xXx

by Tim Waggoner

  Thread that needle, baby! he thought.

  Now that he’d gotten his shot, he turned off his GoPro, tucked it into his backpack once more, and continued racing down the road.

  * * *

  A short time later Xander held onto the bumper of a truck filled with goats and children. When the truck drew near the Salt Mine Camp, he let go. He shot toward a car and leaped off his board. He sailed over the vehicle while his board slipped underneath, but he didn’t attempt to land on it. The ground in the camp was too level and rocky for boarding, and since he had almost no time left, he would have to go the rest of the way on foot. He hit the ground running, and he heard his board flip over and skid across rock. He’d probably have to touch up the paint job when this was all over. He tore off his gloves, tossed them aside, and checked his timer. 00:30. 00:29. 00:28…

  He slipped off his backpack and held it in one hand as he ran for all he was worth toward the ocean, flashing past mine workers and their families, heading for a small hut on the pier. Thirty pissed-off miners were crowded into the hut, waiting, most of them armed and all of them glowering at him. Xander ran to the bar, pulled the small satellite dish he’d “borrowed” from the array out of his pack, set it on the counter, and connected it to a wall jack as the miners watched, grumbling and whispering.

  00:03, 00:02, 00:01…

  A big-screen TV at the back of the bar switched on just in time for the World Cup Final kick-off. The bar erupted in cheers, whistles, and applause, and then everyone turned their attention to the game as it began.

  Xander stood off to the side, watching the happy miners with a feeling of deep satisfaction. Kunal—the boy who’d had Xander’s longboard ready for him at the shack—came up to him. Kunal said he’d put Xander’s gloves and longboard in his hut, and Xander thanked him.

  “Sabio que lo harias, Xander. Nos entregaste el mundo.”

  “El mundo es grande pero siempre cabe en to corazón. Llevalo contigo siempre. Go, go!”

  Kunal ran to watch the game along with the others.

  “Why not pay the satellite company to watch the game like a regular guy?”

  Xander turned to Lola. He’d heard her come up behind him—he always did—but he’d waited for her to speak before acknowledging her presence. She said it creeped her out whenever he turned around just before she started to speak, like he was a wolf who’d caught her scent long before she arrived. He didn’t tell her that he could smell her.

  Lola wasn’t simply beautiful. She was gorgeous, the kind of woman who seemed almost unearthly, as if she were a work of fine art come to life, an idealized image that had stepped out of a painting or a statue transformed into flawless flesh. She was nearly six feet tall, with long auburn hair and brown eyes, and she wore a white sleeveless top with white shorts. As always when Xander saw her, his breath caught in his throat, and it took a second before he could speak.

  “What for? To line the pocket of some boardroom billionaires? Baby, these days regular guys just can’t afford to be regular anymore.”

  “You know, none of them believed you were ever coming back,” Lola said.

  “And what did you believe?”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Happier than they are?” He gestured to the miners gathered around the TV in the bar.

  She stepped forward and put a hand on his chest. “I really missed you.”

  “I never made a promise I couldn’t keep.”

  She smiled then, a little sadly.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  They walked away from the bar, the setting sun behind them, cheers from the crowd in the bar floating on the air.

  * * *

  They rode a salt car down the long track that ran through the camp, the driver studiously looking the other way as Lola straddled Xander, kissing his neck and face. When the car drew near Xander’s hut, the driver stopped and they got out.

  “Grazias,” Xander said, and gave the man a few coins as a tip.

  They smiled and held hands as they walked, children playing all around them. The moment they were inside the hut, they turned to each other and kissed. It was their first passionate kiss of the evening, but it was far from their last.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Xander and Lola—tired, a bit sore, but relaxed and contented—lay atop the hut’s roof, gazing up at the night sky. After a time, Lola began speaking.

  “My grandfather used to say the stars were put in the sky as a map for lost travelers. Now he says there are too many stars. The sky is wrong; the gods have gone crazy. How will anyone find their way home now? The lost will never return.”

  “Your abuelo would’ve been right—one hundred years ago,” Xander said. “Unfortunately, these days no one stays lost forever. Every debt gets settled.”

  “Even out here on the edge of the universe?”

  “Yeah, even out here.”

  “Everybody needs a place in the world,” she said.

  “No, that’s a lie they want us to believe. It sounds good, but does the world really provide a place for people? The game’s rigged, and the house always wins. And if you somehow manage to get ahead in life, you know what they do?”

  “What?”

  “They go and change the rules on you. The world needs me? I say bullshit. I don’t owe the world anything.”

  “True,” Lola said. “I just feel like you’re gonna leave me.”

  Xander glanced upward then, as if responding to some preternatural instinct. He saw a shooting star flash across the sky and then vanish. Except he didn’t think it was a meteorite. It was something more mundane—and far more troubling.

  “Would it make tomorrow easier if you knew tonight?” he asked.

  “You always say that. Stay lost with me. I know you are happy here. I mean, look at it. We’re in paradise!”

  “And if I stay, I’m gonna jeopardize this paradise. That wasn’t a shooting star, baby.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That was what they call an M-9 Air Force Reaper Drone, about a thousand miles from its base.”

  “What was it doing? Looking for you?”

  Xander nodded. “Coming to settle a debt.”

  They were both silent for a moment, and when Lola spoke again, her tone was deliberately light, as if she wanted to avoid the subject of the drone—and what it might mean for the two of them.

  “You still haven’t taught me how to ride that longboard of yours.”

  “Oh, is that all you like me for? Only one rule.”

  “What’s that?”

  Instead of answering, he leaned over and kissed her.

  * * *

  Later that night, Xander lay in bed next to Lola, staring up at the ceiling. From the soft, steady rhythm of her breathing, he knew she was sleeping. He was glad one of them was getting some rest. A fire was burning outside, probably warming some miners sleeping off the effects of their post-soccer celebration. Flickering orange light came in through the window, creating dancing shadows on the hut’s walls and ceiling. As he lay there, knowing that he was going to have to leave at dawn, he found himself thinking back to more than a decade ago, when he’d decided to fake his own death and go off the grid—all the way off.

  He rolled over and put an arm across Lola. She didn’t wake, but she smiled in her sleep and snuggled closer to him. Xander closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. He didn’t want to. He wanted to listen to Lola breathe for as long as he could, for he knew that after tonight, he would never hear it again.

  * * *

  Lola woke in the morning to find Xander gone. She wasn’t surprised, not after what he had said last night. But what did surprise her was that he’d left his longboard—the paint retouched where it had gotten scraped off yesterday—next to her on the bed. There was a post-it note on the board containing
a short message written in Xander’s handwriting: RULE #1: DON’T FALL.

  She smiled.

  * * *

  Xander sat on a bench at an open-air bus station in a town plaza several miles away from the Salt Mine Camp. He was looking at a world map covered in red X’s. The X’s represented all the places he’d been in his life, all places he could never return to—not unless he wanted whoever was looking for him to find him, that is. He’d moved around frequently over the last ten years in order to remain dead to the world, and the hardest part—after leaving behind the few people he allowed himself to grow close to in each place, of course—was finding somewhere new to go. There weren’t too many places he hadn’t been, and it had gotten to the point where he might have to give some serious thought to moving to Antarctica. They had penguins down there, so that was a plus. Penguins were cool.

  An old man sat down on the bench next to Xander. He carried a duffle bag which he tucked beneath the bench. He then sat up, glanced over at Xander, and then down at his map.

  “World getting smaller?” the man said. He smiled. “I know the feeling.”

  Xander turned to the old man and stared at him, unspeaking.

  The man went on, seemingly unbothered by Xander’s lack of response. “Running from your problems never works out, you know. You need a new plan.”

  “Gramps, I think I just need a new map.”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The man smiled again, but this time there was an edge to it that Xander didn’t like.

  “Yeah,” Xander said, “like I need a warning.”

  The old man got up and walked away. Xander watched the man go, thinking that the encounter hadn’t just been weird—it had been straight-up suspicious. He immediately scanned the crowd in the plaza. A teenager sat on the floor air-drumming while music blared from his Beats by Dre headphones. A woman hurried past, obviously late for her bus. A security guard was buying a bottle of soda from a station vendor. Everything seemed okay, but that was the problem. It was a little too okay, and Xander started to think that it might be a good idea to get the hell out of here before—

  That’s when he realized the old man had left his duffle bag. Don’t do it, he told himself. But Xander bent down, took the duffle from under the bench, and sat it next to him. He unzipped it slowly, and when nothing happened, he pulled it open to find enough explosives to level the bus station and probably most of the plaza, too.

  “Oh boy. Here we go again.”

  As if that was a cue, a SWAT team came charging onto the platform, weapons hot.

  “Don’t move, asshole!” the SWAT captain shouted.

  Civilians scattered in all directions as a dozen armed men and women surrounded Xander and trained their weapons on him. Xander, for his part, stood up and watched the officers calmly.

  The captain stepped forward, raised his assault rifle, and aimed it at a point directly between Xander’s eyes. “On your knees, you son of a bitch!” he shouted, spittle flying from his lips.

  “Okay,” Xander said, “I’m trying to comply, but you’re confusing me. Which is it? ‘Don’t move, asshole’ or ‘On your knees, you son of a bitch?’”

  The SWAT team moved in closer, grips tightening on their weapons, eyes gleaming as if they were already picturing Xander’s bullet-riddled body lying on the ground.

  Xander smiled. “Dude, you’re horrible at this.”

  “Three seconds to comply!” the captain shouted, moving even closer to Xander. “One!”

  “I’m just trying to help you,” Xander said.

  “Two!”

  “Three,” Xander finished for him.

  He reached out and snatched the assault rifle from the captain’s hands. He kicked the man in the chest, sending him flying backward, and then he fired point blank on the SWAT team. He fired until the clip was empty and then lowered the weapon. Xander was not surprised to see the men and women still standing there, uninjured. The rifle had been loaded with blanks, just as he’d known it would be.

  “Okay, come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called in a sing-song voice.

  A blond woman in a white suit—who had taken cover behind the bench she had been seated on when the SWAT team appeared—now stood and came walking toward Xander.

  “Olly-olly-oxen-free,” the woman said.

  The civilians who had fled came out of hiding now, and the SWAT officers—including the one Xander had knocked down—moved back to give Xander and the woman room to talk.

  “Wow, you do look different, Gibbons,” Xander said. “What is it? The hair? Did you lose weight?”

  Despite his flippant words, Xander was assessing the woman as she approached him. She was clearly in charge here, and pretty high up on the pecking order too from the way everyone instantly deferred to her. She exuded the confidence of someone who was used to getting what she wanted without having to ask, and who expected her orders to be carried out before she’d finished giving them. To put it simply, she was the Boss.

  “Augustus always had such… well, not exactly nice things to say about you, but his eulogy at your funeral was quite affecting. When did you realize this was all a fake?”

  “From the start,” Xander said. “I’ve seen better acting in a reality show. I mean, you got a kid over there wearing $800 headphones when you can buy the five-dollar knockoff right down the street. That lady running for the bus that doesn’t leave for another two hours, and the security guard paying for a soda with American money. But the kicker was when Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life sits next to a tatted-up beast like me with a bag of bombs, and he just happens to know that I speak English. Come on.”

  “The bullets could have been real,” the woman pointed out.

  “Then their body armor woulda been, too. Here, I believe this belongs to you.”

  Xander handed the assault rifle to the woman and continued speaking.

  “Look, I don’t know who you are, but I don’t like being tested.”

  “Gibbons never believed you were dead. He never stopped looking for you. Hell of a friend.”

  “Yeah? Well, the joke’s on him. We were never friends.”

  “Trust me, he’s not laughing. Nor will he ever again, for that matter.”

  The woman’s words hit Xander like a sledgehammer blow to the gut.

  “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  * * *

  The woman—who introduced herself as Marke—escorted him to an old church off the plaza. As they walked, she gave him a quick rundown of why she’d sought him out—and what had happened to Gibbons. The church was empty, naturally, and she led him to a pew where a computer tablet rested. She picked up the tablet, swiped her finger across the screen to activate it, and then handed it to Xander. A series of images appeared, three men and a woman, their faces mostly obscured by shadows and bad angles. Still frames from security camera footage, Xander guessed.

  “Three of the world’s best killers stepped into the ring with these four, and not one could so much as draw blood. I was hoping you’d be interested in headlining the next fight card.”

  It was hard to tell from the poor-quality images, but if they really had gone up against the biggest and baddest the world’s intelligence agencies had to offer without so much as getting scratched, they weren’t just good: they were damn good.

  “And locate the Pandora’s Box that you lost,” he said.

  “Well, everybody’s in it for something,” Marke said. “I’m just upfront about it.”

  “At least you admit it.” The image on the tablet changed to an outer view of a building in what Xander guessed was Manhattan. He zoomed in on the image to get a better look and saw the shattered remains of a picture window. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. “Whoa. Seventy feet across, ninety feet down, three-inch-thick security glass.”

  Marke nodded. “No rope, no line, no chute.”

  “C’mon, that’s impressive. They must’ve had a blast!”

>   Marke ignored the comment. “We’ve run facial IDs on every database in the world, and we couldn’t even match a speeding ticket for any of them. They’re ghosts in a day and age where that sort of thing is all but impossible.”

  Xander handed the tablet back to her. “You can probably guess that I don’t work for suits, so why would I spoil their fun?”

  “If you won’t do it for me, do it for Gibbons.”

  Xander knew better than to fall for such obvious emotional manipulation. He started walking back down the aisle to the church entrance.

  Marke called out after him. “Your country needs you, Mr. Cage. No more hiding. Time to be a patriot.”

  Xander kept walking as he answered. “I wasn’t hiding. I was taking a long vacation. And patriot? By whose definition? I was once down three strikes, and there was only one man who believed in an underdog. He was a patriot. No such thing as patriotism anymore, though. Only rebels and tyrants.”

  “So which are you?” Marke asked.

  Xander stopped. He thought about the boy lying in the street, half his head gone, dead before he’d even learned to drive. The tyrants of the world ground people like that boy underneath their heels just for shits and giggles. Maybe the world needed more rebels, if for no other reason than so people like that boy would have somebody to fight for them when they couldn’t fight for themselves.

  He turned around to face Marke.

  “I’m Xander fucking Cage.”

  Marke smiled. “Welcome back, Triple-X.”

  He looked at her for a long moment before turning once more and continuing toward the church entrance.

  “Where are you going?” Marke said, sounding concerned, as if she was worried he was going to leave her high and dry after all.

  “London,” he said.

  “Why? What’s in London?”

  “A ghost hunter.”

  He walked out of the church and kept on going.

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