Hollow

by Lee Doty

  Then it occurred to her that she really seemed to have more time in the air between cab and concrete than she’d at first anticipated. She wondered if this was ‘normal’, but then the road struck her arm-back-arm-air-shoulder-back-thigh-feet-butt-back-air-feet and her cheap tennis shoes skidded to a stop. She stood, slightly crouched and completely shocked, at the edge of the road.

  Her intuition again informed her that this likely wasn’t a ‘normal’ outcome.

  She could feel the coolness of blood exposed to the night air at her elbow and looked down to see her clothes had been torn in several places, including that elbow and both knees. She shrugged.

  Before her, the brown panel van screeched around the corner and wavered toward her, tires smoking under the deceleration. She turned right and bolted for the entrance to the blue line. In her peripheral vision, she saw the cab with Jackie and Marko fishtailing as it turned left and was lost to sight a block down the street. Her only friend actually might live. Jo wanted to cheer or pump her arms victoriously in the air, but instead ran flat out for the not-exactly-safety of the entrance to the rail station.

  Behind her, the shriek of van’s tires gave way without any segue to the tromp of boots as the operator who had been shooting at the cab leapt out before the van had completely stopped and barreled down on her. Unless he’d forgotten his gun in the van, there was no way Jo would gain the steps ahead. Behind her, she heard the rear doors of the panel van open and the sounds of three more pairs of running boots. She wondered briefly if she knew it was three pairs of boots because she could hear the difference, or if it was because she was absolutely sure there were four people in the team pursuing her.

  To her surprise, there were no shots fired behind her as she closed the distance to the stairs. Maybe they actually had forgotten their guns in the van, she thought with a burst of mania, but then it occurred to her that they just likely wanted her alive and didn’t think they needed to put a round in her leg to do it. For some reason, this hurt her feelings, but then it occurred to her that this was the time for reflexes and she consciously shut down all thought, giving her brainstem full sway to do its thing.

  What happened next came as a series of impressions and flash photos: A leap over the handrail, another down the first flight of steps leading down to the subterranean station. Air rushing through her hair, past her ears, between her fingers. Impact as the first pursuer slammed into her from behind. Twisting, wrenching, their bodies tangling in the air—the distinct impression that this was how life should be. Another pair of hands grabbing for her right shoulder, a desperate struggle, pain as sharp and clear as the truth burst up from her right shin, then a rolling impact with the stairs that was a lot less painful on her knees than it should have been.

  Rolling from knees to shoulder to feet, Jo came up on the first landing, surprised to be free. Her attackers must have taken the brunt of the fall down the stairs. She bounced off the angled wall ahead with both hands and dodged left, toward the next flight of steps which went down toward a bank of turnstiles . She hadn’t taken a step when the two attackers were again on her. There was the intense anaerobic claustrophobia of close-quarter grappling, hands on her arms, a hard fist bounced from her shoulder to her cheek and her head whipped away. A clanking crack as someone fired a suppressed .45 caliber pistol in the confines of the small stairway.

  Jo dodged and twisted against the stronger opponents, finally ducking and surging ahead, driving through a pair of legs and to the flight of stairs down. The tangle of fists and grabbing hands gave way to the air above the second flight of steps, feet jarring as she collapsed and rolled across the next landing, through an open gate at the right of the turnstiles and past a gaping security officer in the vestibule. Her leaping, careless steps carried her down the final flight of steps, and the empty train platform opened around her.

  The platform was long and thin and overcrowded with a forest of square ten-inch floor-to-ceiling support columns. The design was clunky, as if the architects had thought far too late about the requirement to hold the ceiling up, but it was very fortunate for, say someone who needed cover from madmen with submachine guns. Jo ran forward, dodging through the forest of columns. Behind her, she heard her pursuers’ heavy boots on the floor as they exited the stairwell at a run. Intuition: she dodged left without slowing, putting one of the many square columns between her and her pursuers momentarily. A two-round .45 caliber burst snapped through the air where her leg had been milliseconds before, another burst thud-cracked into the column behind her—low—they were trying to hobble her, not kill her.

  She dodged right, rolling as another coughing burst of fire from behind her threw chips of concrete from the floor to her left and another burst tore through a trashcan behind her.

  She smiled, satisfied, was immediately confused by the elation during a time so obviously reserved for desperate terror, suppressed thought again and did a diving roll over the lip of the platform, landing in a crouch on the tracks with her back to the raised platform.

  She pressed the slide back a couple of millimeters on the silenced .45 pistol in her hands, saw the brass gleam through the ejection port and touched the round with her right index finger before letting the slide snap home. She dropped the magazine from the well and into her left hand. She held up the magazine and again saw the dull gleam of brass through twelve of the thirteen numbered holes on the back. She reinserted the magazine into the pistol and seated it with a slap of her left hand on the butt of the pistol.

  Thirteen rounds… one in the chamber and twelve in the magazine, she thought.

  But all of that was automatic thought—reflexive assessment—brainstem thinking that had been drilled into her mind and muscle-tendon memory by long and stressed repetition. They were not real thoughts per se. No, her first real thought since before she entered the stairwell to the train station was, “WHERE DID I GET A GUN?!???!” only with more emphatic mental punctuation.

  Her mind locked and she stared blankly in confusion at the gun resting on her open hand. As deep and powerful as her sudden confusion was, it was a small river compared to the ocean of déjà vu that staring at the gun on her open palm plunged her into. She was being crushed by its significance, its sheer, incomprehensible magnitude. She could feel it in the cool metal on her palm, see it in the efficient lines of the weapon, smell it in the rich tropical scent on the air, feel it in the warm rain on her face. Somehow it had found her… the pistol had stalked her like a slobbering wolf stalks a doe in the woods, then it had pounced, appearing in her hand… it had caught her.

  Like a defensive mechanism, her mind began to fill this shocked void between her ears with quite a few entertainingly bizarre pictures of where she might have pulled a gun… they all seemed equally improbable and painful. The metronomic cadence of Seuss filled her head like the soundtrack of a movie: “I did not find it in a hut, I did not pull it from my butt, I did not find it here or there, I did not find it anywhere.”

  “DO NOT THINK!” thundered through her head, “ACT!” She had already wasted more time in amazed distraction than she had spent doing the press check and the magazine inspection, and there were still at least two (but again, for some reason, she was sure there were four) armed and armored killers on the platform behind her. With a sizeable expenditure of will, she again suppressed all thought, except for that of her valuable, if mystifying, brainstem. If she lived through this, there would be plenty of time for questions.

  She scrambled on hands and knees across the gravel at the edge of the tracks, finally popping up with the pistol extended, two clanking cracks and the familiar buck of the pistol in her hand. She ducked back down amid the return fire, which ricocheted off the floor of the platform and drove into the wall on the other side of the tracks. Softer even than the sound of the suppressed automatic fire was the almost gentle sound of two thuds on the platform as the operators fell. She scrambled again on hands and feet toward the darkness of the tunnel. Each time she blinked, th
e after-image of the operators fleetingly appeared in the darkness behind her eyelids. They appeared from the perspective of the sight picture over her pistol, each time her sights were aligned with the weak spot in the armor between knee and quadriceps on the inside of their legs.

  With a short feeling of satisfied irony, she rose inside the relative safety of the threshold of the tunnel. Without looking back, she sprinted forward into the relative darkness of the train tunnel, running along the loosely packed gravel to the right of the tracks.

  ***

  “She’s my responsibility!” Jackie shouted.

  “You are not going back there.” Marko responded calmly, “I’m not explaining to the good doctor that I let you get slaughtered by a full team of dragons.”

  “You mean you don’t want to explain why I got slaughtered and you lived to tell her about it.”

  “Well, that’s not entirely inaccurate.” He gave her a sharp look through the mirror, “But there is nothing we can do back there and there’s a slight chance we can avoid their air cover long enough to get a report out, or even escape.”

  “Air cover…” Jackie mused, she’d forgotten, “stop this car right now. You’re right, we need to get word out about what happened, and both of us getting blown up by a missile isn’t getting that done. Marko… look at me.” They shared a hard glance through the mirror, “We don’t have any time… How much heat you got?”

  “Standard robot killer in the trunk, four mags. My sidearm, 2 mags. And I’ve got a pocket knife, which you’ll find about as useful as any of that against them.”

  “I figure we’ve got seconds or minutes before their air patrol kills this cab.” Jackie put a hand on Marko’s shoulder, “There’s another train station a few blocks up, ditch the car… that’s your out. Stop here, I’ll take the SBR and see if I can help Jo. She doesn’t stand a chance with that pharmic keeping her docile.”

  “You see that roll on the sidewalk? If that’s docile, I’m going to reiterate the pointlessness of you going back there. Those other dragons don’t have any implants…” Marko argued, but he’d stopped the car.

  “Good luck.” He popped the trunk.

  “You too.” Jackie jumped out and rounded the car to the trunk. She lifted the carpet, exposing a keypad where the spare tire compartment should have been. She entered the standard code for this month and heard a thunk as a heavy lock disengaged. She pulled the custom M4-inspired M44 Short Barreled Rifle from its shaped case, selected a magazine marked with a band of red tape from the case, and slammed it into the magazine well. She charged the weapon, turned the fire selector from safe to burst and slung the single point sling over her head and right arm. She checked the holographic sights, pulled the bolt back enough to touch the round in the chamber with her index finger, then dropped the rifle, letting the sling take it. She grabbed two more red-banded magazines and stowed one each in her jacket’s pockets. She slammed the trunk, gave it two quick slaps, and Marko accelerated away.

  She readied the rifle, ducked as far into the relative shadows at the edge of the nearest storefront as possible, and checked the sky.

  Nothing.

  For now.

  She took a breath, steeling herself, then sprinted back toward the blue line station, staying as close to the buildings as she could.

  Hearing voices ahead, Jackie stopped, ducking into a recessed doorway of a clothing store. “…this is all so boring… night after night the same club scene. What I wouldn’t give for a little variety.” A woman said as she and a man in a black canvas long coat came out of a club one door down.

  “You have become old and jaded, Mar.” the man said, pausing to light a cigarette.

  Jackie stepped out of the doorway and leveled the rifle at the man’s head. “Do not move.” Jackie said.

  “How’s that for new?” The man said, cigarette dangling, forgotten, from his lips.

  The woman looked stunned.

  “You!” Jackie gestured at the man in the coat, “Give me the coat. Right now.” Jackie finished in her best law enforcement voice.

  “Sure, man. No need to get excited.” The man started to shuck off the coat. “You need wallets, too? I’m very, very chill right now.”

  “Just drop the coat on the ground and run away like your life depends on it.” Jackie jerked her head over her shoulder.

  The coat fell to the sidewalk, and the couple scurried away, hands half raised. “I said RUN!” Jackie shouted after them. It was enough to focus them on a sprint. Jackie scooped up the jacket and put it on over the sling. She again dropped the rifle and the sling pulled it into the open front of the coat, where it ended up dangling, hidden, bumping into her right leg.

  “That was fortunate.” Jackie commented, tucking her chin and walking with purpose down the center of the sidewalk. Two more blocks before the final turn, then one more and she’d be at the station where Jo had jumped out of the car.

  Purpose

  Chicago, 2119

  The long yellow hallway deep in the League’s Chicago terminus stretched out before and behind them. They had walked in silence for some time, pausing occasionally for Ash to rest.

  “I need to see him again.” Ash stopped walking.

  The cleric took another few steps, but then turned back. “Ash, have I not sufficiently impressed on you the importance of this mission? Nothing else is important. Nothing.”

  “But you can’t isolate me, I mean, please don’t isolate me.” Ash pleaded, taking a step forward. “Please… you said I probably wasn’t going to come back, that I’d be stumbling around in the library with a forty IQ and maybe some drooling if I was lucky, right?”

  “If the shock of death in the Hallow doesn’t put you in a coma or kill you outright, yes.”

  “Yeah, yeah… just like any mission, I’m fine with that. But I have to say goodbye… if not to the whole team, then at least let me say goodbye to Crow.”

  “Child, you are now holding a secret so dear that I cannot let you interact with anyone else. If I did, they’d have to be quarantined as well… permanently.”

  “So I’m a prisoner forever… even if I make it back… even if I stop the Palsy and make it so that none of this ever happ… oh. Never mind.”

  “Victory is life.” The Cleric quoted from the liturgies, smiling. “At last, you understand.”

  Ash nodded. “Why can’t I bring him… er, them? You know, the rest of Phoenix.”

  The Cleric turned and continued walking slowly forward so that Ash could catch up. When she had, he answered, “Ash, you can’t even bring any weapons on this one. There will be no team to back you up, no communication with the Clerics. You’re going in alone and unarmed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are going into the belly of the beast, and they won’t swallow you if you’re too prickly.”

  “Not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “You shouldn’t. We’ve got one opening. It’s two days from now or never.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Virginia… to a secret OSI lab.”

  “OSI?” Ash interrupted, “I got an A on intelligence agencies of the 20th century. The Office of Scientific Intelligence was merged into the CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology in 1963. Are you sending me back before 1963?”

  “Only one hundred years back, Ash… limitation of the hardware, remember? You are going in two days, to December 4, 2019.”

  “So, is there another OSI?”

  “No. Same OSI. It was only nominally merged into DS&T… it went deep black in 1963, off the off-books, its rather extensive costs diverted from the excessive pool of what the public knew then as government waste.”

  “You are saying the US government was responsible for the Palsy?”

  “Yes. A small, rogue, overfunded piece of it anyway. Our current intel, harvested by you in Brazil, by the way, shows that Doctor Therese Smith is currently the principal scientist for project Fluffy Moonbeam, which we believe to be the…
”

  Ash snickered, “Fluffy Moonbeam?” Another short bark of amusement, “are you telling me that the world was ended by project Fluffy Moonbeam?”

  “Apparently after the scandals of projects like MK-Ultra came to light, they learned and now only use words familiar to Teletubbies to describe the really sinister stuff. Which would you investigate if you were a reporter or a government oversight official: project ‘Fluffy Moonbeam, or project ‘Prometheus XL?”

  Ash mostly had the giggles under control, “I guess that makes sense… why wasn’t that covered in the IA20K curriculum?”

  “We didn’t know it before Brazil. Project Summer Puppy killed hundreds. Green Birthday… zombies, Pachinko Tutu left 20 in comas… I could go on.”

  “You are pulling my leg.”

  “If I did, you’d fall over.”

  Ash stopped again, “Humor? You are joking with me. I’ve never seen a cleric doing something so… human.”

  The cleric stopped and looked over his shoulder, smiling. “Well, I guess you’re behind the curtain now… there’s a lot we do that you don’t know… saving the world with time-travel, for instance.”

  “Touché.” Ash snorted, “And this doctor, I kill her and we all cease to exist?”

  “Kill her, destroy her work, kill everyone else you see. We only get one shot at this, Ash.” The Cleric stopped before a dull gray metal door, “Make a big enough crater and you’ll probably wake up in a much happier timeline. You’ll get to see children, you’ll be able to taste your food. Maybe you’ll even get to see what Crow’s hand feels like.”