The Day Before Midnight

“Christ,” said Skazy into his hands-free mike, “they just hit our interpreter.”

“All right, Major,” said Dick, “body-bag ‘em.”

Skazy finished the job.

Walls beat the tin door off the junction box with the stock of the Mossberg, badly chewing the wood in the process. No time to worry about that now.

The box, ripped open, yielded a terrifyingly complex mesh of wires crowding in on the junctions. It made no sense to him. It was like so much of the world: all wired up, all fixed, all fancy and complicated, beyond him. It could have been the same old sign.

FUCK NIGGERS it could have said.

He looked at it, feeling the rage grow and seethe. He’d felt this way on the streets sometimes. Hey, he was a hero, goddammit, he went into tunnels for his motherfuckin’ Uncle and did what Uncle said and killed yellow people and did shit no man should have to do and was hit three times and almost killed a hundred more times and then it was, thanks Jack, and good-bye to you and good luck to you.

NO BLACK BOYS NEED APPLY it could have said.

NO BLACK TUNNEL RATS NEED APPLY.

NO SILVER STAR WINNERS NEED APPLY.

NO THREE-TIME PURPLE HEARTS NEED APPLY.

FUCK NIGGERS.

That was some sign.

The Vietnamese woman said something and it pissed him off. It was that singsongy shit they all had, you couldn’t make no sense out of it. She thought he knew what the fuck to do. Like he was some kind of while guy, he had all the goddamn motherfucking answers.

Hon, it don’t mean shit to me. It’s just some wires from white boys, that only white boys can figure out.

He felt like crying. He felt trapped in the tiny little space. Come all this way for nothing. Grief beat at him. But then he figured, fuck it, got to do something. He pulled out his knife. Hey, he was going to use it to stick in some guy instead of sticking it into some wires.

He was just going to stick it in, fuck the wires up, see what happen. But then he remembered the word DOOR from the front of the tin box. He stared at the wires coming into the box. They came out of the walls, most of them, through little tubes. Let’s see, door be that say, let’s see if we can’t find some goddamned wire come from that way. He looked. Sure enough, most of the wires came from some other way, but one trace of wires plunged outside toward the box from his left, from the direction of the duct entrance. Walls hacked at the tubing covering the batch of wires, chipping away little nuggets of rubber that fell like raisins to the floor, until he had some bare wire revealed. He was acting just like he knew what the fuck he was doing.

The woman was so close in the little chamber. She looked at him like he knew what he was doing too. He laughed again. She didn’t know shit either. He thought it was pretty funny, the two of them in a little space off a rocket that was going to end the world, hacking on some wires like they knew what they were doing, a nigger boy and a gook girl, the two lowliest forms of scum on the earth which was going to be blown to shit if they didn’t stop it. She laughed too. She must have been in on the joke, because she thought it was funny too.

They both had a good laugh as Walls chopped his way through the wires. Then, just for the fuck of it, he cut through some more wires. With the blade of his knife as a kind of stick, he lifted one tuft of wires over across the gap and shoved it against the other wires and—

Walls shook the spangles from his eyes and found himself against the wall. Felt like his old daddy had whacked him upside the head one. His nose filled with an acrid odor. His head hurt. When he blinked he saw blue balls and flashbulbs. His teeth hurt. Someone was playing music inside his head. His knife lay on the floor, smoking. What the fuck had—

But the woman was at the mouth of the duct, screaming.

Walls crawled over. Man, he felt smoked himself. Could hardly remember who he was, Jack.

But he remembered when he saw the door into whatever the fuck else was down here: it was open.

Jesus fuck, he’d done it. He’d gotten into whitey’s secret place.

He grabbed for his shotgun, seeing that it would be easy to reach the open door, swing over to the ladder, then get inside.

He pulled the Taurus 9-mm automatic out of his holster and handed it over to her.

“You know how one of these things work, hon?”

He pointed to the safety lever locked up.

“Push that down, babe,” he gestured with his finger, “and bang-bang! You got that? Down and bang- bang!”

The woman nodded once, smiled. The gun was big in her tiny hands, but she looked as though she’d been born with it there.

He reached, and the shotgun came up into his hands. It felt smooth and ready and he still had a pocket full of twelves.

The woman looked at him.

“Ass-kickin’ time,” he said.

The shooting had stopped. Peter looked up. There seemed to be some kind of delay, some sort of hassle up at the launch control facility, and then he heard a roar and looked up as the command chopper, beating up a screen of snow and dust, lowered itself awkwardly from the sky and he saw Dick Puller leap out. The chopper zoomed skyward.

He heard his name called then.

“Dr. Thiokol. Where are you? Where the hell is he? Anybody seen that bomb guy? Dr. Thiokol?”

Shivering, Peter rose.

“Here,” he called, but his voice caught in some phlegm and it didn’t come out quite right, and so he said it again, “Here!” and it came out too loud, too shrill for a battlefield full of the dead, where he was the only man without a gun.

“This way, please, Dr. Thiokol,” yelled Dick Puller.

Peter began the short climb up the hill to the launch control facility, or what remained of it. All around him men moaned and shivered. If only it didn’t feel so unreal, if only the smell of blood and gunpowder weren’t so dense, if only the lights from the flares and the hovering choppers weren’t flickering dramatically, the flares hissing and leaking sparks, the chopper lights wobbling drunkenly. Up ahead, men were consumed in the drama of their equipment, clicking bolts, loading clips, smearing their faces.

Someone was shouting. “Okay, now, goddammit, everybody out of here but the Delta Tunnel Assault Team. You guys in the second element, you form up over there on Captain McKenzie. The rest of you guys, Rangers especially, please back off and give us some fucking room to operate.”

He could see the men rigging themselves with complicated harnesses and thought for just a minute they were parachutes. Parachutes? No, then he realized that it was rappeling gear by which the Delta commandos would slide on ropes down the shaft. Coils of green rope lay about on the ground.

“Thiokol, hurry up, come on,” said Puller, up at the door.

Peter scrambled up the rest of the way.

“It’s not damaged, sir,” said a young soldier. “We tried to hold our fire away from it.”

Peter saw the elevator door set in its frame of solid titanium, the only hard, gleaming thing among the blown-out walls and the shattered floorboarding. Hard to believe this had once been inside a building and that the building itself had stood quite normally until just a few hours ago. And on the hard cool face of the titanium was the computer terminal, which looked for all the world like a bank money machine.

“There’s still current,” said Puller.

“Oh, there’s current,” said Peter. “There’s a solar cell up top, and every day the sun shines, it recharges the batteries. The shaft access unit is independent of outside power. It can go for six days without sun and the