Point of Impact

dog would stop, frown, and leave. At least they had so far.

A bit more limber, Howard started to jog up the street.

The leaves were falling — they’d all be down by Halloween, first good wind that came along any time now would finish ’em — and while the sun was warm, there was that subtle difference between spring and fall, that sense of impending winter.

He passed old man Carlson working in his yard, using the blower to herd leaves into piles. The old man, eighty if he was a day, smiled and waved. Carlson was a tanned, leathery old bird who was the ultimate Orioles fan. He’d retired after forty years with the Post Office, and there wasn’t a street in the district he couldn’t locate for you.

Howard reached the corner and turned right, planning to loop in and out of the cul-de-sacs that fed the main road through the neighborhood, staying on the sidewalk and ducking low, overhanging trees.

Tyrone had called today from his class trip to Canada. He was going to be gone for another ten days, two weeks in all, on a visit for his international relations class, something new at his school. Howard thought it was a good idea, getting to know other cultures. Better than learning it the Army’s way. He smiled, remembering the old slogan his first top kick had posted over his desk when he’d first joined up: “Join the Army and See the World! Travel to exotic, unusual locales! Learn about other cultures! Meet diverse and interesting people — and kill them.”

He picked his pace up a little, stretching out, getting into a longer stride and rhythm. Just inside his breath, barely.

The scars were formed up pretty good where he’d had surgery after the shooting in Alaska. Pretty much nothing hurt most of the time — well, no more than usual after he worked out — but the memories hadn’t faded at all. Being out in the middle of nowhere, exchanging gunfire with some real bad men, giving better than he’d gotten, but almost dying — those kinds of memories didn’t go away in a few months. Every firefight — and he hadn’t had that many — was as clear in his mind as the day or night it had happened. The thought that he might have bled to death in the woods and been eaten by scavengers wasn’t so horrifying in itself. Hell, he was a professional soldier, getting killed went with the territory. But dying and leaving his son, just hitting his teens on his way to manhood, that bothered Howard more than it ever had. All it took was a real possibility he might actually buy the farm. Before, he’d been lucky. Never made it to a real war, and when he finally started seeing some action in Net Force, the bullets had zipped here and there, missing him. Julio had taken a round in the leg during the recovery of the stolen plutonium from the sons-of-whoever. Some of his troops had eaten frags from a mine or bullets from the mad Russian’s hit man, Ruzhyo, the former Spetsnaz killer. Intellectually, he knew it was just chance and maybe a little skill that he’d never gotten hit; emotionally, he’d felt invulnerable, at least to a degree. Like God was watching over him because he was worthy. Yeah. Until that long shot in the darkness had plowed into him. A round from a handgun at rifle distance had killed that feeling of being bulletproof, oh, yes, indeed, it had.

Even Achilles had his heel, and waking up in a hospital full of tubes did make a guy stop and consider the idea he wasn’t gonna live forever.

And while he wasn’t afraid to go into battle — at least he didn’t think so — he didn’t want to die and leave his wife and son. They had become more precious to him when he’d realized he might lose them. He believed in the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tried to live his life in a moral and upright manner, but going there wasn’t at the top of his to-do list for this year.

He opened up a little more on the run, starting to breathe through his mouth more heavily now, as he looped into the next street over from his and headed for the circle at the end.

He remembered another joke his father had told him:

“So the preacher stands up in front of the congregation and says, ‘How many of you want to go to Heaven?’

“And all the hands in the church except Brother Brown’s go up.

“And the preacher looks at Brother Brown, who was known to drink a little even of a Sunday morning, and he says, ‘Brother Brown! Don’t you want to go to Heaven when you die?’

“And Brother Brown says, ‘When I die? Well, sure, Reverend.’

“And the preacher says, ‘Then, how come you didn’t raise your hand?’

“And Brother Brown says, ‘Well, I thought you was gettin’ up a busload to go now.’ ”

He looped around the circle and headed back up toward the main street. A toy poodle in a fenced yard raced back and forth inside, barking wildly at him. Fish bait, his Daddy would call it. A waste of dog space.

He could, Howard knew, become an armchair general, an REMF who directed operations at a distance. Net Force would prefer it that way, and probably nobody would think less of him for it, not those who had been on ops with him before, anyway. But sending a man somewhere he wasn’t willing to go himself didn’t seem right, never had.

That left the other option, which was to retire. He could muster out with his current rank of general, draw a fair retirement, and get a job consulting somewhere, teaching, whatever. Probably do better moneywise than he was doing now. And be a lot more certain of being around when his son graduated from high school, from college, got married, and brought home grandchildren. Sure that was ten, fifteen years away, maybe, but he didn’t want to miss it. And he didn’t want to leave Nadine. If something happened to him, he’d always told her to remarry, find a good man, because she was too precious to waste away alone. And he meant it, too, but on a real, deep level, he had to admit to himself that the idea of Nadine laughing and loving another man wasn’t at the top of his list of fun thoughts, either.

But he was a soldier. A professional warrior. This was what he did, who he was, and he liked it.

So he had to puzzle this out. It was important. Not easy, maybe, but something he had to do.

He picked up his pace again, now close to top speed for his run. He tried to get in four miles a session, at least four or five times a week, and while he was past the days when he could run’em in five or even six minutes a mile, he could still manage six and a half or seven minutes.

That is, if he didn’t get to thinking so hard he forget to keep the speed up.

Run, John. Think later.

Malibu, California

Tad Bershaw drove back to the beach house, poking along, in no hurry now. He had made his deliveries, collected the money, and decided what the hell and taken the purple cap half an hour ago. It would be another few minutes before it started to come on full force, but even now he was getting patterns, geometric overlays of complicated, pulsing grids on everything. That was from the psychedelic components of the drug. It made driving real interesting.

Bobby was cagey about his chem, he never told anybody exactly what was in it, but Bershaw had sampled enough illegal stuff over the years to have some pragmatic knowledge about such things.

There was some kind of MDMA/Ecstasy analog in the Hammer’s alloy, with maybe a bit of mescaline; the body rushes got pretty intense an hour or so in, and just breathing was orgasmic when it got to circulating.

His experiences were not based on any formal knowledge of chemistry, but he knew it when he felt it. Though it didn’t really matter, he had poked at it mentally a few times, what he thought Bobby had created. The psychedelics—entheogens, Bobby called those — for sure. That would be the MDMA, mescaline, or LSD, or maybe even some psilocybin from magic mushrooms. Maybe all four. That gave you that sense of being in contact with your inner self and loving the world and all, entactogenesis and empathogenesis, Bobby called them. Also picked up the sensory input, made everything feel really, really intense.

It had smart drugs in it, he knew that, because he was quicker, sharper, able to make choices better when the Hammer was at full pound, no question. He didn’t know much about nootropics, stuff like deprynl, adrafinil, pro-vigil, shit like that, but Bobby did, and he knew how to tweak’em for an immediate response.

For sure it had some kind of speed — cylert, ritalin, dex, maybe; some tranq to balance it so you got the fast mind but not bad jitters. It definitely had painkiller in it, or a way to kick in the body’s own opiates, and Tad guessed