CHAPTER 7: Four Years Ago…

Dwight Quinn was reluctant to meet his lifetime best friend, Beau Grant. Even if they had arranged to get together at their favorite bar—Mulligan’s Green, the sports-themed watering hole where they’d been going ever since they turned twenty-one during their days at the University of Houston—nothing felt like it used to be now. 

They had spent the first thirty-seven years of their lives as inseparable. He knew many siblings with looser bonds and less intimate knowledge of each other than he and Beau had. They grew up as neighbors. They double-dated to the prom. They both took the fall for Dwight stealing his dad’s truck when he was just fifteen and totaling it. There was hardly a day in Dwight’s life where Beau wasn’t there in some capacity. Beau as his best man; Beau was there before most family members when Dwight’s child was born.

But Beau had changed when the world started changing. When the GAPs first appeared, Beau immediately supported the news reports calling for their detention. And along with those calls, he was watching a lot more TV those days; the kinds of channels the two of them used to make fun of together. But now it felt like Beau was one of the “sheep” they used to mock; he seemed too tied up in the vitriolic commentary to think about things rationally. Every accident the media sensationalized—every time some scared or stupid kid did something without thinking—Beau suddenly took it as an indictment on a whole people. He wasn’t always like that. Wasn’t he? Dwight could not recall a moment where his best friend seemed harmful. They both made some jokes when they were younger that Dwight was embarrassed about now, but… they were kids then. 

If he considered it honestly? Maybe Dwight was part of the problem. He didn’t say anything when Beau would yet again talk about what he saw on the “news” the previous night. Beau just needed to blow off some steam, right? After all, like some of those kids, wasn’t Beau just frightened, too? He would eventually see his way to the light.

But then it happened. Vicki Quinn, Dwight’s daughter, exhibited… powers. It wasn’t much, not at all. She could… he tried to picture it in his head, the way she could extend and stretch her limbs. It made him nauseous to think about, like she had gummy bears where her bones should be. He hated that he found it gross; she was his daughter and he still loved her! But there would be the image in his head or her reaching across the room for a glass and her arm slumping softly, almost wetly, to the floor. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t! But, man… it wasn’t evil, either. She couldn’t hurt anyone. And she didn’t ask for it! What threat was she?

Dwight remembered the night after school when Vicki told him and his wife Liza about it. She was so scared that she cried as she tried to get the words out. She would start a sentence, then get lost in hard breaths and begging them not to be mad at her. He and Liza sat on the couch imagining that she was about to tell them she kissed a boy or shoved a classmate or cheated on a test.

“I’m one of those bad people. Like Uncle Beau hates.” That was how she finally got the words out. Not that she was different. Not if she was in pain. She relayed it to them in terms of how she knew her godfather would feel. 

Beau had not taken the news well when their wives started discussing it on the phone later that night. Liza told him that Janelle Grant took it fine and wished them well, but ever since the call, Beau had not responded to any of Dwight’s attempts to talk to him. Messages were left in a Read status, but no replies came. Phone calls were unanswered. Radio silence. 

Until yesterday.

It had not been much of a text. Just… “Mulligans tmrw at 6?”. But after two weeks of being ignored, it was better than nothing. As Dwight stared at the familiar glass door to Mulligan’s, the specials of the day written in chalk across it, the hopefulness that he had felt when he saw the text yesterday dissipated. Beau’s truck was in the parking lot; he was already inside. What was Dwight about to walk into? He held his breath as he pulled the door open.

Beau had taken up a seat at a table on the leftmost wall. If he saw Dwight come in, he certainly gave no clue of that. Dwight couldn’t help himself but look out across the many wall-mounted televisions across Mulligans, if only because it gave him a second to not have to go straight to Beau’s table. He saw a few baseball games, a soccer match, and one show with sports personalities yelling at each other over some games from last night. No TCN News in sight. Thank goodness, Dwight thought to himself.

Dwight pulled out the chair across from Beau and greeted his friend. Beau nodded, but kept his eyes on the baseball game behind Dwight’s head. The beer in front of him was already almost empty even though Dwight had pulled into the lot at 5:57. 

“Who’s winning?” Dwight asked.

“Too early to tell, you know?”

Dwight nodded. Beau was not giving him much to work with. He pivoted to a more direct approach. “It was nice to hear from you. I was hoping you were okay.”

“I’m fine. What about you? What are you going to do?”

“I’m—,“ the last part of what Beau said threw him off his intended response. “What do you mean what am I going to do?”

Beau continued watching the game and not addressing Dwight to his face. “I’ve been seeing some poll results in the news. The idea of compulsory military service for the… for Vicki’s people. Putting them to work where they are most useful and building up their loyalty to the rest of us. Just making sure they know who they are first. Some people are getting behind it.”

Dwight pushed his seat back from the table. His eyes never left Beau, but his friend (was he still that?) just kept staring right at the television on the wall. Was he too ashamed of what he was suggesting to look at him? Or was he embarrassed to be seen with the father of Vicki? Dwight waited for Beau to meet his gaze and say he was kidding or that obviously that’s not what he really thought. It was all a joke. There was no way.

The server, a young high school looking girl who couldn’t have been more than six years older than Vicki, approached their table. She was punching some information into her tablet before she looked up and smiled at him. She had braces, pimples. Dwight felt himself seething, but didn’t want the girl to think it was about her.

“We aren’t ready yet,” he waved her off, trying his best to look polite and smile at her.

He continued waiting. He wanted to give Beau every opportunity to walk back what he had just suggested. Or maybe he just wanted to give himself every opportunity to respond in a way that didn’t involve hurtling the table in front of them.

 “My twelve year old girl isn’t going to the Army, Beau.”

“Not right now. But maybe when she is fifteen or sixteen…”

“Or maybe when she’s never because she isn’t.”

Beau finally turned to him, though his eyes were not in line with Dwight’s; they were looking at a lower point, Dwight felt his friend was staring him in the chin. “Your dad was in the Air Force, Dwight, you of all people—“

“She isn’t!” Dwight said it clear and with as much force as he could muster without getting others’ attention brought to them.

“Don’t tell me you are buying into all that APGAP nonsense, Dwight. You’re smarter than that.”

Dwight had heard the abbreviated name of the Association for Protections for Genetically Altered Persons recently. They were a group gaining traction and looking for funding for the support of their belief that GAPs were themselves protected as armed citizens under The Second Amendment. They had been fighting local bans on allowing GAP’s into college or on public transit, and they had challenged many instances of their kind… Vicki’s kind, as Beau had sort of put it… being let go from their jobs. It felt flimsy, and it seemed to Dwight like they were putting off the majority by looking at the people as a whole instead of case by case situations, but… it wasn’t nonsense, was it?

“I’m buying into my daughter,” is all Dwight could respond with.

“And this is what’s best for her.”

Dwight’s body felt cold and he fought off the urge to shiver even though he knew Mulligans always ran a bit warm inside. The back of his jaw was tensed into place, as if it was fighting Dwight’s own urge to argue back.

“What do you think you are waiting for here, Dwight? You think this is natural? All of these… all these kids coming down like this? I was watching Barnes last night, and he said this could be something Biblical. Something like a plague. Or… or… an apocalypse of some kind. Judgment.”

“You never listened to that clown until now. And you never believed in that stuff before,” Dwight overpowered his jaw’s resistance to arguing back.

“I never believed a man could punch a skyscraper over, but here we are.”

Dwight recoiled in his seat. His head shook in a short but fast motion, not believing what he was hearing. “What? No one has punched—“

“Not yet.”

“Oh, but Vicki will?” 

“Someone will.”

“You’re insane.”

“What if it’s Liza’s building? What if she’s inside?”

“You’re just making up—“

“Your wife will be dead, and you’ll be sitting there going ‘Oh, well at least my kid didn’t have to go to Basic’, I guess. Like that makes it—“

It didn’t take Dwight long, maybe just a handful of seconds, to realize he had lunged across the table, knocked the remainder of a beer over, and clobbered his friend to the ground. By the time the veil over his senses lifted, he had been straddling Beau on the floor of the restaurant, punching the sides of his head over and over. The patrons of the restaurant were screaming. The girl with the braces had dropped her tablet just feet from him; she must have been coming back to their table when he jumped Beau. Men in white aprons were emerging from the swinging door to the kitchen. Dwight fell backwards, trying to get to his feet, but awkwardly stumbling down onto his own ass. He lifted his arms up to show he was done. He had no idea what came next.

“Look!”

The shout came from the other end of the bar When Dwight turned, he saw a man about ten years younger than himself. But he wasn’t referring to Dwight or Beau; he was pointing at the television on the wall closest to himself.

Dwight looked in every direction. All of the TVs were now showing a news report, though no one in Mulligans looked to have changed any channels; Different camera angles showed various reporters gathered in that room Dwight had seen on on TV where they interview the President’s Press Secretary.

No one was coming any closer to Dwight or Beau. All the attention to Dwight’s assault on his best friend drained away. Someone behind the bar muted all of the televisions but the largest one, the one situated over the bar, and the volume on it was raised loud enough for everyone to hear. A reporter stood there, shuffling in place like she just grew her ow feet and wasn’t stable on them yet. Her eyes shifted around as the camera focused on her. The camera shifted to the right snd shook slightly, and that seemed to get the reporter’s attention.

“Right, right,” she started, shaking her head. “So as you just heard, President Green has partnered with The Senate and The House. They have agreed…” She paused, looked up, and then  settled back towards the camera. “They have agreed to suspend all federal elections indefinitely, and they are advising the states to suspend their elections, too. They have jointly declared the population increase for Ga—for, I’m sorry, for Genetically Altered Person to be a national emergency.”