by Ted Kosmatka
Color drained from Mercy’s face.
“Here?” she said.
“Where the fuck is Vickers?” Hennig snapped.
At that moment, in the distance, Vickers spoke. “Two vehicles.” She was standing in the shadows near one of the smashed-out windows, looking outside.
For a moment, no one moved. Then Hennig sprang to his feet and crossed the room. He stood near Vickers, craning his head through the gap in the wall, looking out. When he turned back toward us, his face was pale. “It’s them,” he said. Hennig turned and sprinted for the weapons. “This is going to be ugly,” he said, voice a snarl.
Mercy was silent. She only crouched on the filthy floor, trembling like she was freezing, though the room was near seventy degrees.
“What do we do?” I asked.
They ignored me. Vickers crossed the room and pulled a plastic tub out from beneath the table where the guns were kept. The tub was heavy, and it scraped a path in the dust. She bent and pulled the top off the plastic bin.
“Bug-out bags,” she said. She tossed one to me.
I pulled the pack over my shoulders. It was old army surplus by the look of it. Maybe ten pounds, half-empty. I saw my phone at the bottom of the bin. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket.
“We need to move quick,” she said. “We stay together. If we can’t stay together, we regroup at the other hide.”
Hennig grabbed a pack and opened it, scrambling to fill it with ammo from the table.
“And where is that?” I asked.
“No time,” Vickers snapped.
I snatched the last handgun from the table, expecting them to stop me. Hennig eyed me close, but said nothing. Mercy shouldered her pack while Vickers headed for the hole in the wall. “Follow me,” she said. She glanced toward me. “Stay close.”
* * *
We ran. Single file, keeping low. We moved quietly, keeping our heads down, moving through the building, crossing from room to room.
We came to another hole in the wall, but instead of diving through as before, Vickers stopped. She bent and peered through the hole.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Don’t look back,” Vickers said.
“And if they catch us?”
“You don’t want that to happen.”
Hennig had his back to the wall, scanning the room behind us while Vickers looked forward through the hole. Her face was a mask of concentration. She crept farther through, looking both ways. She pulled back.
“I don’t like the look of this.” She stood. “Come on.” She crouched low and led us across the building in the other direction.
We passed through another empty room and through a door that funneled us down a long corridor. Metal paneling covered the walls. The dust on the floor was an inch thick. Nobody had walked here in decades.
We came out of the corridor and into another large room—a place that might once have been a factory floor, but which had long since been gutted to serve as another warehouse. We were halfway across the room when we heard it.
Just outside. The thud of a car door. Then barking. Though there was something strange in the sound. The tones deeper than normal. Vickers froze. The rest of us came to a halt behind her.
“Too late,” Hennig whispered.
The barking grew louder.
“Dogs,” I said.
Mercy shook her head. “Worse than that.”
“The hounds,” Hennig said. He glanced down at my gun. “You might be tempted to shoot me with that,” he said. His eyes met mine. “If that’s your plan, then I suggest you wait until after what’s coming.”
I nodded. “I won’t shoot you.”
At that moment, outside, I heard a sound—the clatter of metal, something large running across a fallen section of corrugated siding.
“Come on,” Vickers said. “This way.”
We followed.
We ran through the building, leaping over a pile of bricks and passing through a man-door into a smaller room filled with pipes and large steel tubs. Hennig stopped, then turned and made a shhh sign with his finger and lips. We flattened ourselves to the wall, keeping in the shadows.
From behind us came the sound of heavy feet, then a moment later, a loud crash. It came from the room we’d just left. There were several voices, and then I heard what sounded like the snort of an animal. The heavy in and out breathing of something large.
From where I stood, I could see through the doorway into part of the other room. A moment later, light footsteps. Then a soft chuckle and an answering murmur.
“They’re here,” Hennig said.
At the far end of the room, a figure stepped into view.
41
As a boy I had played on the old breakwater near where my father moored his vessel. Out on the water, an old rotting log floated in the shallows—immense and barnacled, bound to pilings. To call it a pier was too kind.
From where I sat on the breakwater, ripples crossed the water in bands, except at the edge of the old log. All around the log the ripples were different. Unaligned. There the currents were disturbed and the shine moved differently. It wouldn’t have stood out in photographs, but it stood out as you watched, the glints coming quicker—a place that didn’t behave like the rest.
For just a split second, that’s what the figure looked like as it crossed through the shadows. A man but something else, too. A perturbation. An area of irregularity where the ripples were busier.
He followed our tracks across the filthy floor.
Hennig was the one who broke first.
He shouldered his shotgun and fired, and the figure looked up—those ripples unfolding like runnels of flame—a seething aurora, and the shape was suddenly crossing the room, eating up the distance in long, lunging strides. I froze, unable to move, unable to think, while Hennig bellowed and fired, and Mercy screamed.
“Go!”
I ran.
Blind panic.
Leaping through a hole in the wall, I sprinted across the empty warehouse and then down a hall, running full blast. When I crossed through another hole, coming out the other side into open air again, my foot caught on something—and I sprawled in the dirt, scraping my face on the ground. Pain shot through my broken nose. I breathed and opened my eyes.
The sun cast a harsh shadow across the path. I climbed unsteadily to my feet, as I felt something warm running down my face. I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand and it came away red. Bleeding again.
I headed for the nearest building, entering through a hangar door. Once inside, I aimed for the darkest shadows, hoping to lose myself. Where was everyone else? I felt faint. My head was spinning. When I could run no more, I collapsed near a pile of rubble and wedged myself against the wall.
My vision seemed to retreat, like I wasn’t getting all the information from my eyes. Like the concussion from the fire. I heard a gunshot. Then another. Screaming in the distance. Through the open hangar door, I watched Hennig cross between buildings. His face was streaming blood. Eyes wild.
The hound caught him. Or what must have been the hound.
Huge, like a pale rottweiler, but even larger, like no dog I’d ever seen—a thing I couldn’t understand. But Mercy was right, the mind fills in.
And I could see it different ways. Just a split second. Something like a hyena—spotted and wild—as it tore his arm. Blood sprayed the ground—and then I saw it the other way. Just a huge muscular dog.
I remembered the gun then—the gun I’d picked up from the table. But when I checked my hands, they were empty. I turned, and it wasn’t out on the floor next to me either. I remembered the fall. When I’d tripped, I must have dropped it.
Hennig’s screams changed—a sound I did not know a man could make. A sound I wish I hadn’t heard. Then silence.
I closed my eyes. I listened and waited.
When I finally looked up from my place in the shadows, several minutes had passed. The clearing beyond the hangar doors was empty, save for
a small red shape in the grass that did not move.
I climbed to my feet and moved out, keeping to the edges. I saw a hole in the wall ahead and crossed into another room. And then another. The holes made a path through the ruins. Ahead of me, the wall split; I took the corridor on the right. There was a sound ahead, and I froze in place, heart beating wildly. Something was coming. I saw a doorway to my right, so I ducked inside. It was a small room—a foreman’s office of some kind, walls stained black. Windows bashed out. A single wooden desk had collapsed itself into the floor. Thirty years ago, it might have rivaled Jeremy’s desk, but now it was rotted and broken, the legs knocked off.
As the footsteps approached, I ducked behind the desk, trying to make my body as small as possible. The footsteps grew closer, and I pressed my face to the floor, one eye searching through a split in the back of the desk. A gap in the water-swollen wood where I could see into the other room.
There was movement that my eye couldn’t follow. A pair of legs crossed in front of me, the ghost of fabric.
Where was Mercy?
The legs disappeared behind a column momentarily, and I shifted my position for a better look, and then I saw him. A familiar man.
A man I’d had dinner with. A man who spoke of wines and museums. A man who’d had my friend killed.
It’s all in the perspective of your blade.
Brighton crossed the room, and I got a good look at him. He wore a dark hunter’s jacket, caked black at the sleeves by dust and dirt. His pale gleaming eyes searched the shadows but found no reason to pause. He disappeared around the corner.
When he was gone, I waited for thirty seconds before I stood and crossed the hall in the opposite direction. As I ran, I kept my eyes open for Mercy, hoping to catch a glimpse. Outside the air was fresh and clean. The sky was blue. I felt exposed—visible from a hundred angles.
In the distance, shots rang out again. Somewhere up ahead.
I turned and ran the other way—cutting back through the building. Heart hammering. I ran blindly, wanting to put distance between myself and the sounds. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs cramped.
I nearly tripped over Hennig.
He was a man of halves. Half ear, half body, lying just beyond the hangar door. Looking down at him, I was again acutely aware that I didn’t have a gun. I stooped and picked up his shotgun from the mud. The barrel was covered in blood, but it still looked functional. I gripped the weapon with both hands and ran.
I crossed the threshold of another building without stopping or slowing—I simply held the gun vertically as I sprinted through the doorway. Another warehouse. Another empty expanse. I didn’t stop until I found myself in a narrow alley between buildings, blue sky overhead. I crouched with my back to the wall. My breath came in gasps. More shots rang out. Hennig was dead, so the sound meant Vickers or Mercy.
I cracked open the chamber of the shotgun, and I saw only a single round.
It crossed my mind that a single bullet could end it all. I pushed the thought away. I willed my heart to slow and tried to calm my breathing. I’d need to think clearly if I was going to get out of this. I waited. Minutes passed while I watched the gap in the alley, and then I heard a rattle in the distance. Feet on corrugated steel—the tread light and quick. I bolted off the wall at a dead run, threading my way between structures.
Two minutes later, I found her. It was Vickers. I saw her hiding against a wall at the edge of the clearing. The sun threw short shadows behind the buildings, so I moved behind a pile of rubble, trying to stay out of sight. The ruins around me looked familiar, and I realized where I was—the place where we’d gathered wood. The fence was a hundred yards across the tall grass, up the hill. All the running, and I was nearly back where I’d started, a hundred yards from the encampment.
Up ahead, something moved along the rutted track.
Vickers still had her back to the wall, crouched low. She was bleeding from the nose. Bleeding from her head. Her eyes moved to scan the buildings, flitting in my direction, and I opened my hand to her—just a slight movement, but she caught it. She started to step out from the wall, and I waved her back.
Brighton was coming.
She stayed.
Brighton moved slowly between the buildings, pale eyes scanning the shadows.
My eyes watered, and I blinked in the angle of the sun as the grasses waved in the wind. Behind Brighton, a second man was coming up the trail. “Boaz,” I heard myself whisper.
I realized they would cross right in front of where Vickers was hiding. There was no way she’d be missed.
As the men came closer, Vickers pressed herself tighter to the wall, face expressionless. She couldn’t see them from her vantage, but she heard their shoes on the gravel.
Thirty feet away.
I waved her a warning, but she did not see. And anyway, there was no place for her to go.
Twenty feet. I could see Brighton’s eyes searching—looking left then right, as he moved up the road.
“Turn around,” I whispered to myself. “Go another way.”
Ten feet.
“Shit,” I said.
I stepped out from my place behind the rubble and took three steps into the clearing. I raised the shotgun, forcing myself to see the thing I was aiming at—to really see—runnels of black light flickering around his body like the wings of a thousand buzzing wasps. I pulled the trigger.
The gun lurched. The sound was deafening.
The slug clipped the edge of Brighton’s left arm in a snarl of fabric, and a moment later, a cloud of dust burst from a wall behind him.
He looked down at his own shoulder in surprise. Then he turned toward me and roared—an inhuman sound of rage and pain.
I dropped the empty gun and ran.
* * *
I sprinted for the holes.
My only hope was to get ahead and stay ahead. I hit the first hole at full speed, entering the building. When I looked back after ducking through the narrow gap in the wall, Brighton’s eyes locked on mine.
I leaped over a pile of rubble and saw a stray piece of rebar jutting from the concrete. I yanked hard; the steel bar came loose. It felt good to have a weapon again. Any weapon. I crossed the room, and when I ducked through the next hole on the far side, I spun around.
I timed my throw carefully.
You hear stories of incredible feats of strength—people lifting cars off victims when their adrenaline is pumping. I flung the bar with all the force in my body, aiming for the narrow hole through which the man would come, and I saw Brighton’s eyes go wide as the steel bar approached, saw the shock and pain—rebar striking center of mass—while he tried to twist away, but forward momentum carried him on, and his shoulder clipped the wall hard and he went down.
It was enough, and I was sprinting out of sight and around the bend, then around another bend, and another, losing myself in the maze of hallways. Ducking left, then right, utterly lost, until I came to a large loading bay.
A metal staircase ran upward along the wall, and I didn’t hesitate. I took it two stairs at time, surging upward. Here the building was higher, and the staircase took me up by the rafters.
The catwalk shook with every footstep, so I stopped. I turned. Held my breath. I looked down at the main floor and waited, hoping that my pursuer would pass the staircase by. Hoping he would not look up.
Several seconds passed, and then Brighton entered the room below.
There was a moment of silence as he looked out across the empty loading bay. The stillness seemed to confuse him. He scanned the corners of the room. Slowly, he turned his face upward. He smiled.
“There you are,” he said.
I ran along the catwalk to the far door and crossed into another room. Here was a room of pipes and boilers, with huge empty vats and twisted metal railings.
At the far end of the small room was a doorway and another staircase—a way down, and I almost took it. But I knew I’d never outrun him. He’d catch me an
d kill me if I kept running. Instead, I moved to the shadows. When you have reached the limits of fight or flight, there is another, final option. Hide. I wedged myself behind one of the large vats—a huge steel tank that sat in the corner. One foot nudged into a large drainpipe that disappeared between two pieces of equipment.
I waited.
The sound of running. Heavy footfalls entered the room and crossed to the other side.
Keep going. Take the stairs.
At the far side, the footfalls stopped.
Please. I closed my eyes. I cut myself off from myself. I wasn’t there.
Seconds passed.
Then the footfalls continued on, going down the stairs, growing more distant.
Finally, I let out my breath, chest still hammering. Brighton had gone.
I waited to hear something. Anything. I wondered if Mercy had made it. I wondered if she’d gotten away.
There was another sound then, soft, from the other direction. I could almost imagine it hadn’t happened. I began counting. The sound didn’t come again. Three, four, five, six … After a ten count, I inched forward. I craned my neck, hoping for a better view of the room, but there was nothing. No one.
I inched farther. Dreading the rasp my knees made on the floor.
The room was dim and grimy; I couldn’t see much from behind the vat in the corner—the only light diffuse, filtering in through the open doors and down through rust holes in the ceiling.
Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven …
I was still counting. I counted to sixty in my head before I moved, taking comfort in the familiar rhythms. Throwing numbers at the darkness, like when I was a child.
I crawled along the floor on my hands and knees, keeping close to the vat. My hip scraped something—a sound that seemed loud in my ears. When I chanced a look, my heart rose up in my throat.
Although Brighton was gone, a different man stood in the doorway.
A second familiar face.
* * *
Boaz’s active eyes searched the shadows. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he said.
It was the same voice from that night in the restaurant. A voice like gravel.
I backed slowly around the vat until I couldn’t see him anymore. Boaz’s shoes crunched across the floor while I pressed as close to the wall as I could go, making myself small. It was only a matter of time, though. I realized that I might not leave this room alive.
