The Day Before Midnight

Gregor watched the numbers slide away with growing, hazy disinterest. They were like a red tide of blood, come to choke the world in its own rotten evil. A laugh bubbled from Gregor’s lips. He watched the numbers reach toward midnight….

2359:55

2359:56

2359:57

2359:58

2359:58

:58

:58

Gregor stared at the number: forever and ever, it would read:58.

Then the light blinked off.

Gregor’s head fell forward and he slid to the floor, where he quietly bled to death.

* * *

It was a joke!

It was a fucking joke!

And heeeere’s MIRV.

“What’s it on? Is it on a piece of paper or something?”

“It’s on a card, taped to the—”

“Tear it off! Tear it off!” Peter yelled.

He waited a second.

“What’s the letter?”

“B.”

B!

Bypass Primary Separation Mode Check!

“Final launch commencing,” Megan was saying.

“Punch it.”

There was a second in which the universe seemed suspended.

“Punch it! Punch it! Punch it!” Peter was screaming.

“We have an abort,” said Megan. “We have a launch abort.”

The cheers from Delta rose, filling the corridor.

“You did it, Walls!” yelled Peter, lurching on the sheer joy of it, the sheer pleasure, looking at his watch to note this moment, to see that it was ten seconds after midnight, and they’d made it, they’d made it!

I beat you, Megan.

He sobbed the truth.

I love you, Megan, Jesus how I lo—

After Midnight

The call came at 1:30 A.M. It awakened Megan on the cot in the small room off the studio. She shook the confusion out of her head, blinked, and thought for just a moment it was Peter again, and the sound of his voice, twisted but recognizable over the wires, came to her in memory. Her heart quickened. She saw his face. She smelled him. In her heart she touched him. But then she heard the yelling, the screaming, the pounding. The agents were acting like boys at some Fourth of July celebration. It was juvenile, party time, and it felt all wrong to her, somebody else’s party. She was frightened.

She got up and went into the studio. They were still pounding each other on the back and shaking hands and hugging and she had a terrible feeling of isolation from them. Then she looked and saw that the older one, the one called Leo, wasn’t part of it.

He walked over to her. Duty, that bitch, shone on his constricted face. There was triumph in him, but no pleasure and actually a good deal of pain.

“Mrs. Thiokol, at about midnight tonight our Delta force unit fought its way into the installation at South Mountain and managed to disable the Peacekeeper missile just prior to launch.”

“So there’s not going to be a World War Three?” she asked hollowly, as if she cared.

“Not tonight,” he said, but there was something else on his face. She knew, of course.

“Peter didn’t make it, did he?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry to say, he didn’t. He was hit in the head at the last second after Delta broke in and stopped the launch.”

I see.

She took a deep breath. She thought of her squashed tins, crumpled and lurid on the floor. His head, smashed by the bullet. Peter limp on the floor of some hard governmental site, among lean soldiers busy with the drama of their own existence. It was so imbecilic, she almost laughed.

“If it means anything, they say he was a hero. An incredible hero.”

Oh, this was rich. “A hero.” Oh, Jesus, spare me, you asshole. I mean, who gives a fuck? Am I on your team now? Am I supposed to sleep with some hideous little medal?

“No, no, it doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and went back to her room so that they could not see her grief.

Walls sat mute in the chair, facing the dead board of switches. He felt absolutely wrung out. He felt like he was back in solitary, in the little cell with FUCK NIGGERS scratched into the door.

Then he smiled.

Come through some doors today, yes, sir.

Walls waited in the launch control center for another hour, just like that, sitting there, trying to feel something. The only thing he felt was hunger. He was ravenous. He noticed a brown paper sack lying on the console, spotted with grease. He opened it, and discovered a peanut butter sandwich in a Baggie, a bag of Fritos, and an apple. He gobbled down the sandwich but was still hungry. But he didn’t feel as if he had the energy left to open the Fritos.

Finally, the phone rang again. He picked it up.

“Yo?”

“Walls, this is Delta Six. We’ve mopped up the Soviet resistance now. You can come out.”

“Yes, suh. You best get some medics here. Man in here, hurt bad.”

“Yes, we have medics now.”

Walls picked up his shotgun, went to the door and threw the heavy lock, and stepped out. He didn’t understand then, though he did shortly afterward, that he was not only stepping out of the capsule, but also stepping into history.

As he put his foot out, a flash went off. He paid it no mind. It was a picture, taken by a Ranger who’d thought to bring his Nikon along, and the picture ended up four days later on the covers of Time and Newsweek, as the story of the Day Before Midnight, as the press took to calling it, became the story of the decade, or maybe the second half of the century. The picture showed a handsome black man with a red bandanna around his head. His face was dirty and drawn, glistening with sweat, somehow very sexy. He looked tough and beautiful and quite dangerous, all of which he was, and very, very brave. His eyes were the eyes of a battle-weary soldier: They showed wariness and fatigue, and something else as well, a profound humanity. He carried his shotgun with him, and had it at a jaunty angle; his camouflage fatigues were sodden with sweat and his hips were narrow, his shoulders broad. The veins and muscles on his arms stood out.

He became the icon of all of them, all the men who’d died or fought at South Mountain. The newsmagazines developed charts to show how he’d gotten in, where he’d hit people, the chances he’d taken, the luck he’d had, the brains and cool he’d shown. That he was functionally illiterate, and an authentic criminal, by the perverse currents loose in American culture in the late 80s, helped him. It made him a man of massive flaws, no Occidental superman