Tried to call up a sharpness, to cut through the film that, since this morning, the doctor’s words had created between him and the rest of the world.
He wanted a jolt. Some flash to bring him back to earth. Hoped quietly for a crisis. Something that would require his whole mind.
A soft pulse in the chestconnect directed Branner to check the sectors he hadn’t yet. He swung the baffle. Had to. And there some quarter-of-a-mile away was the hospital. Like a cliff.
Through the scope he saw the square-looking white beds. The uniforms of the senior nurses the same blue as his police marksman cap. Not like the pale blue she’d worn the first time they met. Sewing up the wound in his jaw.
Branner wanted to stare the hospital down. Had the insane thought he could shoot the building dead and put an end to things. That if he killed the building, all the illness in it would be done.
There was the falcon again, on the building’s roof. A bolt-black silhouette the size of a bullet casing, against the pale squat structures of the windtwist generators.
He eyed it in the scope. Brought it bold and tangible. Alive with colour, detailed. Close. Then, as if aware of him, it dipped off the ledge, the sudden engine of its shoulders driving it into the sky and out amongst the buildings.
Branner turned away from the hospital. A scruffy dog trotted across the waste ground, stopped briefly and periodically to sniff, to mark. Went instinctively to the broken shallow and lowered its head to drink. Water.
The dog looked feral. It had the thick head and shoulders of an aggressive dog, but an energetic gait.
The dog brought scale to the ground. The fallaway section looked some three to four metres in length and half that wide.
Branner watched the dog, the skin around the scar on his jaw tacking slightly against the rifle stock.
It had a calm certainty. Dipped its head to drink again.
A little way from the pool sparrows folded in the dust.
The thin needling cry of a swift scratched the air.
They had hoped for rain, to diminish somewhat any casual enthusiasm for the protest. But the sun had got stronger through the afternoon, and the heat began to come up off the roof and catch under the hood.
Branner took some of his water ration.
‘Baffle nine,’ came Control.
‘Check,’ said Branner.
There was the soft white noise of electric traffic, filtered through the city. The sun flashed on the perimeter fence below.
Then Branner saw a small boy clamber through the failure in the panel and run, in a headlong way, towards the dog. The boy too looked feral. He would be seven or eight, guessed Branner.
Before the boy could get to the dog, the dog bounded away. Then stopped. Turned.
Barks reached Branner out of synch with the snaps of the dog’s jaw.
The dog was playing, but the boy seemed distraught. Gave loose, frustrated flaps of his arms, as if he tried uselessly to leave the ground.
The dog was delighted. Rolled in the dust. Stretched in the sun. Approached.
But every time the young boy took a step, the dog ran away.
In the end, the boy sat down in the dirt.
Branner saw the fence ripple again. The second boy had snagged his clothing. His face, in the globe of Branner’s scope, was angry and flushed. No more than a few years older than the first boy. He looked asthmatic, Branner thought.
There was some chatter on the comms, but Branner kept his focus on this second boy. The boy had torn his football shirt getting through the fence and shouted across the waste ground. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he walked.
It was clear the boys were brothers.
When the younger brother got up from the dirt, the older brother held him by the arm, and the dog barked once, percussively, as if something had been dropped.
Then the smaller boy began to bawl words into the other’s face. It seemed to pummel the older boy.
It was strange to see. Not hearing anything, at the distance Branner was from them.
Something, then, came across the children.
The dog became compressed and stiff, stared tensely past the boys. Growled, inaudibly to Branner. The minutest shake. Then it uncoiled and hammered off towards the empty river.
Branner looked to see what had caused the dog to spook. The younger boy already ran and shouted after it. The older pleading, hardly able to lift his feet.
Branner leant to the scope and went about a rhythmic grid check, sure he’d see another dog. Or people. Did not. Checked the waste ground patch by patch.
When he looked up, having done so, both the boys were gone.
People threaded onto the bridge. Surchins larked in the concrete channel below.
Branner looked to recognise the two brothers amongst them but did not. He looked for the dog.
The light gleamed off the mica held in the dry sandy mud.
The soft crunching chant of the protest came to him now, guided between the buildings, filling the streets ahead of the marchers.
It brought Branner the sense of something rolling, clanking towards him. He saw the bridge like a funnel.
When he looked back at the waste ground, as if he sensed him first, Branner saw the man.
He lay on his belly, an arm outstretched in the water. Branner’s stomach twisted again, upturned.
Light bounced from the weapon the injured man had dropped. It seemed he tried to drag himself.
Branner feared, for a horrible moment, that he’d had some sort of absence, during which he’d shot the man. The way the man lay prone.
He felt a sort of clatter in his brain. The off-synch patter of the protest growing more defined; the travel of the Overland that passed along the bridge.
From the deep hollow inside himself, Branner heard the doctor’s words begin again to knock and rattle. An expectation; some object tumbling closer.
A wash of adrenalin came with a taste like the metal smell of sundered iron. And his body braced.
He waited for this morning’s news to reach him.
The horrible moment, waiting for the doctor’s words to detonate.
‘Baffle nine.’ Comms call cutting through the chemical flood.
‘Check,’ said Branner.
But he was back, now, there. His first posting. Barely old enough to leave the base. Pulling bodies from the pooling water of the sabotaged pipeline.
How they’d stood there, helpless, listening, the next bomb pinging and clanging towards them down the pipe.
It was that day. That day at the pipe you met.
He brought his eyes down onto the protest. Went for the safety of the scope. But.
‘Sir.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not fully with this, sir.’
‘Branner?’
‘I’m not focused, sir.’
‘We can’t bring you down now. Are you fit for a shot?’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’
‘You’ve got the bridge, John. There’s a reason it’s you up there.’