by Lee Doty
“Probably not.” Crow said, and sprinted up the hill with Shadow bouncing painfully over his shoulder. “That’s why I’m covering my back with a big, stupid meat shield.”
Crow wasn’t sure if the wheeze from Shadow was part of a laugh just a result of being carried over a running man’s shoulder with a chest wound full of helpful and active hooks. Either way, Crow didn’t have the air to waste on further banter. He needed all his breath for running.
***
Chicago, 2020
Jo rounded the corner in the hallway and sprinted for the stairwell. It had only been a few seconds since she’d clubbed Fleet, Delta’s sniper, unconscious with her new best friend, Mrs. Pollack’s frying pan. She was surprised she’d made the corner, she was surprised she hadn’t yet been shot in the back. There were no signs of pursuit behind her, but that meant nothing, as she hadn’t been looking back to see any, as looking back for signs of pursuit when you should be focusing on fleeing was a recipe for getting caught. By “signs”, she supposed she meant that there had been no bullets blowing through her from behind. In any case: good news.
Just as she approached the stairwell door, she changed her direction, instead barreling beyond it and toward the elevators. The mind worked oddly in the heat of combat, she reflected. She was completely clear, mind focused, thoughts nimble, yet there seemed an odd flux between stimulus and decision. It seemed sometimes that she understood what had led to her decisions after they’d been made. It was like her subconscious mind had time-travelled back a half second to inform her actions after her conscious mind had figured out what was going on, then as time looped around again, her mind understood, that half second later, why she’d done what she’d done. Weird, she thought. Also weird that she had so much time for random thoughts in such a critical time.
What her time-travelling subconscious had understood, that her conscious mind only understood as she leapt through the closing elevator doors, was that there had been blood on the carpet in a sporadic and spattered line from a destroyed doorway to those closing doors of the elevator.
What happened next was an old familiar ecstasy. It was the fulfillment of her creation, or at least the creation of her body, the creation of her training, the creation of her indoctrination under the twisted hearts and hands of the Clerics. It was the full and visceral return of what the Clerics had made. It was Ash.
Each team of Falcons had four members in four distinct roles, with distinct skills and strengths. Captain, Tech, Sniper, Close. Ash was her team’s Close, the close-quarters specialist, and she led the league, she led the league because of the exact kind of thing that happened next in the elevator.
***
Rural Virginia, 37 miles from OSI headquarters, 2019
Crow’s vision swam with stars. He’d lost his weapons except for the knife in his boot when he’d had to shrug off his armor in the river. His body was drenched in sweat and his throat was dry and raw with thirst. Shadow’s limp weight was still over his shoulder and he still continued his run, though only at a light jog now.
He was reasonably sure he’d lost Delta in the river, though he’d broken his left arm in two places on the rocks at the bottom of those unexpected falls. He’d stopped to rest twice, but he’d lost a significant amount of blood from a bullet that was still in his side, just below the floating ribs. The wound had closed now, but he was weak, he was exhausted, and there was something wrong with his stomach. Maybe it was an internal injury from the rocks at the bottom of the falls, but that didn’t feel right. Most injuries that started with the numbness of shock, progressed to pain, then to agony if you had to use the medkit. But after that peak, the pain would always begin to resolve, usually it was even gone before the egress at the end of the mission. But this ache, it had begun hours after the last injury he’d received, and it alternately burned and ached through his stomach, and it was getting worse. It was a pain that seemed to track how much weaker he was getting. As his strength faded, the empty pangs seemed to grow to replace it.
Had he been poisoned? He flirted with the thought, but discarded it immediately. Though it would explain his fatigue, and his increasing dizziness, and maybe even the empty pain in his guts, he’d not been shot with anything but bullets, and he’d not even drunken from his canteen… wait.
The pain was like thirst, he reflected, but somehow deeper. Then the thought hit him with a certainty that could not be doubted or denied: He was hungry.
Crow shook his head to clear it and almost stumbled under Shadow’s extra weight. The jerk of his correction brought another small grunt from Shadow, who had lost a lot more blood than Crow had before the medkit had helped his body seal the catastrophic wound in his chest.
They’d made it away, but now Crow was beginning to wonder what would happen if they didn’t have food at some point. Food, he thought. He’d never really had it. He had some kind of lie to eat in the lie of the world they called the Hollow, but just like there was no real feeling there, there was also no taste. When Crow had been on long missions before, he followed protocol and ate the tasteless paste from the minimal pack on his back, and drank the plastic-tasting water from their canteens on the regular intervals their training had instilled in them, but he’d never been hungry, never eaten anything but the Hollow’s lie or the tasteless, formless paste here in whatever the Hallow really was.
He was getting weak, dangerously weak, Crow knew. His mind was starting to get dull, starting to play tricks on him. Maybe it was the heat, the exertion, the lack of food or water—perhaps it was the blood loss or the damage his body had to heal, but he was fading. Hour after dizzy buzzing hour, he could feel it in the thickening clouds blinding his mind and in the aching cold weakening his limbs.
Then another thought struck him: what if this wasn’t real? What if the Clerics had been telling the truth, what if the Hallow was the lie, what if this was the lie? What if the rapidly increasing blur of dementia that was enclosing his mind wasn’t exhaustion, wasn’t hunger? What if this was the coma? What if this was what it was like to be a League fatality? What if this was the precursor of the walking death of the library?
Crow felt his brow furrow and his face twist, heard a small sob escaping his lips with all the hard breath of exertion. What was “real” anyway? What did it mean? Was everything a lie, with only different gradations of hopeless black to distinguish them? What was the point of anything?
And then Crow remembered Ash, the way she looked here, in the Hallow, full of spirit and purpose. He remembered the weight of his friend on his shoulder. He had no context to understand, no framework to use to orient himself to the knowledge that filled him like a warm light from the center of his chest. He understood that there was a reason, but he did not have a name for it. Maybe it was something like duty or commitment, or even friendship, but those were not specific enough words for the Reason, the Reason that kept his feet moving, that kept him straining forward though he had no idea where he was going.
There was a word for the Reason, but he did not know it, not yet.
Crow’s legs finally gave out and he fell, cracking his knees on the hard ground. Though he tried to hold on to Shadow, his strength had gone and both he and his only remaining friend fell to the hard flat ground and lay panting. He tried to get to his feet, but his body seemed distant and it didn’t move when he told it to. With great effort, Crow managed to roll to his side. He was shocked to notice that he’d not collapsed into a clearing in the forest, but on the edge of a narrow two-lane road.
Was Shadow dead? He hadn’t made a sound when Crow had dropped him to the asphalt. For that matter, was Crow dead?
Was this death? He thought, as he rolled to his back with the last dregs of his energy, his will. The blue sky above him faded to paleness, then to shades of gray. He sobbed again, too tired even to properly feel the frustration that was bringing tears to his eyes. He had lost everything.
So this was crying, he thought. He’d always wondered what it was like. Som
etimes cartoons did it, but he’d never been able. Not in the Hollow, not even when things seemed most bleak.
It was strangely comforting. It seemed as if the sorrow was escaping through his flesh, or maybe just expending it’s fury in producing the tears.
The darkening gray and black sky blurred from the tears that were stinging his eyes, and then the darkness became a sound somehow: rumbling low, a purr from a cat the size of a house. As the light departed his eyes, the vibrating purr replaced it, growing louder, closer, until with a screech of tires and pneumatic brakes, it halted near him, almost over him.
Crow tried to open his eyes, but they were too far away and entirely out of his dwindling reach. There was a squeaking bang, then footsteps, then voices over him.
“Who are they, Father?” an elderly woman’s voice.
“Someone who needs our help.” A man’s voice replied, filled with a gentle sympathy.
“Mark!” the man shouted, “Help me get them into the bus! They’re hurt!”
As other steps approached, at least three pairs of them, Crow croaked, “No.”
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?” the woman’s voice again.
“You have cell reception out here, Anna?” the man asked.
The woman didn’t reply, the man continued, “We are ten minutes from the parish. We’ll take them there, then call an ambulance.”
“No.” Crow said again, louder. “No hospitals… they will…” he coughed, “they will find us… they will… kill us.”
There was silence. Crow tried again to open his eyes, but the light was too intense though it had all seemed darkness a moment ago. “If you take us to a hospital,” Crow continued, “They will kill us.”
Silence again, but after a moment the woman spoke, “But they are covered in blood.”
“And scars,” the man said, “Let’s get them to the parish. We’ll figure it out there.”
“But what if they, uh… you know… kill us?” A young man’s voice.
There was silence for a moment, then the man said, “Then they will discover the secret fist of my kara-te.” The man said the last word as two distinct syllables and with great emphasis, like a foreigner carefully pronouncing a revered, yet unfamiliar word.
The kid laughed, but Crow felt himself being gently lifted by many hands.
“Sometimes our religion will demand risks of us.” The man said soberly, “It will not always be easy or safe to help those in need.”
There was silence for a moment, then “Okay,” the young man said, “But I hope they’re not cannibals or something. That’s not how I’d want to feed the hungry.”
Found
Chicago, 2020
Ash sailed through the closing doors of the elevator, the black pan flashing above her like the wrathful sword of a vengeful, culinary God. She saw the scene in the elevator in a flash: four Falcons, and poor Dirk Stone, agent of the OSI. Like the last time she’d seen him, he’d been beaten and wounded by Falcons. Unlike last time, it wasn’t her fault. Also, this time he was sporting a gunshot wound in the leg. It was a pretty standard apprehension wound, the kind Ash had been taught to use when on a snatch mission. It was debilitating and painful, but the shot had missed all the major arteries and it was very unlikely that he’d bleed to death, especially since the Falcons had applied a tourniquet to the leg above the wound. Dirk’s arms were bound behind him and he was held between two Falcons, each with a firm grip on one of his arms.
He had a standard-issue gag in his mouth, but his jaw was set against the harsh fate toward which the Falcons were steering him. He put up a brave front, but his eyes were hollow. The image of a wounded guard flashed through Ash’s mind. Her eyes had been as hollow as Dirk’s were now as she tried to bargain for her life with an unused commlink. Ash saw the woman’s shaking hands and remembered the clanking chuff and the buck of the pistol in her own hands that had ended that negotiation.
Rage. Bigger than her body, bigger than the universe, it crashed in on her, exploded out from her and filled the small elevator with a red-tinged haze. Hotter than the violent center of a star, deeper than the violation of being built by monsters to murder the innocent: rage.
Then the rage disappeared and Ash was left in the clarity of combat, of the focused rush that was the familiar ecstasy of the Hallow. She had one more instant as her scream continued and her muscles tensed into the proper configuration for what would come next, one more instant in the combat fugue of speed to understand. She saw Dirk, or Hawkins, or whatever; saw him as a man in desperate trouble and she was his only hope of salvation. She saw the four Falcons as the victims they were, that she had been. She needed to take them apart, but she could not hate them. She was not here for survival, for vengeance, for rage. She was here to help.
Ash knew two of the Falcons: Ruck was the captain, and he stood in the back corner of the elevator to Ash’s right, Slash was the Close for the team and he was one of the two Falcons holding poor trembling Dirk. The other two Falcons were unknown to Ash, which likely meant they’d been made in the last nine months while Ash had been in the care of the OSI. Since Ruck and Slash were here, that implied that this was team River, or what was left of it after they’d lost their Tech and their Sniper. Ash knew Slash’s stats. He was a competent Close. When Ash had last checked, he’d been third in the League after Ash and Trunc. In the close confines of this elevator, Slash was the primary threat.
Well, not exactly the primary threat, Ash thought as her bellow of rage finally ended and her frying pan shattered Slash’s faceplate with an edge-on strike—today the honor of primary threat belonged to Ash.
Ash let her momentum carry her into the Falcon on Dirk’s other side. She touched the ground once with an outstretched foot, graceful as a bionic ballerina, the movement correcting her course, adding to her velocity. She flipped the frying pan over in her right hand, reversing her grip so that the end of the handle extended between her thumb and first finger with the body of the pan along her forearm, the curve of the inside of the pan gently holding her elbow. Ash faked a superman punch with her left hand as she leapt into the Falcon on the left of Dirk, then used the left hand to gently sweep the tip of the barrel of his gun aside as he tried to bring it on target. Her right arm, with the forward-facing sheath of frying pan over the elbow, delivered a twisting, frying-pan-enhanced elbow strike that smashed into the lower right quadrant of the Falcon’s face mask, slamming it to Ash’s left so hard that the jerk of his chin almost knocked him out. As it was, he saw stars and tried to reorient himself before Ash’s next move.
He was unsuccessful.
Another flash of perception from the exultant blur of purpose and motion: The Falcon before Ash staggering back, blinking. Slash’s insensate body falling directly down toward the ground, trailing a thin spatter of blood and an expanding cloud of polymer shards from his broken helmet and face. Both of the wounded Falcons had released Dirk’s arms and he was stumbling precariously on his uninjured leg with an intensely earnest look of confusion on his face. Ash could tell that he was going to fall, as he wasn’t compensating fast enough after being jerked to one side then released by his captors. Behind her, the elevator’s doors had not yet started to move apart, though Ash had broken the beam of the electric eye between them when she’d leapt into the elevator. The doors were slowing toward a stop and would soon start to slide back open.
Ash ducked to her left, putting the stumbling Falcon between her and Ruck. She then jumped into, then sprang off of the wall of the elevator and into a flying knee strike to the chin of the stumbling Falcon, driving his head back and the light from his eyes. At the same time, Ash’s right hand flashed out, flipping the frying pan again into the more standard forward grip. As her left knee slammed into the stumbling Tech, her frying pan smashed the pistol from the hand of the sniper to her right. He’d been pretty committed to holding the gun, and Ash was pretty sure she’d just broken some bones in his hand. The Tech’s unconscious bulk fell into Ruck, who
dodged to Ash’s right, shoving his teammate aside. As soon as his head cleared the stumbling Falcon’s shoulder, he got the flat of the frying pan on the left side of his helmet with enough force that the helmet cracked and flew from his head, bouncing off the wall to Ash’s left. She snatched the tumbling helmet from the air and sent it into the helmet of the sniper, whose left hand was drawing the knife from his belt.
The pistol that Ash had smashed from the Sniper’s hand hit the roof of the elevator and began to fall again toward the ground. The sniper began to move forward, bringing the knife into a high lunging thrust. Ash spun and stepped to her left, moving briefly out of the range of the knife. She brought the pan around and swung it like a baseball bat. She hit the falling pistol like a major league star. With a clang that cracked the polymer pistol grip, the pistol flew straight and true, slamming into the helmet of the Sniper, cracking the faceplate.
Ash leapt toward the Sniper, pan held high for a downward blow, left leg kicking up then reversing as the Sniper tried to raise his armored forearms to protect his head. As Ash’s left leg swung back, her right knee thrust out, coming up below the sniper’s raised arms and slamming into his chin. Since he’d been looking up at the pan, the knee strike came in under the lip of his faceplate and slammed into his chin and stunned him. His arms weakened and began to come down, half because the Sniper was no longer thinking of defending the pan due to the head trauma, and half because he was instinctively trying to lower them into a low defense against the blow that had already struck him.
Ash’s pan came down as she fell from her leap, impacting just before her feet hit the floor. Her two-handed downward strike to the top of his helmet was both hard enough to crack the helmet, and powerful enough to complete the shock to the Sniper’s neck that knocked him all the way out.
Before his body had crumpled fully to the ground, Ash had dropped to one knee, pivoting ninety degrees right and using the angular velocity to add force to the throw of the pan, which she released like a much more serious version of a Frisbee at Ruck’s head. He managed to get part of his hand on it, but he was already concussed. The hand was weak and the pan had momentum. The hand may have deflected the pan a few degrees to his left, but it still hit him almost squarely in the face. He bounced off the wall and landed on the floor.
