Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett

Author:Robert Jackson Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Delyna is filling up yet another pitcher of beer when she hears the sound: the chatter and tinny crack of gunfire, the eruption of screams.

The surface of the beer in the pitcher quivers: her hands are shaking. She doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to see it, but she can’t help it. She glances up and spies the three strangely fish-eyed feeds capturing the pandemonium and terror, just three boxes on the screens, each with an arm holding a pistol emerging from the bottom left corner—or, in one instance, some kind of much larger assault rifle. In two of the screens, the gun is shooting. The third is not—not yet, at least.

The crowd at the South Tavern whoops and claps like spectators at a horse race. It seems some of them bet on the mall being the selection, and they’ve made a good bit of money with their guess. Those who bet against them appear only mildly downcast. It is hard, it seems, to feel bad when you are witnessing such grand entertainment.

Delyna finishes putting another tray together, then scoops up two orders of cheese fries from Raphael’s order counter. She waits on the last element—chips and salsa—and stares back at the crowd.

These people. They are much like her, working-class and only somewhat educated, but they seem to be from some other nation, where guns and violence are a cheerful fantasy and not a reality as it had been for Delyna. It comes down to entitlement, she supposes: the people in the South Tavern grew up being told that, if a shooting happened, then they would be the survivors, the ones shooting back, or the ones righteously doing that shooting in the first place. The world had not told Delyna or people like her any such thing. Perhaps her role in the frenetic narrative these people dream of is simply that of a victim: sad, perfunctory, but necessary for the story to work.

Or perhaps she’s been forgotten altogether. She is not the intended audience for this story. That has always been clear.

Raphael slides over a basket of chips and salsa. She picks it up and drops the order off at the tables around the televisions. No one seems to notice.

Again, she thinks, Why am I still here? Why didn’t I leave with everyone else?

The question plagues her more and more. She’s seen posts from her departed friends on Nuuvu depicting their happy, contented new lives in South America, or China, or Africa, or Europe. The world is turbulent and changing, that is clear—Europe is still recovering from the last hurricane—but at least in those places, it isn’t actively hostile.

But she knows why she hasn’t left: because she believed that things would change. That they would get better. She wasn’t sure why—she just thought it would. Such an idea had been engraved in her mind since childhood: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It is the American story, or so she thought.

Yet she’s realized all too late that it is exactly that—a story.

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