Sully Wells had spent maybe an hour there in the stifling dark, first shrieking and pounding the lid, rattling herself up and down in hopes that someone would hear her. Then a long period of sobbing quietly, her whole body shaking. And then, worst of all, the quiet acceptance, when her tears ran out and she became acutely aware of the dimensons of her body, and seriously believed that no one would find her, and wondered whether there really was a Heaven.
She must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing in her memory was the lid opening wide to reveal her grandfather’s face, haggard and frantic and relieved all at once. He had picked her up under her armpits and lifted her bodily out of the trick cabinet and hugged her tightly, the both of them crying, and made her promise never, ever to play up in the attic again. And then, because he knew her better than that, he showed her the trick of it -- the hidden latch that opened one of the sides of the cabinet and let the people inside slip out. She’d absorbed it all with wide eyes still red from crying, and said nothing.
That night, lying atop her covers in bed, with all the lights on and her favorite stuffed hippo hugged close to her, seven-year-old Sully decided that she never, ever wanted to feel that scared, that trapped, again. She had to know the secrets her grandpa knew -- the trick to it all. She had to know how it worked.
She started back in the same attic, amid posters of her grandpa in a tuxedo, pulling rabbits out of hats during his days as The Great Gant, Master of Illusions. She pulled out the dusty books of magic he’d gotten from his father, Indigo the Magnificent, and spent all the afternoons of all her summers reading closely, studying the diagrams, practicing with her own hands and her grandmother’s borrowed jewelry mirror. She didn’t concern herself with patter or showmanship; she didn’t want to be up on stage doing these tricks, which her grandfather assured her was not nearly as glamorous and exciting as the posters made it look. She just wanted -- needed -- to know the mechanics. If only so that, the next time she dreamed she was back in the box, as she did now and then, in the close, velvet, suffocating dark, she’d know where to look for the latch.
The skills and the interest stuck with her, into high school, where picking locks proved great for sneaking out of or into the house at odd hours, and sleight of hand made an ideal method for cadging the occasional pack of cigarettes down at the Quik-Stop. And into college, where she picked up more than one guy by surreptitously lifting his wallet while she had him busily looking down her shirt. It’s how she’d known OMG was good -- better than she was -- when she saw him doing card tricks in Santa Monica. And it’s how she was able to make sure that the new tricks she and the magic consultants had worked up cut through his perpetually foggy brain -- by sitting him down with several large cups of coffee and running through the tricks with him, hour after hour, until he could do all the palms and reverses with a skill and fluidity she secretly envied.
So when the sheer, surreal panic of being hauled off her feet by unseen men, bound, blindfolded, and tossed roughly into someplace noisy and dark had passed, Sully was able to take a deep breath, call upon months of West Hollywood yoga classes to calm her heart rate, and take inventory.
The floor was cold and metal, rumbling and bumping. Car, she thought. No, the engine sound was too growly, and the space she was in too spacious-sounding. Truck. Van. She tried to move, tasting the fibers of silk in the gag stuffed in her mouth, and found her hands bound behind her back with what felt like one of those treacherous plastic zipties, and another set around her ankles.
Voices. Two, from somewhere not far away; one low, the other slightly higher. Sully couldn’t make out what they were saying, or even the language. Too much noise. Then someone nearer, much nearer, cleared his throat, and Sully knew she wasn’t alone. There was a third man in the back of the... van, she guessed... with her.
Okay. First things first: Get her hands free. When she wriggled her hands, she felt them press against cold metal. Which meant she was lying with her back to a wall, which in turn meant that odds were her captor couldn’t see her.
She gave her wrists a shake, and her silver cigarette lighter slid neatly into her palm. She waited for the van to hit a bump, and flicked the lighter on, hoping the sound had been covered. Hoping it wasn’t so dark in the back of the van that the flame would cast a light. She began to twitch her ankles back and forth, in a regular rhythm, hoping it would draw the eyes of anyone watching her away from what her hands where doing.
Sully pulled her wrists as far apart as they would go, creating a precariously small gap where the plastic band around her wrists did not touch bare skin, at the cost of cruelly cutting off circulation in her hands. She’d have to work quickly. Carefully, she turned the flame of the lighter against the plastic, and hoped it’d melt before she’d burned her hands.
It did, but only just, and Sully pulled the melted, stretchy plastic apart wincing at the scorched skin on her wrists. She lay there, the lighter flicked shut, and waiting for the stinging to subside. She heard whoever was with her in the back of the van cough and shift -- soft sounds, like silk -- and felt the van lurch to a halt at a stoplight, idle for a moment, and then turn a corner.
Sully began to make gagging sounds in the back of her throat. She let herself convulse, let the sounds welling up from inside her get louder and more distressed. She heard the man move to her, heard his clothing rustle as he crouched down, felt hands against her face clumsily but not cruelly working to untie the gag.
Sully waited until she could feel the faint exhalation of breath on her face. That told her where his head was. She shot one hand out to grab the back of his neck, and using that as a gauge, made a lucky guess as to the location of his testicles with the other hand. Then she brought her head up hard against his. It hurt like hell, for the both of them, but Sully was the only one ready, and before he could so much as whimper, she clonged his head against the metal wall of the van.
She waited. The van drove on. She heard continued conversation from the front seat, and soft, regular breathing somewhere close by. Lucky on two counts. Sully reached up at last and stripped the blindfold off her eyes.
It was, indeed, the back of a van. Outside it was just getting light; Sully couldn’t recognize the neighborhood, but then, she couldn’t recognize anything shorter than a skyscraper in this town. (It was why God had invented cabs.) There was a young Asian man lying next to her, his head shaved and stubbly, dressed in black robes like some kung fu movie reject. There was a goose egg rising on one of his temples, but nothing bleeding, and he seemed to be breathing all right.
Sully used the lighter to get the ziptie off her feet -- wincing as the lighter scorched the leather on her brand-new vintage boots, picturing the look of withering disdain on the face of the shopowner who’d sold them to her that such treatment would surely invite -- and took a moment to plan her next step.
Slowly, staying low to the floor of the van, she crawled around the man in the black pajamas toward the rear doors. She kept an ear cocked for the conversation in the front of the van, but it didn’t change -- now they seemed to be having some sort of good-natured argument.
The van stopped at another light. Sully reached up and turned the latch. The rear doors swung wide, predawn light spilling into the shadowy confines of the van, and Sully tumbled out.
The change in light and the sound of the doors made the two men in the front of the van take notice. There was a burst of Mandarin syllables, flung with the sort of throwing-star vehemence that marked them as curses, and both the front doors of the van opened to disgorge two fit, muscular young men with shaven heads and loose black tunics and pants.
“Dammit!” spat Hu Lao, the stout, broad-shouldered one, slamming a palm against one of the open rear doors of the van. “I thought you were keeping an eye on her, Pang!
Pang Qi exhaled nervously, clapping both hands to his elongated head. “I was watching the road, Hu! You kinda have to do that when you’re driving! Crap, crap, crap! Gary, where’d she go?”
“Huh?” said Gary Cheng, wincing as he rubbed his aching head. “Ow. Damn, do I look like I know where she went? Unconscious here.”
Hu and Pang helped a groaning Gary out of the back of the van, Pang carefully sizing up the lump on Gary’s head. The truck idling behind the three men’s van honked angrily as the light turned green.
“Just go around!” Hu fumed to the driver, who responded with a hand gesture that would not, in any culture, have a friendly interpretation as he sped around the van and through the intersection. “Some goddamn kung fu masters we are. Can’t even bag a skinny little white girl.”
“Skinny little white girl who hits like a freakin’ Marine,” sulked Gary, his pudgy cheeks puffing sullenly. “Even my nana doesn’t hit that hard.”
Pang took another deep breath and surveyed the empty street behind the van. There was nothing -- no alleys where she could have hidden, no other cars with which she could have hitched a ride. She couldn’t have vanished into thin air. So that meant--
There was a sudden lurch of grinding gears, the roar of the van’s motor, and it sped off through the intersection, rear doors flapping open, as the three black-robed men whirled in disbelief.
Hu looked skyward and let loose a stream of paint-peeling syllables. Gary winced anew, this time thinking about the deposit they’d put down to rent the van. Pang just blinked, and nodded.
“She’s good,” he said grudgingly.
In the driver’s seat of the van, Sully risked reaching over to slam the passenger’s side door shut. Her forearms and knees were grimy and gritty from crawling beneath the vehicle, making her way quietly to the driver’s side door while her captors argued at the back, but she was alive, and in one piece, and apparently the new owner of a late-model black Ford van.
She’d run two red lights -- fine, let the cops pick her up, please -- before she thought to check her jacket pocket. Her phone was still there, thank God, reassuring and cool and pebble smooth. She flipped it open one-handed, with experience born of many a day on the freeway, and thumbed the one-touch button for her assistant Ida. She didn’t even wait for a hello, just the click of a line picking up.
“Ida!” she barked. “Sully. I just got kidnapped by three jackasses in ninja suits and a piece of crap van. I’m -- hell, I don’t know, someplace with buildings, and I think I see the Sears Tower off to the left. Just call the cops and get them to wherever I am. And pick up some bagels, and coffee, because I’m gonna be freakin’ starving whenever I get back from wherever this is.”
There was a soft, musical chuckle on the other end of the line -- very un-Ida-like -- and then the gentle tones of a woman’s voice, proper and English -- also not Ida-like, Ida being a native of Cerritos whose way with a DayPlanner was matched only by her colorful approach to grammar.
“Sit tight, dear,” said the weird Mary Poppins voice. “We’ll be by to collect you directly.”
“Hello?” Sully asked, suddenly bewildered. She stared at the phone’s caller ID, knowing she’d dialed Ida; the display read NUMBER UNKNOWN. “Who is this?” But the line had already gone dead.
Three sets of thumps landed on the roof, heavy and person-sized, and suddenly Sully had more immediate problems. She stomped on the gas and took the next corner hard, feeling herself lurch against the seatbelt she’d reflexively buckled on. Things slid around on the roof, and she thought she heard cursing, but her rear-view mirrors revealed no black pajama-clad people tumbling along the pavement in her wake. Couldn’t have everything, Sully supposed.
The passenger door unlatched. Before she could stop him, one of them -- the tall skinny one with the vaguely egg-shaped head and the serious eyes -- had swung himself down inside the van, slamming the door shut behind him. Sully heard footfalls in the rear of the van and the slam of the back doors shutting. She reached over for the parking brake, and the ninja guy’s hand reached out and grabbed hers. She tried to lift it, twist it like she’d learned in the self-defense classes, but his arm seemed to glide out of her grip like water, and reform just as solidly with his hand around her wrist.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the ninja guy said. “I suppose we should have led with that.” Sully jerked her arm, but he held it fast. “Easy! I said we’re not going to hurt you?”
“Yeah, the kidnapping totally convinced me of your good intentions,” Sully growled. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt; if she stomped on the brake...
There was a quiet click next to her, and when she looked again, he’d buckled himself in. Not bad, she had to admit.
“I’m Pang Qi,” the ninja guy said gently, evenly. “That’s Hu Lao in the back, and Gary, who I believe you’ve met.”
“Ow,” chimed in Gary through the partition.
“Yeah, that’s nice,” Sully said. “I don’t care. You put a gag on me and threw me in the back of a van, and I’m not gonna stop until you’ve got about five cops each shoving their nightsticks so far up your--”
“We were sent to protect you,” Pang said firmly. “Your life is in danger, and it’s very important that we keep you safe.”
“Oh, and I so belive that, on account of being bound and gagged and thrown in the back of your crappy-ass van,” Sully said, rolling her eyes. Dammit, there had to be a police station somewhere around here. “Just keep talking. I’m taking mental notes for when my lawyer gets here.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Pang replied, with an edge of sarcasm in his voice. “It’s clear that we should have sat you down over a cup of tea and explained it all to you. You know, given your evidently trusting nature.”
Sully had to think about that. She wasn’t naturally inclined to believe anything anyone told her, ever -- having had far too much experience with the simple, depressing fakery behind the most elaborate of promises -- and especially disinclined in the case of weird Chinese guys who walked around dressed like Hugh Hefner’s palace guard.
“Sullivan Wells,” Pang continued, “we are the Three Brothers of the Dragon, the seventeenth generation in a line of sworn protectors dating back to ancient China. And you are the Gaunt Heir, the lineal descendent of the man who saved our master’s master’s life many decades ago. And we have been sent to you now, in your hour of unknown need, to save your life.”
“Go on,” Sully sighed. “Offer me the red pill now.” She had to admit, there was something about Pang’s no-bullshit manner that she kind of liked. He wasn’t trying to seem less crazy -- especially with all that Gaunt Heir business, whatever that meant. He wasn’t trying to suck up to her, and he knew her full name -- something she didn’t exactly advertise. “Save my life from what, exactly?”
She saw the wide, low-slung black car two seconds too late, and only a split second before it barrelled out of the intersection from their left and smashed into the van.
Metal shrieked and rent. Glass shattered. The world spun sickeningly, over and over, and came to a stop upside down. Sully slumped dazed against the seatbelt, hair hanging over her face, and waited for her brain to stop rattling. She heard footsteps outside, spots swimming before her vision; shoes crunching across broken glass. Something tore her door off its hinges, and powerful hands reached in, undid the seatbelt, and hauled her out.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision, feeling a powerful hand clamped around the collar of her jacket. And then she was lifted abruptly up, the jacket pinching under her arms, her feet danging off the ground.
“Hey!” she, shouted, then broke into a coughing fit. Her eyes finally cleared, and she found herself looking down an outstretched arm at a very tall, very slender man with close-cropped silver hair, a hawkish nose, a thin old-fashioned mustache, and one silver-gray eye staring clinically at her. A black eye patch covered the other eye, and a black coat draped his lanky frame down to his ankles. Underneath, Sully saw, he wore a gray tweed suit, with something small and glinting tucked in the lapel.
There were two more men, black hats and coats like his, climbing out of some gigantic ‘50s beast of a black car behind him. It was the same car that had smashed into them, yet some part of Sully’s brain registered that there was no damage to it, not the hood, not the front grille, not even a busted headlight.
“Hmm,” Eyepatch said, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s definitely you. Pleasure to meet you, Miss Wells.”
“Who--?” Sully managed to blurt, her head still swimming.
“Shhh,” Eyepatch said, raising one long slim finger to his lips. “Don’t trouble yourself. It’ll all be over in a moment.”
With his free hand, Eyepatch reached into his coat and drew out a long, thick silver needle.
There was a sudden whooshing sound, and something round and silver zipped through the air and smashed into Eyepatch’s head. He grunted and dropped Sully, who landed hard on her butt and scrambled back, feeling one of her stockings rip on the pavement. The hubcap that had struck Eyepatch in the face fell to the pavement and began to wobble in a gentle, receding orbit.
Sully looked over and saw Pang, Hu, and Gary next to the demolished van, bloodied but sturdy-looking, poised in the sort of fighting crouches she’d only seen in bad kung fu movies.
“We’re here, Miss Wells,” Pang said, his eyes never leaving Eyepatch or the two other men in dark coats, “to save your life from them.”
“Oh,” Sully said. At this point, that was okay by her.
One corner of Eyepatch’s mouth quirked. Then he smirked. Let out a snort, that became a jag of derisive, hyena-like laughter that quickly spread to his two comrades as well. He fished a crisply folded handkerchief out of one of his suit pockets and dabbed dapperly at the tears forming at either corner of his eyes, and took several deep breaths to calm his laughter into chuckling.
“Oh, son,” he wheezed sarcastically to Pang, “you’ve gotten a bit big for your britches there. The Three Brothers of the Dragon are legendary. Fearsome. You boys are just playing dress-up, there.”
Pang shifted the position of one foot, the sole of his light sandal scraping across asphalt. He tilted one outstreched hand, and twisted it into a fist.
Eyepatch shook his head sadly, his smile going cold. He glanced down at Sully, still crab-walking her way across the pavement. “We’ll be with you in, oh, ninety seconds, Miss Wells. Tops. Don’t you go anywhere.”
Then he flicked the tip of the needle in his hand at the Brothers, and it bubbled with blue energy, and with a sizzling scorch, the chunk of asphalt on which the three had been standing bubbled, burst, and vaporized into a neat crater. Sully yelped with surprise, and immediately hated herself for doing so. But the Brothers had scattered, leaping, and the end result was just one more pothole.
In midair, Pang flung out a hand, and three small blades seemed to materialize in Eyepatch’s forearm. He didn’t drop the needle, though -- just looked at the knives embedded in his flesh, and the dark red stains soaking into the sleeve of his overcoat, and tsked softly.
“Now son,” he sighed to Pang. “There’s no call to go ruining my coat like that.”
Hu and Gary were locked in combat with the other two men, the four of them a dizzying blur of flying punches and spinning kicks and fluttering black silk. Pang and Eyepatch, meanwhile, circled each other slowly, reminding Sully of gunfighters in a Sergio Leone movie.
Eyepatch moved to twitch his wrist and work the needle again, but in a blur, Pang had stepped inside its range and driven the heel of his palm up against Eyepatch’s chin, snapping the tall man’s head back. Pang followed up with a blow to Eyepatch’s stomach, then dropped low under a swing from his opponent to sweep Eyepatch’s legs out from under him. Eyepatch dropped to his back, rolling with the blow, and came up on his feet. A thin line of blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth, and he paused to dab at it ruefully with the handkerchief.
“Two minutes,” Eyepatch revised. “Two and a half, perhaps. And I’m going to enjoy every second.” He made a show of slipping the needle back into his sleeve. “Let’s see what else you’ve got, son.”
Pang’s foot shot out, stomping on the edge of the fallen hubcap he’d first thrown at eyepatch. It popped up into the air, and he spun, kicking it whistling toward Eyepatch’s neck. Eyepatch neatly snatched it one-handed from the air.
“I’ve got no depth perception,” he scolded. “Doesn’t mean I’m blind.” And almost faster than Sully could track, he hurled it back.
The hubcab struck Pang just below the left shoulder. Sully heard bone crack, and Pang winced, glancing for a moment at his arm. In that split-second moment of distraction, Eyepatch charged, and Pang barely had time to throw up a block before Eyepatch slammed a fist down into the apex of his neck and shoulder. Pang cried out and dropped to his knees, but blocked the knee Eyepatch launched at his face, and drove a fist up under Eyepatch’s rib cage, driving the tall man back.
With teeth gritted, Pang reached over and snapped his dangling left arm back into place, then bound it hastily with the sash from his belt. As Eyepatch regained his wind, Pang stood up, wincing, testing his injured arm, and took up a defensive stance.
One of the men in black coats sailed through the air behind them, slamming headfirst into a curbside mailbox with a thunderous clang. He staggered to his feet, shook himself like a dog, and charged back toward a waiting Gary, who was bleeding from his nose and a cut on his cheek.
Eyepatch leapt, one finely shod foot flashing out in a kick aimed at Pang’s neck. Pang sidestepped, grabbed Eyepatch’s ankle, and swung him toward the asphalt. Eyepatch rolled, catching Pang on the chin with his free foot, and got to his feet, plucking the blades one by one from his forearm. He stuck them between each of the fingers in his right hand and made a fist, then smiled thinly at Pang.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting these back,” he said. He swung, wide, roundhouse blows, the blades clenched in his fist whistling centimeters away from Pang’s desperate dodges. At last, Pang managed to grab Eyepatch’s wrist and twist it with a horrible snapping sound; the hand went limp, and the blades fell jingling to the ground, but Eyepatch didn’t so much as whimper. He just smashed Pang in the chest with the flat of his uninjured palm, then calmly set to twisting his wrist back into place.
“Ow,” Eyepatch said, flatly, disinterestedly. “My, you’ve done me a piece of harm.”
Sully took this opportunity to launch herself at his midriff.
She envisioned him going down like a sack of bricks, like in the movies. She certainly threw herself with enough force to catch anyone off balance. Unfortunately, he stumbled a few steps, but stayed very much on his feet. Sully found herself hugging him awkwardly around the waist, looking up along his shirtfront to see him smirking down at her in a way that made her feel like even more of an idiot.
“Wait your turn, Miss,” he said. With one hand, he peeled Sully off him like a piece of lint, and flung her through the air. She landed hard on the hood of Eyepatch’s black land-boat of a car, feeling the shock through her entire body, and took a few seconds trying to remember how to breathe.
Pang, clutching his chest and wheezing, steadied himself against the upside-down wreck of the Brothers’ van as Eyepatch calmly walked over to him.
“Son,” Eyepatch said, dusting a stray pebble off Pang’s shoulder, “you put up a good fight and all. I just can’t be prepared for the consequences if you aren’t smart enough to stay down.”
Pang hit him in the face, then again, and followed up with a kick to Eyepatch’s midriff.
The big man sighed, and casually broke Pang’s right arm with a single hard jerk.
Pang cried out through gritted teeth and staggered backward. Eyepatch let go of Pang’s arm and grabbed him by the throat, lifting the smaller man off the ground. Pang’s feet kicked helplessly off the ground as Eyepatch’s fist smashed again and again into his unguarded midsection. Pang spit blood, gasping for air as Eyepatch’s hand closed off his windpipe.
“Last chance, son,” Eyepatch sighed. “You’re getting blood on my suit there. Say you’ll stay down this time.”
Pang hissed the words out one fierce, defiant gasp at a time. “I won’t. Let you. Hurt her.”
“You say that like you’ve got a choice in the matter,” Eyepatch replied, and began to squeeze.
Behind him, a powerful motor roared to life. Eyepatch turned to see Sully behind the wheel of his own big black car, giving him the finger with one hand as she shifted into drive with the other.
Eyepatch dropped his free hand to his waist pocket, and found his car keys missing. His lone eye grew wide. Then the huge black battleship of a car lurched forward, devouring twenty feet of pavement in a split second, and smashed him like a paper doll against the side of the Brothers’ wrecked van.
Eyepatch choked out unintelligible words, bent backward at the waist over the hood of his own car. He let Pang drop to the hood and roll wheezing off the side of the car. Eyepatch stretched a hand back toward the windshield toward Sully, clawing at her. Hu, Gary, and their opponents had all stopped dead at the sound of the impact, the four of them gaping through fresh bruises and blood dripping into their eyes.
Sully narrowed her eyes, threw the car into reverse, and backed off a few feet. Eyepatch turned, gasping, his spine contorted. Somehow, he was still on his feet. He shook one dangling arm awkwardly, the needle up his sleeve slowly sliding down into his hand. That made up Sully’s mind right quick.
She gunned the engine, seeing the RPM needle on the dash flutter up toward the red, threw the car into drive, and plowed into Eyepatch again, crushing him against the van. This time, what was left of him had the good sense not to move.
She hit reverse again and peeled back, rolling the wheel, the car cutting a wide, dangerous arc through the street that sent Hu, Gary, and the other two men in black scattering. The latter two ran to what was left of Eyepatch, kneeling by the twisting, twitching form, and Sully locked eyes with one of them through the windshield as he looked up at her. His eyes were gray -- the same gray, the exact same gray -- but the hatred behind them was jet black.
The doors around her opened, then slammed shut. Hu had taken shotgun next to her, and Gary cradled Pang in his lap in the back.
“Go, go, go, dammit!” Hu shouted, and Sully managed to break eye contact with the man in black, throw the car into drive again, and peel out through the intersection. She saw the two men in black coats begin to give chase in the rear view mirror, shrinking away, and stop at last to stare after the car as it rounded a corner.
Sully gripped the wheel blindly, not caring where she drove. She wanted a cigarette more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. All she could hear was Pang in the back seat, his breaths turning high and wet and keening. Hu was rummaging around in the glove box.
“Got it,” Hu said, and there was a flurry of sparks from the glove box, and then he was holding a squat black box, trailing wires. “Scratch one homing device.” Sully looked from him to Gary and Pang in the back; they all looked beat to hell, bruises on their face red and purple. One of Gary’s eyes had gone red, bleeding under the surface.
“How’s he doing?” Sully asked around the sudden lump that rose unbidden in her throat, jerking her head toward Pang. He was staring up at the roof of the car, blindly, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Gary just shook his head.
“Hospital,” Sully said to Hu. “You’re from here, dammit. Where’s the closest hospital?”
“No hospital,” Hu said grimly. “We’ve gotta go see the Doc. Next right, then take the second left.”
Sully floored it, and the car surged forward hungrily, greedily, through the empty streets washed in early morning light.
They were heading south, out of the city proper, she guessed. Condos under development flashed past, neat townhouses and crumbling tenements all on the same blocks, and up the hill to her left she thought she glimpsed some kind of big museum building. She noticed a change in the signage -- pictograms accompanying English on the local restaurants and grocery stores and dry cleaners. Chinatown.
“Up here, up here,” Hu said, pointing through the windshield to a wide alley behind a blocky, nondescript industrial building. Chain-link gates swung wide, invitingly. Sully all but took the turn on two wheels, and screeched to a halt across two parking spaces in the small lot at the back of the building, next to the closed-down loading dock and the stairs leading up to the second level.
Sully didn’t even kill the engine, just bolted out her door and threw open the rear driver’s side door. She found Gary sitting there quietly, tears welling in his swollen, bruised eyes, and Pang motionlessly staring out the open door, through her, at eternity.
Her knees wobbled, and she put a hand out against the car to steady herself. Dammit. She didn’t know these people. She didn’t cry, as a rule, ever. Not since she was seven. Not since the trick cabinet in her grandfather’s attic. Now she looked into the face of a stranger who’d died trying to help her, and the monstrous, immense unfairness of it all hit her like a blow to the stomach.
The morning air was still and cold, the shadows wintry blue, the sunlight a pale, sloping orange against the walls. The car idled, spinning clouds of exhaust like candyfloss from its tailpipe. And no one said anything.
The roar of a motor, down the block, grew louder. Coming their way. Sully’s stomach clenched up again, her hands closing into fists. A blur of yellow screeched into the alley, the chain-link gates chiming and jingling as it batted them out of the way, and swerved to a halt, tires squealing, in the middle of the lot right in front of them. It was a taxicab, yellow and black, dented and scoured by years of potholes and harsh winters A wiry young man with tousled black hair, his skin a burnished chocolate brown, all but launched himself from the drivers seat and stared at Sully, Hu, and Gary with wide, desperate eyes.
In the back seat of the cab, a shadow stirred.
“You’ve got to help me,” the driver pleaded in round, rolling curlique syllables. “He’s dying -- the Black Lotus, I think. Please, please tell me -- is this where I find Dr. Xiang?”
Monday, November 20, 2006
To the Death!
“I’m afraid there’s been some terrible misunderstanding,” Rafe Windham said, “and what exactly did you mean by ‘to the death’?” Then the painted warrior’s wide, flat obsidian blade swung down and neatly cleaved his skull in two.
Well, no. More accurately, it cleaved a small bookshelf about halfway in two, Rafe having had the presence of mind to throw himself sideways toward the entertainment center as the warrior leapt over his coffee table to swing. But the head-cleaving intent was certainly there, and for a brief moment on the carpet, Rafe found himself curiously nostalgic for the days when all of his problems were entirely explicable ones.
“I think we can safely rule out this being a joke,” Rafe said, scrambling to his feet as the warrior yanked his knife out of the ruined bookshelf -- Rafe suddenly felt a great deal better about having rented the place furnished -- and advanced once again upon him, twin blades glinting in the morning sunlight through the glass doors to the balcony. “Do I owe someone money?” he tried. “Well, obviously, yes, but someone creative?
The warrior smiled, showing teeth. “This is about your destiny,” he said in his perfectly honed English accent. “Start fighting back. I’ve come too far for this to be over quickly.”
He lunged again, one blade whipping through the air to bury itself deep in the side of the television. Rafe ducked, only to have the warrior’s leathery foot catch him in the ribs. He stumbled back into the sole remaining bookcase, the shelves slamming painfully into his back, and felt the beginnings of a good head of instinctive rage build up. He reached back to the shelf, grabbed the first thing his hand reached, and threw it at the warrior.
The paperback copy of The Thorn Birds bounced harmlessly off the warrior’s unflinching face and flopped to the floor. The warrior looked down at it on the carpet, a bit sadly. “I hope that’s not yours,” he sighed.
At which point Rafe hit him full in the face with Watley’s Field Guide to the Birds of England, unabridged revised second edition. It was a coffee-table book in the sense that it could double as furniture, and it felled the warrior like a bolt from the blue.
“Much better,” Rafe heard the intruder say from beneath the book, in somewhat flattened syllables, just before Rafe brought the entire bookshelf down on him.
There was a slight settling of paper, and a slowly rising cloud of dust -- Rafe not being the most attentive of housekeepers -- and Rafe sagged against the sofa, legs shaking, and waited for the adrenalin surge to die down.
The bookshelf stirred.
“No,” Rafe said, looking around for something heavy he could put on top of it. “Oh, no, come on--!” And then the bookshelf all but leapt from the ground, propelled by a shove of the warrior’s sturdy legs, and the intruder snaked back of to his feet with a breakdancer’s grace, spun the knives impressively in his hands, and smiled.
“This is more like it!” the warrior exulted, and raised his knives high.
Rafe Windham, in his relatively brief life, had enjoyed considerable experience with a variety of men bearing sharp objects (blunt ones, too) and wishing him harm. It began to dawn upon him that he was, perhaps, now facing an expert in the art. Then the knives fell, and the sofa pillow Rafe had instinctively grabbed to shield himself fell into three pieces and a cloud of polystyrene fluff.
Rafe dropped the remains of the pillow, grabbed each of the warrior’s wrists with this own to force them away and apart, and drove a knee as hard as he could into the intruder’s solar plexus. He’d been aiming for the crotch, but this was hardly the time for precision. As the warrior doubled over in pain, Rafe grabbed him by the shoulders and drive his head entirely into the wall.
The warrior sagged for a moment, and Rafe reached down to grab one of the black stone knives -- only to find the thick, solid butt of it driven into his stomach. He lurched backward just in time to avoid a swipe from the blade’s business end, and felt the anger in him tighten and redouble.
The warrior pulled his head from the wall, his face now ghostly white with plaster dust, and spat out a piece of sheetrock.
“I’d have thought the walls a bit sturdier, in a place like this,” he said.
“Americans,” Rafe managed to gasp, struggling to catch his breath. “You know how it is.” Then he ran for the kitchen.
It was just off the living room, with a wide hole cut in one wall to see through from either side. Rafe wasted no time going around this partition; he just leapt, as he had at the parking garage, and slid himself through feet-first, landing hard on the linoleum. He managed to cross his arms in front of his face just in time to take the blow as momentum smacked him forward into the cabinets. He stood up, drew the biggest carving knife he could find, and turned just in time to completely shatter the blade against that of one of the warrior’s stone knives.
“Mm,” the warrior noted. “I see what you mean about the craftsmanship.” He swung with the opposite blade, Rafe ducked, and the stone knife sank itself into one of Rafe’s kitchen cabinets -- taking some of the crockery within with it, by the sound of it. Had Rafe ever used the kitchen for anything more than reheating Chinese food, this might have been a more grievous loss.
The warrior let go of the trapped knife, but before Rafe could grab it, the intruder backhanded him viciously across the face. Rafe tasted blood, and then there was a knee in his ribs, and another fist slamming into the side of his neck.
With a grunt of primal fury, Rafe wrapped both arms around the microwave oven, yanked it from the wall, and smashed it full into the intruder’s face.
When the intruder staggered back, Rafe hurled the microwave at his chest, and the painted warrior fell hard against the lower cabinets, bare feet squeaking on the linoleum, struggling under the weight of the appliance.
Rafe reached down, running on pure furious instinct, and opened the dishwasher -- and when the warrior blindly brought his remaining knife up to slash wildly at Rafe, he shut the door again. Hard. Several times.
At last the warrior, howling, dropped the knife. Rafe heard it clatter against the silverware holder. As the warrior scrambled backward on his elbows, shoving the microwave off him, Rafe opened the dishwasher one final time to snatch up the knife the warrior had relinquished. It felt good and heavy and powerful in his hand, and he turned to grasp the handle of the other one, still jutting from the cabinets. With a tug, it came free. Rafe stood for a moment, testing the weight of the blades in his hands. The warrior was up on his feet now, blood streaming from a broken nose, weaving a bit.
Rafe took a step toward him. And another.
The warrior reached up to strike, and the krav maga class Rafe had taken way back in college -- to impress that one young lady with what had been, in retrospect, a disturbingly fervent interest in the Israeli military -- paid off, as Rafe slapped the blow away effortlessly. The warrior dropped, spinning, to whirl a kick at Rafe’s ribs. It connected, but the pain just fed into the anger growing in Rafe. He didn’t mind people trying to hurt him. It was all too commonplace, generally understandable, and frequently justified. But he absolutely hated it when they succeeded.
“I’ve had a very bad morning,” Rafe growled, smashing the handle of one blade hard into the warrior’s face. The intruder staggered, barely staying on his feet, lurching back toward the living room. “I’ve been cheated. I’ve been chased. I’ve been beaten up. I nearly fell off a train.”
The warrior threw a punch, pathetically, and Rafe hit him again. He fell backwards over one arm of the sofa and rolled onto the glass coffee table, knocking the wooden case from which he’d produced the knives to the floor. The table bore the impact with a thrum of vibrating glass.
“I just wanted to sleep,” Rafe said, low, furious. “I’ve filled my quotient of people trying to kill me for the day. And you’ve done a lot of things to me that hurt quite a bit.” He brought one foot up and smashed it hard against the intruder’s chest, and he heard the table crack with the force of the blow.
Rafe flipped one of the knives in his hand -- it came so easily -- and prepared to bring it down into the intruder’s heart.
And stopped.
He saw the man’s face, the red of his blood against the white of the plaster dust, and the wide, calm accepting eyes. He saw resignation, and disappointment. He’d seen it many times before, in the faces of girlfriends, and professors, and especially his parents. Too many times, honestly.
The cloud of anger that bubbled up from his brainstem, from the deep prehistoric part of him, rolled back and disippated. The knives felt suddenly heavy and wrong and alien in his hands, and once again he realized his legs were shaking. He let the knives drop to the carpet, on either side, and held out a hand.
“Are we done?” Rafe sighed.
The warrior smiled through bloodied teeth. “Indeed we are,” he said, “Your Lordship.” He took Rafe’s hand.
“None of that,” Rafe said, grimacing, as he hauled the man up off the broken table. Everything hurt, even more than it had when he’d walked through the door, as if such a thing were possible. And yet somehow, Rafe felt better than he had in ages. “My father’s the lord, officially, and at the rate I’m going, he’ll sell the deed to Windham Hall to some American software tycoon before he ever lets me have it.”
“I wasn’t talking about Windham Hall,” the warrior said, gingerly touching one thumb to his bloodied lip.
Rafe let himself sink against the sofa. “Look, what’s this about? Did my father send you?”
“The calendar sent me,” the warrior said, collecting the box from the carpet and setting it on the table. He set the knives back inside it, one at a time, but kept the box lid open. “The Long Calendar of the Children of Silence. Carved from a block of solid stone by hands too distant to remember. It knew the date of my birth, and it knew what I would be asked to do. It said that I would travel to this far place, on this day, in the shadow of a great unraveling. I would find the heir of Harker Windham, and test him in ritual combat. And if he were worthy -- if he could be civilized and savage, a foot in both worlds -- I would have the honor of passing on to him his birthright.”
The warrior handed Rafe the open box. Rafe took it and laughed, closing the lid -- and then stopped, because laughing hurt too much. “What sort of truly excellent drugs are you on?” Rafe said. “And where can I get some?”
The warrior just smiled and shook his head. “You’ll need the blades, the calendar says. Something about how they’ve been blessed -- that, or the atomic structure of the stone has been altered. The translations are inconsistent.”
“This calendar,” Rafe said, lifting the lid again to peer at the stone knives. “What else does it say?”
“It says today I die,” the warrior said, looking out Rafe’s window to the skyline of the city off to the south, gleaming in the first full rays of morning sun. “You’ve a lovely view here. Sorry about the mess.”
“I wasn’t expecting to get the deposit back anyway,” Rafe said. “It really said you were going to die?”
The warrior just nodded, his bone necklace jangling. “But it’s been wrong before. Once or twice. Errors of translation, like I said.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Rafe said, his limbs feeling very heavy. He stifled a yawn. “Look, now that you’ve destroyed my apartment and beaten me bloody, what’s your name?”
The warrior opened his mouth, and Rafe’s door flew inward off its hinges, banged off one wall of the entryway, and skidded across the carpet to bump against the far wall.
The painted warrior whirled, and before Rafe even knew what his body was doing, he was up off the couch with both of the stone blades ready in his hands. A tall man in a black coat and hat strode into the room, two similarly dressed men behind him. The tall man’s face seemed curiously red and blistered, as if sunburnt, and his gray eyes swept over the room, locked on Rafe, and bored through him.
“So,” the warrior said. “The calendar was right.”
He leapt through the air toward the tall man, and suddenly seemed to stop short in midair. The tall man had him by the throat, and before Rafe could move, the tall man had shaken him like a rag doll, once, with vicious quickness. Rafe heard the painted warrior’s neck snap, and when the tall man tossed him to the carpet, his body simply flopped, still and unbreathing.
Rafe raised the knives with weary, shaking arms. He had no idea what exactly he would do to this tall, strange, inexplicably disturbing man, but took comfort in the notion that he was, at least, a very sizable target.
The tall man and his associates moved toward him, drawing long silver rods -- no, needles, pointed and wicked at the ends -- from their sleeves. Rafe seemed to hear a distant, droning hum behind him as they approached.
The hum grew louder, and louder still. The men stopped. The tallest one seemed to be looking over Rafe’s shoulder, out the window, with a mixture of frustration, admiration, and sheer disbelief.
Rafe turned to look, and something huge and silver blew through the glass with a blast of wind, the force of its passing and the unearthly roar of the turbine at its rear hurling Rafe sideways through the air onto the couch, and smacked into the three black-coated men like they were bowling pins. It screeched and skidded across the floor, chewing up carpet, and leaving a slick of something far redder and wetter than Rafe ever wished to consider in its wake. It smashed into the entry to the front hall, sending cracks up the walls, and completely obliterating any even mildly theoretical hope that Rafe might indeed ever recover his security deposit.
The turbine ran for a few more seconds, whirling papers and stray objects wildly about the room, and then died out with a whine. A single chunk of glass from the splintered remains of the back windows dropped to the concrete of the balcony and shattered. Rafe struggled to his feet, knives at the ready, and wondered what fresh hell this was, exactly. Polish gangsters were beginning to sound downright wholesome.
The rear hatch of the thing, turbine and all, unsealed with a hiss. A young woman climbed out, her thick black hair a frizzy mess, wearing a red t-shirt, jeans, and trainers, and carrying a satchel bag slung over one shoulder.
“Damn,” she said, surveying the mess. “Need more work on the landings. Are you him? Are you Windham?”
Rafe just nodded, slowly.
“I’m, uh... hi. I’m Nora,” the young woman said, suddenly seeming bashful. “Sorry about your window. I think I’m kind of here to save your life.”
Rafe’s brain considered this improbable chain of events, and decided the only sensible thing to do was shut down. So he nodded, and smiled quite charmingly, and fell straight back into the couch, and the welcoming arms of unconsciousness.
Well, no. More accurately, it cleaved a small bookshelf about halfway in two, Rafe having had the presence of mind to throw himself sideways toward the entertainment center as the warrior leapt over his coffee table to swing. But the head-cleaving intent was certainly there, and for a brief moment on the carpet, Rafe found himself curiously nostalgic for the days when all of his problems were entirely explicable ones.
“I think we can safely rule out this being a joke,” Rafe said, scrambling to his feet as the warrior yanked his knife out of the ruined bookshelf -- Rafe suddenly felt a great deal better about having rented the place furnished -- and advanced once again upon him, twin blades glinting in the morning sunlight through the glass doors to the balcony. “Do I owe someone money?” he tried. “Well, obviously, yes, but someone creative?
The warrior smiled, showing teeth. “This is about your destiny,” he said in his perfectly honed English accent. “Start fighting back. I’ve come too far for this to be over quickly.”
He lunged again, one blade whipping through the air to bury itself deep in the side of the television. Rafe ducked, only to have the warrior’s leathery foot catch him in the ribs. He stumbled back into the sole remaining bookcase, the shelves slamming painfully into his back, and felt the beginnings of a good head of instinctive rage build up. He reached back to the shelf, grabbed the first thing his hand reached, and threw it at the warrior.
The paperback copy of The Thorn Birds bounced harmlessly off the warrior’s unflinching face and flopped to the floor. The warrior looked down at it on the carpet, a bit sadly. “I hope that’s not yours,” he sighed.
At which point Rafe hit him full in the face with Watley’s Field Guide to the Birds of England, unabridged revised second edition. It was a coffee-table book in the sense that it could double as furniture, and it felled the warrior like a bolt from the blue.
“Much better,” Rafe heard the intruder say from beneath the book, in somewhat flattened syllables, just before Rafe brought the entire bookshelf down on him.
There was a slight settling of paper, and a slowly rising cloud of dust -- Rafe not being the most attentive of housekeepers -- and Rafe sagged against the sofa, legs shaking, and waited for the adrenalin surge to die down.
The bookshelf stirred.
“No,” Rafe said, looking around for something heavy he could put on top of it. “Oh, no, come on--!” And then the bookshelf all but leapt from the ground, propelled by a shove of the warrior’s sturdy legs, and the intruder snaked back of to his feet with a breakdancer’s grace, spun the knives impressively in his hands, and smiled.
“This is more like it!” the warrior exulted, and raised his knives high.
Rafe Windham, in his relatively brief life, had enjoyed considerable experience with a variety of men bearing sharp objects (blunt ones, too) and wishing him harm. It began to dawn upon him that he was, perhaps, now facing an expert in the art. Then the knives fell, and the sofa pillow Rafe had instinctively grabbed to shield himself fell into three pieces and a cloud of polystyrene fluff.
Rafe dropped the remains of the pillow, grabbed each of the warrior’s wrists with this own to force them away and apart, and drove a knee as hard as he could into the intruder’s solar plexus. He’d been aiming for the crotch, but this was hardly the time for precision. As the warrior doubled over in pain, Rafe grabbed him by the shoulders and drive his head entirely into the wall.
The warrior sagged for a moment, and Rafe reached down to grab one of the black stone knives -- only to find the thick, solid butt of it driven into his stomach. He lurched backward just in time to avoid a swipe from the blade’s business end, and felt the anger in him tighten and redouble.
The warrior pulled his head from the wall, his face now ghostly white with plaster dust, and spat out a piece of sheetrock.
“I’d have thought the walls a bit sturdier, in a place like this,” he said.
“Americans,” Rafe managed to gasp, struggling to catch his breath. “You know how it is.” Then he ran for the kitchen.
It was just off the living room, with a wide hole cut in one wall to see through from either side. Rafe wasted no time going around this partition; he just leapt, as he had at the parking garage, and slid himself through feet-first, landing hard on the linoleum. He managed to cross his arms in front of his face just in time to take the blow as momentum smacked him forward into the cabinets. He stood up, drew the biggest carving knife he could find, and turned just in time to completely shatter the blade against that of one of the warrior’s stone knives.
“Mm,” the warrior noted. “I see what you mean about the craftsmanship.” He swung with the opposite blade, Rafe ducked, and the stone knife sank itself into one of Rafe’s kitchen cabinets -- taking some of the crockery within with it, by the sound of it. Had Rafe ever used the kitchen for anything more than reheating Chinese food, this might have been a more grievous loss.
The warrior let go of the trapped knife, but before Rafe could grab it, the intruder backhanded him viciously across the face. Rafe tasted blood, and then there was a knee in his ribs, and another fist slamming into the side of his neck.
With a grunt of primal fury, Rafe wrapped both arms around the microwave oven, yanked it from the wall, and smashed it full into the intruder’s face.
When the intruder staggered back, Rafe hurled the microwave at his chest, and the painted warrior fell hard against the lower cabinets, bare feet squeaking on the linoleum, struggling under the weight of the appliance.
Rafe reached down, running on pure furious instinct, and opened the dishwasher -- and when the warrior blindly brought his remaining knife up to slash wildly at Rafe, he shut the door again. Hard. Several times.
At last the warrior, howling, dropped the knife. Rafe heard it clatter against the silverware holder. As the warrior scrambled backward on his elbows, shoving the microwave off him, Rafe opened the dishwasher one final time to snatch up the knife the warrior had relinquished. It felt good and heavy and powerful in his hand, and he turned to grasp the handle of the other one, still jutting from the cabinets. With a tug, it came free. Rafe stood for a moment, testing the weight of the blades in his hands. The warrior was up on his feet now, blood streaming from a broken nose, weaving a bit.
Rafe took a step toward him. And another.
The warrior reached up to strike, and the krav maga class Rafe had taken way back in college -- to impress that one young lady with what had been, in retrospect, a disturbingly fervent interest in the Israeli military -- paid off, as Rafe slapped the blow away effortlessly. The warrior dropped, spinning, to whirl a kick at Rafe’s ribs. It connected, but the pain just fed into the anger growing in Rafe. He didn’t mind people trying to hurt him. It was all too commonplace, generally understandable, and frequently justified. But he absolutely hated it when they succeeded.
“I’ve had a very bad morning,” Rafe growled, smashing the handle of one blade hard into the warrior’s face. The intruder staggered, barely staying on his feet, lurching back toward the living room. “I’ve been cheated. I’ve been chased. I’ve been beaten up. I nearly fell off a train.”
The warrior threw a punch, pathetically, and Rafe hit him again. He fell backwards over one arm of the sofa and rolled onto the glass coffee table, knocking the wooden case from which he’d produced the knives to the floor. The table bore the impact with a thrum of vibrating glass.
“I just wanted to sleep,” Rafe said, low, furious. “I’ve filled my quotient of people trying to kill me for the day. And you’ve done a lot of things to me that hurt quite a bit.” He brought one foot up and smashed it hard against the intruder’s chest, and he heard the table crack with the force of the blow.
Rafe flipped one of the knives in his hand -- it came so easily -- and prepared to bring it down into the intruder’s heart.
And stopped.
He saw the man’s face, the red of his blood against the white of the plaster dust, and the wide, calm accepting eyes. He saw resignation, and disappointment. He’d seen it many times before, in the faces of girlfriends, and professors, and especially his parents. Too many times, honestly.
The cloud of anger that bubbled up from his brainstem, from the deep prehistoric part of him, rolled back and disippated. The knives felt suddenly heavy and wrong and alien in his hands, and once again he realized his legs were shaking. He let the knives drop to the carpet, on either side, and held out a hand.
“Are we done?” Rafe sighed.
The warrior smiled through bloodied teeth. “Indeed we are,” he said, “Your Lordship.” He took Rafe’s hand.
“None of that,” Rafe said, grimacing, as he hauled the man up off the broken table. Everything hurt, even more than it had when he’d walked through the door, as if such a thing were possible. And yet somehow, Rafe felt better than he had in ages. “My father’s the lord, officially, and at the rate I’m going, he’ll sell the deed to Windham Hall to some American software tycoon before he ever lets me have it.”
“I wasn’t talking about Windham Hall,” the warrior said, gingerly touching one thumb to his bloodied lip.
Rafe let himself sink against the sofa. “Look, what’s this about? Did my father send you?”
“The calendar sent me,” the warrior said, collecting the box from the carpet and setting it on the table. He set the knives back inside it, one at a time, but kept the box lid open. “The Long Calendar of the Children of Silence. Carved from a block of solid stone by hands too distant to remember. It knew the date of my birth, and it knew what I would be asked to do. It said that I would travel to this far place, on this day, in the shadow of a great unraveling. I would find the heir of Harker Windham, and test him in ritual combat. And if he were worthy -- if he could be civilized and savage, a foot in both worlds -- I would have the honor of passing on to him his birthright.”
The warrior handed Rafe the open box. Rafe took it and laughed, closing the lid -- and then stopped, because laughing hurt too much. “What sort of truly excellent drugs are you on?” Rafe said. “And where can I get some?”
The warrior just smiled and shook his head. “You’ll need the blades, the calendar says. Something about how they’ve been blessed -- that, or the atomic structure of the stone has been altered. The translations are inconsistent.”
“This calendar,” Rafe said, lifting the lid again to peer at the stone knives. “What else does it say?”
“It says today I die,” the warrior said, looking out Rafe’s window to the skyline of the city off to the south, gleaming in the first full rays of morning sun. “You’ve a lovely view here. Sorry about the mess.”
“I wasn’t expecting to get the deposit back anyway,” Rafe said. “It really said you were going to die?”
The warrior just nodded, his bone necklace jangling. “But it’s been wrong before. Once or twice. Errors of translation, like I said.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Rafe said, his limbs feeling very heavy. He stifled a yawn. “Look, now that you’ve destroyed my apartment and beaten me bloody, what’s your name?”
The warrior opened his mouth, and Rafe’s door flew inward off its hinges, banged off one wall of the entryway, and skidded across the carpet to bump against the far wall.
The painted warrior whirled, and before Rafe even knew what his body was doing, he was up off the couch with both of the stone blades ready in his hands. A tall man in a black coat and hat strode into the room, two similarly dressed men behind him. The tall man’s face seemed curiously red and blistered, as if sunburnt, and his gray eyes swept over the room, locked on Rafe, and bored through him.
“So,” the warrior said. “The calendar was right.”
He leapt through the air toward the tall man, and suddenly seemed to stop short in midair. The tall man had him by the throat, and before Rafe could move, the tall man had shaken him like a rag doll, once, with vicious quickness. Rafe heard the painted warrior’s neck snap, and when the tall man tossed him to the carpet, his body simply flopped, still and unbreathing.
Rafe raised the knives with weary, shaking arms. He had no idea what exactly he would do to this tall, strange, inexplicably disturbing man, but took comfort in the notion that he was, at least, a very sizable target.
The tall man and his associates moved toward him, drawing long silver rods -- no, needles, pointed and wicked at the ends -- from their sleeves. Rafe seemed to hear a distant, droning hum behind him as they approached.
The hum grew louder, and louder still. The men stopped. The tallest one seemed to be looking over Rafe’s shoulder, out the window, with a mixture of frustration, admiration, and sheer disbelief.
Rafe turned to look, and something huge and silver blew through the glass with a blast of wind, the force of its passing and the unearthly roar of the turbine at its rear hurling Rafe sideways through the air onto the couch, and smacked into the three black-coated men like they were bowling pins. It screeched and skidded across the floor, chewing up carpet, and leaving a slick of something far redder and wetter than Rafe ever wished to consider in its wake. It smashed into the entry to the front hall, sending cracks up the walls, and completely obliterating any even mildly theoretical hope that Rafe might indeed ever recover his security deposit.
The turbine ran for a few more seconds, whirling papers and stray objects wildly about the room, and then died out with a whine. A single chunk of glass from the splintered remains of the back windows dropped to the concrete of the balcony and shattered. Rafe struggled to his feet, knives at the ready, and wondered what fresh hell this was, exactly. Polish gangsters were beginning to sound downright wholesome.
The rear hatch of the thing, turbine and all, unsealed with a hiss. A young woman climbed out, her thick black hair a frizzy mess, wearing a red t-shirt, jeans, and trainers, and carrying a satchel bag slung over one shoulder.
“Damn,” she said, surveying the mess. “Need more work on the landings. Are you him? Are you Windham?”
Rafe just nodded, slowly.
“I’m, uh... hi. I’m Nora,” the young woman said, suddenly seeming bashful. “Sorry about your window. I think I’m kind of here to save your life.”
Rafe’s brain considered this improbable chain of events, and decided the only sensible thing to do was shut down. So he nodded, and smiled quite charmingly, and fell straight back into the couch, and the welcoming arms of unconsciousness.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
A Stitch in Time
Author's note: With this chapter, I've beaten NaNoWriMo's 50,000 word goal. Now I've just got to finish the darn thing...
“There are more people coming,” Nora Swift said, backing slowly away, as the tall, black-coated woman advanced on her, holding the long silver needle casually in one hand.
“Oh no, my dear,” Mrs. Stitch laughed, shaking her head cheerily. Her grey eyes seemed to stare through Nora. “There’s no one else coming. They’re having a lovely quiet morning at the office.” The one she’d called Maximillian had bent his tall frame over to pluck the silver needles from the back of Murray’s neck. He glanced up at Nora, coolly, lizardlike, with the same strange gray eyes.
“Copters,” Nora said, feeling the plastic walls of the corridor bump up against her back. “There are news copters -- gotta be.”
“Whatever would they be here for?” Mrs. Stich said gently, almost scoldingly.
That’s when Nora’s body finally caught up with her mind, and she hit the woman in the face, hard as she could with her flashlight. Mrs. Stich sagged against one wall, and Nora turned and ran.
For a moment, she thought she could escape out the hatch, maybe jump in the black boat tied to the railing -- but as she reached the doorway, she saw another black boat rapidly approaching, still and silent men in black coats and hats standing at its helm. She heard the thud of heavy footsteps behind her, and kept running.
Into the passenger cabin now, and when she risked a look back, there was Maximillian, the top of his hat nearly brushing the ceiling, his wide shoulders filling the aisle, pursuing her with long, swift, deliberate strides. Nora began to slap the release buttons on all the overhead bins, dragging carryon bags out to tumble into the aisle and block the route behind her.
Maximillian stepped over the first pile gently, had some difficulty with the second, and calmly began to cut through the row of seats to the next aisle over.
Nora ran, stumbling as the plane rocked gently on the water, back into the flight attendants’ kitchen. She flattened herself against the wall behind the privacy curtain and stared at the strange, bulbous microwave oven, the cabinets, the pot of coffee still percolating in a niche against the wall. She tried to think.
A thick arm in a black sleeve reached through the curtain from the opposite side of the kitchen and grabbed her hair. She hollered and dug her nails into Maximiliian’s exposed wrist as he pushed calmly through the curtain to hold her fast, but he didn’t so much as flinch.
She reached out, grabbed the full pot of coffee, and smashed it full against his face.
He didn’t howl, didn’t cry out, but he staggered back, steam rising from his face, and Nora’s hair slipped from his grasp. Her own hand was scalded where the coffee had splashed, but she scarcely had time to think of that. She half-ran, half fell out the opposite side of the kitchen and saw the two men from the second book gliding down the aisle in her direction.
She passed the stairwell, momentarily wondering if she should climb it -- until she remembered there was nowhere for her to hide in the wide, empty ballroom. Nowhere that she wouldn’t be found. Nora wondered when, exactly, she would wake up. Hopefully soon.
Nora ran into the semidarkness of the corridor ahead, the one she hadn’t explored earlier. She saw the panel marked EMERGENCY on the wall, the silver latch gleaming dully in the dim half-light from the emergency lamps in sconces along the ceiling. “It’s an emergency for damn sure,” she said under her breath, and yanked the panel open.
It was some kind of rifle, silver and sleek as the plane itself, mounted on prongs inside the wall cannister, bearing no identifying marks besides a stylized M embossed onto the stock. She saw a trigger, saw a narrow end, and guessed which side she was supposed to point toward the bad people, and that was good enough for her.
As she removed it from the wall, feeling the rifle cool and resolutely solid in her hands, she saw the clear, pictographic instructions written on the wall behind it. IN EVENT OF SKY PIRATE INCURSION, they were labeled, and the pictograms included tiny figures rapelling from a blimp into the upper surface of a drawing of the plane itself.
At the opposite end of the hallway, someone cleared his throat.
Nora turned and saw Maximillian filling the doorway, the two newly arrived men in black coats just visible behind him. He was slowly wiping the traces of coffee from the bright red skin of his face with a gray handkerchief.
“You stay the hell back,” Nora said, her teeth chattering with adrenalin, hefting the rifle in his direction. Maximillian clucked his tongue disapprovingly and wagged a single finger back and forth at her.
Nora squeezed the trigger.
The rifle kicked, and wet pellets burst from its muzzle, ballooning and spinning as they zipped through the air. They hit with splattering bursts against Maximillian and the men behind him as the three surged forward, expanding into a web of strands that criscrossed the corridor. As Nora watched in amazement, the goo hardened, trapping her pursuers.
“That’s about the most disgusting damn thing I ever saw,” she said to herself, looking down at the rifle with renewed curiosity.
Maximillian stared at her with calm, certain eyes, held fast by the immobilizing resin, and slowly used two fingers to withdraw a long silver needle from the sleeve of one trapped, upraised arm. He touched the tip of the needle to the nearest strand of resin, and to Nora’s horror, the bonds holding him fast began to slowly crumble away into dust.
“Oh, come on!” she shouted, and turned to dash deeper into the corridor. It was narrowing, and as she rounded a corner, she saw the dead end ahead, and felt her heart sink. There were round alcoves along one wall, each secured with a latch, and branded with the same EMERGENCY lettering. Nora briefly glanced at the rifle in her hands, sighed, and figured why the hell not.
The latch hissed open, and a circular door lifted up and out into the hallway. Beyond was a tiny cockpit of sorts, a single-seater with basic controls. Nora heard pursuing footsteps and ducked inside, sealing the hatch shut behind her. She caught just a glimpse of black trouser cuffs and shiny black shoes before the hatch closed, and she hastily turned the wheel on its inner surface to seal it tightly.
“Okay,” she breathed, seating herself and reflexively fastening the straps that dangled from the chair around her chest. “Come on...” A glass bubble wrapped around the front of the tiny cockpit, but all she could see beyond were the seams and rivets of steel plating. Looking down at the cockpit, she saw a blank flatscreen display, a twin-handled control stick, what seemed like a throttle, and -- aha -- a big red button, right within easy reach.
She smacked the red button full with her palm.
Nothing happened. From the hatch behind her, she heard steady hammering on the metal. The men in black wanted in. And then Mrs. Stich’s voice, melodic and crisp, filled the cockpit from a speakers somewhere in the tiny chamber’s roof.
“Very clever, dear,” she said, “but I’m afraid we’ve got the entire craft locked down. There’s no escape for you.” Another wave lurched the ship, and Nora’s stomach with it, and she suddenly felt very trapped and very alone.
“You can stay inside if you like,” Mrs. Stitch’s voice continued, “but Maximillian is a very patient and resourceful boy, and I assure you, he’ll be through the door soon enough. I assure you, dear, that we have no wish to hurt you. Kill you, yes, but I promise it’s thoroughly painless. Like drifting into the soundest, deepest Sunday-morning sleep. We’re not monsters.”
Nora gave a small whimper of frustration and fear. This was insane! Any other morning she’d be filling out paperwork, listening to the horrible, syrupy drive-time hits from Myra’s radio in the next cube over. “Our time, amusingly enough, is short,” Mrs. Stich continued over the intercom, “and I’d rather hoped to be on to Windham by now. So do be a help and open the latch, would you? Maximillian gets so cross when he doesn’t get his way.”
Nora remembered the pursuing man’s creepy gray eyes, his slow patience, and made up her mind.
“Oh, hell no!” she shouted, smacking the button again. “Wake up, dammit! Get me out of here!”
Lights switched on. The flatscreen blinked to life, displaying a soothing blue field and a menu of helpful options Nora had no time to process, much less read.
“Gale family voice override confirmed,” a calm, tinny synthesized voice chimed. “Welcome, Nora Swift. Please state your preference.”
Nora had no time to understand any of this. She only heard the thumping on the door behind her grow louder, each blow now accompanied by the groan of bending metal.
“Go!” Nora shouted. “Launch! Evacuate! Whatever!”
“Command processed,” the computer voice soothed. “Please prepare for launch.”
“Such a clever girl,” Mrs. Stitch sighed over the intercom. “I should have expected no less. We’ll be seeing one another soon, I assure--” Her voice died in a hiss of static, and the entire compartment lurched. Nora felt her stomach curdle, sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. Adrenalin raced through her limbs.
“Oh, fffff---” she began. Then the steel ahead of her knifed away to the pale blue of a morning sky, and something roared underneath her, and the hand of God smashed her back into the seat, cheeks flattening themselves against her teeth, as the capsule shot straight up into the sky.
The punishing acceleration lasted a good ten teeth-rattling seconds, and then there was a sudden, terrifying feeling of weightlessness as the jets cut out. The cockpit bubble slowly rotated, the skyline of the city rising into view, and for a second Nora thought she would plunge straight back into the dark waters of the lake. But there was a hum of hydraulics on either side of her, the clack-clack-clacking of wings unfolding in segments, and a low, vibrating howl as some sort of turbine kicked in, and with another nauseous burst of acceleration, the pod shot forward under its own power.
Nora clenched the stick with sweating hands, breathing in sharp, ragged gasps, and allowed herself a moment of absolute terror. Her hands unconsciously pulled the stick left, and the craft dipped and swooned sharply. Nora yelped and swung the stick back level, and this time, she felt a certain ease, a satisfaction, in how crisply it responded.
“I’m flying,” she said softly. And then a grin of relief and amazement spread across her face. “I’m flying.”
“Current altitude 1,247 feet,” the computer voice offered helpfully. Nora checked the screen and saw colorful gauges for fuel, GPS coordinates for her position, and a steadily dimishing “distance to empty” counter. It currently topped 200 miles.
As the pod drifted onward toward the skyline, Nora’s breathing eased, and she tried to think. She had no idea what was happening to her, what she was even doing in this craft. But she remembered Murray with the needles in his neck as Maximillian -- what? Rewrote his dreams? His memories? And she remembered how the police boats had simply been gone, what Mrs. Stitch had said about the news copters.
She had a terrible feeling that she couldn’t go home, and with a pang, she wondered if she could even call her mother. Did they have her phone tapped? Could they do that?
And then, at last, she remembered the other name Mrs. Stitch had mentioned.
“Hey, you!” she said to the craft. “Computer! Whatever.” It worked on Star Trek, she figured.
“What is your request?” the computer said melodically.
“Do you have any kind of, I dunno, historical information?” Nora asked, feeling strangely stupid. She was used to yelling at computers, but she never expected them to respond.
“The Gale Aeronautics X-9 escape craft has a variety of educational and entertainment options to ease travel,” the computer said.
“What can you tell me about Windham?” Nora said, then thought of something else. “Windham and Gale.”
“Processing,” the computer said. “While I’m thinking, would you like any other information?”
“Yeah,” Nora said, seeing the skyscrapers loom ahead, and once again feeling sweat slick her palms. “I think I’m gonna need to know how to land.”
Far behind her, on the lake, the great gleaming aircraft slowly began to sink, the dark water rising around it, until it was completely swallowed up. For a while, it was a shimmering silver shadow beneath the suface, and then a vague shape, and then, nothing at all.
Two black boats trailed white Vs of wake away from where the great, impossible aircraft had been, headed inexorably back to shore.
“There are more people coming,” Nora Swift said, backing slowly away, as the tall, black-coated woman advanced on her, holding the long silver needle casually in one hand.
“Oh no, my dear,” Mrs. Stitch laughed, shaking her head cheerily. Her grey eyes seemed to stare through Nora. “There’s no one else coming. They’re having a lovely quiet morning at the office.” The one she’d called Maximillian had bent his tall frame over to pluck the silver needles from the back of Murray’s neck. He glanced up at Nora, coolly, lizardlike, with the same strange gray eyes.
“Copters,” Nora said, feeling the plastic walls of the corridor bump up against her back. “There are news copters -- gotta be.”
“Whatever would they be here for?” Mrs. Stich said gently, almost scoldingly.
That’s when Nora’s body finally caught up with her mind, and she hit the woman in the face, hard as she could with her flashlight. Mrs. Stich sagged against one wall, and Nora turned and ran.
For a moment, she thought she could escape out the hatch, maybe jump in the black boat tied to the railing -- but as she reached the doorway, she saw another black boat rapidly approaching, still and silent men in black coats and hats standing at its helm. She heard the thud of heavy footsteps behind her, and kept running.
Into the passenger cabin now, and when she risked a look back, there was Maximillian, the top of his hat nearly brushing the ceiling, his wide shoulders filling the aisle, pursuing her with long, swift, deliberate strides. Nora began to slap the release buttons on all the overhead bins, dragging carryon bags out to tumble into the aisle and block the route behind her.
Maximillian stepped over the first pile gently, had some difficulty with the second, and calmly began to cut through the row of seats to the next aisle over.
Nora ran, stumbling as the plane rocked gently on the water, back into the flight attendants’ kitchen. She flattened herself against the wall behind the privacy curtain and stared at the strange, bulbous microwave oven, the cabinets, the pot of coffee still percolating in a niche against the wall. She tried to think.
A thick arm in a black sleeve reached through the curtain from the opposite side of the kitchen and grabbed her hair. She hollered and dug her nails into Maximiliian’s exposed wrist as he pushed calmly through the curtain to hold her fast, but he didn’t so much as flinch.
She reached out, grabbed the full pot of coffee, and smashed it full against his face.
He didn’t howl, didn’t cry out, but he staggered back, steam rising from his face, and Nora’s hair slipped from his grasp. Her own hand was scalded where the coffee had splashed, but she scarcely had time to think of that. She half-ran, half fell out the opposite side of the kitchen and saw the two men from the second book gliding down the aisle in her direction.
She passed the stairwell, momentarily wondering if she should climb it -- until she remembered there was nowhere for her to hide in the wide, empty ballroom. Nowhere that she wouldn’t be found. Nora wondered when, exactly, she would wake up. Hopefully soon.
Nora ran into the semidarkness of the corridor ahead, the one she hadn’t explored earlier. She saw the panel marked EMERGENCY on the wall, the silver latch gleaming dully in the dim half-light from the emergency lamps in sconces along the ceiling. “It’s an emergency for damn sure,” she said under her breath, and yanked the panel open.
It was some kind of rifle, silver and sleek as the plane itself, mounted on prongs inside the wall cannister, bearing no identifying marks besides a stylized M embossed onto the stock. She saw a trigger, saw a narrow end, and guessed which side she was supposed to point toward the bad people, and that was good enough for her.
As she removed it from the wall, feeling the rifle cool and resolutely solid in her hands, she saw the clear, pictographic instructions written on the wall behind it. IN EVENT OF SKY PIRATE INCURSION, they were labeled, and the pictograms included tiny figures rapelling from a blimp into the upper surface of a drawing of the plane itself.
At the opposite end of the hallway, someone cleared his throat.
Nora turned and saw Maximillian filling the doorway, the two newly arrived men in black coats just visible behind him. He was slowly wiping the traces of coffee from the bright red skin of his face with a gray handkerchief.
“You stay the hell back,” Nora said, her teeth chattering with adrenalin, hefting the rifle in his direction. Maximillian clucked his tongue disapprovingly and wagged a single finger back and forth at her.
Nora squeezed the trigger.
The rifle kicked, and wet pellets burst from its muzzle, ballooning and spinning as they zipped through the air. They hit with splattering bursts against Maximillian and the men behind him as the three surged forward, expanding into a web of strands that criscrossed the corridor. As Nora watched in amazement, the goo hardened, trapping her pursuers.
“That’s about the most disgusting damn thing I ever saw,” she said to herself, looking down at the rifle with renewed curiosity.
Maximillian stared at her with calm, certain eyes, held fast by the immobilizing resin, and slowly used two fingers to withdraw a long silver needle from the sleeve of one trapped, upraised arm. He touched the tip of the needle to the nearest strand of resin, and to Nora’s horror, the bonds holding him fast began to slowly crumble away into dust.
“Oh, come on!” she shouted, and turned to dash deeper into the corridor. It was narrowing, and as she rounded a corner, she saw the dead end ahead, and felt her heart sink. There were round alcoves along one wall, each secured with a latch, and branded with the same EMERGENCY lettering. Nora briefly glanced at the rifle in her hands, sighed, and figured why the hell not.
The latch hissed open, and a circular door lifted up and out into the hallway. Beyond was a tiny cockpit of sorts, a single-seater with basic controls. Nora heard pursuing footsteps and ducked inside, sealing the hatch shut behind her. She caught just a glimpse of black trouser cuffs and shiny black shoes before the hatch closed, and she hastily turned the wheel on its inner surface to seal it tightly.
“Okay,” she breathed, seating herself and reflexively fastening the straps that dangled from the chair around her chest. “Come on...” A glass bubble wrapped around the front of the tiny cockpit, but all she could see beyond were the seams and rivets of steel plating. Looking down at the cockpit, she saw a blank flatscreen display, a twin-handled control stick, what seemed like a throttle, and -- aha -- a big red button, right within easy reach.
She smacked the red button full with her palm.
Nothing happened. From the hatch behind her, she heard steady hammering on the metal. The men in black wanted in. And then Mrs. Stich’s voice, melodic and crisp, filled the cockpit from a speakers somewhere in the tiny chamber’s roof.
“Very clever, dear,” she said, “but I’m afraid we’ve got the entire craft locked down. There’s no escape for you.” Another wave lurched the ship, and Nora’s stomach with it, and she suddenly felt very trapped and very alone.
“You can stay inside if you like,” Mrs. Stitch’s voice continued, “but Maximillian is a very patient and resourceful boy, and I assure you, he’ll be through the door soon enough. I assure you, dear, that we have no wish to hurt you. Kill you, yes, but I promise it’s thoroughly painless. Like drifting into the soundest, deepest Sunday-morning sleep. We’re not monsters.”
Nora gave a small whimper of frustration and fear. This was insane! Any other morning she’d be filling out paperwork, listening to the horrible, syrupy drive-time hits from Myra’s radio in the next cube over. “Our time, amusingly enough, is short,” Mrs. Stich continued over the intercom, “and I’d rather hoped to be on to Windham by now. So do be a help and open the latch, would you? Maximillian gets so cross when he doesn’t get his way.”
Nora remembered the pursuing man’s creepy gray eyes, his slow patience, and made up her mind.
“Oh, hell no!” she shouted, smacking the button again. “Wake up, dammit! Get me out of here!”
Lights switched on. The flatscreen blinked to life, displaying a soothing blue field and a menu of helpful options Nora had no time to process, much less read.
“Gale family voice override confirmed,” a calm, tinny synthesized voice chimed. “Welcome, Nora Swift. Please state your preference.”
Nora had no time to understand any of this. She only heard the thumping on the door behind her grow louder, each blow now accompanied by the groan of bending metal.
“Go!” Nora shouted. “Launch! Evacuate! Whatever!”
“Command processed,” the computer voice soothed. “Please prepare for launch.”
“Such a clever girl,” Mrs. Stitch sighed over the intercom. “I should have expected no less. We’ll be seeing one another soon, I assure--” Her voice died in a hiss of static, and the entire compartment lurched. Nora felt her stomach curdle, sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. Adrenalin raced through her limbs.
“Oh, fffff---” she began. Then the steel ahead of her knifed away to the pale blue of a morning sky, and something roared underneath her, and the hand of God smashed her back into the seat, cheeks flattening themselves against her teeth, as the capsule shot straight up into the sky.
The punishing acceleration lasted a good ten teeth-rattling seconds, and then there was a sudden, terrifying feeling of weightlessness as the jets cut out. The cockpit bubble slowly rotated, the skyline of the city rising into view, and for a second Nora thought she would plunge straight back into the dark waters of the lake. But there was a hum of hydraulics on either side of her, the clack-clack-clacking of wings unfolding in segments, and a low, vibrating howl as some sort of turbine kicked in, and with another nauseous burst of acceleration, the pod shot forward under its own power.
Nora clenched the stick with sweating hands, breathing in sharp, ragged gasps, and allowed herself a moment of absolute terror. Her hands unconsciously pulled the stick left, and the craft dipped and swooned sharply. Nora yelped and swung the stick back level, and this time, she felt a certain ease, a satisfaction, in how crisply it responded.
“I’m flying,” she said softly. And then a grin of relief and amazement spread across her face. “I’m flying.”
“Current altitude 1,247 feet,” the computer voice offered helpfully. Nora checked the screen and saw colorful gauges for fuel, GPS coordinates for her position, and a steadily dimishing “distance to empty” counter. It currently topped 200 miles.
As the pod drifted onward toward the skyline, Nora’s breathing eased, and she tried to think. She had no idea what was happening to her, what she was even doing in this craft. But she remembered Murray with the needles in his neck as Maximillian -- what? Rewrote his dreams? His memories? And she remembered how the police boats had simply been gone, what Mrs. Stitch had said about the news copters.
She had a terrible feeling that she couldn’t go home, and with a pang, she wondered if she could even call her mother. Did they have her phone tapped? Could they do that?
And then, at last, she remembered the other name Mrs. Stitch had mentioned.
“Hey, you!” she said to the craft. “Computer! Whatever.” It worked on Star Trek, she figured.
“What is your request?” the computer said melodically.
“Do you have any kind of, I dunno, historical information?” Nora asked, feeling strangely stupid. She was used to yelling at computers, but she never expected them to respond.
“The Gale Aeronautics X-9 escape craft has a variety of educational and entertainment options to ease travel,” the computer said.
“What can you tell me about Windham?” Nora said, then thought of something else. “Windham and Gale.”
“Processing,” the computer said. “While I’m thinking, would you like any other information?”
“Yeah,” Nora said, seeing the skyscrapers loom ahead, and once again feeling sweat slick her palms. “I think I’m gonna need to know how to land.”
Far behind her, on the lake, the great gleaming aircraft slowly began to sink, the dark water rising around it, until it was completely swallowed up. For a while, it was a shimmering silver shadow beneath the suface, and then a vague shape, and then, nothing at all.
Two black boats trailed white Vs of wake away from where the great, impossible aircraft had been, headed inexorably back to shore.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Encounter in the Depths
Trip Morrow was looking at the silver-and-amber signet ring he’d just put on his finger -- not even the strangest of the objects he’d found in the cigar box resting at the bottom of his backpack -- and thinking about his grandfather’s face, how it had seemed so soft and diminished and unreal lying there in the coffin, when the train crashed.
It was suddenly dark, without even a flicker, and he was lying full on the grimy rubber of the subway car’s floor, and his entire left side felt like the beginnings of a bruise. He felt a tang of iron in the back of his nose and had to check hastily to make sure it wasn’t actually bleeding. It wasn’t, and after a quick intinerary there in the dark, nothing else was bleeding, or broken for that matter. He heard a shriek elsewhere in the car.
The emergency lights kicked in after a few seconds, with a dull whine, spilling flat reddish light throughout the car. Trip, getting to his feet with one of the silver railing poles, counted three other people in the car.
One of them, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, stood up. “It’s OK,” he said, shakily. “Everybody stay calm. I’m a cop. Just be calm.”
(By “I’m a cop,” Officer Brian Callas meant that he had finished the academy six months ago, in the middle of his class, and had since logged many dangerous hours prowling the mean streets of Wrigleyville, writing up college boys for public intoxication. He had once unsuccessfully pursued a very athletic purse snatcher, and had never so much as carried a gun, much less fired one outside the range.)
A young woman, dressed in a puffy black coat, spangly top, tight black pants, and shoes with nothing resembling any sort of proper structural support, sniffled and wiped at the mascara now running down her cheeks. An old woman in the sort of clothes she’d probably wear to church, her dark skin faded and mellowed to cafe au lait with age, made her way unsteadily across the car to offer the young woman a handkerchief.
Trip took a few deep breaths, feeling his heart rattle his ribcage, and began to think.
“We’ll be outta here in no time,” I’m A Cop said, reaching up to pull the emergency knob that would trigger the manual release on the doors on the side of the car, just like the colorful emergency diagrams had told him to do on a thousand prior train rides. He pulled the knob again. And again.
“Okay,” he said, “everyone just be cool. You on the floor, you okay?”
Trip nodded. “I’m good. Listen, I think that--”
“Can you try that door there?” the cop said, pointing to the door at the end of the car, labeled with EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY signs that the transients and panhandlers who periodically weaved through the cars each day made a point to ignore. “I’m gonna try the one up front.”
“Sure, but I think the crash might have--”
“Great,” the cop said, and hustled up the aisle, pausing to check on the young and old women sitting together by the window. “You two all right?”
The young woman blew her nose into the old woman’s handkerchief; the old woman nodded calmly, like someone who’d seen much worse, and patted the young woman reassuringly on the shoulder. “It’ll be all right, honey,” she said; Trip only half-heard it as he jiggled the handle of the rear door, and found it stuck, and wondered whether she’d said to to the girl or the cop.
In the weird glare of the emergency lights, Trip caught his reflection in the glass, all slabs of light and pools of shadow, and started for a minute, his mind overlaying his own face with that of his grandfather. The family had always said they were practically clones; same gangly build, same straight, floppy hair; same angular, earnest features. Trip had always liked the notion that he was going about the world wearing a face passed down from a loved one, and he thought again of the still wax puppet in the coffin to whom he had supposedly been related. From the opposite end of the car, he heard a handle jiggle, then rattle, and then a curse as the cop kicked at the door.
“All right,” the cop said, heading back down the aisle, “let’s just be cool. I’m sure somebody’s coming for us. Anybody got a cell phone?”
“I tried,” the girl said from behind raccoon eyes. She held up a silver wisp of a phone. “There’s no signal down here.”
The cop let out a long breath through pursed lips, hands bunching on the close-cropped hair on the back of his head. “All right, let’s just think. We could smash out the windows. Does anyone have, like, a heavy object?”
Trip had an idea, and began rummaging in his backpack. The cigar box rattled invitingly as he poked around inside, but it could wait. He came up with a swiss army knife, and carefully folded out the screwdriver attachment.
“Hey!” the cop said, as Trip began loosening the screws at the top of the silver pole that ran vertically from the roof to the floor of the car, in the middle of the space left empty for the unfortunate riders who couldn’t squeeze into a seat. “Hey! That’s public property! What are you doing?”
“It’s OK,” Trip said as he finished one screw and moved on to the other. “I think I have a way to get us out. Give me a hand with this?”
The cop made his way uneasily over, and Trip handed him the loose screw. “I think whatever we hit slightly warped the frame of the car,” Trip said. “That’s probably why the doors were stuck.” Having finished with the top of the pole, he dropped to his knees and began unscrewing the bottom. “We can get the side ones open, I think. Just need a little leverage. There. Now pull hard, with me, on three.”
Trip counted to three, and they both yanked hard on the steel pole, and managed to pop it from its housings.
“So what are you?” the cop said. “Like, that guy on TV who makes bombs out of candy bars?”
“Nah,” Trip said. “I just build stuff. I’m Trip.”
“Brian,” the cop said. “Hi.”
“I’m Jenna,” the girl in the back said, appropos of nothing, and Trip smiled and waved at her absentmindedly. She was, some part of his brain noticed, the sort of ridiculously cute girl who never even talked to him outside of potentially life-threatening situations. Of which this was approximately his first, so perhaps, he thought, he should endanger himself more often.
“Muriel,” said the old woman. “Y’all need a hand with that?”
“I think we’re good, ma’am,” Trip said, then turned to Brian and hefted the steel pole. “OK, help me get this wedged in the door.”
It took them a few tries, but together, they managed to get the tip of the pole into the narrow, rubber-flapped gap of the door.
“This totally reminds me of something,” Brian the cop said, suppressing a snicker. Trip shook his head, hair flopping from side to said, and looked at him quizzically. “Never mind,” Brian said. “So what do we do now?”
“Muriel, ma’am?” Trip called to the middle of the car. “We could use your help now. Can you pull the release knob?”
The old lady made her way slowly up the aisle, trailed by Jenna, the young woman walking unsteadily on the tall, skinny heels of her shoes. Muriel reached up into the recess at the top of the doorway, on tiptoes in her flat, squarish shoes, and pulled the knob down.
“Okay,” Trip said. “Brian, Jenna, give me a hand with this. We’re gonna try to lever the door open.”
It took them a few minutes of diligent tugging, until their faces were red and their muscles ached, but at last the doors shrieked and groaned and slid open wide enough to permit passage to the cool, clammy subway tunnel outside.
“Woo!” Jenna cheered, and Brian whooped in triumph. Trip wiped sweat from his brow and grinned.
“Give me a place to stand,” he said to himself, “and I will move the world.”
“Archimedes?” Muriel said, smiling gently.
“Ten points to Muriel,” Trip nodded. “Are you a teacher?”
The old woman shrugged. “I read a lot.”
“Okay, everyone out,” Brian boomed. “Come on, let’s go. Stick to the walls, and watch the third rail.” He wasn’t entirely sure which one was the third rail, but he figured avoiding them all would be a safe policy.
Trip quickly shouldered his backpack -- in an emergency, he supposed, the suitcase he’d had with him could wait for rescue -- and squeezed through the gap in the doors onto the narrow concrete walkway, then helped Muriel and Jenna through. Brian followed, still gripping the slightly crimped steel pole. “Just in case,” he told Trip, who just nodded.
They inched their way along the platform quietly, scuffing shoes echoing in the closeness of the tunnel, lit by the eerie emergency light from within the cars. The train had been nearly empty, this early in the morning, and no one stirred within the cars they passed.
Trip heard the girl, Jenna, behind him, her breathing becoming increasingly ragged. She put out a hand and clutched at the sleeve of Trip’s jacket, and he stopped and turned back to her as Brian and Muriel continued on ahead.
“You all right?” he said, as she continued to gasp, her eyes wide.
“It’s the tunnel,” she said. “I don’t -- I feel like I can’t breathe, it’s so small.”
“Here,” Trip said, slipping a bottle of water from a side pocket of his backpack. He cracked off the cap and gave it to her. “Just shut your eyes and drink it slowly, little sips. We’ll be fine.”
She did just that, taking small sips from the lip of the bottle, smudging it with her lipstick. In the light from the train, Trip could see the glitter on her cheeks. “Where are you from?” he said, conversationally.
“Lincoln Park,” she said, her breathing slowly quieting. “I’m, uh, I’m house-sitting for my sister while I look for a job.”
“Just graduated?” Trip asked, as she handed the water back to him. He screwed back on the cap and stuck it in the pocket on his back.
“Yeah, a few months ago,” she said, then laughed in embarrassment. “I know, who graduates in August? I had a few credits to make up. English major.”
“Want to be a writer?”
“Yeah, totally. Write for a magazine or something. All my friends say I do awesome horoscopes. When were you born?”
“November. The fifth. I’m a Scorpio, right?”
She smiled at him there, in the dim of the tunnel. “Ooh, good sign. Scorpios are all intense and passionate.”
“And also me, apparently,” Trip said, smiling, and got a giggle out of her.
“Hey, hey!” Brian’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “Come on! You’ve gotta see this!”
Trip and Jenna shuffled their way to the front of the train, where Brian and Muriel gazed silently at the front of the train. It had accordioned inward with the force of the impact, but the hulking, carved stone block into which it had smashed showed no cracks or other visible damage.
“Is the driver OK?” Trip asked.
“I dunno,” Brian said. “I think I saw somebody moving in there, but seriously, they’re gonna need the jaws of life to get him out.”
“Hey,” Jenna piped up, “did the crash bust that hole in the wall?”
As the four of them squinted in the gloom, they began to make out the outlines of a rough-edged hole in the concrete wall on the opposite side of the tunnel, next to the strange stone block. It seemed to slope down into an engulfing darkness.
“I don’t think so,” Trip said. “There’s no debris or anything big enough to--”
The tunnel came alive with the sound of stone grinding on stone. Jenna shrieked and grabbed reflexively at Trip’s arm.
“Where did that come from?” Brian said, hefting the steel pole, his head swiveling from side to side, eyes wide.
“From that,” Muriel said quietly, and pointed to the stone block. It was moving.
Now better adjusted to the darkness, Trip could see the strange geometric carvings that covered every surface of the stone block -- not the harsh angles of the Aztecs, but something a lot like it. The grinding sound continued, and the block seemed to get taller. It unfolded arms and straightened legs, and Trip realized it was a statue in the rough shape of a man, about nine feet fall. Solid stone, and yet -- its head swiveled slowly towards the four of them as they unconsciously flattened themselves against the wall of the tunnel.
Red eyes glowed like coals in its head, casting a strange radiance across its carved stone features and the black, open hole of its mouth.
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” it rumbled from somewhere deep within, like a quarry shifting in its sleep. “Ku va tirim Kroatoan.”
“What the hell--?” Brian said, and raised the steel pole. “Hey!” he shouted to the thing, waving the pole from side to side. “Get away from us!”
“Brian--” Trip began. The thing tilted its head slightly, and its eyes glowed even brighter, and then the pole glowed white-hot and burst into vapor. Brian howled, the sleeve of his jacket aflame, the flesh on his palm still sizzling from the burn, and toppled sideways onto the concrete.
Jenna shrieked and turned to run, stumbling on her heels and falling onto the plaform. It saved her life; the thing’s eyes glowed again, and a red line of molten concrete streaked across the tunnel wall at the former level of the girl’s head.
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the stone statue said again, shifting its gaze now to look at Trip. He risked a glance to his left; Muriel was crouched next to Brian, using her tweed jacket to beat out the flames on his arm as he grimaced and writhed. Slowly, keeping his eyes on the statue, Trip extended a hand to Jenna as she lay, whimpering softly, on the platform.
“Just... stay... still,” he told her. “Don’t move.”
Keeping his hands low by his sides, he slowly stepped forward onto the tracks. The thing stood near the center of the tracks, about a foot from the white-capped, raised third rail, and its glowing red eyes tracked Trip as he slowly circled it, drawing its attention away from the people huddled by the wall.
“What are you?” Trip said softly, as amazed as he was knee-knockingly terrified. “You look like stone, but--”
Veins of red light slowly emerged and began to pulse softly along the body of the statue, illuminating its squarish, bulky dimensions.
“Whoa,” Trip said softly, stealing one hand inch by inch back toward the side pocket of his pack. Toward the bottle of water. “Definitely not stone.” He glanced over at the side of the tracks, at the recess against the tunnel wall beneath the lip of the raised platform.
“Okay,” Trip said, “so you recognize tones of voice, and aggressive behavior. And you’re not attacking me, right? Because I’m not doing anything. I’m just talking.”
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the thing said, cocking its head slightly.
“You’re... you’re some kind of sentinel, maybe,” Trip said. “Like a security guard or something.” He slowly, slowly, unscrewed the cap on the water bottle. “But for what? What are you guarding? There’s nothing down here.”
“Irik ku--” the thing began again and Trip hurled the open water bottle underhanded toward its square stone bulk, and dove sideways and down toward the recess by the tracks. He landed hard, the breath rattling its way out of him, and a lot of things happened at once. The wood on the tracks where he’d just been standing burst into blue-white flame, and the metal tracks nearby glowed yellow-orange and began to sag and melt. The water splashed full against the stone guard, and against the third rail, and electricity surged and sizzled in blinding sparks up the sodden body of the creature. It screamed geologically, and the red veins of light on its body burst into flame.
The stone creature’s arms waved wildly, trailing afterimages of white fire, and flames boiled up out of its eyes. Then, suddenly as the fire had begun, it died out. The stone sentinel, now completely dark, toppled smoking to the tracks with a heavy crunch.
“I’m sorry,” Trip said to its hissing remains, and meant it.
***
Dawn was breaking, and on the street outside the subway station, activity was winding down. The ambulance had long since taken Brian to the hospital, and the transit guys were still down in the tunnel, sawing at the cars, freeing the remaining passengers and seeing to the injured. (Trip had asked the guy who looked like he was in charge to get his suitcase out as the transit team headed down into the station and the guy had just given him a look.) A few cabs and cars passed, and one guy on a bicycle, gawking, but the streets were still mostly empty at this hour.
The police detective had folded up his notebook from taking Trip’s statement, sighed, and shook his head. “Still too damn early for this sort of thing,” he’d said, and gone to the Starbucks across the street for coffee. That left Trip with Jenna and Muriel, the latter of whom had managed to find a Sun-Times in a vending machine and was reading the comics, chuckling softly to herself.
“You all right?” Trip asked Jenna, and she smiled up at him from her seat on the curb.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That was so amazing. I thought we were going to die. What was that thing?”
Trip shrugged and sat down next to her. Her hair was a mess, plastered in thick strands against her forehead. Trip liked it. He liked just about everything about her, except maybe her shoes. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looked Aztec or something, maybe, but I haven’t heard of anything--”
Jenna’s pocket began to sing I’m Walking on Sunshine, tinnily, and she reached in and pulled out her phone. “Oh my God!” she said to the voice on the other end. “Oh, sweetie, it’s so good to hear your voice. You’re never going to believe this. I totally almost died.” And just like that, Trip knew his brief and shining window of visibility had passed, and he was once more, and forever, beneath the her notice.
“Walk me to the next block over?” Muriel said to Trip, folding up her newspaper with a knowing grin. “I know I’m not a blonde in one of them short litttle skirts, but...”
“Uh... sure, ma’am,” Trip said. “My pleasure.” They began to walk, Trip taking small steps to keep pace with the old woman. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”
“The police let me call my friend Mary Jean. She’s gonna be by to pick me up in a few minutes,” Muriel replied. They rounded the corner and passed a bakery, its windows darkened like all the other shops on the street. The city waited in the dawn light, a breath away from coming alive.
“You’re a remarkable young man,” Muriel said, smiling up at him.
“You’re not so bad yourself, ma’am,” Trip replied, rubbing his bruised left arm. “You did a good job with Brian’s arm.”
“Used to be a nurse, back in the war,” Muriel said proudly. “Never forgot the training, I guess.” Trip noticed, for the first time, the small silver glimmer on the lapel of her tweed coat.
“Is that -- what, a pin?” Trip asked, and Muriel nodded.
“A needle,” she said, taking hold of it by the eye and drawing it out of her lapel. “Kind of a badge of honor, really. So’s I don’t forget.”
And then she stabbed him in the side of the neck with it.
“Ow!” Trip shouted, stumbling back, hand clapped to the sudden stinging on his neck. He felt a bead of blood form wet against his palm. “Why did you do that?”
“Had to be sure it was you,” Muriel said, casually wiping traces of Trip’s blood from the tip of the pin with a white linen handkerchief. “Thomas Morrow the third, grandson of the one and only, the great man himself.”
“Great man?” Trip sputtered. His legs felt wrong, rubbery, and a hot prickling was beginning to crawl up the base of his neck. “He did forty years behind a desk at Bell Labs!”
“Is that what he did?” Muriel asked, bemusedly. Trip’s world was beginning to spin slowly, and he realized he very much wanted to close his eyes. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You seem like a nice boy and all, and if it was up to me, I’d let you live. But Stitch says you might try to get things all unfixed again, like the bad old days, and we’ve got a big enough mess to deal with as is.”
“What--” Tom said, his lips beginning to turn to disobedient mush. “What did you do to me?”
“You just lie down, Trip Morrow,” Muriel said. “Lie down and go to sleep, and I promise it won’t hurt you none. You won’t even feel it.”
Trip stumbled away from her, ran on blind rubbery legs. The world was canting wildly, and he fell over, tumbling, and lay in the middle of the street. And the last thing he saw before his vision went black was the blurry shape of a taxicab, hurtling toward him, horn blaring, and sure to run him over.
It was suddenly dark, without even a flicker, and he was lying full on the grimy rubber of the subway car’s floor, and his entire left side felt like the beginnings of a bruise. He felt a tang of iron in the back of his nose and had to check hastily to make sure it wasn’t actually bleeding. It wasn’t, and after a quick intinerary there in the dark, nothing else was bleeding, or broken for that matter. He heard a shriek elsewhere in the car.
The emergency lights kicked in after a few seconds, with a dull whine, spilling flat reddish light throughout the car. Trip, getting to his feet with one of the silver railing poles, counted three other people in the car.
One of them, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, stood up. “It’s OK,” he said, shakily. “Everybody stay calm. I’m a cop. Just be calm.”
(By “I’m a cop,” Officer Brian Callas meant that he had finished the academy six months ago, in the middle of his class, and had since logged many dangerous hours prowling the mean streets of Wrigleyville, writing up college boys for public intoxication. He had once unsuccessfully pursued a very athletic purse snatcher, and had never so much as carried a gun, much less fired one outside the range.)
A young woman, dressed in a puffy black coat, spangly top, tight black pants, and shoes with nothing resembling any sort of proper structural support, sniffled and wiped at the mascara now running down her cheeks. An old woman in the sort of clothes she’d probably wear to church, her dark skin faded and mellowed to cafe au lait with age, made her way unsteadily across the car to offer the young woman a handkerchief.
Trip took a few deep breaths, feeling his heart rattle his ribcage, and began to think.
“We’ll be outta here in no time,” I’m A Cop said, reaching up to pull the emergency knob that would trigger the manual release on the doors on the side of the car, just like the colorful emergency diagrams had told him to do on a thousand prior train rides. He pulled the knob again. And again.
“Okay,” he said, “everyone just be cool. You on the floor, you okay?”
Trip nodded. “I’m good. Listen, I think that--”
“Can you try that door there?” the cop said, pointing to the door at the end of the car, labeled with EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY signs that the transients and panhandlers who periodically weaved through the cars each day made a point to ignore. “I’m gonna try the one up front.”
“Sure, but I think the crash might have--”
“Great,” the cop said, and hustled up the aisle, pausing to check on the young and old women sitting together by the window. “You two all right?”
The young woman blew her nose into the old woman’s handkerchief; the old woman nodded calmly, like someone who’d seen much worse, and patted the young woman reassuringly on the shoulder. “It’ll be all right, honey,” she said; Trip only half-heard it as he jiggled the handle of the rear door, and found it stuck, and wondered whether she’d said to to the girl or the cop.
In the weird glare of the emergency lights, Trip caught his reflection in the glass, all slabs of light and pools of shadow, and started for a minute, his mind overlaying his own face with that of his grandfather. The family had always said they were practically clones; same gangly build, same straight, floppy hair; same angular, earnest features. Trip had always liked the notion that he was going about the world wearing a face passed down from a loved one, and he thought again of the still wax puppet in the coffin to whom he had supposedly been related. From the opposite end of the car, he heard a handle jiggle, then rattle, and then a curse as the cop kicked at the door.
“All right,” the cop said, heading back down the aisle, “let’s just be cool. I’m sure somebody’s coming for us. Anybody got a cell phone?”
“I tried,” the girl said from behind raccoon eyes. She held up a silver wisp of a phone. “There’s no signal down here.”
The cop let out a long breath through pursed lips, hands bunching on the close-cropped hair on the back of his head. “All right, let’s just think. We could smash out the windows. Does anyone have, like, a heavy object?”
Trip had an idea, and began rummaging in his backpack. The cigar box rattled invitingly as he poked around inside, but it could wait. He came up with a swiss army knife, and carefully folded out the screwdriver attachment.
“Hey!” the cop said, as Trip began loosening the screws at the top of the silver pole that ran vertically from the roof to the floor of the car, in the middle of the space left empty for the unfortunate riders who couldn’t squeeze into a seat. “Hey! That’s public property! What are you doing?”
“It’s OK,” Trip said as he finished one screw and moved on to the other. “I think I have a way to get us out. Give me a hand with this?”
The cop made his way uneasily over, and Trip handed him the loose screw. “I think whatever we hit slightly warped the frame of the car,” Trip said. “That’s probably why the doors were stuck.” Having finished with the top of the pole, he dropped to his knees and began unscrewing the bottom. “We can get the side ones open, I think. Just need a little leverage. There. Now pull hard, with me, on three.”
Trip counted to three, and they both yanked hard on the steel pole, and managed to pop it from its housings.
“So what are you?” the cop said. “Like, that guy on TV who makes bombs out of candy bars?”
“Nah,” Trip said. “I just build stuff. I’m Trip.”
“Brian,” the cop said. “Hi.”
“I’m Jenna,” the girl in the back said, appropos of nothing, and Trip smiled and waved at her absentmindedly. She was, some part of his brain noticed, the sort of ridiculously cute girl who never even talked to him outside of potentially life-threatening situations. Of which this was approximately his first, so perhaps, he thought, he should endanger himself more often.
“Muriel,” said the old woman. “Y’all need a hand with that?”
“I think we’re good, ma’am,” Trip said, then turned to Brian and hefted the steel pole. “OK, help me get this wedged in the door.”
It took them a few tries, but together, they managed to get the tip of the pole into the narrow, rubber-flapped gap of the door.
“This totally reminds me of something,” Brian the cop said, suppressing a snicker. Trip shook his head, hair flopping from side to said, and looked at him quizzically. “Never mind,” Brian said. “So what do we do now?”
“Muriel, ma’am?” Trip called to the middle of the car. “We could use your help now. Can you pull the release knob?”
The old lady made her way slowly up the aisle, trailed by Jenna, the young woman walking unsteadily on the tall, skinny heels of her shoes. Muriel reached up into the recess at the top of the doorway, on tiptoes in her flat, squarish shoes, and pulled the knob down.
“Okay,” Trip said. “Brian, Jenna, give me a hand with this. We’re gonna try to lever the door open.”
It took them a few minutes of diligent tugging, until their faces were red and their muscles ached, but at last the doors shrieked and groaned and slid open wide enough to permit passage to the cool, clammy subway tunnel outside.
“Woo!” Jenna cheered, and Brian whooped in triumph. Trip wiped sweat from his brow and grinned.
“Give me a place to stand,” he said to himself, “and I will move the world.”
“Archimedes?” Muriel said, smiling gently.
“Ten points to Muriel,” Trip nodded. “Are you a teacher?”
The old woman shrugged. “I read a lot.”
“Okay, everyone out,” Brian boomed. “Come on, let’s go. Stick to the walls, and watch the third rail.” He wasn’t entirely sure which one was the third rail, but he figured avoiding them all would be a safe policy.
Trip quickly shouldered his backpack -- in an emergency, he supposed, the suitcase he’d had with him could wait for rescue -- and squeezed through the gap in the doors onto the narrow concrete walkway, then helped Muriel and Jenna through. Brian followed, still gripping the slightly crimped steel pole. “Just in case,” he told Trip, who just nodded.
They inched their way along the platform quietly, scuffing shoes echoing in the closeness of the tunnel, lit by the eerie emergency light from within the cars. The train had been nearly empty, this early in the morning, and no one stirred within the cars they passed.
Trip heard the girl, Jenna, behind him, her breathing becoming increasingly ragged. She put out a hand and clutched at the sleeve of Trip’s jacket, and he stopped and turned back to her as Brian and Muriel continued on ahead.
“You all right?” he said, as she continued to gasp, her eyes wide.
“It’s the tunnel,” she said. “I don’t -- I feel like I can’t breathe, it’s so small.”
“Here,” Trip said, slipping a bottle of water from a side pocket of his backpack. He cracked off the cap and gave it to her. “Just shut your eyes and drink it slowly, little sips. We’ll be fine.”
She did just that, taking small sips from the lip of the bottle, smudging it with her lipstick. In the light from the train, Trip could see the glitter on her cheeks. “Where are you from?” he said, conversationally.
“Lincoln Park,” she said, her breathing slowly quieting. “I’m, uh, I’m house-sitting for my sister while I look for a job.”
“Just graduated?” Trip asked, as she handed the water back to him. He screwed back on the cap and stuck it in the pocket on his back.
“Yeah, a few months ago,” she said, then laughed in embarrassment. “I know, who graduates in August? I had a few credits to make up. English major.”
“Want to be a writer?”
“Yeah, totally. Write for a magazine or something. All my friends say I do awesome horoscopes. When were you born?”
“November. The fifth. I’m a Scorpio, right?”
She smiled at him there, in the dim of the tunnel. “Ooh, good sign. Scorpios are all intense and passionate.”
“And also me, apparently,” Trip said, smiling, and got a giggle out of her.
“Hey, hey!” Brian’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “Come on! You’ve gotta see this!”
Trip and Jenna shuffled their way to the front of the train, where Brian and Muriel gazed silently at the front of the train. It had accordioned inward with the force of the impact, but the hulking, carved stone block into which it had smashed showed no cracks or other visible damage.
“Is the driver OK?” Trip asked.
“I dunno,” Brian said. “I think I saw somebody moving in there, but seriously, they’re gonna need the jaws of life to get him out.”
“Hey,” Jenna piped up, “did the crash bust that hole in the wall?”
As the four of them squinted in the gloom, they began to make out the outlines of a rough-edged hole in the concrete wall on the opposite side of the tunnel, next to the strange stone block. It seemed to slope down into an engulfing darkness.
“I don’t think so,” Trip said. “There’s no debris or anything big enough to--”
The tunnel came alive with the sound of stone grinding on stone. Jenna shrieked and grabbed reflexively at Trip’s arm.
“Where did that come from?” Brian said, hefting the steel pole, his head swiveling from side to side, eyes wide.
“From that,” Muriel said quietly, and pointed to the stone block. It was moving.
Now better adjusted to the darkness, Trip could see the strange geometric carvings that covered every surface of the stone block -- not the harsh angles of the Aztecs, but something a lot like it. The grinding sound continued, and the block seemed to get taller. It unfolded arms and straightened legs, and Trip realized it was a statue in the rough shape of a man, about nine feet fall. Solid stone, and yet -- its head swiveled slowly towards the four of them as they unconsciously flattened themselves against the wall of the tunnel.
Red eyes glowed like coals in its head, casting a strange radiance across its carved stone features and the black, open hole of its mouth.
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” it rumbled from somewhere deep within, like a quarry shifting in its sleep. “Ku va tirim Kroatoan.”
“What the hell--?” Brian said, and raised the steel pole. “Hey!” he shouted to the thing, waving the pole from side to side. “Get away from us!”
“Brian--” Trip began. The thing tilted its head slightly, and its eyes glowed even brighter, and then the pole glowed white-hot and burst into vapor. Brian howled, the sleeve of his jacket aflame, the flesh on his palm still sizzling from the burn, and toppled sideways onto the concrete.
Jenna shrieked and turned to run, stumbling on her heels and falling onto the plaform. It saved her life; the thing’s eyes glowed again, and a red line of molten concrete streaked across the tunnel wall at the former level of the girl’s head.
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the stone statue said again, shifting its gaze now to look at Trip. He risked a glance to his left; Muriel was crouched next to Brian, using her tweed jacket to beat out the flames on his arm as he grimaced and writhed. Slowly, keeping his eyes on the statue, Trip extended a hand to Jenna as she lay, whimpering softly, on the platform.
“Just... stay... still,” he told her. “Don’t move.”
Keeping his hands low by his sides, he slowly stepped forward onto the tracks. The thing stood near the center of the tracks, about a foot from the white-capped, raised third rail, and its glowing red eyes tracked Trip as he slowly circled it, drawing its attention away from the people huddled by the wall.
“What are you?” Trip said softly, as amazed as he was knee-knockingly terrified. “You look like stone, but--”
Veins of red light slowly emerged and began to pulse softly along the body of the statue, illuminating its squarish, bulky dimensions.
“Whoa,” Trip said softly, stealing one hand inch by inch back toward the side pocket of his pack. Toward the bottle of water. “Definitely not stone.” He glanced over at the side of the tracks, at the recess against the tunnel wall beneath the lip of the raised platform.
“Okay,” Trip said, “so you recognize tones of voice, and aggressive behavior. And you’re not attacking me, right? Because I’m not doing anything. I’m just talking.”
“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the thing said, cocking its head slightly.
“You’re... you’re some kind of sentinel, maybe,” Trip said. “Like a security guard or something.” He slowly, slowly, unscrewed the cap on the water bottle. “But for what? What are you guarding? There’s nothing down here.”
“Irik ku--” the thing began again and Trip hurled the open water bottle underhanded toward its square stone bulk, and dove sideways and down toward the recess by the tracks. He landed hard, the breath rattling its way out of him, and a lot of things happened at once. The wood on the tracks where he’d just been standing burst into blue-white flame, and the metal tracks nearby glowed yellow-orange and began to sag and melt. The water splashed full against the stone guard, and against the third rail, and electricity surged and sizzled in blinding sparks up the sodden body of the creature. It screamed geologically, and the red veins of light on its body burst into flame.
The stone creature’s arms waved wildly, trailing afterimages of white fire, and flames boiled up out of its eyes. Then, suddenly as the fire had begun, it died out. The stone sentinel, now completely dark, toppled smoking to the tracks with a heavy crunch.
“I’m sorry,” Trip said to its hissing remains, and meant it.
***
Dawn was breaking, and on the street outside the subway station, activity was winding down. The ambulance had long since taken Brian to the hospital, and the transit guys were still down in the tunnel, sawing at the cars, freeing the remaining passengers and seeing to the injured. (Trip had asked the guy who looked like he was in charge to get his suitcase out as the transit team headed down into the station and the guy had just given him a look.) A few cabs and cars passed, and one guy on a bicycle, gawking, but the streets were still mostly empty at this hour.
The police detective had folded up his notebook from taking Trip’s statement, sighed, and shook his head. “Still too damn early for this sort of thing,” he’d said, and gone to the Starbucks across the street for coffee. That left Trip with Jenna and Muriel, the latter of whom had managed to find a Sun-Times in a vending machine and was reading the comics, chuckling softly to herself.
“You all right?” Trip asked Jenna, and she smiled up at him from her seat on the curb.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That was so amazing. I thought we were going to die. What was that thing?”
Trip shrugged and sat down next to her. Her hair was a mess, plastered in thick strands against her forehead. Trip liked it. He liked just about everything about her, except maybe her shoes. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looked Aztec or something, maybe, but I haven’t heard of anything--”
Jenna’s pocket began to sing I’m Walking on Sunshine, tinnily, and she reached in and pulled out her phone. “Oh my God!” she said to the voice on the other end. “Oh, sweetie, it’s so good to hear your voice. You’re never going to believe this. I totally almost died.” And just like that, Trip knew his brief and shining window of visibility had passed, and he was once more, and forever, beneath the her notice.
“Walk me to the next block over?” Muriel said to Trip, folding up her newspaper with a knowing grin. “I know I’m not a blonde in one of them short litttle skirts, but...”
“Uh... sure, ma’am,” Trip said. “My pleasure.” They began to walk, Trip taking small steps to keep pace with the old woman. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”
“The police let me call my friend Mary Jean. She’s gonna be by to pick me up in a few minutes,” Muriel replied. They rounded the corner and passed a bakery, its windows darkened like all the other shops on the street. The city waited in the dawn light, a breath away from coming alive.
“You’re a remarkable young man,” Muriel said, smiling up at him.
“You’re not so bad yourself, ma’am,” Trip replied, rubbing his bruised left arm. “You did a good job with Brian’s arm.”
“Used to be a nurse, back in the war,” Muriel said proudly. “Never forgot the training, I guess.” Trip noticed, for the first time, the small silver glimmer on the lapel of her tweed coat.
“Is that -- what, a pin?” Trip asked, and Muriel nodded.
“A needle,” she said, taking hold of it by the eye and drawing it out of her lapel. “Kind of a badge of honor, really. So’s I don’t forget.”
And then she stabbed him in the side of the neck with it.
“Ow!” Trip shouted, stumbling back, hand clapped to the sudden stinging on his neck. He felt a bead of blood form wet against his palm. “Why did you do that?”
“Had to be sure it was you,” Muriel said, casually wiping traces of Trip’s blood from the tip of the pin with a white linen handkerchief. “Thomas Morrow the third, grandson of the one and only, the great man himself.”
“Great man?” Trip sputtered. His legs felt wrong, rubbery, and a hot prickling was beginning to crawl up the base of his neck. “He did forty years behind a desk at Bell Labs!”
“Is that what he did?” Muriel asked, bemusedly. Trip’s world was beginning to spin slowly, and he realized he very much wanted to close his eyes. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You seem like a nice boy and all, and if it was up to me, I’d let you live. But Stitch says you might try to get things all unfixed again, like the bad old days, and we’ve got a big enough mess to deal with as is.”
“What--” Tom said, his lips beginning to turn to disobedient mush. “What did you do to me?”
“You just lie down, Trip Morrow,” Muriel said. “Lie down and go to sleep, and I promise it won’t hurt you none. You won’t even feel it.”
Trip stumbled away from her, ran on blind rubbery legs. The world was canting wildly, and he fell over, tumbling, and lay in the middle of the street. And the last thing he saw before his vision went black was the blurry shape of a taxicab, hurtling toward him, horn blaring, and sure to run him over.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
The Vanishing Skyscraper
It was 20 stories tall, solid steel frame clad in concrete, and the man in the glass box had promised to make it vanish.
That’s why the people had turned out in throngs, even at nearly 4 a.m. on this bone-cold November morning, when the fine, barely palpable wetness of the air seeped through the thickest coats into your marrow. They lined the opposite side of the river that cut through the city, jostling and hugging themselves and stamping feet against the cold, and followed the spotlights that cut through the predawn sky and illuminated the Riverside Tower. They were waiting for it to disappear.
Forty years ago, the Riverside Tower was hailed as the latest wave in truly mod living. Now it was a weirdly angled, moderately beloved eyesore, its cheaply built interiors at least a decade past their prime. The new property owners hungered to tear it down and build newer, shinier, even more exclusive condos in its place.
They’d already cleaned out the area around it, fencing it off and parking the bulldozers and steam shovels. But a phone call from Los Angeles, a few hundred thousand dollars, and the promise of truly outstanding promotional opportunities stayed their hands, at least for a week. Because OMG wanted to use it for his latest trick.
The news crews waited at the back of the crowd, cameramen shivering and drinking coffee, on-air talent savoring the opportunity to be imperfect and human -- at least aside from their hairstyles -- before the red eye of the camera opened on them once again. The Channel 9 guy, a third-stringer fresh from Akron, tried to chat up a young woman waiting disinterestedly at the back of the crowd in fishnet stockings, and got shot down so epically that he might as well have actually been on fire. The news crews waited because there was no news. Just the Riverside Tower, still very much visible, and the live feed coming from the Jumbotrons set up on either side of the crowd, showing the bald man in the box.
OMG must have been a magician, the joke went, because he’d come out of nowhere. Young guy, good looks, spooky intense eyes, and that signature indigo scarf that was starting to get writeups in the fashion magazines. He didn’t give interviews, he didn’t do publicity; he just did magic. On the street, in train stations, in hotel lobbies. He made hats and gloves vanish and reappear all the way across the room, without moving. He made decks of cards sprout like flowers from purses and briefcases he’d never touched. He nodded intently at fortune cookies, and the messages inside became personalized for their owners.
And like magic, he was on magazine covers, TV specials, the sides of buses. He was the calm center of a publicity hurricane, coordinating whole storm systems of publicists and flacks to do his talking to the media for him. He just hung back and preserved the mystery, and people loved it.
OMG had 100,243 MySpace friends and climbing.
Riverside Towers was his latest feat. Last week, just before he’d entered the building and sealed himself in the six-foot-by-six-foot glass box in what had once been its penthouse -- all on video, all broadcast 24/7 on the Internet and the Jumbotron screens for even the sweatiest, least-otherwise-occupied basement-dwelling nerds to squint at and scrutinize, in silent hopes that they’d be the ones to spot the trick -- he’d promised to make it disappear after a week of intense fasting and meditation. Well, the press release had said that. He’d just mumbled something quietly, smiled, nodded, and had the workmen seal him in and drill the airholes.
For days now, he’d been up there in the lonely concrete tower, in the exact same spot in one corner of the glass cube, like a modern art project. Not moving, not eating, not visibly sleeping, not relieving himself, even. They hadn’t even put in a bucket. His head would move every now and then, and his hands and feet would shift in random and barely perceptible ways, and even the Internerds, through the grainy wash of streaming video, could see the steady rise and fall of his shoulders that showed he was breathing.
People had tried to break into the building, of course. To prove it was all a trick, to tap on the glass box, or just to wave to the cameras and feel million invisible eyes on them, warm like sunlight. But fame had given OMG resources, and between the phalanx of off-duty members of Chicago’s Finest -- well-fed and better paid -- and his small army of private security men, each with biceps the size of small bowling balls, no one hopped the fence and crossed the no-man’s-land of dirt to the concrete tower beyond.
So the people waited, some jeering, some snickering, but all secretly hoping to see something amazing. To see the building crack off its foundation and fly brick by brick into the air; to see it shimmer and vanish; to see an indisputably solid and tangible thing enter the realm of the unreal.
A woman in the crowd saw it first -- a junior consultant and A&A, out late and growing sober after a long night’s drinking with clients, drawn to the lights and crowd when she should have been home in bed -- pointing to the video screens.
OMG’s head had lifted. Within the glass box, he slowly nodded. And smiled.
The camera guy from Channel 9 was the lucky one; he happened to have his camera on, getting B-roll footage of the crowd and the building, and he got it all. The explosions began at the foundation of the Riverside Towers and moved up, smoke and concrete bits and roiling clouds of dust billowing outward level by level. The video screens cut out, flaring white static that lit up the faces of the crowd. The building swayed drunkenly and fell in on itself like a bad souffle, and dust billowed out across the river like some searching tendril.
No one was looking east, to the lake. No one saw a brief flash in midair, a strobing flicker like lightning, a reflection off something immense and silver. Everyone was watching the building die.
The cops on guard around the perimeter of the fence, who had no idea this would happen at all, much less at this particular moment, were all huddled in the cars to which they’d hastily scrambled, peering out through the haze of dust. They would later realize exactly why they’d signed those complicated waivers indemnifying themselves against shock, emotional distress, or injury.
On the far side of the river, the crowd screamed, or whooped, or cheered, or something in the middle of the three. They weren’t sure whether or not they’d just seen a man die, but they knew for sure that they’d just seen something huge explode, implode, and collapse, and it plucked some base chord in them that wanted to cheer and ask for more.
The spotlights swept down to the pile of rubble where the building had been, as the cloud of dust and debris finally began to clear. There was a figure standing atop the mass of concrete. People in the crowd squinted, stared through binoculars, tried to cup their hands around their eyes as if it might help them see better. The Internerds, in a thousand dorm rooms and basements and one-bedroom apartments, cursed the inadequacy of their connection speeds.
The dust cleared. OMG, now all but gray with plaster dust, his indigo scarf swung rakishly around his neck and draping down the front of his once-black turtleneck, stood atop the huge, jagged, broken concrete slabs that should have crushed and consumed him. He waved.
The crowd roared. Even the cops cheered. The members of the media among the onlookers began piecing together leads in their mind, dipping into internalized thesauri for words like “stupendous” and “remarkable.” The TV reporters let their minds go blank, and prepared to start speaking.
At the back of the crowd, the woman in fishnets, her lank, dark hair bobbed with razor precision around her angular face, passed a silver dollar coin one-handed back and forth along her knuckles, like her grandfather had taught her, and his grandfather had taught him. She worked for OMG, if only in the sense that when they’d met, he’d been a talented but ambitionless sleight-of-hand man working the Santa Monica pier, and she’d been coming out of grad school with a master’s in media management and absolutely zero luck in the Great Resume Lottery, and she’d needed some project to latch onto if she didn’t want to end up working at the Barnes and Noble like half her classmates.
She’d coordinated the early appearances, got him local TV gigs, put him on the magic circuit. She’d arranged for OMG to just happen to bump into that producer on the street, and get his cell phone -- dead battery and all -- to call the person he’d been thinking of calling without leaving his hip pocket. Abracadabra, they had a national TV deal.
That was the thing about magic. Nobody wanted to know how it was done, really; they came away feeling cheap afterward, and a little guilty. People wanted the illusion, the mystery. No one needed to know that the mysterious OMG was Oscar Myron Gimble, burnout son of wealthy rug importers from Palm Beach. No one wanted to know that he gave no interviews because he rarely had anything worthwhile to say, besides noticing that wow, the sky was so incredibly blue today, or hey, were you going to finish those fries? No one wanted to know that his small army of dedicated and secretly envious accountants had informally calculated that about ten percent of his gross income went to high-quality weed specially imported from Stockholm. The woman in fishnets knew it all, and often quietly wished she didn’t.
She’d been planning this trick for months. Getting the property owners on board was cake; hiring the demolitions experts to prewire the site for demolition, under the guise of a final site inspection, a week before the first press release even dropped was almost as easy. The fake OMG in the box, breathing and twitching animatronically in ways that had to skirt the edges of the Uncanny Valley without falling in, had been a little bit trickier, but she’d called around a year ahead of time and found some mechanical braniac who did rigs for the local haunted houses. She’d had an effects studio in Hollywood digitally scan OMG’s face under the guise of mocap for his upcoming next-gen console game, Feel The Illusion, and sent the data to the braniac . Her assistant said he was a nice guy on the phone, about which she could care less. Three months later she’d opened up a crate to see another OMG sitting inside, breathing quietly on battery power, and most definitely not asking if anyone had any candy bars he could borrow. She liked this one better than the real thing.
After that, it was just a matter of coordinating the split-second signal glitch, mere moments after the workmen had sealed up the box and left the room, from the real OMG in the box to the dummy on a sound stage in a warehouse back in L.A. that exactly replicated the inside of the penthouse, down to the laser-measured inch. The dummy, hooked up to a power source coming up from under the floor, sat there breathing realistically for a solid week, while light sensors wired around the penthouse in Chicago sent data back to the lighting system in the soundstage, replicating the lighting down to the passing shadows of clouds.
Keeping OMG holed up and out of sight had been the toughest part, more in the “keeping him holed up and out of sight” part than the actual logistics. He’d been in a construction trailer on the edge of the condemned property the whole time, a very well-stocked trailer full of his favorite video games and truly amazing leaf and plenty of snacks. And his girlfriend, a very sweet and earnest aspiring model with a great whistling vortex of nothing between her ears, to make sure he didn’t go outside or call for a pizza or anything too terribly stupid. To make sure he was sober and awake and not in the middle of an online deathmatch when the building went, so he could dash off through the dust cloud and climb to the top of the rubble and be there to wave to the crowd.
It cost a pretty penny, sure. But the endorsement deals were already rolling in, and Hollywood would want him for sure after this, and the woman in the fishnets got 10% of everything OMG made, which worked out to a whole hell of a lot of not working at Barnes and Noble. She talked to all the reporters, made all the crucial calls, wrote all the press releases, and no one knew or cared who she was. Exactly as she wanted it.
She also wanted a cigarette, and about a day’s worth of sleep, and a longer skirt, and a heavier coat that went down to her ankles and kept her legs from feeling like ice. But the trick had worked, and the crowd was still buzzing, still cheering, four solid minutes after the building went down, and the thing she’d never admit to anyone was how much she loved to stand at the edge of crowds just like this one and soak that feeling in.
Sully Wells rolled the coin across her knuckles again, smooth and reflexive, and thought about misdirection, and sleight of hand.
Which was kind of inadvertently apt, really, since she and the dozens of other assembled people were staring so intently at the demolished building and the semi-phony magician standing atop it, in the spotlight’s glare, that the men swathed in black silk were able to grab Sully, gag her, and drag her kicking into the back of their van without anyone else even noticing.
That’s why the people had turned out in throngs, even at nearly 4 a.m. on this bone-cold November morning, when the fine, barely palpable wetness of the air seeped through the thickest coats into your marrow. They lined the opposite side of the river that cut through the city, jostling and hugging themselves and stamping feet against the cold, and followed the spotlights that cut through the predawn sky and illuminated the Riverside Tower. They were waiting for it to disappear.
Forty years ago, the Riverside Tower was hailed as the latest wave in truly mod living. Now it was a weirdly angled, moderately beloved eyesore, its cheaply built interiors at least a decade past their prime. The new property owners hungered to tear it down and build newer, shinier, even more exclusive condos in its place.
They’d already cleaned out the area around it, fencing it off and parking the bulldozers and steam shovels. But a phone call from Los Angeles, a few hundred thousand dollars, and the promise of truly outstanding promotional opportunities stayed their hands, at least for a week. Because OMG wanted to use it for his latest trick.
The news crews waited at the back of the crowd, cameramen shivering and drinking coffee, on-air talent savoring the opportunity to be imperfect and human -- at least aside from their hairstyles -- before the red eye of the camera opened on them once again. The Channel 9 guy, a third-stringer fresh from Akron, tried to chat up a young woman waiting disinterestedly at the back of the crowd in fishnet stockings, and got shot down so epically that he might as well have actually been on fire. The news crews waited because there was no news. Just the Riverside Tower, still very much visible, and the live feed coming from the Jumbotrons set up on either side of the crowd, showing the bald man in the box.
OMG must have been a magician, the joke went, because he’d come out of nowhere. Young guy, good looks, spooky intense eyes, and that signature indigo scarf that was starting to get writeups in the fashion magazines. He didn’t give interviews, he didn’t do publicity; he just did magic. On the street, in train stations, in hotel lobbies. He made hats and gloves vanish and reappear all the way across the room, without moving. He made decks of cards sprout like flowers from purses and briefcases he’d never touched. He nodded intently at fortune cookies, and the messages inside became personalized for their owners.
And like magic, he was on magazine covers, TV specials, the sides of buses. He was the calm center of a publicity hurricane, coordinating whole storm systems of publicists and flacks to do his talking to the media for him. He just hung back and preserved the mystery, and people loved it.
OMG had 100,243 MySpace friends and climbing.
Riverside Towers was his latest feat. Last week, just before he’d entered the building and sealed himself in the six-foot-by-six-foot glass box in what had once been its penthouse -- all on video, all broadcast 24/7 on the Internet and the Jumbotron screens for even the sweatiest, least-otherwise-occupied basement-dwelling nerds to squint at and scrutinize, in silent hopes that they’d be the ones to spot the trick -- he’d promised to make it disappear after a week of intense fasting and meditation. Well, the press release had said that. He’d just mumbled something quietly, smiled, nodded, and had the workmen seal him in and drill the airholes.
For days now, he’d been up there in the lonely concrete tower, in the exact same spot in one corner of the glass cube, like a modern art project. Not moving, not eating, not visibly sleeping, not relieving himself, even. They hadn’t even put in a bucket. His head would move every now and then, and his hands and feet would shift in random and barely perceptible ways, and even the Internerds, through the grainy wash of streaming video, could see the steady rise and fall of his shoulders that showed he was breathing.
People had tried to break into the building, of course. To prove it was all a trick, to tap on the glass box, or just to wave to the cameras and feel million invisible eyes on them, warm like sunlight. But fame had given OMG resources, and between the phalanx of off-duty members of Chicago’s Finest -- well-fed and better paid -- and his small army of private security men, each with biceps the size of small bowling balls, no one hopped the fence and crossed the no-man’s-land of dirt to the concrete tower beyond.
So the people waited, some jeering, some snickering, but all secretly hoping to see something amazing. To see the building crack off its foundation and fly brick by brick into the air; to see it shimmer and vanish; to see an indisputably solid and tangible thing enter the realm of the unreal.
A woman in the crowd saw it first -- a junior consultant and A&A, out late and growing sober after a long night’s drinking with clients, drawn to the lights and crowd when she should have been home in bed -- pointing to the video screens.
OMG’s head had lifted. Within the glass box, he slowly nodded. And smiled.
The camera guy from Channel 9 was the lucky one; he happened to have his camera on, getting B-roll footage of the crowd and the building, and he got it all. The explosions began at the foundation of the Riverside Towers and moved up, smoke and concrete bits and roiling clouds of dust billowing outward level by level. The video screens cut out, flaring white static that lit up the faces of the crowd. The building swayed drunkenly and fell in on itself like a bad souffle, and dust billowed out across the river like some searching tendril.
No one was looking east, to the lake. No one saw a brief flash in midair, a strobing flicker like lightning, a reflection off something immense and silver. Everyone was watching the building die.
The cops on guard around the perimeter of the fence, who had no idea this would happen at all, much less at this particular moment, were all huddled in the cars to which they’d hastily scrambled, peering out through the haze of dust. They would later realize exactly why they’d signed those complicated waivers indemnifying themselves against shock, emotional distress, or injury.
On the far side of the river, the crowd screamed, or whooped, or cheered, or something in the middle of the three. They weren’t sure whether or not they’d just seen a man die, but they knew for sure that they’d just seen something huge explode, implode, and collapse, and it plucked some base chord in them that wanted to cheer and ask for more.
The spotlights swept down to the pile of rubble where the building had been, as the cloud of dust and debris finally began to clear. There was a figure standing atop the mass of concrete. People in the crowd squinted, stared through binoculars, tried to cup their hands around their eyes as if it might help them see better. The Internerds, in a thousand dorm rooms and basements and one-bedroom apartments, cursed the inadequacy of their connection speeds.
The dust cleared. OMG, now all but gray with plaster dust, his indigo scarf swung rakishly around his neck and draping down the front of his once-black turtleneck, stood atop the huge, jagged, broken concrete slabs that should have crushed and consumed him. He waved.
The crowd roared. Even the cops cheered. The members of the media among the onlookers began piecing together leads in their mind, dipping into internalized thesauri for words like “stupendous” and “remarkable.” The TV reporters let their minds go blank, and prepared to start speaking.
At the back of the crowd, the woman in fishnets, her lank, dark hair bobbed with razor precision around her angular face, passed a silver dollar coin one-handed back and forth along her knuckles, like her grandfather had taught her, and his grandfather had taught him. She worked for OMG, if only in the sense that when they’d met, he’d been a talented but ambitionless sleight-of-hand man working the Santa Monica pier, and she’d been coming out of grad school with a master’s in media management and absolutely zero luck in the Great Resume Lottery, and she’d needed some project to latch onto if she didn’t want to end up working at the Barnes and Noble like half her classmates.
She’d coordinated the early appearances, got him local TV gigs, put him on the magic circuit. She’d arranged for OMG to just happen to bump into that producer on the street, and get his cell phone -- dead battery and all -- to call the person he’d been thinking of calling without leaving his hip pocket. Abracadabra, they had a national TV deal.
That was the thing about magic. Nobody wanted to know how it was done, really; they came away feeling cheap afterward, and a little guilty. People wanted the illusion, the mystery. No one needed to know that the mysterious OMG was Oscar Myron Gimble, burnout son of wealthy rug importers from Palm Beach. No one wanted to know that he gave no interviews because he rarely had anything worthwhile to say, besides noticing that wow, the sky was so incredibly blue today, or hey, were you going to finish those fries? No one wanted to know that his small army of dedicated and secretly envious accountants had informally calculated that about ten percent of his gross income went to high-quality weed specially imported from Stockholm. The woman in fishnets knew it all, and often quietly wished she didn’t.
She’d been planning this trick for months. Getting the property owners on board was cake; hiring the demolitions experts to prewire the site for demolition, under the guise of a final site inspection, a week before the first press release even dropped was almost as easy. The fake OMG in the box, breathing and twitching animatronically in ways that had to skirt the edges of the Uncanny Valley without falling in, had been a little bit trickier, but she’d called around a year ahead of time and found some mechanical braniac who did rigs for the local haunted houses. She’d had an effects studio in Hollywood digitally scan OMG’s face under the guise of mocap for his upcoming next-gen console game, Feel The Illusion, and sent the data to the braniac . Her assistant said he was a nice guy on the phone, about which she could care less. Three months later she’d opened up a crate to see another OMG sitting inside, breathing quietly on battery power, and most definitely not asking if anyone had any candy bars he could borrow. She liked this one better than the real thing.
After that, it was just a matter of coordinating the split-second signal glitch, mere moments after the workmen had sealed up the box and left the room, from the real OMG in the box to the dummy on a sound stage in a warehouse back in L.A. that exactly replicated the inside of the penthouse, down to the laser-measured inch. The dummy, hooked up to a power source coming up from under the floor, sat there breathing realistically for a solid week, while light sensors wired around the penthouse in Chicago sent data back to the lighting system in the soundstage, replicating the lighting down to the passing shadows of clouds.
Keeping OMG holed up and out of sight had been the toughest part, more in the “keeping him holed up and out of sight” part than the actual logistics. He’d been in a construction trailer on the edge of the condemned property the whole time, a very well-stocked trailer full of his favorite video games and truly amazing leaf and plenty of snacks. And his girlfriend, a very sweet and earnest aspiring model with a great whistling vortex of nothing between her ears, to make sure he didn’t go outside or call for a pizza or anything too terribly stupid. To make sure he was sober and awake and not in the middle of an online deathmatch when the building went, so he could dash off through the dust cloud and climb to the top of the rubble and be there to wave to the crowd.
It cost a pretty penny, sure. But the endorsement deals were already rolling in, and Hollywood would want him for sure after this, and the woman in the fishnets got 10% of everything OMG made, which worked out to a whole hell of a lot of not working at Barnes and Noble. She talked to all the reporters, made all the crucial calls, wrote all the press releases, and no one knew or cared who she was. Exactly as she wanted it.
She also wanted a cigarette, and about a day’s worth of sleep, and a longer skirt, and a heavier coat that went down to her ankles and kept her legs from feeling like ice. But the trick had worked, and the crowd was still buzzing, still cheering, four solid minutes after the building went down, and the thing she’d never admit to anyone was how much she loved to stand at the edge of crowds just like this one and soak that feeling in.
Sully Wells rolled the coin across her knuckles again, smooth and reflexive, and thought about misdirection, and sleight of hand.
Which was kind of inadvertently apt, really, since she and the dozens of other assembled people were staring so intently at the demolished building and the semi-phony magician standing atop it, in the spotlight’s glare, that the men swathed in black silk were able to grab Sully, gag her, and drag her kicking into the back of their van without anyone else even noticing.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The Law of the Jungle
“So tell me,” Rafe said through slightly smushed lips as the two muscular goons pinned his skull down against the alcohol-stained wood of the bar. “How exactly did you lose those fingers?”
Leopold “Eight Fingers” Kruczyk finished lighting his cigarette with his silver Zippo and chuckled softly. The flickering flame of the lighter danced in twin reflections in his glasses, as square and opaque as television screens, and cast eerie shadows on the scarred-over nubs where his right ring and pinky fingers had once been.
“An Irishman,” he said in clouds of smoke, sounded out around the cigarette clenched wolfishly in his teeth. His consonants were heavy and curved, like frost-covered plowshares. “Shot them off back in ‘73 -- it is before your time, I understand. Now he is a very dead Irishman.”
The bar had been closed for hours, but upstairs, Rafe could still hear the lively noise and music of the little casino where he had, until recently, been playing a lovely game of Texas Hold ‘Em. His face had been pushed down facing away from the front windows, but from the light beginning to filter in, it must be close to dawn. Understandably, Rafe was in no position to check his watch at the moment.
One of the gorillas shifted his grip on the collar of Rafe’s black pinstripe sportcoat, and he felt thick, calloused knuckles scrape across the back of his linen shirt and the knots of his upper spine. His arms dangled over the end of the bar, and beneath it, out of his captors’ sight, his long, agile fingers probed for any advantage they could find.
Kruczyk plucked the cigarette from his lips and exhaled a long, luxuriant plume of smoke. He scarcely looked the part of a gangster; he wore a cheap polo shirt from some no-name department store and a rumpled gray windbreaker. Rafe had expected Armani, at the very least.
“I understand we have a problem,” Kruczyk said to Rafe. “You play poker upstairs, yes? With my boys. You lose a great deal of money. Now you say you cannot pay.”
“Will not,” Rafe clarified, smiling as best he could under the circumstances. “I can pay just fine. I said I will not.”
Kruczyk gave another one of his short, rattling chuckles, sounding like something loose in a running dishwasher. “I can tell by your accent you are not from here. Perhaps in England, they play poker different. Here in Chicago, I assure you, if you lose, you pay.”
“Had I lost,” Rafe replied, “I’d pay, and pay gladly. Unfortunately, I was cheated.” He grimaced as one of the goons -- he doubted he’d be able to tell them apart even if he could see them clearly; they were an indistinguishable two-man wall of bad suits and questionable choices in jewelry and facial hair -- dug a fat cigar-sized thumb under one of the bones in his shoulder. “By the -- hnnf -- gentleman now attempting to dislocate my shoulder, if I’m not mistaken,” Rafe added, helpfully.
“Forgive Zbigniew,” Kruczyk said. “He is a sensitive man. He takes these things personally.”
“Well, then he should learn to remove the ace from his left sleeve a little less obviously,” Rafe replied.
Kruczyk set down the lighter with a deliberate clunk on the wooden bar and took off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot from too many late nights, saddled with purplish bags; they made a poor contrast with the frizzy wisps of silver hair still clinging to his scalp. He rubbed the calloused thumb and forefinger of his mutilated hand in slow intersecting lines across his eyelids to the bridge of his nose.
“OK,” he said at last. “I understand. You feel you were cheated. You don’t want to pay. Fair enough.” He rummaged around in a pocket of his jacket, as if for car keys or a stick of gum.
“That’s very reasonable of you,” Rafe said, noting that the pressure against his neck and shoulders hadn’t abated any. Under the bar, his fingers found what they were looking for, and closed fast.
Kruczyk removed something from his pocket, something vaguely oblong and pearlescent and gleaming. A handle. His wrist flicked, and a silver blade snicked out from it.
“We take your fingers instead,” Kruczyk sighed.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Rafe said, and brought his arms up, smashing the liquor bottles he’d grabbed beneath the bar directly into the faces of the two men holding him down.
Their grip loosened for only a second, as the shattered glass cut their skin and the alcohol stung their eyes and soaked their shirtfronts, but it was enough. Rafe snatched up Kruczyk’s lighter from the bartop and ducked out of the goons’ grasp, whirling to face the three men, his back now to the front door of the bar.
“I suppose now, you’re going to shoot me,” Rafe said calmly. Indeed, the two alcohol-sodden men brushing broken glass off their faces seemed to have just such an idea in mind.
“Many, many times,” Kruczyk nodded, and smiled unpleasantly with a mouth dotted in gold.
“I figured as much,” Rafe said, flicked the lighter, and tossed it at the nearest of the goons.
The alcohol caught fire immediately, and his shirt and jacket with it. The other one -- they really were a wall of dumb, weren’t they? -- flailed at the fire with his fat ham fists and only managed to ignite himself as well. Rafe turned and ran.
The stupid amateur mistake in a situation like this would be to try the door. It was always locked, always, and jiggling the latch like an idiot only gave the invariably angry people behind you a chance to sort themselves out, catch you up, and proceed with the previously planned vicious beating. Instead, Rafe leaped to a chair, up on a table, and curled himself into a tight ball as he flung himself at the front window.
There was a crash, and a sudden jarring thud rattling through all of Rafe’s bones, and then he was on the sidewalk on a chilly morning, dawn rising over the distant Chicago skyline, breath steaming in the air. In the split-second he had to spare, he took stock of himself. Watch? Yes. Wallet? Yes, with money in, even. Shoes? Yes. Overcoat. Still in the club upstairs, hate to lose it, but it’s not worth a couple of fingers.
Provided he wasn’t killed in the next few minutes, Rafe’s Illegal Gambling In Shady Dens of Iniquity adventure seemed to be shaping up as quite the success.
Rafe scrambled to his feet and ran, followed by the sound of Polish curses that sounded like a burlap sack full of engine parts and rotted cabbage being bashed against a concrete wall. Halfway down the block, he risked a look back. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as he’d decided he’d call them one day in his memoirs, were hauling themselves out through the broken window. Their faces were a lightly blistered red, and much of the fronts of them was still faintly smoking, including their eyebrows and the tips of their mustaches. And, he noticed, they had guns, with silencers on. That part was less than optimal.
Rafe took a quick cut right into an alley. Fire escapes. God bless the lovely Americans -- always plenty of fire escapes. One set on either side of the alley, spidering their way up the weathered brickwork. He scrambled up onto a dumpster, losing a shoe in the process, and leapt for the lowest of the metal platforms. He’d just gotten a foothold on it when there was a little little sound like a cartoon rabbit passing wind, and something incredibly fast whistled past his ear. It took him a second to remember that this was what being shot at sounded like, and indeed, there were the Tweedles, squeezed into the mouth of the alley, guns raised just like in the gangster movies.
Right. No time to go up just the one, so why not the both?
Rafe pushed off and leapt to the fire escape on the opposite side of the alley, then again, and again, bounding his way back and forth, higher and higher, toward the waiting rooftops. One last leap -- sparks bloomed on the metal railing near his hand, hot particles stinging and singing his skin, and a bullet puffed into the brickwork beside him -- and he was up on the roof, in a world of moisture-pluming chimneys and TV aerials and gravel.
He heard the groan of the fire escapes from the gap in the rooftops behind him. The Tweedles, it seemed, were giving chase. Fine, good, he needed the workout. It had been ages since he’d done this properly.
Rafe ran toward the multistory parking garage looming in the distance, vaulting from roof to roof. Running felt good. When he ran, he forgot all about his troubles. Not the two men at his heels bent on ventilating him, of course -- that was a touch too immediate. But the whole messy impending implosion of his trust fund, certainly. The fact that he was still, technically, until the expulsion was finalized, a university exchange student with a whole lot fo failing credits and two -- no, wait, three papers due on which he had not written, had never intended to write, and would indeed never write a word. The endless disappointment of his father and mother, expressed with steadily escalating vitriol in a series of emails, letters, and strident, quickly deleted voice mail messages. And, of course, the whole business about Julia never wanting to see him again, which was entirely understandable, but also the only one of his troubles that Rafe genuinely regretted.
He risked a look back, in mid-leap from a karate studio to an Indian restaurant, and saw the Tweedles still puffing along after him. Persistent fellows, certainly. The parking structure was just ahead, and -- oh, dear -- there was quite a bit more of a gap than he’d expected. He recalled the words of Marcelique, the Le Parkour instructor with whom he’d spent six months training in Paris when he was supposed to be, oh, taking all those far less interesting classes at the Sorbonne.
“When the gap is big,” Marcelique had said one chilly spring morning, gazing philosophically up the hill at the spires of Sacre Coeur, “you just jump a lot more emphatically.”
Not a lot of help, really, that Marcelique.
Rafe ran out of roof and jumped, very emphatically.
His legs squeezed up to his chest, and he threw up his hands, catching hold of the thick concrete partition and swinging himself through it. He ended up wedged painfully between two bloody great SUVs, and had to do a lot of undignified scrabbling to get his feet back on the ground, but hey, nothing broken. From the rooftop he’d just left, the Tweedle’s guns made their helium noises again, and the windshields of the SUVs starred and exploded. That meant it was time to keep running.
For a moment, Rafe thought he was home free. But sound carried well in the echoing concrete of the parking structure, and far below he distinctly hear the sound of a very powerful motor roaring into the garage, and the snap of a yellow caution arm being broken off its hinge by people very much in a hurry. Rafe leaned over the thick metal wire partitions strung between the levels of the garage, looking three levels down, to see a Chevrolet sedan barreling up the ramp. He caught a quick glimpse of a thick hand, missing two fingers, leaning out one open window.
There was another loud bang off to his left, and for a moment, he thought it was more shooting. But not, it was just two men, two very large, very armed, very Polish men, bursting from the door to the garage’s stairwell like frustrated linebackers, and hurtling in Rafe’s direction.
Lacking better options, Rafe squeezed himself into the gap between the levels, wedging his feet, knees, and elbows against the opposite slanting levels of concrete, and climbed for his life. The wires twanged and hummed as he used them to pull himself up, leaping for the next level as he reached the top of each. Concrete dust fell in his eyes, powdering the sleeves of his sportcoat, and his arms burned from the exertion.
He heard a distant, faint sound over the shouts below him and the steadily rising roar of the approaching motor. A rocking, soothing clacking sound. Oh, he couldn’t be that lucky.
Yes. There were El tracks on the far side of the garage, just outside the walls. Two more levels and he might -- might -- be high enough to make it. The train’s horn sounded, getting closer. Rafe climbed.
He squeezed himself out of the gap between levels, two floors higher, as the Chevrolet sedan roared around the turn at the far end of the garage. It showed no signs of slowing down; if anything, the driver had been told to accelerate. Outside, the ratcheting of train wheels grew louder, nearly deafening. Rafe sprinted out from one pair of parked cars, across the empty aisle -- the Chevrolet passed so close, he could feel it fluttered the hem of his jacket -- squeezed between a Camry and an Accord, leapt up in a crouch to pause for a moment on the ledge--
He jumped, arms and legs flailing long-jumper style, and smacked painfully down on the roof of a passing Brown Line train. He slid -- ouch ouch ouch -- across the bumpy, corrugated top of the train, limbs waving wildly for purchase, and managed to stop himself just before the point at which he would have fallen off the other side to his death below. Good place to stop, really.
Exhausted, lungs burning, chest heaving, he raised himself up on adrenalin-shaking arms and saw tiny, angry Polish men shouting inaudible, angry Polish things from the rapidly receding parking garage. He rolled over at his back, grinning at the pinkish-blue dawning sky. It felt damned good to be alive.
Reginald “Rafe” Windham greeted the day with an impromptu yawp of primal triumph. Law of the jungle, and all that.
One very well-timed descent from the train roof, a few dirty looks from transit police and bleary-eyed commuters, and a station change at Belmont later, Rafe was dragging himself up the steps to the condo he’d rented in Wrigleyville. Well, rented insofar as the landlord expected rent to be paid, and boy, wouldn’t he be surprised this month. Long after Rafe was back in England, thank goodness, being yelled at, for a change, in proper English accents by people mostly related to him.
He was tired. Everything hurt, and his earlier euphoria was giving way, as it always did, to the reminder that he hadn’t slept for a good twenty-four hours now, and he’d probably pulled at least half the muscles in his body, and his legs were reaching the point where they were just going to stop working until they got some rest. He took a few tries getting the key into the lock, but at last, the door opened, and he stumbled into the foyer of the condo, stripping off his coat. He looked at himself in the mirror; tousled dark hair, stubbly chin, dark circles developing under his eyes. Still, all in all, a handsome devil, if he did say so himself.
“Oh, good,” said a voice from the living room, where the windows opened up onto a terrace overlooking Wrigley Field. “You’re back.” It was a crisp voice, a very English voice, and Rafe felt instinctively nervous. And then he actually saw the speaker.
He was brown as mahogany, his eyes very white, wearing a leather loincloth and bindings around his wrists and ankles. A necklace made of animal bones dangled and jangled around his neck, and lines of bright, chalky-looking dried paint crisscrossed his chest. His head had been completely shaved, the scalp as deep brown as the rest of him, and he had the muscles of a well-trained athlete. He was sitting on Rafe’s good white leather sofa, reading a copy of The Economist, with a large, unfamiliar. wooden box on the glass coffee table in front of him.
“I hope you don’t mind,” the visitor said, holding up the magazine. “Haven’t had a chance to catch up with this one, and there’s a smashing op-ed piece on Anglo-Sino relations. Really cracking stuff.”
“Not to be rude,” Rafe said -- he was too tired for anything but courtesy -- “but what the devil are you doing in my house?”
“Ah,” the painted warrior noted, animal bones rattling as he nodded slightly. “You know, I wasn’t sure I had the address right, in which case, apologies are due. You’re Reginald Windham, alias Rafe, correct?”
“Correct,” Rafe said slowly, wondering where the men with television cameras were.
“Son of Harrison Simon Windham, grandson of Harker Windham, of Windham Hall, Devonshire?” Rafe nodded, wary. He very much wanted to sit down.
The painted warrior smiled neatly, cheerily, and began to briskly open the box before him. “Well, that seems entirely in order, so I suppose we can begin,” he said. He withdrew two immense, gleaming black stone blades, stood up from the couch, and dropped into a fighting crouch.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he told Rafe. “To the death.”
Leopold “Eight Fingers” Kruczyk finished lighting his cigarette with his silver Zippo and chuckled softly. The flickering flame of the lighter danced in twin reflections in his glasses, as square and opaque as television screens, and cast eerie shadows on the scarred-over nubs where his right ring and pinky fingers had once been.
“An Irishman,” he said in clouds of smoke, sounded out around the cigarette clenched wolfishly in his teeth. His consonants were heavy and curved, like frost-covered plowshares. “Shot them off back in ‘73 -- it is before your time, I understand. Now he is a very dead Irishman.”
The bar had been closed for hours, but upstairs, Rafe could still hear the lively noise and music of the little casino where he had, until recently, been playing a lovely game of Texas Hold ‘Em. His face had been pushed down facing away from the front windows, but from the light beginning to filter in, it must be close to dawn. Understandably, Rafe was in no position to check his watch at the moment.
One of the gorillas shifted his grip on the collar of Rafe’s black pinstripe sportcoat, and he felt thick, calloused knuckles scrape across the back of his linen shirt and the knots of his upper spine. His arms dangled over the end of the bar, and beneath it, out of his captors’ sight, his long, agile fingers probed for any advantage they could find.
Kruczyk plucked the cigarette from his lips and exhaled a long, luxuriant plume of smoke. He scarcely looked the part of a gangster; he wore a cheap polo shirt from some no-name department store and a rumpled gray windbreaker. Rafe had expected Armani, at the very least.
“I understand we have a problem,” Kruczyk said to Rafe. “You play poker upstairs, yes? With my boys. You lose a great deal of money. Now you say you cannot pay.”
“Will not,” Rafe clarified, smiling as best he could under the circumstances. “I can pay just fine. I said I will not.”
Kruczyk gave another one of his short, rattling chuckles, sounding like something loose in a running dishwasher. “I can tell by your accent you are not from here. Perhaps in England, they play poker different. Here in Chicago, I assure you, if you lose, you pay.”
“Had I lost,” Rafe replied, “I’d pay, and pay gladly. Unfortunately, I was cheated.” He grimaced as one of the goons -- he doubted he’d be able to tell them apart even if he could see them clearly; they were an indistinguishable two-man wall of bad suits and questionable choices in jewelry and facial hair -- dug a fat cigar-sized thumb under one of the bones in his shoulder. “By the -- hnnf -- gentleman now attempting to dislocate my shoulder, if I’m not mistaken,” Rafe added, helpfully.
“Forgive Zbigniew,” Kruczyk said. “He is a sensitive man. He takes these things personally.”
“Well, then he should learn to remove the ace from his left sleeve a little less obviously,” Rafe replied.
Kruczyk set down the lighter with a deliberate clunk on the wooden bar and took off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot from too many late nights, saddled with purplish bags; they made a poor contrast with the frizzy wisps of silver hair still clinging to his scalp. He rubbed the calloused thumb and forefinger of his mutilated hand in slow intersecting lines across his eyelids to the bridge of his nose.
“OK,” he said at last. “I understand. You feel you were cheated. You don’t want to pay. Fair enough.” He rummaged around in a pocket of his jacket, as if for car keys or a stick of gum.
“That’s very reasonable of you,” Rafe said, noting that the pressure against his neck and shoulders hadn’t abated any. Under the bar, his fingers found what they were looking for, and closed fast.
Kruczyk removed something from his pocket, something vaguely oblong and pearlescent and gleaming. A handle. His wrist flicked, and a silver blade snicked out from it.
“We take your fingers instead,” Kruczyk sighed.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Rafe said, and brought his arms up, smashing the liquor bottles he’d grabbed beneath the bar directly into the faces of the two men holding him down.
Their grip loosened for only a second, as the shattered glass cut their skin and the alcohol stung their eyes and soaked their shirtfronts, but it was enough. Rafe snatched up Kruczyk’s lighter from the bartop and ducked out of the goons’ grasp, whirling to face the three men, his back now to the front door of the bar.
“I suppose now, you’re going to shoot me,” Rafe said calmly. Indeed, the two alcohol-sodden men brushing broken glass off their faces seemed to have just such an idea in mind.
“Many, many times,” Kruczyk nodded, and smiled unpleasantly with a mouth dotted in gold.
“I figured as much,” Rafe said, flicked the lighter, and tossed it at the nearest of the goons.
The alcohol caught fire immediately, and his shirt and jacket with it. The other one -- they really were a wall of dumb, weren’t they? -- flailed at the fire with his fat ham fists and only managed to ignite himself as well. Rafe turned and ran.
The stupid amateur mistake in a situation like this would be to try the door. It was always locked, always, and jiggling the latch like an idiot only gave the invariably angry people behind you a chance to sort themselves out, catch you up, and proceed with the previously planned vicious beating. Instead, Rafe leaped to a chair, up on a table, and curled himself into a tight ball as he flung himself at the front window.
There was a crash, and a sudden jarring thud rattling through all of Rafe’s bones, and then he was on the sidewalk on a chilly morning, dawn rising over the distant Chicago skyline, breath steaming in the air. In the split-second he had to spare, he took stock of himself. Watch? Yes. Wallet? Yes, with money in, even. Shoes? Yes. Overcoat. Still in the club upstairs, hate to lose it, but it’s not worth a couple of fingers.
Provided he wasn’t killed in the next few minutes, Rafe’s Illegal Gambling In Shady Dens of Iniquity adventure seemed to be shaping up as quite the success.
Rafe scrambled to his feet and ran, followed by the sound of Polish curses that sounded like a burlap sack full of engine parts and rotted cabbage being bashed against a concrete wall. Halfway down the block, he risked a look back. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as he’d decided he’d call them one day in his memoirs, were hauling themselves out through the broken window. Their faces were a lightly blistered red, and much of the fronts of them was still faintly smoking, including their eyebrows and the tips of their mustaches. And, he noticed, they had guns, with silencers on. That part was less than optimal.
Rafe took a quick cut right into an alley. Fire escapes. God bless the lovely Americans -- always plenty of fire escapes. One set on either side of the alley, spidering their way up the weathered brickwork. He scrambled up onto a dumpster, losing a shoe in the process, and leapt for the lowest of the metal platforms. He’d just gotten a foothold on it when there was a little little sound like a cartoon rabbit passing wind, and something incredibly fast whistled past his ear. It took him a second to remember that this was what being shot at sounded like, and indeed, there were the Tweedles, squeezed into the mouth of the alley, guns raised just like in the gangster movies.
Right. No time to go up just the one, so why not the both?
Rafe pushed off and leapt to the fire escape on the opposite side of the alley, then again, and again, bounding his way back and forth, higher and higher, toward the waiting rooftops. One last leap -- sparks bloomed on the metal railing near his hand, hot particles stinging and singing his skin, and a bullet puffed into the brickwork beside him -- and he was up on the roof, in a world of moisture-pluming chimneys and TV aerials and gravel.
He heard the groan of the fire escapes from the gap in the rooftops behind him. The Tweedles, it seemed, were giving chase. Fine, good, he needed the workout. It had been ages since he’d done this properly.
Rafe ran toward the multistory parking garage looming in the distance, vaulting from roof to roof. Running felt good. When he ran, he forgot all about his troubles. Not the two men at his heels bent on ventilating him, of course -- that was a touch too immediate. But the whole messy impending implosion of his trust fund, certainly. The fact that he was still, technically, until the expulsion was finalized, a university exchange student with a whole lot fo failing credits and two -- no, wait, three papers due on which he had not written, had never intended to write, and would indeed never write a word. The endless disappointment of his father and mother, expressed with steadily escalating vitriol in a series of emails, letters, and strident, quickly deleted voice mail messages. And, of course, the whole business about Julia never wanting to see him again, which was entirely understandable, but also the only one of his troubles that Rafe genuinely regretted.
He risked a look back, in mid-leap from a karate studio to an Indian restaurant, and saw the Tweedles still puffing along after him. Persistent fellows, certainly. The parking structure was just ahead, and -- oh, dear -- there was quite a bit more of a gap than he’d expected. He recalled the words of Marcelique, the Le Parkour instructor with whom he’d spent six months training in Paris when he was supposed to be, oh, taking all those far less interesting classes at the Sorbonne.
“When the gap is big,” Marcelique had said one chilly spring morning, gazing philosophically up the hill at the spires of Sacre Coeur, “you just jump a lot more emphatically.”
Not a lot of help, really, that Marcelique.
Rafe ran out of roof and jumped, very emphatically.
His legs squeezed up to his chest, and he threw up his hands, catching hold of the thick concrete partition and swinging himself through it. He ended up wedged painfully between two bloody great SUVs, and had to do a lot of undignified scrabbling to get his feet back on the ground, but hey, nothing broken. From the rooftop he’d just left, the Tweedle’s guns made their helium noises again, and the windshields of the SUVs starred and exploded. That meant it was time to keep running.
For a moment, Rafe thought he was home free. But sound carried well in the echoing concrete of the parking structure, and far below he distinctly hear the sound of a very powerful motor roaring into the garage, and the snap of a yellow caution arm being broken off its hinge by people very much in a hurry. Rafe leaned over the thick metal wire partitions strung between the levels of the garage, looking three levels down, to see a Chevrolet sedan barreling up the ramp. He caught a quick glimpse of a thick hand, missing two fingers, leaning out one open window.
There was another loud bang off to his left, and for a moment, he thought it was more shooting. But not, it was just two men, two very large, very armed, very Polish men, bursting from the door to the garage’s stairwell like frustrated linebackers, and hurtling in Rafe’s direction.
Lacking better options, Rafe squeezed himself into the gap between the levels, wedging his feet, knees, and elbows against the opposite slanting levels of concrete, and climbed for his life. The wires twanged and hummed as he used them to pull himself up, leaping for the next level as he reached the top of each. Concrete dust fell in his eyes, powdering the sleeves of his sportcoat, and his arms burned from the exertion.
He heard a distant, faint sound over the shouts below him and the steadily rising roar of the approaching motor. A rocking, soothing clacking sound. Oh, he couldn’t be that lucky.
Yes. There were El tracks on the far side of the garage, just outside the walls. Two more levels and he might -- might -- be high enough to make it. The train’s horn sounded, getting closer. Rafe climbed.
He squeezed himself out of the gap between levels, two floors higher, as the Chevrolet sedan roared around the turn at the far end of the garage. It showed no signs of slowing down; if anything, the driver had been told to accelerate. Outside, the ratcheting of train wheels grew louder, nearly deafening. Rafe sprinted out from one pair of parked cars, across the empty aisle -- the Chevrolet passed so close, he could feel it fluttered the hem of his jacket -- squeezed between a Camry and an Accord, leapt up in a crouch to pause for a moment on the ledge--
He jumped, arms and legs flailing long-jumper style, and smacked painfully down on the roof of a passing Brown Line train. He slid -- ouch ouch ouch -- across the bumpy, corrugated top of the train, limbs waving wildly for purchase, and managed to stop himself just before the point at which he would have fallen off the other side to his death below. Good place to stop, really.
Exhausted, lungs burning, chest heaving, he raised himself up on adrenalin-shaking arms and saw tiny, angry Polish men shouting inaudible, angry Polish things from the rapidly receding parking garage. He rolled over at his back, grinning at the pinkish-blue dawning sky. It felt damned good to be alive.
Reginald “Rafe” Windham greeted the day with an impromptu yawp of primal triumph. Law of the jungle, and all that.
One very well-timed descent from the train roof, a few dirty looks from transit police and bleary-eyed commuters, and a station change at Belmont later, Rafe was dragging himself up the steps to the condo he’d rented in Wrigleyville. Well, rented insofar as the landlord expected rent to be paid, and boy, wouldn’t he be surprised this month. Long after Rafe was back in England, thank goodness, being yelled at, for a change, in proper English accents by people mostly related to him.
He was tired. Everything hurt, and his earlier euphoria was giving way, as it always did, to the reminder that he hadn’t slept for a good twenty-four hours now, and he’d probably pulled at least half the muscles in his body, and his legs were reaching the point where they were just going to stop working until they got some rest. He took a few tries getting the key into the lock, but at last, the door opened, and he stumbled into the foyer of the condo, stripping off his coat. He looked at himself in the mirror; tousled dark hair, stubbly chin, dark circles developing under his eyes. Still, all in all, a handsome devil, if he did say so himself.
“Oh, good,” said a voice from the living room, where the windows opened up onto a terrace overlooking Wrigley Field. “You’re back.” It was a crisp voice, a very English voice, and Rafe felt instinctively nervous. And then he actually saw the speaker.
He was brown as mahogany, his eyes very white, wearing a leather loincloth and bindings around his wrists and ankles. A necklace made of animal bones dangled and jangled around his neck, and lines of bright, chalky-looking dried paint crisscrossed his chest. His head had been completely shaved, the scalp as deep brown as the rest of him, and he had the muscles of a well-trained athlete. He was sitting on Rafe’s good white leather sofa, reading a copy of The Economist, with a large, unfamiliar. wooden box on the glass coffee table in front of him.
“I hope you don’t mind,” the visitor said, holding up the magazine. “Haven’t had a chance to catch up with this one, and there’s a smashing op-ed piece on Anglo-Sino relations. Really cracking stuff.”
“Not to be rude,” Rafe said -- he was too tired for anything but courtesy -- “but what the devil are you doing in my house?”
“Ah,” the painted warrior noted, animal bones rattling as he nodded slightly. “You know, I wasn’t sure I had the address right, in which case, apologies are due. You’re Reginald Windham, alias Rafe, correct?”
“Correct,” Rafe said slowly, wondering where the men with television cameras were.
“Son of Harrison Simon Windham, grandson of Harker Windham, of Windham Hall, Devonshire?” Rafe nodded, wary. He very much wanted to sit down.
The painted warrior smiled neatly, cheerily, and began to briskly open the box before him. “Well, that seems entirely in order, so I suppose we can begin,” he said. He withdrew two immense, gleaming black stone blades, stood up from the couch, and dropped into a fighting crouch.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he told Rafe. “To the death.”
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