The Opal (Book 2 of the Matt Turner Series)

by Michael Siemsen

  Núñez led them down the dirt road, across the turnaround area, and into the woods, heading south toward the flat-topped mountain. Whereas last night they could only imagine a wooded slope that went on indefinitely, they could now see the peak in the sunlight.

  The voice from the radio kept repeating in Jess’s head. “They’re dead, bitch.” But who was dead? Roger and Chuck? Everyone? Or maybe it was a lie. He hoped to God it was.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Matt saw the muzzle flash from the shotgun, and his eyes slammed shut out of reflex. He felt a million things strike his body, and he fell backward, certain he was dead.

  I am Tadinanefer, daughter of Bes of Swenet. I run between the West End houses. The path hits the wide outer road that follows the city wall in both directions. I turn and keep running.

  I’m Matt Turner. I am me. I feel my body burning all over. Fando shot me. Pieces of the opal are inside me. Probably the little pellets from the shotgun are in me, too. Am I bleeding internally? I can feel my arms and legs. I hear Fando laughing, Rheese moaning. But I can see only a road outside an Egyptian city ahead of me as I run—no, as Tadinanefer runs. She’s making my legs run, too! And making my arms move. I need to get up. If I’m not dying, I need to get up and run. But I can’t see.

  Matt opened his eyes, and the image before him was still a bouncing road, but now with the backdrop of an early-morning sky behind a foreground of treetops. He tried to turn his head left, but Tadinanefer snapped it forward again. He tried to put his hand down beside him to sit up, but the girl wanted to run.

  How am I conscious through this? It must be the searing pain. It’s all over my body—I guess, reminding my brain that my body is still there. This has happened before. I’ve seen this double vision before!

  Between snippets of Tadinanefer’s rolling internal dialogue, Matt recalled flashes of pain from when he was ten years old. Someone had thrown a bottle at their house. The brother of someone his dad had busted. He’d been threatening the family. He threw the bottle, and it shattered on the stucco next to their front door. His dad had called up some uniforms to come over, and the guy had been arrested at his home later that night.

  A week or two later, Matt had been running around in his sock feet in the front yard. Hidden in the grass was a shard of green glass, which jabbed into Matt’s foot. He had fallen down on the lawn, screaming in pain, but he had also sworn, shouting out bad words he didn’t even know. And as his mom and dad came running, he was seeing double. He could see the bright sky with cotton-puff clouds cruising by, V’s of migrating geese, the contrail of an invisible jet. But he also saw his house—the view from the street, where they put the garbage cans on Tuesdays. It was nighttime, and the porch light was on. He could see the bench and the potted tree, the rain gutter, the front door. He saw and felt himself chug down the last of the Heineken beer he had brought with him.

  “Got it!” Dad had said triumphantly. He held the bloodied shard of glass between thumb and index finger, and Matt cried. But it was done—no more double vision, no more yelling out someone else’s curses.

  That’s gotta be it, Matt thought. It’s the pain lighting up my nerves.

  Tadinanefer hurdled a bush and crouched down between a tree and the city wall. Her chest heaved.

  Now, she’s sitting still. See if you can get up!

  Matt felt as if he now had more control over his body, though her breathing was out of rhythm with his own, and her endless, fear-filled train of thought terribly distracting. He managed to roll onto his side and get a foot under him. He had his eyes wide open, trying to differentiate the ground around him from that around the girl. Both views were equally real.

  He heard the radio on the ground beep, and the same woman’s voice from before said, “Chuck or Roger, this is Núñez. Please respond.”

  Fando sighed, “Hijo de la chingada, lady, get a damned clue.” He walked over, picked up the walkie-talkie, and said, “They’re dead, bitch. You can shut up now,” and clipped the radio to his pants pocket.

  Matt made it to his feet, though he found himself falling to one side. Tadinanefer was leaning against a wall that Matt didn’t have, throwing off his balance.

  “And where’re you goin’?” Fando said, laughing.

  Tadinanefer got up, stretching a leg over a bush, and Matt lifted his foot over an invisible obstacle. As he moved, he could feel his jeans rub against tiny shards protruding from the skin of his legs, tearing each little cut ever so slightly. The girl began to run again.

  Every step Matt took gave him the jarring surprise of having climbed the final stair and thinking there was one more, only to step down hard on the landing. His arms and legs trembled with small convulsions, and he felt the girl’s desperate thirst. He sped up his own body to try to match hers. The wide, house-lined road ahead of Tadinanefer was clear. She glanced back to be sure she wasn’t being followed. Matt’s head turned as well. He could see Rheese, lying on the ground and holding his hands over one eye . . . his dad’s dead body . . . the body of his dad’s friend. This is all my fault. They would still be alive if I’d gone with Tuni. Tadinanefer head turned forward again, and a giant tree smashed into Matt’s face and chest. He bounced back and crashed to the ground, screaming and flailing as if he were having a seizure.

  “Holy shit!” Fando yelled, laughing uproariously. “Did you see that, Rheese? Funniest shit I ever seen in my life! Look at him—oh, shit! Ha, ha!”

  Matt tried desperately to right himself, feeling like a bug trapped on his back, and the agony renewed all over his body. His nose was definitely broken now if it hadn’t been before. Blood poured down his throat, gagging and choking him. He rolled over and planted his hands on the ground as he pulled his knees under him.

  * * *

  Fando watched, still giggling at Matt’s quaking, constant humming, and unintelligible outbursts. He was like a street racer revving in front of a red light. And then he took off.

  “Whoa, green light!” Fando cheered.

  Matt disappeared behind the tree he had hit, reappeared beyond it a second later, and then was gone, down the hill. The crunching of leaves, branches, and fallen palm fronds marked his path until the sound faded into the din of the waking jungle birds.

  Fando sighed out the last bit of laughter, rubbed his eyes, and turned to Rheese, still whimpering on the ground. “That was the shit, eh?”

  “Just bloody kill me, you sick bastard,” Rheese said, with his hands still covering his ruined eye.

  “Yeah, that’d be the decent thing to do, right? Turner’s gonna go run his ass off a cliff, so you oughta get off that easy, too, yeah?” Fando scratched his cheek with the shotgun muzzle and chewed his lip. He took a deep breath. His posture sank, and his eyelids drooped with his exhalation, as if he had breathed out all the high of the moment. Thoughts of reality returned: flashes of his son’s grinning face, his woman’s gleaming curly hair, Raúl’s rare laugh, Danny always calming him down when he got too wound up, his mom. His mom eclipsed the others—her eyes so disappointed, her mouth pursed. She would blame him for Raúl. For Danny, too. She always liked “Daniel,” as she called him, accent on the “e,” and told Fando he’d finally picked the right kind of friend—now he just had to start learning from him. She didn’t know that Danny did some stupid shit, too. He was the one who, at 15, stole the neighbor’s Suburban for a joyride and then picked up Fando and Raúl to cruise with him. But Fando was the one driving when they got busted, so he took the fall, which was fine, but it didn’t make his mom’s words sting any less when she said, “You’re gonna drag Daniel down with you! He would never have been involved in something like that if he didn’t know you!”

  He had always followed Danny. Signed up for the Marines after him, requested Afghanistan when Danny’s unit got deployed there, and when they got out he applied to SecureElite after they hired Danny. Some of the jobs were shit, and Fando would have quit, but Danny said they had to bide their time for a “big-payoff op.” That was wh
at Rheese was supposed to be. All this was Rheese’s fault. If not for him, they would be bouncing at a Saudi prince’s party or delivering the ransom for some company’s kidnapped VP in Colombia.

  Fando looked down at Rheese. “You wanna die, huh?”

  Rheese looked small and defeated. “Just bloody do it,” he said.

  Fando nodded and looked around him with the bewildered air of someone walking out of a serious car accident. I gotta . . . gotta do somethin’. We gotta go or . . . I don’t know. We gotta go . . .

  “Get up.” He had no plan, but he knew he wanted to get off this mountaintop now.

  Rheese whimpered, “I can’t.”

  Fando used his calm, menacing voice. “Get up or I’ll make it worse. You don’t get to die yet.”

  * * *

  Rheese began to cry. He sobbed into his hands, and his belly trembled. He hadn’t actually cried since he was 15, after being dumped by the girl he thought he would marry. He had later written her off as a whore who wanted only to shag his footballer friends or anyone else who caught her fancy. He had not thought of her name, her face, or her very existence for at least thirty years, but at this moment, she had come back to his consciousness. Judith Marwick. Strawberry blonde, pale blue eyes, upturned nose. Big lips he’d kissed more than once, large breasts he’d never gotten to touch. If she could only see him now: fat, bald, one eye knocked out by a piece of flying gemstone—a wanted criminal, a coward begging for a merciful death, blubbering just as he had in the library when she’d told him it was off . . . I am a repulsive, vile wretch.

  “One more second, and I’m takin’ a finger,” Fando said, suddenly close to Rheese’s ear.

  Rheese flinched and rolled his remaining eye over to Fando’s looming mug. He wished the man would just put the shotgun to his head and take away his pain, but that was clearly not in the cards. There was more suffering to be had. This is bloody karma, he decided. All of it. Be a man, Garrett Rheese. Be a gentleman, an Englishman, until your time is up. Don’t give him the bloody satisfaction.

  He inhaled a deep breath, pulled his hands away from his face, and stared defiantly at Fando’s curious eyes.

  “Very well,” Rheese said, sitting up. “Let’s be off, then.”

  Apparently not expecting such sudden compliance, Fando nodded and said, “Yeah, right, we’re goin’ . . .” He scanned the sky. “Southeast. But put somethin’ over that nasty-ass eye before I fuckin’ puke.”

  Rheese found the clothes pile again and tied his undershirt around his head to cover up. He also found his button-down shirt and pulled it over his shoulders.

  Fando picked up Roger Turner’s backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “Walk,” he said. “That way.”

  Rheese stood up with all the dignity he could manage: shoulders back, chin up, as he limped forward with an arm cradling his ribs.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Just keep going, Matt thought as he leaned against Tadinanefer’s direct path. There was another tree in front of him, a cluster of palmettos ringing its base. It worked. As he continued down the hill, he found with each step that he still had some degree of influence over his body. But the double vision remained an insufferable hindrance. They were moving too fast for him to quickly distinguish the objects and terrain in his own reality from those in hers. And then her imprint ended and dropped into dark space. His body and senses were his again, if only for the moment.

  He stopped and turned around, surveyed the scene, listened. The birds in the canopy above were in full riotous song, and he couldn’t hear anyone coming. If Fando had decided to follow him, he would have had to leave Rheese behind. Who was more important to him?

  Matt looked down at his perforated body. He could see where the shards of opal had shot into his chest and stomach. There seemed to be a hundred little spots, some with tiny trickles of congealed blood, others with thicker clots. Some of the larger pieces still showed above the skin. He needed these fragments out of his body, and he started by plucking the biggest ones first. One shard in his left pectoral muscle was long; it seemed to keep coming far after he expected it to be out. He winced as the end finally left his body. The long spicule looked like a little bobby pin, flat but with a few wiggles. He flicked it away into the jungle and began pulling out every piece he could get his fingernails around.

  The Atli imprint from the Arab fortress would begin any second. Could he even get them all out? There had to be some buried deep beneath his skin. Again he thought about all the shotgun pellets that could be in him, and wondered whether this all was a waste of time. For all he knew, he could be bleeding out internally, his organs well on their way to failing.

  Atli’s hand curled around the buried sword’s jutting hilt as he lay on the pile of slaughtered bodies.

  Great . . . here we go.

  Atli’s thoughts streamed into Matt’s head: visions of wealth, the woman who (he hoped) awaited him back home, the farm he would buy, the sons he would raise (seven seemed a good number), his brother and whoever his wife turned out to be. They would buy neighboring farms and pool their livestock.

  Matt’s wide eyes blinked, and his arms hung in the air as if he were balancing on a tightrope in the dark. He hesitated to take a step, because the darker overlay of Atli’s world eclipsed the jungle before him. It sounded as if a battle were raging up the hill, where he had just been, but he knew that the sounds came from the past, on the other side of a fortress in North Africa.

  Though Atli remained indifferent to the mutilated flesh around him, Matt found himself reminded of his father. Gone forever. No inevitable reconciliation to put on hold for just a few more years. Dad had been trying so hard. I was such an asshole. Why did I always have to be such an asshole? The transgressions that had once seemed so unforgiveable shrank to triviality in Matt’s head. A decade ago—no, further back than that, even. How long did Dad have to pay?

  Atli stood and began climbing the wall. Matt lost his balance and fell backward—fortunately, onto soft soil. He remained there, his leg, arm, and chest muscles tensing rhythmically as Atli continued climbing. He tried to get up, but Atli said no, we’re running down stairs now.

  Now, after the battle . . . the Grim encounter. Matt didn’t bother trying to stand while Atli was in motion.

  Atli and his lieutenants walked toward Grim. Atli chanted the words in his head. They weren’t the exact words his father had said, but they still came together, and in his voice: “Bear up, son. Tomorrow is always better, though tomorrow may not come tomorrow.”

  Atli stopped in front of the black-bearded commander on his horse. The sun was behind Grim.

  Matt took the opportunity to try to stand, finding a semi-sturdy sapling beside him. He pulled himself upright, but suddenly felt a new pain on his wrist. Another!

  “Ow, sonofa—!” he shouted as he spotted the sources of his pain: frantic army ants scurrying around his hand and wrist and some on their way up his arm. He violently brushed his arm with his other hand and said aloud, “A report, Grim?” One more bite on the inside of his wrist. He flicked the perpetrator then got rid of two more strays. He checked the rest of his arm, his shoulder, torso, and then the ground. Hoping he was now clean of ants, he took a few cautious steps away from the infested sapling.

  “It’s called Damascus,” Matt said. “Some sort of special forging skill of the Saracen blacksmiths. If you like it, I shall try to find one for you.”

  A few moments later, Matt’s legs flexed and he struggled to maintain balance as Grim rode off on his horse. The sensation of horseback riding had Matt tripping forward in tiny skips. He found a giant leaf in his face and smacked it away, actually growling at it. He felt overcome with anger and frustration. The imprints needed to stop. And he needed to be out of this godforsaken jungle. Fando was going to pay for this. Dark space.

  What’s next? Little kid Haeming in the cold . . .

  He stepped away from the bushes and brushed away the dirt and leaves stuck to his sweaty skin, in the proces
s grazing several tiny jutting shards of opal. He could very well have hundreds, thousands, of these bits in him. How could he ever find and remove them all?

  It was time to get moving again. If he continued in the same direction, he would eventually hit the road they had taken here. And then . . . well, he didn’t know what then. Flag a passing car, perhaps, or maybe he’d find Uncle J or that woman with the drill sergeant voice on his dad’s friend’s radio.

  He began trotting downhill, weaving in and out of trees and thickets, when his bare torso began to chill. Iceland . . . Little Haeming running through the snow from the toolhouse. Here the double vision wasn’t as hard to sort out, what with all the white in Haeming’s view. Matt felt his legs tripping up again, so he tried to shorten his strides to move in sync with the boy’s. It happened quickly and, to his surprise, naturally. It felt like how his legs wanted to move. They were at the door to the log-walled house in no time, and Haeming was wrestling with the door. Matt’s body couldn’t reconcile the disparity in motion, so he halted and leaned against some sort of fig tree. He felt feverish, alternating hot and cold chills surging and ebbing over him like ocean waves on a beach.

  Haeming stepped inside to face his father’s perpetual wrath.

  A thought struck Matt—one he was shocked to have missed up to this point: might it be possible to pause this? He closed his eyes and commanded the imprint to halt. Amazingly, it did, with a freeze-frame view of Haeming’s hands closing the door. Matt opened his eyes and peered warily around. The still shot of the door and hands remained, filtering the view of endless green and shafts of sunlight. Matt smiled for the first time in a long while.

  He took a cautious step forward.

  “Where’s the ax?” Grim growled.

  Damn it, pause!

  The vision stopped again, this time with a candlelit view of Grim’s fearsome profile. Seated at the table, he had his eyes turned only halfway to the boy. Matt could see the terracotta cup on the table before him—the same cup that very soon would come flying across the room to break against his head.