The Walls of Orion

by T. D. Fox

  “Okay. Hang in there. See you tomorrow.”

  He hung up. She stayed, kneeling by the end of her bed with the contents of her purse scattered all over the floor, phone pressed to her cheek. She didn’t want to put it down. For several long minutes, she stared at the little slip of paper on the carpet.

  The distant beep of the microwave, reminding her of her abandoned cocoa, finally brought her to her feet. She padded into the kitchen. After reheating her cup, she grabbed a blanket from her room and shuffled to the living room. Turning on all the lights, Courtney switched on the TV and lowered the volume until it hummed in the background. Then she curled up on the sofa.

  Her eyes were still open when the sun rose.

  10. THE KNIGHT

  COURTNEY FELT SILLY in the morning. It was the concussion. Everything from the night before had been the concussion, messing with her brain. Nevertheless, she had an appointment.

  She had never been to the café at the end of the street, half a block down from Jessie’s Joe. As a barista she’d always had all the coffee she could ever want. It felt weird walking into a coffee shop as a customer. Cream & Sugar was bigger than Jessie’s, with quite a few more patrons, but the feel and smell of it was the same. She hovered in the doorway until she spotted Jasper sitting at a small table by the window.

  He saw her the same moment she saw him and lifted a hand in greeting.

  “Hope you got some sleep after I woke you up,” she said as she sat down across from him.

  “Don’t worry.” He held up his full cup of coffee. “The caffeine’s on tap here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Seriously, don’t worry about it. I stayed up researching some stuff after you called me. You might’ve given me a lead in a case I’ve been stuck on for months.” He took a sip. “Anyway, you’re the one I was worried about.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You sounded... I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you sounded pretty bad.”

  “Thanks.” Courtney rubbed a hand over her face, acutely aware of every minute of sleep she’d lost last night.

  “Do you need coffee? I’ll get you something.”

  She smiled. “No, thanks. I’m okay.”

  Jasper nodded toward the tape at her temple. “How’s the head?”

  “I get headaches off and on. But I’m doing fine. My best friend’s a nurse, so she’s checking up on me every day.”

  “That’s good of her. You know, the concussion might be causing some of the sleeplessness.”

  “She said so too. That and trauma. If you could call it trauma.”

  “What do you mean, if you could call it trauma? Loads of people, even on the force, develop PTSD from stuff like this. Flashbacks and noise triggers keep you up at night a long time after.”

  “I wasn’t the one who got my head slammed into a counter.”

  “Yes, but you were a witness to violence, and a man kicked you in the head for crying out loud. Go easy on yourself. Stuff like this... you can’t get over it in a week. It takes time.”

  He was staring at her with those concerned blue eyes again, the same eyes he’d given her the night of the break-in. How many people did he console after incidents like this? No doubt he’d learned on the field how to navigate traumatic events. But this... it didn’t feel like trauma. That ghostly whistle kept her up at night, yes. But when she thought back to that moment in the café? When that psycho pulled the gun in her friend’s face and she stepped right in front of it?

  She didn’t remember fear. She remembered thrill.

  “Then...” she said, realizing she needed to speak. “I guess losing a couple nights of sleep at first is normal.”

  “Perfectly.” Jasper took another sip of coffee and leaned forward. “If you don’t mind my asking, what made you remember the detail you shared with me? About the whistling.”

  I imagined it, echoing through my apartment, like a schizophrenic. Courtney bit her tongue. “That scene kept replaying in my head. I kept thinking there was something different about that guy without a mask. And then I remembered.”

  “Do you remember the tune?”

  “Is... the tune important?”

  “It might be.”

  Courtney hesitated. Feeling a little foolish, she closed her eyes and tried to pinpoint the exact notes the man had hit when he’d left the store. A familiar eerie whistle filled her brain. She wasn’t sure how much of it was an actual memory, and how much her mind had made up over the night’s tossing and turning. She strained her thoughts backward. Oddly enough, another memory surfaced. The haunting, airy notes that hung on the rain that night several weeks ago, as she took her lonely walk home from the café.

  The tunes blended together. She couldn’t remember if they were the same.

  “Are you getting anything?”

  “A little.” Courtney opened her eyes, cheeks warming. “You don’t want me to sing it, do you?”

  “You could whistle it.”

  She looked around. “What, right here?”

  “Well, it’s too loud for you to try humming. Maybe you could translate it. How did it go: low, low, high? Or high, low, high? How many bars were there?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Courtney sighed, feeling her cheeks get redder. She took a deep breath and whistled the melody as clearly as she could.

  The high, eerie notes rose above the din of the customers. It filled the crowded space, echoing louder than she meant it to. She could feel eyes turning toward her. As soon as she’d finished, she ducked her head and hid her face behind her coppery braid.

  The hair on her arms prickled. It was one thing to imagine it; quite another to hear it out loud. One man in particular, a few tables away, was staring at her.

  “Wow,” said Jasper.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure you haven’t heard that anywhere else? You remembered that all just from the café?”

  “Why?”

  “I mean, you’ve got it down pat. Every note.”

  She stared at him. “You’ve heard the song before?”

  “It’s not a song. Well, at least not one that anybody else knows. It’s unique to a syndicate I’m after. Street-named The Whistler.”

  “Whistler?” That name sparked a memory. Something she’d heard from Dina or seen on the news. “You mean that guy from the papers? Public enemy number one?”

  Jasper shook his head, knuckles clenched on the table. “Not a guy. A group. The media might spread a different story for views, but nobody on the force thinks he’s a man. At least, not one man. There’s no way one man could be capable of all the crimes he’s wanted for.”

  Unsettled, Courtney glanced past Jasper toward the man across the café to see if he was still staring. He wasn’t. He’d picked up the sugar shaker at his table and upended it over his coffee. She could see the stream of sugar falling from where she sat.

  She returned her attention to Jasper. “What do you mean? What all is he wanted for?”

  “A hundred impossible things. Murder in two places at once, with the same signature. There are a dozen conflicting descriptions from witnesses. ‘He’ kills a cop in a building with every exit covered and still disappears without a trace. And the outbreaks of Changers? He’s always connected. We’ll think we have him cornered, then he’ll slip through our fingers. It’s a syndicate, each member pretending to be the same killer. They’ve made a superhuman public figure, a larger-than-life monster that everyone’s terrified to cross. They’ve got fingers in every major crime organization in this city. Even Emilio Valentini’s afraid of this ‘Whistler’.”

  “But what if it’s a real person? We’ve got enough superhuman stuff going on in this city, you’d think the cops wouldn’t bat an eye.”

  “The public wants a villain to pin things on as bad as they want a superhero. The idea of a whole super-organization under their city is terrifying, so they stick to an urban legend that a gang of murderers prey on. But looking at facts, not sensationalism,
what was the description of your coffee shop murderer?”

  “Seriously? I gave it to the cops like seven times.”

  “I know. Big, dark hair, dark eyes, right? Well, we’ve got a zillion other descriptions of a whistling killer. Blue eyes and blonde hair. Black hair and pale skin. Very short, very tall, all the heights in between. European, Asian, Hispanic, African-American. Big and beefy like your guy, or skinny as a rail. Still think it’s all the same man?”

  Courtney picked at a chip in the wooden table. “How could there be such a big terrorist organization right underneath the cops’ noses?”

  Jasper laughed. “Really? I’ve never met anyone else in this town as naïve as I am.”

  She looked up, teetering on the edge of being offended. He raised his hands.

  “Sorry, that came out worse than I intended. I meant... I’m used to being the new guy everyone makes fun of, getting riled up by the way things are run around here. The corruption, the crime, the negligence from the police. It’s nice to meet somebody else who believes there could be real justice in this town.”

  Courtney dropped her eyes, picking a little more determinedly at the crack in the table. She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore. She remembered a different conversation, in a different café with a very different man. If W was right about the state of Orion City, the only real “justice” might be more along the lines of what that vigilante was doing.

  She glanced back at Jasper, catching onto something he’d said. “New guy? When did you join the force?”

  “When I moved here.”

  “Oh. From Eastside?”

  “Outside, actually.”

  “You mean you got stuck here with the Quarantine?” Courtney blew out a breath in sympathy. “That’s rough. Did you have family on the Outside?”

  “No, I mean—yeah, I’ve got family on the Outside—but I didn’t get stuck. I transferred here. Last year.”

  He watched her, sitting up straight, as if bracing for an unpleasant reaction. She hadn’t noticed it before, but he had a very open face. Those blue eyes gave away everything he was feeling. Embarrassment. Nerves. Excitement. She’d figured he was a rookie because he kept leaking details of the case. But she’d never imagined he was new new, as in from Outside.

  “What’s it like?” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “The Outside! Is it just like in the movies? How much has changed? Where are you from? Are you from Illinois? Have you been outside the States? Tell me it’s not like here. They still have gasoline, I bet, everything’s not self-sustaining electricity. Does it stink? Is there pollution? Do you take public transit everywhere? Does everyone have their own car? Is it crowded? Oh, I bet there’s open space everywhere, just fields and fields where you could run and cartwheel with nobody in sight...”

  The more she gushed, the more he stared, and the more her cheeks began to burn. She trailed off, waiting for him to answer at least one of the hundred questions she felt building inside.

  “That’s what you ask?” he said. “It’s usually, ‘Why the hell would you come here?’ Or ‘Are you crazy?’ Once someone straight up tried to punch me.”

  “Tell me what it’s like,” she begged.

  He scratched the back of his head. “I mean, I’m probably not the best sampling. I’m not from Illinois, I was born on the other side of the country. A little town in Oregon. Not much out there, where I’m from, but you’d like it I guess. If you like fields and hundreds of acres of just... well, nothing. Mountains and trees and sheep. I was on the force in such a small county, they made me sheriff when the old guy retired. My age didn’t matter as the only applicant in a one-horse town. I spent a lot of time patrolling empty roads, winding round and round through acres of farmland and forests.”

  Courtney tried not to let the longing show on her face. “And you gave all that up?”

  “There it is,” Jasper said with a wry smile.

  “Why? What on earth would make you throw away a life of freedom to get stuck inside this Wall?”

  Emotions struggled behind that open gaze. “I wanted to make a difference.”

  The words plucked at that uncomfortable place inside her, the same place W’s words had touched when he’d made a similar declaration. One man can make a difference.

  Swallowing, she ground her fingernails deeper into the tabletop. If she hadn’t learned to keep her head down, she might not have had a head to keep. Just like everybody else in Orion. Hopefully Jasper learned that sooner rather than later. She liked his honest face.

  He looked self-conscious at her silence, so she forgot she was wearing a hole in the table and leaned forward, waiting for him to go on. When he didn’t, she prompted, “I thought the Outside didn’t know how bad it really was in here. We’re a red zone. Nobody in or out, unless you’re a crazy scientist.”

  “That’s why I came. Nobody in or out, save the lab quacks. The government steers everyone clear of this place like the plague, and anybody left wants to round you up and treat you like a bunch of patient zeroes. Who’s responsible for treating you like human beings? The way I saw it from the outside, Orion City is a time bomb full of scared people who need protection—real people, not a bunch of zombies or vegetables for crying out loud. They need honest men to keep the peace. After almost a decade of Quarantine, it’s not a stretch to imagine desperate people trying to take advantage of the situation.”

  “So you came... what, as a knight in shining armor?”

  “What? Gosh, no, I’m not that naïve—hopefully. I came because I wasn’t making any difference helping people back home. There are twenty thousand cops trying to save the world out there. I just wanted to help one city. Nobody else was going to.”

  A knight indeed. “What’d they say when you told them you wanted a transfer?”

  “Well, at first they were sad, of course. It’s a small town, so everybody knows you. They expected me to stay till I was old and gray like the first sheriff. When I told them about Orion City, they thought I was bonkers. Tried to get me in with the town psychiatrist, convince me I was having a midlife crisis at twenty-three. Or, if they agreed I was wasting my talents, at least transfer me to a more realistic city like Portland or Eugene.”

  “You must’ve really wanted out. Coming here, just to get away from your hometown?”

  “That wasn’t it at all. I love my hometown. Yeah, it’s small, and the people don’t know the concept of minding their own business, but I loved them. I didn’t leave because I needed to turn over a new leaf or something. I considered it more like a sacrifice for a greater cause.”

  The more he talked, the younger he looked. Maybe it was the idealism, or maybe it was the simple fact that he was smiling now, his eyes lighting up when he talked about his hometown. She wondered if he’d left family behind, a girlfriend even, in Oregon.

  “What’d your parents think?” she asked.

  “They were a little ticked at first. But I’ve got brothers, so it’s not like I was leaving them alone. I didn’t put down any roots there I couldn’t pull up. And I don’t plan on being here forever, anyway. I’ll see them again.”

  Courtney blinked. “That’s quite the gamble. You don’t know when—or even, if—Quarantine will lift.”

  “It will. They can’t keep you guys in here forever. They’ve been working on a cure for ten years. They’ll find it.”

  Courtney smiled wryly. Did everyone on the Outside still believe that line? But Jasper’s blue eyes were dead serious. The guy had thrown his whole life away to try and help the poor unfortunate souls within Quarantine walls. It was hard not to feel bad for him, but at the same time... the idealism was kind of cute.

  “Well,” she said. “Hope the demotion was worth it. Sheriff to regular detective. Free man to guinea pig.”

  He smiled. He had a nice smile, bright and wide and real. Nothing at all like W’s. “Yeah, it’s worth it. I get to help citizens like you.” He cleared his throat. “Which reminds me why we’re her
e in the first place.”

  She laughed. “Sorry. It’s not often I get to meet someone from the outside.”

  “You’d be surprised how often I get asked about it in a workday.”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot.” He cleared his throat again, a slight pink coloring his cheeks. “Anyway. Do you have anything else you want to tell me about this guy? The whistler in the café.”

  Oh. Right. The Whistler.

  “Um...” Courtney racked her brain. “I can’t remember anything else right now. But more memories might come back to me later.”

  “Well.” Jasper scratched the back of his head, the pink in his cheeks growing darker. She wanted to laugh, but didn’t. “I mean, you’ve got my number, if anything else comes back to you.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Neither of them moved.

  “Or, you know,” he said. “We could meet again. In a couple days, maybe Friday, in case you remember something later. Just to be thorough.”

  Courtney couldn’t hide her grin. “Okay. I’m not working for a while, so my schedule’s open.”

  “Then... how’s Friday?”

  “Friday works.”

  “Seven?”

  “Sure. Same place?”

  “Sure.”

  He smiled again, and there it was—every feeling, written on his face. Nerves, uncertainty, and a certain hopeful glow that made her stifle another grin. She hadn’t seen that look on anyone’s face before.

  “I’ll see you Friday, then,” she said as they gathered their coats.

  He walked her to the door, still smiling a little self-consciously. “I’ll look forward to it.”

  He held the door for her as they left the café. But before it swung closed behind them, she felt the familiar prick of eyes on her back.

  She turned.

  The stranger at the other end of the café still watched her, burning gaze following even after the glass door clicked shut.

  11. HEROES, LUNATICS, AND EVERYONE ELSE

  COURTNEY DIDN’T REMEMBER anything else about the gunman. No more details about the café murder, extra descriptions, or anything about “the Whistler.” But she and Jasper met up twice more in the coffee shop down the street. She felt guilty for not having any more information, but that soon became irrelevant. In fact, the case hardly came up at all. They talked and laughed. She learned he had a quirky sense of humor, was adorably old-fashioned in the way he viewed the world, and had the most brilliant streak of optimism in any man she’d ever met. By the end of their third not-date, Jasper dropped the pretense of meeting up to talk business.