by Marcus Sakey
The way I shine?
He supposed it didn’t make much difference; it was in-or-out time. Brody nodded.
The man gestured at two companions and the three of them started walking. Brody split his attention between them and the others, especially the kid with the bow. He knew nothing about archery, and had to imagine that fifty yards was a difficult shot, but it seemed like a doable one. The moment he saw the kid nock an arrow was the moment he went over the side.
It struck him how very odd a thing that was to be worried about, someone shooting him with an arrow on a bridge in downtown Chicago, but he packed it away.
The man he’d been speaking with was broad shouldered and athletic, and carried a fireman’s axe lightly in one hand, the head of it swaying an inch above the ground. He was flanked by a middle-aged man with a cop moustache and a police baton. A woman with the face of a soccer mom and the body of a yoga instructor came last, carrying, sure, a samurai sword. Brody eased closer to the railing.
When they reached him, the man glanced at the river below. “Water’s cold, man.”
Brody said nothing.
“Name’s Kyle. This is Antoine and Lucy.”
“Will Brody.”
“Nice to.” Kyle’s eyes flicked over him appraisingly, stopping on the holstered Glock. “Police?”
“FBI.”
“Wow, never met one before. You guys?”
Lucy shook her head. Antoine spat over the railing.
“Wanna see a trick, Will Brody? I’m going to read your mind.” Kyle put his free hand to his temple and mimed concentration. “You’re thinking this is the weirdest dream you’ve ever had. Right?”
Brody said nothing.
“Kyle, why are you messing around?” Lucy held the sword in a way that made Brody believe she knew how to use it. “Look at him. He’s an Eater.”
“He’s fed. That’s not the same thing,” Kyle said. “We felt someone arrive.”
“You saying a new arrival took an Eater alone?”
“I don’t know yet,” Kyle said. “So let’s hear from our man here. What’s your story, Will Brody?”
Brody said, “What’s an Eater?”
“Well, we’re not the first new friends you made today, right?”
It was a test, he realized. All of this. Some sort of interview. He didn’t know what these people were talking about, or what they stood for, but they were measuring him. “I was attacked by three strangers. Two men and a woman. They had weapons, a machete, a knife. And they were . . . fast. Strong.” He hesitated, shrugged. “They did impossible things. I hit one, and the others backed off.”
“You hit him, and they just went away?”
“Her,” Brody said. “It was the woman. And I cracked her skull with a fire extinguisher.” He held the gaze, shoulders back.
After a moment Kyle nodded. He glanced over his shoulder at Lucy. “Self-defense.”
“If it’s true. He could be trying to bluff his way out.”
“A desperate Eater might try that, one with no gas in the tank. But he’s shiny. If he didn’t want to fight, he could have run. Not like we could catch him.”
That gave Lucy pause. Kyle turned back to him. “Sorry about all this, Brody. If you are what you say you are, I’m sure you’re confused. But we have to be certain. This far out, newbies mostly end up dinner. But”—he gave the axe a little swing, like a one-handed golf putt—“somehow, you took three.”
That might have been the most dramatic understatement Brody had ever heard. But he was very aware of the sway of Kyle’s axe, the comfort with which Lucy held the sword, the way Antoine had slowly been circling. If this was a test, he hadn’t passed yet. “I made it into a liquor store, locked the security gate. Two of the men, the, ah, Eaters, they bent the bars. The woman came through alone. It took her all of a second and a half to beat me down. I’m only here because she got cocky and I got lucky. After I killed her, the others backed off. Now can I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“I’m a special agent with the FBI. Why are you all acting like I’m a security risk?”
Antoine snorted a laugh. “I think he’s okay.”
Kyle turned to Lucy. “You?”
The woman bit her lip, studied him carefully. Then nodded and lowered her sword. Brody exhaled.
“Sorry about that,” Kyle said, slinging the axe on his back. “It’s just that it’s rare for new arrivals to make it unless we get to them first. I’ve never met a flush newbie.”
“Flush?”
“Minty fresh. Sparkly. Full tank.”
Brody just stared at him.
“Right. How to explain.” Kyle scratched at his chin. “Okay. Do me a favor and remember that we’re the good guys.”
The man lunged at him, left hand flickering out in a fast jab. On instinct, Brody started to put up a block.
Everything changed.
Kyle’s punch turned from a lightning strike to a gentle crawl, his fist creeping through the air as if punching underwater. Brody dipped his shoulder, conscious of the ease and play and power of his muscles as he planted his foot to spring forward, closing his left hand around Kyle’s wrist and twisting, locking the elbow and tugging the shoulder. He could see Kyle’s expression change, one micromuscle at a time, the pain tightening his lips and widening his eyes. Brody maintained the grip on Kyle’s wrist as he stepped forward and put the blade of the Bowie knife to the carotid artery.
No one else had moved more than a couple of inches.
“Shit!” Kyle yelped. “Easy, easy, you’ll break my arm!”
Lucy cursed, and Antoine cocked his baton. At a distance, the others yelled, raised their weapons. Time seemed to have returned to normal. Brody maneuvered Kyle between him and the archer kid. “What the hell?”
“I thought it’d be easier to show you than—Jesus, man, seriously, lighten up on my arm, you don’t know your own strength right now.”
He eased back, though he didn’t release the hold. “Start talking. What’s going on?”
“You’re not dreaming. You know that, right?”
Brody could feel the warmth of Kyle’s breath, could smell the slightly sour odor of all three of them. Could see every detail of the buildings beyond the bridge, hear the murmur of the river. His feet were tired from the walk, and his hands were sweaty. He nodded.
“Okay, so you’re not dreaming, but everything has changed.” A bead of sweat ran down Kyle’s temple. “You already know the truth. I’m sure you’ve got theories to explain it away, but in your heart you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. The whole city has taken a powder. A couple of strangers tried to murder you with machetes. What’s the last thing you remember before it all got weird?”
A rainbow sun born in a dark church, and a wave of shimmering razors riding a shock wave that hurled you into the air—
“That’s it,” Kyle said. “I can see it on your face, man. You got it.”
It couldn’t be. It was impossible. There was no way, no way, that this was . . . he was on an operating table, Claire was in the waiting room, this was a hallucination . . .
“Brody. Listen to me. I know what you’re going through. We’ve all been there. Stop messing around and say it.” There was honest sympathy in Kyle’s voice. “Say what you know is true.”
The air smelled of river rot and rusted metal. Cloud shadows reflected in ten thousand windows. Funny, the sky had been bright blue when he went into the church.
Brody let go of the man’s wrist. Lowered the knife and stepped back. “I’m . . .” He knew the next word, felt the truth of it, but still, it caught on his tongue. He took a breath and tried again. “I’m dead.”
“You’re dead,” Kyle agreed, rubbing at his elbow. “Welcome to the afterlife.”
TWELVE
There was little in the way of sunrise or set but there was day and night, and by that measure Edmund passed months and years and decades and more.
<
br /> Afoot and alone he wandered, startled by land that seemed to sprawl forever. In the beginning he stayed near the sea, but as he encountered others like himself and fed on their spirits as he had fed on the bodies of his crewmates, he took from them the things they knew, and grew confident. Grew hungry to wander the breadth of this new world, his kingdom.
Edmund saw many things.
Forests so dense he stood where man might never have. Trees ten people couldn’t have encircled, wet brown bark carpeted in moss. Ridges of broken stone spires like fingers grasping for heaven. Crystalline caverns stretching into intractable darkness. Swamps of treacherous mud spanning the horizon. On nights he’d eaten the soul of another, sometimes the clouds broke enough to reveal pinpoint stars circling the firmament.
The world changed around him. The huts of savages gave way to buildings of sawn lumber and churches of stone. Trading posts grew to towns and then to cities. Many of the things he saw in them were unfathomable; and yet it was in cities he most found others, though never one so fast or strong as he had grown, and so he came to understand pendulum clocks and pocket watches, sextants of brass and pianos of wood.
He fed when he chose, from hunger or desire. He dabbled in pleasures and he dabbled in cruelties.
From a fierce nigger whipped until his skin hung in ribbons and blood sluiced down his legs and his heart exploded, Edmund saw another land, and on it a golden cat the size of a calf. A predator that fed without fear and lived lazily between meals, and he liked the image.
Edmund watched battles in their aftermath, men rising from the ground only to see their enemies rise also, and as the bloody slaughter began again he laughed, for surely he was no longer of man.
On the muddy flats of a muddy river, in a city named Nouvelle-Orléans, he took a girl with skin like polished mahogany, and she cried out names of gods he had never heard of until he tasted her life and learned of Legba and Agwé and Samedi, not gods at all, but powerful spirits, capricious and wild, who rode their believers like horses.
No longer thin or weak, he remained restless of mind, and the idea that seized him seemed so obvious he could scarce believe it hadn’t before.
Flush with the girl’s energy, he stalked the city, looking for living ghosts. Pale people whose hold on their world was so slender they were almost in his. For centuries he had seen them, faint and flickering spirits, but still on the other side of the boundary. Beyond a gulf he could not cross, no matter how many souls he consumed. They were alive, and so not his to feed upon.
But perhaps to ride.
He found a woman ragged from poverty and mourning a husband gone. She drifted through her days like a shadow, picking through garbage and begging on the street, her squalling son beside her crowned in flies. At night Edmund crouched beside her rags and whispered, nourishing the blackest parts of her, tending her despair like a garden, and on the third morning she took her infant boy to the river and held his body beneath the muddy water until the splashing ceased.
And Edmund, plucking the reborn child up into his own arms, looked down at the wailing animal and knew that he had found a greater truth than any penitent or priest.
When God unleashed the flood, he had done it not to cleanse, but to grow.
It was in that rush of water that he became divine; in the slaughter that he fed. Not for hunger or pleasure but for power, harvesting the tiny energies of a million souls.
People, who glow like candle flames; faint and small alone, but in quantity enough, brighter than the sun.
THIRTEEN
-Thank you for calling the Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line. All calls are recorded. Do you have something to report?
-Umm, yes, hello. I live in West Chicago, and there’s a church. It’s shut down, but I keep seeing a man going into it. He looks very suspicious.
Claire skipped to the next.
-Thank you for calling the Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line. All calls are recorded, do you have something to report?
-I, I think so. I keep seeing a man in a hoodie going into this church off Kedzie—
To the final clip.
-Thanks for calling the FBI tip line. All calls are recorded.
-Yeah, I just saw a man go into this abandoned church. It’s been closed up for a while. It looked like he was carrying a gun.
-A gun? What kind of—
Claire slumped against the counter and rubbed at her eyes.
That it was a trap had been immediately obvious. An abandoned building was a pointless target if you were hoping for casualties. But in the crush of the investigation—half the city descending on the church, securing the perimeter, going house to house in the neighborhood, attending to the wounded, communicating with the media—the obvious corollary had taken a few hours to realize.
If the sniper wanted his bomb to kill cops, he had to get them there. And the easiest way to do that was to call the tip line and report himself. She was listening to the voice of the man who had killed Will Brody—and seventeen other people.
From one perspective, it was sloppy that headquarters hadn’t caught this. But they were dealing with thousands of calls a day. Each had to be transcribed, collated, and analyzed. And the lead had been pretty small; if there hadn’t been the mention of the gun, it wouldn’t even have been yellow flagged.
She’d heard the conversations a hundred times already, but even so, she set her phone to loop, let the words echo around her kitchen. 1:22 a.m., and the last place she wanted to be was home. But there was nothing else to do right now.
The sniper’s voice was bland, calm. Probably white, probably Midwestern. The team had spent the whole afternoon working the calls. All came from separate burner phones. All were made in public places, none of which had closed-circuit cameras. Voice analysis specialists had pored over every word, looking at nuances of pronunciation and diction, ethnographic hints, idiom, word choice. Audio engineers had magnified the background noises and filtered the sound fifty different ways.
She supposed she should take some consolation in knowing that she’d been right when she’d told Agent Huang that this was the sniper. They’d used the data from the cell tower to pinpoint a handful of likely vantage points. On one of them, the fire escape of a neighboring building, they’d found cigarette butts. Camel Blues, the same brand the sniper favored. Formal DNA results would be available tomorrow, but the techs had already given her unofficial confirmation.
Yet like every other piece of evidence they’d collected, it offered them no leads. They already had the sniper’s DNA—they just didn’t have a match for it.
Several hours ago, Claire had called the director and asked permission to release the tapes to the media. He’d refused. The voice wasn’t distinctive enough. All it would do was cause more panic, more useless tips they’d have to wade through.
He was right, she knew that, but it was driving her crazy to be so entirely on defense. To not have a single useful lead. Eighteen murders, and the man hadn’t left one piece of evidence they could use to catch him—
Stop, she thought. Stop pretending this is casework. Stop pretending you’re not about to fall apart.
She straightened, paced the length of the counter. Went to the windows and drew the curtains, then felt claustrophobic and reopened them. The plates from last night were still in the sink, bits of egg floating in a thin slick of water. Claire flashed on Brody teasing her last night, pretending to go cold, and then saying that thing, the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. She thought of Brody’s hands in her hair as she undid the sash of her robe. When she’d looked at the clock it had mostly been to set up her joke, but she’d noted the time anyway, 1:29 a.m., and now the same clock read 1:23, which meant that less than twenty-four hours separated then and now.
Amazing. Impossible.
Twenty-four hours ago, she and Will had the door locked and the universe to themselves. Most people would call it foolish to discuss a future based on a few weeks of illicit romance. Neither of
them cared. What had he said? I know there’s a whole world to Claire McCoy I haven’t seen. I know it’s ridiculous to feel like I’ve been waiting for you to come along. And I don’t care. I have been waiting for you.
She had felt exactly the same. Had imagined a life unspooling in front of them. When in fact he’d been hours from the end of everything.
Maybe it was the modern era, digital music and pictures in the cloud, hard drives and off-site backup, but it was impossible to believe she couldn’t get back to that moment. The sheer strength of her desire to should have made it so. But there was no pressing CTRL+Z on a day, no loading a previous copy. She knew that time only flowed one direction, but it was one thing to know it and another to be standing on the opposite side of the divide, where every passing second pushed her farther away. Tomorrow at 1:29 it would be forty-eight hours. Some day it would be ten years.
-Umm, yes, hello. I live in West Chicago, and there’s a church. It’s shut down, but I keep seeing a man going into it. He looks very suspicious.
Claire went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. As she was drying herself with the towel, she saw Will’s ratty old toiletry kit. Robbed now of purpose. No one would shave with his razor, use his hair gel. Through the shower glass this morning billowing steam had made Brody a ghost, far away gone already. And he had in fact been hours from dying. How was it that she could not have known, not have sensed it?
-I keep seeing a man in a hoodie going into this church off Kedzie—
In the bedroom closet, two of his suits hung amidst her own clothes, along with a couple of shirts in dry cleaner plastic. She’d let him stake that claim in the first week, and it had felt weird not because she was scared but because she wasn’t. Making room for him made perfect and uncomplicated sense.
-I just saw a man go into this abandoned church. It’s been closed up for a while. It looked like he was carrying a gun.
Slowly, she turned and confronted the bed.
