Game of Cages

by Harry Connolly

  I nodded and kept quiet. After a few minutes we came to the gate. Catherine drove by, slowing slightly to allow us to look up the driveway. I didn’t see any cars or guards, but a heavy chain held the two halves of the gate together.

  She drove down the road a ways, turned off her headlights, then did a quick three-point turn. We approached the gate from the other side and stopped at the entrance. “I have a bolt cutter in the back,” she said, reaching for the door.

  “We don’t need it,” I said. I opened the passenger door and closed it as quietly as I could. The chunk sound it made was loud in the thin mountain air.

  If there was an alarm system on the gate, it was hidden. There were no wires, electric trips, or warning signs. I took the ghost knife from my pocket. Holding it felt like holding my own hand.

  I approached the chain snaked through the gate and laid the laminated edge of the ghost knife against it. It cuts ghosts, magic, and dead things. With a quick flick of my wrist, I slid the sheet of paper through the steel, slicing it in half.

  Metal rods extended through the bottom of the gate into a hole in the asphalt. I cut those as well.

  The chain came off in two pieces. They had been wrapped around the gate but not locked together. I hadn’t needed the ghost knife at all.

  I pushed the left gate open, making enough room for the Acura. No klaxons went off, no lights flashed, no Dobermans charged out of the darkness at me.

  We drove up the driveway with our lights off. It was a winding road, dipping and curving around gullies and rock faces. I was glad Catherine had shot down my idea of crossing the estate on foot—it would have taken hours.

  It occurred to me that, if the society wanted to get rid of me, this was the way to do it. Send a woman to pick me up. Dress her in bland, nondescript clothes. Drive all the way into the mountains. If this estate belonged to Annalise or one of the other peers, no one would ever find me.

  I shook that off. A peer could just as easily throttle me in my bed and burn down my apartment. Or pull my head off with their bare hands. They didn’t need to be clever.

  Catherine and I gasped at the same time as a curve in the road revealed a pair of headlights shining from around the next bend. She braked gently. I laid my hand on the door handle in case I needed to bolt from the car.

  “Don’t,” Catherine said. The headlights were not moving toward us. In fact, they weren’t moving at all. We backed up a few yards and turned down an access road I hadn’t noticed. The tires crunched on downed branches and muddy gravel. She drove twenty yards, then shut off the engine. Once the sun rose, anyone on the drive above would be able to spot the car, but I hoped we would be gone by then.

  We shut the doors as quietly as we could. Catherine changed from her office shoes into hiking boots and slung a pack over her shoulder, then followed me back to the driveway. My own black leather low-tops slipped in the mud.

  Once back at the driveway, Catherine laid a long pine branch across the shoulder. She then placed a pinecone in the center of the asphalt.

  With the access road to the car marked, we crept along the shoulder, staying just inside the line of trees. I heard the wind blowing above me, but I was sheltered down in the hills. Unfortunately, we were heading up. My jacket was too thin for December in the mountains, but I’d be okay if I kept dry.

  I reached the edge of the curve. A BMW sat on the shoulder of the road, grille facing me, but the headlights were off. The lights actually came from a second vehicle: a panel truck on its side, the windshield cracked and the low beams shining into the trees across the road. The truck was lit by the headlights of a third car that I couldn’t see from where I stood. I watched for a minute or so, waiting for the drivers to show up. They didn’t.

  Catherine crept up beside me and peered around the trunk of a tree. I wished I knew the hand signals TV commandos use. I leaned close to her and whispered: “Let me check it out. If no one shoots me, you follow.”

  The reflected headlights illuminated Catherine’s face clearly. I saw her nod gratefully.

  I rubbed the tattoos Annalise had put on my chest and forearms, but I couldn’t feel anything. That was how they worked: where the marks covered my skin I was numb, but those marks could bounce bullets.

  It wasn’t much. My neck, my face and head, my back, my legs, and a couple of other places I didn’t like to think about were not bulletproof, but it was more than most people had.

  I darted from one tree to the next. The headlights lit the accident scene pretty well, but anyone who might be standing guard was well hidden. Or there was nothing to guard. To hell with this. I climbed down the embankment and walked along the shoulder.

  The BMW was an xDrive 50i in a lovely burgundy. An X6. It was also empty. The license plate holder showed it belonged to a “luxury” rental agency. Out of habit, I checked the ignition. No keys. The driver’s door was unlocked, though. I had always liked stealing BMWs. They were fun to drive and valuable enough to ship out of the country. That wasn’t my life anymore, of course.

  I jogged toward the toppled panel truck. I was too close to creep around in shadows, and it would have looked suspicious if I’d tried. Instead, I strode directly through the headlights, trying to make my body language say I am a Good Samaritan.

  The truck was lying on the passenger side, with the cab partly blocking the driveway. The mud beside it was smeared with footprints.

  Standing by the roof, I pulled myself up and peered into the open driver’s window. There was blood on the steering wheel and a bloody handprint on the side of the door.

  Then I noticed the front driver’s-side tire. It was dead flat, and there was a finger-poke hole in the metal rim.

  A skid mark stretched from the middle of the road to just a few feet away. Uphill was a long, gentle slope, very unlike the terrain we’d passed on the estate so far. The trees were scant on that part of the hill, and at the far top I could see the lights of a house.

  I walked around the front. There were no dents in the grille, so it was clear there’d been no collision. At the bottom of the truck, I could feel the drive train still giving off heat. Gas dripped out of a small rupture in the plastic gas tank.

  Catherine jogged up beside me. “This accident just happened,” I said.

  “Did you notice the color on the roof?” she asked.

  I followed her around the truck. Now that she’d told me it was there, I saw it immediately—there was a dark circle just under two feet in diameter on the part of the roof next to the ground. I knelt close to it. The blue paint of the truck was nearly black there, although it was difficult to judge color accurately in the moonlight.

  Was this circle fresh paint? I picked up a stick and poked it.

  “Don’t—” Catherine said, but she was too late. One tap against the circle caused the whole area to crumble to dust, leaving a hole in the roof.

  I jumped back, careful not to get any dust on me. “Holy shit,” Catherine said. “What did that?”

  “I was going to ask you,” I said.

  She took a flashlight from her bag and shined it down onto the pile of dust. It looked like fine metal filings. She turned the beam of light into the truck. “I can’t tell what I’m seeing in there.”

  I walked to the back. The third car parked behind it wasn’t a BMW. Something about it caught my attention, but the headlights were bright and I was too focused on the truck to think about it. The truck’s double doors were unlatched. One door hung across the opening. Half of a bakery logo was visible on it. The other door lay open on the uneven ground. It would have been convenient if the headlights of the third car had lit the interior of the truck, but it had been parked at the wrong angle for that.

  Catherine joined me but kept well back from the open door. She knelt and shined her flashlight into the darkness of the truck. Right beside the opening was a car battery. Beyond that, I couldn’t see much detail.

  I didn’t see or hear anything moving inside. I stepped onto the open door. It g
roaned and bent under my weight. I knelt below the other door, not wanting to touch it in case it made more noise, and I crawled inside.

  Catherine followed. Her flashlight illuminated the contents well enough. Beside me was the car battery. Only one lead was still attached.

  At the far end of the truck bed was a Plexiglas cube, three feet on each side. It was still bolted to the floor, which meant it was now midway up the side of the tipped-over truck. There was a broken battery mount on it, and each corner of the cube had a floodlight aimed toward its center. With the battery broken off, presumably by the accident, the lights had gone out.

  “What the hell is this?” Catherine asked. Her voice echoed off the metal panels.

  “A cage,” I said. I remembered something Annalise had once told me: Predators like to be summoned, but they hate to be held in place. I moved closer to it. There was a discolored hole on the “roof” of the cage.

  “Don’t touch that, please,” Catherine said. “I have to breathe the air in here, and I don’t want a lot of plastic dust floating around.”

  “Good idea.”

  “It looks like we’re too late,” she added. “It looks like the owner of this truck won the auction, then had an accident while they were driving away. The battery mount broke, the lights went off, and whatever was inside escaped. Seem right to you?”

  “Sure, except about the accident. That left front tire was shot out. You can see the bullet hole on the metal rim.”

  She nodded. I had the impression I’d passed the first IQ test. “Okay. If the gunfire has already started, then we should gather up what information we have and get out of here. But what do you think about these discolored holes?”

  “I think I don’t want to get in this predator’s way.”

  She handed me the flashlight, then stepped outside. I could hear her texting someone, probably reporting to the society.

  I shone the light around the enclosure. There were small stones at the front of the truck bed. I got down close and saw they weren’t stones at all. I picked one up. It was half a dog biscuit.

  I climbed out of the truck just as Catherine shut off her phone. “Well?”

  “They’ll be on their way as quickly as they can. It’ll take hours, though. Probably not until tomorrow night or later. Did you find anything?”

  “Just this.” I held up the biscuit. She frowned at it.

  “Weird. Do you think they fed a dog to the predator?”

  “What are the odds that this predator eats doggy treats?”

  She gave me a look that told me I’d failed my second test. She held out her hand and I gave her the flashlight. As she stooped below the hanging door to enter the truck again, she said: “No offense, but I’m going to check your work. I’m the investigator here.”

  She was? That was useful information. I’d never met a society investigator before, but I knew they were supposed to look into suspicious situations, file a report, and get out. It was up to the peers—and their wooden men—to do the fighting.

  She was inside the truck for just a minute or two, but it seemed much longer. Someone was going to catch us here if we didn’t move on soon.

  I looked at the third vehicle and stopped short. No wonder it had caught my attention: it was a Maybach Landaulet, roof closed, naturally. Christ. Someone was rolling in the cash.

  Finally, Catherine climbed out of the truck. “I have an idea,” she said. She walked around the truck to the hole in the roof, then began searching the muddy slope. “Look.”

  She pointed to an indentation in the mud. It was perfectly round and flat, as if someone had tamped down the earth with a big soup can. There was another nearby farther up the slope, then another and another. They were spaced out like footprints, and there seemed to be a lot of them.

  “Are there two predators?” I asked.

  “Either that, or it had more than two legs. And look at this.” She shone the flashlight onto a separate set of tracks, this time made by men’s dress shoes. They headed up the small rise and over it, the men chasing the escaped predator.

  “Which way do we go?” I asked. “Do we follow the tracks or continue toward the house?” I nodded up the slope at the house lights.

  “Can the spell you used to cut the chain out front kill a predator?” she asked, her tone making it clear she didn’t have that sort of weapon.

  “It has in the past,” I admitted. To push away the memories that statement churned up, I kept talking. “Whether it will work on this one or not, I don’t know. I don’t even know what we’re facing.”

  “Neither do I,” she said.

  We trudged through the mud after the footprints. At the top of the rise we saw a long, even, tree-lined slope headed downward. And four bodies.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Oh, shit,” Catherine said as she backed away. I moved toward the dead men, more out of a sense of duty than common sense. Apparently, searching the dead wasn’t part of an investigator’s job.

  The three men whose faces I could see—one was facedown in the mud—were Asian, and they were all dressed very well. They wore wool three-quarter-length coats and dark suits. One suit had pinstripes, which was a stylish touch. Their hair was neatly cut, and they were all closely shaved.

  The nearest man had been shot in the side of the head from very close range. Two others farther down the slope had been shot in the chest; they lay on their backs, Glocks in their hands. The fourth man, the one lying facedown, had at least eleven exit wounds in his back and one in his neck. He also held a gun, but the slide was back. His gun was empty.

  There was a little white mark on the side of his face. I crouched down to look at it more closely. It actually looked like the end of a mark, as though someone had rubbed bleach on his face with the pad of a thumb. It ran from his temple down toward his cheek; the rest, however much there was, was covered by mud. I could have seen more if I’d wanted to move the body, but I didn’t.

  He had a wallet bulging in his back pocket. It ruined the line of his suit, so I pulled it out for him and opened it up. It contained American greenbacks along with a number of foreign bills. There was an identity card, but it was written in some kind of kanji and I couldn’t read it. The picture showed a very serious Asian man with a crooked nose but no white mark.

  Damn. Seeing him with his eyes open, even if it was only on a driver’s license or whatever, gave me a chill. Images swirled in my mind—food, laughter, booze pukes, fucking, boredom in line at the bank—all the memories I imagined would make up his life, all reduced to this lump of dead meat on a muddy hillside.

  Catherine was watching me. I held the wallet open to her. “Can you read Japanese, or Thai, or whatever?”

  She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. I closed the wallet and slid it back into the man’s pocket. I didn’t take the money, not even the U.S. bills. I wasn’t going to pick a dead man’s pocket in front of Catherine.

  “Who shot them?” she asked.

  “I think they shot each other,” I answered. “I’m no TV detective, but this dude was shot at close range, and …” I opened the first man’s coat. His weapon was still in the holster. “Yeah, he didn’t even get a chance to draw his gun. Those two were shot from farther away, and they have their guns in their hands.

  “And this bastard is lying here with an empty weapon and a good dozen bullet holes in him. Are there more footprints going down the hill?”

  Catherine went around the bodies. The starlight was pretty dim, but our eyes had adjusted. “Yes,” she said. “But there are fewer of them.”

  “I think Mr. White Smudge here shot the others. The ones who killed him probably stood around what-the-hell-ing for a while, then took off after the predator.”

  “Wouldn’t they want to carry their friends back to the car? Or call the cops?”

  I shook my head. These guys had expensive suits and identical weapons. I figured them for somebody’s hired muscle—a crew. I’d been part of a crew once. We’d d
one everything together, but we hadn’t been friends. Not really.

  I looked at Catherine. “Do you want to turn around?”

  “Let’s keep going,” she said. “We decided to chase the predator, and this doesn’t really change things, does it?” Her arms were still crossed. I didn’t suggest she take one of the dead men’s guns. Her body language made it clear what she thought of the idea. Besides, it hadn’t done them much good. She glanced at White Smudge as though trying to figure out what had turned him on his buddies. Then she looked away.

  We followed the footprints down the hill, through a stand of trees into a meadow. Some of the bark was scorched black as though from a fire. The damage looked months old, though, and the forest was rebounding.

  The weird soup-can footprints didn’t pass through any of the trees. At least, there were no dark circles on the trunks. I wondered why the predator didn’t take shortcuts through them. Were they too thick? Too alive? Something else? I had no idea.

  “Look at this,” Catherine said.

  The soup-can footprints headed straight across open ground, then clustered together as though the creature had turned to face its pursuers. Then the trail split apart.

  One set of prints continued ahead down to the meadow. Another went to the right. A third led off to the left. The shoe prints also split up to follow the three separate trails.

  “It’s not cloning itself, is it?” I asked. Catherine shrugged.

  I followed the trail of prints to the right. After about five feet, they vanished.

  Catherine waved to me. “The prints stop here,” she said. She was standing about ten feet away on the trail that led to the left. A quick check showed the same thing on the center trail. After about five feet, it vanished.

  The shoe prints milled around, then split up and led away in those three different directions. What the hell was going on?

  “Maybe it cloned itself and flew away,” Catherine said.