I Spy With My Eyes

By Eric Cline

A FEW SECONDS BEFORE THE BURST of radiation, my only problem was old magazines in the waiting room.

How long had Heath Ledger been dead? Aussie Hunk Stars in “A Knight’s Tale.”
I should have brought something to read, I thought. I put back the wrinkled movie magazine.

My podiatrist’s waiting room was on what should have been the thirteenth floor of the Silverton Medical Building. But in deference to ancient superstition, they went from twelfth to fourteenth.

Just then, through the plate glass swinging doors, I saw semi-transparent reds and yellows, artificial representations of rad values, streaming out of some office down the hall. A gray-haired woman in a pantsuit walked unknowingly through it.

The burst ended.

The woman then looked, belatedly, scared.

Oops, she was looking at my horrified face, and reacting to me. Wondering what kind of weirdo I was. Great training, Hockner, I thought to myself. You’re the king of spies.

I gave her a cheese-eating grin. Fortunately, she turned left and went down another hall. I looked back to the interior of my podiatrist’s office. Her practice had an x-ray room. I could see it in the background behind the receptionist’s window.

It was shielded. No stray streamers came out. Just like my dentist’s office.

The receptionist glanced at me. My eyes told me she had normal body temperature and heart rate. I walked up to her and said, “I’ll have to cancel my appointment. Urgent text from work. I’ll do the co-pay, of course.” She smiled.

I left the podiatrist’s and walked down the hallway. No rad burst right now. The fluorescent lights behind their panels in the ceiling gave out their own routine energy signature.

Another short burst, more reds this time. I stopped. Then the event stopped. Since I was alone, I muttered, “Tiki, compare recent radiation event to a standard chest x-ray.” In a moment, hovering in front of my eyes, were two lines of yellow text. Apparently, what had just happened was about three times the recommended standard for a chest x-ray.

I sighed. I came to the end of the corridor. The right-hand side was glass paneling which looked out onto the parking lot thirteen floors below. The left-hand side had one set of glass doors at the very end, just before a bay of elevators. The unshielded x-rays had come from this office.

The doors were stenciled with the words:

Silverton Family Care Group
Mark Westill, M.D.
Gennifer Mecklin, M.D.
We Accept Medicaid

I was on duty this afternoon, patrolling along the Plaza, so I just remembered the name, and beat feet. Detecting radiation bursts is not why they scooped my real eyes out and replaced them.

***

The Plaza. Four lanes of traffic, multiple civilian walkways between high-end shops. Wide, spacious sidewalks. Me. A few thousand people in summer clothes ambling around. One Infiltrator.

The Infiltrator gave a slight tick of radiation within a knot of people coming toward me. Then, just before I would have strode past, the knot dissolved into several people going every which way, and one rather attractive woman, in a blonde pageboy haircut, with a real leather handbag and a mid-length gray skirt.

My eyes showed me the outline of an Infiltrator in her left thigh, its heat signature, and slightly above-human rad levels. She wore sunglasses, so I couldn’t see the vacant, doll-like stare in the unfortunate woman’s eyes.

I turned to follow her. I made a cell call to HQ to tell them I had a live one, using the appropriate code language.

(Rumor is, the Agency subsidized cell phones back in the 1980s to make them commercially viable, so no one would think a person talking into a device was suspicious.)

The power walking lady went into a building. A fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a goatee that did nothing to hide his triple chin, came toward me. I tensed as I saw a hot mass in his abdomen. Had the Infiltrators detected me and set up an ambush?

But then a closer scan told me it was just cancer; the heat signature was within levels of an aggressive tumor, drawing blood to itself. The man looked at me curiously as I passed. Sorry buddy, I thought. Hope you’ve been diagnosed. Cancer is a big source of false positives; they told us all from the first day we were recruited that we were going to see people in peril whom we could not help. And to be sure not to help them.

Finding and killing the Imps was the only mission.

She went into an office complex which was a known high-tech hub; my Tikis knew it, at least, and told me, with the yellow text. The Infiltrators were always looking to get their hands on our tech. They targeted scientists and engineers.

She strode to the elevator without looking at the directory. She apparently worked here. Or she had, before one night in her apartment, when a strange noise and a crackle of light had woken her up, and she had gotten up to investigate, and a four-pound being from some other dimension flew out of a rip in the middle of the air, latched onto her body, burrowed into her thigh, and made her its mindless puppet.

“Hey Bob,” I said into my phone. “I’m in your building now and I’m in the elevator. Be seeing you in a few minutes.”

She and I shared the elevator with three people, two of whom got off at the second floor. Lazy, I call that, when both of them could have done with a bit of exercise.

By the time the doors closed on the fifth floor, we were alone.

“Man, this weather,” I said.

There was an elevator-sized pause.

“Yes,” she said.

“Tell ya, if I have to put off one more weekend of lawn mowing because of this rain—” and I punched her in the side of the head, a quick jab. She fainted away from me, but I caught her before she fell.

The elevator stopped just then on the seventh floor. An old man in an expensive suit, with a full head of distinguished-looking white hair, got on. He raised his eyebrows.

“My girlfriend is gonna lose her job if she doesn’t get in today,” I said. I dragged her past him, trying not to look like I was carrying the whole weight. “Her friends and I are gonna sober her up with some coffee before her boss gets in.” I winked at him.

"Uh, guess she’ll owe you," he said as the doors closed.

There was a small break room with three vending machines just beyond the elevators. Four tables with plastic chairs stood empty. It wasn’t lunchtime yet on this floor. I sat her down carefully in one of the seats and then took a load off myself.

I called HQ: “Unmasked communication. Seventh floor breakroom next to elevator one. Send retrieval team.”

I looked through her purse and found her security badge. Siobhan Carney, Transformative Tech, Inc., ninth floor.

The leg kicked.

The Infiltrator had detected that its host was unconscious, and it had apparently figured out why.

I carry tools with me, of course. Grenades disguised as cell phones. A blade in a sock holster. But most of it is to use against Imps trying to make a last stand—and with terrible consequences for their human puppets. I avoid it whenever possible.

Miss Siobhan Carney’s femoral artery wasn’t too far away from the invasion site, and I was very much afraid it would burst if the creature tried to get out.

To say nothing of what the lunch crowd would think about the new paint job.

“Tiki.”

A little yellow dot of an awaiting orders prompt floated in the middle of my vision.

“Right eye to be laser stamp. Armed upon removal.”

Processing ... done, the yellow text said.

The leg twitched again, just as my right eye went blind. All the battery energy had been marshalled for a single task. I put my index finger up to the iris; upon reading my print it flattened and elongated itself. In the reflection from the candy bar machine Plexiglas, I saw it sticking an inch out of my socket. The engineers had made them like that so we wouldn’t get black eyes every time we popped them in or out.

The Infiltrator was going to rip skin any moment now. Miss Carney, almost unconscious, was groaning with the pain. I didn’t dare coldcock her again, because even the first time had risked brain damage. Another hit could make her bleed into her skull. She shook back and forth, and the cheap white plastic of the chair back bent under her dead weight.

Without the slightest lascivious impulse, I flipped up her skirt. I could see the sort-of-squid outline of the Infiltrator. A long white scar showed where it had invaded her some weeks ago; it wasn’t going to be anywhere near so careful in the emergency escape. It would rip her open and she would bleed out.

My vision was flat, with only my left eye. I had to cock my head to get a good look at what I needed to do. I used the right eye, sticking out of the bottom of my fist, like a rubber stamp. Calculating where the Imp’s brain was (where three tiny tentacles emerged from the mass, as my left eye showed me) I smacked the eye down onto her thigh.

A brief laser burst burned an inch circle of skin black. But in the same moment, the Infiltrator stopped squirming. It was either dead or as good as. And so was my right Tiki, which would have to be recharged at the Basement.

But Siobhan Carney would live.

Movement through the doorway at the corner of my eye. I thought of some preposterous lie about screwing in the lunchroom to try to get people to leave—

“Can we have some privacy here!” I yelled, with further plans to come later.

But it was the retrieval team. The three men and two women bundled Miss Carney out of the building, and in an hour she was getting treatment in the Basement. So was I.

Mort Pisstest walked up and stood over the bay where I rested. (He would never give us his last name, so one of the agents had bestowed one based on his apparent function.) I knew it was him; he had a big belly and wore loose clothes to hide it, and I could hear the swishing of his garments coming toward me even before he opened his mouth.

I had to go by that because I was stone blind. The left eye had also been taken out for its post-operation maintenance check.

“Wish I could have you answer my door on Halloween,” Mort said. “Freakin’ damn kids in my neighborhood.”

“How’s the lady?” I asked.

“Good. She’s sedated, of course, but we removed the Imp. She’s gonna have a freak accident where she falls in her apartment and wakes up with a terrible gash on her leg.”

“Nice. Say, I saw something the other day.”

“Imps?”

“No, nothing to do with Imps. An uncontrolled x-ray burst.”

“Imps don’t use x-rays as a weapon.”

“I know. It was a doctor’s office in a medical building. Their x-ray was unsafe. It was coming out into a hallway without proper shielding.”

“Shit, I hope that’s not very common. Though I’ve had enough kids, heh, heh. That can’t be good. Still, it’s nothing to do with us.”

“Just thought we could get it fixed somehow. With an anonymous tip, maybe.”

“We’re an Imp-stomping shop. Period, period. Moving on, I have some questions about how well the laser worked—”

***

Two full days off. And how did I spend this vacation? Back at the Silverton Medical Building. I went through the doors:

Silverton Family Care Group
Mark Westill, M.D.
Gennifer Mecklin, M.D.
We Accept Medicaid

The office was impressively decorated, with cherry-red oak wainscotting and sturdy hand-stained furniture. I had never seen a doctor’s office that wasn’t decorated in Blandish Bland from the Bland period. I must have been conspicuous in how I looked around, because the receptionist grinned at me and said:

“Sumptuous, isn’t it? Dr. Westill put himself through school doing detail work on construction sites. He loves tooling around, making the place look good.”

“Yeah, indeed,” I said.

“What time is your appointment?”

“Oh, I’m a walk-in—”

As I approached the window, a little boy appeared out of nowhere, running past me, almost tripping me up. He had a superhero action figure in his chubby little hand and was trying to make it fly. He also did sound effects: “Pshh! Pshh! Voooom!”

A fat woman in a seat facing me called out—belatedly—“Manuel! Stop it!”

Then she looked down again without glancing at me. And Manuel most certainly did not stop it.

The receptionist looked at my insurance card and compared it to something on her screen. “Okay, we take them,” she said. “Drs. Westill and Mecklin both have openings at one o’clock.”

“Fifteen minutes from now?”

“Yeah, we have a lot of people that cancel at the last minute. Since they’re unemployed, don’t know what’s taking up their schedule. Do you want it?”

“Sounds good. Westill’s the male doctor, right? I guess I’ll stick with that.”

“Okay, the husband,” she said, and typed something.

“The huh?”

“Dr. Westill and Dr. Mecklin are husband and wife.”

“Oh.”

Manuel brushed my butt as he ran behind me.

“Pssh! Pyew! Pyyew! Voom!”

“Manuel!”

The receptionist leaned forward confidentially and whispered, “It’s good to have a patient who isn’t,” and her voice dropped further, “a freeloader on Medicaid.” She winked.

I winked back.

***

When the nurse was weighing me, Manuel and his mother walked past. They were shown into Exam Room Four. I had figured out from the configuration of the office that Four was the source of the unfiltered x-rays.

“The nurse will be in to draw some blood very soon,” said the person who had led them in.

A man in his 40s, swept-back hair tinged with gray, walked past me.

“Doctor, you wanted me to let you know if Miss Beltran came in for lab work today,” the nurse said. She adjusted the weights on the scale. “She’s in Four now.”

“Excellent,” he said, without breaking stride. “Thank you.” He disappeared around the corner.

“You guys do lab work in your own office?” I said. “That’s great.”

“Blood work, at least.”

I took a risk and said: “x-rays too?”

The nurse didn’t flinch in the slightest. “No, we don’t have one in our office. But we use LabMed on the fifth floor and they take a lot of different insurances.”

“Convenient,” I said. I made the snap judgment that she was not involved.

Not involved in what was an entirely different question.

My eyes told me of an acceptable spike in radiation. I looked over, and saw a few tiny yellow-orange spots from the closed door of Room Four. It was shielded, safe, like at my podiatrist’s office.

I cupped my cell phone with my entire hand so the nurse couldn’t see it not light up, not vibrate.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I have to take this call,” I said. My feet were already moving. “I’ll just be out in the hallway for privacy for just a moment.” I ran through the front past the receptionist, out the doors, and rounded the corner.

Dangerous streamers of unshielded radiation reached out of the wall.

The receptionist looked annoyed when I walked past her again.

“Cell phones sure have changed the definition of politeness,” she said.

I looked suitably hangdog. The nurse was even more ticked off.

Dr. Westill walked out of where he had been, glanced at Room Four, and smiled, then knocked.

“Come in,” said the fat woman who had been unable to control her kid.

“Just me,” Dr. Westill said. “Not time for the blood stick yet. I just wanted to thank you for finally coming in. We missed you the last two times.”

I couldn’t see the woman, but I heard her dumb kid still muttering his sound effects for his toy, and the woman saying: “I just don’t like needles. I’m sorry I done cancelled so much.”

“It’s all right.” A woman with a blood draw kit appeared from another corridor. “Ah, here she is.”

Just before the lab technician closed the door, I saw how thick it was. Thick enough to hide a panel of lead in the middle of it. I remembered the baroque waiting room, and how handy Dr. Westill was with construction.

He’d built a lead-lined room in there. But he hadn’t bothered with the far wall, which only bordered an empty hallway.

Soon, I was in exam room Two (I don’t know how much I would have done to avoid Four), and Dr. Westill was listening to my breath sounds through a stethoscope.

As soon as the cold circle was removed from my back, I said, “I’m glad you take my insurance.”

“May’s good at that,” he said. I assumed May was the receptionist.

“Wonder why I bother paying for it though,” I said. “Looks like Uncle Sam is giving health care away free, as long as you can pump out a kid or two and get on Welfare. No offense, just me bellyaching.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, then pulled out the earpieces and looked at the floor. “Your belly isn’t the only one aching, brother. Sixty percent of our patients are on Medicaid. Between you and me, it gets a bit much. They show up with two kids that they can’t support, so they’ve got your taxes feeding and housing them. Then next year they have another kid, then year after that another. All by different fathers.”

“It’s all set up for the sons of bitches who don’t give a damn about taking care of themselves,” I said.

“That’s exactly what it is!” he said. His hand slapped the table that held the cotton swabs and boxes of gloves. My eyes told me his temperature had risen to 100.6 and that his heart was racing above normal. Then he stretched his neck and back, and almost as if going into character, resumed the exam.

***

I needed to go through, in my mind, what I suspected. So I had an imaginary conversation with Mort Pisstest. A real one would set off alarm bells that I could not un-ring, and there would go my ability to conduct my extracurricular investigation.

“I figured out the source of the unshielded x-rays,” I said.

Does it have anything to do with catching and killing Infiltrators? Imaginary Mort Pisstest said.

“Nope. It’s a doctor, actually maybe a couple of doctors, who are exposing their patients to x-rays to sterilize them. Some kind of half-assed eugenics done at the Joe’s Corner Store level.”

The Imps are what we’re funded to stop. No one knows if they’re from another planet, or a parallel Earth. We can’t tell the public about them because we can’t give up the special methods we have for detecting and killing them. Like your 2.0 eyes, or a hundred other things that are above your pay grade to know about.

“I wanna save the country, Mort. But there are other things happening besides the Imps. The country is rotting out from under us in a thousand different ways. We should help out.”

Then grow a ponytail and join a non-profit.

“Well, I’ll just have to do it in my spare time, then.”

Oh yeah? Good thing this is an imaginary conversation then, isn’t it?

“Because if you knew I was doing it, you’d rip out my eyes and hand me a Reduction-In-Force notice and a striped cane, right?”

You got that right, Albert Schweitzer.

***

Secret agencies have no monopoly on information anymore. I just Googled them. Dr. Mecklin had written numerous rants about how people on public assistance should be stripped of their right to vote and “forced to practice birth control.” Dr. Westill had praised “The Bell Curve” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and “The Death of the West” by Pat Buchanan.

They didn’t have any hobbyhorse about one race or ethnic group in particular, but they were definitely of the opinion that if you were poor, it was because you were dumb. And dumb, poor people were outbreeding rich, educated people, and turning the country into “an open sewer,” as Dr. Westill wrote.

Dr. Mecklin’s bio said she had been a radiology technician before she was accepted into medical school. Between her expertise in that, and his talent as an interior construction worker, they had been able to convert Exam Room Four into a sterilization chamber.

***

I sit in the park, munching on a burger and sipping a Pepsi One. A guy with a new food cart started today, and I don’t have to go with just hot dogs.

I can’t talk to my parents or my brother about my job. They think I’m in mortgage auditing with Housing and Urban Development.

The only thing to do is stew.

Here are the ingredients in the stew:

One-half cup of pride at capturing and killing hundreds of Infiltrators.

One-third cup of anxiety about the fact that our country has a lot more problems than just the Infiltrators.

Two tablespoons of amazement at how shitty people can be to each other even in the absence of Infiltrators.

A pinch of memory: I was annoyed at a woman and her noisy kid, and had unkind thoughts about them—until I saw them being experimented on like lab rats.

Two rotten tomatoes: Dr. Westill and Dr. Mecklin.

Four fluid ounces of disgust at the narrow mandate my agency has.

Five ounces of ground-up, thrown-away meat; my original eyes.

Two eggs filled with state-of-the-art electronics.

One full serving of this stew is guaranteed to make you fed up.

Dr. Mecklin and Dr. Westill walk slowly down the path, oblivious to the great unwashed mass of mortals whom they have no use for. He has a gym bag over his shoulder. She is walking next to him, scrolling through the web on a smartphone.

I wad up the grease paper from my burger, toss it and the drink into the trash, and trail them.

We come to an isolated stretch of greenery like you would hardly believe could exist in the big city, with a canopy of trees covering the sky and not another person in sight.

“Your office is on the thirteenth floor,” I say.

They turn back, surprised at my loud voice.

I jog up to them, closing the gap.

In the last moment, I can see their heart rates increase.

Rare wisdom on their part. 

Eric Cline has been published in “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,” “Galaxy’s Edge,” “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,” “Stupefying Stories,” “Every Day Fiction,” “James Gunn’s Ad Astra,” “Writers of the Future,” and more.