Story by Camron Miller Ill.u.s.tration by Les McClaine

FIRING SQUAD.

I HAD DINNER WITH AN OLD HIGH SCHOOL ACQUAINTANCE THE OTHER DAY. We'd b.u.mped into each other on the street after years with no contact at all. Even though we hadn't been very close when we were teenagers, it was a pleasant surprise to see him. After standing at an intersection chatting through a few cycles of the traffic light he asked if I was too busy to have a meal and really catch up. One thing I'm rarely accused of being is busy, so we were soon at a stylish little restaurant he knew.

Conversation quickly moved from the ba.n.a.l to his travels. It turned out that after graduating from university he'd spent a long time out gallivanting through all sorts of parts of the world. He'd saved up a bit of money and went to countries where it would last him a long time. That's what this guy was like. He'd always been the one to do the things everyone wanted to do. As teens it had made him the dare taker, the gutsy one, and understandably led to him being much more popular than a n.o.body like me.

Even as kids when he talked about his adventures he never sounded like a braggart. That hadn't changed. He'd always been matter-of-fact in talking about the sorts of sc.r.a.pes he'd been in and he came off as brave, instead of filled with bravado. Even though he lacked a beard, it only took a few minutes for me to settle on a descriptor: grizzled. He seemed like a veteran of something.

Thinking about this, I asked him if he'd had any experiences out in his travels that he'd thought he wouldn't make it through, that he felt lucky to be alive after.

He sat back in his chair a bit, the slice of bread in his hand forgotten while he thought. "Lucky to be alive? It's hard to say. Because of my emphysema, it's never really bothered me." I was about to offer an apology when he stopped me. "I mean, I don't have emphysema now, but that's what my death is going to be. Eventually. I breathe just fine these days so it's hard to feel like that's ever going to affect me."

Fair enough, I thought and prepared for the subject to change, but he surprised me by continuing.

"There was one time out in Asia, though, when I thought that all the emphysema in the world wasn't going to save me. You want to hear it?"

"That's why I asked," I replied. We ordered another round of beers and he began his tale.

I was in a country that was undergoing a bit of a revolution at the time, but figured it wouldn't affect me much. I was just a tourist, tramping around the mountains with my backpack, supporting the local economies by staying in little three-house villages and purifying the bottled water I was buying. No problem to anyone. But the revolutionaries had a lot of support in these villages, or at least it seemed like they did from the way their graffiti was scrawled on rocks and buildings.

I didn't pretend to understand the politics of it all, and for most of my travels that didn't give me any trouble. I had no idea what a revolutionary even looked like until I found myself face to face with three of them one evening.

I was in the common room at a little guesthouse, eating lentils and drinking a beer some poor sherpa must have dragged up the mountain on the same slippery little paths I was travelling for adventure. It was spring, so the snow at the lower alt.i.tudes was gone, but the weather could still wreak havoc with your schedule if you cared about those kinds of things. And it was still pretty chilly, so these smoky old common rooms at the guesthouses were the perfect places to rest after a day on your feet.

When I looked up from my plate, three young men were sitting on the other side of the rough table, staring at me intensely. None of them were very tall, but they had the tough look of mountain people. Their faces were purple from burst blood vessels-or maybe it was makeup, I'm not going to pa.s.s myself off as some expert here. They wore heavy canvas clothes and long, filthy woolen scarves.

So these three guys were sitting there, silently staring while I ate. Kind of unnerving, as you might expect, but I'd gotten used to people staring with abandon and didn't let any annoyance show.

When I finished my meal the one on the left spoke to me. "Do you know where we can get a Machine of Death?"

This surprised me on a few levels. First, his English was good. I'd only learned a couple of words of the local language, and usually struggled to understand the broken English employed by those in the hospitality industry out there. This guy's was accented, sure, but very clear.

Second, a Machine of Death? A bit of a non sequitur there. I would have expected something about how they wanted to be my guides for a great new route to the summit of Angku Norge IV that no Westerner had ever set eyes on (apart from the Swedish couple they took yesterday). He noted my surprise and continued.

"I'm sorry to interrupt but we are from the local, umm...non-governmental organization." He smiled shyly at his joke. "Our operations in this region would be greatly helped if we had access to such a device. It's understood that in the West these machines are to be had in great abundance, but here in the mountains we are sadly deficient in your luxuries. We were hoping you knew where we might be able to find one."

"I'm not sure I do know where to get one," I told them. "It's not really my line. I mean, I'm just a guy, no special connections or anything. I don't think I'd be able to help you."

"That's all right," he replied as he and his two friends got up and wrapped their scarves around them, preparing to leave. "But if you could keep your eyes open and remember us, we would greatly appreciate it. My English name is MJ. Like Michael Jackson."

They would have walked out of the guest house right then, but I was curious about one thing. "You do know that a Machine of Death doesn't kill anyone, right?"

They stopped at the blanket-covered doorway and MJ explained with a slightly patronizing air, "We aren't simpletons. Of course we know what the Machine does. We need one for internal use."

"How so?" I was really curious at this point.

"We have some traitors in our group. They are selling information about us to the government but we don't know who they are. Yet. This is a big problem for our cause. When we find them, we will execute them in the name of revolution." I nodded, and he seemed encouraged by the way I didn't shrink away at this plain talk of death and traitors and such.

"If we had a death machine we would be able to find out who is due to be executed. It would say Firing Squad, because that's how we deal with traitors. With the Machine's verdict we will know who the traitors are. Then we will execute them as such."

It was a very straightforward explanation, and for some reason it impressed me. I thanked MJ for his answer, and promised him that I'd keep an eye open.

"It's kind of weird to think of now," my friend said between mouthfuls of salad, "but I found their logic oddly appealing. I mean, I really wanted to help them. These poor guys just wanted to get their revolution going without outside interference and needed a common enough device to get on with it."

"Outside interference is kind of par for the course when it comes to revolutions though, isn't it?" I asked. "And besides, I'm pretty sure the Machines don't work like that."

"Well sure, sitting here it seems a little off to see them as foolproof traitor-finding machines. But these guys just seemed so confident their plan was solid and that all that was holding them back was this lack of technology. It's hard to get down on that kind of idealism. I was young at the time." He shrugged, half-smiling, and speared a segment of mandarin orange.

"But this isn't where you felt in danger?"

"Oh no. That only came after I found them a Machine."

It was a couple of weeks later. I'd made my way up through those revolutionary mountain paths and then down to the road where I was about to catch a bus back to the lowlands. There was a bit of a chill in the air but the sun was busy melting away the snowdrifts, all that remained of a blizzard that had delayed me here a few days. I was sitting at a teahouse where I could keep an eye on the road without getting run over, and enjoying the opportunity to let my socks dry out on the cheap plastic table.

I heard sounds of a party coming from a part of the village I couldn't see. It seemed to be a wedding or something, lots of music and cheering and things. It made for a festive background while I sipped my tea. Out of nowhere the music stopped. A few minutes later a bunch of well-dressed young men came out of an alley and dumped what looked like a small refrigerator into the creek that ran next to the road. After a moment of study, I realized it wasn't a fridge at all, but a Machine of Death.

There's no way, I thought to myself. I mean, what are the chances that such a thing would show up unattended so soon? I'd been thinking about the revolutionaries as sort of a quixotic rabble, good for a bit of local colour in my stories, but nothing more. Now here I was, in a position to get them exactly what they desired. It was kind of an odd feeling. I don't think I can remember ever being in such a powerful position before. I thought to myself. I mean, what are the chances that such a thing would show up unattended so soon? I'd been thinking about the revolutionaries as sort of a quixotic rabble, good for a bit of local colour in my stories, but nothing more. Now here I was, in a position to get them exactly what they desired. It was kind of an odd feeling. I don't think I can remember ever being in such a powerful position before.

Anyway, I paid my bill and went down to the creek to check out the Machine. It was intact, except for the electrical cord, which didn't have a plug anymore. Looked like it had been torn out quite forcibly. No one was coming down to berate me for messing with their property, so after about half an hour I figured it was free for the taking.

I found a young guy and asked him if he'd like to make a bit of money. He was from the town, not the mountains, wearing knockoff plastic sneakers. He understood a bit of English and seemed eager for the cash.

"I need you and maybe a couple of your friends to help me carry this thing to a village," I told him, down by the creek. "It'll take a day or two, but I'll take care of your expenses." The kid hemmed and hawed about it but eventually we negotiated a price for him and three of his friends to help me.

Of course I was going with them. I couldn't remember the name of the village I'd met my revolutionaries in, but knew how to get there. And besides, I wanted to make sure the Machine arrived without being dumped in another mountain stream.

The hike back to the village went quickly. I didn't do any of the carrying but the guys I got did fine. On the walk they ended up telling me how the Machine had arrived in the first place: The richest guy in the village had a daughter who was getting married, and he imported it at fantastic expense for the wedding party. It was sort of a novelty thing, flaunting how rich they were. The groom was the first to find out how he was going to die, and the paper read 'Stabbed in Heart by Jealous Wife.' Not the greatest way to get a marriage started off right. The Machine, disgraced by such an inauspicious announcement, was discarded, as I'd witnessed.

At this my friend stopped his story and contemplated his still half-full bowl of soup.

"So what happened?" I asked. My soup was done-the benefit of listening to a tale over dinner instead of telling, I guess.

"Now, in my mind the plan had been to drop off the Machine somewhere in town and get word to the revolutionaries somehow." He put down his fork and knife and his fingers ran along the rim of his water gla.s.s as he explained. "I wasn't demanding any payment for my service, so I didn't really need to see them again. It was barely an inconvenience, or at least, that's what I hoped. I mean, I wasn't doing this to be praised or anything, right?"

I knew what he meant. "You wanted to be able to say, 'Oh this? It was nothing. Don't worry about it.'"

"Exactly! It had cost me the equivalent of, I don't know, four dollars in sherpa fees. Not a big deal at all. But they didn't see it that way."

One of my guys tried to explain to the woman at the guesthouse that she should tell the revolutionaries that the plug needed replacing before the Machine could be used. It was taking a while. She was confused about what the Machine did and even though I'd told my translator the details weren't important, it seemed he couldn't stop himself. She was loading wood into the stove while he talked, forcing him to repeat himself over the clatter and roar of the fire.

I was ready to let my inner North American take over and leave for the sake of my schedule. I was done, ready to go catch the bus back down to the lowlands the next day. My bag was on my back when the blanket-door behind me lifted up. I hadn't realized how smoky the stove had made it inside until a shaft of light fell through the room only to be blocked again by three figures walking in.

"It is so nice to see you again," said the one in the centre. It was Michael Jackson and the revolutionaries. "How time flies."

They looked the same as when I'd last seen them. Same old uniforms with the same long, woolen scarves, same earnest expressions. I guess the only difference in me was a bit more beard, so who was I to talk?

"Hey guys, nice to see you, too. I guess this'll be easier than all these explanations here." I indicated my sherpa and the proprietor woman, and noticed they'd both shut right up when the others entered. The woman had a smile on her face, and the sherpa had a defiantly set jaw. The other three sherpas weren't making any sudden moves, but they kept their hands in their pockets ominously.

I didn't want to get in the middle of a fight, so I told my guy everything was fine and gave him his money. He took it without taking his eyes off the revolutionaries, and then he and his friends left, quickly, like they were trying not to show how badly they wanted to run.

That's when I started to get an inkling that I might not exactly understand everything that was going on.

Once the townies were gone, MJ warmed right up. He beckoned me to sit at the hacked and dented wooden table. "What brings you back to this village?"

"I found you a Machine of Death. It's sitting outside."

The woman brought us tea. The other two revolutionaries stood back by the blanket-door. Something about them seemed a lot more menacing than I'd remembered, as if they'd seen a lot of action in the past few weeks. They weren't old, but they weren't the fresh-faced youths I thought I'd met.

Michael Jackson spoke thoughtfully, "Yes, we saw it when we arrived. I hoped that's what it was." He took a few more sips of tea. "So what do you want for it?" He asked this in the same quiet tone, but I noticed that the two others at the door were watching me closely.

At this point my emphysema sentence popped into my head. These guys weren't going to kill me. I knew that. But I also knew there's a lot of wiggle room in these things. If I said the wrong thing they could possibly make me a prisoner for the rest of my days. Or at least enough of those days to make me severely uncomfortable. Happily, I didn't have any intention of doing anything to get anyone angry.

"Me?" I asked, smiling as broadly and non-threateningly as I could. "I don't want anything. It's my gift to you. It's a little broken though. The Machine doesn't plug in because the cord is torn. I'm sure you can fix that."

Maybe I was just projecting my own emotions into him, but MJ seemed relieved. Instead of the terse businesslike smile he'd been wearing, a much more peasant-like grin split his face.

"That is excellent! Thank you so much for your help. We cannot possibly repay the magnanimity of your gesture."

"Oh this? It was nothing," I said. "Don't worry about it. In fact I should be on my way back. I have a flight to catch in a week and the buses around here take..."

MJ grabbed my arm in what seemed a friendly gesture. Not a violent restraint, though his grip was strong. "No, you cannot! We may be poor and unable to honour your gift as you deserve, but the one thing we can do is to have a meal. You will come back to our camp and we will have a feast to the now-inevitable success of our cause!"

I tried to demur, to explain about bus schedules, to say I didn't need any sort of feast or honour, to spout cliches about a good deed being its own reward, but he wouldn't have any of it. He promised it would be done that very evening and that I'd lose practically no time at all. His grip on my arm didn't slacken through the whole exchange I desperately didn't want to escalate into an argument. In the end, I gave in, and went back to the revolutionary camp.

The tale was interrupted here by the arrival of our main courses. One bite of his entree-some sort of duck in a sweet-smelling sauce-and my friend was delighted. "There really is nothing better than a good meal with fine company."

"Very true. Let's have a toast." We raised our gla.s.ses of beer. "To chance meetings!" I said.

He nodded and responded, "To civilization!" And we drank.

The restaurant was filling up. The new patrons looked dressed for the theatre. A large group behind me were calling for wine. We ate silently for a few minutes before I brought us back to his story. "I get the feeling the revolutionary camp wasn't quite like this."

"No it wasn't," my friend replied, staring down at his plate.

MJ sent one of his companions ahead to get preparations started for the feast, and the other got a series of straps together to help him carry the Machine on his back.

We set off in the direction I'd need to go to get back to the bus, which did alleviate a few of my apprehensions. Soon, though, we left the main path for a narrow muddy trail through the trees. I hadn't realized how I'd been hiking on the equivalent of a freeway the previous weeks. Those main paths had room for you to press up against a cliff face when you met a train of donkeys. But this trail seemed like we were the first to travel it. The density of the trees gave loads of shade, so the snow I'd hiked through and seen melt a few days before here made our way even more treacherous. We were descending, and often I found myself falling on my a.s.s for safety's sake. And I wasn't the one with a Machine of Death on my back.

The walk had been quiet, mostly me cursing at the slopes I was sliding over, but when we arrived at the camp, MJ took charge. Before talking with a crowd of eager kids who'd congregated, he told the guy with the Machine to bring it to a large tarp-covered lean-to. Soon I could hear the sputter of a generator inside.

The camp wasn't large. A dozen canvas tents and a few shanties made out of the local trees held out the snowdrifts. The ground was a mess of wet mud with a few planks thrown down at random. You couldn't see the sun through the needly canopy.

And there were revolutionaries. I hadn't expected them to be so young. Almost all of them were skinny teenagers. They seemed to look up to MJ, and were getting in a lot of questions that seemed to be about me. I've been in enough strange places that being the centre of attention wasn't a novelty anymore, so I let my mind wander.

A young girl brought me a bottle of beer. Like always, the bottle was huge. I took it from her with a smile and my best "thank you" in her language. Instead of the giggle that usually produced, her eyes went wide and she bolted to a group of older girls standing near what looked like a kitchen tent. They all looked nervously across the camp at me. It took a few moments of fumbling with my bottle opener to get that drink into me. This wasn't going how it was supposed to.

MJ finished with his mob and came over, smiling apologetically. "I am so sorry to have to tell you that our leader is out on an operation and will not be able to get back in time to meet you this evening. Unless you would consider staying until tomorrow?"

I explained that I couldn't possibly, but thanked him for the consideration. We wrangled politely for a few minutes but eventually I won. Arrangements would be made to guide me to the nearest guesthouse on the main path after the celebration was over.

Once all those niceties were out of the way we could get down to the tour of the camp. MJ told me how long they'd been encamped and how dedicated they were to the cause of freedom from the tyranny of the capital. He talked about corruption in the towns, how farmers couldn't afford to grow anything and instead had to turn to letting foreigners into their homes, while they bought their food from the outside.

"And now they want us to stop using firewood!" he exclaimed outside the tent where he'd shown me their collection of rifles and ammunition. "'It's bad for the environment to cut down so many trees,' they say. They've never lived through one of our winters. Do you know how much it would cost to use their gas stoves?" I didn't, but was soon informed.

The whole tour had just been a way of killing time while the feast was being prepared. He could have pointed out each tent and told me its contents from almost any point in the little camp. As we moved off from the armoury tent I spotted something off behind it a little ways. It looked like an animal pen of some sort, but the fences seemed a bit high for pigs.

MJ noticed me looking and thought for a second before speaking. "Would you like to see?"

"Yeah, what is it, your chickens?"

"Not exactly."

The pen was the most st.u.r.dily built thing I'd seen in the camp. When we got closer I realized that it was in a bit of a gully and the fences were much higher than I'd a.s.sumed-maybe ten feet tall-and covered with chicken wire. We stopped on a small ridge where we had a good view over and inside.

Eight people were in the cage.

"Like I said," MJ said in a conversational tone, "we've had some problems with traitors recently. These are our current suspects."

Once one noticed us looking in, all of the prisoners began staring. MJ talked about the reasons why each of them might have betrayed the revolution, but they mostly looked at me. The oldest might have been fifteen. Two of them were girls. I'd imagine none of them had seen a foreigner before. There were a few muddy blankets inside and everything was sodden. I couldn't see even a pit for a toilet.

"And now that you've brought us the Machine, we will be able to tell which of these are guilty," MJ finished up, clearly pleased with the situation. "The innocent ones will, of course, receive the revolution's deepest sympathies and positions of honour."

When he finished with his oration, which because it was in English they had no way of understanding, most of the prisoners started talking at once. They were pleading with MJ, but he replied dismissively, then patronizingly. At least that's how it sounded, but it's so hard to tell when you don't know the language. He turned back to me. "They all say they are innocent, of course, and don't want to be in this cage, but it won't be much longer. I told them how you'd brought the Machine that would exonerate they who truly are innocent."

They were all staring at me with horrible looks. A few deep scowls, some wide-eyed terror, and one calm gaze you could tell was a mask for calculating how to get over that fence and cut my throat.

MJ wasn't the kind of guy who liked silence from his guest of honour. "It's too bad the plug is damaged, or we could get all this justice out of the way tonight." When I kept on staring into the cage, he went on. "We have a few boys who are good with these kinds of things though. They should be able to get it up and running very soon."

And with that we headed back to see if the feast was ready.

"How did we get on this story again?" My friend hadn't stopped fidgetting with his water gla.s.s for five minutes.

"A time you felt scared, like you might not make it back."

"Right." He stared at his gla.s.s for a few more seconds. Somewhere in the restaurant a woman was laughing at what she wanted everyone to know was the funniest thing she'd ever heard.

"They had this feast for me, I sat at the head of the table, got the choice pieces of goat, the whole deal. And through the whole thing everyone's faces looked like those eight prisoners' did. Like they couldn't believe the monster they'd let in to their home. Just scared of me and what I'd brought. They didn't say anything weird, didn't spit at me or anything, but I've never felt so hated in my life. The girl who'd brought me the beer when I arrived wouldn't look anywhere near our direction. I wondered if she had a brother in the cage. That wasn't the worst of it, though.

"The worst thing was fearing that one of those bright kids would come running from the generator tent saying he'd fixed the plug: that the Machine could pa.s.s sentences that very night! I ate bits off my goat haunch and smiled at MJ's jokes, just waiting for the horribleness to play out.

"Everyone would have to gather by the generator to witness each judgment in turn. They'd lead each prisoner over, get her drop of blood and wait. Each one of their deaths would say 'Firing Squad.' There's no way around it. I could feel it in the air. It wouldn't matter if they were traitors or the most fervently loyal revolutionaries history had ever known. All of those prisoners were going to die. Because of my good deed they'd be shot by a squad of teenagers.

"And then when the prisoners were all dead, MJ would start to think, 'That was a lot of traitors. More than I'd thought even.' And he'd get inspired to test everyone he'd had any suspicions of. And each of their deaths would say 'Firing Squad'. And then they'd start to run out of suspicious people and have to test everyone. The little girl that brought me my beer, all of his little sycophants, even those two I'd met him with, they'd all be revealed as traitors. By the Machine I'd brought.