At his briefing on radicalization, Kevin is noticeably despondent and he interrupts often to interject points of contention with the material presented to him. It’s a continuation of a conversation he’d had with the colonel upon arrival at the facility, the words used to describe attacks by men of varying racial identifiers.
“Radicalization is evident in every instance of gun violence,” Kevin says, “but you all seem to be very limited in your characterization. The same with terrorists groups. Any group of people who encourage or condone violence are one in the same and they radicalize individuals who would otherwise not commit these crimes. There is no real difference between ISIS and the Crips, between the Zetas or the KKK; the only discernable differences are the people who fill out their ranks. But they prey on the same cross section of people, people who don’t have very much and want someone to blame for it, and they give them the means to exact revenge on their imagined enemy. Your code name for this operation is backward. These radicalized individuals are the ones chasing Dummy Men. Sure it can be argued that they have a diminished intellectual capacity that leaves them susceptible to manipulation, but they are the ones scapegoating innocent people, stripping their victims of their humanity to the point that they can kill their dummies with no remorse.”
The room is quiet and frustrated.
“The Dummy Men distinction refers to the fact that there are charismatic leaders who deploy their dummy men to do their bidding.” The colonel explains.
“I heard you the first time but we need to make it clear that your name underestimates the enemy. You can be a savvy pawn of a charismatic leader. And when you take out that leader, it’s always a pawn who moves in to take his place.”
“Fine,” the colonel says, obviously annoyed. “But let’s move on. We have our codename and our targets”
“Is your mind reader focusing solely on ISIS inspired attacks?” Kevin asks.
“The mindreader will be here at the facility soon and we’ll start focusing on anything that registers. We want to stop whatever we can.”
“Does her ability make a distinction?”
The colonel looks Kevin in the eyes. “We’ll find out soon enough son.”
The night is dark, no moon. It could rain but the clouds are holding. It isn’t hot, but mild, Jamal’s nose is sweating as he leaves his mother’s house. It could be the layers he wears, the dark hoodie with the long sleeve shirt underneath, long pants, but the few others moving in the night sweat lightly too. Jamal is in a hurry, he has a small window to execute his plans, and many stops before reaching his destination. He is on edge, every sound in the night rattles his nerves and he wonders if he is being followed. Accessing information online isn’t a crime, but the websites he’d been frequenting could raise red flags, the ones that criticized American imperialism and capitalism, the ones that explained how black people in America will always be a slave class to affluent whites who kept them subdued with welfare and other government handouts, the ones that called for a black exodus to the homeland and for blacks to embrace the Islamic religion because of its roots in Africa. All of those ideas had seeped into the bedrock of Jamal’s ideology that was forged on the west side of Charlotte, NC where he had witnessed the deaths of so many of his friends and family members, or watched them become docile parasites of the welfare state, or end up in jail. He had spent time in jail himself and though he had worked hard to change his fortunes by getting his GED and doing vocational training in jail, he found it impossible to find a job upon his release and all of the positive encouragement he’d heard before his release turned out to be lies. Eventually it all became clear to him, that America didn’t care about him and the system was rigged in such a way that he never had a chance. He, like his family and neighbors, were expected to have kids who would flip burgers or fold sheets in hotels that served rich white people. There was nothing else for them.
Tonight, Jamal would exact his revenge on that system. Tonight would be the culmination of everything he had been reading. He had never killed anyone before, but he spent months building up the mentality necessary to take a life. He had come to understand that real change required blood in a country that was predicated on false perceptions of change to assuage dissatisfaction with the ruling class — empty gestures like soaring rhetoric that paid lip service to the plight of the average black american, calls for impotent conversations in the wake of killings by law enforcement that only saw black men as criminals to be slaughtered; none of it did anything to ensure that waves of black lives wouldn’t be lost so senselessly in the future. Jamal came to understand that the only way to move people, the only way to make politicians truly hear the distress caused by their apathy, was to paint the streets red with the blood of those who passively enjoyed the spoils of a corrupt, bishop, hypocritical system that upheld the status quo of privilege by right of a white skin tone.
Jamal stops at the apartment of a friend who had agreed to sell him a hand gun. The friend sells guns to anyone with the money to buy and doesn’t worry that purchases can be traced back to him. He never asks about his buyers’ intentions either, but he knows Jamal and there is something about his mood that makes him ask questions that he normally wouldn’t.
“You ok man? You in trouble?”
“Let’s just do this, I got somewhere to be.” Jamal says.
“You take care of yourself out there.” The friend says and Jamal barely hears it as he leaves in a hurry.
He approaches downtown Charlotte with his hand gripping the trigger of the gun in his pocket. He knows that there will be people who can’t understand his actions, who will say that he is the problem with the black community for resorting to violence, but he knows that the statement he intends to make is bigger and more important than that. He is the product of the country that made him, that ignored him, underestimated him all of his life, and the lives he would take would not be his victims, but the victims of that country that refused to see him as a man deserving of dignity and opportunity. As he nears his destination, his heart begins to race and his head is filled with confirmations that his actions are justified and necessary; “They have to see, they have to pay.”
His first shot kills a police officer who stands patrolling a busy street corner. The officer was taken completely unaware; his back was turned to Jamal and he had no chance of defending himself. The gunshot causes panic on the busy street and people run in all directions away from the sound. His second shot injures a white woman fleeing with her boyfriend and when he kneels to help her, Jamal uses his third shot to kill him.
It is a surreal experience and all the while that Jamal slowly strolls the avenue shooting when he has a clear shot of a white person, he is screaming in his mind, “They have to see, they have to pay.”
On the other side of the country, the news is breaking live on tv while Kevin is in a meeting with the Colonel. They had only recently started tests of the range of his ability and Kevin was successful in creating things from his imagination in a government facility in the midwest from the facility in the pacific northwest. He only needed to see the physical space and imagine a thing there, and sure enough, just like always, his creation was tangible for about 15 minutes before it disappeared.
The story of Jamal in Charlotte is unfolding on the tv that the Col summoned out of a wall with a remote when they were told about it, and there is an aerial view of the street where Jamal has apparently taken a hostage as a human shield. It is a young white boy who sobs while Jamal presses his gun into his temple.
“Son of a bitch,” the Col says. “I wonder what he’s going on about.”
Kevin watches heartbroken, every time something like this happens it shoots daggers through his heart to think that someone he knew or loved could be killed at the whim of a crazy person. “Should I try to do something?”
The Col is pensive. The last thing he wants is to create more confusion for the police on the scene. He has no way of contacting them to coordinate the maneuvers they’d been developing with Kevin. But he knows that Kevin can shut it down quickly.
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