The Shadow Walker

by William R Hunt

  It occurred to Victor now that the broken message he had received in the bunker had been a command to abort, to leave the scientists alone. While he and Washburn were underground, someone had arrived and commandeered the mission—someone who either had more clout or more muscle than Jones. Maybe both. There must have been a gunfight with the compound’s defenders (Victor and Washburn, separated from the surface by yards of concrete, wouldn’t have heard it). Maybe someone had called down to the laboratory, warning them to surrender themselves.

  “We did what we could, Vic,” Washburn said. He was sitting on the ground while Jones patched the knife wound. Victor realized he should have been the one helping Washburn, but his frustration had overcome his concern for his teammate’s safety.

  Victor watched the scientists climb into the helicopters, as white as ghosts in their lab coats. A sense of heavy disappointment settled inside him. He thought of all the preparations they had put into this mission, both tactical and psychological, and how close he had come to dying in that bunker. And for what? So that he could watch someone else take the credit? Or, worse yet, what if the scientists simply disappeared and the truth never came out?

  “So we’re just handing them over?” he asked, addressing the question to Jones. “That’s your fucking plan?”

  “We were surprised and outnumbered,” Jones barked. “So I did the only thing you can do when everything goes to shit—I’m getting my team out of here alive.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes alive isn’t good enough.”

  “Vic!” Washburn called. “Think about what you’re doing!”

  The truth was, Victor had already given it as much thought as he needed. As he trotted toward the helicopters, the outline of his plan took shape. It was desperate, sure, and it might get him killed, but it beat going home with his tail tucked between his legs. He had to try. Sometimes that was all a man could do.

  Victor spotted the German walking toward one of the helicopters.

  “Hey!” Victor screamed as loud as he could, fighting to be heard above the roar of the helicopter blades. Someone in the helicopter gestured in Victor’s direction, and the German turned.

  “Go home, American!” he shouted.

  “If you’re taking the scientists, I’m going with you!”

  The German shook his head. “If you try getting on, my men will shoot you!” He turned. In his mind, that was the last word. The conversation was finished. Victor, however, had one more card to play.

  “I saw everything! I saw the insects, the boxes—all of it!” He watched for a reaction. It was dark, and a maelstrom whipped furiously around them, but even so Victor was able to see the German’s face. It was as stony as the likenesses of the presidents on Mount Rushmore.

  The pause lasted only a few moments, but it seemed pregnant with possibilities. Victor wondered distantly if the German might simply draw a sidearm and shoot him. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  Then the German came to a decision. He waved Victor forward. Victor caught up to him and followed him into the helicopter, where they sat across from one another. The helicopter rose and tipped, the fences and buildings of the compound shrank beneath them, and Victor found himself staring into Washburn’s upturned face. He wondered if Washburn would be okay. He wondered if he himself would be okay. He wondered, most of all, if he would ever get home to Camila again, and what he needed to do before then to be able to live with himself.

  A release valve. Kids being kids, men being men. Was it just something in his blood that made him throw his life into danger like this, a strand of DNA he had been born with? Or was it a conscious choice he made time after time, regardless of the consequences to the people he loved?

  When he lifted his eyes to the interior of the helicopter again, he discovered the German was watching him.

  The German extended his hand. “Peter Krieg.”

  “Victor Gervasio.”

  Peter smiled. “Welcome to the front line, Victor.”

  “The front line?”

  “Of the war,” Peter answered, gazing out into the darkness swirling past them. “A crisis unlike anything the world has ever known.”

  Chapter 5

  Victor snapped his fingers. “Dante? You awake?”

  Victor had become so absorbed in talking about his past that he had lost track of time. The moon was now high overhead, the sky studded with the sharp light of the stars. The temperature was still dropping, and he considered - not for the first time - how soon winter would arrive and how unprepared they would be, given how far they were from the cabin where they had spent the last few winters. Staying at a clubhouse in the middle of a golf course was not exactly his idea of being prepared.

  Dante sucked in a quick breath. “Yep. Still here. You were saying something about watching the news?”

  Victor frowned, taking his brother seriously.

  Dante chuckled. “Just messing with you. I was awake until you got to the part about flying off in a helicopter with a total stranger. That’s when it got really boring.”

  “Probably as good a place as any to stop for now,” Victor answered thoughtfully. “You look like you could use some sleep.” He regarded his brother closely, thinking how different he looked from a week ago. There was a tension in his face, a guardedness, even when he joked. A wariness lurked behind his eyes, as if he could not quite believe that he was safe again.

  Victor, of course, could not blame him. Dante had been kidnapped, beaten, threatened, and drugged before Victor finally rescued him. His mind, as well as his body, would take time to heal.

  Dante shivered and stared into the darkness. Somewhere out there a wolf howled, its lonely voice filling the empty night.

  “Come on,” Victor said, standing. “I saw a fireplace inside. Let’s see if we can’t get it started.”

  ___

  While Dante rested beneath a pile of blankets on the carpet, Victor worked on breaking a chair into kindling. He didn’t have a hatchet, so he propped the chair against a bureau and stomped on it, shattering the wood. He grimaced at the sound it made, thinking how far that sound might carry through the dark night (much like the voice of the wolf), and who might be listening out there.

  He found a stack of magazines and tore out the mail-in cards from inside, which would burn better than the glossy pages. He flicked his lighter and held it to the pile of torn cards.

  “Where’d you get the lighter?” Dante asked, watching Victor.

  A week ago, Victor would have given a vague answer: It was a gift, or I got it from an old friend. But the time for secrecy and lies was past, wasn’t it? He hoped it was. He had nearly lost his only brother, who was kidnapped for no crimes of his own, and now it was time to turn the page.

  “Peter gave it to me,” he said, twisting his neck to meet Dante’s eyes. Dante nodded slowly, not looking away, as if showing he understood how things had changed. We’re on the same side now, his eyes seemed to say. I trust you again.

  “You were good friends, weren’t you?” Dante asked.

  Victor nodded, then turned to add more wood to the flames.

  “And Khan? He was a good friend too, wasn’t he?”

  Victor searched his brother’s voice for a note of accusation, but didn’t find any. “It was a long time ago,” he answered, “but yes. He was a good man—or so I thought until he tied you to the saddle of a horse.”

  “I don’t think it was like that. He helped kidnap me, yes, but I don’t think he really wanted to.”

  Victor grunted. “But he rode off with you anyway, didn’t he? That makes him as bad as Walker—worse, maybe, because he actually had a conscience.”

  “So why did you let him go? Why didn’t you put a bullet in him like you did with Walker?”

  Victor did not answer. He had asked himself the same question as he watched Khan ride away, and he still did not know the answer. Maybe it was because Walker’s death had been enough. Or maybe it was because there was a bond between him a
nd Khan forged by a life Victor had tried for years to forget, a bond he could not break no matter how hard he tried. Blood is thicker than water, as they say, and there had been plenty of blood.

  “I get it,” Dante said after a long silence. “It’s difficult to talk about.”

  “We’ll talk more in the morning,” Victor promised, trying to give his brother an encouraging smile. He hoped it did not look like a grimace, which was how it felt.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Dante whispered, and closed his eyes as a sudden shiver rode through him.

  It’s just the cold, Victor told himself. The cold and the pain. That’s all. But he knew better.

  Once the fire was a cheery blaze, he settled into a recliner as Dante’s chest fell into a steady rhythm, the room silent except for the crackling of the fireplace and the cold fingers of wind that clawed and whistled through broken panes. He stared into the flames and thought about all that had transpired this past week—the appearance of Walker, who had gone to such lengths to deceive the brothers about his identity; the fight at Fairfield; the cannibal town and Oswald, the budding sociopath; the gunfight that took place less than a quarter mile away from this very place. If Victor had had his way, they would still be at the cabin stocking wood and food against the coming winter. Dante would still be talking about the world beyond their four cozy walls, and Victor would still be advising patience, waiting a little longer, not making a decision they might later regret.

  He knew now that he should have been straight with Dante from the beginning. Had he told him everything, Dante would have understood Victor’s suspicions about Walker. They could have been prepared, and perhaps the bloodshed could have been avoided.

  And what would I have said? he thought. What if it had been Khan we met in the woods instead of Walker? What if he had delivered the Baron’s message then? Would I have gone with him?

  He thought again of how he had met Peter Krieg. Even on that first night as the helicopter shuttled through the darkness, he had sensed a certain aura about Peter, a magnetism. Many of the great leaders of the world had been described in such a way—Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, Napoleon Bonaparte, even Joseph Stalin. However history judged them, they had all been men of conviction and purpose, determined to leave their mark on the world. Peter had been just such a man. That was why it had taken so long for Victor to leave.

  As the night drew toward morning, Victor discovered sleep would not have him. He tried to imagine the future, but it seemed a vast and empty canvas, unwritten, neither good nor bad, barren of all purpose.

  When he finally fell asleep sometime later, he could still hear the whir of chopper blades in his ears.

  Chapter 6

  Dante woke to the smell of breakfast. There was a dream fading from his mind, losing credibility with every blink of his sleepy eyes, but he still felt it. He had been running from something. Yes, he was sure of that much. He had always had vivid dreams, a fact Victor had been envious of when they were children, and his brief affair with what one of his buddies used to call “Rich Man’s Aspirin” had only heightened the projecting power of his subconscious mind. The colors seemed a little brighter since then, the transitions crisper. It was like wearing prescription glasses after putting up with bleary vision for years.

  It was a two-edged blade, however—this clarity. He felt things in his dreams very strongly. If he was flying through the air, he noticed how the air whipped his hair back from his scalp; if he was munching Captain Crunch and watching Sponge Bob on the sofa of his parents’ old house, the sound of the cereal seemed to overwhelm the sound of the TV. This also meant, however, that when he was running away from a man with a knife, he could hear the man’s labored breathing behind him, the squeak of his soles as he chased Dante down a featureless hallway.

  It was the smell of Cream of Mushroom soup that rescued him from the nightmare, and as soon as his eyes were fluttering in the beam of sunlight slanting through the window, the dream scattered like spilled beads, leaving behind only a residual fear to remind him of what had swum up from his subconscious. He sat up, his heart beating a little too fast, and saw Victor slip a bottle of Jim Beam into his backpack.

  “Look who’s up,” Victor said, smiling. His face was pale and haggard, the skin drooping beneath his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Fine,” Dante answered a little too quickly. It was true, for the most part. His body felt more grounded than it had the night before, less apt to dissolve into a constellation of floating atoms at any moment. It was his mind that was unsteady.

  “Are my eyes deceiving me,” he asked, “or was that a bottle of bourbon you just put in there?”

  “I found it hidden away in one of the bedrooms. A secret stash, I guess. It was about the only thing I was able to find.”

  Reading between the lines, Dante took this to mean Victor had spent a long time searching the building. Perhaps that was why he looked so tired.

  “Well,” Dante answered, stretching his arms and yawning, “I hope we find a reason to celebrate before too long.” He pushed out his legs and gave a startled yelp as his neurons, those unsung torturers, reminded him what happens when a ton of meat and bone lands on a human leg. He had been on a horse when Victor rescued him from his kidnappers, and during the fight Dante’s horse had crushed his leg. He had avoided serious injury, but he expected he would be limping for a good while.

  “Stop moving, moron,” Victor said as he threw back the blanket covering Dante’s feet and examined the injury. The leg had been propped on a cushion to reduce swelling, but had slipped off during the night.

  “You haven’t called me a name like that since…well, since our greatest concern was how to save up enough money for the BB gun we saw on TV,” Dante replied. He grinned despite the pain. “Knucklehead.”

  Victor pushed the leg of Dante’s jeans back so he could see the injury better. “I won’t lie to you,” he said, “you’ve got a watermelon at the end of your leg.”

  Dante was still grinning. “Think you’ll have to amputate?”

  “I wish. I don’t think anything’s broken, though. Looks like it’s just a bad sprain.” He withdrew his hands and sat back on his haunches, frowning.

  Dante knew this look and did not like it. “Spit it out.”

  “How are you feeling? You looked feverish last night. Has it—”

  “Am I having withdrawals?” For once, Dante was the one not interested in beating around the bush. “Walker only shot me up twice—not enough to build up a strong dependency.” But it was long enough, he thought, to remind me what it’s like.

  Victor nodded, accepting Dante’s authority on such matters. “Good. The crows can have that bastard now.”

  Dante chuckled humorlessly. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange he knew I used to be an addict?”

  Victor shrugged. “He must have seen the track marks on your arm.”

  Dante pulled back the sleeves of his hoodie, which he had slept in. “I don’t have any. I never messed with that shit. It was always the powder.” There was a meaningful distinction between the two, at least in Dante’s mind, but the way Victor gazed at him suggested they could never see the issue the same way. To Victor, drugs were drugs—dangerous substances that would control your life, if you let them. To say anything more was splitting hairs.

  “What about when I found you in that apartment, just before we went to the cabin?” Victor asked. “Pretty sure you didn’t have that tie wrapped around your arm to check your blood pressure.”

  Dante bit his lip. It had happened one time, one time, the very day Victor picked to storm into his life. He hated how Victor hung that over him.

  “Maybe he didn’t know,” Victor said, changing course. “Walker was a sadist. Maybe the worst thing he could imagine was to make you an addict. It would also keep you from trying to escape again.”

  Dante shook his head. “He told me he knew me, Vic. Said he was going to kill me after I fulfilled my purpose.”<
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  “Your purpose?”

  “His words, not mine.”

  Victor looked away, gazing at the remains of the fire. The sunlight lit the side of his face, showing the flecks of gray in the stubble along his cheek and beneath the angle of his jaw. Dante studied that face and thought, distantly, We aren’t kids any more, haven’t been kids for a long time. We’re men now and that’s how the world means to treat us.

  The question was burning inside him, and he thought it would make him sick if he didn’t get it out.

  “Am I crazy,” he asked, “to think they kidnapped me to get to you?”