them broads,” said eyepatch. He scratched his nose in an aimless sort of way. “Y’know, on account of them being broader in the hips and uh, chest area. I think. Say, I met this one once, and she was -”
“Yes, Michael, but what I was saying was that there was this bird – woman – and she was in trouble.”
“So?”
“Well, she was one of ours.”
“Ah.”
“Not one of theirs.”
“Who’s ‘theirs’?” asked Martin. “The Nazis? ‘Cause I met something like half of all my girls that way. Course, the other half were double-agents. You get over it fast or you get out of the career, that’s what Dad always told me. Of course, that was after Helga. What a lady. Pity about the way we parted, what with the -”
“Listen here, I’m trying to tell a story. Can’t you lot just keep your traps shut for three damned minutes and listen to my nostalgic tale of my youth?”
“Weren’t you almost thirty by then?”
“Details! Look, this girl was in trouble. She’d been spying for us, and the reports stopped coming in. And the last message left before it all went to pot was her thinking that they’d found her out.”
“Goddamned shame,” said Michael.
“Right. So then what happens next, is the lads send me in. And I go there.”
“Where’s there?”
“Paris, I think. Or maybe it was Shanghai. I think it was. Yes, it was definitely Tokyo, or wherever else those yellow chappies lived.”
“That’s racism,” said Martin.
“Oh come off it, you can’t go two sentences without saying ‘kraut.'”
“But that’s nationalism. It’s a lot less personal. I’m just saying, I don’t feel like this porch is a safe space anymore. I can’t even say kraut without you two jumping down my throat like a bunch of Nazis.”
“Oh really, now come on, that’s downright offensive,” said Matthew, tapping his cane on the ground in irritation, irritatingly. “One of my best friends was Jewish.”
“Really? What happened to him?”
“Oh, he got promoted. Can’t be a boss and a best friend at once, you know how it was. Anyways, there I was in Rome -”
“Shanghai,” said Michael.
“-don’t talk rot, it was Rome – and I asked around. Used the girl’s oldest contacts, the ones least likely to be compromised, the ones that had passed along the news of her vanishment to us.”
“And?”
“They were compromised. Served me right up to them on a silver plate.”
“Who’s them?”
“You know. Them. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” said Martin.
“How odd. I could’ve sworn. So there I was, face-to-face with their best man in Rome, and he did me over something fierce. Boot to the breadbasket, boot to the jewels, boot to the head once I’d said for the fourth time I wasn’t saying anything… come to think of it, he may have just really enjoyed kicking people. Had excellent boots, anyways.”
“Gotta take pride in your boots,” said Michael. “Hell, I’ve worn these since I was twenty-six. Ripped ’em off the corpse of one of the soldiernaires of Slannar Slammik’s fifth legion. They fit perfect if you stuff half a rag of newspaper in the sixth-to-ninth toes, and you can kick through a brick shithouse with ’em.”
They admired Michael’s boots for a minute.
“So you were being kicked?” asked Martin.
“Was I?”
“Yes. In Rome.”
“Yes, in Tokyo. Well, the joke was on him, because while he was preoccupied with kicking me, the girl snuck up behind him and knocked him out.”
“Clever!”
“Yes, very. Told her so myself as she undid the rope, got me out the window, then made beautiful, wild, passionate love to me back in my hotel room. It was quite nice.”
“How wild and passionate was this love?” asked Martin.
“Oh, very. Quite. Distracted me perfectly from the sleeping pills she put in my tea. Woke up tied upside down to a chair with the friend we’d left behind, plus one bruise on his noggin. Rather startling, I did say. She’d triple-crossed us – defected to them to get info, then defected back to us, then defected on that after gaining my utter trust and a good shagging. Plus some of those secret documents I’d brought with me.”
“What were they about?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. I never bothered with paperwork on my missions.”
There was a pause as they admired the newly risen sun. It looked nice. The distraction continued as the manager of the nursing home – also its owner, janitor, cook, nurse, and dogsbody – brought out a light, late breakfast seasoned with salt, pepper, and bitter, hateful resentment. Matthew had thinly buttered toast; Michael had bacon n’ eggs; Martin had plain oatmeal and a thinly sliced pitaya; Herbert didn’t have anything. All was as it should be.
“So how’d you escape?” asked Martin at length, straightening his shirt and brushing away small specks of stray oatmeal, including a rogue outlier that had somehow embedded itself in his hatband.
“Eh? Oh, I don’t really remember. I think I shot someone – and then probably the girl didn’t make it. That was usually how it worked back then, most often after they put me in the middle of a silly way to die. Why, one man locked me in a room with five bears! Poor fellow was quite beside himself when I explained that the black bear is a timid, fearful creature that is quite averse to violence under most circumstances.”
“I punched one of those once,” mused Martin.
“Yeah, but you’ve punched everything on earth,” said Michael.
“No, I never punched a whale. Wonderful animals. One of my nephews helped found Greenpeace, and I made him a promise.”
“Buncha hippies.”
“Look who’s talking. Didn’t you grow your hair long back in the day?”
Michael snorted violently and scratched his eyepatch. Something unidentifiable shot out of his nose and landed in the begonias. “Y’mean back when I fought the raving horde of Klacc the Ugly? I was stuck out in the Europan Lowlands for five weeks, drinkin’ liquid helium to survive, with nothin’ to eat but a half-a-Yagg leg shared between me and fifteen starving men!”
“You never did tell us why your government sent only sixteen men to deal with that particular nuisance, old boy,” said Matthew.
“Was all we could fit in those damned model-H capsules,” said Michael. “Sixteen men, a buncha guns, the worst shit in the world you could make and still call food, and maybe half a porno mag. And we had to share the porno mag.”
“Oh I say.”
“What? No, knock it off, this’s MY story. So there we were, me ‘n my squad: the Raging Hellberries – named, ‘o course, for my grandad, uncle Wilson Hellberry, who was named for his dad, Wilbur Hellberry, who was named on account of his possessing the most horrifying and dog-ugly raspberry bush known to man on his property. I think it ate a kid’s dog once.”
“What kind of dog?”
“German shepherd.”
“Good dogs. I owned one once. Bit a Nazi’s arm clean off at the shoulder. Just rip and tear. Of course, old Bacon was part-wolverine. Very eccentric breeder.”
“Hah! One arm? At the shoulder? You shoulda seen what we found once that slug-ass capsule poked its way out to Europa. It was SUPPOSED to be a real easy-like job, right? Europa’s cake compared to Venus, or Mars, or half the hellholes we been before. Put down the capsule, step out into the capital, tell Klacc that the good ol’ U-S-A runs Europa now and he can either quit this wannabe-Stalin shit or do what we say while he goes for it. Only the capsule lands wrong. Upside-down wrong.”
“I spent an entire mission upside-down,” said Matthew, fidgeting with his cane in an absent way that was utterly devoid of energy. “Goodness me, the things it did to my digestion. I believe the issue was that the man in question had some rather interesting theories about perspective, and how to alter it, and the clarity resulting from extremely abnormal circumstances. He wanted to kidnap several world leaders and force them to live a decade each as the poorest of the poor in one another’s countries.”
“Really?” asked Martin. “What’d you do?”
“Oh, we shot him, of course. I told you, that’s how most of my missions ended.”
“If you broads could quit jabbering, I could tell you my story,” hissed Michael. “So we were upside-down, stuck in this dump of a swamp. No capital in sight, and half the guys are down to poisonous fumes by the time we get outta there. And then we double-check our coordinates – well, our egghead does it for us – and hey, we’re in the right spot. That sonuvabitch Klacc had sunk the whole danged city right into the swamp. Turns out he’s amphibious, and likes the damp. So we just get out of our beautiful little death-trap of a capsule, and bam, there’s a whole messa armed and armoured slugsingers surrounding us with mazer cannons.”
There was a pause, during which Michael reached for a small flask that he hadn’t carried at his side for over twenty years and the others pretended not to notice.
“So! We get trussed up and drug down to Klacc’s throne. And he earned that moniker straight-out, let me tell ya. None of his guys are pretty, but he’s in a league of his own. Heck, that face wasn’t pretty to start with, but then half of it went missing! So he was all who-sent-ya and I-could-crush-you and we’re stalling and pausing and killing time, because we saw ol’ ‘Juicy”s got a hold of his backup pistol.”
“Where’d he keep it?” inquired Martin.
“Drawers.”
“I used to keep mine in my left boot,” said Martin wistfully. “They never check your boots for guns. Knives, yes, but not guns. Had a beautiful little number, a model something-or-other, made by that shop in Denmark. You know the place? Owner’s daughter used to run it back when Matthew here was running around?”
“Yes, I remember her,” said Matthew with a nod. “Charming girl. Kim, wasn’t it? Or Cassandra. God, she was such a clever thing. Wicked sense of humour. And a tight little… err, yes. But I kept mine strapped to my back. Right in the hollow of the spine.”
There was a pause.
“My gun, that is.”
“Of course.”
“Right.” Michael squinted. “Wait, that wasn’t what we were talking about. Where was I?”
“I’m not at all sure.”
“Oh yeah. So we were all safe, but half the moon was hunting for us by then. We had no weapons after the breakout, and ‘Juicy’ and half the squad’s still woozy. And we’re starving. Me an’ egghead hide in a bog and wait for the pursuit to pass us by, then we jump their supply train and run off with a whole half-Yagg. The thing fed us for nearly a whole goddamned week. By the end, we could barely take a half-bite without throwing up. Wasn’t that just great?”
“Old times,” said Martin with a happy smile. “Reminds me of that Sahara crossing. Ate three camels, one after another. The last one was mostly skin.”
“Yeah, Yagg’s probably a bit meatier. But oily. So, right, after we snuck back in with the Atom Hammer -”
“The what now?”
“The Atom Hammer. Keep up, limey. So we snuck back in with it -”
“Wait, how?”
“We just did, okay? Sheesh, it ain’t rocket science. So we snuck back in with it.”
“What was it?”
“The Atom Hammer. Goddamnit, if you ain’t paying attention, I ain’t talking. Shut it. Anyways, we shot him with it.”
“Who?”
Michael threw his plastic fork at Matthew, ricocheting it from his glasses into the deck, where it stuck. “Goddamned teadrinker,” he muttered, and collapsed into a cloud of dark profanity and glares.
A late teatime emerged, borne on the skeletal fingers and oily glare of the manager. It was sandwiches: peanut butter and jam for Matthew, miscellaneous compressed meats for Michael, BLT for Martin, and nothing for Herbert. Seasoned with salt and pepper and an unpleasant hint of something vaguely toxic.
“You know…” said Martin.
“Yes?” said Matthew.
“What?”
“You know what?”
“What what?”
Matthew sighed.
“That’s not good for you, that sort of stress. You look pretty pale. Palest I’ve ever seen a living man – but the dead men, oh no. I told you two about that time in Brazil, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Michael. “There was an anteater and you wrestled it to death. Then you punched a Nazi into its mouth.”
“No, no, no; that was Argentina.” Martin shook his head. “And that was about the lab where they were trying to clone anteaters in preparation for cloning sloths in preparation for cloning horses in preparation for cloning Hitler. Brazil was about diamonds.”
“What kind of diamonds?” asked Matthew.
“The legendary kind. Y’see, it all started with a lady that walked into my office with an old book and a pretty little hat. Claimed it was a lost journal of Cortez that detailed ancient legends of the Aztecs never before written down about horrible treasures from faraway lands in the southern rainforests etcetera etcetera. Well, I just about told her to get out, but the handwriting looked proper, the pages looked to be the right age, and the hidden map in the binding seemed right. So I decided to take a look. Well, we booked a plane down to Brazil, but our pilot pulled a gun on us and tried to force us off. Wasn’t having that, so we ended up in a tussle – we took the parachutes, he took the plane down, and there it was: just me and a beautiful lady, stuck in the middle of the Amazon.”
“What kind of hat was the dame wearing?” asked Michael.
“Good question. Hmm… I think it was one of those little cute ones. Y’know, with the bows?”
“Yeah. Straw?”
“No, no. The ones that are shaped sort of like chocolate boxes.”
“Yeah, those ones!”
“Right!”
“What colour?”
Martin drummed his fingers on his chair, then shook his head in frustration. “Hell, I forget. But it was pretty, alright.”
“Yes, the girls don’t wear hats like they used to,” said Matthew wistfully. “Such a pity. Nothing more beautiful than a girl in a hat. And nothing else.”
“Shaddup, I want to hear about what happened to this broad Martin’s talking about before we go on another one of your I-knew-a-dame fantasies. So, what happened?”
“Oh, she was a Nazi. Should’ve known, really – she was probably going to rifle my corpse and guide the pilot to the spot marked on the map, only I went and got us both stranded. So she had to rely on me for help through the jungle, down the river, over the surprising and unexpected two-hundred-foot waterfall that I saw coming, and through the ancient caves into the rear entrance of the diamond mines of Xlac’Tla. Then she revealed that she’d been radioing our position, and stabbed me in the back right as her friends showed up with a couple of tanks. No idea how they got them through the rainforest. Had to run like the wind.”
“No good winds here,” complained Michael. “Y’miss ’em after you spend a couple of days on Jupiter. I tell ya, the breezes there would flay the skin right off an elephant in a wink. The bubble suits kept us from goin’ crazy, but we had to talk with sign language. Worst bit is, I can still remember a lot of it. Useless junk. Why can’t one of you two go deaf so it ain’t wasting space in my head?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Martin. “So then, after I used the seemingly useless junk – thank you for reminding me – to blow up the second tank, I cornered Gloria. She was all repentant, and contrite, and honestly-it-wasn’t-my-choice-they-have-my-father, and I didn’t listen and just shoved her into the bottomless chasm of Tix-Tlac-Ta, where her body rolled in the dust of the mines and turned paler than the finest china.”
“Steady on there lad; wasn’t that a bit harsh?” said Matthew.
“This was the sixth or seventh time that’d happened, Mike, I wasn’t about to listen to her. Fool me eight times, shame on you. Besides, I could only rescue her or the diamond dust that woke the dead. And I’d promised Dad that I’d find a way for Mom to get her last wish finished – she left us right in the middle of the sentence, and “dig up the gold, it’s burrriiieed aaat-” isn’t what you’d call a straightforward request.”
“The lady was past worrying,” said Michael. “Just take the broad, do her hard, and go home.”
“No, we’d done that earlier. In the jungle.”
Michael swore bitterly in a language meant for things with no tongues. “Christ, between you and the limey, I don’t need enemies. The one time I got laid on-job was when we went to Venus. And she had three legs. And our egghead, after the mission? Know what he told me?”
“What?” asked Martin.
“He said that wasn’t a leg. Then he wouldn’t stop laughing, no matter how hard I hit him. Screw Venus.”
A sullen silence reigned, interrupted by dinner, which was undercooked and tasted burnt. Chicken-fried steak for all, with salad (Martin, Matthew), french fries (Michael), or nothing at all and no steak (Herbert).
“And you got out okay, right?” said Michael.
“Of course I did. I’m here now, aren’t I? Lost a good shirt though. But the diamond dust made up for that. And it made up for the trek back home in a stolen Nazi plane – those krauts build good aircraft, but I’m no pilot. And it even kept me going in the bit where I got shot down by the national guard. But I’m not sure it covered the disappointment of finding out mom had gotten confused and her last words were a plot point in the mystery novel she’d been reading in her final hours.”
“What author?” asked Matthew.
“Agatha something. Doesn’t matter. All brain-trash, Dad said, and I have to agree.”
They cleaned their plates, and stared at them in melancholy as the sun began to dip below the valley wall.
“I say,” said Matthew, “all this food today has been rather bitter. I’ve half a mind to complain. Why, if it weren’t for neither of you two chaps keeling over, I’d nearly say it was cyanide.”
“I’m immune,” said Michael. “Part of the cocktail they shot into us before they dropped us onto Mons Olympus during the Plague Wars.”
“Haven’t had so much as a cold sniffle since that time I drank from the Fountain of Life,” said Martin.
They looked at their plates again.
“Cyanide, huh?” said Michael.
“Yes. You never quite forget that little almond tinge on your tongue. Very fierce.”
“Well, shit,” said Matthew.
The sun went down.
“I think,” said Martin, “that we’d better ask Herbert.”
The diamond dust pouch was old, battered, and so ingrained with its contents that it looked like something you’d have taken to a disco. It was still over half full, even after Martin fumbled the measure he took and needed a second pinch, which he dropped into Herbert’s mouth.
Herbert creaked. Herbert sighed. And as a long, slow breath filled him up, Herbert sat fully upright in his chair, the only one of the four of them with perfect posture, although his skeleton had the natural advantage of no longer being weighted down with flesh or organs.
“Hello there,” he drawled – without lips, quite a feat. “What’s fixin’?”
“Just a few questions,” said Martin. “Could you tell us if this food was poisoned?”
“Yup. You fellas make another friend?”
“It seems like it. Tell me, what’s the manager doing right now?”
“Loadin’ a shotgun. Three slugs. Y’reckon one of you buried his pappy?”
“Might have,” opined Matthew, “or near enough, at least. It’s all in the math, I’m afraid – wait fifty years and I’m sure the widows-and-orphans of our collective bodycounts have all had enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to populate a good-sized city.”
“Not mine,” said Michael. “You two were the guys dumb enough to plug people that lived on your front lawns. I kept my business off-world.”
“And I suppose that meteor last summer that killed poor Mrs. Ellbridge was just a freak coincidence?” said Matthew.
“The broad knew the risks when she slept with me.”
“If you ladies are done bickering,” said Herbert, “he’s finished loadin’. Reckon you’ll need a hand?”
“No thanks,” said Martin.
Herbert sighed, letting out most of the breath in him in one go. “Still so damned stubborn. Just as thick as the day you came lookin’ for my advice as a snot-nosed puke. Won’t ever listen to the old folks, you won’t!”
“Herbert, we ARE old.”
“Not from where I’m standin’,” said Herbert, increasingly faintly. “Where’s the six-shooter I gave you? Typical boys, throwin’ away good gifts…”
Herbert collapsed into a loose pile again.
“What?” said Martin crossly as his friends looked at him. “I pawned it after the war. I needed lunch and I didn’t speak the language, it was the best deal I could make.”
“The gentleman indoors will come through the door in a moment,” said Matthew. “Perhaps we can postpone the argument, eh what? Anybody got a plan?”
“Nah,” said Michael. “Something better.” With a grunt and a struggle, he reached into his half-wrecked pants and yanked out several dented, worn, and bent metal parts. “Now, was it long-short-long, or short-long-long…aw, close enough.” He snapped them together with a creak of angry metal, then slotted two or three fingers into the oversized trigger. “Right. Limey! Mark me a target. My depth perwhatever isn’t so great.”
“There,” said Matthew, pointing at the nursing home behind them.
Michael squirmed in his chair, held the Atom Hammer halfways over his shoulder, and pulled the trigger, missing the doorway the manager was standing in by inches and hitting the wall, which disappeared, along with both floors, the ceiling, the basement, and the porch, dropping all four of them, plus Herbert, into the begonias in the tattered remnants of their chairs.
The manager was the first to surface, spitting out flower petals. The shotgun was still clenched in his fist, and his teeth vibrated with uncontainable rage as he wobbled a sighting on Michael’s face. The Atom Hammer had slipped apart again, and the old man was cursing quietly as he reassembled it backwards.
“Excuse me,” said Matthew. The manager’s eye twitched towards him, and it was because of that that the shot that killed him went directly in a straight line from pupil to brainstem.
“Terribly sorry,” added Matthew, wincing as he rubbed his arm. “Good lord, I’d forgotten it’s a bit harder to reach back there nowadays. Still, what’d I tell you, eh? Nothing like it as a place to keep your gun. Now, would whoever’s turn it is to find a new nursing home get the car running, there’s a good lad. I feel like a nap.”