Liminal Wake Chapter 4: Flex (Part 2)
Part 2
If you stumbled onto this, here are the preceding chapter links:
Chapter 4 (part 1)
4. Flex (part 2)
Bennett hung up his workbag and hat in the half-kempt entryway of his old Queen Anne home. He ruffled his overgrown black hair to air it out as he walked down the hall, then knocked gently on his daughter’s bedroom door. She’d covered it in cheeky stickers against Bennett’s meek protest, as thirteen-year-olds often do. “Char, I’m home. Can I come in and we’ll talk about dinner ideas?”
“Enter,” came the sleepy voice, and Bennett sat on the corner of the bed in the darkened room, careful to step over the bulky oxygen machine and its cords, and leaned his hand onto the folded patchwork quilt that lay across the foot of the bed. Charlotte sat herself up and rubbed her eyes, tapping the base of her jumping-salmon-shaped novelty lamp beside her bed to turn it on. She coughed into her elbow.
“Bit tired today?” asked Bennett as he rose to push the window shades up.
She nodded. “I’m hungry, though.”
“Did you eat anything at school?” He returned to his spot on the corner of the bed.
“No.”
He sighed. “Punk’, you know you have to eat.”
“I just listen to my body and it’s telling me not to eat. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re sick?”
“That’s when you have a cold or a stomach bug. Stuff like that.” He tore his eyes away from her thin pale form to glance at the floor.
“Chronic illness doesn’t count, then,” she said dryly, not a little like her late mother.
She took a drink from the giant water bottle on the nightstand. Bennett had the urge to ask when the last time was that she cleaned it, but thought better of it.
“Dinner?” she inquired again.
“That’s my girl,” he smiled, giving her shin beneath the covers an encouraging squeeze.
Bennett cooked up some macaroni and cheese with sausage. They bickered over whether or not to include broccoli. In the end, Charlotte won out and he dumped it in.
Bennett slid the bowls to the breakfast bar and they sat down. Charlotte began shoveling in the pasta like she hadn’t eaten in days, barely chewing it. He watched as the digits on her O2 saturation monitor, clipped to her waistband, ticked downward: ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three.
“Hey, slow down there,” he said, trying not to sound alarmed. The monitor would beep if she was falling into severe hypoxia. “Breathe, Punk. Didn’t we teach you to chew food when you were like six months old?”
She brought another orange mound to her lips and rolled her eyes.
He set his fork down, ignoring the attitude. “Char, I have to go out of town for a meeting tomorrow. I won’t be back ‘til late. Your grandpa’s going to come hang out with you after school and make you dinner, okay?”
Charlotte nodded, her dark brown hair nearly falling into the cheese sauce as she resumed her meal. She pushed it out of the way absentmindedly.
“I can braid that,” he offered.
She eyed him sideways. “I am way too old for you to be braiding my hair, Dad,” she said around a mouthful of broccoli.
“You used to let me braid it all the time,” he replied. Then, jokingly: “Heck, I can probably find those little bows I used.”
“That was only because Mom was bad at braiding.”
“I was only teasing, Char. Do kids these days not know what teasing is?”
She snorted. “Kids tease, but it’s much meaner than anything you could muster.”
Charlotte had been refining her delivery of back-handed and passive aggressive comments for several months, so Bennett wasn’t totally surprised. He merely puffed his chest out and said facetiously, “Excuse me, miss. I am a writer. I’m as merciless as they come.”
She interrupted as soon as she finished swallowing, smiling. “Don’t tell me, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’”
“Well,” he started, thinking this might be a teachable moment.
“Pshsh. No, Dad. It is not. I’ve seen streamers hit harder than any journalist.”
He dropped the matter, and tried to remind himself that it’s common for teens to put down their parents’ occupations. It wasn’t about his work in particular. It was about her current awe for the online world of mega-streamers who make their money by punching each other down with vicious wit and private investigations into one another’s personal lives. Kids’ inspirations came and went. It could be worse.
Still, the moodiness, the boundary-pushing, the occasional duplicity. It was hard. What surprised him was that those things weren’t as hard as leaving behind that little girl who cuddled under his arm and had her hair braided and wrote him misspelled poems and asked him to fly on an imaginary Pegasus with her.
He pushed down the nostalgia as he did a routine onceover on his bionic leg before bed, and turned his thoughts to work instead. Not his work at The Mirror. His work for Charlotte’s future.
— · —
The clouds broke under the late afternoon sun. Rain had been in the forecast, as it often is in late April in Seattle, but today was a fortunate break. Bennett leaned against his Porsche Panamera and pulled his ballcap lower to shade his face. He stared at the faded paint of his parking spot on the asphalt, listened to the birds chortling. He waited.
Into the Tuesday pre-rush emptiness of the Burger Moon parking lot rumbled a huge motorcycle. The massive man riding it slid into the vacant spot beside Bennett, only inches from his feet. He took his time shutting off the ignition and removing his helmet, revealing a shaggy mess of strawberry blonde hair and pale skin that didn’t match his hulking frame. He pulled sunglasses from a pouch and slid them on, then scratched his short beard a few thoughtful times before finally acknowledging Bennett’s presence.
The sequence of motions, taken together, felt more unsettling than any one of them had a right to—but maybe that was the nerves. Bennett cleared his throat, not yet sure what to say.
A strong, gravelly voice finally greeted him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Bennett. New Dimension Resources sent me. I’m here to help.”
Bennett nodded, swallowing. “So, you know my predicament.”
“I saw a picture. Seems like a real sweetheart.” The words were mild, but they made the hair on Bennett’s neck prickle.
The man continued, slowly pulling off his gloves and flexing his fingers. “You’ll be happy to know we’ve made room for her on the schedule. She’ll be taken care of—”
“And?” Bennett cut in sharply. He clenched his jaw.
“You want to know what we want from you.” The representative from New Dimension Resources nodded. “A man in your position, with your skills, is valuable. To us. This might be a little outside your comfort zone, but,” he scratched his beard again, “we think you’ll do just fine.” He stared straight into Bennett’s eyes beneath the brim of his cap. Bennett couldn’t see his eyes through the shades, but he could feel the stare. He held still, waiting.
“You’re well-acquainted with the anti-Loopers. We suspect someone you’ve built a professional relationship with is involved with their most radical fringe sect—Life for All. LFA, as they call themselves…”
“Which individual?” Bennett clipped, though he already knew.
“Joel McMillan,” replied the NDR man. “Anyway, we want you to leverage that relationship to put them down.”
Bennett flinched away from the car. Put them down? They’d made this deal with the wrong guy. Yet in the same instant, he knew he’d do anything to save Charlotte—even if it meant crossing lines he’d never imagined. She was too far down the transplant queue. He knew she wouldn’t make it. How she’d looked these last couple days was all the confirmation he hadn’t wanted.
The man waved a hand and chuckled, and Bennett let out a tense breath. “Obviously not that. We need you to do what you do. Or what you used to do, back in the day. Before,” he gestured vaguely, “whatever this current phase of tiptoeing around the issues is.”
The journo bristled at the dig. His career had plateaued, true. But the easier interview pieces bought time with his daughter. “What’s that, then?”
The man stared at him from behind the mirrored lenses, as if the answer was obvious. “Find the dirt. Tell the world.”
Bennett crossed his arms. “Why a journo? Why not let law enforcement handle it? LFA’s dangerous. They’ve gotten violent. You saw what they did to that boat coming in from Vancouver—”
“—NDR and the Welfare Office know exactly what kind of people they are,” the man said, rolling his shoulders and stretching, his leather jacket creaking softly. This whole conversation seemed to bore him. Bennett wondered if it even fell under his usual duties. “No cover law enforcement could craft would be as convincing as a respected journalist doing an exposé on the Territory’s most hated political group.”
“So you want me to make them think this series is going to be…what? Balanced? Sympathetic?”
“There’s nothing fringe groups love more than publicity. But send in a ‘new recruit’ and they’re suspicious as sick.”
Bennett stood there, letting it settle. “That’s… yeah. Can’t argue with that,” he muttered, though he could. He swallowed again.
The man tugged his gloves back on, flexing his hands. “NDR’s giving you freedom with the first few pieces—how you frame them, the tone, all that. We think four or five will do the trick. But the last one? That one needs to have the juice. Okay? Rip ’em a new one.”
Blood rushed through Bennett’s temples. Damn. What have I gotten myself into?
The NDR agent strapped on his helmet and fired up the engine. Over the roar, Bennett shouted, “When? When is Charlotte going to—”
The man cut him off, yelling back, “We’ll send word when it’s time.” He rolled out of the lot and disappeared into traffic.
New Dimension Resources wasn’t above backroom deals that let people skip the bionics line. Corruption came with the territory. Bennett understood that enforcing those deals required intimidation, bluntness—unscrupulous people doing unpleasant work. Still, it was a side of the corporation he’d never seen firsthand.
The hair on his neck was still standing.
……
Read Chapter 5 here.
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