by Marcus Sakey
Then they were gone. The echo was exactly as it had been. Just the crew of them sprawled across the equipment, eating chicken legs and sipping wine in Solo cups.
“You okay?”
“What?” He blinked, rubbed his eyes, looked at Claire. “Yeah. I just . . . for a second I saw people. Living people.”
“In the park?”
“In the park, on the sidewalk, in cars. Everywhere.”
“A daydream?”
He shook his head. “Kyle said it would happen. Something to do with having fed. Little flashes of the real world.”
“I wonder if they could see you.”
“Huh. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the explanation for people seeing ghosts.”
“Not to split hairs,” she said drily, “but you are dead.”
He laughed, and was about to respond when a wobbly sensation ran through him. It was mild but distinct, an inner ear feeling. Something like the way a small boat tilts when someone climbs out.
At first he presumed it had to do with what he’d seen, but then he noticed that everyone else had felt it too. People were reaching for weapons, rising to their feet. Kyle lowered his sandwich. Claire pulled the hatchet from her pack.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Finn said, “Strong one.”
Kyle nodded, then went back to eating.
Brody looked back and forth. “Why aren’t we—wasn’t that a new arrival?”
“No,” Finn said. “With arrivals the world seems more, I don’t know, full. And you kinda know where they came from. That’s how we found you.”
“So then, what was—”
“Departure,” Kyle said. “Not a newbie. That was an Eater dying. A powerful one.”
“What does that mean?” Claire still held the hatchet.
“Nothing.” Kyle tossed his sandwich. “Risks of the lifestyle.”
“I thought they don’t fight each other.”
“Mostly. But it’s like overpopulation. Just because lions mostly eat zebras doesn’t mean they’re above a mouthful of cat.” He stood, dusted his hands. “Come on, let’s move along. I want to swing by Wrigley Field, see if they’re flying the W.”
The group wound up, leaving their garbage where it lay. There was something shocking in that. A lifetime habit of putting trash in the can made the notion of just dropping your junk almost obscene, even with the knowledge that it would vanish, that if they returned here in ten minutes there would be no sign of their presence.
Kyle took the lead, and the rest fell in. None of them said much of anything. Brody and Claire locked eyes, and he could practically hear her voice.
A powerful Eater?
Like Simon Tucks?
THIRTY
A day passed, two, then three. The patrols became routine, almost pleasant. Each trip they saw Eaters, but always at a distance, the men and women staring with naked hunger held in check by fear. The second day, one of the other squads brought in a new arrival, and when Brody introduced himself, her searching gaze reminded him of the way soldiers arriving for their first deployment looked at the veterans.
He and Claire made love, gently because of her bruises and laughing about it, joking about her being an old woman. On patrol, he reached out and took her hand as they walked, and she jumped, surprised, and it occurred to both of them that this was something they’d never been able to do before, hold hands on a walk in public. At work they’d had to keep their relationship secret, and there hadn’t been the time—
There hadn’t been the time.
They met most of the people, learned some of their stories. Hector, who had fallen off a construction ladder a week before the release of his beloved superhero movie. Antoine, a corrections officer shivved on a routine court transfer by a teenaged Latin King. Madeleine, who knit gorgeous scarves that she purposefully abandoned in the echo, some cross between prayer and art project. Finn, who had learned to use a bow hunting deer with his stepfather, and died when the man, smashed, drove their pickup into a bridge support.
“If he was drunk, why weren’t you driving?”
“I was drunker.”
One evening Emily Watkins made a point of coming over to the couch he and Claire sat on. Previously, there had been something ghostly about her, a sense of sadness worn like a shawl. Now she seemed vital, her cheeks pink with cool air and her skin glowing with that hyper-focus, the feeling that invisible spotlights shone only on her. “I want to thank you.”
Mildly embarrassed, he said, “No need.”
Emily turned to Claire. “He saved me. And not just from the Eater.” To Brody, she added, “I was about to make a terrible mistake.”
It clicked for him then, why she had been alone out beyond the bridges. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.”
Brody considered telling her the rest of it. How he’d stood over her body in a parking lot, how he’d visited her husband to inform him of her death. But why remind her of the things she’d lost, just when she was starting to notice the things she’d gained?
Over three days, they felt the weird tilting sensation five more times. Five more Eaters gone, and one of them so powerful that Brody stumbled, had to hold the wall for balance. Though it set everyone on edge, no one seemed to have answers, or feel the need to investigate.
Each day Claire mentioned the idea of pursuing Simon Tucks less frequently, but he could see she was wrestling with the notion that it was no longer her responsibility. That that Claire McCoy was dead. He got it, felt the same.
There were moments when grief gutted him. Stilettos of loss and regret that made him reel, close his eyes, take deep breaths. Partly for the people he had lost; partly for the fact that he knew they were suffering, mourning for him.
Yet there was something about being on the flip side of disaster that changed everything. Sure, it hurt to know that the people he loved were suffering, but there was comfort in knowing they were alive. That whatever pain they felt, it was part of a larger life. It turned out that there was a difference between knowing you’d never see someone again and knowing they were dead.
Especially when you were the one in the brave new world.
And he had to admit that there were moments of adventure and play. Yesterday, exploring the hotel, he and Claire had discovered the swimming pool. A broad, gorgeous space of pale polished stone, white deck chairs, and sheer curtains glowing twilight shades. The chemical smell was vivid, exciting. Claire had whooped and stripped her sweatshirt off without hesitation, dumped her bra, then started hopping on one foot to yank off the boots. A minute later they were swimming.
It felt wonderful to knife through the water in a clean crawl, the way he’d done most mornings of his old life. On his tenth lap he’d bumped into Claire drifting on her back, and they both swallowed water and came up laughing and coughing. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her body against him, cool water and warm skin, her chlorine lips like a memory of summer. They’d made it to the side without breaking the embrace, and then he’d hoisted her up onto the pool’s edge and kissed his way down her shivering thighs to the warmth between them. As he worked her with tongue and mouth her cries echoed and rebounded off the stone and her feet churned the water.
When they left, they found five people waiting in the hallway with towels slung over their shoulders and grins plastered on their faces. They burst into applause. Claire flushed so red she looked boiled.
Now, sitting atop the concrete wall of the parking deck neighboring the hotel, watching an impromptu soccer game, Brody smiled to remember the wolf whistles, the good-natured teasing. He loosened his boots and kicked them off, rubbed at road-sore feet.
Today’s patrol had been simple enough. He’d grown accustomed to the twenty-pound sledgehammer slung across his back—when he’d told Kyle he wanted a baseball bat, the man had said, “Son, right now you could lift a car. Think bigger”—and when they’d spotted two Eaters a block away, part of him hoped they’d attack. No one seemed to have a fixed
answer on the half-life of his new power; it depended on the strength of the Eater. Kyle said to think in terms of weeks, and less the more he used it. Though he still felt flush from Raquel, a voice inside whispered that he could always have more.
So perhaps it was for the good that the two Eaters had retreated, their hollow eyes staring.
The team had raided stores, broken out the windows and half the wall of Katsu to let in enough light for them to eat sashimi and rice by the handful. Stopped in a sports store for Brody’s new swim goggles, and a jewelry shop where Claire, with an expression of delight that bordered on the fetishistic, had smashed the case and withdrawn a twenty-thousand-dollar Rolex.
The soccer game was casual at best, the goals marked by discarded jackets, the teams oversized and in constant flux. It was mostly kids, the youngest a four-year-old cutie with her hair bound up in silly bun twists. They scrambled after the ball, yelling and laughing, no one particularly worried about scoring. The top floor of the parking deck was walled on all sides and open to the sky, making a safe play space in an unsafe world. The effect on everyone was palpable. True, every few minutes the ball went too far and ended up rolling down the ramp, but the kids had even integrated that, everyone sprinting to be the first to touch it. Adults were in the game too, Kyle and Hector and a handful of others, with Antoine acting as ref. On the outskirts dozens of people loitered, cheering on the players or talking in small groups, drinking beer, eating chips.
The door to the stairwell was propped open, and he saw Claire reach the top, panting only slightly. One thing with the echo, you got your cardio in. She put a hand over her eyes to scan the field, and he waved. She approached, gave him a theatrical look, then flipped her left wrist up to glance at the watch. “It is now 5:22 p.m.”
“It was killing you not to know, wasn’t it?”
“Totally.”
“The battery works?”
“Battery?” She scoffed. “This is a fully mechanical automatic watch, constantly wound by my motion, and waterproof to a thousand feet.”
“Thank god. I was wondering how we’d tell time at the bottom of the ocean. How’d you set it?”
He lowered a hand to her, but she waved it away, grabbed the lip of the wall, and pulled herself up. The hatchet on her belt clattered against the concrete. She’d been practicing throwing it, spending an hour a day hurling it into the rich wood of the lobby desk, the same way she had once spent that time down at the firing range. “Walked down to Macy’s on State, the one with the big clock out front.”
“Alone?”
“Lucy came along, Madeleine, Rosario, Patricia.”
“Was there girl talk?”
“Of course.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Why is it,” Claire said, twisting a piece of hair in her mouth, “that when women talk, men think it’s about them?”
“We just assume everything is.”
A cry went up from the soccer game. The little girl was racing downfield, kicking the ball with great determination and slightly less accuracy, pursued by teenagers who could have caught her with ease. Kyle stood in the goal, knees bent, arms out. She ran straight at him, more pushing the ball than controlling it, and gave a last mighty kick that almost sent her flying. The ball took to the air, and Kyle somehow managed not to stop it. Her team exploded, yelling, “Goal!” and hoisting her onto their shoulders.
“It’s not bad here,” Claire said.
He turned to her. The bruises on her face had moved from purple to yellow-green, and her scalp had scabbed up. But the changes went deeper than that. There was, he realized, a calm about her. Something akin to the way people relaxed on vacation, how it became normal to wave to strangers, to smile good morning at everyone. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not.”
“I keep thinking that I should resist it more. That I should be fighting this. But who would I fight against? Where would I file a complaint? We’re here. That’s that. I guess I won’t become the first female director of the FBI. Do I hold on to that?”
“Look at it this way,” he said. “You’re the highest ranking FBI agent in the world right now.”
They sat watching the game, their thighs touching. She fiddled with her watch. “It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? Like, from one perspective, we got a terrible deal. Simon Tucks took everything from us, everything we’d built, all the people we loved. And that’s unbelievably awful. You could say that we had terrible luck.
“Or,” she shrugged. “Or, you could say that after we both carelessly lost our lives, we discovered there was something that came afterward. A strange place, yeah, but one with warmth and community, with people trying to help each other. And not only that, but we have each other. Lots of people here are fooling around, and some are in relationships. But not like us.” She paused. “So do we have the most hideous luck on the planet? Or are we the most fortunate people in history?”
“Yes,” Brody said. He smiled at her, and after a moment she smiled back. They kissed, soft and slow but with heat behind it, and right out in the open.
A whistle blew, two long blasts. All of the guards on the bridges and nearby buildings carried them, and there was a system of signals. One long note meant the squad from sector one returning, two for two, three for three. Continuing blasts meant danger, everybody up. Brody had made a Game of Thrones joke to Arthur about it, and received a blank stare in return. Twenty years in the echo meant missing a few cultural touchstones.
“They’re late,” Claire said, glancing at her new toy. Before he could respond, another sound came.
A loud, shrill whistle—that didn’t stop.
THIRTY-ONE
“You’re sure about this?”
DeAndre slid a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Claire put him at about seventeen, tall and handsome, his scalp shaved but a sculpted goatee framing his features. He had some South Side swagger, but not the dead-eyed stare corner kids learned early. He’d died before she moved to Chicago, but she’d followed the story of his shooting with the same queasy horror as the killings of Freddie Gray and Eric Garner. DeAndre said, “Saw what I saw. They was setting up for the night.”
Brody said, “They might have sentries.”
“Might,” Kyle agreed. “Not their SOP, but neither is this.”
“We could wait for daylight.” Claire still couldn’t get used to how very dark the city was with nothing on, how cold and quiet. She remembered Kyle’s description the other day, of the echo as a dead world, and it seemed more apt than ever. A dead rock spinning through space with the remnants of a world left behind on it, and a few stragglers clinging. She fought a shiver at the image.
“No,” Sonny said. The biker’s voice was surprisingly honeyed, not the gravelly snarl she would have expected. Like he’d done voiceover work instead of running meth. “Come morning they’ll be rolling.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they don’t hold meetings. If the boy’s right—”
“Don’t call me boy—”
“—they’re on the move.”
There had been a moment, as the panic whistle lilted into the sky, when everyone on the rooftop stopped. Frozen, staring at one another. Good humor and certainty of action evaporating. Claire had seen it happen before. It was the reaction people had when things that weren’t supposed to happen, did. A lightning strike change in the landscape. It was what had made Simon Tucks so terrifying. A gunshot in a war zone was commonplace. A gunshot on a clear blue Chicago day tore the underpinnings out of reality. No one knew what to do in those moments, and everyone stared at one another, desperate for answers. Pack mentality: someone tell me how to act now.
Then Kyle was bolting for the stairs, she and Brody right behind.
By the time they made it to the street, scores of others had joined, their weapons out and eyes wild, trying to look in all directions at once.
The squad that had just come in from patrol were pale and gasping,
many of them collapsed on the ground outside the hotel. They looked like they’d sprinted miles with wolves at their heels. Which turned out to be true, more or less.
The squad was led by a woman named Rhonda, a former cop from Atlanta, who three years ago had slipped on an icy El platform just as the train came in. Thing musta tore me in pieces, she’d told Claire yesterday. Y’all live in a dumb climate. She was panting too hard to speak, and she’d gestured to DeAndre to explain.
The kid told them what he’d seen. How he’d split from the group to do a little recon, climbing the stairs of a mid-rise university building that offered a broad view. “Not many tall buildings over there,” he’d said. “I keep track. Don’t mind climbing, and plenty of times I can spot trouble.”
What had followed DeAndre’s story had been an hour of disbelief and argument, of two hundred people trying to talk at the same time. Of frantic orders to get the children inside the hotel and triple the guard on the bridge. The sounds of breaking glass from all around as cars were pushed to block the road and vantage points in the hotel were opened.
She had been the one to suggest a small group investigate. Brody had backed her, and Kyle and a few of the more aggressive members had quickly joined in. Arthur had been opposed to the idea, but while he was clearly respected, he didn’t seem to be in charge, and so shortly after dark, a team of six—she and Brody, DeAndre, Kyle, Sonny, and Lucy—had set off to the southwest. They’d moved carefully, darting from alley to alley. The empty city had unspooled around them, the river a slick dark ribbon, the trendy restaurants on Randolph lonely in the quiet. At the concrete spaghetti of the Circle Interchange, where three highways met, they’d left the road and hiked the grass beneath vaulting ramps. Smells of rot and wet grass. They held their weapons in hand, and didn’t speak. All around them buildings stared in mute judgment. It had taken almost three hours to cover four miles.
Now, standing amidst the tree-lined order of the UIC campus, she could make out the building DeAndre had been talking about. An ugly concrete tower, pale against the dark clouds, the windows like slit eyes, narrow and tall. It looked more like a fortress than a science office. Probably built in the ’60s, when students were occupying universities. From the south she could hear a faint hum and crackle, impossible to interpret but definitely not the wind. Brody stood beside her, a huge sledgehammer dangling from his hand as lightly as a stick he’d snagged to swat leaves.
