A wave of sublime joy washed over her, cleaning away the terror of the preceding moment. She was alive and that was unexpected. But her transcendent happiness was fleeting. A glance across the rapidly deflating airbag revealed the aftermath of the crash; the front end of the Altima looked like an accordion, crumpled beyond recognition, and steam was hissing from the destroyed radiator.
Oh, my god. It’s totaled, Leilani thought. How am I going to pay for this?
Such mundane thoughts ricocheted through her head, transforming the miracle of her survival into something onerous, but this too was a temporary reaction. She pushed down the rising despair as a more rational part of her brain realized that the crisis was not over.
The phone had been knocked from her hand by the airbag, and as she tried to pick it up, she found that her hands were trembling. Just closing her fingers on the slim plastic case was like trying to thread a needle. She finally got a grip on it and brought it up from the floor, but as soon as she tapped in 9-1-1, she saw the words “No Service” flash across the display.
“What is this, the 90’s?” she muttered. Leilani couldn’t remember ever not being able to get coverage. She directed a few choice curse words at her wireless service, but the message did not change.
“Well, what good are you, anyway?” she finally said to the phone. Then it occurred to her that it was more than just a phone.
She activated the video camera function and then held it out in front of her, framing the crash scene in the phone’s display. “Okay,” she said, haltingly at first. “I was just in a huge accident. A semi flipped over right in front of me, and I couldn’t stop in time. There’s also some weird shit going on out in the desert. A lot of lightning… I wonder if that’s why I can’t get a signal?”
She aimed the phone toward the mountains on her right, catching several flashes at an oblique angle. “Anyway, it’s pretty weird. I think I’ll get out and take a look around.”
As she said it, it occurred to her for the first time that the driver of the eighteen-wheeler might be injured…or worse. Somehow, that made the idea of shooting video of the crash seem more than just silly; it was almost ghoulish.
She depressed the button on her seatbelt, but it refused to release. “Damn it. Doesn’t anything work?”
Suddenly, something slammed against the window beside her. A sound like a gunshot reverberated through the vehicle, startling her and opening the adrenaline gates once more. She tried to pull away instinctively even as she snapped her head around to get a look, but the seat belt held her fast.
A nightmare gazed through the window at her. It was a man…except it wasn’t a man; it wasn’t even human. It was the face of a demon.
The thing’s baleful red eyes fixed on Leilani, and it bared its teeth in a feral snarl as it hammered its hairy fists against the glass again.
Primal panic tore through Leilani, as she struggled in vain to loosen the seat belt. She didn’t even bother with the latch, but instead slipped her upper torso under the shoulder strap, giving the belt enough slack to allow her to squirm snake-like out of its restraining embrace.
The creature pounded again, and the Altima shook under the assault.
Leilani half-rolled over the center divider, but the seat belt caught on her shoes. She struggled and kicked, and when that didn’t work she tried slipping the shoes off.
The car shuddered again, the impact so ferocious that Leilani pitched forward, into the foot well on the passenger side. She tried to push herself up but her arms were pinned beneath her and every inch of movement was a titanic struggle, made all the more impossible by the relentless shaking.
There was a harsh snapping sound as the driver’s side window broke under the furious hammering, transforming instantly into an opaque mosaic of tiny tempered glass particles, held together only by a thin laminate coating, and then the curtain separating her from the demon fell apart as the creature thrust both arms through.
Leilani felt its fingers graze her leg and somehow found the will to wrestle her arms free and push herself off the floor. She stretched a hand out for the passenger’s side armrest, felt her fingers close on the latch lever, and frantically pulled at it. There was a click inside the door panel as the mechanism released. She threw the door open, and with a near-superhuman effort, heaved herself through the opening.
She felt the creature’s nails rake the bare skin of her leg, but that minor injury was nothing to what she experienced when she crashed face first onto the hot asphalt alongside the wrecked Altima. Both hurts however were muted by the anaesthetizing flood of endorphins. The scrapes and bruises might as well have been happening to someone else for all that she felt them. A single imperative drove her now.
Run!
She scrabbled for a purchase on the blisteringly hot tar macadam and pulled herself the rest of the way out of the car. She was on her feet an instant later and immediately started moving.
She didn’t get far.
Another demon appeared from behind the rear of the Altima, blocking her escape. The thing rose to full height, towering over her, all matted black hair, carious yellow teeth and bloody red eyes. She pivoted, trying to get around it, ducking under the sweep of its massive arms, but before she could move, she felt the ground slip away. Another pair of arms seized her from behind and closed tight in a crushing embrace.
There was just enough air in her lungs for a scream.
2122 UTC (2:22 pm Local)
Arizona Department of Public Safety officer Matt Becker felt a moment of dread as he stopped his police cruiser and stepped out of its air-conditioned environs into the desert heat. He’d seen plenty of carnage on the road in his six years with DPS, and it never got any easier. According to the 911 call, this one was probably going to be pretty bad, but it was what he was paid to do.
Traffic coming from Phoenix was already piling up on 60. From what he could tell, the wreck was at least twenty minutes old, but no one from the long queue of idling vehicles had ventured out to play Good Samaritan. That was probably for the best, but Becker thought it a little strange; usually there was always someone eager to offer their services or at the very least, gawk at the twisted bodies. Today however, the onlookers seemed to want to keep a healthy distance; there was a gap of almost half-a-mile between the first stopped car—presumably the person who had placed the emergency call—and the edge of the wreck.
Becker left the cruiser with its MARS lights flashing a constant warning, and jogged toward the chaotic sculpture of fiberglass and metal. It was difficult to tell how many vehicles were actually involved. There were three eighteen-wheelers, all of them either jack-knifed or on their side, but pieces of passenger cars and SUVs poked out from beneath them. Becker counted at least six different smaller vehicles. Yet, it was only as he was completing his hasty assessment of the wreck that he realized something was profoundly wrong.
There wasn’t a soul in sight.
It was extremely rare to find a rollover accident where passengers weren’t ejected on impact. Seat belts weren’t always a sure way to prevent being thrown when a car traveling close to eighty miles an hour suddenly started tumbling, and statistically, there were always a few dumb schmucks who couldn’t be bothered to “click it.” This time however, there were no scattered bodies. Nor were there any walking wounded, milling about the site in a state of shock.
Shaking his head, Becker approached the nearest vehicle—the rear end of a silver Ford Taurus, was poking out from under the tanker-trailer of a big rig—and stuck his head in through the sprung left rear door. Through the almost overpowering smell of evaporating gasoline and diesel, he caught the metallic odor of blood. Red-black streaks and clumps of gory tissue painted the interior, but there were no bodies.
Becker felt a chill creep down his back in defiance of the Sonoran Desert heat. He moved over to the nearby semi and peered in through the spider-webbed windshield.
No one there.
“What the—?”
B
ecker’s disbelief gave way to trepidation as he moved into the heart of the pile-up, but there was not a single person, living or dead, in the entire tableau. Only blood, sometimes in copious amounts, splattering the interiors of the wrecks and drying to black spots on the asphalt, offered any sort of proof that the occupants of the vehicles had not been simply whisked away, raptured off to heaven or beamed up onto an orbiting alien starship.
No, Becker thought. People died here. And then someone took them.
He kept searching, but his initial eagerness had given way to funereal dread. On the far edge of the pile-up, he found one last vehicle, a dark blue Nissan Altima that had slammed into the underside of an overturned shipping container, which stretched across the road like a gate. He glanced up the highway and saw that, here too, a surreal buffer zone existed between the wreck and the line of traffic from the east.
Becker circled the Altima, knowing full well that there would be no body, but then something caught his eye and he stuck his head in through the opening where the driver’s side window had been.
Lying on the floor, covered in tiny particles of broken glass, was a smartphone.
He picked it up and swiped a gloved thumb across the display to wake the device. The screen immediately lit up and showed a live-action image of the interior of the car; the video-camera function was actively recording.
“Holy shit,” he breathed. Someone had been shooting footage of the accident, and Becker realized that the answer to the bizarre disappearance might literally be in the palm of his hand.
He tapped at the ‘stop’ button, and saw a menu pop-up on the screen.
Upload video? [YES] [NO]
He tried to stab at the “no” button, but his gloved fingertip must have dragged across the alternative, because the menu changed to a progress bar that quickly registered “100%” and then flashed the message:
File Uploaded
“Crap.” Becker stripped off his right glove, knowing full well that it was a serious break in procedure, and with far more dexterity, he navigated through the phone’s files to locate the video segment by its timestamp. He tapped on the file icon and the display switched to a view of the crumpled front end of the Altima, as viewed from the driver’s seat.
Becker watched and listened with rapt attention as the Altima’s occupant—a young woman by the sound of her voice—recorded the aftermath of the experience.
Then something unbelievable happened.
After six years with DPS, Matt Becker thought he’d seen it all, but he had never seen anything like this.
EXCLUSION
1.
New York City — 1335 UTC (9:35 am Local)
George Pierce stared at the person sitting in the threadbare easy chair with a mixture of pity, revulsion and disbelief. When the man smiled, revealing missing and decayed teeth, the proportions remained about the same, but the emotional brew roiling in his gut spilled over like beer from a shaken bottle.
“George,” the man said, his voice grateful, but with an undercurrent that made Pierce wary. “Long time, brother.”
You aren’t my brother, Pierce wanted to say. You’re someone who happens to share some genetic material with me, but you sold your right to call me ‘brother’ for an eight-ball, and shot up, snorted, smoked…or whatever the hell it is you do with that crap. You burned that bridge a long time ago. My real brother is sitting downstairs, waiting for me.
But he didn’t say that or anything like it. Instead, he managed a weak smile and sat down. “Hey, Micah.”
“I’m glad you came,” Micah Pierce said. He nodded his head enthusiastically, but to George Pierce, it looked almost like an involuntary nervous tic. “I feel good about this. I think I’m really going to be able to kick it this time.”
Pierce also felt his head bobbing, but the confident utterance made no impression whatsoever. Micah was reading from an old script; they had played this scene out four times, was it? Five? I’ve lost track, Pierce thought.
The first time, Pierce had been wholeheartedly supportive of his sibling’s declared intent to end his narcotics addition. He had taken a leave of absence from his position at the University of Athens, effectively ceding control of a very important research project to one of his colleagues and along with it, the credit for the subsequent discovery, to give Micah his unconditional emotional support during the weeks of rehab and his subsequent effort to get established in society.
The second time, almost eighteen months later, Pierce had been more cautious, but still hopeful. Relapses happened, but Micah was family—his only remaining blood relative.
Micah’s second “clean” period, or rather the length of time between the end of his stint in rehab and his arrest for attempting to sell stolen property, which led to another court-ordered stay at an addiction treatment facility, had lasted only four months.
Pierce no longer felt any hope when Micah emerged from his personal darkness with another promise to throw the monkey off his back once and for all. Pierce felt only a profound weariness, and no small measure of guilt, partly because of his perceived failure to do the impossible and somehow lift his brother up, but mostly because he just wanted Micah to stop calling.
He nodded perfunctorily at Micah’s assurances, and chimed in with as few words as possible when his younger brother began reminiscing about experiences from their childhood—memories that were so colored and distorted as to bear little resemblance to anything that had really occurred. Pierce did not attempt to set the record straight. He had read a lot of literature about addiction over the years and recognized the classic behavior of an incorrigible addict.
On an earlier occasion, armed with academic knowledge, Pierce had confronted his brother with these realities, reducing Micah to tears, but in the end, it hadn’t made any difference. Now, Pierce no longer bothered.
He still took Micah’s calls and came to visit him when he made an apparent effort to get clean, but it wasn’t because he entertained hope that things would change. He came because he knew that someday, maybe someday soon, Micah would wind up on a slab, and then Pierce would really feel guilty. He didn’t want his last interaction with his only blood relative to be one of abject rejection.
When he could take no more of it, he rose. “Mike, I can’t stay.”
The younger Pierce started to protest, but George headed him off. “I think you really can do it this time if you want it bad enough.” He leaned over and gave Micah a quick perfunctory hug, then hastened out of the room without another word.
As he moved down the short hallway to the stairs, Pierce felt like he was struggling to breathe in a vacuum. The visit with Micah had sucked the energy right out of him, and he desperately needed to get away. He was almost running as he reached the door to the lobby, and tapped his foot anxiously as he waited for the receptionist to release the electronic lock, permitting him to rejoin the man he thought of as his true brother. He caught sight of the tall, athletic-looking figure in faded jeans and a black Elvis T-shirt, standing pensively near the exit.
“That’s done,” Pierce said. “Now let’s head upstate where I can get some of the stink off…”
Pierce’s voice trailed away as he noticed the other man’s urgent expression. “Uh, oh. I know that look. Let me guess: duty calls?”
The other man returned a grim smile and held up his smartphone as if that explained everything—it did. “I’m going to need you on this one.”
2.
Ivan Sokoloff peered through the EO Tech Gen II 3X scope at the front door of the innocuous looking brownstone residence, and waited. When the door opened, as he expected it to in the next few minutes, he would become ten million dollars richer. He let his finger brush the trigger of the bolt-action Remington Model 700 and felt an unexpected stir of anticipation; it felt surprisingly good to be working again.
Sokoloff had thought he was done with this life, and up until only a month ago, he had considered himself happily retired. Like anyone who enjoys their work
, there had been some moments of ennui at the prospect of giving up his lucrative career, but it had been a necessary thing. His success in his chosen profession had become a liability; too many people knew of him, knew his deadly reputation, and it was inevitable that he would eventually, having lived by the sword, also die by it. Perhaps it would be a bloody showdown with law enforcement agents or an unexpected betrayal from one of his own associates, hoping to cement a reputation by being the man who killed the world’s deadliest hitman. Or it would just be that his luck would run out—one job too many, his reflexes no longer quite as quick as they once were, his target just a little too well defended.
That was how nearly all professional killers ended their careers, and for a long time, Sokoloff was resigned to that eventuality. But the longer he stayed alive, notching one successful job after another, building a tremendous personal fortune secreted away in various untraceable bank accounts, he had begun to realize that he didn’t really want to go out in a blaze of glory. There was, after all, something to be said for the living the good life and dying at a ripe old age in a lavish cabana in the tropics.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as giving two weeks notice and walking away. Even retired, he would still have been a very desirable target for any number of enemies. The only way to truly close the door on his past life was to end it, literally. He had to die, or rather make the world believe that he was dead.
Callsign: King - Book 2 - Underworld (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella) Page 2
