The Mac Dies Story--OMFG IT'S DONE

[lb_lee]

A/N: This is the first good chunk of what is colloquially known as The "Mac Dies" Story.  It was started in March of '05; it is now finally completed.  This is the first fifth of it; you can get the entire thing (roughly fifty pages, about 28K words) here.  Elle, Ser, the version I gave you is mostly correct, but rougher; there were some minor changes towards the end, but none in plot events.  This is cousin to the sprawling Infinity Smashed canon, but since I don't want to make anyone suffer and slog through that, I will throw in requisite backstory.

The PIN is a government agency devoted to stamping out illegal activity of the interplanetary type, lamentably little of the "conquer the planet" variety.  Like the Men in Black, with less glory, more paperwork, and a great deal of headaches concerning jurisdiction and ethics.  Specialists are the enforcers who speak softly and carry a big gun, mostly dealing with immigration and bootlegging.  Comboys are their partners who manage the scheduling and information-harvesting, usually by the minute.  Specialist Grey is Mac's superior officer, and Mac is known by his full name (Patrick MacIntire) here.  The rest I think can be figured out without too much trouble.

 

Red Roses, Old Record Players

Some joker had replaced the john’s toilet paper with something pink, and the guy in the urinal down from mine was whistling Céline Dion. When I got back to my cubicle, someone had stuck pink crepe on its walls, and I attacked them with vigor.

"Ha! I knew it! I knew you couldn’t hold back much longer!" Jenny taunted from her cube across the aisle. "It’s tradition for you, Bob: every year, you’re sore at being single, get bitter, and trash Valentine’s Day."

"Hallmark Day," I corrected, ripping down one last streamer before dodging stems as Delilah waltzed down the hall with roses, "and it should be trashed. The taken women love everything, the single women hate everything, and the men hide. Working here is hard enough as it is."

"Hey, that’s not fair. My feelings are stable; I don’t need a holiday to define me." Jenny complained. "You’re doing a pretty decent job at the guy version of the I-hate-everything session, though."

"I don’t hate everything, only the holiday." Wadding the mess of streamers into a ball, I performed a fair three-pointer into the wastebasket across the hall. "And I’m cheerful, compared to some."

I indicated Randall, who was skulking in his cube, grumbling under his breath, and pounding on his keyboard as though he expected that to win over Doom 3. When the Marine keeled over in a pool of blood, he punched the monitor and began making angry caveman noises.

"Randall has a mood disorder. You know we’re not all that bad." Jenny said. "You might be a middle-aged old fart—and don’t say you’re not, you played Rogue in college—"

"Grad school."

"—Even worse—but you get along with us OK the rest of the year."

True, I didn’t do half bad with the twenty-somethings that filled the comboy roster. That should’ve meant that youth and maturity weren’t mutually exclusive, but the reverse was true; I was waiting for the sage wisdom they assumed I had.

"So what’re you going to do this evening?" She asked as I flopped back into my chair in front of my computer. "Be like Randall, bar yourself in your room, drink yourself into a coma, and watch porn all night?"

"Hmm, tempting, but I’ll have to skip the tradition this year. I’m dragging Grey into the world for the evening."

Jenny’s eyes widened. "You’re telling me that Specialist Grey, the sorta-living, sorta-breathing reminder that all work and no play make Jack boring as hell, remembered Valentine’s Day?"

I snorted. "Of course not." The only holidays Grey remembered were Lent and Christmas. With the latter, he was usually at least a week off, but with Lent, he was better; he’d only missed it twice. "He’s free from the Hallmark Day mire: he works all year round."

"Exactly. You got him to do something besides tackling aliens and shooting stuff. What’d you do, tranq him? Sneak hash in his coffee?"

I adopted my best geezer voice. "Back in my day, we didn’t have illicit drugs; we had to use persuasion, innate charm, and rocks."

"Ohhh." Jenny nodded. "So you bitched."

"Damn right. He’s getting bad for company morale."

"Uh huh. Cut the macho pride and just admit it. You don’t want to be alone and depressed on Valentine’s Day, so you’re taking whatever company you can get, even if it’s Grey."

I snorted. "Don’t want to be alone? Jenny, I work with you people sixty hours a week. I’d love to be alone."

"Well, with Grey, I’m sure you’ll get next best." Jenny sneered. "Bob, you’re my cube-neighbor and I care for you deeply… but I’ve met produce more well-adjusted than your specialist."

"You don’t want to admit that you don’t understand a word he says."

Jenny was both a woman and a Psychology major. Claiming I, your average middle-aged man, could ‘understand feelings’ better than she could left a bad taste in my mouth, but it was guaranteed to succeed. "That’s because there’re no words to understand! I don’t know why you bother; partners are partners, but he doesn’t even try to be human anymore!"

Maybe I had acted too smug. I took another cheap shot to change the subject. "That’s why he’s getting a night off. Is MacIntire?"

Patrick MacIntire was Jenny’s specialist and in his twenties like everybody in this place besides geriatrics like Grey and me. A burly redhead, MacIntire was a decent guy, more laid-back than most and with a sense of humor that had won him a reputation in his grunt days. It was no secret what Jenny thought of him, and sure enough, mentioning his name distracted her.

"Of course. We’re having dinner—and I didn’t have to drag him into it. We might even have a conversation during it."

"Really? Did you sneak hash into his coffee, or did you do it the old-fashioned way, with persuasion and innate charm?"

Under her dark skin, she blushed and said too defensively, "It’s not like that."

Yes, it was, but she was only the latest addition to the long list of coworkers thumbing their nose at protocol. The boys upstairs frowned on workplace relationships, but they never noticed their underlings, and comboys get curious about the face attached to the voice that they spend hours talking to every day. Hell, MacIntire was handsome enough, and Jenny was pretty enough, and they were both young enough. As long as it kept her productive and in a good mood, I couldn’t care less.

Besides it being Hallmark Day, the work shift was uneventful. The workload kept me occupied enough that I was neither hacking the specialists’ e-mail for entertainment, nor tearing the phone line out of the wall to stop my earpiece from ringing. I even stopped finding the girlish squeals irritating, though that didn’t stop me from yelling at Sofia to turn the volume down after the fourth time that she’d played ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ Things calmed down a bit after that, and the place had maintained some semblance of sanity for about an hour. Then the roses came.

"Oh, damn." I remarked with more resignation than annoyance as I saw the deliveryman with the massive paper bundle. I knew what would happen next: squealing, dancing, tears. Céline Dion. Either way, it’d mean the brief peace was over, and I’d have to work at maintaining a good mood.

Sure enough, out burst the shriek, but it came from right across the aisle. The roses were for Jenny.

"So much for your stable mood." I said. She began the frantic hand flapping and the squeals of, "ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod," but even as I tried to tune her out, the long-term view was bright. After she came back down to earth, Jenny would be the perfect coworker for at least a week and a half. MacIntire was one wily bastard; for this, he deserved an award for workplace enrichment.

"That idiot, he knows I hate red!" She laughed, swatting at one of the offending flowers.

Before she could work her way up to dancing and music, both our computers dinged at us. Giving the roses a kiss and a pout, Jenny hopped back into her chair. I spun to my computer, readjusted my headset, and read my monitor.

A new e-mail had popped up for me to crunch and relay to Grey. The same e-mail had been sent to the comboys of three other specialists: Patrick MacIntire and Joseph Dean, who were both handling transport from Section 42 out in the desert, and Ebony Larkin, who was off-duty but in the area with her gear. I scanned the mess of radar records, GPS coordinates, and case abstract as I pressed speed-dial.

The familiar monotone rumbled over the line. "Specialist Grey."

"Hey, big guy, bad news. You’ve got an emergency off Highway 12, 18-45 in the Vaygo Desert. MacIntire, Larkin, and Dean too, and firepower’s an OK. Just hit ground, staying with the ship, some joker listed as ‘Serious Putty.’ I’ve never heard of him; have you?"

"Might not make dinner." He replied, and hung up on me.

Hmm. From him, that was quite a reaction. In the PIN, emergency isn’t a term you throw around, and a carte blanche for weaponry less so, but my partner was the best specialist who’d lived past forty and a stoic of Roman proportion. Normally he would silently hang up and head on to blast something otherworldly.

Frowning, I turned to Jenny, who by the look of it had ended her own call with similar misgivings.

"Did Grey just act urgent?" She asked.

"For him."

"So did MacIntire, and he didn’t give me time to ask why." She said, tugging at a curl of her hair. "That sounds bad. You’ve been here longer; you know this guy?"

I shook my head. "Serious Putty’s new to me." Aliens with unpronounceable names often got tags relevant to abilities or appearance, such as Johnny Kaboom or Batman. "It’s probably a protist or something. Shapeshifter, maybe."

Still worried, Jenny spun back to her computer. "I’ll know in a moment."

Her concern didn’t rub off on me, but I did take an interest in Serious Putty. My need to make everything my business bought me stress and worry, but that had never stopped me before, and I was curious what Grey was grappling with. I decided to follow Jenny and visit the PIN databases, only to get a surprise.

"Son of a bitch." I remarked, plucking at my moustache. I typed in my clearance, only to get an unpleasant surprise and repeat with less bemusement, "Son of a bitch!"

"Classified?" Jenny asked. "For you? I thought Grey’s clearance—"

"It is." I replied. "It’s not high enough."

"What is wrong with these people?" Jenny demanded, letting her elbows hit the desk so that her roses shook. "We’re trying to keep our specialists from getting their asses blown up; we shouldn’t have to deal with clearance right now."

If they’d given me fifty-three pages of xenobiology and Krikaggatran politics, I would’ve lost interest and left well enough alone, but they’d gotten my full attention now. What beat Grey’s clearance and goaded him into talking? Shoving my glasses up my nose, I frowned and started working. A password requirement was an inconvenience, not the Berlin Wall. The mistake that had landed me at the PIN was hacking into their databases and then trying to blackmail them for it. Of course, I had finesse now, but the habits remained. As a matter of course, I plugged in a few of the standard passwords, with no success.

"How many have you tried?" I asked Jenny.

She sighed. "The usual. ‘Breakway.’ ‘Langdon.’ Every form of ‘omni’ they might’ve come up with."

Those were the obvious, and I’d tried the obscure. Knowing our tech department, it was a random sequence generator; nothing impossible for me to break through, but it’d take time and energy at my desk. Back to old habits, then. I logged onto the Internet and began digging up my old programs, which were less legal but more effective. Permanently saving them to my hard drive was impossible, of course, but the PIN Internet filter was laughable; at worst, I’d give my hard drive a good scrubbing and claim I’d been hit with a virus and had to reinstall my OS. With our software, it was plausible.

Halfway through the download, Jenny’s headset popped on with a buzz. In her anxiety, she didn’t realize she was nearly shouting and I heard her clearly.

"Patrick, what—" She cut herself off and pressed the receiver harder against her ear, brow knitting.

Grey was involved in this, and therefore so was I, so company policy could go to hell. Grabbing my dial, I tapped into her line just in time to catch the last half of what MacIntire bellowed into her headset: "—Up now! See you tonight, darlin’, love you—" There was a noise too blurry to make out, maybe a crash, maybe a burst of bad static. The line didn’t die, and I could hear at least one person shouting on the other end, but the sound wasn’t sharp enough to know who or what.

I looked at Jenny, who’d frozen and now sat staring at her console screen with wide eyes. "Patrick?"

I knew that look, and it wouldn’t do us any good. Hauling off my headset, I rushed to her desk. Around us, heads turned and people stood to watch, but they knew better than to interrupt.

"Call for backup?" I asked.

She nodded, pushing the receiver into her ear as though that would make the sound clearer. I tugged the set from her head and pressed it to mine instead. The sounds were still indistinct, though the shouting continued, and I knew MacIntire wasn’t coming back to the phone. I reached over and killed the line, which made Jenny look up. What worried me was that she wasn’t angry.

Damned if I liked Grey’s idea that work solved all emotional calamities, but I couldn’t let her cave on me now. She would have all the time in the world to collapse after the emergency passed. I tossed her headset back to her; she almost didn’t catch it. "Call the higher-ups; I’ll get the backup."

My sharp tone almost made the life click back on behind her eyes. Still looking dazed, she nodded again and got to work, and I straightened from where I stood next to her.

"Hey, people!" I bellowed.

Around the room, more heads popped up.

"You can, call anyone who’s close for the Vaygo Desert, get them to…" I paused to dash to my keyboard so I could make sure I recalled correctly, "18-45, off the highway. Emergency and we’ve got a hall pass."

The office burst into a frenzy of activity, and I started on my own phone calls. In the middle of the Vaygo Desert, there was no way for me to receive workable information except through Grey’s cell, and he wouldn’t call until everything was over. All I could do was what I’d told everyone else to do.

None of us had gotten far when Randall bolted to his feet.

"Shut up! It’s Larkin!"

The babble didn’t cease, but it quieted. I hung up on Specialist Balloui without a second thought and tapped into Randall’s line, and across from me, Jenny did the same thing. Her expression was anxious, which was an improvement, but her fingers were wooden; for her sake, I hoped the news was good.

Specialist Ebony Larkin’s drawling voice, smooth despite the stress, ran into my earpiece, and I tensed; it was going to be bad. He voice was one of the few that rivaled Grey’s for slowness, but now it was too ponderous for relief, too weary for pain. There was some babble going on in the background; somebody was making a hell of a racket behind her, but I couldn’t make out who it was or whether the sounds were from terror, rage, or pain. "Cancel the backup; once again, cancel the backup, we don’t need it. First docs you can get, call them over. My bleeding’s under control, nothing major, but Dean’s broken his collarbone at least, and he ain’t walking nowhere soon. He’s probably got some shock going on; we got a touch of nasty stuff over here."

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath against the quivering weakness that spread up and down my back. In specialist understatement, ‘nasty stuff’ meant someone was dead, and we all knew whose specialist had a betting pool over how much longer he’d last before his age caught up with him.

"Larkin," I said, "don’t humor me. Is Grey…?"

"It’s all right, man." She reassured me, not surprised that I’d tapped in. "Grey got here last, came out best; he’s bruised and gonna be hella sore in the morning, but it’s nothing your old man won’t walk off."

I released my breath and let myself slump against the support of my chair. "Stupid bastard could’ve called."

The relief didn’t last long. I was already braced for the bad news, and though I hadn’t lost a partner, that didn’t change that ‘nasty stuff.’ Not enough time had passed for any of the reinforcements to arrive, so if she was all right, and Grey was all right, and Dean was in shock and injured but not dying, then…

I turned to look across the aisle. Jenny was sitting at her desk, face pale, rubbing a rose petal between her fingers, but she hadn’t said a word.

"Is MacIntire’s comboy on?" Ebony Larkin asked.

I held my hand over my transmitter. "Jenny. She’s talking to you." When she didn’t respond, I uncovered it and said, "Yes, she’s on."

Ebony Larkin sighed over the line. I already knew what she would say, word for word. Every time, it was the same phrase, and every time, it the same tone. "I’m sorry. It was fast; MacIntire didn’t even feel it."

Of course he didn’t. They never did.

Jenny nodded as though Ebony Larkin could see her, then reached over and disconnected the line. Still with her headset on, she pulled the roses into her lap, curled into a ball in her chair and began to cry. If you ignored the tears, you wouldn’t have known anything was wrong; she was silent and only looked confused, unable to understand how this had happened to her. Your specialist wasn’t the one who died; it was the one who was incompetent, or new, or far too old. MacIntire wasn’t—or hadn’t been.

Our floor was a zoo, but now it was silent except for the hum of computers. I wasn’t the only one who’d known what MacIntire meant to her; everyone had. As close-mouthed as they’d been, it was impossible to hide in a room full of loons hired for their love of information. All of us played mum, because all of us had been tempted once, at the least. When you lived in an occupational cloister and no longer showed up on a census, it happened.

I looked around and sighed. Some of the kids looked down at their desks, for the dignity of the dead if nothing else, but most of my coworkers were standing, looking at me, their eyes begging me to fix everything. I was Jenny’s friend and the oldest one on the floor by at least ten years; death was supposed to be familiar. Year for year, I was the least mature of them, but these guys were kids; they weren’t supposed to deal with people they knew dying yet. Telling Larkin, "Thank you. Docs are on the way," I killed my line, removed my headset, got up from my chair, and went to Jenny.

"He knows I hate red." She said, shaking the roses at me as though in admonishment. Her voice trembled only slightly, and she ignored the tears on her cheeks. She would’ve been better off hysterical. "Corny bastard always was a tease. Giving me—" she hiccuped, "flowers that’re red—could’ve been worse, I guess, he could’ve gotten me a pony or a Pikachu or something."

I shook my head, ignorant to what she was talking about and unsure if that was good or bad. "I’m sure he thought it was funny."

Jenny’s shoulders slumped, her face caving in. "Can’t even kill him for it; they beat me to it." She said. "Bang, just like that. He… and now he’s gone." That word finally hit a nerve in her, and her face became animated for a moment as she told herself, "No!" Unable to face the concept, she changed the subject and slid back into her zombielike trance. "How will I cancel the reservation? It took us a week to get it. Valentine’s Day, you know, everyone wants to be there on Valentine’s Day…"

"Forget the reservation. You’re on leave. There anything you need?"

"No. Nothing at all." She stated, brushing my hands away as I reached to shut down her computer. Then she changed her mind and thrust the roses at me. "Yes. Get rid of these."

I held my hands out to push them away. "No, I—"

"Get rid of them!" Her voice cracked under the scream, and two tears ran down her cheeks.

If I didn’t, she’d pitch them down the shredder and never forgive herself, and I couldn’t take that face. Aware of every eye on us, I took the bundle from her hand and retreated to my cube. Once the flowers were out of her sight, Jenny withdrew into her numb stupor again, tearing apart a spare petal.

Delilah drifted over to my side, wringing her sweater between her hands. "I’ll drive her home once she’s on leave." She whispered. "Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her. You go home. I’m glad Grey’s OK."

I nodded, unable to look away from the flamboyant red bouquet in my hand. All I could say was, "Thank you."

The rest of the shift I spent in my own trance. Randall had already called the docs and some generous soul had canceled my backup orders, so all I could do was send the report to the higher-ups and put up a request for Jenny to get some mental health leave. Then I shut my computer down, yanked the headset off, and headed out the door with those goddamn flowers. The news must have spread, because nobody cracked wise about them.

At six thirty, I still sat on the curb out front of the building, roses next to me but a safe distance away, waiting for Grey to pick me up for dinner. After a shift like that, it didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t come.

It didn’t matter that I was the oldest comboy on my floor and that I’d experienced coworkers’ deaths before. The shock never wore off. In this cubicle ant farm, people were shuffled in and out every week, and even with the ones who stayed, you were too busy to exchange more than casual conversation. Most of your words were with your specialist, and nobody wanted to think that they might end up shot or ripped apart. Money rode on whether Grey would last the year; specialists didn’t call forty the kiss of death for humor, and his had been three years ago. Normally, I thought of his age only to make cash on the side, since he was as invincible as man could get, but at the moment, that habit felt petty.

At seven o’clock, just as I was beginning to realize that Grey wouldn’t show up, he did. He had the abusive grandfather of bruises across his jaw and I could only speculate at what he was hiding under his clothes, but someone had taken the swelling down and he could pass in public as the victim of a barroom brawl. The moment I saw him limp from his car, I began feeling human again. I’d seen him stagger in for work in condition that made this look like prime health, and even then, he’d still looked big, competent, and intimidating. Not handsome, and certainly not congenial, but intimidating, and intimidating I found reassuring. Intimidating meant he was alive. He was silent, nothing unusual.

"So, MacIntire’s gone." I said.

"Good man." He glanced at the bundle on the curb next to me. "You have flowers."

I inferred his question mark. "She hated red." I took off my glasses, breathed on the lenses, and rubbed them against my sleeve. Grey nodded as though my response made sense; to him, it might’ve. "Mind if I keep them in the back of your car?"

As he opened the door for me to toss them in, he added, "Sorry."

"For what?"

"Making you wait."

Not subtle, but after a second, I agreed the subject deserved to be changed. Though it was a reach, I clapped a hand to the shoulder he favored less, just to make sure he was there. "Forget the details, as long as you’re—" A muscle twitched under my hand, and I frowned. "Tell me you let the docs give you more than a once-over."

"I’m fine." He said, shrugging me off both ways. It was neither an answer nor true but it was good to hear regardless. "Hungry?"

In the emergency, I’d forgotten about my stomach, but my appetite had returned with Grey without me realizing it. "You still want dinner?"

"If you do." He tugged at his collar as though it didn’t fit. The semi-formal street clothes made him look like a militant uncle of the Beaver, but on his part, they were titanic effort. Usually, he insisted on staying in uniform, so people mistook him for my bodyguard. I frowned and waved a hand at his clothes.

"Why?"

"Had to shower."

"And dinner?"

"Have to change if you don’t." He replied, tugging at his collar again.

"And God forbid I make you do that." I said, getting into the passenger seat.

Seeing as it’s me who drags Grey out, you’d think I’d drive. Not so. I could blame it on him being a traditionalist, but though that has something to do with it, mainly it’s because he has the car. My wages are mediocre. I own a bus pass, live in government issue housing, and if I get desperate, eat government issue mystery meat. I am not liquid. Grey isn’t either, but since he’s frighteningly good at what he does and has been for over twenty years, his wages are higher than mine, and he doesn’t have any hobbies to spend them on. He can even afford an apartment, which is a sad irony, seeing as he’s rarely in it.

A glance to the backseat made me wince. The plain clothes had given me a sense of false security. As I pulled on my seatbelt, I asked, "Why is your crap in the backseat?"

He shrugged.

I sighed. "I thought you said you went back to your apartment."

"Nothing to do."

Grey rarely showed an outward response to deaths of other specialists—or much else, for that matter—but I could’ve gotten him mental health leave if I’d mentioned his compensations afterward. More than one morning after a bad day I’d found him in his office popping No-Doze and chugging coffee black, surrounded by finished stacks of paperwork he otherwise put off for weeks. It was my first clue that he wasn’t an emotional void.

"Relax. Serious Putty’s gone."

Grey shook his head. "Didn’t get him."

At that, I didn’t think to brace myself for when he screeched out of the parking lot. The moment the seatbelt let me breathe again, I glanced at him. His face was expressionless, but that meant nothing. He seemed to recognize my look in his peripheral vision.

"You didn’t know."

"I didn’t hear the whole call; I was… you didn’t get him?" Then a more shocking revelation: "And you’re not still in the field? You aren’t that badly hurt; what happened, they put you on leave?"

"Yes." He screeched into a sharp left turn that nearly sideswiped a Jeep Cherokee. His infamous driving distracted me long enough for him to inquire, "Want Indian?"

"You hate Indian." I said, annoyed that he’d gotten a word in. "All you eat is curry rice."

"Want it?"

"No, damn it. You’ve had enough of a bad day; I won’t let you humor me." Tires screeched, Grey blasted the horn, and I took a firmer grip on the armrest. "How about Italian? Hell, after today, I’ll suffer a night at the Opera House for your sake, and yes, that is a suggestion."

Some of the tension left his shoulders, and he pulled into the left lane. "OK."

I realized too late that he planned to pull an illegal U-turn but experience braced me before centrifugal force flung me into the door. Either he didn’t want any words out of me, or the shift had taken more out of him than appeared.

People think talking to Grey is hard; they don’t realize he can’t lie. He tells the truth in some way or other, changes the subject, or goes silent, depending on how tender the subject is. Interrogation makes him a skipping record, so I wanted to wait until we got to the Opera House before asking. That way, I’d have my questions in the proper order to get the answers fastest, and I wouldn’t distract him into flipping the car over.

---TBC