Brawler

by Neil Connelly

  The cameraman got to his knees and his light was doused. And I was about to comply too, exhausted and willing, ready for an end to all this. But some of the guys — maybe a couple of the high rollers, maybe their bodyguards — had other ideas. Their gunshots rang out from the curling stairway, echoed in the central chamber. The police returned fire, and Khajee and I crouched low in the fountain for cover. But then she tugged my hand and said, “Mac. Look!”

  Down the corridor we’d come up earlier, a single glowing light danced in the darkness. Somebody had snapped up one of those lanterns and was fleeing along the dimly lit path, making a break for the cars. Khajee said what I was thinking, “Sunday,” and as one, we got up and raced after him.

  Following the lanterns on the ground, we pursued the fleeing light past the same stores we’d come by earlier, past the humongous extinguished cigarette. But as we neared the abandoned anchor store with its army of mannequins, the lantern we were chasing suddenly paused, a hundred feet ahead of us. Beyond it, strobing red and blue lights flickered, and it was easy to picture police cruisers in the parking lot. That lantern suddenly reversed course, coming right back at us. “Hide!” Khajee whispered. “Into the shadows!”

  We leapt from the illuminated path, got low behind a bench, but before the lantern reached us, it veered to the side and disappeared. I wondered if Sunday had just turned the darn thing off, but Khajee snapped up a lit lantern of her own, and we rushed to the area where we last saw Sunday’s. She located a door, and when she lifted her light it shined on the words, “Staff Only.”

  “Maintenance hallway,” she said. “This runs behind all the stores. There’s got to be an exit. C’mon.”

  Together we charged down a dim concrete hallway, coming quickly to an intersection. It felt like we were in a labyrinth, complete with the threat of a Minotaur. “Which way?” I asked. She shushed me. In the silence, deep down the darkness to our right, we heard mumbling.

  Quiet as we could, we headed in the direction of the voice. There was a loud banging, muffled curses. After a left at the next crossroads, we saw a glow around the bend just ahead. Khajee squeezed my hand, released it, then brought a finger to her lips. She extinguished our lantern, which I thought was pretty smart.

  We crept ahead and peered around the corner. Forty feet ahead of us in the lantern’s shine stood not just Sunday but Grunt, who was slamming his big shoulders into a locked door. They were totally distracted, and we snuck toward them, all but on tiptoes. Grunt battered the door but it didn’t budge. Sunday said, “Enough. Try shooting the damn lock.”

  With this, the two of them stepped back. Grunt yanked a pistol from his beltline and leveled it at the door. The report was loud and sharp, a flashing burst of white and a deafening pop that echoed down the corridor. Khajee gasped. In the silence that followed, Sunday said, “You hear that?”

  He turned toward us, not twenty feet away, and lifted his lamp. The safety of the corner was twenty feet behind us, but we didn’t run for fear of giving ourselves away in the dark.

  Grunt humphed and shrugged his shoulders, lazily lifting his gun in our general direction.

  “No,” Sunday said. “Cops would’ve announced themselves. Could be some of our esteemed guests. Just hang on.” With that, he turned off their lantern, dropping us all into absolute black.

  In the next extended instant, I recognized the lightless void, knew it like a childhood nightmare, and I waited for the phobia that always followed. The terror that would swallow me and whisper in my ear:

  You’re small.

  You’re weak.

  You can’t help.

  But that voice never came. Instead, I was visited by the craziest vision I’d ever had. A prophetic flash that seemed to freeze time, and when I came back, I knew what I had to do.

  Noiselessly, I eased Khajee against one wall, lifted the unlit lantern from her hand, and pressed my back against the cool of the opposite wall, across from her. Ahead of us, Sunday declared, “We know you’re there. I’m guessing you want to get out same as us. Speak up.”

  Khajee and I held our silence, and I could just make out the shush of Sunday’s voice as he whispered something to Grunt. A few heartbeats later, another shot burst the stillness with a pop and a white flash. That tiny flare made my target as I bull-rushed forward, heaving the lantern ahead of me and hollering to Khajee, “Run get help!”

  My aim must’ve been true, because there was a clattering crash and something skittered along the concrete beneath me. Totally blind, I sprinted in behind my projectile, following it like a lead blocker, and I dipped my shoulders and prayed I wouldn’t plow headlong into that door. That night, my prayers were answered.

  When I rammed into Grunt, he was totally unprepared. I knocked the air out of him, and we slammed into the locked door. He pounded my back as we tumbled onto the floor, and I swung a fist up at where I thought his face might be. I connected with something, his thick chin or the side of his skull. One of his massive paws found my head, and he snagged a handful of hair, drove my face sideways into the wall. As he yanked me back for another shot, I spiked an elbow deep into something meaty, maybe his gut. He let loose an “oomf” and released his grip.

  I scrambled to my feet and suddenly light flooded the world. Sunday held up his lantern, and its glow illuminated his shocked face. “Kid?” he said.

  Next to him, Grunt was on one knee, frozen and gawking too. I didn’t know if he was paralyzed for a second by sheer surprise or just trying to gather his breath, but his eyes didn’t even lock with mine. They floated lazily over my shoulder, widened at something.

  I spun to find Khajee, holding the gun in a two-handed grip, aimed squarely at Grunt. To my total surprise, Grunt spoke in a raspy voice, like broken glass. “You sure you know how that thing works, little girl?”

  Unshaken, Khajee took one step closer and tilted her face, sighting an eye along the barrel. “I know which end the bullets come out,” she told him. “And the trigger’s not a mystery.”

  Grunt, still genuflecting, seemed like he was trying to weigh his options, and I decided to narrow them. Pivoting at the hip, I jabbed my leg out and launched my foot forward, driving my heel deep into his jaw. It hurt like hell but his face cracked back. The big man teetered for a moment, wobbled, then collapsed in a heap.

  I turned to Sunday, my fists raised and ready. But he slowly set down the lantern, shook his head, and meekly lifted his palms.

  Khajee said, “Okay. Turns out maybe I was wrong about your front kick.”

  I eased from my fighting stance and asked, “So am I worthy of the Tiger Claw secret now?”

  She smiled, and I had the only answer I needed.

  Over Khajee’s shoulder, voices called out “Police!” from the far end of the maintenance maze. Lights flashed down the hallway, and the sound of boots echoed toward us. I pictured Harrow and her team. Surely they’d been summoned by the gunfire and were racing to save us, not realizing that Khajee and me, we’d already saved ourselves.

  It turns out that crazy vision I had in the dim corridor was my last one ever. After that, my power left me for good. And really, that final time, I didn’t glimpse the actual future. I didn’t see the bond that would form between Khajee and my mom, or all that would come to pass during my days at Fort Indiantown Gap, which Quinlan arranged just like Harrow and I talked about on that third call. Truth be told, I didn’t miss the gift of prophecy. Just like the past isn’t something that can be fixed, the future isn’t something we’re supposed to see. It’s something we’re meant to create, here in this moment, one move at a time.

  What came to me when Khajee and I appeared to be trapped in that maze, the memory I still recall from time to time when things seem hopeless, is this: the presence of some future self, an older Eddie, reaching back to me through the years in that frozen moment. His grizzled face is lined with age, and he settles a thick and calloused hand on my chest as he smiles and says, “Don’t worry. You got this.” In a blink, he
vanishes. I take one steady breath, then another, and in that darkness, I’m not gripped like I’d always been by the fear my father might find me, that I’d forever be nothing more than a slobber-crying failure. Instead, I see then that I’m neither a sheep nor a wolf. Not Brute Boy or Wild Child. Not my father. I’m just me, Eddie MacIntyre. At last, I’m okay with that, and it doesn’t suck to feel that way.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at another powerful book from Neil Connelly, The Miracle Stealer

  I needed to save Daniel. That’s why I made the choices I did. I didn’t need for my dad to come home, and I didn’t need for my mother and me to have some grand reconciliation. I didn’t need the track scholarships I’d turned down or the futures they promised. I didn’t even need Jeff Cedars to fall in love with me a second time. All I needed was for my kid brother to have a normal life, and I believed with all my heart that I knew the way to give it to him. The only problem, as I came to find out, was that just believing something doesn’t make it true.

  Take for example what some believe about the morning that ragged rescue crew pulled baby Daniel from the earth after three days buried alive. I suppose that like most of the planet you watched on TV, saw his body strapped to that board, his cheeks bloodied and his eyes blinking in the day’s first light. You heard the word whispered reverently by every wide-eyed reporter: miracle. Afterward, some people couldn’t get enough of that crazy story. They took it as gospel truth that Daniel died in that hole and came back to life as something more, something better. In no time the tabloids and nutjob websites filled with wild rumors about my brother, about the fire that didn’t burn him and the cripples he cured and the blind whose eyes he opened. But the thing about stories like Daniel’s is that they take on a life of their own. Nobody really knows what happened for sure except the ones who saw it all firsthand, like I did.

  In the hospital, right at the end of the life I used to lead, Leo told me that seeing something happen only makes you an observer. To qualify as a witness, he explained, you have to offer testimony, share your own truth with others. So I’ll tell you all I saw and did, plain as I can, and you’ll decide for yourself just what to believe about the Miracle Boy of Paradise, Pennsylvania. I’ll start with the Saturday night about a year back, a midsummer evening when, if you trust the rumors, my brother Daniel walked across the waters of Paradise Lake to bring a baby girl back from the dead.

  After midnight I was in my bed down in Cabin Two, but I was wide awake, alert, and waiting. I knew from Gayle that Mrs. Abernathy was close. When the screen door of the main house creaked open and snapped shut, I rolled from my bed, knelt by my window, and brushed back the worn curtain. Up the hill and beyond the dark columns of trees, I could see my mother crossing through the yellow porch light and down the stone steps. She led Daniel by the wrist. With his free hand he was rubbing at his eyes.

  Already dressed, I jammed on my sneakers and took off through my living room, out onto my porch, and then up the steep trail, ducking beneath hairy hemlock arms and scraping against the rough bark of pines. By the time I got to the truck, my mother had tossed Daniel into his booster and strapped the seat belt across his chest. I reached for the passenger door handle, but she fisted down the lock. Our eyes met through the window. Daniel, wide-eyed and startled, was wearing the Batman pajamas I’d just bought him for his sixth birthday. He looked tired and confused. My mother straightened and turned the key, causing the engine to sputter to life and the tailpipe to cough smoke. But before she could pull away, I charged right into the headlights and slammed both hands on the hood. We stared at each other through the dirty windshield until her face soured and she cranked down her window. “They called,” she said.

  I looked at Daniel. “Little Man, open that door and hop on out.”

  He glanced toward my mother but otherwise stayed frozen.

  My hands shivered from the engine’s hum. My mother gripped the steering wheel. “The Abernathys are good people,” she said, “and they need our help. Can’t you try to have a little faith?”

  “I got all the faith I need. Faith in Bert and Dr. Ghadari. Mr. Abernathy needs to call the hospital.”

  “You know how they feel after what happened last time. That’s not our decision.”

  “It’s not our decision to keep Daniel safe? Look at your son, Ma.”

  Tears were slipping down his freckled cheeks now, and he was running a hand through his short blond crew cut.

  My mother shook her head. “He’s crying because you upset him. He was fine before you came and got him all riled up. He wants to go and help. It’s a sin not to use the gifts God gives you.”

  I looked at my brother and remembered his fevered face the night Mrs. Bundower died. And when the elders of our church — a pack of four-star loonies — accused him of not praying hard enough after the fish kill that same summer, I was the one who found him alone in his bed, sweaty and trembling as he tried to do the impossible. I leaned my chest down into the grille and locked my knees out behind me, as if I could halt the truck like one of the superheroes in the comic books Daniel loved. “Daniel’s not praying for anybody tonight,” I told my mother.

  Daniel sniffled and wiped tears from his face. “Everybody’s yelling. I was dreaming ’bout a red balloon.”

  “There’s no time for this,” my mother shouted. She shifted into gear and locked eyes with me again. It seemed entirely likely that she might run me down, but I didn’t budge. “Fine,” she finally said, “come with us if you must.”

  I stepped out of the headlights’ shine. Just as I rounded the bumper, the truck surged forward, spitting up rocks and dust. I smacked the rear quarter panel and saw Daniel spin around in the seat, tugging against the restraint. He watched me through the rear window. His freckled cheeks and wet, brown eyes grew smaller and smaller as the truck curved down our driveway. The brakes, long past their prime, whined in protest, and then the headlights swung right onto Roosevelt Road.

  I kicked at the gravel and cursed, then glanced at the crescent moon. It was a fingernail in the cloudless sky, not casting enough light to run by. But I bent quick and tied the laces of my sneakers, pictured the blisters I’d get from jogging without socks, then took off down the trail. Because of the Black Hole, I knew my mother would need to drive south and swing below the dam before heading north again on the far side of the lake. If I made good time running straight north and had a little luck, I might beat her to the Abernathys’.

  And so I ran, down past my log cabin and Cabins Three and Four, then past the brick chimney rising from the charred square of earth where Cabin Five used to be, back before my dad left Paradise behind. I’d jogged the path along the shoreline a thousand times, and my feet were quick to find the safe pace I could travel in the half-light. I focused on planting my feet cleanly on the roots and rocks and pine needles, pumping my arms, breathing easy. In darkness, I passed through the compounds that once belonged to the Marshalls and the Zanines and the MacKenns, all of them gone, and the guest cabins they once rented out now falling apart — shattered windows and cobwebbed porches.

  Back when I was a kid, the lake was crowded with people all summer long. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, every Friday found Roosevelt Road hosting a parade of fathers delivering their families to Paradise in gleaming station wagons. I used to love meeting the guests, making quick friends, showing them around the compound that Dad and I tended as a team. When I was ten, we raked leaves into piles and burned them together, repainted the interiors of the cabins side by side. At twelve, I helped him mow and he taught me the proper use of every tool in his toolbox, one by one. Sure, people called me a tomboy, but that was nothing new for a short-haired girl with a man’s name. By thirteen, I was next to Dad, dipping my chain saw into the trees that dropped in the winter storms. On the night I’m telling you about now, I was nineteen, and by that point, I was taking care of things around the compound pretty much on my own.

  I broke from the forest into the open field of Roosevel
t Park, and the stars spread over the whole dome of the sky, beautiful and bright. With that bit of extra light and a path free of roots and rocks, I sped up to my normal pace and then beyond. As I crossed the grass, I felt that weird tug from the forest above the picnic pavilions. Up that slope are the shale walls stacked by settlers two centuries ago, and the wild apple orchard where Jeff Cedars and I used to take long walks and spend time alone. Beyond that is the fairy fort.

  Midway across the open field I passed the bronze statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who came up with the great idea of building a dam at the southern end of Paradise Valley to create a man-made lake and generate electricity. That was 1932, so most of the people who lived in the low country were happy to take the buyout money, but one family refused. Irene McGinley and her two sons had come from Ireland on a steamer late in the nineteenth century, and to show the good Lord their appreciation for safe passage to the New World, they built a fine church with a steeple next to their home along the banks of the Lackawaxen River. The day the Civilian Conservation Corps finally blocked the flow of the river, Mrs. McGinley lashed herself and her boys to the bell tower of the church and cursed the town as the waters rose and drowned them. So the story goes.

  Decades later, some folks started hearing the church bell late at night, tolling out from under the lake. They claimed it was an omen, that if you heard it, then trouble was coming your way. The mothers of Paradise began warning their children, “Be home by dark, or Mrs. McGinley might call you to her church at the bottom of the lake.” When little Gabriella Abernathy fell through the ice, and just a year later, when Mrs. Abernathy miscarried at the hospital, the curse was clearly at work. Mrs. McGinley was judged responsible for the great ice storm that trashed the whole town and the fire that torched Cabin Five (though there’s at least one thing she can’t take credit for). And later when all the fish died overnight, nearly all the crazies agreed it was due to the old woman’s wrath.