Game of Cages

by Harry Connolly

  She took a deep breath. “Right. Of course. I knew that.” The Acura reached the bottom of the slope and lost momentum against the next rise. Catherine twisted the wheel so it blocked the road. “I’m sorry. The gunfire has me a little rattled. We run for the gate, don’t we?”

  “I think so. Those guys will be coming up behind us, and the old man ordered the floating storm to kill everyone it found between the house and the fence. Although …”

  “Although what?”

  “He didn’t seem to have complete control over it.”

  She sighed again. “Let me get my jump bag.” She grabbed a small, stuffed duffel bag from the floor behind her and got out of the car. Then she began jogging up the road. I followed her but spared a glance behind us. The two gunmen hadn’t made it over the hill yet. We didn’t sprint because we weren’t sure how far we had to go, but we did hustle.

  “Ray,” she said. She was not breathing hard, but she didn’t look comfortable. “I’m sorry for what I said. You’ve been a solid guy. You didn’t have to come out here to warn me, but if you hadn’t …”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a tremendous sense of relief that I couldn’t really explain. It was hard to admit how much I wanted her acceptance, and through her the acceptance of the society as a whole.

  And that hadn’t been easy for her to say.

  “Too bad you’re a wooden man.”

  “Let’s save our breath, okay?” But I knew what she meant. A wooden man didn’t come with a long life expectancy.

  The treetops cast long shadows across the road. The woods around me seemed to become more clear. My eyes were adjusting, I thought, but something didn’t seem right. The shadows were too sharp. I grabbed Catherine’s sleeve and pulled her to a stop. She cringed just a little, and I let go of her.

  The long, crooked shadows of the trees were slowly moving toward us. I glanced up. Ahead and to the left there was a light in the sky. It was dimmer and smaller than a full moon, but it was growing brighter.

  “Lord above,” Catherine said. “It’s coming right toward us.”

  I heard hissing, like water drops boiling in a skillet. It was, in fact, coming right toward us.

  Catherine bolted for the downhill slope at the edge of the road. The bramble was thick there and the ground uneven. “No!” I shouted. “This way!” I ran back up the road.

  I glanced back once to see that she had followed and that she could keep up. The floating storm passed over the trees onto the road. We ran around the Acura and up the hill.

  “Where are we going?” Catherine called.

  I slowed down to let her get next to me. An old joke popped into my head about running away from a bear, but I didn’t think she’d find it funny. Catherine’s mouth was set in a determined frown, and her forehead was a mass of wrinkles. She already had streaks of sweat down the side of her face.

  Ahead of us, the two gunmen had reached the top of the slope. They had already seen the floating storm, of course. The tall one with the elaborate hair was talking very excitedly on his cell. His partner was short and round, with a Moe Howard haircut that made him seem like comic relief. He didn’t have a fearful expression; he looked like he was seeing the awful end he’d always expected.

  I risked one glance back at the creature behind me. It was traveling along the road now, but I couldn’t tell if it was gaining or not.

  The gunmen glanced at Catherine and me. I could see their indecision.

  “Run for your lives!” I screamed at them, letting my face show some of the terror I was feeling. They shrank away from me, understanding the tone of my voice if not the words. Fear is contagious. The men in the basement had proved that.

  They turned their attention back to the predator. Haircut pulled his cellphone away from his ear and winced as though it had stung him.

  We were fewer than ten yards from them now. I grabbed Catherine’s elbow and shoved her toward a deer path on the side of the road.

  It was a steep drop-off. We hopped partway down the hill until I slipped in the mud and fell, body-sledding into the back of Catherine’s legs and knocking her on top of me.

  We struck a tree trunk at the bottom of a shallow ravine and tumbled into the mud. I jumped up, pulled Catherine to her feet, and followed her up the slope ahead.

  Gunshots. We both stopped at the top of the little slope and looked up at the road.

  The two gunmen were holding their ground, standing in two-handed firing stances: shoulders squared, legs spread, one hand supporting the other. The shots went quickly, popopopop—it takes surprisingly little time to empty a handgun.

  The floating storm was about fifteen yards off the ground and nearly above them. Moe Howard dropped the magazine out of his pistol and slapped in a new one with well-practiced speed. He started shooting again, and I knew he was hitting his target even though I couldn’t see any effect. Haircut didn’t bother to reload. He began to back away.

  Beside me, Catherine said, “Oh, God. No.”

  The floating storm was above Moe now. There was a tremendous flash of reddish light and a thunderclap louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life. A blast of air staggered me. Haircut was close enough to be knocked down. When I blinked away the lights in my eyes, I saw him struggling to his feet, still half stunned.

  The floating storm moved straight toward Haircut. He didn’t have a chance.

  I turned to run and saw Catherine giving me a withering stare of raw hatred. I was startled, but when she took off downhill, I followed.

  We ran, aiming mostly northward because it was downhill. Where the ground was rough, we angled toward one side of the path or the other, trying to keep to flat ground. We also kept to the trees, hoping they would force the predator to stay high and out of range. And the ground was clearest where the trees were thickest. Where they were thin, the way was choked by vines and bramble.

  It stayed on our tail, never getting too close and never falling far behind. Would a ball of churning gas and electricity toy with its prey? I figured not.

  So we ran. The light from the predator cast long shadows ahead of us. Whip-thin tree branches, nearly invisible in the dim electric light, stung my face, neck, and arms. As we topped a ridge and slid down the other side, the light the predator gave off was suddenly blocked. We had to pick our way through the moss-covered branches by touch until the floating storm came close enough to light the way again.

  We were never going to survive this way.

  We came to a little stream—not deep, but the banks on both sides were pretty near vertical and too far to jump. Catherine bolted to the right, running along the gap until she came to a place where the bank on the far side was more gentle.

  She jumped, hitting the ground with a loud whuff. I landed beside her and a little farther up. I grabbed her jacket to help her up the hill, but she shook me off angrily and ran by me. Her breath was coming in labored heaves.

  I glanced down at my shadow and realized how short it had become. I sprinted after Catherine, trying to keep close without passing her.

  I watched her. It was obvious that she was tired, but she never let up the pace. She ran on willpower, hurdling broken branches and exposed roots. It was barely running—more like hopping through an obstacle course. I didn’t think either of us had the stamina to outrun the predator. I glanced back at it again. If it was becoming tired, I didn’t know how I’d tell. At least we were putting a little more distance between it and us.

  Catherine suddenly angled to the right, and I followed. She’d found a footpath that was clear of broken branches, although the moss was still slippery. The wind chilled the sweat on my face. We made better time on the footpath, and the forest grew darker around us.

  “The town is down there,” Catherine wheezed. I looked in the direction she pointed. Through the trees, I could see a cluster of faint, distant lights.

  We could never run that far. We kept running anyway.

  Then we came to the thing I was most afraid of—
the ground dropped away in front of us. We had reached the edge of a fifty-foot cliff.

  At the bottom was a little pine forest, all laid out in perfect rows. A Christmas-tree farm.

  “Shit,” Catherine said. “I can’t run any more. Boy, you said you had a weapon that could kill a predator.”

  “I said maybe. And it won’t work on this one. My spell is made of paper, and that thing is made of lightning. My spell would just burn up.”

  “Are you sure? You won’t even try?”

  Of course I would try—as a last resort. To the left of us, there was a section of cliff that had collapsed, making a very slight slope. A couple of trees grew nearly sideways out of the dirt. “Can you climb down this cliff?”

  The electric hum of the predator was growing louder, and the woods were growing brighter. “Not fast enough,” she answered.

  “I’ll give you time. Get down to the farm. Find something to kill an electricity monster. I’ll lead it to you.”

  She ran to the left. “What if it catches you?”

  I almost answered: Then when it comes for you, I won’t be leading it, but the predator was close and it was time to run.

  I followed the path along the top of the cliff, lengthening my stride to stretch out my legs. I’d already run a couple hundred yards over rough ground, and I didn’t have a lot of gas left in my tank. The predator fell behind, but at least it was chasing me, not Catherine.

  The woods to my right became steeper, sloping higher and higher until it was a wall of ferns and mud above me. If this trail dead-ended, I would be dead-ended, too. I was too damn tired to run uphill.

  A couple of the trees ahead looked strange—too regular, and stripped of their branches. As the floating storm lit the woods around me, I realized they were power poles.

  I picked up the pace. The power line came up the cliff below at a slant, ran along the trail for a few hundred feet, and then continued uphill to the right at a rocky point. The nearest pole on the trail was just ahead. The cliff drop to the left was still steep but looked manageable if I had a little time to work at it. I stepped around the pole and backed away from it, gasping to catch my breath.

  As I’d hoped, the floating storm went for the power line. It moved carefully through the trees, avoiding branches when it could, setting them alight when it couldn’t go around them. It reached the top of the pole and began to draw power slowly, sipping instead of gulping. Blue arcs flashed out of the top of the pole to the predator.

  At the edge of the cliff, the muddy ground beneath me shifted. I fell, sliding with the mud down the slope. I had a sudden image of myself lying at the base of the cliff with a broken back while the predator moved toward me.

  I managed to grab hold of a cluster of woody brush and stop my slide. I struggled to my knees, but the angle of the slope was too steep for me to hold myself in place, so I let go and stretched out flat. I slid slowly down the hill, finding one foothold after another in tree roots, trunks, and clumps of bushes. There were a couple of sketchy moments, but I survived.

  At the bottom of the hill, I scrambled to my feet. The wind was gentle, but it still chilled me. Maybe Catherine was right, but I left my shirt on. I didn’t like throwing away resources.

  I crossed under the power line. The predator was still up there at the top of the cliff, still feeding. It had apparently learned that it could trip the breaker by feeding too fast. I didn’t like that. I wanted it to be like a shark—dangerous but basically stupid. The smarter it was, the harder it would be to kill.

  It looked like it was growing larger. Would it stop hunting me if it fed enough from the power pole? I didn’t know what to do, so I jumped up and down and swung my arms, trying to keep my muscles warm for the next leg of the chase. All I was sure of was that I was giving Catherine extra time to prepare.

  Then I imagined the predator growing large enough to split in two like a dividing cell. That thought scared the hell out of me.

  Five quick cuts with the ghost knife on the nearest power pole made it topple—away from me, thank God—and snapped the power line. The blue arcs stopped popping under the predator. Dinner was over.

  The floating storm didn’t move for a couple of seconds. It bobbed up and down as if it was trying to puzzle out why the juice had stopped. I picked up a rotten hunk of branch and threw it.

  The predator was too far away for me to hit it. The branch landed in the bushes near the base of the electric pole, and a sudden crack of red lightning blasted the ground at that spot. The sound startled and frightened me, and clumps of dirt and burning wood chips showered down over me.

  The floating storm started in my direction. I turned and ran like hell toward the tree farm. The chase was back on.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There were no trees here, and the landscape between me and the tree farm was a wall of bramble and bush. I sprinted around the edges, hopping over downed trees in some places and pushing blindly through tall grass in others. My shadow began to shorten. Then I hit a rocky little stream and ran along it, picking up speed. I knew it was stupid to have my feet in water, but it was the only place I could run.

  The stream disappeared into a drainage pipe. I scrambled up a dirt slope and ran straight into a chain-link fence.

  With my ghost knife, I cut a hole in the chain link and pushed through. My shadow was short—too short. Behind me the creature was humming like a transformer, and I expected to feel lightning any moment. I sprinted out into the neat rows of trees. Flat ground. Hallelujah.

  The old man had ordered the predator to patrol within the iron fence, but the chain link was made of steel. Obviously, he didn’t know that the black iron fence along the road didn’t ring the property. Or he didn’t care. I had a moment’s hope that the floating storm would turn back at the fence anyway, but that didn’t happen. Damn. I kept running.

  The trees themselves were just over two feet tall and offered no cover at all. I was glad. I needed to see.

  My shadow slowly stretched out before me. I saw a small cluster of buildings way off to my right and angled toward them. There was a figure waving a long cloth back and forth over its head. Catherine.

  I tried to put on extra speed, but I didn’t have it. I didn’t look back at the predator. I didn’t need to. I could feel it back there like a high-tension wire, and I was flagging.

  There were three buildings: One was a yellow farmhouse well off to the left. The others were a pair of big wooden barns, both painted red.

  Catherine stopped waving her jacket at me, backed toward the red buildings, and ducked between them, making sure I’d seen where she’d gone. I was not far behind her.

  “Through here!” Her voice came from the darkened doorway on the right. I staggered toward it just as the shadow of the other building swept over me. The floating storm was close behind.

  I rushed into the darkness, barking my shin against something low and wooden. I tumbled onto my face, and the pain in my leg made me curse a blue streak. Something wet sloshed onto my leg.

  The ground was packed earth and smelled of pine needles. I scrambled away from the doorway until I struck my head against something metal.

  The barn lit up with a flickering electric red light.

  I turned around. The floating storm had followed me to the doorway but had stopped at the entrance. It bobbed up and down, as though it didn’t want to enter an enclosed space.

  I glanced around, trying to see what Catherine had planned aside from the water-filled trough across the entrance, but the predator was too bright. I couldn’t see into the shadows cast by the doorway.

  I had not been this close to the floating storm before. It seemed to be swirling and churning from inside, like a sped-up lava lamp. The outside was a bluish-white cloud of brilliant light, but in the spaces where the swirling gases were thin or parted from one another, I could see a dark red color that swirled like blood in oil. In the center of that was a white-hot fire.

  I laid my hand on an old, rusting truck
. Would grounding myself lure it inside? Apparently not. To my left I saw a small pile of wooden disks. I grabbed one. It had been cut from the base of a pine trunk and was still sticky. I threw it at the floating storm like a discus. It struck almost dead center, but nothing came out the other side but a little burp of flames. So much for using my ghost knife.

  “What are you waiting for?” I yelled. “Didn’t the old man order you to kill me? You want to pose for a picture first?”

  There was no way to tell whether it understood. I kept throwing hunks of wood at it. One grazed the bottom edge and landed, burning, on the ground outside. The others never made it all the way through.

  After the sixth piece of wood, it ducked under the lintel and floated into the room. It must have decided I didn’t have anything more dangerous than slices of Christmas trees.

  I took the ghost knife from my pocket.

  The shadows receded as the floating storm entered. Tucked back into the corner on the right, I saw Catherine against the wall. She had a long wooden pole in her hands.

  As the predator moved by her, she dropped the pole and something heavy swung out of the ceiling—chains, it was chains. They fell against the floating storm’s body and splashed into the water.

  What happened next happened without a scream or a moan or any of the sounds you would expect from a living creature. It seemed to bleed light and heat into the hanging chains. The water below boiled. That lasted a few seconds until the creature’s core had deformed into a teardrop shape as the power flowed out of it.

  The glowing chains melted apart and dropped into the boiling trough below.

  The predator flew erratically for a few seconds, seemingly disoriented. It was very much reduced in size, but for a split second I was sure that Catherine’s trap would have killed it if I hadn’t let it drink so much power from the electric lines. My fault, I thought. All my fault.

  Then the water sprinklers turned on.