Button Man
I had a hell of a time finding the AR-15. The last one was made in 3075 and when I asked around some didn’t even know what a rifle was. Through an old military connection, I met a gun genealogist called Taddeo—part antiques dealer and part historian. I had pretty much dismissed him as another dead end and probably a crank. Then, one morning, just as I stepped out of the shower the doorbell rang and I heard feet scurry away down the porch steps. I quickly threw on a pair of pants and when I got to the door found a narrow white box left on the mat. I took it inside and opened it. The rifle was wrapped in tissue paper like one of those fancy fruit deliveries well-wishers sent to us at the military base. One box of ammunition sat near the stock and another near the muzzle and a scope nestled next to the barrel.
My fingers slightly trembling, I snapped a picture and sent it to Donna with the message, I guess it’s on now. She got back right away with, The Wrighthammer job? Can it be? ☺ Come in this afternoon? We settled on a time and I finished getting dressed.
I was about to pick up the rifle, just to feel its heft, when Ben called. His face rolled up on the screen when I answered.
“Guess who’s in business?” I said.
“My old military buddy, the sharpshooter?”
We both laughed, Ben more heartily than me. We’d only learned that word, “sharpshooter,” recently. With the long wait between being assigned to the Wrighthammer job and coming by the rifle I had had plenty of time to research the strange history and primitive mechanics of the gun.
“Arrived this morning,” I said and hovered my phone over the rifle.
Ben’s face came up on the screen. It took me a few seconds to realize that the look in his eyes was fear. In our military days, Ben was never scared. Of the two of us, he had always been the more adventurous, had even volunteered for field work in the colonies—something I stayed well clear of. But the Wrighthammer job put him off. The rifle put him off. He had tried to tell Donna to turn the client away—as if anyone told Donna anything, especially since she’d become a vice president at Terminease.
“Dangerous thing, John, be careful.”
“We can kill more with an M-Tab in 30 seconds than this clunker can in …” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, but we both got the point.
“I’m not talking kill rates, man.”
“Then, what?”
Ben went silent.
“It’s too personal,” he said, finally. “It can … stir up … too much stuff. There’s a reason we’ve used M-Tabs for the last century.”
“Of course. Easier. Better control. No way we’d manage the colonies with these stupid things,” I said.
“It’s not just that. It’s the remove, the distance … It’s, you know, abstract what we do. We couldn’t do half of it up close. All I’ll say is when you’re done get rid of that thing. Give it back to Taddeo. Smash it up. Melt it down. Whatever.”
“Sure. I’ll make belt buckles out of it,” I said.
Ben laughed a little and then changed the subject.
After we hung up, I screwed the scope on the gun and took it out to the backyard. I was barefoot and the soil below me was still wet with dew. I pressed my feet into the soft ground and scanned the yard with a gun until I came to an elm tree. Through the scope I zoomed in on a robin sitting in the tree. I could see the rim of white around its eye and the knobs on the branch it perched on. I lowered the rifle. closed my eyes and imagined the closing animation I’d set on my M-Tab in my military days: a smiling ghost flying up every time a kill was finalized. Sometimes when I had killed groups of people the screen turned almost completely white, a blizzard of death. I looked down at the antique in my hands. Amazing to think that so much violence was done here in the home country with them. Getting rid of the guns and limiting devices like the M-Tab to the military and companies like Terminease had brought peace.
***
Donna kept a vase of flowers on the table in her office. I could gauge her mood by whether or not she pushed them aside when she talked to me. If she left them where they were it mean she was stressed or irritated. If she pushed them off to the side so they didn’t impede our view as we sat across from each other, I could expect her to be sunny. She shoved a bunch of yellow tulips to the rim of the table and smiled as she passed me the file.
I flipped open the cover and looked at the picture on the first page. Loose mahogany curls framed a chubby face. Astrid Wrighthammer was pretty—not really my type, but still, pretty. Her upper lip was made up of two perfect peaks and her nose was slightly turned up. I smelled tulips, the soft rotten smell of stems that had been in water too long.
“Astrid Wrighthammer,” I said her name, “So, this is the one who wants to be shredded with an old-fashioned military rifle instead of an M-Tab?”
Donna asked, “Not who you were expecting?”
“I wasn’t sure what to expect. Not exactly a type.”
“Well, if this catches on we’ll see if she’s a type any more than the sad sacks who pay to be fried by remote control.”
“That has the benefit of painlessness.”
“I’ve never been convinced of that.” Donna said as she pinched off a shriveled petal “How can we know? But then I’ve never been a button man—or a Terminease client.”
“Compared to what an AR-15 can do, believe me it’s painless. I’ve seen whole families expire with barely a whimper,” I said. I thought about some of exploded corpses I’d dug up in my research.
“Painless. Clean. Final,” Donna said repeating the Terminease tagline. “Even if we only got two out of three it’s still a bargain.”
Donna’s face turned serious in a way that made her look older. She was in her fifties and whether she looked old or young was now largely a matter of expression and lighting. With a smile on her face she could pass for ten years younger. “You know, John, the board is watching this case closely. They think it may be the beginning of a trend. Dr. B., one of the shrinks who signs off on client requests, says he’s seeing this need for the visceral.
“A hunger for blood and guts? “Ben won’t like this. He prefers his killing quiet.” I knew I was breaking a confidence. It had always been understood that what me and Ben talked about stayed between us.
“You’ve talked about this with Ben?”
“Yes, well, when I wasn’t sure it would ever happen,” I said.
Donna smiled knowingly. “Ben’s a good guy, but not exactly forward-looking.”
“Exactly,” I said, “Not forward looking—but a good guy.”
“A good guy,” Donna said with a nod and look of certainty.
I felt my loyalty slide from Ben and to Donna, and because of that I felt less like I was betraying Ben and more like I was fulfilling a duty to Donna.
“Anyway, Dr. B says he’s seeing it even in his non-suicidal patients.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to this. Why go through unnecessary pain? The whole point of Terminease was that if you wanted to pull your plug but didn’t have the guts and wanted it to be … well … painless, clean, and final, you called us.
Donna leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Good work on getting the rifle,” she said.
I looked down at the picture of Astrid again. I imagined her curls scattered over a sidewalk, bloodless and in delicate swirls.
Donna stood up and walked to her desk. “Well, study up. The deadline’s next week.”
When I got home I poured a cup of coffee so I could skip my afternoon nap. I wanted to dig into Astrid’s file immediately. I spread out the reports, the client narrative, the clinician statement, and all the other papers on my kitchen table. Unlike other client narratives, Astrid’s was written longhand in pen, something the Terminease intake specialist commented on in his report. “She demanded a written statement. Actually written, with a physical pen. Part of her nostalgia—for lack of a better term,” he had noted. Her loopy handwriting was in blue ink and she had included a sketch of the AR-15 midway down the first page. Around it she laid out her reasoning for wanting to be killed with this particular weapon.
When I was a kid I read about the M-Tab killings in the colonies. Soon after I took to blindfolding myself and banging around the house until I was bruised. I discovered pain then and everything else fell into place. They call the colonies the cemetery lands, but no one’s as dead as we are here. I grew to hate the idea of those M-tabs and their clean, silent killing. I want to crash into my death. And I admit it—it’s not just the death; it’s the few seconds of explosive life that I’ll feel when the bullet from the rifle rips through me that I want as much as death.
The deadline for the job was next Thursday. Sometime between now and then I would kill Astrid with the rifle. I poured over the details for the next hour. Astrid worked at an implant firm from 8 AM until 4 PM. She walked to and from work. Her apartment had windows facing East. She was 5 foot 4 and weighted 130 pounds. She had studied botany before dropping out of college. On her back left calf she had a tattoo of a purple iris.
I put together my report for Donna. I named Tuesday the kill date for two reasons: 1. I liked my three-day weekends; and 2. I wanted to build in some time so if anything went wrong I could still make my deadline. It was, after all, my first actual gun kill. I would position myself on the roof of the building a few blocks from the plant and when she was walking to work I’d take her out. Terminease would take care of all of the unseen details, including making sure no one stopped me. The assistants for the day would all wear a necklace with three interlocking gold hearts.
I drank another cup of coffee and then I took up the rifle again. It didn’t feel as awkward this time. My shoulder curved more easily around its stock and I lifted and lowered its barrel with greater ease. I took it outside again and stood at the porch railing. I peered through the scope and panned around the yard until I found a squirrel sitting on a concrete base that once held a water fountain. I eased the gun down until the animal was squarely within the sight range and pulled the trigger. An explosion of red flashed before me.
The recoil jerked me back a little and I could feel my muscles jolting out of place. My ears rang and my heart slammed against my chest. I had the feeling that I was in the wake of something, something massive and world-altering—a feeling I’d never had with the M-Tab. My body settled quickly and I had a sensation of ease and order that was new to me. For the first time I had a sense of what drew the guys of old to the military. Unlike the M-Tab, the rifle was no mere tool, no quiet electronic slave. It was an equal. When I lowered the gun I had that feeling you get when you bite into a chili pepper or something pleasantly hot, except it was all throughout my body.
I got a garden trowel and a plastic bag and cleaned up the squirrel mess in the yard. I wouldn’t have thought you could feel both anticipation and satisfaction at one time, but that’s just the sense I had—as if I were starting and finishing something perfectly. When I checked my screen, I saw that Ben had called again. I didn’t call him back, and then I decided to switch off the phone altogether. Talking to him or anyone else could only bring me down.
In the days leading up to the Wrighthammer job Ben left me messages almost every day. They took on an increasingly frantic tone, and sometimes they got to me. “Do you really want to splatter a woman?” he’d asked in one. I told myself that this was a woman who wanted to be splattered and wasn’t that her right? But every time I planned to call Ben and remind him of this I’d back out. Sometimes, when I woke up too early, the first word to cross my mind was splatter, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t force myself back to sleep. I’d lay there for a while with my stomach getting knotty. Then I’d get up and practice with the rifle.
On those mornings I stalked around in the empty, dawn-stained back streets looking for prey, my ears stuffed with cotton. I shot a feral cat, a rabbit, and three more squirrels. My technique got progressively better. I told myself I was a natural. With the M-Tab I was just an order follower equipped with a machine that could remotely dispatch the troublesome and the troubled with ease. All it took was one finger. Unlike the gun, which required the whole body. Precision. Concentration. Training.
I was never really even sure how the M-Tab worked. Something about interrupting electrical impulses that kept the heart banging away. What did I know? They could have told me the M-Tab killed by marshaling an army of invisible fairies and I would have believed them. But a gun doesn’t lie. I had always thought of myself as a meek man. Malleable. Able to follow direction with a minimum of curiosity, much less resistance. No real conviction. But that had all been an illusion—one that the gun blasted away. The gun told the truth about who I was; the M-Tab lied.
The cat I killed was the girl who laughed at my advances when we toured an Eastern colony. I didn’t even really like her, but she sat alone in a bar popular with Button Men—a frumpy young woman who I didn’t think would do anything but melt when a soldier gave her some attention. The squirrels were the cousins who locked me in the basement one Halloween and only let me out the next morning when everyone else had dumped their costumes and I showed up to breakfast dressed like a peanut. I’d never thought of killing any of these people before, but the rifle made it seem like the most natural thing in the world.
On the night before Astrid’s termination I secured the safety on the rifle and placed it next to me in bed. In the past, I had lain next to women like this—my ex-wife for five years, for one—but they were lumpy and hairy. The gun was a sleek perfect line.
I didn’t eat anything the next morning. I shaved, brushed my teeth, ran a comb through my hair. Then I disassembled the rifle and put it in an old suitcase. As I was locking my door Ben called again and I hit “decline,” sending him on his way to leave another voicemail. It was only 6:30 in the morning, but it was already hot. I got in my car and turned on the air conditioning. The steering wheel was still too hot to touch. I flipped on the air conditioning, and as I was waiting for the car to cool down, Ben called. Again, I heard his voice in my head: Do you really want to splatter a woman? I hit decline and then squeezed the phone in my fist. I didn’t need Ben now. I wasn’t sure I’d ever need him again.
An hour later I arrived at the building across from Astrid’s work, a security guard who wore the gold heart necklace buzzed me in. She led me up to the roof without saying a word. I assembled the gun, click after satisfying click its parts married up. Then I crouched down. I followed a number of people walking down the street through the scope, telling myself all sorts of things to explain why I wouldn’t kill them.
When I sighted Astrid a couple of blocks away I kept the gun level and followed her as she made her way to the plant. Her hair was tied up in a knot on the top of her head and she bounced slightly as she walked. She was confident and her confidence was all the approval I needed. For a moment I was angry at Ben and angry at myself for allowing his doubt to seep into me. But that didn’t last long. The work was too important. What did the reservations of a small man matter in the face of it? Silently, I thanked Astrid. She understood the gun long before me, and I owed her everything for it. I felt more alive than ever and now Astrid would too. I took a deep breath and tightened my stance until I felt the gun grow out of me. I trained the scope on the side of Astrid’s head, just where her hairline began, and pulled the trigger.
The screaming from passersby startled me for a minute. A woman in a yellow coat bent down next to Astrid and then others followed until a small crowd was around her. They looked at each other and then started waving their hands wildly. Someone pulled his car to the curb and ran toward the crowd. A spray of blood stained the wall of the implant factory behind them. I wanted to stay and watch, but the security guard with the necklace tapped me on the shoulder and pointed for me to leave the building.
I knew Astrid wouldn’t be the last.
And she wasn’t. After her, there was a handyman leaving a building supply company with a bag of quick-drying cement that exploded with the shot and hardened some of the blood splatter. The second was a mother of six who, we later learned, believed that Astrid’s killing heralded the end of the world and had pulled the kids out of school. Then there was the guy who ran an aquarium who was carrying a tank of angelfish into his store when I blasted him from across the street. Dead fish and glass shards lay in the pool of blood alongside his unusually small body. Then there were others.
The calls from Ben stopped, but that didn’t mean he’d gone away. A few days after I got a purple iris tattooed on my inner forearm, I heard something in the kitchen as I as I was drifting off to sleep. When I stumbled in with the gun—I was never without it these days—I found Ben sitting at the table with an M-Tab in front of him. It was about half the size of a postcard, smaller than the one I’d used in both the military and Terminease.
“New model?” I said. I forced a smile and Ben looked up at me with a face so still it could have been carved from wood. He had gray half-moons under his eyes and his skin was waxy.
“I tried to—” Ben bit his upper lip. “—reason with you, warn you.”
“Like I’m still one of those sad, ex-military guys, who would be happy to press an M-Tab button for the rest of my life?”
Ben ran his finger along the edge of the M-Tab.
“Sad?” Ben said. “We were two guys doing a job. A well-paid job. One that provided a service.
“We still are. It’s just that you can’t understand the service I provide. Not while you’re still using that thing.” I nodded toward the M-Tab. In the sliver of a second that Ben looked down toward it I flipped the safety lever on the rifle.
“I’m clear about what my service is right now, John, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”
Ben looked up at me and after a second or two said, “You know, I tried to get Donna to tell me the address of the Astrid job. I was going to stop you. Not kill you, but stop you. But she couldn’t see the danger either. All she could talk about was new markets and how this time around the gun would only be put to good use and the board says this or that.”
Ben stroked the gray-flecked stubble on his chin. He was an old man now. Obsolete.
“I wanted to stop you then. Without it coming to this. Now there’s no choice,” Ben said.
Maybe not for you, I thought.
Ben tapped the M-Tab. It began its series of five vibrations before kill-initiation.
On the second beep, I put the muzzle of the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger for the last time.