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  Aftershock

  Shockwave

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Vachss

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vachss, Andrew H.

  Shockwave : an Aftershock novel / Andrew Vachss.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-90885-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-307-90886-5 (e-book)

  1. Psychopaths—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3572.A33S56 2014 813’.54—dc23 2013040808

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Pablo Delcán

  v3.1

  for Maggie:

  Patience wasn’t your specialty—you never could wait, not for anything. Always driving so hard on teardrop-slicked roads, keeping your eyes closed so you couldn’t see what was coming. Until you ran off the edge. Now we’ll never get that chance for me to show you how real horses—not those stick-legged Thoroughbreds you gave your heart to—duke it out. The next one Big Syd wins at Cal-X, that’s for you. We’ll watch that together … both of us long-distance.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  About the Author

  I didn’t want to be doing this.

  Not ever again, not any part of it. It was all wrong. Every interlocking piece of it, wrong.

  The worst part was that, once I started, it didn’t feel wrong. Not once I found that place inside me that didn’t feel anything. Inside that world of ice-pure emptiness, there is only this: la mission est sacrée. As a child, I had been directed to that world as another might have been to a boarding school—to learn how to conduct myself in a place already reserved for me.

  I left for one world; the man who told me where I must go left for another. I was forbidden to follow him, and there was no question as to my obedience. How could I not obey the only person who had ever loved me?

  I was certain I’d forever left that place I’d been sent to, but later I found that I could return at will. And I wouldn’t need a map. That place wasn’t a geographic location—it was an implant.

  Until Dolly, the training I got there may have kept me alive, but I felt no gratitude for that. Instead, I often blamed it for my always empty life.

  Before Dolly, no matter what path I walked, the road would seem to fork at every juncture. But those were nothing but illusions—there never had been more than one path for me to walk … not if I wanted to keep walking. The destination never mattered, only the departure.

  But those who had abandoned me, used me, even paid me—their implant never reached my core. Deep inside myself, I waited. Should I ever come across a chance—a real chance—at another life, I’d take it.

  If anyone tried to stop me, I’d take theirs.

  It wouldn’t matter whether I had to hack my way through vegetation, or flesh and bone. If I ever saw such a chance, I knew it would be a tiny candle, burning in a black cellar. A flickering candle, with very little remaining light.

  Whatever that cost—I’d pay. Or I’d make others pay.

  The only way I knew to leave the place that trained me was to use that training.

  By whatever miracle, I’d managed to do that. The opening appeared. The instant it did, I leaped blind. And landed at the one place I’d always been seeking.

  In my world, secrets were weapons, and you never abandoned your weapons. Surrender wasn’t an option—not when you were fighting those who didn’t trade prisoners, and being paid to fight by those who had no prisoners to trade.

  Whatever had compelled me to leap so blindly had been true. I thought I’d paid in full, but it turned out that all I’d paid was the price of admission. If I wanted to stay, I’d have to return to what I once was.

  And, that time, it was my choice.

  It took a lot. A lot of lives.

  Once I’d done all that, I couldn’t just throw a switch and put things back to the way they’d been before.

  The life Dolly and I had worked so long and hard to make for ourselves was gone forever.

  But all it had taken was a single backward glance to push us both over to the other side of the line. Back to using what had cost us so much to learn, and so much more to leave behind. But even the cost of stepping back across that line hadn’t separated us. We were still one.

  I knew that if I ever slipped, if I ever dropped back into Hell, Dolly would follow me. And bring me back, too. She’d done it before.

  When our paths first crossed, I was a professional soldier.

  If you prefer, a hired gun; an assassin. Or a freedom fighter; a liberator. What I was called depended on who was saying the words.

  Dolly was the other side of the coin I was paid in. I was paid to take lives; her mission was to save lives … and she wasn’t paid at all. I, a mercenary. She, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, switching between French and English as smoothly as if both were her native tongues.

  That first time Dolly came into my life, she healed my wounds. She asked no questions—my skin color alone would have told her that I didn’t belong where I’d been found. There weren’t any tourists in that zone—even the missionaries gave it a wide berth. That didn’t leave much … and my camo outfit would narrow any guesses down to one.

  Regardless, Dolly wouldn’t have asked my motives. Her team’s only way to continue its mission was to maintain its role of pure impartiality. It must be always apolitical, never judgmental. To Médecins Sans Frontières, a gunshot wound was a gunshot wound, a machete slash was a machete slash—they were there to heal the wounds, not aid the cause of the wounded.

  But even the mosquitoes knew the difference. In Africa, everybody gets malaria sooner or later, but the native-born have a much better chance of coming out the other side of that hideous ague. Coming out alive. Darwin ruled that world in all ways. Only survivors can breed—some genetic resistance to malaria became the native heritage.

  The extraction of that chunk of metal from my leg in the field hospital had left me woozy, disoriented.

  So I don’t remember much about the evac to Switzerland itself, but the message that I couldn’t stay came thro
ugh clearly. As soon as my wounds were healed enough for me to move under my own power, I was expected to move on.

  By that time, Dolly was long gone.

  I asked about her, but all I got in return was blank stares. Another clear message: Whatever we know is ours, not yours … and a man such as you could never be one of us. Could never become one of us. Blood washes off a healer’s hands. But it forever remains on those of a professional life-taker.

  As the years passed, I began to believe that Dolly was an apparition I had fever-dreamed.

  It was easier that way. Even if she had been real, I knew the chances of our paths ever crossing again were too remote to imagine.

  But even the longest odds aren’t the same as absolute zero—otherwise, all the world’s roulette wheels would have stopped spinning long ago.

  When I saw Dolly walking out of a hospital in San Francisco, I had to shake my head violently and refocus, just to be sure my eyes weren’t playing some cruel joke.

  But this was no mirage in the desert of my life—it was Dolly, and she could not have been more real. I don’t know why she’d been inside that hospital. But I knew what had brought me there. And it was no mystical, magnetic pull—I was coming into that hospital to do something to a patient. Actually, for a patient, but I knew the law wouldn’t see it that way.

  I called her name—“Dolly” was all I knew—and she turned to face me.

  And she remembered—I could see her eyes flash a decision.

  We didn’t have much time then, but Dolly answered my questions as if she knew why I was so desperate for the answers. She even told me her secret. She was finished with the unrelenting parade of hurt, crippled, and wounded people. Not just soldiers. Gang-raped women. Children missing both their forearms, left alive only to send a witch doctor’s message—the trademark of the Lord’s Resistance Army was to force a child to hack limbs off his own sister. The child knew if he refused he would die … and his sister would follow, raped to death.

  The child who did not refuse was maintained on a steady diet of hallucinogens until the witch doctor’s words became the only truth in his life. Once he had surrendered to that evil magic, he would become what those who had infused his life with horror had been. And carry it on.

  Dolly stopped because she couldn’t make it stop. Nobody could. It was as much a part of the jungle as the ever-renewing undergrowth. A kill-zone inhabited by targets, all tracked by human predators. And those who hunted those predators.

  The cycle never changed—a river of blood, limbs, and organs, all flowing into the same delta. When that delta filled, it would disgorge itself, forcibly reversing the current with an even stronger backflow.

  And then it would all begin again. Names might change, allegiances shift, new weaponry be introduced … but killing, rape, torture, they never stopped. In that part of the world, only the seasons change, never the climate.

  I’d never heard of “post-traumatic stress disorder,” but I’d seen it. Seen men paralyzed by something that went way deeper than any fear could. Seen men never stop shaking inside. Seen men grab their rifles and start shooting at empty darkness, certain “they” were out there.

  And I didn’t find out what secondary PTSD was until much, much later. Had I known, I would have understood why the relentless inevitability of the broken, bleeding, suffering, and dying had made Dolly flee for the same reason I had, so long ago: to save herself. Not her life, her self. I couldn’t think of another way to put it.

  The French—not the men I served with, but the privileged elite who spent their lives in cafés, smoking their cigarettes, sipping their espressos, analyzing a world they would never enter—never stopped talking. None of them ever listened; their empty-room lectures always ended the same way. They would shrug off the pain of others, devoutly proclaiming their anthem, “Chacun fait ce qu’il peut.”

  “One does what one can.” For such people, “can” was always limited to talk. Endlessly, they would discuss, argue, debate. Circles within circles. That was their self-assigned role. That men such as me had our roles assigned by others, even forced upon us, that was not their concern.

  And certainly not their fault. So there was nothing to stop them from judging us. And they have not stopped to this day.

  Maybe it was different for those who wore their own country’s uniforms into battle.

  The frontline medics who patched up the wounded and sent them back into combat, maybe they believed that a war was made noble by its necessity. To protect democracy from dictatorship, that was worth whatever it might cost.

  Still, it was sometimes all down to them. That ultimate decision: would the soldier they had just repaired go back to the fighting, or would he be sent home?

  And who better to make such judgments? They were unarmed warriors, always under fire. Whether a man truly deserved the medals others pinned to his chest—that was a political game. The true test was black-and-white clear: had he placed himself in harm’s way? From the dawn of combat between men, there were always those who could avoid this. But no medics did—the only time they went home would be in body bags.

  Dolly’s people didn’t have even that luxury. Their cloak of neutrality had no room for pinned-on medals. They were always in harm’s way, but when they returned, not even gratitude awaited them.

  Soldiers obey orders. Soldiers can be conscripted, but Médecins Sans Frontières personnel were all volunteers. And they had to know that some of those they saved would soon be creating new patients for them, or even be returning to take their lives.

  The truth of their mission mattered not at all to those whose only mission was to kill … sometimes in combat, sometimes at their leisure. Why else would the Médecins Sans Frontières nurses have “rape bombs” strapped to their belts?

  What Dolly wanted more than anything was to live the rest of her life in peace. Not some “paradise,” just a place where the climate wasn’t a permanent rainy season, an unending downpour of violence and death. She’d even found a place where she believed she could do that.

  From the moment I was entrusted with that secret, my mission—the only one I had ever truly volunteered for—was to give Dolly that life she wanted. I never lied to myself, never pretended unselfishness. Every step I took toward finding that place of peace Dolly wanted came with my prayer for a chance to share that life with her.

  Against insane odds, I got that done.

  And once my prayer was answered, I thought I was done, too. Not dead, but finished forever with doing the only work I knew how to do.

  For a long while, it seemed as if the dream would hold. Dolly had a place in that little community, and I had … Well, I had Dolly. All I wanted.

  But then I was forced to start a fire that drove the rats from their hiding places. That was no accident, and I didn’t act alone. Dolly had been the one who handed me the matches.

  To live in peace, we’d both had to leave our lives behind.

  Not just the work, all the ID, too. We had to be different people.

  Dolly had to give up being an R.N. She still had all the skills, and she was always finding ways to use them—healing isn’t always about the wounds you can see or stitch.

  I still had my skills, too. But no real use for them. Not anymore. Yes, even after we came here, I had done some things I would never tell Dolly about. But once I was satisfied that our perimeter was secure, I was done working.

  Dolly never stopped nursing. Teenage girls flocked to her as if she were the only flower they could feed from.

  Dolly cared for them all. She didn’t make judgments, but she always had rules. You do what’s right, or you do it somewhere else.

  But even though Dolly was able to go back to her own mission—the one she created for herself—I couldn’t tell if she was feeling what I was.

  I didn’t think so. A soldier and a battlefield healer would share the awareness of some things, but not all—same jungle, but very different reasons to be there. Ever since we put those hea
ds up on stakes surrounding our village, my soldier’s sense could feel a dirt-gray haze hovering overhead.

  Part of the climate now. Not the climate people in this part of the country are always bragging about. Maybe they don’t look close enough to see it—or they deliberately look away. For most of them, even if they did see it, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at.

  Rats always return. Survival is their sole genetic heritage—they breed constantly, and they’ll kill each other as quick as they’ll kill anything else. Food is food. Put up all the barriers you want, spray all the poisons you like, some of them will still get through.

  Rats only tackle what they can handle alone—they don’t work in packs. They only tolerate the presence of others of their kind up to the point where the food supply is threatened. Then they use death to achieve maximum volumetric efficiency. Put a thousand rats inside a cage that any two of them could tear open if they worked together, come back a few weeks later, and the cage will be intact. With only one rat left.

  The only difference between rats and human vermin is that rats don’t have food preferences. But once human vermin taste something that fires every synapse inside them, that’s all they want. Such humans are always hungry, and they stick to their chosen diet as closely as they can.

  No rat ever dies from obesity. Except lab rats, force-fed by humans experimenting on them.

  When you work a jungle for the first time, you find yourself under a canopy of leaves and vines so thick it blocks out the sun.

  Until you learn better, that canopy creates an illusion of safety. You can hear the planes overhead—supply ships carrying food, death dealers packing missiles. But you don’t worry about sounds: you can’t see them, so how could they see you?

  If you live long enough, you learn that the only thing that jungle canopy protects is its own undergrowth. It won’t stop a bomb, or turn a missile off-target. That kind of delivered death has its own vision.

  And the shade-shielded undergrowth is perfect for constructing camouflaged deadfalls, with poison-tipped punji sticks awaiting anyone who takes a wrong step.

  If you walk a wrong path, every step is a wrong one.