Free The Beam: Season Three by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant Page B

recently replaced the metal-and-glass eye he’d had since ’37 with a quasi-organic replacement like the ones hospitals gave people who got their eyes poked out somehow — or possibly by buffoonish plumbers like in the black-and-white Three Stooges reruns Leo watched on the Old Time Channel growing up. The thought was depressing instead of funny. If The Three Stooges had seemed ancient to young Leonidas Booker, younger people like Gregory wouldn’t even know them. That would have been true even if there hadn’t been a decade of environmental chaos and decimation between Mo, Larry, and Curly and the kids of today.  
    “What do you need?” Leo asked.
    “Your guy is here.”  
    “What guy?”  
    “He wouldn’t say.”
    “He wouldn’t tell you his name?”  
    “He wouldn’t tell me who he was,” Gregory said, as if that encapsulated everything.  
    “I don’t need any surprises. Tell him to get the fuck out of here unless he wants to come clean like the rest of us.”  
    “I don’t think it’s like that.”  
    Leo paused. Then he said, “I was Leonidas, but you were Centurion. Does it feel strange to be called Gregory now?”  
    “Yeah, some.”  
    “No Gaia names up here. This new man? He picks a name, or he goes back to the city. Things are different now.”  
    “I don’t think it’s just picking a name that’s getting him,” said Gregory.  
    Leo looked him over. Gregory was almost a foot taller than Leo and twice as wide. He’d been a demolition specialist. The man had been absolutely fearless and obedient to the death. Leo had once commanded Gregory — then Centurion — to run into a factory with a string of plasma grenades around his waist. If he couldn’t lob them into the machines, his instructions were to yank a single string fastened to the pins — all of which had been ground smooth for easy egress from the explosive bulbs. He would have done it without hesitation: one man dead, one cause advanced.  
    It was strange to see him tamed now, with his realistic eye instead of his old chrome one. This was a different leap of faith Leo was asking him to take — and for fighters like Gregory, the leap to pacifist living was a harder one than anything involving death.
    And that didn’t even consider the larger leap Leo was asking his people to make. All of them going dry, all of them hurting.  
    “Then what is it?” Leo asked.  
    “He said to tell you he’s brought salvation. He’s in the meeting hall, waiting.”  
    Leo sighed. Was that today? He’d totally forgotten. The errand was good, but in a way it was also terrible. The visitor sounded like he was bringing religion, and for now, that’s what Leo allowed the others to believe: that Leo had found God. In truth, he’d found something else. It was strange how conflicted Leo felt about it all. Seen one way, Leo was saving his people. Seen another, he was leading them to doom.  
    “Okay. Thanks, Gregory.”  
    Gregory turned. Leo took one last sighing glance across the unincorporated mountain valley. Before the Fall, most of this had probably been owned by someone. Then in the reincorporation and districting, it had gone back to Mother Nature, owned by nobody. To make his group’s claim on the land official, Leo had dragged a large sum from the coffers that NAU Protective Services had allowed the remains of Gaia’s Hammer to keep unfrozen. He’d started this group when it had seemed the old ways were returning even after nature had asserted herself on the planet, and now he himself was doing the same. Buying land. Machinery might come next, followed by mass production. Then polluting. Then raping and exploiting the earth. Humanity seemed incapable of coexisting with the world for long, like a parasite on the planet.  
    “Gregory,” Leo said, turning halfway.
    Gregory looked back.  
    “I’d like you to get your arm covered.”  
    Gregory looked down at the shining silver thing jutting from his elbow. It, too,