The Shadow Walker

by William R Hunt

  “Listen,” he began, glancing out into the main room to make certain they were still alone. “If you have any friends waiting to ambush me, you should know my first bullet will be for you.”

  “Charming,” she answered. “You think I’m bait.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Tell me, if you found me handcuffed to a desk, would you let me go?”

  “If I had a gun, sure.”

  He paused, his hands on the edge of the desk. “Do you have a gun?”

  She smiled. “If I had a gun on me, trust me, you’d know.”

  Victor set the Colt on top of the desk. Then he placed his hands beneath the edge of the desk and squatted.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Just lift the damn thing.”

  The desk was heavier than he had expected. He glanced around one of the legs to see her rising, the handcuffs dangling from her wrist. He dropped the desk and reached for the Colt, but he was a second too late.

  He raised his eyes to see the barrel of his own gun staring back at him.

  Chapter 13

  Victor’s mouth went dry. “Are you serious?” he asked. “I just saved your life.”

  “I lied to you,” she answered, keeping the gun trained on Victor’s torso as she shifted toward the door. “I wouldn’t have saved you.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “No. Nobody’s innocent in this world. Nobody.”

  “So what happens now?”

  She shrugged. She was standing in the doorway now. “We go our separate ways.”

  “Just like that? Not even going to tell me your name?”

  “Scarlett.”

  “I’m Victor.”

  “Well, Victor, if you’re waiting for an apology, you’ll be waiting a long time.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” he said as she began backing through the doorway. “Was it a trick? Is that mark on your forehead just for show?”

  She shook her head. “Sadly, no. They may be coming back soon, so if I were you—”

  The grinding, high-pitched whine of a hinge interrupted her. It had come from the other end of the factory. Her eyes widened at Victor and she took a step back.

  “Don’t just leave me in here,” he whispered fiercely.

  She hesitated, wasting a few precious seconds before motioning for him to follow her.

  They stepped quickly through the long room, dodging overturned chairs and piles of bird droppings. There was only one exit: the staircase at the far end. The stairs were completely dark now, swallowed by a nest of shadow as the dying daylight continued to recede westward like a tide inching back toward the sea.

  Victor came to an abrupt halt.

  “What are you doing?” Scarlett hissed.

  “They’re on the stairs.”

  A few more moments passed as they waited for a shape to materialize from the darkness. Then Scarlett grabbed Victor’s sleeve and pulled him toward the side of the room.

  They crouched among a cluster of headless manikins as a flashlight beam trawled across the ceiling. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Muttering voices. Victor watched the shadows lengthen and pool together, wishing he had never left Dante in the forest.

  Scarlett’s face seemed to glow in the darkness, her eyes wide and cat-like.

  The first figure held a long pipe that he used like a walking stick. It drummed hollowly against the floor. He did not lean on it, but instead tapped it like a renovator searching for studs in a wall.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk.

  He was a large, heavy man, but the rest of his features were hidden because the flashlight was at his back. It swept across the room in lazy spirals—tracking the floor one moment, splashing across Victor’s face the next.

  Momentarily blinded, Victor closed his eyes. His ears could track the strangers on their own. First came the thump of the pipe, then the drifting patter of three or four sets of feet. They had stopped murmuring. Their voices were completely silent as they approached the door, the same door behind which Scarlett had been imprisoned.

  The flashlight rose, freezing on the open doorway. The man with the pipe stopped walking. Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Victor was calculating his odds of reaching the staircase with Scarlett, but he had no idea if she even knew how to fire a gun. Better to wait, hoping these Beast-worshipers grew discouraged and slunk away.

  After an interminable pause, the man walked into the room.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk.

  The others followed—three of them, long-haired and thin. Victor could not tell their genders.

  He leaned close to Scarlett’s ear. “We have to go now,” he whispered. “Right now.”

  She shook her head sharply.

  “We have to,” he repeated as urgently as he could. “Hand me the gun.”

  She stared straight into his eyes. “There were five of them.”

  “What?”

  “When they caught me, there were five of them.”

  Something shifted on the other side of the room. Another bat?

  Suddenly a howl rose from the room where Scarlett had been kept prisoner—angry, aggrieved, vengeful. Glass shattered. A woman shrieked. The three long-haired people raced from the room, chased by the man with the long pipe. They scattered into the shadows.

  Except for the one with the flashlight. She was stooped over, studying the tracks in the floor dust.

  ___

  The man with the pipe joined her. Neither spoke. The flashlight swung in a slow arc, wider and wider, then narrowing.

  She started shuffling back toward the stairs.

  Victor held his hand out to Scarlett, palm upward. His skin was just barely visible.

  Scarlett was biting her lip. He read all her doubts and fears in the glint of her eyes. Seconds rolled by, eternal. The flashlight rose, swept toward them, then kept moving along the wall. Victor released a quiet sigh.

  Scarlett slowly raised herself to a crouch. She began moving away from the flashlight, toward the wall. Victor shook his head at her, but she ignored him. He had no choice but to follow.

  His back was to the flashlight now, so he kept pausing to look back. The man with the pipe was standing silent in the middle of the room, only visible because he was silhouetted against the windows opposite Victor. The woman with the flashlight was still tracking along the floor. Her two companions flanked her now, drifting in and out of the beam of light.

  Victor bumped a manikin and reached out quickly to stop it from toppling. Scarlett, only a few feet ahead of him, had reached the brick wall. A row of mostly-intact windows ran along it. Victor was considering their chances of surviving a two-story fall without serious injury. In the darkness? Not good. Especially if there might be someone else waiting down below.

  Scarlett peeked out the window, her head momentarily visible against the gray light. She lowered herself again, pressed her back to the wall, and mouthed something to Victor.

  He crept closer until his ear was only inches from her mouth.

  “Fire escape.”

  He nodded. Finally, a plan.

  He settled on his haunches and studied the window. Double-hung. No lock or clasp. A few bullet-holes through the glass. He glanced back toward the center of the room.

  The flashlight was gone.

  Cold, clammy sweat dampened his shirt. He craned his neck, searching for the light, and finally saw it. It was closer now, but far enough away that he liked their chances of escaping through the window. Besides, there was a pillar and a heap of manikins between them and the flashlight, so even if they made a noise, they might not get spotted right away.

  Just then the woman with the flashlight gave an excited cry. The man with the pipe hustled over. They had discovered Victor’s and Scarlett’s trail in the dust.

  “Time to go,” Victor whispered to Scarlett. “I’ll lift the window, you go through.”

  She nodded, staring at him with wide, luminescent eyes.

  With a deep breath, Victor rose and wrapped his fingers a
round the frame of the window. He tugged.

  Nothing happened.

  “It’s sealed with paint!” Scarlett whispered, pointing.

  She was right. Someone had painted the window shut. The paint, however, was old, and most of it had already fallen away in flakes, dried by the sunlight.

  Victor faced Scarlett. “Just get ready to climb through.”

  Behind them, the strange murmuring they had heard from the stairwell began again.

  At a nod from Scarlett, Victor gripped the window and jerked as hard as he could. The window shot upward and wedged itself in place. Scarlett stepped through, careful not to rattle the metal frame of the fire escape on the other side.

  Victor could hear the murmurs behind him growing excited, agitated. He slipped one leg through the window, but he was bigger than Scarlett and he bumped the top of the frame as he climbed through. As he straightened, ready to descend the stairs and rejoin Dante by the brook, the loosened window fell shut again.

  The glass shattered, tinkling against the metal fire escape in tiny shards.

  An outraged voice roared from inside the room.

  “Go!” Victor shouted at Scarlett. But she only stood at the top of the stairs, staring downward.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “The stairs are gone! There’s no way down!”

  Victor took a deep, calming breath, not thinking about the footsteps racing across the factory floor, not concerned about being outnumbered.

  In the calmest voice he could muster, setting his jaw and doing his best to show he was in absolute control of the situation, he said, “Hand me the gun, Scarlett.”

  Chapter 14

  Dante watched the shadows of the trees lengthen. Sweat dampened his armpits, even though he had hardly moved since Victor left.

  What if he doesn’t come back?

  He closed his eyes against the words, tried to erase them from the blackboard of his mind. But there they were, traced in permanent marker, indelible.

  He was not afraid Victor would run into trouble. Victor had always possessed a knack - no, a gift - for solving problems, for paring the world open with the knife of logic. If Victor ran into trouble, Victor would get himself out of it.

  That was who he was.

  What he wanted, however—that was an entirely different question.

  Since the early days at the cabin, Dante had viewed the crisis of the world as their opportunity to start over. Life was simple now. You didn’t worry about career choices or the next election or whether you had missed a cable bill. You paid attention to the simple things: Food and water, being dry when it rained and warm when it snowed, knowing that if a stranger came to steal the few possessions you had, you would know what to do.

  Dante loved this simplicity because it saved him from the doubts that used to circle him like carrion birds: When are you gonna get job? Huh, Dante? What about finding a girl? You don’t plan to be a bachelor all your life, do you?

  When these doubts used to circle him, he would always compare himself to Victor. It was unfair, but it was also inevitable. Victor had been Dante’s opposite: successful and happily dating a wonderful woman. Grounded. Never doubting himself, never stopping to question whether it was all worthwhile. At least that was how it had always looked to Dante.

  But now, as he waited for Victor to emerge from the forest, he kept thinking about the story Victor had told about Peter Krieg. It was not the substance of the story that worried him so much as the way Victor told it—the nostalgia in that far-off gaze, as if Victor longed more to relive that past life than to be here with Dante.

  It raised another doubt, too: How well did Dante really know his brother? Despite all the secrets Victor had kept from him, Dante had always believed he and Victor were, and always would be, the same two boys who had grown up together. But what if he was wrong? What if Victor had found another path? After all, hadn’t Victor said that Khan, the leader of the horsemen who had kidnapped Dante, had been his friend?

  It all came down to one central question: What if he discovered that he and his brother were on two separate tracks curving in opposite directions? Could he ever make a clean break from Victor? Could he ever stand up to him, say, It’s time we go our separate ways? After everything Victor had done for him, wouldn’t that be the epitome of ingratitude?

  Gunfire tore through the silence. Lumpkin whinnied and danced a few steps. Dante stared into the darkness, wondering who might emerge. He cradled the Winchester against his shoulder and waited.

  ___

  He was firing blind. Once the flashlight winked out, it was like shooting at ghosts. He counted every bullet, knowing he would soon have to reach into his pocket for the second - and last - clip.

  Then the movement stopped. The factory went quiet.

  “Are they dead?” Scarlett whispered, as if afraid of being heard.

  “Not likely,” he answered. “They’re probably waiting for us to go back inside so they can jump us.”

  “I’m not going back inside.”

  “We might have to.”

  Scarlett leaned over the rail, staring down.

  Victor grabbed her arm. “Hey. It’s too dark. If you break a leg on the way down, that’s it. You’re done for.”

  “Meaning you’d leave me?”

  “Would you blame me if I did?”

  She managed a pale smile. “I suppose not.”

  Victor took a deep breath and turned back to the shattered window. “As long as we’re up here, we’re safe. They can’t get us.”

  “Meaning we’re just a couple of cats stuck in a tree surrounded by wolves.”

  He shrugged. “Basically.”

  She sank down against the metal rail and hugged her knees. The night was cold. They both shivered silently. Victor stared at the dark window, wishing for some moonlight so he could glimpse inside the factory.

  “Is this what you do?” Scarlett asked. “Save damsels in distress?”

  He laughed—the sound just came out on its own. “Not usually. I try to mind my own business.”

  “You don’t seem very good at it.”

  “Which? Minding my own business or saving damsels in distress?”

  She smiled thinly. “Either.”

  He took a long breath and leaned against the rail, tasting the cold night air on his tongue, listening for the creak of a floorboard or the scuff of a boot but hearing nothing. How long could he wait out there? All night, if he had to. It would be suicide for him to go into the factory, suicide for them to come out. Might as well be suicide to try dropping from that height in the dark, as well.

  A classic impasse.

  But he had one crucial advantage. Sunrise, if he could wait for it, would be his ally, not theirs. He just had to outlast the cold, ghostly night, hoping Dante stayed where he was, keeping his Colt ready in case those fanatics tried coming through the window. Once sunlight illuminated the factory, he could pick them off one by one.

  “Are your hands cold?” Scarlett asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I can take a turn, if you want.”

  “You ever fired a gun before?”

  “More times than I’ve painted my nails.”

  He turned toward her. “So what’s your story? How did these crazies find you? Why did you leave the other survivors?”

  She frowned at him. “What makes you think I was with other survivors?”

  “Look at you—you’re clean, well-dressed. It’s pretty obvious you haven’t been sleeping in a cardboard box.”

  “You should be careful not to judge people too quickly.”

  Victor frowned, wondering what she meant but uncertain how to ask. The opportunity came and went. His legs grew tired and he lowered himself beside Scarlett, his gun hand resting in his lap with the barrel aimed in the general direction of the window.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Is this what you do? Get yourself imprisoned by religious nuts?”


  “Not usually, no.” Her voice shuddered slightly as she spoke. Her knees were shaking.