The Shadow Walker

by William R Hunt

  “Peter!” Victor shouted. When Peter did not respond, Victor rushed across the room and bowled into him, sending the torch bouncing across the floor. Moments after he landed on top of Peter, several figures rushed into the room. A knee connected with Victor’s chin, snapping his head back and filling his mouth with blood. He punched the man in the groin, then grabbed his leg and pushed him over backward.

  “Enough!” Peter shouted as hands grabbed Victor and hauled him to his feet. “Let him go.”

  Victor leaned on his thighs as his mind cleared. “Peter,” he said, “I think we need to talk.”

  ___

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Victor demanded outside the interrogation room. “A blowtorch?”

  “I was testing her,” Peter answered. He touched his hip and winced. “I think you gave me a good bruise.”

  “Testing her? Looked to me like you were ready to burn her eyes out.”

  “You really think I would do that?” Peter scoffed. “What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one who said I don’t know you at all.”

  Peter glanced at his soldiers, who were observing them from a short distance away. “They might have killed you,” he said to Victor. “You should consider that next time before you attack me.”

  “So what do we do now? She clearly isn’t going to talk.”

  “Not after you called my bluff,” Peter answered coldly.

  “Maybe we should try one of the other scientists.”

  Peter shook his head. “No, she’s the one. I told you, we have been watching them. The others know nothing.”

  Victor thought for a moment. “Then we try the opposite approach. Offer some kind of incentive. Try to convince her we’ll help her get away, escape whoever she’s working for, if she just gives us a name.”

  Peter ignored the suggestion. “I have one more idea that might work. But in order to try it, I must know you will not interfere.”

  Victor frowned. “What’s the idea?”

  “You won’t like it. But I promise you, no matter what I say or do, I will not go through with it. It is only a threat.”

  “Another bluff. You really think she’ll buy it?”

  Peter smiled. “Trust me. This will work.”

  “Trust,” Victor repeated, shaking his head. “That’s a lot to ask after the stunt you just pulled.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows. “Who said I’m asking?”

  ___

  Victor was grateful for the questionable quality of the security camera. The woman lying on the floor, bound to the chair, was a pitiful sight. He no longer saw an intelligent, attractive woman but a helpless victim, someone to be pitied rather than desired. He felt disgusted by the shallowness of his own feelings.

  “Sorry for the interruption,” Peter said as he entered the interrogation room. “It will not happen again.” He grabbed Sophia’s chair and lifted her back to a sitting position. She slumped there like a doll, humiliated but somehow unbroken.

  “A name,” Peter repeated softly. “That is all I am asking for. Then all this will end. You can start a new life somewhere far from here. All you must do is face your demons, amend the wrong you have set in motion.”

  “Or what?” she whispered. The tears had stopped, but they could still be heard in her voice. “You’ll kill me now, is that it? Cover it all up?”

  “I gave you a choice.” Peter turned around and glanced deliberately up at the camera, as if to say, See how she leaves me no choice? Then he took something from the metal tray—a small tube, perhaps. He showed it to Sophia.

  “Truth serum?” the woman asked with a bitter, mocking laugh. Victor could not identify the object visually, but if she suspected he was holding the so-called “truth serum,” it must be a syringe of some kind. Victor’s arms tensed, but he remained seated.

  “Not truth serum,” Peter corrected. He uncovered the syringe, then plunged it into a small bottle sitting on the tray. He then raised it in the air, tapping the syringe with his middle finger.

  “This is your last chance,” he said. “Once this enters your bloodstream, there will be nothing I or anyone else can do for you.”

  “What is it?” she whispered, mesmerized by the sight of the needle.

  “It’s called Marburg virus. You will feel nothing at first. Not for a few days, in fact. You will convince yourself it was all a cheap trick, that you did the right thing by toughing it out.” He paused. “Then you’ll start to think you came down with the flu. You will have headaches, fever, a lack of energy. You will try to convince yourself it is only a sickness you caught in your travels, something that, with proper rest and medication, will soon pass.”

  He stooped in front of her, holding the needle before her eyes. “But when you are lying on the floor in your own shit, bleeding from your organs—then, if your mind is still capable of rational thought, you will remember this room, this chair, my face. You will remember you could have chosen life, but instead you decided to protect the name of a person intent on ruining the world.”

  She broke his stare, turning her head so she would not have to see the gleaming needle.

  Peter straightened. “What will it be, Sophia? You of all people should know how dangerous a virus can be. It won’t kill you right away, oh no. Instead it will give you just enough time to think you have escaped, to find your dear husband so he can watch you writhe in agony, twisted by the pain—”

  “You’re bluffing,” she said. “Your friend there - Victor, was it? - he won’t let you go through with it. He, at least, has a conscience.”

  Damn, Victor thought. She’s good.

  Peter expelled a disappointed sigh. “Have it your way, Sophia.” He set the needle down on the tray, then turned to the doorway. “Bring him in.”

  ___

  Victor was flanked by two of Peter’s mercenaries as they led him into the interrogation room. He caught Sophia’s eye but immediately looked away, ashamed and disgusted by what he saw.

  “Here he is,” Peter pronounced to Sophia, “your savior. The only thing you seem to have forgotten is who I am and what this place is.” He flicked his fingers, and the men behind Victor grabbed his arms.

  “What the hell—” Victor began, but Peter spoke above him.

  “This is my castle, my world, and you are in my power,” he continued, still addressing Sophia. He did not even glance at Victor. “And I do not give a damn about the scruples of anyone’s conscience.”

  A third man grabbed Sophia from behind, pinning her head against the back of the chair. Peter plucked the syringe off the tray.

  “Wait!” Victor shouted, fighting the men restraining him. “Stop, Peter, we talked about this!”

  Sophia was as pale as the sheet that had covered the mirror. Her mouth opened to take a quick, fish-like gulp of air as the tip of the needle touched her neck. Victor went on shouting until one of his captors punched his stomach, driving the air from his lungs. He watched, bent over, as the rest of this strange scene unfolded.

  Peter and Sophia locked eyes. Peter cocked his elbow as if to drive the needle deep into her neck, when suddenly a whimper escaped her lips.

  “Please, please, just stop. Please.” The tears were running again.

  “A name,” Peter whispered, almost gently.

  “Graves,” she answered as she hyperventilated. “Antoine Graves.”

  Peter waited a few seconds before withdrawing the needle from her throat. Then, in a voice heavy with disgust, he said, “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Chapter 31

  Dante would have plenty of time to regret his decision in the days ahead, time to think how differently things might have gone if he and Victor had chosen another path. He would imagine, on sleepless nights haunted by the eerie twilight of the moon, that they had remained outside the city and joined a small community of survivors who hunted and experimented with different species of crops and kept their ears pressed to the ground, listening
for any news to tell them the crisis would soon be over.

  For sooner or later, Dante truly believed, the crisis would end. Someone would figure out a way to do what nature had been doing on its own for millennia. A provisional government would take the reins, establish contact with the major food-growing parts of the country, and slowly reassert civilization. This entire crisis would become just another epoch in the relentless advance of mankind, a fireside tale for grandfathers to tell their grandchildren.

  Maybe it was happening already.

  In this flight of fancy, Dante had children of his own. Victor did, too. Their children played together almost every day, though the two families lived just far enough apart to respect one another’s privacy. (This was more for Victor’s benefit than Dante’s.) Victor spent his days drilling soldiers so that the next time the horsemen - or another group like them - came for tribute, they would be answered with bullets. And Dante…

  Dante became a farmer, working all day in the fields with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His wife would bring him iced tea or lemonade; the children would visit to see what creepy crawlies lived in the dirt. But mostly, his mind remained elsewhere—on the horizon, the distant past, the what-ifs and could-have-beens.

  Maybe it would always be that way for him, no matter what path he chose. His mother had told him he possessed “the heart of a wanderer,” and he thought those words might be fitting enough to grace his tombstone. Because sometimes the only thing you knew was that what you had was not enough. Sometimes you just knew fate, or destiny, or whatever you called the thing with a rope tied around your heart—that thing was pulling you, and like the call of the sea to a sailor, you could ignore that pull for a while but you could never escape it.

  Sometimes you wanted a thing so much, you didn’t care if it made you bleed.

  ___

  “Are you sure about this?” Victor asked. He glanced at Dante, almost involuntarily, as he said this. Dante had been strangely thoughtful since seeing that billboard (OLD RUM: ALMOST AS HARD TO FIND AS WHITEY BULGER), and this new reticence troubled Victor. Though, if he were honest, he would have to admit Dante had been a bit withdrawn ever since the episode with the horsemen. Sometimes when Dante made his jokes, Victor would get the sense that Dante wasn’t laughing on the inside, as if his mind was actually somewhere far away.

  “We have to start somewhere,” Dante answered. “It might as well be here.”

  Victor turned to Scarlett. “You sure we can trust these people?”

  Scarlett smiled patiently, but there was a tightness to that smile, an edginess. “Just keep your gun in your pants,” she answered, perhaps unaware of the double entendre. “Same with you, Dante. If you raise that rifle, we’re all dead.”

  “I don’t usually call it my rifle, but…” Dante did not bother to add his customary grin. To Victor, who believed he knew his brother well, the words sounded more perfunctory than humorous. He might have considered this longer if not for the argument at the front of the line.

  At the end of the boulevard, where four lanes of traffic stood abandoned like toys on a Hot Wheels track, a black man was clutching two children to his sides and shouting at the guards. He wore a heavy parka that nearly swallowed his children’s heads. All Victor could see was a trailing braid on one side, a small hood on the other.

  “It’s just a cough!” the man insisted.

  The soldier, who was wearing an oxygen mask, shook his head. “No one showing signs of sickness gets inside. Leave the girl, and you and your other daughter can come through. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise what? You’re going to shoot us over a cold?” He stepped forward, and the reaction was like a hive of wasps stirring. The soldier with the mask raised his rifle. Two others trotted toward him from either side, brandishing their own weapons.

  There was a moment of tense expectation, a waiting to see whether the black man would take another step and how the soldiers would answer. Instead, however, he shook his head and steered them back through the crowd.

  “You damn racists!” he called over his shoulder.

  Victor watched the man push his way through the stream of refugees, then pause by a crosswalk sign on the far side of the boulevard. He just stood there, looking toward the gate and then down a side-street where several people were sleeping beneath newspapers or hiding inside castles of trash, his daughters peppering him with questions but no answers coming from his lips.

  If that had been me, Victor thought, they’d be dragging my corpse away from the gate right now.

  The line continued its steady march to the gate, heedless of small tragedies like the man and his two children who were left to fend for themselves. Some were turned aside, but most passed through the gate after a quick inspection of their belongings.

  “How do they decide who to let in?” Victor asked.

  “They have quotas to fill,” Scarlett answered. “Certain skills are prioritized over others. If you can’t contribute, you can’t enter. But most people can make themselves useful one way or another.” She shrugged as if to say, I don’t make the rules.

  “Do they have any contact with the government?” Victor asked.

  She shrugged again. “I suppose it depends on whether you think there still is a U.S. government.”

  “Oh, there’s still a government,” Victor answered. “They keep contingency plans on top of contingency plans. It might be a government in hiding, but it’s a government nonetheless. Someone is acting as president. The real question is whether that someone has any power.”

  Scarlett was watching him. “You really think there’s a life after all this, don’t you?”

  Victor pressed his lips together. “I had a friend once, a real intellectual, told me history is a wave graph. Each peak is the pinnacle of a civilization, each trough its collapse.” He paused. “We - America - had our peak, and it lasted a while. This is the trough before the next civilization rises from the ashes.”

  Dante looked ready to add something to the conversation, but they had reached the front of the line and the soldier was waving them forward.

  “Let me do the talking,” Scarlett whispered.

  Whatever she said to the soldier, it worked. Only a few minutes later, after a quick search of their possessions (to make sure they didn’t have any explosives or other contraband), the soldier was waving them through.

  “I wish I had an Easy Button right now,” Dante said.

  “If you only knew the power of a pretty smile,” Scarlett answered.

  ___

  The mark of progress on the other side of the wall was evident everywhere. Gardeners trimmed dead branches from trees that had slithered up through the asphalt; rubble from what might have been a recent explosion was removed by the wheelbarrow load; the broken window of a storefront was replaced by a gleaming plate of glass.

  “Who are they?” Victor asked, indicating a few figures collecting trash in plastic bags. The letter S was embroidered on the left sleeve of their coats.

  “Subversives,” Scarlett answered, hardly glancing in their direction. “Only the worst offenses merit a firing squad. Well, nowadays there are more hangings than shootings. Ammunition is not as plentiful as it was in the early days.”

  Victor wanted to ask what she meant by “the early days,” but she was already moving ahead.

  She led them to an outdoor restaurant where they ate fresh-baked rye bread, salmon, and a medley of vegetables cooked in a stir-fry. When Victor asked how they were able to eat so well, Scarlett explained that it was one of the advantages to the community’s model. Their government was relentless in its efforts to make sure every person, from the elderly on down to little children, had a role to play to keep their community functioning. The ugly side of this model, however, was that those who did not work - primarily the disabled and the sick - soon starved, since there were no soup kitchens or other programs for the needy.

  Victor watched Scarlett as she talked, wondering why she had tried escapin
g this place. Was it like the town of Wayward Pines, a seemingly-ideal community hiding a terrible secret? He didn’t know, and for now, with his stomach full for the first time in over a week, he didn’t much care.

  He sat back, listening to Scarlett and Dante talk about food and different methods for growing crops, and he imagined how it would feel to be responsible for a place such as this—to have the power of life and death in his hands, to choose where people should work and live and what they should eat. The idea was simply extraordinary.

  His eye caught a tall man in fatigues moving toward them. The speed at which he moved, the purpose on his face, caused Victor to tense. Victor’s hand slipped into his pocket.

  The man stopped beside Scarlett. “Comrade Yates would like to see you,” he said.