Hollow

by Lee Doty

  But this time, when the quickening came, it was sweeter, it was brighter—it was different. This time, as the chemicals flowed through his mind, a warm purpose flooded his heart with joy and the brightness of faith. This was the same feeling that had led him into the priesthood—that had led him to God. It was the same, yet it was different. He was sure that the spirit was the same; that it came into this fallen world like a ray of light through dark and threatening clouds. But what it fell upon was not him, not directly at least. What it illuminated was Ash.

  That inner light did not reveal God to him directly, but through her, as if she were a lens, both magnifying and clarifying his vision, so that through her, he could see God’s purpose, he could see his own purpose and how it was intertwined with Ash’s. He could see that all three of those purposes were a part of one unbroken mystery. One unbroken mystery that, at that moment, his heart understood instinctively, though his mind was left only with faith. Faith, and one clear thought: She was the only thing in this world that was holy. That together they were two complimentary parts of something bigger and more important than either of them, or anything else in this dim existence.

  Full of the power and peace of the quickening, Crow almost stepped around the corner. All between him and Ash was laughably small, and therefore couldn’t be a real threat. But then that same spirit that held him up, held him back. He hesitated long enough for his mind to reengage with the tactics of the situation. Crow might be able to overcome Delta miraculously, but then the Clerics would know he was in the building. Also, it was more likely than not that even from surprise, Delta would paint the hallway with Crow’s blood. They were three, he was one. They were armored, he was not. They’d been training and doing field work for the last nine months, Crow had been getting fat at silent retreats with excellent pancakes.

  As Crow listened, Delta pried the doors to the elevator open and Chrome ordered everyone to drop a fragmentation grenade down the shaft in three… two…

  Crow’s fear… no, that was not the word… Crows concern had been great, and his hands had tightened expectantly around his weapon, but again, that same peace constrained him and he waited.

  Before Chrome reached one, and before Delta pulled the pins on their grenades, Chrome shouted “Hold!”

  He paused, clearly receiving instructions from the Clerics, then gave orders to his team to shadow the elevator down using the stairs. He then used the team channel to tell Fleet to take the elevator down and meet them in the lobby.

  Crow wondered at that order… and where was Fleet? Fleet’s response came back, and Crow heard it… not the words, but the thready sound of his voice as he came down the hallway that the rest of Delta had sprinted from.

  The door to the stairs opened and Crow heard the quiet footfalls as the three members of Delta rushed through it. Then there was one more set of footfalls as Fleet came around the corner on the other side of the elevators at an unsteady jog. He stopped at the bank of elevators and hit the call button. After a few seconds, the doors opened and Fleet moved forward. Crow peeked the corner one last time and saw Fleet stumble into the elevator. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and his face was covered with blood, bruises, and some kind of white paste. In the half second that Crow saw him, he noted that a hematoma had almost entirely swollen his left eye closed—and that Fleet was using his finger to put some of the white stuff that covered his face into his mouth. Weird.

  Crow smiled. No helmet meant no camera. The Clerics would have telemetry on Fleet, but not video, and unless he opened the command channel on his communicator, no audio.

  He sprinted silently toward the elevator and dove between the doors as they were closing. He caught Fleet entirely by surprise, his finger was in his mouth and his eyes were closed with pleasure. Crow noticed the tang of some kind of chicken and garlic dish in the air and understood why Fleet was so distracted. An instant of empathy bloomed in Crow’s heart in the clarity of the combat fugue—Fleet had not tasted food until tonight. Crow remembered the first food he’d eaten, in Father DeFranchesco’s small parish, a bowl of chicken broth. He’d cried… sobbing like a baby. Sometimes memories of his first fresh peach could still make him misty. Memories of the first time he’d heard DeFranchesca’s small church choir could still make him cry now, and if he spent too long thinking about how Palestrina had sounded in his first experience with the priest’s iPod, this leap was going to end in a hug rather than the required violence.

  The thought of Ash in danger was enough to snap his mind into the clearest focus.

  Crow struck Fleet in the forehead with the butt of his weapon hard enough to knock him from his feet, but maybe half as hard as he could have hit him. Fleet bounced off the back wall of the elevator and landed in a heap on the floor.

  Seeing Delta’s sniper so completely helpless on the floor gave Crow a brief flash of memory of the last time they’d met, of the catastrophic chest wound he’d dealt Shadow as they’d fled into the forest around the OSI’s base. He remembered Shadow’s half-conscious groans of pain as Crow had carried him almost thirty miles through the Virginia forest on the night that he’d lost Ash—lost Tink. Though the flash of memory was painful, and intense for all its brevity, Crow held no animosity for Fleet. What he felt instead were equal parts pity and empathy. Fleet had been his brother in arms in the Hallow and his brother in chains for as long as they’d both lived. Though Crow was free, Fleet was still a slave.

  When Crow had worn the chains that Fleet still wore, he’d dealt out death and misery without even the knowledge for remorse. He’d been a toy, a tool for the Clerics, an attack dog, a slave.

  “Sleep well, brother.” Crow muttered, “May you dream of garlic sauce.”

  He hit the button for the lobby, then began unstrapping Fleet’s armor as the doors slid closed.

  ***

  “I want them alive.” Bai said, “But primary objectives are, in order: taking Dr. Hawkins alive, then preventing Ash’s escape.”

  Cleric Jen relayed more specific orders to the members of Root, her team in the apartment lobby.

  The team got behind some passable cover on two sides of the lobby. They’d used some utility tape to string two armed flash grenades across the doors of the elevator and scored the tape in the center where the elevator doors met to weaken it. When the doors slid open, it would break the weakened tape and the armed grenades would fall, their levers released by the tape, and detonate in front of the elevator, hopefully giving Root the opportunity to seize the initiative and capture their quarry without killing them.

  ***

  Crow was fastening Fleet’s gun belt beneath the stolen plate carrier when the elevator began to slow. He checked the display over the doors—third floor. Someone had called the elevator. Maybe Fleet’s unconsciousness on the Clerics’ telemetry had not been attributed to the damage he’d taken from Ash as Crow had hoped. Maybe the three remaining members of Delta were on the other side of that door and looking for payback for the many, many insults Crow had given them over the years—the last of which lay sprawled on the elevator floor behind him.

  He’d fastened the belt in place, moved to the side of the elevator and readied his stolen submachine gun before the elevator settled at the third floor. The muted snap-snap of the fire selector on his gun moving from safe to auto sounded as the door began to rattle open.

  The door slid aside and Crow found himself staring stone-faced and with murderous intent over his weapon at an elderly couple walking an elaborately coiffured dog on a white retractable leash. The man was somewhere north of sixty, dressed in an expensive but old suit with every crease carefully pressed into fastidious alignment. The man’s wife clung to his arm like an unexpectedly needed life preserver, her face drawn taut with surprised anxiety, her eyes blinking in disbelieving confusion. The man’s only visible reaction was a slight stiffening, a small widening of the eyes, and a slight recoil of his head that brought his chin back an inch.

  The dog with the ridiculous, gra
vity-defying hairdo regarded Crow with a sullen resignation in his eyes. It occurred to Crow in a moment of inexplicable empathy that the dog had in its youth considered itself somewhat a rogue, willing to take bold moves and suffer the consequences, a poodle truly to be reckoned with, a poodle of action and subtle motivations. Of course, that fantasy had all come crashing suddenly down when he’d been adopted, named “Mr. Tinkersnuggles” and given the fur style of a vacuous canine Barbie doll reasserting her fashion relevance well into old age. Black hopeless eyes seemed to stare out of the dog-become-hairstyle, communicating with Crow, one slave to another—they seemed to say, “There was a time when the world was new and ‘neutered’ was an abstract concept for other dogs, not an ever-expanding continuum of humiliation with no end to the headroom left beyond terms like ‘eunuch’ and ‘show dog’.”

  With effort, Crow tore his eyes away from the plight of the slave dog.

  The man made a hesitant, questioning sound, raising his hands fractionally as if in a tentative surrender. Crow dropped the gun back onto its sling and raised his own hands, mirroring the man’s gesture. “Please go back to your apartment,” Crow said gently, allowing the gentle authority he used over the pulpit to inform his voice, “There is about to be a rather intense—and honestly, hopeless— gunfight in your lobby, and unlike me you have not yet submitted the binding RSVP.”

  The man gave a shocked half nod, his eyes lingering on Crow’s collar, then shifted to Fleet’s body on the elevator floor behind Crow.

  “Don’t worry,” Crow added, feeling the couples’ fear nearly as intensely as he was feeling their dog’s imagined fate. He cocked his head toward Fleet’s unconscious form, “Don’t worry, he was a bad guy… well actually, he was kind of sweet, but he’s a trained killer, uh… not a cop or anything.” Crow swallowed hard, why was this social interaction making him so much more nervous than the coming conflict downstairs? It made no sense.

  He tried some more comforting words, “Nobody’s here to hurt you, but you really shouldn’t go downstairs for the next hour or so.”

  As if to punctuate his words, the double boom of stun grenades came from two floors below, in the lobby. This far away, the sound was muted, but it seemed to come to them mostly through the elevator shaft, as if the explosions had occurred in or near the elevator bank below the floor.

  Crow resisted the urge to repeatedly press the button for the lobby with the fervor of a preteen with a game controller, but failed. Yet as the door began to close, with the elderly couple and their slave dog still standing shocked motionless before it, Crow’s mind pushed his panicking heart aside and started doing its job again. If he simply rode the elevator down, he’d emerge with the warning of the slowly opening door into the heart of the action. He considered briefly leaving the elevator and sprinting down the stairs, but he knew that approach would be actively covered and he’d likely lose the element of surprise before he left the stairwell.

  His hand shot out and stopped the door before it had finished closing and the elderly couple took a fearful half step backward. The dog continued its dead, accusing stare.

  “I’m sorry,” Crow said as gently as possible, keeping his hands partly up and trying to keep the wicked smile off of his lips, “but may I borrow some lipstick or maybe an eyebrow pencil, Ma’am?”

  The man’s mouth dropped slightly open to protest and he took a half step in front of his wife.

  “Please.” Crow said, “Anything I can use to write with. It would really help me.” He gave them a hopeful smile. The man was looking at Crow’s gun, but the woman was looking at the priest’s collar that protruded above the stolen plate carrier he wore.

  “Of course.” She said, releasing her husband’s arm and rummaging through her purse. After a few seconds she asked, “Lipstick, pen, or eyebrow pencil?”

  “Lipstick, please.” Crow said.

  She stepped forward and passed him the lipstick.

  Crow stepped back and took his hand off the door. “Thank you, Ma’am. I may not be able to return this to you as my death is all but sure, but should I happen to see an attorney before the end, I will leave it to you… uh. Uh, thanks.” Crow gave them a fake-feeling smile.

  The man started nodding and didn’t stop as he led his wife away. “Don’t worry about it dearie… I’ll pray for you!” she said over her shoulder.

  Crow nodded again, willing his lips to stay together, preempting the next gale of irrelevance and blather welling in his mind and throat.

  As the couple moved away, the dog stayed, staring at Crow in what Crow could not stop imagining as sullen resignation to a cruel yet inevitable fate. Finally, the leash tightened with distance as the old couple moved and the dog was pulled gently away, ending the moment of imagined empathy. Imagined, Crow thought, not least because as the leash pulled the dog, he (or she, Crow realized) let out a squeaking bark and pranced away, wagging his/her tail happily, a small bell trilling gaily on (probably) her neck.

  That was weird, Crow thought when the doors had closed. Then he smiled, realizing that the couple was undoubtedly thinking the same thing, but with much more solid reasoning.

  As the elevator again began to descend, he let his small smile stretch into the wicked smile he’d been suppressing since he’d settled on his new plan.

  He took the cap off of the lipstick and turned to the unconscious form of Fleet.

  ***

  The elevator was not yet half open when Ash saw the two grenades hit the ground in front of the doors. One bounced about half a foot into the lobby and the other about a foot into the elevator.

  Ash kicked at the grenade, intending to send it out into the lobby, but before her foot touched it, both grenades went off and the universe seemed to convulse and dissolve.

  She thought she was blinking her eyes to clear them, but she had no proof. The world was an unbroken, flickering formless white filled with a pervasive and painful ringing sound. It seemed to her that somehow the white and the ringing were two halves of the same experience. As she thought about it, the sight and sound seemed to harmonize, growing and retreating in tandem.

  Pain exploded from her right leg, and she was sure she was falling. Then there was a white nova that imploded into blackness and she thought nothing at all.

  ***

  Hawkins felt the blinding boom and then the cuffs on his wrists. He perceived no time passing between; one moment he was standing in the elevator, defiantly holding his gun in his off-hand, ready to go out in a blaze of glory. The next moment, someone was kneeling on his neck and he was freaking hog-tied again.

  At least this time, Ash’s space-age auto splint was keeping the torsion of the cuffs from grinding the ends of his broken bone together. There was a flash of despair that seemed to jerk from his heart like the spasm that might end a nightmare on waking, then peace. Like the splint on his arm, the hope Ash had given him stood between him and the pain. He still remembered who he was.

  “Oh whatever.” He mumbled as the Dragon who had bound his hands and elbows took her knee off the back of his neck and stood. He was smiling, but as of yet, avoiding the manic giggling he felt threatening on every exhale.

  ***

  When the door had opened, the members of Root were behind cover. Two were behind a half wall by the mailboxes and the other two were behind a vestigial front desk left over from a long-ago time when there had been a concierge in the building.

  After the detonations of the stun grenades at the mouth of the elevator, their captain had hobbled Ash in the thigh with a shot from his pistol and the sniper had used a bean bag round from a short shotgun to knock her down with a shot that glanced off her forehead.

  Their Close and their Tech had rushed forward, securing both the semi-conscious Ash and the stunned OSI chief.

  The three members of Delta burst from the stairwell in a flawless clockwork of overlapping zones of fire. They’d arrived seconds after the grenades went off, but were too late to participate in the capture.


  Seconds later, Ash and Hawkins stood on shaky legs, gagged and bound in the center of the seven Falcons, ready for extraction. The goal-tone sounded through everyone’s headset, and their Clerics relayed orders for proceeding to the extraction point.

  “I need telemetry on Fleet.” Chrome said into the command channel as he stared toward the elevator bank.

  “Unconscious.” The Cleric said into the command channel. “Still in the elevator, descending past the second floor.”

  “Unconscious…” Chrome repeated, brow furrowing. Fleet had taken some very intense head trauma and he’d been foggy when Chrome left him, but he’d made it to the elevator under his own power.

  Chrome gestured to the rest of his team and they snapped into action, fanning out and centering their focus on the elevator bank. “Threat unknown.” Chrome said and the other team moved, hurrying the captives to the partial cover of the mail alcove and putting a man each to cover the stairwell and the front entrance to the building.

  They waited in a tense silence, then finally, the doors of the elevator opened and they saw Fleet, they saw the message.