Hollow

by Lee Doty

  ***

  Chicago, 2119

  “Observe, child.” The cleric at the end of Ash’s couch gestured to the television that Ash had been watching before he’d made his ninja appearance with his odd agenda of solo missions and secrets.

  Ash turned back to the television and settled a little further into the couch.

  As if the cleric had a hidden, or perhaps built-in, remote, the beleaguered cat and sadistic mouse gave way to a peaceful field of flowers. Unlike most transitions when Ash operated her remote, there was no strobe of darkness between two different programs. Instead, there was a slow dissolve of the cartoon programming that then bloomed into a miracle of vibrant color and clarity she’d never seen on her television before. It was as if the cleric’s hidden remote had repaired or enhanced her television somehow, and maybe even her vision.

  On the screen, Ash could see the wind stirring the long grass, see the individual petals of purple wildflowers reacting to the shifting air around them, hazy dandelion seeds seemed to school through the air, their motion revealing the subtle movements of the breeze.

  Then it hit her: this wasn’t an animation. This was a scene so vibrant with detail and life that it could only have been recorded from the Hallow.

  “How?” Ash asked, her voice small.

  “…took its first victim in Virginia in 2020… How? What do you mean, Child?” The cleric interrupted his monologue just as Ash realized he’d been speaking.

  “Sorry,” Ash shook her head, “How did you get this cartoon? Is it the Hallow?”

  “Please, pay attention, Ash.” The cleric’s brow simulated disapproval.

  “Sorry… I actually didn’t hear anything you said. Can you start over?” Ash bit her lip.

  The Cleric was silent for a few seconds, possibly bleeding power away from frustration capacitors before an overload shut down his systems. Finally, like a minimum wage tour director at a run-down chocolate factory, the cleric began his canned speech again.

  “This is the world at the turn of the millennium. This is the world before the war, before the palsy—this is the living world.” He paused for emphasis, “This is the world we are trying to save.”

  “Save?” Ash tore her eyes away from the screen, but the cleric continued as if he hadn’t heard.

  “In 2017, the end began.” The cleric’s eyes shifted to Ash, “After the first regional nuclear exchange, many unstable alliances formed and all sides turned their eyes to a single goal: Finding the next deterrent.”

  “What’s a ‘new clear exchange’?” Ash’s hopes of enlightenment were fading. Again, the cleric continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “The Palsy took its first victim in Virginia in 2020. Our scientists theorized that it escaped from one of the many bio labs of our own government, or perhaps it was released deliberately by a State or their proxy terrorist groups… no one knew.” He paused again, “In five weeks, it no longer mattered.”

  The scene on the television shifted through a quick succession of vistas: patients packed on gurneys and cots in military tents in a hospital parking lot, soldiers in hazmat gear, riots where mobs fought with police and destroyed businesses, bulldozers covering bodies with earth in mass graves hundreds of feet long.

  “Almost everyone who caught it died within weeks, and everyone caught it. By 2021, the world had moved from chaos to the cold peace of a hospice.” On the screen, the scene moved from that of a burning city to an abandoned street, filled with empty cars and bleached bones.

  “Nice turn of phrase, for a machine.” Ash said absently. Again, the cleric continued, as heedless to her commentary as her questions.

  “At the CDC in Atlanta, the scientists who had been working for a cure in isolation finally found a partial solution. They found a way to slow the palsy, found a way to turn its quick death into a process of years, even decades.”

  On the screen, the scene shifted to a hospital with several clerics moving between the beds, administering to patients with the emaciated bodies that Ash saw every day in the mirror. “Now we clerics have two missions: to keep the world’s few survivors alive for as long as possible, and to save the world from the fate that has befallen it.”

  “How can you save a dead world?” Ash asked again, though she didn’t have much hope of an answer, “Are you still looking for the cure?”

  The cleric turned to her, “We are still looking for the cause.”

  “But, I thought you knew what the palsy was…”

  “We’re not looking for what the palsy is, we’re looking for who caused it.”

  “They’re still alive? How could that possibly help…” Ash began.

  “Of course they’re not still alive,” the cleric interrupted, “this is where you come in, Ash. This is the secret that you must understand to complete your next mission. This is the secret that you must know and that we cannot allow you to tell.”

  ***

  Chicago, 2020

  “Gun!” Jo yelled, ducking her head beneath the level of the cab’s rear window.

  Less than a block behind them, a soldier in black fatigues and body armor leaned from the passenger side of the brown panel van and sighted down the barrel of a heavy assault gun. The cab driver—Marko, apparently— immediately swerved into the oncoming lane, then half back into their lane trying to avoid the incoming fire.

  Despite Marko’s best evasive maneuvers, the first three-round burst hit the rear window in a tight, two inch group directly behind the driver’s head. The bullets hit with a single thwack like a whip striking mud. The window held, capturing the bullets in small opaque cataracts that formed around each captured slug. Jo did a double-take at the evening’s newest surprise, then was surprised again as her eyes found Jackie. Unlike Jo, she hadn’t ducked. She was surveying the scene behind them with remarkable dispassion. Her eyes moved in short arcs, her jaw set tight with focus. The fear was no longer visible in her eyes.

  “This happen to you a lot?” Jo asked as she edged up to look over the back seat. Jackie gave her a look, then returned her gaze to the truck behind them just as two more bursts slammed into the rear window… the first hit in a five inch group directly before Jackie’s face, then the second burst hit again behind the driver’s head, further whitening that part of the window, but still not able to breach the glass.

  “Control! This is two-eight. We are being pursued and taking fire! Require air support and a response team ASAP!” Marko shouted into his radio as he jerked the wheel and threw the car into a wide, fishtailing turn down a side street. The car accelerated toward a blinking red light at the next intersection while everyone listened to the regular pattern of static that came from the radio. “Control! Respond! This is two-eight, we are receiving fire and require immediate assistance!” The droning static again filled the car.

  “We’re being jammed, Marko.” Jackie said through tight lips. “You can hear it in the static. We’re on our own.”

  “What about the CAP? Even without the radio, they’ve got to see…” Marko was interrupted by a bloom of white light from above and behind them that caused Jackie to raise a hand to shelter her eyes, then an instant later by an echoing boom like rolling thunder. A block behind them, the top of an eight-level parking structure seemed to explode as a large flaming missile screamed into it from above.

  “What was that?” Marko shouted as the brown van again screeched into view behind them.

  “Was your CAP a reasonably flammable FA-34 whispercraft?” Jo asked.

  Jackie’s mouth dropped open, Marko’s suspicious eyes found Jo in his mirror, neither said anything.

  “If so, that—” Jo hooked a thumb toward the burning wreckage fallen from the damaged parking garage and nodded earnestly, “was your CAP. We’re alone.” Jo turned to the rear window with its view of the burning whispercraft and the persistent and extremely hostile brown panel van. “I’m not sure which is more surprising: that someone just shot down your Combat Air Patrol or that your taxi company has on
e.”

  “You did not just make a joke and giggle.” Jackie said.

  “I’m sure I’m just hallucinating.” Jo giggled harder, bringing her fist to her mouth to try to suppress her sudden mania. “None of this is real.” Something clicked. “Not real.” She repeated, all traces of humor drained from her.

  Connections were forming in her head, but nothing came to the surface to be examined or understood, yet she could hear the clicking, the whirring. She could feel the radiation from hidden meaning crashing into hidden meaning like mysterious particles in her mental supercollider. “Not real.”

  “Jo?” Jackie said, raising her hand between them, concern coloring her voice.

  “The problem isn’t the high velocity shells suspended in your bulletproof glass or the panel van full of Falcons behind us…” Jo began to survey the wider scene, head snapping about as she scanned her surroundings, searching. “The problem is that whatever knocked down your CAP is still up there, and we’re not going to lose it even if you lose that van. Also, my guess is your roof won’t stop the kind of ordinance that can knock down a whispercraft.”

  “Falcons?” Jackie asked, still looking out the rear window.

  Marko made another fishtailing turn and the brown van was again lost to view. “Jo, we’re going to get you out of here. We’re going to make it…”

  “No.” Jo said, eyes settling on the stairs down to the blue line rail station a block ahead, “We’re not.”

  Jackie flinched back at Jo’s statement, eyes widening at some perceived threat that Jo couldn’t begin to guess at.

  “But maybe you will. It’s pretty obvious that these guys are after me…” Jo finished, then she did the stupidest thing she could remember doing—even worse than the wrong bathroom incident—she opened her door and jumped from the speeding car as its hard acceleration drove it past fifty miles per hour.

  Mission

  Chicago, 2119

  Across the room, the television dimmed, and the apocalyptic scene of whited bones and abandoned cars was again replaced by the cat and mouse. The cleric spoke again, “Ash, have you noticed that all of your missions happen exactly one hundred years ago?”

  She nodded, not knowing where this was going.

  “…and that the mission clock is always advancing with the date here in the real world?”

  She nodded again. “Right… you’re just using the time to increase the continuity of the experience, right?”

  “No, Ash.” The cleric paused, “It’s a hard limitation of the equipment. Why does the Hallow seem more real than the real world?”

  “It’s injected straight into our brains, bypassing all the damaged nerves?”

  The cleric nodded indulgently. “Ash, we have a mission that is more important than anything you’ve attempted before, more important than anything any team has ever done before…”

  “How can one mission be more important than another? It’s a game.”

  “No Ash, it’s not a game.”

  “I know, I know, ‘We live another day through the intensity of its grace. Victory is life.’” Ash began to quote from one of the league liturgies, but then the Cleric cut her off.

  “The Hallow is life. Just like this is life.”

  “Uh… right… what are you talking about?” Ash shook her head, opened her hands palms up.

  “Every time you wake in the Hallow, you are waking in 2019.”

  “I’ve seen the mission clock… we were just talking about it…” she raised her open palms farther, shrugging her shoulders.

  “I’m saying that every mission you run there has an effect here in our time. I’m saying that we are trying to find and destroy the creators of the Palsy and that the league teams are our instruments in the past. I’m saying that we are trying to save the world.”

  Ash had not understood until after the last word. Somewhere in the lengthening silence, it all clicked together and she understood. Not what the Cleric was trying to say, not yet that she could save the world, not yet that somehow there was a body in 2019 that she was using like her own… she understood the hole through her being that her heart had known in that rainy alley in that jungle compound. Long before her mind, her heart had somehow known. It had known that she was a murderer.

  If her body would have allowed, she would have wept bitterly. As it was, she sat on the couch staring through the Cleric, not hearing the cat’s bitter cries from the television.

  Blank face and hollow eyes, she sat burning. Whispers surrounded her, voices at the edges of her perception, voices going from concern to panic. The room started to fade into darkness—maybe she was passing out?

  “Ash!” the cleric shouted, inches from her face. Her eyes focused, he was shaking her, and not too gently. “Ash! Snap out of it!”

  “Wha… where am I?” Ash stammered, but she already knew. She could still hear the antics of the cat and mouse, she could see her drab apartment beyond the Cleric’s face. If she’d blacked out, it hadn’t been for long.

  “Drink this.” The Cleric produced a silver flask from beneath its robes.

  “What…” Ash trailed off, all she could see now was a loop of trembling hands and pleading eyes followed by the muted bark of her pistol, repeating without pause in her memory. You knew, you knew, she thought. You knew and you didn’t stop.

  “Here, this will help you think.” The Cleric twisted the cap off of the flask and lifted it to Ash’s lips when she didn’t reach out to take it.

  Like anything she drank or ate here, Ash sensed it only in the vaguest way and tasted it not at all, but nearly immediately she felt it… radiating not from her stomach, but from the base of her skull to her widening eyes. Warmth. Peace. Clarity. The shocked sorrow receded before the new feeling.

  “What was that?” Ash asked as the Cleric screwed the cap back onto his flask.

  “Something to help you think clearly.” The cleric stowed the flask, seemingly in the folds of his grey robe.

  “I don’t remember swallowing…” she started.

  “I’m afraid I’ve given you a shock, but I need you to think clearly. I need you to understand.”

  “That I’m a murderer? I understand.”

  “No, Ash, that you are a warrior engaged in a just cause—that you are a savior.”

  “With a well-used gun.”

  “Well put, Ash. Your gun is well used.” The cleric put a hand on her shoulder. “Your purpose, though you haven’t known it, has always been holy.”

  “Holy?” Ash spat the word.

  “Holy. How many people have you killed in the Hallow?”

  “Forty-two confirmed, seventeen unconfirmed.” Ash said without a pause to think.

  “If this next mission succeeds, you will save billions of lives, Ash.” The cleric rested his hand on her shoulder, “Not just the lives of soldiers, criminals, and spies like you have killed thus far… not just the lives of adults, Ash. Have you ever seen a child?”

  Her eyes focused, found the Cleric’s, “Twice. In the Hallow.”

  “Did you ever kill a child there? Even on accident?”

  “I’ve never killed anyone accidentally.” Ash snapped, not knowing why at first. Then she realized that the sudden heat came because the Cleric’s question had bruised her professional pride. This realization almost made her laugh bitterly.

  If the Cleric noticed her reaction, he didn’t comment. “Well, something like three billion children died in horrible pain because of the Palsy. If you’re looking for absolution, you can take some comfort in that.”

  “Absolution… is that like ‘certainty’, or ‘absolutely’, or something else?”

  The cleric waved his hand dismissively, “If you think you’ve done wrong, then you believe that billions of innocent deaths were the better option. How do you equate forty two deaths of the enemy with the deaths of billions of innocents? If we succeed… if you succeed, you will have more than balanced the equation.”

  “Our religion is kinda Mathy.”
Ash observed, but her smile was back. “But I see what you’re saying. I know what I have to do… wait, what do I have to do?”

  “Kill one woman. Kill her and destroy her work so no one can continue it.” The Cleric took his hand off Ash’s shoulder and gestured to the television. Like before, the cartoon faded and was replaced by a photo of an ageless woman behind a lectern, gesturing to a complicated graphic on a screen behind her.

  Somewhere between fifty and ageless, the woman’s short silver hair was swept up in the controlled spiky chaos preferred by women less than a third of whatever her age might be. Her dead serious suit was softened by no jewelry, her angular face was softened by no makeup that Ash could discern, yet fashion choices that might make others seem harsh had no such effect on the speaker.

  Kill one woman, Ash thought. She could kill her guilt, kill her pain, kill the palsy… kill them all with this one woman. It was lucky she didn’t need to save the world by teaching one woman to dance or baking one woman the perfect cake or something. This she could do.

  Ash’s smile stretched a little wider.

  ***

  Chicago, 2020

  Having less than a year of memories in her head, Jo didn’t have a lot of reference points on what was ‘normal’, but she had a fairly clear intuition as she flew through the air with the pavement rushing beneath her and Jackie’s screamed “JO!” fading into the slipstream, that most people who have been put in a coma and permanently scarred by car crashes don’t then usually leap from speeding cars. At least not the smart ones.

  Then it occurred to her that they might jump out if the memory of cars frightened them, but quickly batted that thought aside as she anticipated what the concrete of the road was going to feel like. Then it occurred to her that maybe the reason why some of these people had been injured in car crashes was because of a predisposition to leap from vehicles at inopportune moments. She then filed that one away for the next time the doctor asked her to reconstruct her car crash during one of their sessions. She was sure there was plenty of material in that idea to explore: “…then I remembered that I’d left the iron on at home, so I jumped from my car and broke my leg.” Pure genius. This was going to be fun. She imagined the look of frustration on Dr. Smith’s face and wanted to giggle.