Severance Package

Jedi. Even better: Convince the Rebels to replace his hand with a cybernetic part. Start over.

Jamie looked at his fingers.

Oh, God.

He couldn’t look at them.

They throbbed hard, as if to remind him: We’re here. We’re damaged. We’re here. We hurt. Fix us. Fix us now.

Jamie pulled some gauze from the kit and tried to wrap them blind, using as much tape as possible. If Andrea were here, she’d yell at him for not using disinfectant. Of course he could argue that it wasn’t worth worrying about infection. When Jamie looked down, he could have sworn he saw bone.

“What are you doing?”

“Wrapping up my fingers.”

“You’re not doing a very good job.”

“I’m new at this.”

“Give me your hand. We don’t have much time.”

Nichole looked down at Jamie’s mangled fingers and said,

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to be able to stitch anything. There are no stitches in this kit.”

“That’s fine. Whatever you can do.”

“I’ll tape it best I can, try to sterilize everything with this Scotch I found in David’s desk. You can get it looked at later. Okay?”

“Seriously, whatever you can do.”

“Want a drink first? It’s Johnnie Walker Black.”

“I’m okay.”

“I think you’re going to regret that decision in about ten seconds.”

Nichole got to work. Jamie looked up at the ceiling tiles, and listened to peeling and tearing sounds of tape. He didn’t want to know the gory details. Better that he pretend she was expertly stitching up the flesh of each finger, so perfectly, in fact, that a few days later he would be able to flex his fingers and ping! ping! ping! ping! ping!—the stitches would pop out, and he’d be completely healed. Even though he knew there were no stitches.

“Here we go.”

“You haven’t started yet?” Jamie asked.

“Brace yourself.”

Jamie kept his eyes transfixed on the off-white ceiling tiles, imagining that the dimples in the material were craters big enough to hide in. He heard the quiet hollow thoooomp of a corktop being removed from a bottle.

“Cheers.”

There was no way Jamie could have prepared himself for the agony that washed down over his mangled hand. The old pain—the pain that caused the horrible gashes in the first place—was like a memory of the beaches of heaven compared to this NEW PAIN. The burning-acid molten-flesh drilled-bone torture of NEW PAIN.

“Shhhh now.”

Nichole held his wrist steady while the rest of his body writhed violently. Jamie shrank and floated up into a big crater on the ceiling.

A few minutes later, he opened his eyes. The light was harsh. He was back down on the floor.

Riiiiip.

“You passed out,” Nichole said.

“Urrrgghhhhh,” Jamie said.

“Don’t throw up. I’m halfway done.”

She continued working.

Passing out didn’t erase a single memory. There was no blissful moment of, Hey now, where am I? Why is this tall woman fussing over my hand? Why is she only wearing a bra? Jamie remembered everything. Nothing had changed. Except that he felt like he needed to throw up.

“Nichole.”

“Yeah.”

Riiiiip.

“Do you have any idea why David wanted to kill us this morning?”

She didn’t reply.

“Did he lose his mind?” Jamie asked. “I think that’s the theory I would prefer. The stress of the job, he goes postal …”

“That what you believe?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

Riiiiip.

“That’s because you know what’s really going on, don’t you? That we’re actually some kind of secret intelligence agency.”

“If you don’t already know, then you’re not supposed to know.”

“Jesus, Nichole, c’mon!” Then he added a faint “Ow.” She had pressed down hard. Maybe even on purpose. “I almost died this morning. Along with everybody else. I deserve to know.”

“Trying to concentrate here.”

“Can you at least tell me if we’re working for the good guys?”

Nichole looked at him with a lifted eyebrow.

“You know? The U.S. government?”

She returned to her tapework.

“Reason I ask,” Jamie said, “is because if we are the good guys, then how come David Murphy was allowed to come in this morning with orders to kill us? That’s not something the good guys do, is it? Especially to people like me, who until about an hour ago had no friggin’ idea we actually worked for the government?”

“You don’t work for the government,” she said.

Jamie would have stormed out of the office had Nichole not been taping up the remains of his hand. This was not right. This was not fair. Guy in the military, he gets a draft notice, gets told, yeah, you might get a ball blown off in another country, or come home in a flag-draped box. That’s how we roll, Private. Guy puts on a police badge, same deal, only you take your risks in your own backyard. Death’s unlikely, but certainly possible. You know walking in.

But Jamie wasn’t a cop or a solider. He was a public relations guy who thought he was working for a financial services company, and did so because of decent pay and medical benefits. He didn’t sign on for anything else.

This was not right.

This was not fair.

Not to his wife and baby, who right now had no idea what was happening up here.

This was the horror of 9/11, or at least, the horror Jamie imagined whenever he thought about what it was like on one of those burning floors of the towers. The horror that your family will never know what happened in your last minutes alive. Like you were already dead.

He felt eyes. Nichole was staring at him.

“I’ve been thinking about what to say to you,” she said. “Because I do want you to live through this. And the less you know, the better. Trust me on this. I can’t speak for the rest of this company, but I’m one of the good guys. I may be the only good guy here. You probably saved my life, so I’m going to try to save yours. Fair enough?”

Jamie swallowed. His mouth tasted like death. “Yeah.”

“David is a bad guy. David sealed this floor and tried to kill us. Molly stopped David, but now she’s trying to kill us. That makes her a bad guy, too. That’s all we need to know.”