by Ted Kosmatka
Her apartment was tiny, colorful. The dining room table sat a few feet from the front door. Beyond that, the kitchen cubicle—and beyond that, the hall. She led him by the hand, pulling him toward the bedroom.
The bed angled out from the far corner—white blankets, neatly made, and, against the wall, shelves of books.
The sounds of the street below filtered through the windows. A distant car horn, sporadic traffic. She pulled his shirt over his head.
“Now you,” he said, unbuttoning her blouse. She shrugged out from beneath it, her golden brown shoulders suddenly exposed.
She sat on the bed, fumbling with his belt.
His pants thumped to the floor, and then she stood, kissing him again, slipping out of her slacks.
When they were naked, she slid backward onto the pillows, pulling him toward her.
It was what he remembered, and a little more.
* * *
Afterward, in the darkness, she slipped her hand into his.
She reached up to touch his eye patch. “Does it ever hurt?”
“Sometimes. You’re sure it doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” She smiled. “Honestly, you could be way less good-looking and I still would have dragged you into bed.”
“You should write Hallmark cards.”
“I should. I can see it now: Happy Valentine’s Day. You could be twenty-five percent less sexy and I’d still want to sleep with you.”
“Better than the alternative, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could be barely hot enough. One wrinkle away.”
She laughed. “Who are you?”
“Just me. The same.”
“No, not the same. Everyone is always two people at the same time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who we are, and who we’re becoming. People change.”
“Do you always think this much?”
“It always happens the same way,” she said.
“What?”
“What comes next.”
“And what’s that?”
“Not this week, or next week. But eventually.”
“What?” he coaxed.
She touched his arm, sliding a finger along his bare skin. Her face grew sad in the half-light spilling in through the window. “I get bored,” she said.
Paul was silent for a long time. “Is that what happened last time?”
“With you? No. I learn everything I can, like there’s this hunger inside, but then something happens to it.”
He squeezed her hand, running a finger along her narrow forearm.
“It happens every time,” she continued. “Once I learn everything there is to learn.”
“You lose interest.”
“Yes. But you were always different.”
“How?”
“I never thought I learned everything. Sometimes it felt like I barely knew you at all.”
33
Paul stayed in Chicago over the weekend, sleeping at Lilli’s apartment for another two nights.
She gave him a mug of coffee for his drive, and he left for home the same time she left for work.
When he got back to town, eleven hours later, he slowed at his apartment complex. Two men stood outside, smoking. They were the same two men he’d seen in the hall the previous week. Only this time they weren’t coming or going. They were waiting. It didn’t take a great leap of deductive reasoning to figure out who they were waiting for. Paul slunk down in his seat and drove past without slowing. The men didn’t see him, but there was no question that something had changed. The noose around his neck was tightening.
The computer guy picked up on the third ring.
“Hello.”
“Alan, it’s Paul.”
“Hey.”
“Did you finish the analysis?”
“The report is almost done, but I wanted to double-check some of the fine-grain analysis.”
“How fine-grain?”
“Just eliminating confounds.”
“Do you have a result?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good enough. Whatever is done, I need to pick it up.”
“I can have the rest of the report done by morning.”
“That’s too late.”
There was a pause. “I don’t really like you changing the game plan on me.”
“It can’t be helped.”
“You in some kind of trouble, man?”
“No, no trouble.”
“Then what’s the hurry?”
“I just need to square things away.”
“Whatever the fuck that means.”
“Yeah, whatever the fuck. I’ve got the money. Full price.”
“Your money, man.” There was silence. Then: “Come by and pick it up anytime.”
“I’m on my way.”
“You mean now?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll save the report to the same drive you gave me, and you can have your data back.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“And after this … don’t call me again. You make me nervous.”
“That’s a deal.”
Paul hung up and sat considering his phone for a while. He texted Lilli: When can you have the tests done?
Her reply came a minute later: Should be able to test in a few days.
He texted back: The sooner the better.
* * *
A half hour later, Paul pulled onto Alan’s block. He drove past the apartment twice.
He didn’t see anyone waiting. No men in suits. Nothing suspicious. But still, things didn’t feel right.
He opened his phone and punched the numbers.
“Hello.”
“You need to meet me,” Paul said.
There was a pause on Alan’s end. “I thought you were coming here?”
“No, it’s better we meet somewhere else. You bring the drive and I’ll bring the money.”
“You’re acting real sketchy, man,” he said.
“It’ll be fine.”
“I don’t like this.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“Maybe I just smash this drive with a hammer and forget I ever met you.”
“You’d be doing us both a favor.”
“Then maybe I will.”
“Do what you have to.”
There was silence on the line. The crackle of static.
“Where do you want to meet?”
“The bridge two blocks over.”
“My jacket is already on.”
Paul watched the front steps. He was parked a block and a half away, but he had a clear line of sight to the front of Alan’s building.
He opened the text feature on his phone and typed in Alan’s number. Then he typed the words STOP, GO BACK.
His finger hovered over the Send button but did not press it. He waited.
Although Alan had said his jacket was on, it still took three minutes for a man to exit Alan’s building—small and slight, wearing Alan’s leather jacket, a baseball cap pulled down over a head of dark hair. If it wasn’t Alan, it was a guy who looked just like him.
Paul scanned the street carefully. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one followed. No one stepped from the shadows. Alan looked both ways, then turned and moved up the sidewalk, disappearing around the corner. Paul waited a full minute before closing his phone. He climbed out of his car and walked one block over, heading for the bridge. The streets were quiet this time of the night. The traffic was light. Few pedestrians on the sidewalks. Around the corner, the bridge loomed into view. The structure itself was an old, iron monstrosity, about 150 yards long, an intermittently lit suspension of two-lane road. A pedestrian walkway crowded one edge of the traffic lanes. The bridge crossed a sloping landscape of trees and brush that dropped into a low, dark river in the center of the span. Up ahead, Alan stopped against the handrail under a streetlight, about a third of the way across. His collar w
as turned up, the cap still hiding his face.
Paul approached.
As he got closer, he waved.
Alan waved back.
There was something in his stance. Something off about it. Paul’s pace slowed. Alan seemed to sense this, and he turned slightly, his face coming out of the shadows for a moment, and it was then that Paul saw it. The bruises. Two black eyes. A broken nose.
Paul stopped. He was thirty feet away.
“Alan?”
Alan refused to look him in the face. Paul noticed that his hand was bandaged. Soaked through in blood. Blood dripped to the pavement.
“What…” Paul began, but there was no need to finish the question.
From somewhere behind Paul came the sound of a gunning engine. Paul turned. A gray van surged up the street, its bright lights bearing down on them through the darkness.
“I’m sorry,” Alan said. “They made me.”
Paul ran.
He sprinted past Alan along the walkway, pumping his legs as fast as he could. The sound of the engine grew louder, until it was right beside him. He chanced a look and saw a blond man in the driver’s seat, glaring at him. The squeal of brakes and doors opening—then shouts.
“Stop right fucking there!”
“You’re only making it harder!”
“No, let him run.” It was the last voice that brought Paul’s gaze around again. A twisted voice from out of a nightmare.
A dark, hooded figure was stepping away from the van. A long coat flapped in the wind, and beneath the hood Paul caught the flash of something that his mind couldn’t process. A face.
Paul bolted. Footfalls closed in on him. He ran as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The thing hit him like a locomotive. A dark man-shaped thing that bulged out from beneath a gray trench coat. Paul slammed into the railing, slipped, spun, fell. He staggered to his feet, turning to look at his attacker. It was a few inches shorter than him but wider. The darkness and a hooded sweatshirt hid its features.
“You’re making this fun,” the shape said.
Paul lunged away but it was faster. Much faster.
The blow knocked Paul off his feet. He hit the corrugated grating.
And now the others were there.
The blond man, grinning in the dark.
In the distance, a scream. “No!” Alan tried to fight them as he was shoved into the open van. One of the men jumped into the driver’s seat and the van sped along the bridge, screeching to a halt right in front of Paul, blocking his view of the roadway.
Paul pulled himself to his feet and hooked an arm around the bridge railing. Here the bridge was still above land, not water. A tangle of branches spread below.
He angled away from them, moving along the walkway, but the hooded shape advanced, cutting him off.
“They don’t get out much,” the blond man said, gesturing toward his hooded partner. “They’re a specialized set. Bad at some things, good at others. But this kind of work, hunting down men—it’s like they were born for it.”
Paul backed up against the rail.
“Another step, and I’ll jump.”
The blond man smiled. “Do us a fucking favor.”
They came for him in a rush, the hooded figure moving faster than the others, and Paul leaned backward, the small of his back pressed against the railing. His legs came up … only instead of going over, he put everything he had into a two-legged kick at the hooded, incoming face. The thing’s head snapped back with the force of the blow. Then fast—so fast—a huge arm came up like a piston and smashed Paul in the side of the head, sending him spinning over the rail, and then he was falling.
An iron grip caught him by the ankle.
He looked up in shock, and there was the dark shape glaring down at him. Impossibly fast, impossibly strong. Paul weighed north of two-thirty and this thing had him in one viselike hand.
Paul looked down and saw the tree branches a dozen feet below. It was impossible to tell how high he was. Where he’d land. What he’d land on.
Paul looked up at the leering face. For the first time, he got a good view of it, in the light from a passing car. Under the hooded sweatshirt, the face was impossible. Huge and prognathic, thin lips peeled back from teeth like no human ever had—enormous canines, clenched down with insane intensity. The eyes had no whites—just dark pools of rage.
And then that impossibly strong arm pulled and Paul’s two-hundred-thirty-plus pounds were drawn inexorably upward.
Paul used his other foot to kick the demon in the face, and then he fell.
* * *
Free fall.
The sound of rushing wind. The soft, supple texture of the last few moments of his life.
Then branches clawed his face, and Paul spun, clutching—boughs coming apart in his hands, body twisting in the darkness, as he smashed through the leafy canopy—the crackle of rending wood getting louder as the thin outer branches bent under his weight, carrying him downward before snapping, and still he hung on, the taste of leaves, pinwheeling, taking on angular momentum as his body careened off the thicker branches.
Sounds like bones breaking, like gunshots; then a huge blow to the back of his legs, and his body swung beneath the branch, spinning—and then a moment of nothing, free fall again, and time slowed to an instant crack.
He hit the ground.
* * *
There were two things in the universe.
Darkness.
Pain.
Waking like sleeping. Half-conscious, aware only that he was alive. Shouts rained down from high above. From another world.
“Paul? You dead, Paul?”
“I think he’s dead.”
“We need to check.”
Paul was on his back. The entire world above him. He sat up, and the pain was excruciating. He collapsed into a heap. Blackness.
The men.
The thing.
Paul opened his eye again, slowly this time, trying to remember what he was supposed to do.
His head throbbed. His thoughts were jumbled. Where his spine had once been was now only white-hot screaming pain. His eye burned.
When he thought he could sit up, he did, and the pain laid him out again.
From somewhere above, the garbled shouting grew louder. Then silence. Instinctively, he knew the silence was worse.
They were coming for him.
They.
And that brought it back.
All of it.
He remembered the impossible face. The iron-strong hand.
Paul climbed to his feet and made them move.
His right leg was agony, but it supported his weight.
He limped up the hill for a few steps, then stopped. That hill, he realized, was what they’d be coming down to meet him. He changed course, moving down the hill, toward the water, scrambling through the underbrush. He made his way to the river.
The foliage opened up before him, and there was the sudden expanse of water. Paul crouched and scooped a handful onto his face. It was shockingly cold. He dumped another handful over his head.
Voices drifted down from somewhere above.
They were searching. He looked right and then left, trying to make a decision.
He went left, hugging the shoreline, trying to put distance between himself and the voices. This took him under the bridge and along the other side. He moved as fast as his damaged body could carry him. The limp was getting worse as his muscles tightened up.
The voices grew louder, so Paul moved a few yards up from the riverbank. This way, if they made it to the riverbank and looked downstream, they wouldn’t see him.
Distance was the thing. The only thing. It was what mattered, putting distance between himself and them. When he’d gone another hundred yards, pushing twisted branches out of his way, he allowed himself to veer upward again, climbing the hill. He was on the other side of the bridge now. If they’d sent anyone down the hill on this side, he was finished. It was as simple as that
.
He climbed, and the hill grew steeper, the underbrush less dense. The sound of traffic filtered through the bushes above. Soon a streetlight was throwing faint illumination through the foliage. Then, with a last upward surge, his thigh muscles burning, he was up and out.
He stepped onto a crumbling sidewalk. It was like being born.
He kept his head down and limped up the street, away from the bridge. Two blocks over, he circled back toward his car.
If they knew where he’d parked, if they’d left a guard, he was done.
He came around the corner of the building. He eyed his small black Matrix. He saw nobody nearby, but then again, he wouldn’t. Sometimes, pretending you had a choice was a waste of time.
He limped to his car, opened the door, and climbed inside.
He hit the ignition, shifted into drive, and pulled away from the curb. Without putting his seat belt on. Never had that infernal beeping sounded so good.
* * *
There were only so many places he could go.
His apartment was out of the question.
Paul drove quickly through the city streets, heading for the highway. It started to rain again.
First he’d need money. That before anything else.
But then a thought occurred to him. Even before money, he had to warn Charles. If they’d followed him to the computer guy, then it was hard to tell what they knew. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for them to know he’d talked to Charles. Paul flipped open his phone but closed it again. His phone records might be compromised. If not now, then possibly later. If he called Charles, it would show up on a spreadsheet somewhere, and later it might make trouble for Charles. Paul didn’t want that.
Best to warn him in person. Tonight. Before things had a chance to spiral any further out of control.
It was a thirty-minute drive across the city.
When Paul finally pulled onto Charles’s street, he made a point not to slow down. He drove past the building, searching every shadow, working up his nerve. Again, nothing suspicious. By now Paul had realized that this didn’t mean much. There’d been nothing suspicious at Alan’s place, either. He parked two blocks away and walked it.
The sidewalks were puddled, but at least the rain had stopped. Paul kept his head down, walking with purpose. If he saw anything fishy, he’d take off, he decided. He’d never been much of a runner, and now, with his leg screwed up, he’d be even worse, but maybe with enough of a head start, he figured, he could make it back to his car. These were the things he was thinking about as he approached Charles’s apartment.
